While he wondered, the clock chimed the half hour after nine. He heard it.
Sergius spoke with a sudden unutterable contempt.
"Ring for another bottle of champagne," Anthony replied. "This one is empty."
"Well--for a parson and a teetotaller, I must say!"
Sergius rang the bell. A second bottle was opened. The servant went out of the room. As he closed the door, the wind sighed harshly against the window panes, driving the rain before it.
The remark was an obvious one; but, as spoken, it sounded oddly furtive, and full of hidden meaning. Sergius evidently found it so, for he said:
"Why, whom d'you know that's going to sea to-night?"
Anthony was startled by the quick question, and replied almost nervously:--
"People one knows cross the channel every night almost."
He glanced towards the clock and again mechanically his hand went up, for a second, to his left breast. Anthony leaned forward in his chair quickly, and broke into speech. He had seen the stare at the clock-face, the gesture.
"It's strange," he said, "how people go out of our lives, how friends go, and enemies!"
"Yes. I sometimes wonder which exit is the sadder. When a friend goes--with him goes, perhaps for ever, the chance of saying 'I am your friend.' When an enemy goes--"
"With him goes, perhaps for ever, too, the chance of saying, 'I am not your enemy.'"
"No, Sergius, other men forgive besides parsons; and other men, and parsons too, pass by their chances of forgiving."
"You're a whole Englishman, I'm only half an Englishman. There's something untamed in my blood, and I say--damn forgiveness!"
The face of Sergius did not change at the sound of this name, unless, perhaps, to a more fixed calm, a more still and pale coldness.
"Olga is punished," he said. "She is ruined."
"Yes. Tell me, Sergius"--Anthony spoke with a strong earnestness, a strong excitement that he strove to conceal and hold in check--"you loved her?"
"Since I'm not changeable, I daresay I shall."
Anthony's thin, eager face brightened. A glow of warmth burned in his eyes and on his cheeks.
Anthony's strong voice quivered before he pronounced the last word, and his eyes were alight with fervent anxiety. He was looking at Sergius like a man on the watch for a tremendous outbreak of emotion. The champagne he had drunk--a new experience for him since he had taken orders--put a sort of wild finishing touch to the intensity of the feelings, under the impulse of which he had forced himself upon Sergius to-night. He supposed that his inward excitement must be more than matched by the so different inward excitement of his friend. But he--who thought he understood!--had no true conception of the region of cold, frosty fury in which Sergius was living, like a being apart from all other men, ostracised by the immensity and peculiarity of his own power of emotion. Therefore he was astonished when Sergius, with undiminished quietude, replied: