Produced by David Widger from page images generously provided by the Internet Archive IDOLS By William J. Locke Second Edition John Lane: The Bodley Head London And New York 1898 [Illustration: 0009] TO J. S. IN MEMORIAM M. S. IDOLS PROEM Two men once issued from the darkness and broke into a house. They came for robbery, but, finding an old man asleep in a chair, they murdered him. Then terrified at their deed, they fled, almost empty-handed, and so vanished into the night. Long afterwards they were overtaken by justice, confessed their crime and paid the penalty. Their sordid story is set down in the newspapers of the time. Otherwise they have passed into oblivion, and no man concerns himself with the dismal working of their souls. Their existence would not have found a mention here, were it not that the blow they dealt was the cause of convulsions in other lives. For under the outer seeming of harmonious days and gentle living, often lies a smouldering train of devastating forces--stifled passions of greed and lust and jealousy, splendid heroisms and enthusiasms that burn white. In the common way of life no match is set; which forms a trite moral for the elegist. But now and then the way of life is lit with lurid suddenness and the mine is sprung. Beneath the surface of four gentle lives such a train was smouldering. The vulgar crime of the two nameless abjects set it ablaze. And they, issuing from the darkness for one ghastly moment, were but blind, almost impersonal instruments of Destiny, so far as they concerned these four. CHAPTER I It was Irene Merriam’s hour of greatest content when she looked into her heart for a fugitive desire and smiled at finding none. And this was a source of all the more comfort, because she was a woman who gave unsparingly of herself to life, and made large claims upon life in return. She sat in a leathern armchair by the fireplace, listening to the talk of her two companions, who were sitting by the dinner table over their coffee. Now and then she interposed a remark, but lazily, preferring to watch the play of expression on their faces, to dream dreams about them, and to realise her own happiness. This after-dinner scene was a familiar one; familiarity had made it dearer. She had grown to regard it as an essential in her scheme of life, like sleep and food and raiment. Of the two men, one was her husband, Gerard Merriam; the other, his life-long, intimate friend. They had chummed together at school, at the University; had joined the same Inn of Court, and had been called to the bar together; and in spite of wide divergence of taste and character, had remained in close relationship to the present day.