Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate
on a tray and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully,
lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. He looked
like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.

The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke,
and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips,
as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had
not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images
of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason.
It is one of its chiefest charms.

He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his chocolate.
The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The sky was bright,
and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was almost like a morning
in May.

Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,
blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves
there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all
that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling
of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat
in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion.
The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now.
How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness,
not for the day.

He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more
than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy,
greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.
But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out of the mind,
to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle
one itself.

When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead,
and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his
usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie
and scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once. He spent a long
time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his
valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made
for the servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence.
At some of the letters, he smiled. Three of them bored him.
One he read several times over and then tore up with a slight look
of annoyance in his face. "That awful thing, a woman's memory!"
as Lord Henry had once said.

After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his
lips slowly with a napkin, motioned