He related as carefully as he could, and then she said: “For a couple of darlings you are the most extraordinary creatures on earth. Katya’s Katya, of course; but why in Heaven’s name you can’t be reasonable it passes me to understand.”
“Reasonable!” Grimshaw exclaimed.
“Well,” Ellida answered, “you don’t know Katya as I do. You think, I dare say, that she’s a cool, manlike sort of chap. As a matter of fact, she’s a mere bundle of nerves and insane obstinacies. I don’t mean to say that she’s not adorable. She’s just the most feminine thing in the world, but what you ought to do is perfectly plain. You ought to bring her to her knees. If you won’t give in to her—it would be the easiest thing to do—it would be just as easy to bring her to her knees.”
“It would?” Grimshaw asked.
“Yes,” she said, “easy, but I dare say a bit of a bore. You go off with some other woman, and she’ll be after you with hatchets and knives in ten seconds after she hears the news. That’s Katya. It’s Kitty, too, and I dare say it would be me if I ever had anything in the world to contrarify me.”
“Oh, I’m tired out,” he answered. “I told you some time ago that if I grew very, very tired I should give in to her. Well, I’ve come down to tell her that, if she’ll take on Dudley, she can take me on, too, on her own terms.”
Ellida looked up at him with her quick and birdlike eyes.
“Well, look here, Mr. Toto,” she said, “if you’re going to do that, you’d better get it told to her quick. If you don’t catch her on the hop before she’s got time to harden into it as an obstinacy, you’ll find that she’ll have made it a rule of life never to speak to you again; and then there’ll be nothing for it but you’re carrying on with—oh, say Etta Hudson—until Katya gets to the daggers and knives stage.”
“But where is she?” Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, well, you’re a man who knows everything,” she answered. “I expect she’s gone to one of the six or seven of her patients that are always clamouring for her. You’d better hurry to find her, or she’ll be off touring round the world before you know where you are.... I’ve always thought,” she continued, “that you handled her wrongly at the beginning. If the moment she’d begun that nonsense, you’d taken a stick to her, or dragged her off to a registry office, or contrived to pretend to be harsh and brutal, she’d have given in right at once; but she got the cranky idea into her head, and now it’s hardened into sheer pride. I don’t believe that she really wanted it then, after the first day or two. She only wanted to bring you to your knees. If you had given in then, she’d have backed out of it at the last moment, and you’d have had St. George’s and orange-blossoms, and ‘The Voice that breathed o’er Eden’ all complete.”
“Well, I can’t bother about it any longer,” Grimshaw said. “I’m done. I give in.”
“Good old Toto,” Ellida said. And then she dropped her voice to say: “I don’t know that it’s the sort of thing that a sister ought to encourage a sister doing, but if you managed not to let anyone know—and that’s easy enough, considering how you’ve set everybody talking about your quarrels. You can just meet her at Athens, and then come back and say you’ve made it up suddenly, and got married at the Consulate at Scutari or Trebizond, or some old place where there isn’t a Consulate, and nobody goes to—if nobody knows about it, I don’t see that I need bother much.” She looked up at him and continued: “I suppose you’ll think I’m immoral or whatever it is; but, after all, there was mother, who was really the best woman in the world. Of course I know you think of the future, but when everything’s said and done, I’m in the same position that your children will be, and it doesn’t worry me very much. It doesn’t worry Katya either, though she likes to pretend it does.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking of anything at all,” Grimshaw answered. “I just give in. I just want the ... the peace of God.”
She looked up at him with her eyes slightly distended and wondering.
“Are you,” she said, “quite sure that you will get it? Katya is a dear, of course, but she’s the determination of a tiger; she has been play-acting from the first, and she has meant to have you since you were in your cradles together. But she’s meant to have you humbled and submissive, and tied utterly hand and foot. I don’t believe she ever meant not to marry you. I don’t believe she means it now, but she means to make you give in to her before she marries you. She thinks it will be the final proof of your passion for her.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I don’t know and I don’t care. What I want is to have things settled. What does it matter whether it’s for life or death?”
“And Pauline Leicester?” Mrs. Langham asked.
Robert Grimshaw made a little motion with his thumb and fingers, as if he were crumbing between them a little piece of dried earth.
VI
IN the drawing-room with the blue curtains Mr. Held was saying to Pauline Leicester: “Yes, it’s just gone ten. It’s too late for a telegram, but I’m sure you’ll get a message somehow to say she’s coming. After all, he can telephone from Brighton.”
“He mayn’t have succeeded,” Pauline said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s succeeded,” Mr. Held answered. “I feel it in my bones.”
It was now the thirtieth or fortieth time that since eight o’clock he had uttered some such words, and he was going on to say: “He and she are great friends, aren’t they?” when Saunders opened the door to say that a lady wished to speak to Mrs. Leicester.
“Oh, they are great friends,” Pauline answered Mr. Held. “Miss Lascarides is his cousin”; and then to Saunders: “Who is it?”
Saunders answered that he didn’t know the lady, but that she appeared to be a lady.
“What’s she like?” Pauline said.
The butler answered that she was very tall, very dark, and, if he might say so, rather imperious.
Pauline’s mouth opened a little. “It’s not,” she said—“it’s not Lady Hudson?”
“Oh, it isn’t Lady Hudson, mum. I know Lady Hudson very well by sight. She goes past the house every day with a borzoi.”
In the dining-room, lit by a solitary light on the chimney-piece, Pauline saw a lady—very tall, very dark, and very cool and collected. They looked at each other for the shadow of a moment with the odd and veiled hostility that mysterious woman bestows upon her fellow-mystery.
“You’re Pauline Leicester?” the stranger said. “You don’t know who I am?”
“We’ve never met, I think,” Pauline answered.
“And you’ve never seen a photograph?”
“A photograph?” Pauline said. “No; I don’t think I’ve seen a photograph.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t have a photograph of me that’s not a good many years’ old. It was a good deal before your time.”
With her head full of the possibilities of her husband’s past, for she couldn’t tell that there mightn’t have been another, Pauline said, with her brave distinctness:
“Are you, perhaps, the person who rang up 4,259 Mayfair? If you are ...”
The stranger’s rather regal eyes opened slightly. She was leaning one arm on the chimney-piece and looking over her shoulder, but at that she turned and held out both her hands.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s perfectly true what he said. You’re the bravest woman in the world, and I’m Katya Lascarides.”
With the light full upon her face, Pauline Leicester hardly stirred.
“You’ve heard all about me,” she said, with a touch of sadness in her voice, “from Robert Grimshaw?”
“No, from Ellida,” Katya answered, “and I’ve seen your photograph. She carries it about with her.”
Pauline Leicester said, “Ah!” very slowly. And then, “Yes; Ellida’s very fond of me. She’s very good to me.”
“My dear,” Katya said, “Ellida’s everything in the matter. At any rate, if I’m going to do you any good, it’s she that’s got me here. I shouldn’t have done it for Robert Grimshaw.”
Pauline turned slightly pale.
“You haven’t quarrelled with Robert?” she said. “I should be so sorry.”
“My dear,” Katya answered, “never mention his name to me again. It’s only for you I’m here, because what Ellida told me has made me like you;” and then she asked to see the patient.
Dudley Leicester, got into evening dress as he was by Saunders and Mr. Held every evening, sat, blond and healthy to all seeming, sunk in the eternal arm-chair, his fingers beating an eternal tattoo, his eyes fixed upon vacancy. His appearance was so exactly natural that it was impossible to believe he was in any “condition” at all. It was so impossible to believe it that when, with a precision that seemed to add many years to her age, Katya Lascarides approached, and, bending over him, touched with the tips of her fingers little and definite points on his temples and brows, touching them and retouching them as if she were fingering a rounded wind-instrument, and that, when she asked: “Doesn’t that make your head feel better?” it seemed merely normal that his right hand should come up from the ceaseless drumming on the arm of the chair to touch her wrist, and that plaintively his voice should say: “Much better; oh, much better!”
And Pauline and Mr. Held said simultaneously: “He isn’t ...”
“Oh, he isn’t cured,” Katya said. “This is only a part of the process. It’s to get him to like me, to make him have confidence in me, so that I can get to know something about him. Now, go away. I can’t give you any verdict till I’ve studied him.”