“‘Out upon it, I have lovedThree whole days together!And am like to love three more,If it prove fine weather.’”
“‘Out upon it, I have lovedThree whole days together!And am like to love three more,If it prove fine weather.’”
“‘Out upon it, I have lovedThree whole days together!And am like to love three more,If it prove fine weather.’”
A Paramount Picture. The Ace of Cads. “THE ACE OF CADS” TRIES TO FORGET HIS LOST ELEANOR AT THE GAMING TABLEA Paramount Picture.The Ace of Cads.“THE ACE OF CADS” TRIES TO FORGET HIS LOST ELEANOR AT THE GAMING TABLE
She: “Oh, but I can match you one vulgar Restoration gallant against another!
“‘Then talk not of inconstancy,False hearts and broken vows;If I by miracle can beThis live-long minute true to thee,’Tis all that Heaven allows.’”
“‘Then talk not of inconstancy,False hearts and broken vows;If I by miracle can beThis live-long minute true to thee,’Tis all that Heaven allows.’”
“‘Then talk not of inconstancy,False hearts and broken vows;If I by miracle can beThis live-long minute true to thee,’Tis all that Heaven allows.’”
He sighed: “How I loved you, Leonora! As I had never loved anyone before, as I will never love anyone again!”
“How I loved you, Maximilian! But now!” And she said: “A legal separation is a silly quibble. Besides, you might want to marry again. Or I might.”
“Might, Leonora? But you will, must, can’t help but! With your beauty, youth, wealth.”
“Thank you. I have often noticed that one’s friends like one best as one is leaving them. Then, Maximilian, shall I divorce you?”
“If you please, dear. My lawyers are Messrs. Onward & Christian. They will arrange the matter with yours in the usual way.”
“Remember, dear, that your King will not receive a divorced Duke at court.”
“The King can do no wrong,” yawned the Duke. “It must be rather hard on him sometimes, but the law is the law.”
His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-the-mist, and lo! wasgone. She said softly: “You are such a baby, Max!”
Seamen passed by, bearing a great leather Innovation trunk to the side. A black cloud rose up from Africa and hid the sun. A shadow walked across the pretty town of Cannes and drove the youth from painted faces.
“And because,” said the young Duchess wistfully, “you are such a baby, I don’t put it beyond you to make love to my sister if you should meet her. She has always been jealous of me, so she would enjoy nothing so much as your making love to her. Promise not to, Max, please, oh, please! She has just come over to Paris, so I read this morning inThe New York Herald. Max, promise not to make a fool of me to my own sister!”
“She’s pretty?”
“Pretty? Are words so scarce, sir, that you must use a copper coin? And she my twin!”
“Ah me! Oh dear!”
Her voice scarce disturbed the silence of the yacht: “Good-bye, Duke Maximilian. Our lives go different ways. I do wish you success, happiness, health. Good-bye.”
As he lay, with closed eyes, his fingers found her hand and raised it to his lips.
“Good-bye,” said he. Such was his farewell.
She looked back from the side. He lay silent. She said:
“Courtesy, Maximilian?”
A sea-bird mocked the silence. The cloud athwart the sun was now as large as half the world. The Duchess of Mall said:
“Chivalry, Maximilian?”
The sea-bird screamed and flew away, and Leonora of Mall cried: “I will forgive you all things but your farewell, Maximilian. The very birds are appalled to see chivalry so low in a man that he will take his lady’sadieulying down.”
Her maid, hatted and veiled for travelling, whispered to her ear:
“Your Grace, he is asleep.”
It is a sorry business to enquire into what men think, when we are every day only too uncomfortably confronted with what they do. Moreover, the science of psychology—for that is what we are talking about—is as yet but ademoiselleamong the sciences; and that writer carries the least conviction who tries to wind his tale about her immature coils. Therefore we will not enquire into the young Duke’s thoughts, but merely relate his actions: we will leave his psychology to the fishes of the tideless sea, while we let him confront us with all his vanity.
The time came when the young Duke awoke. Now the winds of the sea were playing about him, the sun was certainly not where he had left it, and the angle of his deck-chair was peculiar. The world was very dark. He looked upon the sea and found it odd, and he looked upon the land and did not find it at all.
“Ho!” cried the Duke. “Where is the land, the land of France? Ho there, Captain Tupper! What have you done with the fair land of France? I do not see it anywhere. Our French allies willbe exceedingly annoyed when they hear we have mislaid them. And do my eyes deceive me, or is that a wave making for us over there?”
“It is blowing moderate from the southeast, your Grace.”
“Moderate, upon my word! Captain Tupper, moderation sickens me. Ho, I see some land over there!”
“We have just left Nice behind, your Grace.”
“I sincerely hope, Captain Tupper, that you are not among those who affect to despise Nice. Queen Victoria was very fond of Nice. It may not be Deauville or Coney Island, Captain Tupper, but Nice can still offer attractions of a homely sort.”
“But I understood, your Grace, that——”
“These are strange words, Captain Tupper! But proceed.”
“—that our direction was Naples.”
“Naples? Good God, Naples! And look, there’s another wave making straight for us! Hang on, Tupper. I’ll see you are all right. You sailors aren’t what you were in the days when you each had a port in every——”
“A wife in every port is the correct form of the libel, your Grace.”
“But hang it, I call this, don’t you, a damned rough sea? However, I feel very gay this evening. I have just had an idea. Now, Tupper, let me hear no more of this high-handed talk about turning your back on Nice.”
“But, your Grace, we are making for Naples!”
“Your obsession for Naples seems to me singularly out of place on a windy evening. I thinkyou might consider me a little, even though I am on my own yacht. I detest, I deplore, Naples. Put back to Nice, Captain Tupper. I am for Paris!”
“For Paris, your Grace!”
“For Paris, Captain Tupper, with a laugh and a lance and a tara-tara-diddle for to break a pretty heart!”
Students of sociology have of recent years made great strides in their alleviation of the conditions prevailing among the poor; but is it not a fact that, as a notorious daily paper lately asked, the study of those conditions appears to attract the interest of only the lighter sort of society people and the pens of only the most ambitious novelists? And that the benefits of this study, at least to novelists, are not mean, was proved beyond all doubt only the other day, when perhaps the wealthiest of contemporary writers increased his fortune by writing a tale about a miser in a slum. No one, on the other hand, will deny that the achievements of sociologists among the poor are as nothing compared with those of students of hospitality who, poor and unrewarded though they remain, have of late years done yeoman work in alleviating the conditions prevailing among the rich. It is to the generous spadework of men such as these that American hostesses in Europe owe the betterment of their lot; and it is by the support of their merciful hands that ladies burdened with great wealth are prevented from sinkingdown in the rarefied atmosphere to which they have been called.
Mere students of hospitality had not, however, been strong enough to support the ailing burden of Mrs. Omroy Pont when that lady had first come over from America at the call of certain voices that had advised her that her mission lay in European society. It had needed graduates of that brotherhood, lean with endeavour in ball-rooms and browned with the suns of the Riviera, to prevent that ample lady from succumbing to the exhaustion of carrying her wealth through the halls of her houses in London and Paris among guests who had failed to catch her name on being introduced. But the Good Samaritans had worked unceasingly on her behalf, and since Mrs. Omroy Pont had both great wealth and infinite insensibility she was soon in a position to give a ball at which quite half the guests knew her by sight.
The morning after the Duke’s arrival in Paris there was this notice in the ContinentalDaily Mail: “The Duke of Mall has arrived at his residence in the Avenue du Bois, and will spend the spring in Paris.” And presently the good Mrs. Omroy Pont was on the telephone, first here, then there and finally to the Duke himself, saying: “My dear Duke, how do you do, how do you do? I am so glad you are in Paris just now, Paris is so attractive in the spring. You mustn’t fail to see the tulips in the Tuileries, they are as beautiful asdébutantes. My dear Duke, I am giving a party to-morrow night, you must come, you really must come, now don’t say you won’t because I can’t bear that, and really I must say, my dear Duke, that your unfortunate inability to accept any of my invitations so far has seemed almost marked, whereas——”
“I am afraid,” began the Duke, who had not the faintest intention of going anywhere near one of Mrs. Omroy Pont’s parties, for she bored him and life is short.
“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear Duke, I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling your leg——”
“Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud: “Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement——”
“It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be such fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to sleep just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct the conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.”
The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs. Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his meeting with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit, hadn’t seemed any lesssensible to the pleasant quality of their companionship. A beautiful girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest in the passing moment and a delicious capacity for deriving pleasure from the twists in conversation which came so naturally to the Duke but were become, it has to be confessed, a shade familiar to his friends. She hadn’t, he reflected over his morning coffee, said anything throughout the evening that didn’t interest and entertain; and, since she had come to Europe for the first time but the other day, had amused him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any means all favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity; which was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy.
All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he had talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature that she couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him.
What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does seem to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually meet. Now between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you dared swear, so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and symmetry of feature. But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on earth should there beor need there be or could there be, since Leonora and she had been twins as punctually to the second as was possible?
A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression, capacity for attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said, contribute far more than actual looks to mark the difference between one woman and another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for whereas both the Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and immense blue eyes generally affected by American ladies for the conquest of Europe, the Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded here to the deep lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of Byzantine amber—the Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while Miss Lamb’s was as near black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who is without Irish blood.
In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the differences between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he had thought it only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had decided, for each their sakes, to break their marriage; and he had thought it only fair to himself to point his confession with a sigh, a sigh which he explained, after a silence quite beautifully bridged by an understanding look from her, as being forced from him by the fact that there was no pleasing some women.
“You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d addedwretchedly, “that I am trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but——”
“Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic monotony of the mother-tongue.
To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment, was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a touch of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by American ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of all visitors to a bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady.
And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the consequences of her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply she disapproved of that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his tongue from exploring further into that misguided sister’s character—it had meant so much that he had been content to wait on her understanding even before she’d quietly added: “Oh, I understand——”
“But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a delicious talent for silence.
“My dear”—it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally, quite wonderfully—“if only other women were like you! To understand, I mean, just to understand!”
“And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that she too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind.
“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.
“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of men?”
“Enough surely, surely!”
“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”
“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew nothing of men?”
“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just because, like all rare people, you’re—well, fastidious!”
“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t know....”
“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many quite sensible men, somuch wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to wait.”
“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”
“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”
“But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough—I mean, my friend, for time to bring the best out of someone you love?”
“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see, the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”
Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to hear this. It hurts me—for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”
The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.”
“Yousaythat! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her crying for her lost love.”
“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a matter of fact, whileI was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though—look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let us talk of something else. Of you!”
“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”
“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”
“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”
“Bravo, bravo!”
“So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.”
“What, you feel it beating!”
“Perhaps. A little.”
“Oh!”
“At being in Paris, Duke.”
“I deserved the snub. Go on, please.”
“My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of my dreams. When I was a girl I had—oh, such dreams!”
“Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use the sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh, I know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents that befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been, Miss Lamb dear, most utterly married.”
“I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!”
“Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she certainly was bornto be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never let me forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her birth.”
“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no! My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”
The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow theconcierge’swife talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the anguish of ravished countries—the miraculous art of men to worship their own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried: “Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!”
The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make me think of all that is impossible.”
Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the Seine shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the night to the dignity of fallen archangels driving chariots to the conquest of the Heavens. And a three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash from thebeau quartierabout the Place Victor Hugo.
“There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent——”
“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”
“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely name for a town built by men to have!”
And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted—and all, honest to God, by companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to renew all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to increase it, for wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise enough to appreciate enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like this girl, why, since they were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a little of Ava’s warm attention and quick understanding? And again the Duke,in solace for self-pity, cast back to yesternight, how he had warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of Paris and had told her the tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and the way of that was this:
“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of the dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of France. Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I mean. Now that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to rest himself after the tumult of battle with the worship of art and beauty, which is not at all the fashion among princes nowadays, because of course we have progressed so far since then. And so our prince, when he had killed as many natives of the conquered country as the honour of war demands, chained the rest with iron chains and put them to the building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And when at last the city was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the world, as all who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young prince hated argument.
“All went well until they came to the christening of the city, when it transpired that no one had the faintest idea what name to call it. Here was a to-do! Nameless they could not leave so great a city, yet what name would embrace all these marvels of architecture, how could they call so fair a city by any such commonplace kind of label as Rome, Jerusalem or Wapping? Therefore the young prince fell weeping with mortification for that his city must remain nameless just because it was the fairest city in the world, when an ancient man rose up in the assembly and said: ‘This here is not the fairest city in the world. But the magic city of Is in the land of Brittany has got it so beat that this looks like a slum beside it. I have spoken.’ Not that he ever had a chance to again, even though it presently was proved that not the fairest city in the world could be fairer than Is in Brittany, and so the prince made the best of a bad job and called his city the Equal to Is, which is Par-Is, which is Paris. Shall we dance?”
But she said: “No, no! They are playing an old-fashioned fox-trot. Besides, one can always dance; there are so many men with whom one can only dance, for what have they to talk about? Duke, I did love your legend of the christening of Paris! Did you make it up?”
Now these words had chanced to cast a gloom about the young Duke, and he had said: “But there is another legend, a more private legend. It tells, sister, of the house of Mall, how the golden cock on the weather-vane of St. James’s tower shall crow thrice at the birth of the greatest of the Dukes of Mall. And, although I say it who shouldn’t, this very miracle attended the birth of him who now stands beside you. And the legend further tells that when the golden cock on St. James’s tower again crows thrice the greatest of the Dukes of Mall shall die. Ava, to-night I find myself in fear of my fate. That which is written shall come to pass, and no man may defy the passage of his destiny—but to-night, Ava, I amtroubled with a foreboding that the second crowing of that beastly cock is not far distant from this dear moment.”
Very sweetly she had tried to soothe his foreboding, but it was heavy in him and he had not listened, saying: “I’ve never but once before been vexed with this depression, and that was on the night of the day I fell in love with Leonora Lamb.”
“Let us dance,” she had said shyly, but they had not danced very enjoyably owing to the number of the students of hospitality who were generously supporting Mrs. Omroy Pont on so memorable an occasion.
And thus it was on the first night between Miss Ava Lamb and the young Duke of Mall.
Now the Duke had turned his yacht from Naples merely to amuse himself (that is to say, to annoy his wife); but is it not a fact, asThe Morning Postlately asked in reference to our treating with the Soviet Republic, that it is dangerous to play with fire? So it happened that the Duke had not been gay of his new enchantment for long before all others palled on him, and he awoke one morning to recognise that he could not, try as he would, do without the one enchantment that was called Ava Lamb. Those American sisters, first the one and then the other, were fated, it appeared, to ravish his imagination to the exclusion of the whole race of womankind. And he had all the more leisure in which to contemplate his dilemma insomuch as Miss Lamb, pleading the importunity of friends, would sometimes not see him for days at a time.
In the meanwhile the Duchess, in London, was preparing to petition the Courts to release her from her unfortunate marriage; and after the usual correspondence had passed between the lawyers of both parties, and the usual evidence collected, the majesty of the law pronounced the usual decree and everyone said the usual things.
Impatiently the Duke in Paris awaited the wire which would tell him that he was no longer the husband of Leonora Mall; and when it came he delayed only long enough to instruct his valet to telephone his London florists to send the ex-Duchess a basket of flowers before calling on Miss Ava Lamb at her hotel.
However, she was not at home. The Duke protested. Even so, she was not at home. The Duke felt rebuked for not having conformed to the decencies of divorce so far as to wait twenty-four hours; and in all humility he returned the next day.
However, she was not at home. The Duke pleaded. Even so, she was not at home; for, her maid said, she was resting before the ardours of the night journey to Cherbourg, whence she would embark for New York. The Duke scarce awaited the end of the astounding news. Miss Lamb was lying down. Calm and cold, she said:
“What does this mean, Duke? How dare you force yourself on me like this?”
Fair, tall, intent, the Duke further dared her displeasure by raising her unwilling hand to hislips. Twilight filled the room. Outside, the motors raced across the Place Vendôme. The Duke said:
“I have dared everything on this one throw. Ava, I love you.”
Miss Lamb said to her maid, “Go,” and she went.
The Duke smiled unsteadily, saying: “Well? Ava, what have you to say?”
Where she lay on her couch in the dusk, her face was like a pale white flower. But he could not see her eyes, because they were closed. The dress she wore was black. The hand that lay outstretched on her black dress was as soft as a temptation, and he said: “I have a ring for that hand that has not its peer in the world. I love you. Ava, will you marry me?”
He could not see her eyes, because they were closed. But still the dusk lacked the courage to steal the red from her mouth, and the Duke saw that her mouth was parted in a queer sad smile.
“Why do you smile?” he whispered, and he said unsteadily: “I know why. You do not believe I love you, you do not believe I know how to love, you think me the shallow, vain braggart that I have shown to you in the guise of myself until this moment. But I love you, Ava, more than life. I love you, Ava, with all the youthful love I had for your sister increased a thousandfold by the knowledge I now have of myself: for it is by loving that men come to know themselves, and it is by knowing themselves in all humility that men can love with the depths of their hearts. Ava, I do love you terribly! Won’t you speak, won’t you say one word, do you disdain my love so utterly as that? Yet I can’t blame you, for I have spent my life in proving that my love is despicable. I have been proud, pitiless, impious. I am soiled. But, Ava, even a fool may come to know the depths of his folly; and I who know so much of desire, dearly beloved, know that I have never loved until this moment. Still you won’t speak? Ava, I did not think you so ungenerous when in my vanity I first fell under your gentle enchantment. Dear, your silence is destroying all of me but my love. Won’t you give me even so much as a queen will give a beggar, that, had he been another man in another world, he might have kissed her hand?”
Now night had extinguished all but the last tapers of twilight, and in the dark silence the maid whispered to his ear: “Your Grace, she is asleep.”
The Duke told his chauffeur outside Miss Lamb’s hotel that he would not need him again that evening, he would walk. But he had not walked above a dozen yards across the Place Vendôme, regardless of his direction, regardless of the traffic, when the breathless voice of his valet detained him. Stormily the Duke swung about.
“This telegram,” the valet panted, “came the minute after you had left this afternoon. I feared, your Grace, it might be important, and took the liberty to follow you.”
The Duke’s face paled as he read. The telegram was from the hall-porter of his club in St. James’s Street. The valet, an old servant, was concerned at his master’s pale looks: but he was even more concerned at the sudden smile that twisted them.
“I hope I did right, your Grace.”
“Quite right, Martin.” And suddenly the young Duke smiled a happy smile. “You have brought me this wire at just the right moment. I can’t, Martin, thank you enough. Meanwhile, old friend, go back and pack. Everything. We are for Mall to-night. Paris is no place for an Englishman to die in. For pity’s sake, Martin, don’t look sogaga—but go!”
Miss Lamb’s maid did not attempt to conceal her surprise at the Duke’s quick reappearance at the door of the suite. But the young man’s face was so strangely set that she had not the heart to deny him sight of her mistress.
“I’ll be,” she sighed, “dismissed!”
The Duke smiled, and maybe he never was so handsome nor so gay as at that moment.
The maid said: “My mistress still sleeps. It is when she is happy that she sleeps.”
“Happy? Does it make a woman happy, then, to see a man destroyed by love?”
“It is more comfortable, your Grace, to be loved than to love. But I know nothing of my mistress’s heart. I came to her service only the other day. Yes, she is asleep. And the room is dark.”
The Duke said: “Good! This is indeed my lucky day.”
“I leave you, your Grace. And if I am dismissed?”
“I count you as my friend. I do not forget my friends. Leave me now.”
But a few minutes before he had left that room in a storm of rage. Now, a great peace was on him. He let the minutes pass by, standing there in the soft darkness, a man condemned to death. His life behind him lay like a soiled wilderness through which smirked and pirouetted an unclean travesty of himself. The gates of death looked to him clean and beautiful. He did not wish his life had been otherwise: he regretted not a minute of waste, not one inconstancy, not one folly: he regretted not a strand that had gone to the making of the mad silly tapestry of his life, he was glad that all had been as it had been so that he could now be as he was, a man who understood himself and could die with a heart cleansed of folly and sacred to love.
To the windows of the quiet dark room rose the chatter of the lounging traffic of the Place Vendôme. The Duke listened, and smiled. Brown eyes and scarlet lips, blue eyes and scarlet lips, black hair and golden hair and tawny hair, lazy smile and merry smile and greedy smile and bored smile, little breathless laughs, little meaningless laughs and sharp cries of pleasure, dresses of Chanel, Patou, Vionnet, Molyneux—round and round the Place Vendôme they went, like automata on a bejewelled merry-go-round. And the Duke saw himself sitting in motor-cars first beside one and then beside another, talking, talking, whispering, sighing, yawning....
As the minutes passed his sight began to distinguish the objects in the room. On a table someroses were fainting in a bowl. He made obeisance and kissed a rose, for kissing a rose will clean a man’s lips. Then he knelt beside the still figure on the couch and he kissed her mouth.
“Oh!” she cried, and she cried: “You thief!”
He said: “Your voice is so cold that ice would seem like fire beside it. But I don’t care.” And again he kissed her mouth. Then he said: “Your lips are burning. That is very odd. Your voice is very cold, but your lips are burning. Now why is that?”
“For shame,” she whispered. “They are burning for shame that you are so little of a man.”
He laughed, his lips by her ear. “Beloved, do you think I would die without kissing your lips? Honestly, beloved, could you expect it?”
In the darkness he could just see the pale mask of her face and the shining, savage pools of her eyes, and he kissed first one and then the other. She was very still.
“Die?” she whispered.
He would have laughed again, but he fancied that maybe too much laughter would not become his situation, would appear like bravado. But he would have liked to show her he was happy, and why he was happy. A vain man, he had realised that he was contemptible: therefore it was good to die. Loving as he had never loved before, he was unloved: therefore it was good to die.
He told her how he had been warned that the cock on St. James’s tower had crowed thrice that dawn. And then he was amazed, for as he made to rise he could not. He cried out his wonder.
She said: “Be still!”
He cried out his despair.
She whispered: “Be still!”
Her arm was tight about his shoulder, and that was why his happiness had left him like a startled bird. He sobbed: “Child, for pity’s sake! It’s too late now. Let me die in peace. To have died without your love was blessedly easy. A moment ago I was happy.”
“Die! You!” And, as she mocked him thus, the cold irony of the English tongue tore aside the veil of the American accent, and when the Duke stared into her eyes he had leapt up and run away for shame but that her arm was still tight about his shoulder.
“You, Leonora, you! And so you have revenged yourself!”
She whispered: “Be still!”
And as he made to tear himself away, she said: “Yes, I wanted to be revenged. I wanted you to fall in love with me. I wanted you to look a fool.”
“Then you must be very content, Leonora! Let me go now.”
“Let you go?” she cried. “Let yougo! But are you mad!”
“Oh, God,” he said pitifully, “what is this new mockery!”
“You see,” she sighed, “I’ve gone and fallen in love with you again! That rather takes the edge off my joke, doesn’t it? Oh, dear! Maximilian, I have waited to love you as I love you now ever since I married you four years ago. But you never would let me. Be honest, sweet—would you ever let me love you? You were always theworld’s spoilt darling, the brilliant and dashing and wealthy Duke of Mall—and I your American wife! Darling, what a lot of trouble you give those who love you! I have had to go through all the bother of divorcing you to make you love me, and now I suppose I must go through all the bother of marrying you again because you’ve made me love you——”
“Oh, but listen!” he made to protest.
“I certainly won’t!” she cried. “I must say, though, that you’ve made love to me divinely these last few months, and the real Ava would have fallen for you, I’m sure, if she hadn’t been in California all this while. I dyed my hair a little, but the only real difference between me and your wife was that I listened to you while you talked about yourself. Darling,” said she, “kiss me, else how shall I know that we are engaged to be married?”
He said desperately: “Leonora, what are you saying! Do you forget that I am to die?”
“Not you, not you! You may be divorced for the time being, poor Maximilian, but you’re not nearly dead yet. I sent that wire myself this morning from Victoria Station—to mark the fact that the Duke of Mall is dead! Long live the Duke of Mall!”
“Leonora, I can’t bear this happiness!”
“But you must learn to put up with it, sweet!”
“Leonora, how divine it is to be in love! I love you, Leonora!”
“My, how this British guy mocks a poor American girl!”
“But, Leonora, I adore you!”
“Words, words, words! Whereas, sweet, a little action would not come amiss. You might for instance, kiss me. Max, how I’ve longed to be kissed by you these last few months! Max darling, please kiss me at once! I assure you it is quite usual between engaged couples.”
Note:The legend of the Dukedom of Mall may not find a full measure of credence owing to the fact(only recently pointed out to the author)that the weather-vane on the tower of St. James’s Palace is adorned, not by a golden cock, but by a golden arrow. But have we not been warned in letters of gold, that shall last so long as mankind lasts, not to put our faith in the word of Princes? The author does in all humility venture to suggest that the same must undoubtedly apply also to the word of Dukes.
THERE is a tale that is told in London, and maybe it is told also in thesalonsof New York and upon the Boulevards of Paris, how one night a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square and how that song was of a doubtful character calculated to provoke disorder in households brought up in the fear of God. Needless to say, there are not wanting those who will have it that no nightingale could have done such a thing; nor has the meanness of envy ever been so clearly shown as by those who have suborned certain bird-fanciers into declaring that the nightingale is a bird notably averse from singing in squares and that the legend should therefore be deleted from the folk-tales of Mayfair. But, however that may be, the song of the nightingale is far from being the burden of this tale, which has to do in a general way with a plague of owls, in a particular way with one owl, and in a most particular way with the revolting doom of a gentleman who would not dance with his wife. Many will hold, in extenuation of his disagreeable attitude, that he could not dance. But could he not have taken a lesson or two?
Now of the many and divers people who saw the owls in flight we need mention only policemen, statesmen, ’bus-drivers, noblemen, Colonials and hawkers, to be convinced of the truth of what they one and all say, how in the gloom of a certain summer’s twilight not long ago there flew a plague of owls across Trafalgar Square towards the polite heights of Hampstead Heath. Maybe no one would have remarked them, for the strange cries and hootings with which they adorned their flight were not discordant with the noises of the town, had not the pigeons that play about Lord Nelson’s monument fled before them with affrighted coos; and in such an extremity of terror were the timid creatures that very few were ever seen in those parts again, which is a sad thing to relate.
Nor can any man speak with any certainty as to the exact number of the owls, for the twilight was deep and the phenomenon sudden; but one and all need no encouragement to vouch for their prodigious multitude: while the fact that they appeared to be flying from the direction of Whitehall at the impulse of a peculiar indignation has given rise among the lower people to a superstition of the sort that is perhaps pardonable in those who have not had the benefits of a public-school education. These simples declare that the owls, for long peacefully asleep within the gloomy recesses unrecognisable to the feathered intelligence as the austere House of Lords, had been startled from their rest by the activities of the new Labour Government as revealed in that patrician place by the agile incendiarism of my Lords Haldane and Parmoor, and had in one bodyfled forth to seek a land wherein a Conservative Government would afford them the lulling qualities necessary for their rest.
The serious historian, however, is concerned only with facts. The plague of owls fled no one knows whither, although superstition points to Italy. But this much is known, that whilst crossing the brilliant centre of Piccadilly Circus one among them swooped down from the twilight and perched on the left wing of the figure of Eros:[A]which, presented to the nation by one of the Earls of Shaftesbury, adorns the head of the charming fountain where old women will sell pretty flowers to anyone who will buy, roses in summer and roses in winter, roses by day and roses by night, or maybe a bunch of violets for a young lady, a gardenia for a gentleman of the mode.