The murder is out. A paragraph has appeared in the newspapers to the effect that the marriage arranged between Mr. Simon de Gex and Miss Eleanor Faversham will not take place. It has also become common knowledge that I am resigning my seat in Parliament on account of ill-health. That is the reason rightly assigned by my acquaintances for the rupture of my engagement. I am being rapidly killed by the doleful kindness of my friends. They are so dismally sympathetic. Everywhere I go there are long faces and solemn hand-shakes. In order to cheer myself I gave a little dinner-party at the club, and the function might have been a depressed wake with my corpse in a coffin on the table. My sisters, dear, kind souls, follow me with anxious eyes as if I were one of their children sickening for chicken-pox. They upbraid me for leaving them in ignorance, and in hushed voices inquire as to my symptoms. They both came this morning to the Albany to see what they could do for me. I don't see what they can do, save help Rogers put studs in my shirts. They expressed such affectionate concern that at last I cried out:
“My dear girls, if you don't smile, I'll sit upon the hearthrug and howl like a dog.”
Then they exchanged glances and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things, under the impression that they were brightening me up. I am being deluged with letters. I had no idea I was such a popular person. They come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament, from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs. I could set up as a general practitioner of medicine on the advice that is given me. I am recommended cod-liver oil, lung tonic, electric massage, abdominal belts, warm water, mud baths, Sandow's treatment, and every patent medicament save rat poison. I am urged to go to health resorts ranging geographically from the top of the Jungfrau to Central Africa. All kinds of worthy persons have offered to nurse me. Old General Wynans writes me a four-page letter to assure me that I have only to go to his friend Dr. Eustace Adams, of Wimpole Street, to be cured like a shot. I happen to know that Eustace Adams is an eminent gynecologist.
And the worst of it all is that these effusions written in the milk of human kindness have to be answered. Dale is not here. I have to sit down at my desk and toil like a galley slave. I am being worn to a shadow.
Lola Brandt, too, has heard the news, Dale in Berlin, and the London newspapers being her informants. Tears stood in her eyes when I called to learn her decision. Why had I not told her I was so ill? Why had I let her worry me with her silly troubles? Why had I not consulted her friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield? She filled up my chair with cushions (which, like most men, I find stuffy and comfortless), and if I had given her the slightest encouragement, would have stuck my feet in hot mustard and water. Why had I come out on such a dreadful day? It was indeed a detestable day of raw fog. She pulled the curtains close, and, insisting upon my remaining among my cushions, piled the grate with coal half-way up the chimney. Would I like some eucalyptus?
“My dear Madame Brandt,” I cried, “my bronchial tubes and lungs are as strong as a hippopotamus's.”
I wish every one would not conclude that I was going off in a rapid decline.
Lola Brandt prowled about me in a wistful, mothering way, showing me a fresh side of her nature. She is as domesticated as Penelope.
“You're fond of cooking, aren't you?” I asked suddenly.
She laughed. “I adore it. How do you know?”
“I guessed,” said I.
“I'm what the French call avraie bourgeoise.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said I.
“Are you? I thought your class hated thebourgeoisie.”
“Thebourgeoisie,” I said, “is the nation's granary of the virtues. But for God's sake, don't tell any one that I said so!”
“Why?” she asked.
“If it found its way into print it would ruin my reputation for epigram.”
She drew a step or two towards me in her slow rhythmic way, and smiled.
“When you say or do a beautiful thing you always try to bite off its tail.”
Then she turned and drew some needlework—plain sewing I believe they call it—from beneath the Union Jack cushion and sat down.
“I'll make a confession,” she said. “Until now I've stuffed away my work when I heard you coming. I didn't think it genteel. What do you think?”
I scanned the shapeless mass of linen or tulle or whatever it was on her lap.
“I don't know whether it's genteel,” I remarked, “but at present it looks like nothing on God's earth.”
My masculine ignorance of such mysteries made her laugh. She is readily moved to mild mirth, which makes her an easy companion. Besides, little jokes are made to be laughed at, and I like women who laugh at them. There was a brief silence. I smoked and made Adolphus stand up on his hind legs and balance sugar on his nose. His mistress sewed. Presently she said, without looking up from her work:
“I've made up my mind.”
I rose from my cushioned seat, into which Adolphus, evidently thinking me a fool, immediately snuggled himself, and I stood facing her with my back to the fire.
“Well?” said I.
“I am ready to go back to my husband, if he can be found, and, of course, if he will have me.”
I commended her for a brave women. She smiled rather sadly and shook her head.
“Those are two gigantic 'ifs.'”
“Giants before now have been slain by the valiant,” I replied.
“How is Captain Vauvenarde to be found?”
“An officer in the French Army is not like a lost sparrow in London. His whereabouts could be obtained from the French War Office. What is his regiment?”
“The Chasseurs d'Afrique. Yes,” she added thoughtfully. “I see, it isn't difficult to trace him. I make one condition, however. You can't refuse me.”
“What is that?”
“Until things are fixed up everything must go on just as at present between Dale and me. He is not to be told anything. If nothing comes of it then I'll have him all to myself. I won't give him up and be left alone. As long as I care for him, I swear to God, I won't!” she said, in her low, rich voice—and I saw by her face that she was a woman of her word. “Besides, he would come raving and imploring—and I'm not quite a woman of stone. It isn't all jam to go back to my husband. Goodness knows why I am thinking of it. It's for your sake. Do you know that?”
I did not. I was puzzled. Why in the world should Lola Brandt, whom I have only met three or four times, revolutionise the whole of her life for my sake?
“I should have thought it was for Dale's,” said I.
“I suppose you would, being a man,” she replied.
I retorted, with a smile: “Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one of these days you'll do it. Meanwhile, I'll wait in patience.”
She gave me one of her sidelong, flashing glances and sewed with more vigour than appeared necessary. I admired the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders as she bent over her work. She seemed too strong to wield such an insignificant weapon as a needle.
“That's neither here nor there,” she said in reference to my last remark. “I say, I don't look forward to going back to my husband—though why I should say 'going back' I don't know, as he left me—not I him. Anyhow, I'm ready to do it. If it can be managed, I'll cut myself adrift suddenly from Dale. It will be more merciful to him. A man can bear a sudden blow better than lingering pain. If it can't be managed, well, Dale will know nothing at all about it, and both he and I will be saved a mortal deal of worry and unhappiness.”
“Suppose” said I, “it can't be managed? Do you propose to keep Dale ignorant of the danger he is running in keeping up a liaison with a married woman living apart from her husband?”
She reflected. “If my husband says he'll see me damned first before he'll come back to me, then I'll tell Dale everything, and you can say what you like to him. He'll be able to judge for himself; but in the meanwhile you'll let me have what happiness I can.”
I accepted the compromise, and, dispossessing Adolphus, sat down again. I certainly had made progress. Feeling in a benevolent mood, I set forth the advantages she would reap by assuming her legal status; how at last she would shake the dust of Bohemia from off her feet, and instead of standing at the threshold like a disconsolate Peri, she would enter as a right the Paradise of Philistia which she craved; how her life would be one continual tea-party, and how, as her husband had doubtless by this time obtained his promotion, she would be authorised to adopt high and mighty airs in her relations with the wives of all the captains and lieutenants in the regiment. She sighed and wondered whether she would like it, after all.
“Here in England I can say 'damn' as often as I choose. I don't say it very often, but sometimes I feel I must say it or explode.”
“There are its equivalents in French,” I suggested.
She laughed outright. “Fancy my coming out with asacre nom de Dieuin a French drawing-room!”
“Fancy you shouting 'damn' in an English one.”
“That's true,” she said. “I suppose drawing-rooms are the same all the world over. I do try to talk like a lady—at least, what I imagine they talk like, for I've never met one.”
“You see one every time you look in the glass,” said I.
Her olive face flushed. “You mustn't say such things to me if you don't mean them. I like to think all you say to me is true.”
“Why in the world,” I cried, “should you not be a lady? You have the instincts of one. How many of my fair friends in Mayfair and Belgravia would have made their drawing-rooms unspeakable just for the sake of not hurting the feelings of Anastasius Papadopoulos?”
She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, looked at me gratefully.
“I'm so glad you've said that. Dale can't understand it. He wants me to clear the trash away.”
“Dale,” said I, “is young and impetuous. I am a battered old philosopher with one foot in the grave.”
Quick moisture gathered in her eyes. “You hurt me,” she said. “You'll soon get well and strong again. You must!”
“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” I laughed.
“Eh bien, je le veux,” she said with an odd expression in her eyes which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like a captivating odour—but it was not an odour—a strange magnetic influence.
I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer.
There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I will save her from Dale for her own sake.
All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.
And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously andcum privilegiodunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or spiritual; and yet sheis, in a queer, indescribable way, all these things.
“Je le veux,” she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything she bade me. If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary's cap or a hair of the Prester John's beard, I would have telephoned forthwith to Rogers to pack a suit-case and book a seat in the Orient express.
What would have happened next Heaven alone knows—for we could not have gone on gazing at each other until I backed myself out at the door by way of leave-taking—had not Anticlimax arrived in the person of Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos in his eternal frock-coat. But his gloves were black.
As usual he fell on his knees and kissed his lady's hand. Then he rose and greeted me with solemn affability.
“C'est un privilege de rencontrer den gnadigsten Herrn,” said he.
Confining myself to one language, I responded by informing him that it was an honour always to meet so renowned a professor, and inquired politely after the health of Hephaestus.
“Ah, Signore!” he cried. “Do not ask me. It is a tragedy from which I shall never recover.”
He sat down on a footstool by the side of Madame Brandt and burst into tears, which coursed down his cheeks and moustache and hung like drops of dew from the point of his imperial.
“Is he dead?” asked Madame.
“I wish he were! No. It is only the iron self-restraint that I possess which prevented me from slaying him on the spot. But poor Santa Bianca! My gentle and accomplished Angora. He has killed her. I can scarcely raise my head through grief.”
Lola put her great arm round the little man's neck and patted him like a child, while he sobbed as if his heart would break.
When he recovered he gave us the details of the tragic end of Santa Bianca, and wound up by calling down the most ingeniously complicated and passionate curses on the head of the murderer. Lola Brandt strove to pacify him.
“We all have our sorrows, Anastasius. Did I not lose my beautiful horse Sultan?”
The professor sprang to his full height of four feet and dashed away his tears with a noble gesture of his black-gloved hand.
Base slave that he was to think of his own petty bereavement in the face of her eternal affliction. He turned to me and bade me mark her serene nobility. It was a model and an example for him to follow. He, too, would be brave and present a smiling face to evil fortune.
“Behold! I smile, carissima!” he cried dramatically.
We beheld—and saw his features (smudged with tearstains and the dye from the black gloves which he obviously wore out of respect for the deceased Santa Bianca) contorted into a grimace of hideous imbecility.
“Monsieur,” said he, assuming his natural expression which was one of pensive melancholy, “let us change the conversation. You are a great statesman. Will you kindly let me know your opinion on the foreign policy of Germany?”
Whereupon he sat down again upon his stool and regarded me with earnest attention.
“Germany,” said I, with the solemnity of a Sir Oracle in the smoking-room of one of the political clubs, “has dreams of an empire beyond her frontiers, and with a view to converting the dream into a reality, is turning out battleships nineteen to the dozen.”
The Professor nodded his head sagaciously, and looked up at Lola.
“Very profound,” said he, “very profound. I shall remember it. I am a Greek, Monsieur, and the Greeks, as you know, are a nation of diplomatists.”
“Ever since the days of Xenophon,” said I.
“You're both too clever for me,” exclaimed our hostess. “Where did you get your knowledge from, Anastasius?”
The Professor, flattered, passed his hand over his bulgy forehead.
“I was a great student in my youth,” said he. “Once I could tell you all the kings of Rome and the date of the battle of Actium. But pressure of weightier concerns has driven my erudition from me. Pardon me. I have not yet asked after your health. You are looking sad and troubled. What is the matter?”
He sat bolt upright, fingering his imperial and regarding her with the keen solicitude of a family physician. To my amazement, Lola Brandt told him quite simply:
“I am thinking of living with my husband again.”
“Has the traitor been annoying you?” he asked with a touch of fierceness.
“Oh, no! It's my own idea. I'm tired of living alone. I don't even know where he is.”
“Do you want to know where he is?”
“How can I communicate with him unless I do?”
Anastasius Papadopoulos rose, struck an attitude, and thumped his breast.
“I will seek him for you at the ends of the earth, and will bring him to prostrate himself at your feet.”
“That's very kind of you, Anastasius,” said Lola gently; “but what will become of your cats?”
The dwarf raised his hand impressively.
“The Almighty will have them in His keeping. I have also my pupil and assistant, Quast.”
Lola smiled indulgently from her cushions, showing her curious even teeth.
“You mustn't do anything so mad, Anastasius, I forbid you.”
“Madame,” said he in a most stately manner, “when I devote myself, it is to the death. I have the honour to salute you!”—he bowed over her hand and kissed it. “Monsieur.” He bowed to me with the profundity of a hidalgo, and trotted magnificently out of the room.
It was all so sudden that it took my breath away.
“Well I'm——” I didn't know what I was, so I stopped. Lola Brandt broke into low laughter at my astonishment.
“That's Anastasius's way,” she explained.
“But the little man surely isn't going to leave his cats and start on a wild-goose chase over Europe to find your husband?”
“He thinks he is, but I shan't let him.”
“I hope you won't,” said I. “And will you tell me why you made so hot-headed a person your confidant?”
I confess that I was wrathful. Here had I been using the wiles of a Balkan chancery to bring the lady to my way of thinking, and here was she, to my face, making a joke of it with this caricature of a Paladin.
“My dearest friend,” she replied earnestly, “don't be angry with me. I've given the poor little man something to think of besides the death of his cat. It will do him good. And why shouldn't I tell him? He's a dear old friend, and in his way was so good to me when I was unhappy. He knows all about my married life. You may think he's half-witted; but he isn't. In ordinary business dealings he's as shrewd as they make 'em. The manager who beats Anastasius over a contract is yet to be born.”
By some extraordinary process of the contortionist's art, she curled herself out of her chair on to the hearthrug and knelt before me, her hands clasped on my knee.
“You're not angry with me, are you?” she asked in her rich contralto.
I took both her hands, rose, and assisted her to rise. I was not going to be mesmerised again.
“Of course not,” I laughed. Indeed my wrath had fallen from me.
Her bosom heaved with a sigh. “I'm so glad,” she said. Her breath fanned my cheek. It was aromatic, intoxicating. Her lips are ripe and full.
“You had better find your husband as soon as possible,” said I.
“Do you think so?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself.”
She started. “You?”
“Yes,” I said. “The Chasseurs d'Afrique are probably in Africa, and the doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off in no time with brain fag and writer's cramp. Your husband will be what the newspapers call an objective. Good-bye!” said I, “I'll bring him to you dead or alive.”
And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.
I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail. Judged by the ordinary canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic. The question is: Does the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amusement or anger? I compromise with myself. I am angry at having been forced on an insane adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable pleasure.
Let me set it down once and for all. I resent Lola Brandt's existence. When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my vantage of social and intellectual superiority. I can pooh-pooh her fascinations. I can crack jokes on her shortcomings. I can see perfectly well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty's Government, and eventually drop the “Esquire” at the end of his name and stick “The Right Honourable” in front of it—in fact, a most superior, wise and important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate whose knowledge of women has hitherto been limited to his sisters and the common little girl at the tobacconist's.
I say I resent it. I resent the low notes in her voice. I resent the cajolery of the supple twists of her body. I resent her putting her hands on my shoulders, and, as the twopenny-halfpenny poets say, fanning my cheek with her breath. If it had not been for that I should never have promised to go in search of her impossible husband. At any rate, it is easy to discover his whereabouts. A French bookseller has telegraphed to Paris for theAnnuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise, the French Army List. It locates every officer in the French army, and as the Chasseurs d'Afrique generally chase in Africa, it will tell me the station in Algeria or Tunisia which Captain Vauvenarde adorns. I can go straight to him as Madame Brandt's plenipotentiary, and if the unreasonable and fire-eating warrior does not run me through the body for impertinence before he has time to appreciate the delicacy of my mission, I may be able to convince him that a well-to-do wife is worth the respectable consideration of a hard-up captain of Chasseurs. I say I may be able to convince him; but I shrink from the impudence of the encounter. I am to accost a total stranger in a foreign army and tell him to return to his wife. This is the pretty little mission I have undertaken. It sounded glorious and eumoirous and quixotic and deucedly funny, during the noble moment of inspiration, when Lola's golden eyes were upon me; but now—well, I shall have to persuade myself that it is funny, if I am to carry it out. It is very much like wagering that one will tweak by the nose the first gentleman in gaiters and shovel-hat one meets in Piccadilly. This by some is considered the quintessence of comedy. I foresee a revision of my sense of humour.
This afternoon I met Lady Kynnersley again—at the Ellertons'. I was talking to Maisie, who has grown no happier, when I saw her sailing across to me with questions hoisted in her eyes. Being particularly desirous not to report progress periodically to Lady Kynnersley, I made a desperate move. I went forward and greeted her.
“Lady Kynnersley,” said I, “somebody was telling me that you are in urgent need of funds for something. With my usual wooden-headedness I have forgotten what it is—but I know it is a deserving organisation.”
The philanthropist, as I hoped, ousted the mother. She exclaimed at once:
“It must have been the Cabmen and Omnibus Drivers' Rheumatic Hospital.”
“That was it!” said I, hearing of the institution for the first time.
“They are martyrs to rheumatic gout, and of course have no means of obtaining proper treatment; so we have secured a site at Harrogate and are building a comfortable place, half hospital, half hotel, where they can be put up for a shilling a day and have all the benefits of the waters just as if they were staying at the Hotel Majestic. Do you want to become a subscriber?”
“I am eager to,” said I.
“Then come over here and I'll tell you all about it.”
I sat with her in a corner of the room and listened to her fairy-tale. She wrung my heart to such a pitch of sympathy that I rose and grasped her by the hand.
“It is indeed a noble project,” I cried. “I love the London cabby as my brother, and I'll post you a cheque for a thousand pounds this evening. Good-bye!”
I left her in a state of joyous stupefaction and made my escape. If it had not fallen in with my general scheme of good works I should regard it as an expensive method of avoiding unpleasant questions.
Another philanthropist, by the way, of quite a different type from Lady Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex Campion. I have known him since our University days and have maintained a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since. He is also a friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and then inveigles into weird doings in the impossible slums of South Lambeth. He has tried on many occasions to lure me into his web, but hitherto I have resisted. Being the possessor of a large fortune, he has been able to gratify a devouring passion for philanthropy, and has squandered most of his money on an institution—a kind of club, school, labour-bureau, dispensary, soup-kitchen, all rolled into one—in Lambeth; and there he lives himself, perfectly happy among a hungry, grubby, scarecrow, tatterdemalion crowd. At a loss for a defining name, he has called it “Barbara's Building,” after his mother. His conception of the cosmos is that sun, moon and stars revolve round Barbara's Building. How he learned that I was, so to speak, standing at street corners and flinging money into the laps of the poor and needy, I know not. But he came to see me a day or two ago, full of Barbara's Building, and departed in high feather with a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.
I may remark here on the peculiar difficulty there is in playing Monte Cristo with anything like picturesque grace. Any dull dog that owns a pen and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable institutions. But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative, adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy matter. You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with the craving unsatisfied. You have really had so few opportunities; and when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties as to baffle all but the most persistent. Have you ever tried to give a beggar a five-pound note? I did this morning.
She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches in Sackville Street. She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.
“Here,” said I to myself, “is an opportunity of bringing unimagined gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature's life.”
I pressed a five-pound note into her hand and passed on. She ran after me, terror on her face.
“I daren't take it, sir; they would say I had stolen it, and I should be locked up. No one would believe a gentleman had given it to me.”
She trembled, overwhelmed by the colossal fortune that might, and yet might not, be hers. I sympathised, but not having the change in gold, I could do no more than listen to an incoherent tale of misery, which did not aid the solution of the problem. It was manifestly impossible to take back the note; and yet if she retained it she would be subjected to scandalous indignities. What was to be done? I turned my eyes towards Piccadilly and beheld a policeman. A page wearing the name of a milliner's shop on his cap whisked past me. I stopped him and slipped a shilling into his hand.
“Will you ask that policeman to come to me?”
The boy tore down the street and told the policeman and followed him up to me, eager for amusement.
“What has the woman been doing, sir?” asked the policeman.
“Nothing,” said I. “I have given her a five-pound note.”
“What for, sir?” he asked.
“To further my pursuit of the eumoirous,” said I, whereat he gaped stolidly; “but, be that as it may, I have given it her as a free gift, and she is afraid to present it anywhere lest she should be charged with theft. Will you kindly accompany her to a shop, where she can change it, and vouch for her honesty?”
The policeman, who seemed to form the lowest opinion of my intellect, said he didn't know a shop on his beat where they could change it. The boy whistled. The woman held the box of matches in one hand, and in the other the note, fluttering in the breeze. Idlers paused and looked on. The policeman grew authoritative and bade them pass along. They crowded all the more. My position was becoming embarrassing. At last the boy, remembering the badge of honour on his cap, undertook to change the note at the hatter's at the corner of the street. So, having given the note to the boy and bidden the policeman follow him to see fair play, and encouraged the woman to follow the policeman, I resumed my walk down Sackville Street.
But what a pother about a simple act of charity! In order to repeat it habitually I shall have to rely on the fortuitous attendance of a boy and a policeman, or have a policeman and a boy permanently attached to my person, which would be as agreeable as the continuous escort of a jackdaw and a yak.
Poor Latimer is having a dreadful time. Apparently my ten thousand pounds have vanished like a snowflake on the river of liabilities. How he is to repay me he does not know. He wishes he had not yielded to temptation and had allowed himself to be honestly hammered. Then he could have taken his family to sing in the streets with a quiet conscience.
“My dear fellow,” said I through the telephone this morning. “What are ten thousand pounds to me?”
I heard him gasp at the other end.
“But you're not a millionaire!”
“I am!” I cried triumphantly. And now I come to think of it, I spoke truly. If a man reckons his capital as half a year's income, doubles it, and works out the capital that such a yearly income represents, he is the possessor of a mint of money.
“I am,” I cried; “and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll settle five thousand on Lucy and the children, so that they needn't accompany you in your singing excursions. I shouldn't like them to catch cold, poor dears, and ruin their voices.”
In tones more than telephonically agonised he bade me not make a jest of his misery. I nearly threw the receiver at the blockhead.
“I'm not jesting,” I bawled; “I'm deadly serious. I knew Lucy before you did, and I kissed her and she kissed me years before she knew of your high existence; and if she had been a sensible woman she would have married me instead of you—what? The first time you've heard of it? Of course it is—and be decently thankful that you hear it now.”
It is pleasant sometimes to tell the husbands of girls you have loved exactly what you think of them; and I had loved Lucy Latimer. She came, an English rose, to console me for the loss of my Frenchfleur-de-lis, Clothilde. Or was it the other way about? One does get so mixed in these things. At any rate, she did not marry me, her first love, but jilted me most abominably for Latimer. So I shall heap five thousand pounds on her head.
I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. I wonder why? Which reminds me that I made the identical remark to Lucy Latimer a month or two ago. (She is a plump, kind, motherly, unromantic little person now.) She had the audacity to reply that I had never had any.
“You, Lucy Crooks, dare say such a thing!” I exclaimed indignantly.
She smiled. “Are there many more qualified than I to give the opinion?”
I remember that I rose and looked her sternly in the face.
“Lucy Crooks or Lucy Latimer,” said I, “you are nothing more or less than a common hussy.”
Whereupon she laughed as if I had paid her a high compliment.
I maintain that I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. First, there was an angel-faced widow, a contemporary of my mother's, whom I wooed in Greek verses—and let me tell the young lover that it is much easier to write your own doggerel and convert it into Greek than to put “To Althea” into decent Anacreontics. I also took her to the Eton and Harrow match, and talked to her of women's hats and the things she loved, and neglected the cricket. But she would have none of me. In the flood tide of my passion she married a scorbutic archdeacon of the name of Jugg. Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can't remember. It was something ending in “-ine.” We quarrelled because we held divergent views on Mr. Wilson Barrett. Then there was Clothilde, whose tragical story I have already unfolded; Lucy Crooks, who threw me over for this dear, amiable, wooden-headed stockjobbing Latimer; X, Y and Z—but here, let me remark, I was the hunted—mammas spread nets for me which by the grace of heaven and the ungraciousness of the damsels I escaped; and, lastly, my incomparable Eleanor Faversham. Now, I thought, am I safe in harbour? If ever a match could have been labelled “Pure heaven-made goods, warranted not to shrink”—that was one. But for this rupture there is an all-accounting reason. For the others there was none. I vow I went on falling in love until I grew absolutely sick and tired of the condition. You see, the vocabulary of the pastime is so confoundedly limited. One has to say to B what one has said to A; to C exactly what one has said to A and B; and when it comes to repeating to F the formularies one has uttered to A, B, C, D and E one grows almost hysterical with the boredom of it. That was the delightful charm of Eleanor Faversham; she demanded no formularies or re-enactment of raptures.
TheAnnuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaisehas arrived. It is a volume of nearly eighteen hundred pages, and being uncut both at top and bottom and at the side it is peculiarly serviceable as a work of reference. I attacked it bravely, however, hacking my way into it, paperknife in hand. But to my dismay, the more I hacked the less could I find of Captain Vauvenarde. I sought him in the Alphabetical Repertory of Colonial Troops, in the list of officershors cadre, in the lists of seniority, in the list of his regiment, wherever he was likely or unlikely to be. There is no person in the French army by the name of Vauvenarde.
I went straight to Lola Brandt with the hideous volume and the unwelcome news. Together we searched the pages.
“Hemustbe here,” she said, with feminine disregard of fact.
“Are you quite certain you have got the name right?” I asked.
“Why, it is my own name!”
“So it is,” said I; “I was forgetting. But how do you know he was in the army at all?”
He might have been an adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who had poured a gallant but mendacious tale into her ears.
“I hardly ever saw him out of uniform. He was quartered at Marseilles on special duty. I knew some of his brother officers.”
“Then,” said I, “there are only two alternatives. Either he has left the army or he is——”
“Dead?” she whispered.
“Let us hope,” said I, “that he has left the army.”
“You must find out, Mr. de Gex,” she said in a low voice. “I took it for granted that my husband was alive. It's horrible to think that he may be dead. It alters everything, somehow. Until I know, I shall be in a state of awful suspense. You'll make inquiries at once, won't you?”
“Did you love your husband, Madame Brandt?” I asked.
She looked at the fire for some time without replying. She stood with one foot on the fender.
“I thought I did when I married him,” she said at last. “I thought I did when he left me.”
“And now?”
She turned her golden eyes full on me. It is a disconcerting trick of hers at any time, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling; but on this occasion it was startling. They held mine for some seconds, and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman's soul. Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.
“Now?” she echoed. “Many things have happened between then and now. If he is alive and I go to him, I'll try to think again that I love him. It will be the only way. It will save me from playing hell with my life.”
“I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light,” said I.
“I wasn't thinking of Dale,” she said calmly.
“Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?”
She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained gestures.
“You are quite right,” she said, with an odd note of hardness in her voice. “You're quite right in what you said the other day—that it was high time I went back to my husband. I pray God he is not dead. I have a feeling that he isn't. He can't be. I count on you to find him and ask him to meet me. It would be better than writing. I don't know what to say when I have a pen in my hand. You must find him and speak to him and send me a wire and I'll come straight away to any part of the earth. Or would you like me to come with you and help you find him? But no; that's idiotic. Forget that I have said it. I'm a fool. But he must be found. He must, he must!”
She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space, she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature is baffles me. Although I contemplate with equanimity my little corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a disembodied spirit, yet I do not like to be baffled. It makes me angry. But during this interview with Lola Brandt I had not time to be angry. I am angry now. In fact I am in a condition bordering on that of a mad dog. If Rogers came and disturbed me now, as I am writing, I would bite him. But I will set calmly down the story of this appalling afternoon.
Lola stood before me wringing her hands.
“What are you going to do?”
“I can get an introduction to theChef de bureauof the information department of theMinistere de la Guerrein Paris,” I replied after a moment's reflection. “He will be able to tell me whether Captain Vauvenarde is alive or dead.”
“He is alive. He must be.”
“Very well. But I doubt whether Captain Vauvenarde keeps the office informed of his movements.”
“But you'll go in search of him, won't you?”
“The earth is rather a large place,” I objected. “He may be in Dieppe, or he may be on top of Mount Popocatapetl.”
“I'm sure you'll find him,” she said encouragingly.
“You'll own,” said I, “that there's something humourous in the idea of my wandering all over the surface of the planet in search of a lost captain of Chasseurs. It is true that we might employ a private detective.”
“Yes!” she cried eagerly. “Why not? Then you could stay here—and I could go on seeing you till the news came. Let us do that.”
The swiftness of her change of mood surprised me.
“What is the particular object of your going on seeing me?” I asked, with a smile.
She turned away and shrugged her shoulders and took up her pensive attitude by the fire.
“I have no other friend,” she said.
“There's Dale.”
“He's not the same.”
“There's Sir Joshua Oldfield.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
I lit a cigarette and sat down. There was a long silence. In some unaccountable way she had me under her spell again. I felt a perfectly insane dismay at the prospect of ending this queer intimacy, and I viewed her intrigue with Dale with profound distaste. Lola had become a habit. The chair I was sitting in wasmychair. Adolphus wasmydog. I hated the idea of Dale making him stand up and do sentry with the fire shovel, while Lola sprawled gracefully on the hearthrug. On the other hand the thought of remaining in London and sharing with my young friend the privilege of her society was intolerable.
I smoked, and, watching her bosom rise and fall as she leaned forward with one arm on the mantelpiece, argued it out with myself, and came to the paradoxical conclusion that I could pack her off without a pang to Kamtchatka and the embraces of her unknown husband, but could not hand her over to Dale without feelings of the deepest repugnance. A pretty position to find myself in. I threw away my cigarette impatiently.
Presently she said, not stirring from her pose:
“I shall miss you terribly if you go. A man like you doesn't come into the life of a common woman like me without”—she hesitated for a word—“without making some impression. I can't bear to lose you.”
“I shall be very sorry to give up our pleasant comradeship,” said I, “but even if I stay and send the private inquiry agent instead of going myself, I shan't be able to go on seeing you in this way.”
“Why not?”
“It would be scarcely dignified.”
“On account of Dale?”
“Precisely.”
There was another pause, during which I lit another cigarette. When I looked up I saw great tears rolling down her cheeks. A weeping woman always makes me nervous. You never know what she is going to do next. Safety lies in checking the tears—in administering a tonic. Still, her wish to retain me was very touching. I rose and stood before her by the mantelpiece.
“You can't have your pudding and eat it too,” said I.
“What do you mean?”
“You can't have Captain Vauvenarde for your husband, Dale for yourcavaliere servente, and myself for your guide, philosopher and friend all at the same time.”
“Which would you advise me to give up?”
“That's obvious. Give up Dale.”
She uttered a sound midway between a sob and a laugh, and said, as it seemed, ironically:
“Would you take his place?”
Somewhat ironically, too, I replied, “A crock, my dear lady, with one foot in the grave has no business to put the other into thePays du Tendre.”
But all the same I had an absurd desire to take her at her word, not for the sake of constituting myself heramant en titre, but so as to dispossess the poor boy who was clamouring wildly for her among his mother's snuffy colleagues in Berlin.
“That's another reason why I shrink from your going in search of my husband,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “Your ill-health.”
“I shall have to go abroad out of this dreadful climate in any case. Doctor's orders. And I might just as well travel about with an object in view as idle in Monte Carlo or Egypt.”
“But you might die!” she cried; and her tone touched my heart.
“I've got to,” I said, as gently as I could; and the moment the words passed my lips I regretted them.
She turned a terrified look on me and seized me by the arms.
“Is it as bad as that? Why haven't you told me?”
I lifted my arms to her shoulders and shook my head and smiled into her eyes. They seemed true, honest eyes, with a world of pain behind them. If I had not regarded myself as the gentleman in the Greek Tragedy walking straight to my certain doom, and therefore holding myself aloof from such vain things, I should have yielded to the temptation and kissed her there and then. And then goodness knows what would have happened.
As it was it was bad enough. For, as we stood holding on to each other's shoulders in a ridiculous and compromising attitude, the door opened and Dale Kynnersley burst, unannounced, into the room. He paused on the threshold and gaped at us, open-mouthed.