“That won’t do,” said I. “I went to the play with him last night.”
“I am not so stupid as to have forgotten that. He came back yesterday, and left for Paris again this morning, carrying a new cypher to the Embassy. He writes the most wonderful poems, which he composes as he is flying.”
“She will ask for them at Bickers,” said I.
Agnes thought intently for a moment.
“She may ask for them at Bickers,” she said, “but she won’t get them because they are not published. They are type-written on vellum, and he lets his friends see them. Perhaps we had better write one or two. What is vellum?”
My head whirled.
“But what is it all about?” I cried. “I don’t mean his poems, but himself. Why are you making all this up?”
She looked at me as at a rather stupid child.
“Now, try to understand,” she said. “I invented him originally to save myself from going mad, and we are making up delicious details about him to save ourselves from detection. We have both of us said that we know Robbie Oriole, and so we must know something about him; the more picturesque the better.We must be able (I have already done so and am telling you about it) to describe his appearance, his career, his tastes. If you told somebody you knew me, and couldn’t say anything definite about me, people would think that you didn’t know me at all. It’s the same with Robert Oriole: we must be able to tell Mrs. Withers about him, and say the same thing. You would be quite despicable if, having said you knew a glorious creature like Robbie, it appeared as if you didn’t. What a delicious name, too! It came to me in a flash, and I felt as if I had known him all my life. Fancy poor Mrs. Withers not knowing Robert Oriole! How bitter for her!”
“Ah, that’s your real reason,” said I. “Now you are serious.”
“Not at all; that is the humorous side of it. It is to save ourselves that we have got to build up this solid, splendid presentment of our friend, and that is why I am telling you so carefully all I have said about him to Mrs. Withers. When it comes to your turn, as it undoubtedly will, to describe him further, you must always telephone to me at once what you have said.... Where had we got to? Oh, yes, his poems. Haven’t you got some joyous little lyrics in your desk which are his? Or better, some vague morbid little wailings? Yes: that shall be the other side of Robbie, known only to his most intimate friends. To the world, which worships him, he is all sunshine and splendour, but to us, his dearfriends, there is another side. His grandmother was a Russian, you must remember. I think I had better write the poems.”
Somehow, incredibly to myself, the fascination of creating and building up and furnishing out a wonderful young man like this, who had no existence whatever, began to gain on me. Also, as Agnes had said, there was the instinct of self-preservation to spur on the imaginative faculty. There was also the pleasure of going one better than Mrs. Withers and of pretending to know intimately somebody whom nobody could possibly know.
“He is an orphan,” I said. “And may he be an American? That would make him easier to get rid of than if he was English.”
She shook her head.
“Orphan—yes,” she said. “American—no. I can’t bear American poetry, and I am sure I couldn’t write it. But his parents lived in India. They are both dead, and he hasn’t got any relations whatever, which makes him so romantic and accounts for that salt soul-loneliness in his poems. We will give him a home—just a little remote house by the sea, in Cornwall, near St. Ives, and the Atlantic rolls in on the beach in front of his grey-walled garden. His poems have the beat and rhythm of the sea——”
I sprang from my chair.
“Never, never!” I cried. “Mrs. Withers goes to St. Ives every summer.”
“We will give him his home, then, in the Lake District,” said Agnes thoughtfully. “There is no beat and rhythm of the sea in his poems, but the eternal melancholy of lakes and mountains. He must have somewhere pretty far off to go to when he is demobilized, as he will be almost immediately. His constant presence in London would lead to detection.”
“Then why demobilize him?” I asked. “He can always be in France when it is convenient to us.”
She was quite firm about this.
“It would never do,” she said. “Mrs. Withers might make inquiries about him from some General in the Flying Corps. Indeed, I am almost sorry he was an airman at all, but that can’t be helped now.”
“He can go to India to see his parents’ graves,” said I, “if we want to get him out of the country for a long period.”
“Yes, but he can’t always be doing that. No one would make constant visits to India to see graves, however beloved were their occupants. Besides, it takes so long to go to India and back. He had much better be in his lovely home in the Lakes, and pay flying visits to London—here to-day and gone to-morrow—just giving us a new poem on vellum. That will be much more fun. Oh, a most important point! He must have some other friends besides us who are worthy of knowing him. John Marrible will be a nice friend for him; John will appreciate him. I will tell a few trustworthy people about Robbie, andyou must do the same. We will call ourselves the Oriolists.”
Mrs. Withers, of course, telephoned both to Agnes and to me to bring Robert Oriole to her party on Thursday evening; but there were so many new and resplendent friends there that she did not, except for a passing moment, regret the absence of that poetic airman, who was up in Westmorland. We had each of us provided him with two or three nice friends, who were in sympathy with him, but for some days after that he made no particular developments, and I began to think that, having served his purpose in protecting Agnes from insanity at Mrs. Withers’s luncheon party, she was losing interest in her benefactor.
Then suddenly he burst out in renewed glory, for it came to Agnes’s ears that in allusion to that same luncheon party Mrs. Withers had said to a mutual friend that dear Aggie had told her the most wonderful things about the Secret Service which she could not possibly repeat. This was sufficient to put new life and vigour into Robert Oriole. Agnes—who had never been called “Aggie” before—dragged me from the music-room at an evening party, where Dickie Sebastian was playing all that had ever been written for the violin, and recounted this outrage on the stairs.
“I have seen that woman three times,” she said,“once when I was introduced to her, once when I lunched with her on the day Robbie was born, and once when I didn’t bring him to her Thursday evening. And now I am ‘Aggie,’ and told her all about the Secret Service! I was almost inclined to let Robbie fade away again, but now she shall see. Heavens! There she is!”
Dickie Sebastian had ceased for the moment, and a few straggling couples emerged stealthily from the music-room, the first of whom was Mrs. Withers and Lord Marrible. Mrs. Withers would have been content, so it struck me, to kiss her hand to Agnes and pass on, for she had just been alluding to Aggie again, but since he came to a stop, she was obliged to wait also. He had already heard that he was “Jack,” and his broad good-humoured face was a-chink with merriment as he spoke to my companion.
“Hallo, Aggie!” he said. “Been talking Secret Service on the stairs?”
“Mr. Goodenough and I,” said Agnes carefully, “were waiting for Robbie. Do go and find him and bring him here by his golden hair.”
“What, is Robbie here?” he asked, thereby conveying to me that he was an Oriolist. “I didn’t see him. If Robbie is in a room it’s not easy to miss him. I didn’t even know he was in town.”
“Of course he is,” said Agnes. “Fancy not knowing if Robbie is in town. You might as well not know——”
“If the sun is shining,” said I fervently.
“Quite. Lord Marrible, do go back and see if he isn’t there. He and Mr. Goodenough and I are going back to his flat, and he is going to read to us. And then he is going to play the piano and then I suppose it will be time for breakfast before we have talked enough.”
Mrs. Withers rose like a great salmon fresh from the sea, and rushed at this wonderful lure.
“I never heard anything so improper,” she said. “You and—and Mr. Goodenough and Robbie Oriole! My dear Miss Lockett, who is chaperoning you?”
Agnes’s face dimpled into the most delicious smile.
“Ah, we don’t want any chaperon in the sunlight,” she said, as John shouldered his way back into the music-room.
“Then let me drop you all at his flat,” said Mrs. Withers. “I have my motor here, and I’m going home now. I am sure it is not out of my way.”
Agnes nudged me with her elbow to indicate that I had to answer this.
“Robbie’s car is here, many thanks,” I said. “It’s waiting for us. I saw it when I came in.”
“And he plays the piano too?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Agnes laughed.
“Ah, I believe you know him all the time,” she said, “and mean to repeat to him all the nice things that we say about him. You know him intimately,I believe, but if you tell me that he has already sent you those three sonnets he wrote as he flew to Cologne the other day, which he promised to read us to-night, I don’t think I could bear it. Mr. Goodenough and I were promised the first hearing of them, and I believe he has sent them to you already.”
“Indeed he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Withers in a social agony. “I really don’t know Mr. Oriole, though I am dying to. I hoped you would have brought him to my little party last Thursday.”
“Thursday, Thursday,” said Agnes. “Yes, I remember: Robbie was up in the Lakes. Such a pity! He would have loved it, just the sort of party he adores.”
Mrs. Withers’s brow, that Greek brow with a fillet of crimson velvet across it, from which depended a splendid pearl, grew slightly corrugated, and made the pearl tremble. She prided herself on knowing all her engagements for a week ahead, but the recollection of them was difficult even to her.
“Sunday at lunch then,” she said. “Will you both come and bring Mr. Oriole? Tell him how divine it would be if he would read us the Cologne sonnets.”
“I’ll tell Robbie,” said Agnes, “but as for your chance of finding him disengaged, I couldn’t promise anything. How his friends grab him when he appears! Ah, there’s John—I mean Lord Marrible. Well?”
“He simply isn’t here.”
Agnes turned to me.
“Ah, now I remember,” she said. “He told me that if he couldn’t get here by half-past ten, he wouldn’t come at all, but would just send the car for us. What time is it now?”
“Eleven,” said I.
“Oh, come quick, then,” said she. “We’ve missed half an hour already.”
Lord Marrible turned to Mrs. Withers.
“Well, you and I must console ourselves with supper,” he said, “as Robbie hasn’t asked us.”
It was all very well for Agnes to say that we would go quickly, but Mrs. Withers just clung.
“But wouldn’t he let me come too?” she said. “Mayn’t I drop you at his door, Miss Lockett, and I would wait while you asked him if I might come in?”
Agnes’s face dimpled again.
“My dear, if it were possible!” she said. “But with Robbie, however intimately you know him, you can’t quite do that. You agree with me, Lord Marrible, I know. But if—if he gives me a copy of the Cologne sonnets, or lets me make one, you may guess to whom I will show it, unless he absolutely forbids me to show it to anybody. How tiresome it is that you don’t know him!”
Mrs. Withers’s pearl trembled again.
“Or if lunch on Sunday won’t suit Mr. Oriole,” she said, “I have got a few people to dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday, and if you would bring him then I should be more than charmed.”
She remembered that her hospitable table was crammed on Wednesday, but there were two or three people who did not matter, and she could easily tell them that she expected them not that Wednesday but the next....
“Or if he would ring me up and suggest any time,” she added.
Agnes laughed again.
“Too kind of you,” she said, “and how rude of me to laugh! I laughed at the idea of Robbie telephoning. He can’t bear any modern invention.”
“But he is an airman, isn’t he?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Never have I admired the quickness and felicity of the female mind more than at that critical moment which would have caused any mere man to stumble and bungle, and leave an unconvincing impression. There was not even the “perceptible pause” before Agnes answered.
“Ah, but Robbie says that flying is the effort to recapture bird-life of a million years ago,” she said. “Birds and angels fly; it is not a modern discovery, but a celestial and ancient secret now being learned by us in our clumsy way. Robbie is lyrical about flying. But what bird or angel ever telephoned? Come, Mr. Goodenough, let us find that car.”
“I forget how he reconciles himself to motoring,” I said. I did not want to put Agnes in a fix, but only to delight my soul with another instance of feminine alacrity.
“He doesn’t,” said she brightly. “But then you have got to get to places quickly, and you can’t fly through the streets of London yet.”
“He sounds too marvellous,” said Mrs. Withers ecstatically. “Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday then. Any of them.”
The discerning reader will easily have perceived by this time that both John Marrible and I were but wax in the inventive hands of Agnes, and flowed into the shapes that her swift fingers ordained for us. Occasionally we suggested little curves and decorations of our own, which she might or might not permit; but we had no independent will in the matter of Robert Oriole. She was the architect who built this splendid temple to an imaginary deity in whose honour Mrs. Withers, his deluded worshipper, swung unregarded censers of asparagus and salmon; at the most we were the cognisant choir and the organ....
During the next weeks which included the Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday, on which Mrs. Withers’s hospitality hungered for Robbie, the number of Oriolists greatly increased, and this secret society became positively masonic in clandestine fervour and fidelity. I could see at a glance, without grips ofany kind, whether some friend or acquaintance who inquired after Robbie was a mason or not, for there was a gleeful solemnity about the initiated Oriolist which the profane crowd lacked.
There were many who now spoke of him, for Mrs. Withers in her frenzied efforts to capture him and show him at her house, asked everyone she met if he knew Robbie, and her large circle of uninitiated guests and acquaintances grew almost as excited about him as she. Those who knew, the initiates to whom these mysteries had been unveiled, answered casually enough when they were applied to by Mrs. Withers, but with that gleeful solemnity which revealed them to each other.
One morning Robbie would have been “stunting” over Richmond, or had lunched at the Ritz, or had been swimming in the Serpentine before breakfast, dropping in unexpectedly to entrance Agnes with the Brahms-Handel variations, or flying back to the Lakes in the afternoon, and the telephone messages that passed between the houses of the initiated were cryptic and yet comprehended utterances. Then on an ever-memorable day two type-written copies of the Cologne sonnets circulated among the elect, and were secretly read in corners to the less fortunate.
On another day, Robbie must have called on me when I was out, for I found his card with his address, “Blaythwaite Fell,” upon it, when I returned. He was not able to go to Mrs. Withers’s house eitheron Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Friday when she returned from a concert at which Royalty was present, she found a similar card with Agnes’s on her table, and all the account her parlour-maid could give was that Miss Lockett had come to the door with “another gentleman” whom she had not seen before, for Lord Marrible had not previously come to the house.
Mrs. Withers, trembling with chagrin (for she had not been presented to Royalty at the concert, and had missed so much more by not stopping at home) telephoned to Agnes at once, only to learn that Robbie had that moment left by air for the Continent.
It is better to describe than to let the reader imagine for himself the state into which Mrs. Withers was brought during these days, because the imagination from excess of excited fancy would go wildly astray. For she did not grow one atom distraught or deranged; she became on the contrary more concentrated and businesslike than ever. She telephoned daily to Agnes and me to know whether Robbie—she always spoke of him now as Robbie—had got back from the Continent, and told us quite firmly that she would put off any other engagement in order to receive him at her house, or meet him at any other house.
But pending that consummation she remained as regular and as resonant as a cuckoo-clock, and struckher social hours with the same fluty regularity. She did not lose her appetite, or take to cocaine or opium-smoking or drown herself in the Thames, as imagination might expect, but kept her head, went up several times in an aeroplane in order to get used to it in case Robbie on his return suggested an expedition, and temporarily stole my copy of the Cologne sonnets.
I am not quite sure about this, but I missed them one afternoon when she had been having tea with me, and found next day that in my absence she had called and gone into my sitting-room to write a note to me. On my return I found the note prominently displayed, and the Cologne sonnets concealed in the blotting-book which I had unsuccessfully searched the evening before. The case is not proved against her, but certainly after that she could quote from the Cologne sonnets....
Then one morning, even while I was wondering what made Agnes keep Robbie so long on the Continent, I was rung up by her maid, and asked to go round to her at once. In answer to a further inquiry, “It’s about Mr. Oriole, sir.”
Full of some nameless apprehension, I started instantly on that bright June morning, feeling sure that at the least Robbie was the victim of some catastrophe. I was even prepared to learn that Robbie was dead, though I could not form the slightest conjecture as to what had led to this suddendemise. Or was Robbie engaged to be married, and had we to arrange about an elusive female of mysterious charm and antecedents?...
Well, it was not that, but it was even worse, for Agnes was engaged to John Marrible, who, with the selfishness of his sex, insisted that Robbie should die. He was with her and put his case. Agnes really seemed more taken up with Robbie than she was with him, and he demanded her undivided affection. For her part, she wanted to leave Robbie on the Continent for future emergencies, and promised not to think about him, but John objected to that. His head, he told us with a glance at her, was too full of other things, and he could not trust himself not to give the whole affair away by some inadvertence of happiness and pride. That glance settled it; Agnes took a half sheet of paper and wrote on it for a few minutes in silence.
“I will send it to the principal morning papers,” she said, “and John shall pay for it. Listen! Will this do?
“ORIOLE.—On the 17th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert, only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi, India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers.‘We will grieve not, only findStrength in what remains behind.’”
“ORIOLE.—On the 17th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert, only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi, India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers.
‘We will grieve not, only findStrength in what remains behind.’”
‘We will grieve not, only findStrength in what remains behind.’”
‘We will grieve not, only findStrength in what remains behind.’”
That appeared next day, and I do not supposethat anybody lamented him more deeply than Mrs. Withers. She sent Agnes and me charming little notes of condolence and quoted from one of the Cologne sonnets, and asked if those touching lines in the notice of his death were by him.
A week or two later, I sat next Mrs. Withers at dinner, and Mr. Chapel was on her other side.
“Of course, you knew dear Robbie Oriole, Mr. Chapel,” she said. “What a loss to poetry. Are not those Cologne sonnets the finest in your opinion since Keats? I was privileged to have a copy of them. You agree with me, do you not, Mr. Goodenough? Do you remember that marvellous one beginning, ‘The clouds weep westwards under the scurrilous sky’?”
I hugged myself over not asking who had given her that privilege and sadly assented. She proceeded to talk to both of us, as her manner was at the dinner-table, with an intuition wrong in itself, but so excruciatingly right in general direction that it made me catch my breath.
“Yes, those sonnets,” she said. “How amazingly feminine they are, both in their tenderness and bitterness. Or, perhaps, all I mean is that women will always appreciate them more than men. When I say them over to myself, as I so often do, I seem to see Robbie reading them to Aggie Lockett. Certainly, I thought, when she first spoke to me about Robbie, that she was absolutely devoted to him. Indeed, itgave me a little shock when I saw to-day that she was to marry Jack Marrible.”
This was almost incredibly wonderful, for Mr. Chapel was one of our most fervent Oriolists. It was as full of points as a hedgehog; I could not count them all——
Then he turned on me the usual look of gleeful solemnity, and I knew we both wondered who would be the first to tell Aggie.
“Poor Robbie,” he said. “I never knew anybody the least like him. He will be a sacred memory to us, will he not?”
Mrs. Withers shook her head, regretfully, smiling.
“And the last time he called,” she said, “I was not at home. Of course, if he had only told me he was coming, I would have thrown over any engagement to be there, but, as you may not know, he would never use a telephone. It will always give me a little heartache to think that I was not there the last time.”
Mr. Chapel let his eyes wander admirably before he caught mine again.
“It is only human to feel that,” he observed in the best style.
Reginald Case, newly promoted to the rank of Captain in the 43rd Native Cavalry of the Indian Army, was picking his way back to his bungalow by the light of a somewhat ill-burning lantern from the regimental mess-room where he had dined. It was early in July, the long-delayed rains had broken at Haziri, in the Central Provinces, ten days before, and it was an imprudent man who would venture on a mere field-path like this at night without some illumination for his steps, lest inadvertently he might tread on a meditative and deadly kerait, with murder behind its stale small eyes, or step on the black coils of some hooded cobra. Only a few days before, Case had found one such in the bathroom of his bungalow, curled up on the mat within a few inches of his bare foot, when he went there to bathe before dinner, and he had no desire to give his nerves any further test of steadiness under such circumstances.
To-day there had been a break in the prodigious deluge, and all the afternoon the midsummer sun had blazed from a clear sky, causing all vegetable things to sprout with magical rapidity. This path, which yesterday had been a bare track over the fields, was now covered with springing herbs; the parade-ground, which for the last week had been but a sea of viscous mud, was clad in a mantle of delicate green blades, and the tamarisks and neem trees were studded with swelling buds among the dead and dripping foliage of the spring. A similar animation had tingled through the insect world, and as Case passed across the couple of fields that lay between the mess-room and his bungalow, a swarm of evil flies dashed themselves against the glass of his lantern. Overhead, since sunset, the clouds had gathered densely again across the vault of the sky, but to the east an arch of clear and star-lit heavens was dove-coloured with the approaching moonrise. Against it the shapes of silhouetted trees stood sharp and black in the windless and stifling calm.
It was a night of intolerable heat, and his two bulldogs, chained up in the veranda of his bungalow, with their dinner lying untouched beside them, could do no more by way of welcome to him than tap languidly with their tails on the matting in acknowledgment of his return. His bearer, not expecting him to be back so soon from the mess-room, was out, and he had to wait on himself, pulling out a long chair and table from his sitting-room, and groping for whisky and soda in his cupboard. The ice had run out, and after mixing and drinking a tepid peg, he went back to his bedroom and changed his hot dinner clothes for pyjamas and slippers. Cursing inwardly at the absence of his servant, he lit hislamp with a solitary match that he found on the table, and came out again into the veranda to think over, with such coolness as was capturable, the whole intolerable situation.
At first his mind hovered circling round outlying annoyances. He was dripping at every pore in this dark furnace of a night, the prickly heat covered his shoulders with a net of unbearable irritation, he had just lost heavily for the tenth successive evening at auction-bridge, his liver was utterly upset with the abominable weather, the lamp smelled, mosquitoes trumpeted shrilly round him. Here, more or less, was the outer and less essential ring of his discontent; to a happy and healthy man such inconveniences would have been of little moment, but in his present position they seemed portentously disagreeable. Then his mind, still hovering, moved a little inwards round a smaller and more intimate circle, surveying the calamities of the past six weeks. He had killed his favourite pony out pig-sticking, he was heavily in debt, and this morning only he had been talked to faithfully and frankly by his colonel on the text of slackness in respect of regimental duties. But still his mind did not settle down on his central misfortune—instinctively it shrank from it.
Thick and hot and silent the oppression of the night lay round him. Now and then one of his bulldogs stirred, or an owl hooted as its wings divided the motionless air, while farther away, in the bazaarsof Haziri, a tom-tom beat as if it was the pulse of this stifling and feverish night. The clouds had grown thicker overhead, and every now and then some large drop of hot rain splashed heavily on the dry earth or hissed among the withered shrubs. Remote lightning winked on the horizon, followed at long intervals by drowsy thunder, and to the east, in the arch of sky that still remained unclouded, a tawny half-moon had risen, shapeless through the damp air, and illuminating the vapours with dusky crimson. Once more Case splashed the tepid soda-water over a liberal whisky, still pausing before he let his mind consciously dwell on that which lay as heavy over it as over the gasping earth this canopy of cloud.
The veranda where he sat was broad and deep, and two doors opened into it from the bungalow. One led into his own quarters, the other into those of his brother officer, Percy Oldham. He was away on leave up in the hills, but was expected back to-night, and Case knew that, before either of them slept, there would have to be talk of some kind between them. A year ago, when they had taken this bungalow together, they had been inseparable friends, so that the mess had found for them the nicknames of David and Jonathan; then, by degrees, growing impalpable friction of various kinds had estranged them, and to-night, when at length Case thought of Oldham, his mouth went dry with the intensity of his hate. And at the thought of him, his mind,hovering and circling so long, dropped like a stooping hawk into the storm-centre of his misery. He took from the table the letter he had found waiting for him in the rack at the mess-room that evening, and by the light of the fly-beleaguered lamp read it through again. It was quite short.
“Dear Case,—I shall get back late on Thursday night, and before we meet I think I had better tell you that I am engaged to Kitty Metcalf. I suppose we shall have to talk about it, though it might be better if we did not. For a man who is so happy, I am awfully sorry; that is all I can say about it. She wished me to tell you, though, of course, I should have done so in any case.—Yours truly,“Percy Oldham.”
“Dear Case,—I shall get back late on Thursday night, and before we meet I think I had better tell you that I am engaged to Kitty Metcalf. I suppose we shall have to talk about it, though it might be better if we did not. For a man who is so happy, I am awfully sorry; that is all I can say about it. She wished me to tell you, though, of course, I should have done so in any case.—Yours truly,
“Percy Oldham.”
Case read this through for the sixth or seventh time, then tore it into fragments, and again replenished his glass. It was barely six months ago that he had been engaged to this girl himself; then they had quarrelled, and the match had been broken off. But he found now that he had never ceased to hope that when he went up himself, later in the summer, to the hills, it would be renewed again. And at the thought his present discomfort, his debts, all that had occupied his mind before, were wiped clean from it. Oldham—they had talked of it fifty times—was to have been his best man.
Suddenly, out of the black bosom of the windless night, there came a sigh of hot air rustling the shrubs outside. It came into the veranda where he sat, like the stir of some corporeal presence, making the light of his lamp to hang flickering in the chimney for a moment, and then expire in a wreath of sour-smelling smoke. One of his dogs sat up for a moment growling, and then all was utterly still again. The arch of clear sky to the east had dwindled and become overcast, and the red moon showed but a faint blur of light behind the gathering clouds.
Case had used a solitary match to light his lamp, and did not know where, in his own bungalow, he might find a box. But he could get one for certain out of Oldham’s bedroom, for he was a person of extremely orderly habits, and always kept one on a ledge just inside his bedroom door. Case got up and in the dark groped his way across the lobby out of which Oldham’s bedroom opened, and feeling with his hand, immediately found the box on the ledge at the foot of his bed. Standing there, he lit a match, and his eye fell on the bed itself. It was covered with a dark blanket, and on the centre of it, coiled and sleeping, like a round pool of black water, lay a huge cobra. On the moment the match went out—it had barely been lit—and, closing the bedroom door, he went out again on to the veranda.
He did not rekindle his lamp, but sat, laying the forgotten match-box on his table, and looking out intothe blackness of the yawning night. The wind that had extinguished his light had died away again, and all round he heard the heavy plump of the rain, which was beginning to fall heavily. Before five minutes were past, the sluices of the sky were fully open again, and the downpour had become torrential. The lightning, that an hour ago had but winked remotely on the horizon, was becoming more vivid, and the response of the thunder more immediate. At the gleam of the frequent flashes from the sky, the trees in front of the bungalow, the road, and the fields that lay beyond it, started into colour seen through the veil of the rain, that hung like a curtain of glass beads, firm and perpendicular, and then vanished again into the impenetrable blackness. He was not conscious of thought; it seemed only that a vivid picture was spread before his mind—the picture of a dark-blanketed bed on which, like a round black pool, there lay the coiled and sleeping cobra. The door of that room was shut, and a man entering it would no longer find, as he had done, a match-box ready to his hand, close beside the door.
For another hour he sat there, this mental picture starting from time to time into brilliant illumination, even as at the lightning flashes the landscape in front of him leaped into intolerable light and colour. The roar of the rain and the incessant tumult of the approaching thunder had roused the dogs, and by the flare of the storm Case could see that Boxer and hiswife were both sitting tense and upright, staring uneasily into the night. Then simultaneously they both broke into chorus of deep-throated barking and strained at their chains. By the next flash Case saw what had roused their vigilance. The figure of a man with flapping coat was running at full speed from the direction of the mess-room towards the bungalow. He recognized who it was, and now the dogs recognized him, too, for their barking was exchanged for whimpers of welcome and agitated tails.
Oldham leaped the little hedge that separated the road from the fields and ran dripping into shelter of the veranda. In the gross darkness he could not see Case, and stood there, as he thought, alone, stripping off his mackintosh. Then, by the light of a fierce violet streamer in the clouds, he saw him.
“Hullo, Case,” he said, “is that you?”
Oldham moved towards him as he spoke, and by the next flash Case saw him close at hand, tall and slim, with handsome, boyish face.
“You got my letter?” asked Oldham.
“Yes, I got your letter.”
Case paused a moment.
“Do you expect me to congratulate you?” he asked.
“No, I can’t say that I do. But I want to say something, and I hope you won’t find it offensive. Anyhow, it is quite sincere. I am most awfully sorry for you. And I can’t forget that we used to bethe greatest friends. I hope you can remember that, too.”
He sat down on the step that led into Case’s section of the bungalow, and in the darkness Case could hear Boxer making affectionate slobbering noises. That kindled a fresh point of jealous hatred in his mind; both dogs, who obeyed him as a master, adored Oldham as a friend. Hotly burned that hate, and he thought again of the closed bedroom door and the black pool on the blanket. Then he spoke slowly and carefully.
“I quite remember it,” he said, “and it seems to me the most amazing thing in the world. I can recall it all, all my—my love for you, and the day when we settled into this bungalow together, and the joy of it. I recall, too, that you have taken from me everything you could lay hands on, money, the affection of the dogs even——”
Oldham interrupted in sudden resentment at this injustice.
“As regards money, I may remind you, since you have chosen to mention it, that I have not succeeded in taking any away from you,” he remarked.
Case was not roused by this sarcasm; he could afford, knowing what he knew, to keep calm.
“I am sorry for having kept you waiting so long,” he said. “But you may remember that you begged me to pay you at my convenience. It will be quite convenient to-morrow.”
“My dear chap,” broke in Oldham again, “as if I would have mentioned it, if you hadn’t!”
Case felt himself scarcely responsible for what he said; the tension of the storm, the infernal tattoo of the rain, the heat, the bellowing thunder, seemed to take demoniacal possession of him, driving before them the sanity of his soul.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mention it,” he said, “until you had sold my debt to some Jewish money-lender.”
In the darkness he heard Oldham get up.
“There is no use in our talking, if you talk like a madman,” he said.
The sky immediately above them was torn asunder, and a flickering spear of intolerable light stabbed downwards, striking a tree not a hundred yards in front of the bungalow, and for the moment the stupendous crack of the thunder drowned thought and speech alike. Boxer gave a howl of protest and dismay, and nestled close to Oldham, while Case, starting involuntarily from his chair, held his hands to his ears until the appalling explosion was over.
“Rather wicked,” he said, and poured himself out a dram of neat spirits.
That steadied him, and, recovering himself a little, he felt that he was behaving very foolishly in letting the other see the madness of his rage and resentment. It was far better that he should lull Oldham into an unsuspicious frame of mind; otherwise he might suspect, might he not, that something was prepared forhim in his room? Others, subsequently, if they quarrelled, might guess that he himself had known what lay there ... but it was all dim and fantastic. Then the fancied cunning and caution of an unbalanced man who is at the same time ready to commit the most reckless violence took hold of him, and instantly he changed his tone. He must be quiet and normal; he must let things take their natural course, without aid or interference from himself.
“The storm has played the deuce with my nerves,” he said, “that and the news in your letter, and the sight of you coming like a wraith through the rain. But I won’t be a lunatic any longer. Sit down, Percy, and try to forgive all the wild things I have been saying. Of course, I don’t deny that I have had an awful blow. But, as you have reminded me, we used to be great friends. She and I were great friends, too, and I can’t afford to lose the two people I really care most about in the world, just because they have found each other. Let’s make the best of it; help me, if you can, to make the best of it.”
It was not in Oldham’s genial nature to resist such an appeal, and he responded warmly.
“I think that is jolly good of you,” he said, “and, frankly, I hate myself when I think of you. But, somehow, it isn’t a man’s fault when he falls in love. I couldn’t help myself; it came on me quite suddenly. It was as if someone had come quickly up behind meand pitched me into the middle of it. At one moment I did not care for her; at the next I cared for nothing else.”
Case had himself thoroughly in hand by this time. He even took pleasure in these reconciliatory speeches, knowing the completeness with which a revenge prepared without his planning should follow on their heels. Had a loaded pistol been ready to his hand, and he himself secure from detection, he would probably not have pulled the trigger on his friend, but it was a different matter that he should merely acquiesce in his walking in the dark into the room where death lay curled and ready to strike. That seemed to him to be the act of God; he was not responsible for it, he had not put the cobra there.
“I felt sure it must have happened like that,” he said. “Besides, as you know, Kitty and I had quarrelled and had broken our engagement off. Of course, I hoped that some day we might come together again—at least, I know now that I hoped it. But that was nothing to do with you. You fell in love with her, and she with you. Yes, yes. Really, I don’t wonder. Indeed—indeed, I do congratulate you—I congratulate you both.”
Oldham gave a great sigh of pleasure and relief.
“It’s ripping of you to take it like that,” he said. “I hardly dared to hope you would. Thanks ever so much—ever so much! And now, do you know, I think I shall go to bed. I am dog-tired. I had asix hours’ ride to the station this morning, and even up there it was hideously hot.”
Case again reminded himself that he must behave naturally—not plan anything, but not interfere.
“Oh, you must have a drink,” he said, “though I’m afraid there is no ice. I’ll get you a glass and soda.”
He came out into the veranda again with these requisites. Oldham was stifling a prodigious yawn.
“I’m half dead with sleep. Probably I shall chuck myself on my bed just as I am, to save the trouble of undressing.”
Case felt his hand tremble as he put the glass down on the table.
“I know that feeling,” he said. “Sometimes, when one is very sleepy, the sight of a bed is altogether too much for one. I dare say I shall do the same. Help yourself to whisky while I open the soda for you.”
Oldham drank his peg and again rose.
“Well, I’m for bed,” he said. “And I can’t tell you what a relief it is to me to find you like this. By the way, about that bit of money. Pay me exactly when it’s convenient to you—next year or the year after, if you like. I should be wretched if I thought you were putting yourself about over it. So good night, Reggie.”
He turned to go, and it seemed to Case that hours passed and a thousand impressions were registeredon his brain as he walked down the twenty-five feet of veranda that separated the two doors of entrance that led into their quarters. Outside, another change had come over the hot, tumultuous night, and, as if the very moon and stars were concerned in this pigmy drama, where but a single life out of the innumerable and infinitesimal little denizens of the world was involved, a queer triangular rent had opened in the rain-swollen sky, and a dim moon and a company of watery stars stared silently down, and to Case’s excited senses they appeared hostilely witnessing. Ten minutes ago the rain had ceased as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, and, except for the tom-tom that still beat monotonously in the town, a silence of death prevailed. The steam rose thick as sea-mist from the ground; above it a blurred etching of trees appeared and the roof of the mess-room. The grey unreal light shone full into the veranda, and he could see that Boxer was sitting bolt upright on his blanket-bed, looking at Oldham’s retreating figure. Daisy was industriously scratching her neck with a hind-leg, and from the table a little pool of spilt soda-water was dripping on to the ground.
All this Case noticed accurately and intently, and, as yet, Oldham was not half-way down the veranda. Once he hung on his step and sniffed the hot, stale air. That was a characteristic trick; he wrinkled his nose up like a dog, showing his white teeth. Once he shifted his dripping mackintosh from right handto left, holding it at arm’s length. Then, as he turned to pass into the door, he made a little staccato sign of salutation to Case with his disengaged hand. Boxer appropriated that, and wagged a cordial tail in response.
Eagerly and expectantly, now that he had vanished from sight, Case followed his movements, visualizing them. He heard him shuffle his feet along the floor in the manner of a man feeling his way in the dark, and knew that he was drawing near to the closed bedroom door and the black interior. Oldham had said that he was very tired, that he was inclined just to throw himself on the bed and sleep, and the absence of matches and the added inconvenience of undressing in the dark would further predispose him to this. He would throw himself on the bed all in a piece, after the fashion of a tired man, and awake to fury the awful bedfellow, with the muscular coils and the swift death that lay crouched beneath its hood, which lay sleeping there. To-morrow there would be no debt for Case to pay, no gnawing of unsatisfied hate, and for Oldham no letter to his lady with the so satisfactory account of the evening’s meeting.
Then from within came the rattle of a turned door-handle, and Case knew that the death-chamber stood open. There followed a pause of absolute stillness, in which Case felt utterly detached from and irresponsible for whatever might follow. Then came the jar of a closed door....
And that tore him screaming from his murderous dreams, from which, perhaps, he had awoke too late. He found himself, with no volition of his own, running down the veranda and calling at the top of his voice:
“Percy, Percy,” he cried, “come out. There is a cobra on your bed!”
He heard the handle rattle and the door bang. Next moment he was on his knees in the dark lobby, clasping Oldham’s legs in a torrent of hysterical sobbing.
Mrs. Arthur Bolney Ross, when, three years ago, she set sail, or, rather, set screw, for England, had no very clear idea of the campaign she intended to wage there, though a firm determination to win it, and had mentally arrived at no general plan beyond those preliminary manœuvres which our charming American invaders usually adopt when they first effect a landing on the primitive pavements of Piccadilly. She had, in fact, taken half a dozen rooms at the Ritz Hotel and a box on the grand tier of the Covent Garden Opera House. But she had also, for the six months preceding her expedition, secretly received daily lessons on the pronunciation and idioms of that particular (and, as she thought, peculiar) dialect of the English language which was in vogue among the section of the English-speaking race with whom she intended to have dealings.
Rightly or wrongly, she had decided that the screaming drawl of New York, which a few years before had so captivated the English upper classes, and had led to so many charming and successful marriages, was now out of date, and would enchant no longer. So instead of being content with her expressive native speech, she learned with almost passionateassiduity the mumbling English diction, the inaudible Victorian voice, which she rightly considered would be a novelty to those who had so largely abandoned it themselves in favour of a more strident utterance. But she did not, in mastering the Victorian voice and intonation, suffer her knowledge of her native tongue and its blatant delivery to wither from misuse; she but became bi-lingual, and schooled her vocal cords to either register without in the least confusing the two.
It was in this point that she showed herself a campaigner of no stereotyped order, but one who might go far, who intended in any case to go further than anybody else. The idea was brilliant. Others before her had become more English than the English, and had done well; others had remained more American than the Americans, and had done even better. But she, among the immense bales of her luggage, brought with her this significant little handbag, so to speak: she could sound American or English at will. She could say without stumbling, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” or “How are you?” just as she pleased. And in this, so it seems to her historian, lay the germ of her success, and also the seeds of her final and irretrievable disaster, for in spite of her modulated voice and acquired idiom, she remained American in thought, with the regal impulses of a queen in Newport.
In other respects she was not, on her first landing, different in kind from our ordinary hospitable invaders. She had a real Arthur Bolney Ross in the background, who was capable of being shown and tested, if, so to speak, she was “searched,” but who, since his mind had in the course of years become nothing more nor less than a mint, out of which streams of bullion perpetually issued, preferred to be left alone for the processes of production. Amelie was excellent friends with him, when they had time and inclination to meet, and it always gave her a comfortable feeling to know that Arthur was in existence. If they had met very often, it is probable that they would have got on each other’s nerves, and, since she had an immense fortune of her own, have considered the desirability of a divorce; but in the meantime Amelie decidedly liked the feeling of stability which her husband gave her. She did not think about him much, but she knew he was there.
Husbands, she had ascertained, were going to be fashionable in London this year, or, if not exactly fashionable, were going to be “worn” in the manner of some invisible but judicious part of the dress, like a cholera belt, or, as Amelie would have called it when she spoke American, a gripe-girdle. Pearls also were worn, though not so invisibly as husbands, and Amelie had five superb ropes of these, which could be verified by anybody, and never got on her nerves at all. She had also, among her general equipment, a very excellent sort of social godmother, LadyBrackenbury, who, for a remuneration that made no difference to Amelie, but a good deal to her, was prepared to exert herself to the utmost pitch of her very valuable capabilities in the matter of bringing people to see her and in taking her to see people, and in preventing the wrong sort of people from having any sort of access to her. Amelie was willing to put herself into Lady Brackenbury’s hands with the complete confidence in which she would have entrusted her mouth to a reliable dentist, had her admirable teeth demanded any sort of adjustment. She could not have made a wiser choice: there was nobody, in fact, among possible godmothers in London, who would have been a sounder sponsor.
The two had met eighteen months before in New York, and subsequently, in the summer, Violet Brackenbury had spent a month with her friend at her cottage at Newport, which exteriorly resembled an immense Swiss chalet, and inside was like a terminus hotel. There, on ground for ever afterwards more historic than Marathon, had been fought the famous sixteen days’ war, in which Amelie had so signally defeated and deposed the reigning queen of the very smartest set of New York society.
The point to be decided, of course, was which of the two could give the most ludicrous, extravagant, and delirious parties, and thus be acclaimed sovereign among hostesses. Amelie, as challenger, had flungthe gauntlet in the shape of a midnight lawn-tennis party, with hundreds of arc lamps hung above the courts, the nets covered with spangles, and the lines made of ground glass faintly illuminated by electric lights beneath, while, by way of contrast with this brilliance, a number of men dressed like mourners at a funeral, with top-hats and black scarves, picked up and presented the lawn-tennis balls to her guests in coffin-shaped trays. Here was a high bid for supremacy, and it was felt that Mrs. Cicero B. Dace would have to do something great in order to eclipse the brightness and originality of this entertainment. But bright and original she was, and when, two nights later, she gave her marvellous canary ball, it was thought that her throne had not yet tottered. On this occasion her admiring guests were thrilled to find that all round the walls of her ballroom had been planted mimosa trees, among the branches of which three thousand canaries had been let loose, after being doped with hard-boiled egg soaked in rum and water. These chirped and sang in a feverish and intoxicated manner. At the end of the ball the men of the party, dressed as huntsmen and armed with air-guns, shot these unfortunate songsters and presented the spoils to their partners in the cotillion.
Amelie had two answers to that—the first an indignant letter, printed in large type throughout the American press, denouncing this massacre, and the second another ball. The letter Mrs. Cicero B. Dacedid not object to at all, since it but enhanced her notoriety, but she objected to the ball very much indeed, since Amelie’s ingenious mind hit on the simple and exquisite plan of dispensing with the band, and having in its place a choir of three hundred singers, who, in batches of one hundred at a time, sang the dance tunes. The effect was contagious, and dancers joined in also, producing, as the press said, the “most stupendously lyrical effect since the days of Sappho.”
Then Mrs. Cicero B. Dace sat down and thought again, lighting upon the famous idea of the auction ball, in which a real English Duke acted as auctioneer, and before each dance put up the ladies for auction, to be bid for by the men who wished to be their partners. But Amelie swiftly sent for Arthur Bolney Ross, and he and a friend of hers, who was backing her in this struggle for sovereignty, continued to bid for her for so long that, out of sinister compassion for her hostess, she stepped down from the rostrum and refused to dance with either, for fear that there should be no more dancing for anybody. This completely spoiled the success of the auction ball, and while Mrs. Cicero B. Dace was still staggering from its failure, Amelie annihilated her altogether by giving her inimitable glacier ball on the hottest night of the year. A refrigerating apparatus was rigged up on the walls of her ballroom, and their entire surface thickly coated with real ice. Glass channels, fringed with blue gentians, weremade round the margin of the floor, to carry off the melting water, while accomplished members of the band yodelled at intervals to carry out the Swiss illusion. She and the auctioneer Duke—whom she had captured from under the nose of Mrs. Cicero B. Dace—dressed in knickerbockers, with a rope round his shoulder and an ice-axe in his hand, led the cotillion, and Mrs. Cicero B. Dace, having in vain tried to point out that the gentians were three parts artificial flowers, retired at 1A.M.in floods of tears.
Such were Amelie Ross’s social achievements when, unlike Alexander the Great, she bethought herself that there were more worlds to conquer, and decided to extend her dominions over England. Her godmother, of course, knew her history, having, indeed, assisted at the history she had already made, and on the night of her arrival at the Ritz Hotel, dined with her there in her charming room looking over the Green Park, before going with her to her box at the opera. As regards this first appearance of her god-daughter, Violet Brackenbury had laid her plans very carefully, and explained them as they dined.
“I have asked nobody else at all, dear Amelie,” she said, “because I want everybody to be wild to find out who you are, and nobody will be able to say. Curiosity is the best sauce of all.”
Amelie became thoroughly American for a moment.
“My!” she said. “Don’t you mean that your folk over here haven’t seen hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me in the papers?”
“Probably not one, my dear. And I’ve only told one woman that you are coming. You are going to burst on everybody to-night, you and your lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you’ve got. I want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the dance at Alice Middlesex’s, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is to-night. She is the one person I have told.”
“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie.
“Yes; and she is quite certain to ask you if you know Lady Creighton, that dreadful countrywoman of yours who is climbing into London like a monkey and hopping about it like a flea. She tried to patronize Alice, and Alice won’t get over it either in this world or the next. So tell her that Lady Creighton is not received in New York—which I believe is the case, isn’t it?—and look very much surprised at the idea of knowing her. I can’t tell you how important that is.”
Amelie frowned slightly.
“But Elsie Creighton telephoned to me half anhour ago,” she said, “asking me to lunch with her to-morrow to meet——”
“It doesn’t matter whom she asked you to meet. If she asked you to meet the entire Royal Family, you would be wise to refuse. You don’t want to climb into London on the top of a hurdy-gurdy.”
“My! What’s a hurdy-gurdy?” asked Amelie, whose English lessons had not taught her that word.
“Hurdy-gurdy? Street organ. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know people, if you understand; you want to make people want to know you. My plan is not that you should climb up, but that you should spread down.”
Amelie instantly caught this.
“I see,” she said. “I’m to begin at the top. But Elsie Creighton said there was a Prince coming to lunch to-morrow. I thought that was a good beginning.”
“Not so good as the Creighton woman is bad. Did you accept, by the way?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then telephone to-morrow exactly at lunch-time to say you are ill, and lunch with me very obviously downstairs in the restaurant. In fact, it couldn’t have happened better. It will mark you off very definitely from her and her crowd. I don’t mean to say that there are not charming people among it, but it would never do to enter London under her wing. Perhapsjust at present, darling, you had better ask me before you accept invitations. It is so important to cut the right people.”
Amelie was completely cordial over this.
“I expect that is what I have got to learn,” she said. “And now for to-night—will my dress do?”
Lady Brackenbury regarded this admirable costume and shook her head.
“No, I don’t think it will,” she said. “It is lovely, but you want something more arresting. You, with your wonderful complexion, can stand anything. Orange, now—haven’t you got a hit-in-the-face of orange? I want everybody to be forced to look at you, and you’ll do the rest. You see I have made myself as plain and inconspicuous as possible, to act as a foil. It is noble of me, but then I am noble. And all the pearls, please, just all the pearls, with the big diamond fender on your head. To-morrow, at the French Embassy, you shall wear the simplest gown you have got, and one moonstone brooch, price three-and-sixpence.”
Such was the opening of Amelie’s amazing campaign, the incidents and successes of which followed swift and bewildering. Under Violet’s capable guidance she began, not by collecting round her that brisk and hungry section of well-born London which is always ready to sing for its dinner, and by giving huge entertainments to bring together a crowd at allcosts, but by attracting and attaching a small band of the people who mattered. Lady Brackenbury knew very well that even in the most democratic town in the world certain people, not necessarily Princes or Prime Ministers, were large pieces in the great haphazard game of chess; the crowd meantime, after whom Amelie secretly hankered, would only get more eager to be admitted. In particular, Lady Creighton starved for her entry. She asked Amelie to dine any Tuesday in June, when she was giving her series of musical parties, but Amelie found, to her great regret, that she was engaged on all those festive occasions. But she gave a musical party herself—London was prey this year to a disordered illusion that it liked music—and Melba and Caruso sang there—informally, so it seemed, just happening to sing—to not more than fifty people, who sat in armchairs at their ease, instead of elbowing each other in squashed and upright rows. In vain did Lady Creighton spread an assiduous report that the artists had sung out of tune and that the peaches were sour. Everyone knew that she had not been there, and that she alluded to another sort of fruit. Violet Brackenbury was successful in persuading Amelie not to send any account of this brilliant little affair to the papers, and to refuse all scraps to the writers for the press. But she was careful to provide for a far more telling publicity.
Gradually, craftily, a reef at a time, Violet allowedher friend to let out her sails. She left her flat at the Ritz and rurally installed herself in a spacious house in the middle of Regent’s Park. There was a big field attached to the house, and, yielding to a severe attack of Americanism, which she thought it might be dangerous to suppress, Violet permitted her to give a haymaking party of the Newport type. Hay was brought in from the country and scattered over the field, and mixed up with roses and gardenias, while the guests on arrival were presented with delightful little ebony pitchforks with silver prongs, or cedar-wood rakes. But this symptom caused her a little uneasiness, for it was obvious that Amelie thought her haymaking party a much brighter achievement than the previous concert.
The expansion continued. Amelie and her friend strolled into Christie’s one morning, and found a tussle going on between two eminent dealers over the possession of a really marvellous string of pearls. At a breathless pause, after the first “Going!” that followed a fresh bid, Amelie said in her most ringing American voice, “I guess I’ll sail in right now,” and began bidding herself. The crowd of dilettante London, which delights in seeing other people spend large sums of money, parted for her, and she moved gloriously up the auction-room and took her stand just behind one of the Mosaic little gentlemen who wanted the pearls so badly.
The recognition of her spread through the place like spilled quicksilver, and the auctioneer, with an amiable bow, caused the pearls to be handed to her for her inspection. With them still in her hand, as if it was not worth while returning them to the tray, she sky-rocketed the price by three exalting bids, the third of which was as a fire-hose on the ardour of her competitors. Her cheque-book was fetched from her car outside, and she left the room a moment afterwards, having drawn her cheque on the spot, pausing only to clasp the pearls round her neck.... And Violet, with a strange sinking of the heart, felt as if her pet tiger-cub had tasted blood again after the careful and distinguished diet on which she had been feeding it.
Amelia had a fancy to leave London early in July, and give a few parties at an immense house she had taken near Maidenhead for the month. She had had some gondolas sent over from Venice, with their appropriate gondoliers, and London found it very pleasant to float about after dinner, while the excellent string band played in an illuminated barge that accompanied the flotilla. Exciting little surprises constantly happened, such as the arrival one evening of artists from the Grand Guignol, who played a couple of thrilling little horrors in the ballroom, while on another night the great Reynolds picture belonging to the Duke of Middlesex was found to have put in an appearance on the walls. Ameliesaid that it was her birthday present to her husband, and made no further allusion to it. The frame had gone to be repaired, and it was draped round in clouds of silvery-grey chiffon that extended half over the wall. And had Violet Brackenbury known the outrage that her friend had planned, the frenzy of suppressed Newportism that was ready to break forth, it is probable that she would gladly have returned the cheque which she had that morning received from Amelie.
As it was, she felt wholly at ease, and inclined to congratulate herself on the unique and signal character of Amelie’s success. Never before, so she thought, had a woman so dominated the season; never, certainly, had one of her countrywomen so “mattered.” And all this, with the exception, perhaps, of the haymaking party and the incident of the pearls at Christie’s, had been gained in quiet, unsensational ways; and, lulled to content, she did not realize that the spirit that inspired the queen of hostesses was ready to flare up like an access of malarial fever. Poor unsuspecting godmother, who fondly believed that those gondolas from Venice, those Grand Guignol artists from Paris, this gem of Reynolds’s pictures, were a safety-valve, not guessing that they were but as oil poured on the flame!
The cotillion that night was to begin at twelve. Amelie was leading it herself with one of the Princes,and the big ballroom was doubly lined with seated guests, when on the stroke of twelve she entered, dressed in exact facsimile of the glorious Reynolds. As she advanced with her partner into the middle of the room, the band in the gallery struck up, and simultaneously a tongue of fire shot through the flimsy draperies round the picture, instantly enveloping it in flames. The canvas blistered and bubbled, and in ten seconds the finest Reynolds in the world was a sheet of scorched and blackened rag.
The crowd leaped to its feet, but before the panic had time to mature, the cause of it was over. There was nothing inflammable within range of the swiftly-consumed chiffon, and only little fragments of burned-out ash floated on to the floor. But the fervent and instantaneous heat had done its work.
Then for a moment there was dead silence, and Amelie’s voice was heard in its quietest, most English tones.
“Oh, isn’t that a pity!” she said.
Then arose a sudden hubbub of talk, drowning the sound of the band, which, at a signal from Amelie, had started again.
* * * * *
Violet stood with her friend before the blackened canvas next morning in the empty room, drawing on her gloves.
“I don’t think you understand yet the effect of what you have done,” she said. “No one doubts that the fire was intentional, and—and I think that Lady Creighton will be of more use to you in the future than I can possibly be.”