CHAPTER XII
WhileClementina, in her own fashion, was shattering an idyll to pieces, Quixtus under the tutelage of Billiter pursued the most distasteful occupation in which he had ever engaged. Had some Rhadamanthine Arbiter of his Destiny compelled him, under penalty of death, to choose between horse-racing and laborious practice as a solicitor, he would unhesitatingly have chosen the latter. Course and stand and paddock and ring, the whole machinery of the sport, wearied him to exasperation. Just as there are some men to whom, as the saying goes, music is the most expensive form of noise, so are there others to whom the racing of horses is merely the most extravagantly cumbersome form of gambling. Why train valuable animals, they ask; to run round a field, when the same end could be attained by making little leaden horses gyrate mechanically round a disk, at a millionth part of the cost? Of the delight of studying pedigree, of following form, of catching the precious trickles of information that percolate through the litter of stables, of backing their judgment thus misguided they have no notion. They cannot even feel a thrill of excitement at the sight of the far-off specks of galloping horses. They wonder at the futility of it all as the quadrupeds scrabble down the straight. An automobile, they plead, can go ten times as fast. That such purblind folk exist is sad; but after all they are God’s creatures, just the same as jockeys and professional tipsters.
At first there was one feature of the race-course which fascinated Quixtus—the ring. Then he imagined he had come into contact with incarnate evil. Those coarse animal faces, swollen with the effort of bawling the odds, those hard greedy eyes bulging from purple cheeks, those voices raucous, inhuman, suggested to his mild fancy a peculiarly depraved corner of Tophet. But what practical evil resulted from this Masque of Hades was not quite apparent. Nobody seemed any the worse. The bookmaker smiled widely on those who won, and those who lost smiled on the world with undaunted cheerfulness. So, in the course of time, Quixtus began to regard the bookmakers with feelings of disappointment, which gave place after a while to indifference, and eventually to weariness and irritation.
Even Old Joe Jenks, thick-necked, fishy-eyed villain, to whom Billiter personally introduced him, proved himself, in all his dealings, to be a scrupulously honest man. The turf, in spite of its depressing ugliness, appeared but a manœuvring ground for the dull virtues. Where was its wickedness? He complained, at length, to Billiter.
Billiter seemed for the moment to be in a bad humour. He tugged at his heavy moustache.
“I don’t see what fault you can find with racing. You’re making a very good thing out of it.”
Which was true. Fortune, who had played him such scurvy tricks, was now turning on him her sunniest smile. He was winning prodigiously, fantastically. Billiter selected the horses which he was to back, he backed them to the amount advised by Billiter, and in most instances the horses won.
“If you think the mere gaining of money gives me any pleasure, my dear Billiter,” said he, “you’re very much mistaken. I have sufficient means of my own to satisfy my modest requirements, and to accept large sums of money from your friend, Mr. Jenks, is humiliating and repulsive.”
“If that’s the matter, you can turn them over to me,” said Billiter, “I don’t get much out of the business.”
They were walking about the paddock, between the races. Quixtus halted and regarded his morose companion with cold inquiry.
“You gave me to understand that you were betting on the same horses as I was.”
Billiter cursed himself for an incautious fool.
“Only now and then,” said he, “and for small stakes. How can I afford to plunge like you?”
“What is the dismal quadruped I am betting on for this next race?” asked Quixtus looking at his card.
“Punchinello. Forty-five to one. Dead cert.”
“Then,” said Quixtus, “here are five pounds. Put them on Punchinello and if he wins you will have two hundred and twenty-five.”
Billiter left him, made his way out of the paddock to that part of the race-course where the outside bookmakers have their habitation. Old Joe Jenks in the flaming check suit and a white hat adorned with his name and quality stood on a stool shouting the odds, taking bets and giving directions to the clerk at his side. Business for a moment was slack.
“Another fiver for the governor on Punchinello,” said Billiter.
Old Joe Jenks jumped from his stool and took Billiter aside.
“Look here, old friend,” said he, “chuck it. Come off it. I’m not playing any more. I poured a couple of quarts of champagne over your head because you told me you had got hold of a mug, and instead of the mug you bring up a ruddy miracle who backs every wrong ‘un at a hundred to one—and romps in. And thinking you straight, Mr. Billiter, sir, I’ve stretched out the odds—to oblige you. And you’ve damn well landed me. It’s getting monotonous. See? I’m tired.”
“It’s not my fault, Joe,” said Billiter, humbly. “Look. Just an extra fiver on Punchinello. He’s got no earthly—you know that as well as I do.”
“Do I?” growled the bookmaker angrily, convinced that Billiter was over-reaching him. “How do I know what you know? You want to have it both ways, do you? Well you won’t get it out of me.”
“I swear to God, Joe,” said Billiter, earnestly, “that I’m straight. So little did I expect him to win that I’ve not asked a penny commission.”
“Then ask it now, and be hanged to you,” cried the angry bookmaker, and leaping back to his stool, he resumed his brazen-throated trade.
Billiter kept his five-pound note, unwilling to risk it with another bookmaker on the laughing-stock of a Punchinello, and sauntered away moodily. He was a most injured man. Old Joe Jenks doubted his good faith. Now, was there a single horse selected for his patron to back upon which any student of racing outside a lunatic asylum would have staked money? Not one. He could lay his hand on his honest heart and swear it. And had he staked a penny on his selections? No. He could swear to that, too. He had not (fool that he was) asked Quixtus for a commission. Through his honourable dealing he was a poor man. The thought was bitter. He had run straight with Jenks. It was not his fault if the devil had got into the horses so that every shocking outsider, backed by Quixtus, revealed ultra-equine capacities. What could a horse do against the superhorse? Nothing. What could Billiter himself do? Nothing. Except have a drink. In the circumstances it was the only thing to do. He went into the bar of the grand stand and ordered a whisky and soda. It sizzled gratefully down a throat burning with a sense of wrong. His moral tone restored, he determined to live in poverty no more for the sake of a quixotic principle, and, proceeding to a ready-money bookmaker of his acquaintance, pulled out his five-pound note and backed Rosemary, a certain winner (such was his private and infallible information) at eight to one. This duty to himself accomplished, he went to the grand stand to view the race, leaving Quixtus to do that which seemed best to him.
The bell rang, the course was cleared, the numbers put up; the horses cantered gaily past. At the sight of Rosemary, a shiny bay in beautiful condition, Billiter’s heart warmed; at the sight of Punchinello, a scraggy crock who had never won a race in his inglorious life, Billiter sniffed scornfully. If Old Joe Jenks was such a fool as to refuse a free gift of two pounds ten—they had agreed to halve the spoils—the folly thereof lay entirely on Old Joe Jenks’s head.
The start was made. For a long time the horses ran in a bunch. Then Rosemary crept ahead. Billiter’s moustache beneath the levelled field-glasses betrayed a happy smile. Rosemary increased her lead. At the turn into the straight, something happened. She swerved and lost her stride. Three others dashed by, among them the despised Punchinello. They passed the post in a flash, Punchinello first. Billiter murmured things at which the world, had it heard them, would have grown pale, and again sought the bar. Emerging thence he went in quest of his patron. He had not far to go. Quixtus sat on a wooden chair at the back of the grand stand reading a vellum coveredElzevirduodecimo edition of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. When Billiter approached he rose and thrust the volume into the tail pocket of his frock-coat.
“Was that a race?” he asked.
“Race. Of course it was.Therace. Didn’t you see it?”
“Thank goodness, no,” said Quixtus. “Did any horse win?”
The sodden and simple wit of Billiter rose like a salmon at this gaudy fly of irony. He lost his temper.
“Your damned, spavined, bow-legged, mule-be-gotten crock of a Punchinello won.”
Quixtus regarded him mildly; but a transient gleam of light flickered in his china-blue eyes.
“Then, my dear Billiter,” said he, “I have won nine hundred pounds, which, in view of my opinion of the turf, based on experience, I think I shall hand over to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to be earmarked for the conversion of the Mahommedans in Mecca. As for you, Billiter, you have won two hundred and twenty-five pounds”—Billiter quivered with sub-aspirate anathema—“which ought to satisfy the momentary cupidity of any man. Let us go. The more I see of it the more am I convinced that the race-course is no place for me. It is too good.”
Billiter glanced at him with wrathful suspicion. Was he speaking in childish simplicity or in mordant sarcasm? The grave, unsmiling face, the expressionless blue eyes gave him no clue.
Thus, however, ended Quixtus’s career on the Turf. To stand about wearily in all weathers in order to witness what, to his fastidious mind was merely a dull and vulgar spectacle, was an act of self-sacrifice from which he derived no compensating thrill. The injured Billiter having patched up a peace with Old Joe Jenks, convincing him of his own ingenuousness and of the inevitable change in his patron’s luck, in vain persuaded Quixtus to resume his investigations. He offered to introduce him to a fraternity of so-called commission agents and touts, in whose company he could saturate himself with vileness.
“I have no taste for disgusting society,” said Quixtus.
“Then I don’t know what the deuce you do want,” exclaimed Billiter in a fume.
“You can’t touch pitch without being defiled.”
“I thought that was just what you were trying to be.”
“In one way, yes,” replied Quixtus, musingly; “But I loathe touching the pitch.”
In spite of his confessed belief in the altruistic purity of the turf, he regarded as unspeakable defilement the cheques which he had received from Old Joe Jenks. He had kept them in his drawer, and the more he looked at them the more did the bestial face of Old Joe Jenks obtrude itself before his eyes, and the more repugnant did it become to his now abnormal fastidiousness to pay them into his own banking account. To destroy them, as was his first impulse, merely signified a benefit conferred on the odious Jenks, who would be only too glad to repocket his filthy money. What should he do? At last a malignant idea occurred to his morbidly and curiously working mind. He would cast all this pitch and defilement upon another’s head. Some one else should shiver with the disgust of it. But who? The inspiration came from Tartarus. He endorsed the cheques to the value of nearly two thousand pounds, and paid them into the banking account of his nephew Tommy Burgrave.
He would be as diabolically and defiledly wicked as you please, but the intermediary pitch he would not touch.
That was his attitude towards all the suggestions for wickedness laid before him by his three counsellors. They, for their part, although they recognised great advantage in fostering the gloomy humour of their mad patron, began to be weary in evil-doing. After they had taxed their invention for an attractive scheme of villainy, they found that it either came within the tabooed category of crime or, by its lack of refinement, failed to commend itself to the sensitive scholar. They were at their wits’ end. The only one to whose proposal Quixtus turned an attentive ear was Huckaby, who had suggested the heart-breaking expedition through the fashionable resorts of Europe. And, to the credit of Huckaby, be it here mentioned that, beyond certain fantastical and mocking suggestions, such as the devastation of old women’s wards in workhouses by means of an anonymous Christmas gifts of nitroglycerine plum-puddings, this was the only serious proposal he submitted. Anxious, however, lest the idea should lose its attraction, he urged Quixtus to start immediately. It is not every day that a down-at-heel wastrel has the opportunity of luxurious foreign travel, to say nothing of the humorous object of this particular excursion. But Quixtus, very sensibly, pointed out to his eager follower that the fashionable resorts of Europe, save the great capitals, are empty during the months of May and June, and that it would be much better to postpone their journey until August filled them with the thousand women waiting to have their hearts broken.
Vandermeer, unemployed since his embassy to Tommy Burgrave, unsuccessful in his suggestions and envious of Billiter and Huckaby, at last hit upon an ingenious idea. He brought Quixtus a dirty letter. It ran:
“Dear Mr. Vandermeer,—You, who were an old friend of my husband’s in our better days and know how valiantly I have struggled to keep the home together, can’t you help me now? I am ill in bed, my children are starving. The little ones are lying now even too weak to cry out for bread. It would break a wolf’s heart to see them. If you can’t help me, for I know how things are with you, can’t you bring my case before your rich friend, Mr. Quixtus, of whose kindness and generosity you have so often spoken? . . .
“Yours sincerely,
“Emily Wellgood.”
It bore the address “2, Transiter Street, Clerkenwell Road, N.W.”
“What do you bring me this for?” asked Quixtus as soon as he had read it.
“I am satisfying my own conscience as far as Mrs. Wellgood is concerned,” replied Vandermeer, “and at the same time giving you an opportunity of being wicked. It’s a genuine case. You can let them die of starvation.”
Quixtus leaned back in his chair and gave the matter his consideration. Vandermeer had interrupted him in the midst of a paper which he was writing to controvert a new theory as to the juxtaposition of the palæolithic and neolithic tombs at Solutré, and he required time to fetch back his mind from the quaternary age to the present day. The prospect of a whole family perishing of hunger by an act; as it were, of his will, pleased his fancy.
“Very good. Very good, Vandermeer. Let them starve,” said he. “Let them starve,” he murmured to himself, as he took up his pen.
Vandermeer, hanging about, hinted at payment for the service rendered. Quixtus met his crafty eyes with equal cunning.
“You would be too soft-hearted—you would give them some of the money. Wait till some of them are dead.” He rolled the last words delectably round his tongue. “And now, my dear Vandermeer, I’m very busy. Many thanks and good-bye.”
Vandermeer left reluctantly and Quixtus resumed his work.
“The bizygomatic transverse diameter,” he wrote, putting down the beginning of the sentence that was in his head when Vandermeer was announced. He paused. He had lost the thread of his ideas. It was a subtle argument depending on the comparative measurements of newly discovered skulls. He threw down his pen impatiently, and in mild and gentlemanly language anathematised Vandermeer. He attacked the bizygomatic transverse diameter again; but the starving family occupied his thoughts. Presently he abandoned work for the morning and gave himself up to the relish of his wickedness. It had a delicious flavour. Practically he was slaying mother and babes, while he stood outside the ordinary repulsive and sordid circumstances of murder. Vandermeer should have his reward. After lunch, he felt impelled to visit them. A force stronger than a strong inclination to return to his paper led him out of the front-door and into a taxi-cab summoned from the neighbouring rank. He promised himself the thrill of gloating over the sufferings of his victims. Besides, the letter contained a challenge. “It would break a wolf’s heart to see them.” He would show the writer that his heart was harder than any wolf’s. Instinctively his hand sought the waistcoat pocket in which he kept his loose gold. Yes; there were three sovereigns. He smiled. It would be the finished craft of devildom to lay them out on a table before the woman’s hungering and ravished eyes and then, with a merciless chuckle, to pocket them again and walk out of the house.
“I willnotbe a fool,” he asserted, as the taxi-cab entered the Clerkenwell Road.
The taxi-cab driver signed that he wished to communicate with his fare. Quixtus leaned forward over the door.
“Do you know where Transiter Street is, Sir?”
Quixtus did not. Does any easy London gentleman know the mean streets in the purlieus of Clerkenwell? But, oddly enough, a milkman of the locality knew not Transiter Street either. Nor did a policeman on duty. Nor did a postman. Perplexed, Quixtus drove to the nearest District Post Office and made inquiries. There was no such street in Clerkenwell at all. He consulted the Post Office London Directory. There was no such street as Transiter Street in London.
Quixtus drove home in an angry mood. Once more he had been deceived. Vandermeer had invented the emaciated family for the sake of the fee. Did the earth hold a more abandoned villain? He grimly set about devising some punishment for his disingenuous counsellor. Nothing adequate occurred to him till some days afterwards when Vandermeer sent him another forged letter announcing the demise, in horrible torment, of the youngest child. He took up his pen and wrote as follows:
“My Dear Vandermeer,—I am sending Mrs. Wellgood the burial expenses. I have also enclosed a cheque for yourself. Will you kindly go to Transiter Street and claim it. For the present I have no further need of you.
“Yours sincerely,
“Ephraim Quixtus.”
He posted the letter himself on his way to lunch at the club where Wonnacott remarked on his high good humour.
Since the discontinuance of the Tuesday dinners (for they were not resumed after the establishment of the new relations), Huckaby, Billiter, and Vandermeer had contracted the habit of meeting once a week in the bar-parlour of a quiet tavern for a companionable fuddle. There they exchanged views on religion and alcohol, and related unveracious (and uncredited) anecdotes of their former high estate. Jealous of each other, however, they spoke little of Quixtus, and then only in general terms. The poor gentleman was still distraught. It was a sad case, causing them to wag their heads sorrowfully and order another round of whisky.
But one evening of depression, Quixtus having for some time refused their ministrations, and pockets having become woefully empty, they talked with greater freedom of their respective dealings with their patron. Vandermeer related the practical joke he had played upon him; Billiter described his astounding luck, and his crazy reason for retiring from the turf; and Huckaby, by way of illustrating the unbalanced state of Quixtus’s mind, confided to them the project of breaking a woman’s heart.
“What are you going to get out of it?” asked Vandermeer brutally, for the first time breaking through the pretence that they were three devoted friends banded together to protect the poor mad gentleman’s interests.
Huckaby raised a protesting hand. “My dear Van!”
“Oh, drop it,” cried Vandermeer. “You make me tired.” He repeated the question.
“Simply amusement. What else?” said Huckaby.
They wrangled foolishly for a while. At last Billiter, who had remained silent, brought his fist down, with a bang, on the table.
“I’ve got an idea,” said he. “Have you any particular woman in view?”
“Lord, no,” said Huckaby.
“I can put you on to one,” said Billiter. “No need to go abroad. She’s here in London.”
Huckaby called him uncomplimentary names. The Continental trip, as far as he was concerned, was the essence of the suggestion; the capture of the wild goose a remote consideration.
“Besides, old man,” said he, “this is my show.”
Billiter looked glum. After all, the idea was of no great value. Vandermeer’s cunning brain began to work. He asked Billiter for a description of the lady.
“She’s the widow of an old pal of mine,” replied Billiter. “Lady and all that sort of thing. Her husband, poor old chap, came to grief—Dragoon Guards—in the running for a title—went it too hot, you know—died leaving her with nothing at all. She has pulled through, somehow—lives in devilish good style, dresses expensively, and has the cleverness to hang on to her social position. Damned nice woman—but as for her heart, you could go at it with a pickaxe without risk of breaking it. I thought she would just suit the case.”
“Where does the money come from to live in good style and dress expensively?” asked Huckaby.
“Billiter thinks it might just as well come from Quixtus as from any one else. Don’t you, Billiter?”
Billiter nodded sagaciously and gulped down some whisky and water.
“And then we’d all stand in,” cried Vandermeer.
“That may be all very well in its way,” said Huckaby, “but I’m not going to give up my one chance of getting abroad.”
“Go abroad then,” retorted Vandermeer. “If the lady is of the kind I take her to be, she won’t mind crossing the Channel when she knows there’s a golden feathered coot in Boulogne just dying to moult in her hand.”
“You are crude and vulgar in your ideas, Van,” said Huckaby. “Gentlemen of Quixtus’s position no more go to Boulogne for a holiday than they frequent Ramsgate boarding-houses. And they don’t give large sums of money to expensively dressed ladies with conjecturable means of support.”
“He’s such a fool that he would never guess anything,” argued Vandermeer.
“Hold on,” said Billiter, “you’re on the wrong tack altogether. I told you she was a lady.” His manner changed subtly, the moribund instinct of birth crackling suddening into a tiny flame. “I don’t know if you two quite realise what that means, but to Quixtus it would mean everything.”
“I’m a sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge——” began Huckaby, ruffled.
“Then you must have met a lady connected with somebody in your damned Academy,” said Billiter, who had been sent down from Oxford.
“The University of Cambridge isn’t an Academy,” said Huckaby, waxing quarrelsome.
“And a woman who subsists on gifts from her gentlemen friends can’t be a real lady,” said Vandermeer.
“Oh go to blazes, both of you!” cried Billiter, angrily.
He clapped on his hat and rose. But as he had been sitting in the corner of the divan, between Huckaby and Vandermeer, with the table in front of him, a dignified exit was impracticable. Indeed, he was immediately plumped down again on his seat by a tug on each side of his coat, and adjured in the vernacular not to stray from the paths of wisdom.
“What’s the use of quarrelling?” asked Huckaby. “She’s a lady if you say so.”
“Of course, old man,” Vandermeer agreed. “Have a drink?”
Billiter being mollified, and the refinement of the Dragoon Guardsman’s widow being accepted as indisputable, a long and confidential conference took place, the conspirators speaking in whispers, with heads close together, although they happened to be alone in the saloon-bar. It was the first time they had contemplated concerted action, the first time they had discussed anything of real interest; so, for the first time they forgot to get fuddled. The plot was simple. Billiter was to approach Mrs. Fontaine (at last he disclosed the lady’s identity) with all the delicacy such a mission demanded, and lay the proposal before her. If she fell in with it she would hold herself in readiness to repair to whatever Continental resort might be indicated, and then having made herself known to Huckaby, would be introduced by him to Quixtus. The rest would follow, as the night the day.
“The part I don’t like about it,” objected Vandermeer, “is not only letting a fourth into our own private concern, but giving her the lion’s share. We’re not a syndicate of philanthropists.”
“I’m by way of thinking it won’t be our concern much longer,” replied Billiter.
“And nobody asked you to come in,” said Huckaby. “You can stand out if you like.”
An ugly look overspread Vandermeer’s foxy face.
“Oh can I? You see what happens if you try that game on.”
“Besides,” continued Billiter, disregarding the snarl, “it will be to our advantage. Which of us is going to touch our demented friend for a hundred pounds? We didn’t do it in former days; much less now. But I’ll back Mrs. Fontaine to get at least three thousand out of him. Thirty per cent, is our commission without which we don’t play, and that gives us three hundred each. I could do with three hundred myself very nicely.”
“How are we to know what she gets?”
“That’s easily managed,” said Huckaby, pulling his ragged beard. “She’ll make her returns to Billiter and I’ll undertake to get the figures out of Quixtus.”
“But where do I come in?” asked Vandermeer. “How shall I know if you two are playing straight?”
“You’ll have your damned head punched in a minute,” said Billiter, looking fierce. “To hear you one would think we were a set of crooks.”
“If we aren’t, what the devil are we, then?” muttered Vandermeer bitterly.
But Billiter had turned his broad back on him and did not catch the words, whereby possibly he escaped a broken head. Billiter was sometimes sensitive on the point of honour. He had sunk to lower depths of meanness and petty villainy than the other two in whom the moral sense still lingered. He would acknowledge himself to be a “wrong ‘un” because that vague term connoted in his mind merely a gentleman of broken fortune who was put to shifts (such as his disastrous bargain with Old Joe Jenks and the present conspiracy) for his living; but a crook was a common thief or swindler, a member of the criminal classes, of a confraternity to which he, Billiter, deemed it impossible that he could belong, especially during a period like the present, when he found himself, after many years of dingy linen, apparelled in the gorgeous raiment of his gentlemanly days. He had sunk below the line of self-realisation. But the others had not. Vandermeer, who hitherto had merely snapped like a jackal at passing food to satisfy his hunger, did not deceive himself as to what he had become. Cynical, he felt no remorse. On the other hand, Huckaby, who went to bed that night sober, had a bad attack of conscience during the small hours and woke up next morning with a headache. Whereupon he upbraided himself for his folly; first, in confiding to his companions the project of his whimsical adventure; secondly, in allowing it to drift into such a despicable entanglement; thirdly, in associating himself with a scarlet crustacean of Billiter’s claw-power; and fourthly, in not getting drunk.
Huckaby was nearer Quixtus than the others in education and point of view. Though willing to accept any alms thrown to him he was not rapacious; he had not regarded his mad and wealthy patron entirely as a pigeon to be plucked; and beneath all the corruption of his nature there burnt a spark of affection for the kindly man who had befriended him and whose trust he had betrayed. He spent most of the ineffectual day in shaping a resolution to withdraw from the discreditable compact. But by the last post in the evening he received a laconic postcard from Billiter: “The Fountain plays.”
The sapped will-power gave way before the march of practical events. With a shrug he accepted the message as a decree of destiny, and wandered forth into congenial haunts, where, in one respect at least, he did not repeat the folly of the previous evening.
CHAPTER XIII
Notlong after this Quixtus announced to Huckaby his intention of going to Paris to attend a small Congress of the Anthropological Societies of the North-West of France, to which he, as president of the Anthropological Society of London, had been invited. He had gradually, in spite of his preoccupation, resumed his interest in his favourite pursuit, and, though he knew his learned friends to be villains at heart, he enjoyed their learned and even their lighter conversation. Human society had begun to attract him again. It afforded him saturnine amusement to speculate on the corruption that lay hidden beneath the fair exterior of men and women. He also had a half-crazy pleasure in wearing the mask himself. When he smiled in his grave and benevolent manner on the woman by his side at the dinner-table, how could she suspect the malignant ferocity of his nature? He was playing a part. He was fooling her to the top of her bent. She went away with the impression that she had been talking to a mild, scholarly gentleman of philanthropic tendencies. She possibly asked the monster to tea. He hugged himself with delight. When it was a question, however, of identifying remains of aurochs and mammoths and reindeer, or establishing the date of a flint hatchet, he took the matter seriously and gave it his profound attention. A palæolithic carving of a cave lion on mammoth ivory recently discovered in the Seine-et-Oise was to be exhibited at the Congress and form the subject of a paper. As soon as he heard this he accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. The carving was supposed to be the most perfect of its kind yet discovered, and Quixtus burned to behold it.
Huckaby, whose financial affairs were in the saddest condition and who had called with the vague hope of a trifle on account of services to be rendered, pricked up his ears at the announcement. Even though the main heart-breaking quest was deferred to August, why should they not seek a minor adventure during Quixtus’s visit to Paris? It would be a kind of trial trip. At the suggestion Quixtus shook his head. The Congress would occupy all his time and attention.
“Quite so,” said Huckaby. “While you’re busy with prehistoric man, I’ll be hunting down modern woman. By the time I’ve found her, you’ll have finished. Having done with the bones, you can devote a few extra days to the flesh.”
Quixtus winced. “That’s rather an unfortunate way of putting it.”
“To the spirit then—the Evil Spirit,” said Huckaby, unabashed. “That is, if we discover a subject. We’re bound to try various experiments before we finally succeed.”
“I’m afraid it will be more trouble than the thing is worth,” said Quixtus, musingly.
Here was something happening which Huckaby dreaded. Quixtus was beginning to lose interest in the adventure. In another month he might regard it with repugnance. He must start it now with Mrs. Fontaine in Paris, or the whole conspiracy must collapse. The thought urged Huckaby to fresh efforts of persuasion.
“Revenge is sweet and worth the trouble,” he said at last.
“Yes,” replied Quixtus, in a low voice. “Revenge would be sweet.”
Huckaby glanced at him swiftly. Beyond the iniquity of Marrable, he was ignorant of the precise nature of the injuries which Quixtus had sustained at the hands of fortune. Was it possible that a woman had played him false? But what had this fossil of a man to do with women?
“I, too,” said he, with malicious intent; “would like to pay off old scores against a faithless sex. You have found them faithless, haven’t you?”
Quixtus’s brow darkened. “As false as hell,” said he.
“I knew a woman had treated you shamefully,” said Huckaby, after a pause during which Quixtus had fallen into a dull reverie.
“Infamously,” replied Quixtus, below his breath. He looked away into the distance, madness gathering in his eyes. For the moment he seemed to forget the other’s presence. Huckaby took his opportunity. He said in a whisper:
“She betrayed you?”
Quixtus nodded. Huckaby watched him narrowly, an absurd suspicion beginning to form itself in his mind. By his chance phrase about revenge he had put his friend’s unsound mind on the track of a haunting tragedy. Who was the woman? His wife? But she had died beloved of him, and for years, until this madness overtook him, he had spoken of her with the reverence due to a departed saint. It was a puzzle; the solution peculiarly interesting. How should he obtain it? Quixtus was not the man to blab his intimate secrets into the ear of his hired bravo—for as such he knew that Quixtus regarded him. It behoved him not to change the minor key of this conversation.
“A man’s foes,” he quoted in a murmur, “are ever of his own household.”
Quixtus nodded again three or four times, with parted lips.
“His own household. Those dearest to him. The woman he loved and his best friend.”
In spite of his suspicion, Huckaby was astounded at the inadvertent confession. In his last days of grace he had known Mrs. Quixtus and the best friend. Swiftly his mind went back. He remembered vaguely their familiar intercourse. What was the man’s name? He groped and found it.
“Hammersley,” he said, aloud.
At the word, Quixtus started to his feet and swept his hand over his face.
“What are you talking about? What do you know against Hammersley?”
A lurid ray shot athwart his darkened mind. He realised the betrayal of his most jealously guarded secret to Huckaby. He shrank back, growing hot and cold through shame.
“Hammersley played me false over some money affairs,” he said, cunningly. “It’s a black business which I will tell you about one of these days.”
“And the woman?” asked Huckaby.
“The woman—she—she married. I am glad to say she’s giving her husband a devil of a time.”
He laughed nervously. Huckaby, with surprising tact, followed on the wrong scent like a puppy.
“You can avenge the poor fellow and yourself at the same time,” said he. “Women are all alike. It’s right that one of them should be made to suffer. You have it in your power to make one of them suffer the tortures of hell.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll do it,” cried Quixtus.
“No time like the present.”
“You’re right,” said Quixtus. “We’ll go to Paris together.”
For the first few days in Paris Quixtus had little time to devote to the secondary object of his visit. The meetings and excursions of the Congress absorbed his attention. His Parisian confrères took him to their homes and exhibited their collections of flint instruments, their wives and their daughters. He attended intimate dinners, the wordssans cérémoniebeing underlined in the invitation, where all the men, who had worn evening dress in the morning at a formal function of the Congress, assembled in the salon gravely attired in tightly-buttoned frock-coats and wearing dogskin gloves which they only took off when they sat down to table. His good provincial colleagues, who thought they might just as well hear the chimes at midnight while they were in Paris as not, insisted on his accompanying them in their mild dissipation: This generally consisted in drinking beer at a brasserie filled with parti-coloured ladies and talking palæolithic gossip amid the bewildering uproar of a Tzigane band. Now and again Huckaby, who assured him that he was prosecuting his researches in the fauna of the Hôtel Continental, where, on Huckaby’s advice, they were staying, would accompany him on such adventures.
Curiously enough, Quixtus had begun to like the man again. Admitted on a social equality and dressed in reputable garments, Huckaby began to lose the assertiveness of manner mingled with furtive flattery which of late had characterised him. He began to assume an air of self-respect, even of good-breeding. Quixtus noticed with interest the change wrought in him by clothes and environment, and contrasted him favourably with Billiter, whom new and gorgeous raiment had rendered peculiarly offensive. There were times when he could forget the sorry mission which Huckaby had undertaken, and find pleasure in his conversation. Scrupulous sobriety aided the temporary metamorphosis. As he spoke French passably and had retained a considerable amount of scholarship, Quixtus (to his astonishment) found that he could introduce him with a certain pride to his brother anthropologists, as one who would cast no discredit on his country. Huckaby was quick to perceive his patron’s change of attitude, and took pains to maintain it. The novelty, too, of mingling again with clean-living, intellectual and kindly men afforded him a keen pleasure which was worth a week’s abstinence from whisky. Whether it was worth a whole life of respectability and endeavour was another matter. The present sufficed him.
He played the scholarly gentleman so well that Quixtus was not surprised, one afternoon, when passing through the great lounge of the Continental, to see a lady rise from a tea-table and greet his companion in the friendliest manner.
“Eustace Huckaby, can that possibly be you—or is it your ghost?”
Huckaby bowed over the proffered hand. “What an unexpected delight.”
“It’s years and years since we met. How many?”
“I daren’t count them, for both our sakes,” said Huckaby.
“Why have you dropped out of my horizon for all this time?” asked the lady.
“Mea maxima culpa.” He smiled, bowed in the best-bred way in the world, and half turned, so as to bring Quixtus into the group. “May I introduce my friend Dr. Quixtus? Mrs. Fontaine.”
The lady smiled sweetly. “You are Dr. Quixtus, the anthropologist?”
“I am interested in the subject,” said Quixtus.
“More than that. I have read your book;The Household Arts of the Neolithic Age.”
“An indiscretion of youth,” said Quixtus.
“Oh, please don’t tell me it’s all wrong,” cried Mrs. Fontaine, in alarm. “I’m always quoting it. It forms part of my little stock-in-trade of learning.”
“Oh, no. It’s not exactly incorrect,” said Quixtus, with a smile, pleased that so pretty a lady should count among his disciples, “but it’s superficial. So much has been discovered since I wrote it.”
“But it’s a standard work, all the same. I happened to see an account of the Anthropological Congress in the paper this morning, in which you are referred to as theéminent anthropologue anglaisand the author of my book. I was so pleased. I should have been more so had I known I was to meet you this afternoon. Have you turned anthropologist too, Mr. Huckaby?”
Huckaby explained that he was taking advantage of the Congress to make holiday in the company of his distinguished friend. That was the first afternoon the Congress had allowed him leisure, and they had devoted it to contemplation of the acres of fresh paint in the Grand Palais. They had come home exhausted.
“Home? Then you’re staying in the hotel?”
“Yes,” said Huckaby. “And you?”
“I too. And in its vastness I feel the most lonesome widow woman that ever was. I’m waiting here for Lady Louisa Mailing, who promised to join me; but I think something must have happened, for there is no sign of her.”
A waiter brought the tray with tea which she had ordered before the men’s entrance, and set it on the basket table. Mrs. Fontaine motioned to it.
“Won’t you share my solitude and join me?”
“With pleasure,” said Huckaby.
Quixtus accepted the invitation, and with his grave courtesy withdrew a chair to make a passage for Mrs. Fontaine, who gave the additional order to the waiter. The lounge and the courtyard were thronged with a well-dressed cosmopolitan crowd, tea-drinking, smoking, and chattering. A band discoursed discreet music at a convenient distance. The scene was cool to eyes tired by the vivid colours of the salon and the hot streets. Quixtus sat down restfully by the side of his hostess and let her minister to his wants. He was surprised to find how pleasant a change was the company of a soft-voiced and attractive woman after that of his somewhat ponderous and none too picturesque confrères. She was good to look upon; an English blonde in a pale lilac dress and hat—the incarnation of early summer; not beautiful, but pleasing; at the same time simple and exquisite. The arrangement of her blonde hair, the fine oval contour of her face, the thin delicate lips, gave her an air of chastity which was curiously belied by dark grey eyes dreaming behind long lashes. All her movements, supple and natural, spoke of breeding; unmistakably a lady. Evidently a friend of Huckaby’s before his fall. Quixtus wondered cynically whether she would have greeted with such frank gladness the bloodshot-eyed scarecrow of a fortnight before. From their talk, he concluded that she had no idea of the man’s degradation.
“Mr. Huckaby and I knew each other when the world was young,” she said. “Centuries ago—in the palæolithic age—before my marriage.”
“Alas!” said Huckaby, sipping the unaccustomed tea. “You threw aside the injunction:arma cedant togæ. In our case it was the gown that had to yield to the arms. You married a soldier.”
She sighed and looked down pensively at her wedding-ring. Then she glanced up with a laugh, and handed Quixtus the bread and butter.
“Believe me, Dr. Quixtus, this is the first time I ever heard of the rivalry. He only invented it for the sake of the epigram. Isn’t that true?”
“In one way,” replied Huckaby. “I was so insignificant that you never even noticed it.”
She laughed again and turned to Quixtus.
“How long are you going to stay in Paris?”
“Just a day or two longer—till the end of my Congress.”
“Oh! How can you leave Paris when she’s looking her best without devoting a few days to admiring her? It’s unkind.”
“I’m afraid Paris must get over the slight.”
“But don’t you love Paris? I do. It is so fascinating; dangerous, treacherous. Plunge into it for a moment or two and it is the Fountain of Youth. Remain in the water a little longer than is prudent, and you come out shrivelled and wrinkled, with all your youth and beauty gone from you.”
“Perhaps I have already had my prudent plunge,” said Quixtus; with a smile.
“I’m sure you haven’t. You’ve been on dry land all the time. Worse than that—in a quaternary formation. Have you dined at Armenonville?”
“In my time I have; but not this time.”
“Voilà,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “The warm June nights, the Bois in the moonlight with all its mysteries of shadow, the fairy palace in the midst of it where you eat fairy things surrounded by the gaiety and sparkle and laughter of the world—essential and symbolical Paris—you disregard it all. And that is only one little instance. There are a thousand others. You’ve not even wetted your feet.”
She embroidered her thesis very gracefully, clothing the woman of the world in a diaphanous robe of pretty fancy, revealing a mind ever so little baffling, here material, there imaginative—a mind as contradictory as her face, with its chaste contours and its alluring eyes. Quixtus listened to her with amused interest. She represented a type with which he, accustomed to the less vivid womenfolk of the learned, was unfamiliar. Without leaving Huckaby, her girlhood’s friend, out in the cold, she made it delicately evident that, of the two, Quixtus was the more worthy of attention on account of his attainments and the more attractive in his personality. Quixtus, flattered, thought her a woman of great discernment.
“But you,” said he, at last. “Have you made your plunge—not that you need it—into the Fountain of Youth? Have you fed on the honeydew of the Bois de Boulogne and drunk the milk of Armenonville?”
“I only arrived last night,” she explained. “And I must remain more or less in quarantine, being an unprotected woman, till my friend Lady Louisa Mailing comes, or till my friends in Paris get to know I am here. But I always like a day or two of freedom before announcing myself—so that I can do the foolish things that Parisians would jeer at. I always go to the Louvre and look at the little laughing Faun and the Giaconda; and I always go down the Seine in a steamboat, and from the Madeleine to the Bastille on the top of an omnibus. Then I’m ready for my plunge.”
“I should have thought that bath of innocence was in itself the Fountain of Youth,” said Huckaby.
The least suspicion of a frown passed over Mrs. Fontaine’s candid brow. But she replied with a smile:
“On the contrary, my friend. That is a penitential dipping in the waters of the past.”
“Why penitential?” asked Quixtus.
“Isn’t it wholesome discipline to give oneself pain sometimes?” Her face grew wistful. “To re-visit scenes where one has been happy—and sharpen the knife of memory?”
“It is the instinct of the ascetic,” smiled Quixtus.
“I suppose I have a bit of it,” she replied, demurely. Then her face brightened. “I don’t wear a hair shirt—I’ve got to appear in an evening gown sometimes—but I find an odd little satisfaction in doing penance. If I were a Roman Catholic I would embarrass my confessor.”
Huckaby’s lips twitched in a smile beneath his moustache. If all the tales that Billiter told of Lena Fontaine were true, a confessor would be exceedingly embarrassed. He regarded her with admiration. She was an entirely different woman from the hard and contemptuous partner in iniquity to whom Billiter had introduced him before he left London. It had not been a pleasant interview—just the details of their Paris meeting arranged, the story of their past acquaintance rehearsed, and nothing more. Huckaby, descending her stairs with Billiter, had felt as if he had been whipped, and prophesied failure. She was not the woman for Quixtus. But Billiter grinned and bade him wait. He had waited, and now had the satisfaction of seeing Quixtus caught immediately in the gossamer web of her charm. He wondered, too, how she could have maintained her relations with so undesirable a person as Billiter, for whom he himself entertained a profound contempt. Billiter was unusually silent on the matter, letting it be vaguely understood that he had been in the Dragoon Guardsman’s set before running through his money, and that he had accidentally done her a service in later years. What that service was he declined to mention. Huckaby sniffed blackmail. That was the more likely influence keeping together a well-received woman of hidden life and a shabby and unpresentable sot like Billiter. He remembered that Billiter had confessed to a mysterious source of income. What more natural an explanation thereof than the fact that, having once surprised a woman’s secret and holding her reputation in his hands, he should have been accepted by her, in desperation, as her paid doer of unavowable offices? He knew that a woman of Lena Fontaine’s type, with an assured social position in the great world, does not descend into the half-world without a desperate struggle. Her back is against the wall, and she uses any weapon to hand. Hence her use of Billiter. At all events, in the present case there had been no pretence of friendship. To her it had obviously been a hateful matter of business, which she had been anxious to conclude as soon as possible. One condition she rigorously exacted; that her acquaintance with Billiter should not be revealed to Quixtus. She was not proud of Billiter. Huckaby took what comfort he could from the thought.
Mrs. Fontaine sat talking to the two men until the tea-drinking and chattering crowd had melted away. Then she rose, thanked them prettily for wasting their science-filled time on an irresponsible woman’s loneliness, and expressed to Huckaby the hope that she would see him again before he left Paris.
“I trust I, too, may have the pleasure,” said Quixtus.
“You might lead us to the Fountain of Youth one of these evenings,” said Huckaby.
“It would be delightful,” said the lady, with a questioning glance at Quixtus.
“I could dream of nothing more pleasant,” he replied, bowing in his old-fashioned way.
When she had gone, the men resumed their seats. Quixtus lit a cigarette.
“A very charming woman.”
Huckaby agreed. “It has been one of my great regrets of the past few years that I have not been able to keep up our old friendship. We moved in different worlds.” He paused, as if thinking sorrowfully of his misspent life. “I hope you don’t mind my suggesting the little dinner-party,” he said, after a while. “My position was a delicate one.”
“It was a very good idea,” said Quixtus.
Huckaby said little more, preferring to leave well alone. The plot, up to this point, had succeeded. Quixtus gave complete credence to the story, unsuspecting that Mrs. Fontaine was the woman selected for his heart-breaking experiment, and already considerably attracted by her personality. Diabolical possibilities could be insinuated later. In the meanwhile; Huckaby had played his part. Future success now lay in Mrs. Fontaine’s hands.
Quixtus dined that evening with one of his colleagues, and Huckaby, after a meal at a restaurant, went to the Comédie Française and sat throughPhèdrefrom beginning to end, with great enjoyment. The re-awakening of his æsthetic sense, dulled for so many years, surprised and gratified him.
When he met his patron the next morning, he said abruptly;
“If I had a chance of getting back again, I’d take it.”
“Getting back where?” asked Quixtus. “To London?”
Huckaby explained. “I’m tired of running crooked,” he added. “If I could only get regular work to bring me in a few pounds a week, I’d run straight and sober for the rest of my life.”
“I don’t think I can help you to attain your wishes, my dear Huckaby,” replied Quixtus, reflectively. “If I did; I should be committing a good action, which, as you know, is entirely against my principles.”
“I don’t yearn so much after goodness,” said Huckaby, “as after decency and cleanliness. I’ve no ambition to die a white-haired saint.”
“All white-haired saints are whited sepulchres,” said Quixtus.
In spite of regenerative impulses, Huckaby persuaded his patron to lunch at the hotel where he knew that Mrs. Fontaine and the newly arrived Lady Louisa Mailing had planned to lunch also. The establishment of informal relations was important. They entered the table d’hôte room, and, preceded by the maître d’hôtel, marched to the table reserved for them. About six tables away sat Mrs. Fontaine and her friend. She smiled a pleasant greeting.
“Women can sometimes be exceedingly decorative,” remarked Quixtus, helping himself to sardines.
“If they are not, they leave unfulfilled one of the main functions of their existence.”
“Did you ever know a good woman?”
“Mrs. Fontaine is one of the best I’ve ever known,” replied Huckaby, at a venture.
The heart-breaking could be practised on a sweet and virtuous flower of a woman with much more villainous success than on a hardened coquette.
Quixtus said nothing. His natural delicacy forbade the discussion of a specific woman’s moral attributes.
The occupants of the two tables met after lunch in the lounge, and had coffee and cigarettes together. The men were presented to Lady Louisa Mailing, an aimless, dowdy woman of forty, running to fat. As far as could be gathered from her conversation, her two interests in life were Lena Fontaine and food in restaurants. In Mrs. Fontaine’s presence she spoke chiefly of the latter. When Mrs. Fontaine went up to her room for a forgotten powder-puff, leaving her with the men, she plunged with animation into eulogy of Mrs. Fontaine’s virtues. In this she was sincere. She believed in Mrs. Fontaine’s virtues, which, like the costermonger’s giant strawberries, lay ostentatiously at the top of her basket of qualities; and she was so stupid that her friend could always dissimulate from her incurious eyes the crushed and festering fruit below.
“I always think it so sad for a sweet, beautiful woman like Lena to be alone in the world,” said Lady Louisa, in a soft, even voice. “But she’s so brave, so cheerful, so gentle.”
“It’s a wonder she hasn’t married again,” said Huckaby.
“I don’t think she ever will,” replied Lady Louisa; “unless she gets a man to understand her. And where is he to be found?”
“Ah where?” said Huckaby, to whom as Mrs. Fontaine’s childhood friend this talk had been mainly addressed.
Lady Louisa sighed sentimentally. She was an old maid, the seventh of eleven daughters of an impecunious Irish earl now defunct. Her face, such as it was, had been her fortune, and it had attracted no suitors.
“Not that she isn’t very much admired. She knows hundreds of nice men, and I’m sure heaps of them want to marry her; but, no. She likes them as friends. As a husband she wants something more. The modern man is so material and unintellectual, don’t you think so?”
This Diana (with a touch of Minerva) among widows came up, swinging the little bag of which she had gone in search.
“I’m sure Lady Louisa has been talking about me,” she laughed.
“She has not been taking away your character. I assure you,” said Quixtus.
“I know. She has been giving me one. And the worst of it is, I have to live up to it—or at least try. I suppose it’s always worth while having an ideal before one, though it may be somebody else’s.”
“You believe in an ideal of goodness?” asked Quixtus.
She raised her dreamy eyes to his and looked at him candidly.
“Why, yes, don’t you?”
“No,” he replied, with a darkening brow. “There is only one force in nature, which is wickedness. Man sometimes resists it for fear of the consequences, and the measure of his cowardly resistance is by a curious inversion taken by him to be the measure of his striving towards an ideal.”
Mrs. Fontaine exclaimed warmly; “I must cure you of your pessimism.”
“There is only one remedy.”
“And that?”
“The same as will cure the disease of life.”
“You mean death?”
“Yes,” said Quixtus.
“It’s a remedy; but not the only one.” Her pale cheeks flushed adorably. “In fact, it’s only by a twist of language you can call it a remedy. The only remedy against the malady of life is life itself. The bane is its own antidote. The only cure for loss of illusions is fresh illusions, more illusions, and always illusions.”
“Supposing for argument’s sake you are right—where are they to come from?”
“They form of themselves, like fresh tissue of the flesh, without your volition.”
“Only in healthy flesh,” said Quixtus, with his tired smile. “So in a gangrened soul there can be built up no fresh tissue of illusions.”
Womanlike, she begged the question, maintaining that there was no such thing as a gangrened soul. She shuddered prettily. Belief therein was a horrible superstition. She proclaimed her faith in the ultimate good of things. Quixtus said ironically:
“The ultimate good takes a long time coming. In the ages in which I, as a student, am interested, men slew each other with honest hatchets. Now they slay by the poisoned word and the treacherous deed. The development of mind has for its history the development of craft and cunning, of which the supreme results are a religion as to whose essential tenets scarcely two persons can agree, a rule of thumb arrangement of purely mechanical appliances, which is the so-called wonder of wireless telegraphy, and an infinite capacity for cruelty which has rendered Hell a mild and futile shadow in human speculation. Whatever hellishness human imagination could invent as the work of devils, calm history, the daily newspaper, your own experience of life tells you has already been surpassed by the work of man. Sometimes one is tempted to cry, like Ferdinand inThe Tempest, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ But if it was, and the devils were here, they would be hard put to it to find a society in which they should not be compelled to hold up their tails before their snouts in shame and horror. You would find them meeker than the meekest of the Young Men’s Christian Association.”
He spoke with a certain crazy earnestness which arrested Lena Fontaine. Heartless, desperate, cynical though she was, intelligent too and swift of brain, she had never formulated to herself so disastrous a philosophy. She leaned forward, an elbow on the wickerwork table.
“Such a faith is dreadful,” she said, seriously. “It reduces living among one’s fellow creatures to walking through a horde of savages—never knowing whether some one may not club you on the head or stab you in the back.”
“Can you ever tell whether your dearest friend isn’t going to stab you in the back?” asked Quixtus.
His pale blue eyes held her with a curious insistence. Her eyelids flickered with something like shame, as though she had divined a personal application of the question. She shivered; this time naturally.
“Oh, I love to believe in goodness,” she exclaimed, “although I may not practise every virtue myself. There would be no sunshine in a purely wicked world.” She plucked up courage and looked him in the face.
“Do you think I, for instance, am just one mass of badness?”
“My dear Mrs. Fontaine,” replied the pessimist, with his courtly smile, “you must not crush me by using the privilege of your sex—arguing from general to particular.”
“But do you?” she insisted.
“I believe,” said he, with a little inclination of his head, “all that Lady Louisa has been telling me.”
The talk ran for awhile in lighter channels. Lady Louisa and Huckaby who had been discussing cookery—he had held her in watery-mouthed attention while he gave her from memory Izaac Walton’s recipe for roasting a jack—joined in the conversation.
“You two have been having a very deep argument,” said Lady Louisa.
“I have been trying to convert him to optimism,” laughed Mrs. Fontaine. “It seems to be difficult. But I’ll do so in time. I’m a determined woman. I’ve a good mind to forbid you to leave Paris before your conversion.”
“The process would be pleasant, though the result would be problematical.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. I just want to make you see things for yourself.”
“I will submit gladly to your guidance,” said Quixtus.
She looked at the little watch on her bracelet, and her rising brought the little party to their feet.
“Shall we begin now? I’m going to walk up the Rue de la Paix and see the shops.”
Quixtus also consulted his watch. “I shall be honoured if you will let me walk up the Rue de la Paix with you. But then I must reluctantly leave you. I must meet my confrères of the Congress at the railway-station to go to Sèvres to see Monsieur Sardanel’s collection.”
“What has Sèvres china to do with anthropology?”
He smiled at her ignorance. Monsieur Sardanel had the famous collection of Mexican antiquities—terra-cotta rattles and masks and obsidian-edged swords.
Her long lashes swept shyly upwards. “I’m sure I could show you much more interesting things than those.”
It was a long time since a pretty and fascinating woman had evinced a desire for his company. He was a man, as well as a diabolically minded anthropologist. Yet there was a green avanturine quartz axe-head in the collection which he particularly lusted to behold. He stood irresolute, while Mrs. Fontaine turned with a laugh and took Lady Louisa aside. He caught Huckaby’s glance, in which he surprised a flicker of anxiety. Huckaby was wondering whether this was the right moment to speak. It seemed so. Yet the more he thought over the matter, the less was he inclined to cut the disgraceful figure in Quixtus’s eyes of the base betrayer of his supposed childhood’s flower-like friend. Here, however, was the wished-for opportunity, when Quixtus was evidently hesitating between primitive clay masks and a living woman’s face. He resolved to throw all the onus of the decision on Quixtus’s shoulders.
“I’m afraid these dear ladies rather interfere with the prospects of our little adventure,” he said, drawing him a step or two from the table where they had been sitting.
“I never thought of it,” said Quixtus, truthfully.
Then an idea of malignant cunning took possession of his brain. Mrs. Fontaine should be the woman; and Huckaby should not know. Her heart he would break and, when it was broken, he would confound Huckaby with the piteous shards and enjoy a doubly diabolical triumph. In the meantime he must dissemble; for Huckaby would not deliberately allow his old friend’s happiness to be wrecked. To hide a smile he crossed the passage of the lounge and lit a cigarette from matches on one of the tables. Then he turned.
“My dear fellow,” said he, “let us talk no more about the adventure, as you call it. It never really pleased me.”
“But surely——” Huckaby began.
“It’s distasteful,” he interrupted, “and there’s an end of it.”
“As you will,” said Huckaby, for the moment uncertain.
Mrs. Fontaine approached them smiling, provocative in the dainty candour of her white dress and hat.
“Well? Have you decided?”
Quixtus paused for the fraction of a second. The lady swept him with her dreamy glance. A modern Merlin, he yielded. This delicious wickedness at last on foot, Sardanel and all his spoils of Mexico could go hang.
“For the afternoon,” said he, “I am your humble disciple.”
They went forth together, outwardly as gay a company as ever issued through the great gates of the Hôtel Continental into the fairyland of Paris; inwardly, save one of their number, psychological complexities as dark as any that have emerged into its mocking and inscrutable spirit. Of the three, Quixtus, the tender-hearted scholar of darkened mind, who could no more have broken a woman’s heart than have trampled on a baby, pathetically bent on his intellectually conceived career of Evil and entirely unconscious of being himself the dupe and victim—of the three, Quixtus was certainly the happiest. Huckaby, touched with shame, avoided meeting his accomplice’s eye. He walked in front with Lady Louisa, finding refuge in her placid dulness.
Once during the afternoon, when Lena Fontaine found herself for a moment by his side, she laughed cynically.
“Do you know what you two remind me of? Martha and Mephistopheles.”
“And you are Gretchen to the life.”
The retort was obvious; but apparently it was not anticipated. Mrs. Fontaine flushed scarlet at the sneer. She looked at him hard-eyed, and said, with set teeth:
“I wish to God I were.”