The murder is out. A paragraph has appeared in the newspapers to the effect that the marriage arranged between Mr. Simon de Gex and Miss Eleanor Faversham will not take place. It has also become common knowledge that I am resigning my seat in Parliament on account of ill-health. That is the reason rightly assigned by my acquaintances for the rupture of my engagement. I am being rapidly killed by the doleful kindness of my friends. They are so dismally sympathetic. Everywhere I go there are long faces and solemn hand-shakes. In order to cheer myself I gave a little dinner-party at the club, and the function might have been a depressed wake with my corpse in a coffin on the table. My sisters, dear, kind souls, follow me with anxious eyes as if I were one of their children sickening for chicken-pox. They upbraid me for leaving them in ignorance, and in hushed voices inquire as to my symptoms. They both came this morning to the Albany to see what they could do for me. I don't see what they can do, save help Rogers put studs in my shirts. They expressed such affectionate concern that at last I cried out:
“My dear girls, if you don't smile, I'll sit upon the hearthrug and howl like a dog.”
Then they exchanged glances and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things, under the impression that they were brightening me up. I am being deluged with letters. I had no idea I was such a popular person. They come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament, from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs. I could set up as a general practitioner of medicine on the advice that is given me. I am recommended cod-liver oil, lung tonic, electric massage, abdominal belts, warm water, mud baths, Sandow's treatment, and every patent medicament save rat poison. I am urged to go to health resorts ranging geographically from the top of the Jungfrau to Central Africa. All kinds of worthy persons have offered to nurse me. Old General Wynans writes me a four-page letter to assure me that I have only to go to his friend Dr. Eustace Adams, of Wimpole Street, to be cured like a shot. I happen to know that Eustace Adams is an eminent gynecologist.
And the worst of it all is that these effusions written in the milk of human kindness have to be answered. Dale is not here. I have to sit down at my desk and toil like a galley slave. I am being worn to a shadow.
Lola Brandt, too, has heard the news, Dale in Berlin, and the London newspapers being her informants. Tears stood in her eyes when I called to learn her decision. Why had I not told her I was so ill? Why had I let her worry me with her silly troubles? Why had I not consulted her friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield? She filled up my chair with cushions (which, like most men, I find stuffy and comfortless), and if I had given her the slightest encouragement, would have stuck my feet in hot mustard and water. Why had I come out on such a dreadful day? It was indeed a detestable day of raw fog. She pulled the curtains close, and, insisting upon my remaining among my cushions, piled the grate with coal half-way up the chimney. Would I like some eucalyptus?
“My dear Madame Brandt,” I cried, “my bronchial tubes and lungs are as strong as a hippopotamus's.”
I wish every one would not conclude that I was going off in a rapid decline.
Lola Brandt prowled about me in a wistful, mothering way, showing me a fresh side of her nature. She is as domesticated as Penelope.
“You're fond of cooking, aren't you?” I asked suddenly.
She laughed. “I adore it. How do you know?”
“I guessed,” said I.
“I'm what the French call a vraie bourgeoise.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said I.
“Are you? I thought your class hated the bourgeoisie.”
“The bourgeoisie,” I said, “is the nation's granary of the virtues. But for God's sake, don't tell any one that I said so!”
“Why?” she asked.
“If it found its way into print it would ruin my reputation for epigram.”
She drew a step or two towards me in her slow rhythmic way, and smiled.
“When you say or do a beautiful thing you always try to bite off its tail.”
Then she turned and drew some needlework—plain sewing I believe they call it—from beneath the Union Jack cushion and sat down.
“I'll make a confession,” she said. “Until now I've stuffed away my work when I heard you coming. I didn't think it genteel. What do you think?”
I scanned the shapeless mass of linen or tulle or whatever it was on her lap.
“I don't know whether it's genteel,” I remarked, “but at present it looks like nothing on God's earth.”
My masculine ignorance of such mysteries made her laugh. She is readily moved to mild mirth, which makes her an easy companion. Besides, little jokes are made to be laughed at, and I like women who laugh at them. There was a brief silence. I smoked and made Adolphus stand up on his hind legs and balance sugar on his nose. His mistress sewed. Presently she said, without looking up from her work:
“I've made up my mind.”
I rose from my cushioned seat, into which Adolphus, evidently thinking me a fool, immediately snuggled himself, and I stood facing her with my back to the fire.
“Well?” said I.
“I am ready to go back to my husband, if he can be found, and, of course, if he will have me.”
I commended her for a brave women. She smiled rather sadly and shook her head.
“Those are two gigantic 'ifs.'”
“Giants before now have been slain by the valiant,” I replied.
“How is Captain Vauvenarde to be found?”
“An officer in the French Army is not like a lost sparrow in London. His whereabouts could be obtained from the French War Office. What is his regiment?”
“The Chasseurs d'Afrique. Yes,” she added thoughtfully. “I see, it isn't difficult to trace him. I make one condition, however. You can't refuse me.”
“What is that?”
“Until things are fixed up everything must go on just as at present between Dale and me. He is not to be told anything. If nothing comes of it then I'll have him all to myself. I won't give him up and be left alone. As long as I care for him, I swear to God, I won't!” she said, in her low, rich voice—and I saw by her face that she was a woman of her word. “Besides, he would come raving and imploring—and I'm not quite a woman of stone. It isn't all jam to go back to my husband. Goodness knows why I am thinking of it. It's for your sake. Do you know that?”
I did not. I was puzzled. Why in the world should Lola Brandt, whom I have only met three or four times, revolutionise the whole of her life for my sake?
“I should have thought it was for Dale's,” said I.
“I suppose you would, being a man,” she replied.
I retorted, with a smile: “Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one of these days you'll do it. Meanwhile, I'll wait in patience.”
She gave me one of her sidelong, flashing glances and sewed with more vigour than appeared necessary. I admired the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders as she bent over her work. She seemed too strong to wield such an insignificant weapon as a needle.
“That's neither here nor there,” she said in reference to my last remark. “I say, I don't look forward to going back to my husband—though why I should say 'going back' I don't know, as he left me—not I him. Anyhow, I'm ready to do it. If it can be managed, I'll cut myself adrift suddenly from Dale. It will be more merciful to him. A man can bear a sudden blow better than lingering pain. If it can't be managed, well, Dale will know nothing at all about it, and both he and I will be saved a mortal deal of worry and unhappiness.”
“Suppose” said I, “it can't be managed? Do you propose to keep Dale ignorant of the danger he is running in keeping up a liaison with a married woman living apart from her husband?”
She reflected. “If my husband says he'll see me damned first before he'll come back to me, then I'll tell Dale everything, and you can say what you like to him. He'll be able to judge for himself; but in the meanwhile you'll let me have what happiness I can.”
I accepted the compromise, and, dispossessing Adolphus, sat down again. I certainly had made progress. Feeling in a benevolent mood, I set forth the advantages she would reap by assuming her legal status; how at last she would shake the dust of Bohemia from off her feet, and instead of standing at the threshold like a disconsolate Peri, she would enter as a right the Paradise of Philistia which she craved; how her life would be one continual tea-party, and how, as her husband had doubtless by this time obtained his promotion, she would be authorised to adopt high and mighty airs in her relations with the wives of all the captains and lieutenants in the regiment. She sighed and wondered whether she would like it, after all.
“Here in England I can say 'damn' as often as I choose. I don't say it very often, but sometimes I feel I must say it or explode.”
“There are its equivalents in French,” I suggested.
She laughed outright. “Fancy my coming out with a sacre nom de Dieu in a French drawing-room!”
“Fancy you shouting 'damn' in an English one.”
“That's true,” she said. “I suppose drawing-rooms are the same all the world over. I do try to talk like a lady—at least, what I imagine they talk like, for I've never met one.”
“You see one every time you look in the glass,” said I.
Her olive face flushed. “You mustn't say such things to me if you don't mean them. I like to think all you say to me is true.”
“Why in the world,” I cried, “should you not be a lady? You have the instincts of one. How many of my fair friends in Mayfair and Belgravia would have made their drawing-rooms unspeakable just for the sake of not hurting the feelings of Anastasius Papadopoulos?”
She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, looked at me gratefully.
“I'm so glad you've said that. Dale can't understand it. He wants me to clear the trash away.”
“Dale,” said I, “is young and impetuous. I am a battered old philosopher with one foot in the grave.”
Quick moisture gathered in her eyes. “You hurt me,” she said. “You'll soon get well and strong again. You must!”
“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” I laughed.
“Eh bien, je le veux,” she said with an odd expression in her eyes which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like a captivating odour—but it was not an odour—a strange magnetic influence.
I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer.
There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I will save her from Dale for her own sake.
All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.
And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and cum privilegio dunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or spiritual; and yet she is, in a queer, indescribable way, all these things.
“Je le veux,” she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything she bade me. If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary's cap or a hair of the Prester John's beard, I would have telephoned forthwith to Rogers to pack a suit-case and book a seat in the Orient express.
What would have happened next Heaven alone knows—for we could not have gone on gazing at each other until I backed myself out at the door by way of leave-taking—had not Anticlimax arrived in the person of Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos in his eternal frock-coat. But his gloves were black.
As usual he fell on his knees and kissed his lady's hand. Then he rose and greeted me with solemn affability.
“C'est un privilege de rencontrer den gnadigsten Herrn,” said he.
Confining myself to one language, I responded by informing him that it was an honour always to meet so renowned a professor, and inquired politely after the health of Hephaestus.
“Ah, Signore!” he cried. “Do not ask me. It is a tragedy from which I shall never recover.”
He sat down on a footstool by the side of Madame Brandt and burst into tears, which coursed down his cheeks and moustache and hung like drops of dew from the point of his imperial.
“Is he dead?” asked Madame.
“I wish he were! No. It is only the iron self-restraint that I possess which prevented me from slaying him on the spot. But poor Santa Bianca! My gentle and accomplished Angora. He has killed her. I can scarcely raise my head through grief.”
Lola put her great arm round the little man's neck and patted him like a child, while he sobbed as if his heart would break.
When he recovered he gave us the details of the tragic end of Santa Bianca, and wound up by calling down the most ingeniously complicated and passionate curses on the head of the murderer. Lola Brandt strove to pacify him.
“We all have our sorrows, Anastasius. Did I not lose my beautiful horse Sultan?”
The professor sprang to his full height of four feet and dashed away his tears with a noble gesture of his black-gloved hand.
Base slave that he was to think of his own petty bereavement in the face of her eternal affliction. He turned to me and bade me mark her serene nobility. It was a model and an example for him to follow. He, too, would be brave and present a smiling face to evil fortune.
“Behold! I smile, carissima!” he cried dramatically.
We beheld—and saw his features (smudged with tearstains and the dye from the black gloves which he obviously wore out of respect for the deceased Santa Bianca) contorted into a grimace of hideous imbecility.
“Monsieur,” said he, assuming his natural expression which was one of pensive melancholy, “let us change the conversation. You are a great statesman. Will you kindly let me know your opinion on the foreign policy of Germany?”
Whereupon he sat down again upon his stool and regarded me with earnest attention.
“Germany,” said I, with the solemnity of a Sir Oracle in the smoking-room of one of the political clubs, “has dreams of an empire beyond her frontiers, and with a view to converting the dream into a reality, is turning out battleships nineteen to the dozen.”
The Professor nodded his head sagaciously, and looked up at Lola.
“Very profound,” said he, “very profound. I shall remember it. I am a Greek, Monsieur, and the Greeks, as you know, are a nation of diplomatists.”
“Ever since the days of Xenophon,” said I.
“You're both too clever for me,” exclaimed our hostess. “Where did you get your knowledge from, Anastasius?”
The Professor, flattered, passed his hand over his bulgy forehead.
“I was a great student in my youth,” said he. “Once I could tell you all the kings of Rome and the date of the battle of Actium. But pressure of weightier concerns has driven my erudition from me. Pardon me. I have not yet asked after your health. You are looking sad and troubled. What is the matter?”
He sat bolt upright, fingering his imperial and regarding her with the keen solicitude of a family physician. To my amazement, Lola Brandt told him quite simply:
“I am thinking of living with my husband again.”
“Has the traitor been annoying you?” he asked with a touch of fierceness.
“Oh, no! It's my own idea. I'm tired of living alone. I don't even know where he is.”
“Do you want to know where he is?”
“How can I communicate with him unless I do?”
Anastasius Papadopoulos rose, struck an attitude, and thumped his breast.
“I will seek him for you at the ends of the earth, and will bring him to prostrate himself at your feet.”
“That's very kind of you, Anastasius,” said Lola gently; “but what will become of your cats?”
The dwarf raised his hand impressively.
“The Almighty will have them in His keeping. I have also my pupil and assistant, Quast.”
Lola smiled indulgently from her cushions, showing her curious even teeth.
“You mustn't do anything so mad, Anastasius, I forbid you.”
“Madame,” said he in a most stately manner, “when I devote myself, it is to the death. I have the honour to salute you!”—he bowed over her hand and kissed it. “Monsieur.” He bowed to me with the profundity of a hidalgo, and trotted magnificently out of the room.
It was all so sudden that it took my breath away.
“Well I'm——” I didn't know what I was, so I stopped. Lola Brandt broke into low laughter at my astonishment.
“That's Anastasius's way,” she explained.
“But the little man surely isn't going to leave his cats and start on a wild-goose chase over Europe to find your husband?”
“He thinks he is, but I shan't let him.”
“I hope you won't,” said I. “And will you tell me why you made so hot-headed a person your confidant?”
I confess that I was wrathful. Here had I been using the wiles of a Balkan chancery to bring the lady to my way of thinking, and here was she, to my face, making a joke of it with this caricature of a Paladin.
“My dearest friend,” she replied earnestly, “don't be angry with me. I've given the poor little man something to think of besides the death of his cat. It will do him good. And why shouldn't I tell him? He's a dear old friend, and in his way was so good to me when I was unhappy. He knows all about my married life. You may think he's half-witted; but he isn't. In ordinary business dealings he's as shrewd as they make 'em. The manager who beats Anastasius over a contract is yet to be born.”
By some extraordinary process of the contortionist's art, she curled herself out of her chair on to the hearthrug and knelt before me, her hands clasped on my knee.
“You're not angry with me, are you?” she asked in her rich contralto.
I took both her hands, rose, and assisted her to rise. I was not going to be mesmerised again.
“Of course not,” I laughed. Indeed my wrath had fallen from me.
Her bosom heaved with a sigh. “I'm so glad,” she said. Her breath fanned my cheek. It was aromatic, intoxicating. Her lips are ripe and full.
“You had better find your husband as soon as possible,” said I.
“Do you think so?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself.”
She started. “You?”
“Yes,” I said. “The Chasseurs d'Afrique are probably in Africa, and the doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off in no time with brain fag and writer's cramp. Your husband will be what the newspapers call an objective. Good-bye!” said I, “I'll bring him to you dead or alive.”
And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.
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