Simon the Jester Part 15

"The _bourgeoisie_," I said, "is the nation's granary of the virtues.

But for G.o.d'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 cus.h.i.+on 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 cus.h.i.+oned 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 Cha.s.seurs 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 G.o.d, 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.suming 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 'd.a.m.n' 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 'd.a.m.n' 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 gla.s.s," 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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.