Simon the Jester Part 35

"... I can't work at this election. For G.o.d's sake, give her back to me. Then I won't care. What is Parliament to me without her? And the election is as good as lost already. The other side has made as much as possible of the scandal... ."

The only letters that have not been misery to read have come from Eleanor Faversham. There was one pa.s.sage which made me thank G.o.d that He had created such women as Eleanor--

"Don't fret over the newspaper lies, dear. Those who love you--and why shouldn't I love you still?--know the honourable gentleman that you are.

Write to me if it would ease your heart and tell me just what you feel you can. Now and always you have my utter sympathy and understanding."

And this is the woman of whose thousand virtues I dared to speak in flippant jest.

Heaven forgive me.

After receiving Lady Kynnersley's appeal, I went to Lola. It was just before the case came on at the Cour d'a.s.sises. She had finished luncheon in her private room and was sitting over her coffee. I joined her. She wore the black blouse and skirt with which I have not yet been able to grow familiar, as it robbed her of the peculiar fascinating quality which I have tried to suggest by the word pantherine. Coffee over, we moved to the window which opened on a little back garden--the room was on the ground floor--in which grew p.r.i.c.kly pear and mimosa, and newly flowering heliotrope. I don't know why I should mention this, except that some scenes impress themselves, for no particular reason, on the memory, while others a.s.sociated with more important incidents fade into vagueness. I picked a bunch of heliotrope which she pinned at her bosom.

"Lola," I said, "I want to speak to you seriously."

She smiled wanly: "Do we ever speak otherwise these dreadful days?"

"It's about Dale. Read this," said I, and I handed her Lady Kynnersley's letter. She read it through and returned it to me.

"Well?"

"I asked you a week or two ago what you were going to do with your life," I said. "Does that letter offer you any suggestion?"

"I'm to give him some hope--what hope can I give him?"

"You're a free woman--free to marry. For the boy's sake the mother will consent. When she knows you as well as we know you she will--"

"She will--what? Love me?"

"She's a woman not given to loving--except, in unexpected bursts, her offspring. But she will respect you."

She stood for a few moments silent, her arm resting against the window jamb and her head on her arm. She remained there so long that at last I rose and, looking at her face, saw that her eyes were full of tears. She dashed them away with the back of her hand, gave me a swift look, and went and sat in the shadow of the room. An action of this kind on the part of a woman signifies a desire for solitude. I lit a cigarette and went into the garden.

It was a sorry business. I saw as clearly as Lola that Lady Kynnersley desired to purchase Dale's immediate happiness at any price, and that the future might bring bitter repentance. But I offered no advice.

I have finished playing at Deputy Providence. A madman letting off fireworks in a gunpowder factory plays a less dangerous game.

Presently she joined me and ran her arm through mine.

"I'll write to Dale this afternoon," she said. "Don't let us talk of it any more now. You are tired out. It's time for you to go and lie down.

I'll walk with you up the hill."

It has come to this, that I must lie down for some hours during the day lest I should fall to pieces.

"I suppose I'll have to," I laughed. "What a thing it is to have the wits of a man and the strength of a baby."

She pressed my arm and said in her low caressing voice which I had not heard for many weeks: "I shouldn't be so proud of those man's wits, if I were you."

I knew she said it playfully with reference to masculine non-perception of the feminine; but I chose to take it broadly.

"My dear Lola," said I, "it has been borne in upon me that I am the most witless fool that the unwisdom of generations of English country squires has ever succeeded in producing."

"Don't talk rot," she said, with foolishness in her eyes.

She accompanied me bareheaded in the suns.h.i.+ne to the gate of my hotel.

"Come and dine with me, if you're well enough," she said as we parted.

I a.s.sented, and when the evening came I went. Did I not say that we were like two lost souls wandering alone in the mist?

It was only when I rose to bid her good-night that she referred to Dale.

"I wrote to him this afternoon," she announced curtly.

"You said you would do so."

"Would you like to know what I told him?"

She put her hands behind her back and stood facing me, somewhat defiantly, in all her magnificence. I smiled. Women, much as they scoff at the blindness of our s.e.x, are often transparent.

"It's your firm determination to tell me," said I. "Well?"

She advanced a step nearer to me, and looked me straight in the eyes defiantly.

"I told him that I loved you with all my heart and all my soul. I told him that you didn't know it; that you didn't care a bra.s.s curse for me; that you had acted as you thought best for the happiness of himself and me. I told him that while you lived I could not think of another man.

I told him that if you could face Death with a smile on your face, he might very well show the same courage and not chuck things right and left just because a common woman wouldn't marry him or live with him and spoil his career. There! That's what I told him. What do you think?"

"Heaven knows what effect it will have," said I, wearily, for I was very, very tired. "But why, my poor Lola, have you wasted your love on a shadow like me?"

She answered after the foolish way of women.

I have not heard from either Dale or Lady Kynnersley. A day or two ago, in reply to a telegram to Raggles, I learned that Dale had lost the election.

This, then, is the end of my _apologia pro vita mea_, which I began with so resonant a flourish of vainglory. I have said all that there is to be said. Nothing more has happened or is likely to happen until they put me under the earth. Oh, yes, I was forgetting. In spite of my Monte Cristo munificence, poor Latimer has been hammered on the Stock Exchange. Poor Lucy and the kids!

I shall have, I think, just enough strength left to reach Mentone--this place is intolerable now--and there I shall put myself under the care of a capable physician who, with his abominable drugs, will doubtless begin the cheerful work of inducing the mental decay which I suppose must precede physical dissolution.

I must confess that I am disappointed with the manner of my exit. I had imagined it quite different. I had beheld myself turning with a smile and a jest for one last view of the faces over which I, in my eumoirous career, had cast the largesse of happiness, and the vanis.h.i.+ng with a gallant carelessness through the dusky portals. Instead of that, here am I sneaking out of life by the back door, covering my eyes for very shame. And glad? Oh, G.o.d, how glad I am to slink out of it!

I have indeed accomplished the thing which I set out to do. I have severed a boy from the object of his pa.s.sion. What an achievement for the crowning glory of a lifetime! And at what a cost: one fellow-creature's life and another's reason. On me lies the responsibility. Vauvenarde, it is true, did not adorn this grey world, but he drew the breath of life, and, through my jesting agency, it was cut off. Anastasius Papadopoulos, had he not come under my malign influence would have lived out his industrious, happy and dream-filled days. Lesser, but still great price, too, has been paid. Jealous hatred, misery and failure for the being I care most for in the world, the shame of a sordid scandal to those that hold me dear, the hopeless love and speedy mourning of a woman not without greatness.

I have tried to make a Tom Fool of Destiny--and Destiny has proved itself to be the superior jester of the two, and has made a grim and bedraggled Tom Fool of me.

... I must end this. I have just fallen in a faint on the floor, and Rogers has revived me with some drops Hunnington had given me in view of such a contingency.

These are the last words I shall write. Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.