Mrs. Fazakerly did not keep him wondering long. Already she was
tripping into the room with a gleeful and inquisitive assurance. A
small person, with a round colorless face and snub features finished
off with a certain piquant ugliness. Her eyes seemed to be screwed
up by a habit of laughter, and the same cheerful tendency probably
accounted for the twisting of her eyebrows. Mrs. Fazakerly must have
been forty and a widow. She was dressed with distinction in the
half-mourning of a very black silk gown and a very white neck and
shoulders. She greeted Miss Tancred affectionately, glanced at
Durant with marked approval, and swept the Colonel an exaggerated
curtsey, playfully implying that she had met him before that day. It
struck Durant that nature had meant Mrs. Fazakerly to be vulgar, and
that it spoke well for Mrs. Fazakerly that so far she had frustrated
the designs of nature. He rather thought he was going to like Mrs.
Fazakerly; she looked as if she would not bore him.
If Mrs. Fazakerly was going to like Durant, as yet her glance merely
indicated that she liked the look of him. Durant, as it happened,
was almost as plain for a man as Miss Tancred was for a woman; but
he was interesting, and he looked it; he was distinguished, and he
looked that, too; he was an artist, and he did not look it at all;
he cultivated no eccentricities of manner, he indulged in no dreamy
fantasies of dress. Other people besides Mrs. Fazakerly had approved
of Maurice Durant.
Unfortunately the Colonel's instant monopoly of the lady had the
effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy
during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs.
Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her
feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since,
as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was
roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little
gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for
purposes of humorous observation, used a _pince-nez_, which
invariably leaped from the bridge of her nose in her subsequent
excitement. It was leaping now.
"Mr. Durant, Miss Tancred is trying to say something to you."
He turned with a dim, belated courtesy as his hostess repeated for
the third time her innocent query, "I hope you like your room?"
He murmured some assent, laying stress on his appreciation of the
flowers and the books.
"You must thank Mrs. Fazakerly for those; it was she who put them
there."
"Indeed? That was very pretty of Mrs. Fazakerly."
"Mrs. Fazakerly is always doing pretty things. I can't say that I
am."
In Miss Tancred's eyes there was none of the expectancy that betrays
the fisher of compliments. If she had followed that gentle craft she
must have abandoned it long ago; no fish had ever risen to wriggling
worm, to phantom minnow or to May-fly, to Miss Tancred's groveling
or flirting or flight; no breath of flattery could ever have bubbled
in men's eyes--those icy waters where she, poor lady, saw her own
face. Durant would have been highly amused if she had angled; as it
was, he was disgusted with her. It is the height of bad taste for
any woman to run herself down, and the more sincere the depreciation
the worse the offense, as implying a certain disregard for your
valuable opinion. Apparently it had struck Mrs. Fazakerly in this
light, for she shook her head reproachfully at Miss Tancred.
"If Mr. Durant had been staying with _me_, I should have packed him
into the bachelor's bedroom with his Bible and his Shakespeare."
Miss Tancred, accused of graciousness, explained herself away. "I
put you on the south side because you've just come from the
Mediterranean; I thought you would like the sun."
Why could he not say that it was pretty of Miss Tancred?
The Colonel had pricked up his ears at the illuminating word.
"What sort of weather did you have when you were in Italy?"
It was the first time that he had shown the faintest interest in
Durant's travels. He seemed to regard him as a rather limited young
man who had come to Coton Manor to get his mind let out an inch or
two.
Durant replied that as far as he could remember it was fine when he
arrived in Rome two years ago, and it was fine when he left Florence
the other day.
The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I don't call that weather.
I like a variable barometer. I cannot stand monotony." As he spoke
he looked at his daughter. In a less perfect gentleman there would
have been significance in the look. As it was, it remained
unconscious.
"The Colonel," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "is studying the
meteorology of Wickshire."
It seemed that Mrs. Fazakerly was studying the Colonel, that it was
her business to expound and defend him. She had implied, if it were
only by the motion of an eyelid, that all they had heard hitherto
was by way of prologue; that the Colonel had not yet put forth his
full powers. Her effervescent remark was, as it were, the breaking
of the champagne bottle, the signal that launched him.
Meteorology apart, the Colonel, like more than one great
philosopher, held that science was but another name for ignorance.
"But with meteorology," he maintained, "you are safe. You've got
down to the bed-rock of fact, and it's observation all along the
line. I've got fifteen little memorandum books packed with
observations. Taken by myself. It's the only way to keep clear of
fads and theories. Look at the nonsense that's talked in other
departments, about microbes, for instance. Fiddlesticks! A microbe's
an abstraction, a fad. But take a man like myself, take a man of
even ordinary intelligence, who has faced the facts, don't tell me
that he hasn't a better working knowledge of the subject than a
fellow who calls himself a bacteriologist, or some other absurd
name."
Durant remarked meekly that he didn't know, he was sure. But the
Colonel remained implacable; his shirt-front dilated with his wrath;
it was wonderful how so gentle a voice as the Colonel's contrived to
convey so much passion. Meanwhile Miss Tancred sat absorbed in her
dinner and let the storm pass over her head. Perhaps she was used to
it.
"Fiddlesticks! If you don't know, you ought to know; you should make
it your business to know. If I've got cholera I want to be told
what'll cure me. I don't care a hang whether I'm killed by a comma
bacillus or----"
"A full-stop bacillus," suggested Mrs. Fazakerly.
"The full-stop bacillus for choice--put you sooner out of your
agony."
"For shame, Mr. Durant; you encourage him."
"I, Mrs. Fazakerly?"
"Yes, you. It was you who brought the _Nineteenth Century_ into the
house, wasn't it? Depend upon it, he's been reading something that
he's disagreed with, or that's disagreed with him."
Durant remembered. There were things about bacteriology in that
_Nineteenth Century_, and about hypnotism; the Colonel had
apparently seized on them as on fuel for a perishing fire.
Heedless of the frivolous interruption, the little gentleman was
working himself into a second intellectual fury.
"Take hypnotism again--there's another abstraction for you----"
Here Mrs. Fazakerly threw up her hands. "My dear Colonel, _de
grace!_ If it's an abstraction, why get into a passion about it?
Life isn't long enough. You're worrying your brain into
fiddlesticks--fiddlestrings I mean, of course. This child doesn't
look after you. You ought to have something tied over your head to
keep it down; it's like a Jack-in-the-box, a candle blazing away at
both ends, a sword wearing out its what's-his-name; it's wearing out
your friends, too. _We_ can't live at intellectual high pressure, if
you can."
The Colonel softened visibly under the delicious flattery of her
appeal; he smiled at her and at Durant; he came down from his
heights and made a concession to the popular taste. "Well, then,
take influenza----"
"We'd very much rather not take it, if it's all the same to you."
"Take what?"
"Why, the influenza--the bacilli, or whatever they are. Or do the
bacilli take _you_?"
"My dear lady, you don't know what you're talking about. The bacilli
theory is--is--is a silly theory."
And Durant actually smiled; for his own brain was softening under
the debilitating influence. He would not be surprised at anything he
might do himself; he might even sink into that sickly state in which
people see puns in everything and everything in puns; it would be
the effect of the place.
"Well, it made you very ill last winter, that's all I know."
The wrinkles stopped dancing over the Colonel's face; his
shirt-front sank; he was touched with an infinite tenderness and
pity for himself.
"Yes. But I had a fit of the real thing. It left me without a
particle of muscle--legs mere thread-papers, and no brain----"
"Cherry-tart, Mr. Durant?"
The voice was Miss Tancred's. It was keen, incisive; it cut the
Colonel's sentence like a knife. But if she had meant to kill it the
unfilial attempt was foiled.
"No brain at all, Durant." He held up a forefinger, demonstrating on
the empty air. "That, mind you, is the test, the mark of true
influenza--the _ut_-ter, abso_lute_ collapse of brain power."
"Im_bacilli_ty, in short."
Having emitted this feeble spark, Durant's intellect went out
altogether. Trusting to his face not to betray him, he inquired
gravely if it was long since the Colonel's last attack of influenza.
But he had trusted rather too much to his face. A painful flush
spread over it when he found Miss Tancred looking at him with a
lucid, penetrating gaze. She had recognized his guilt; it was
impossible to tell whether she had measured the provocation.
He, at any rate, had discovered the secret of her silence; it was
not stupidity, it was shame. The spectacle of the Colonel's
conversational debauches had weaned her forever from the desire of
speech. For the rest of the meal he, too, sat silent, building a
cairn of cherry-stones at the side of his plate; an appropriate
memorial of a young man bored to death at a dinner-table.