Not long 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 words _sans
cérémonie_ being 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 the _éminent anthropologue anglais_ and 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
through _Phèdre_ from 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 in _The 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.”