Clementina sat in the vestibule and fanned herself with the telegram. It
was from Marseilles and had been telegraphed on from London. It ran:
“Doctors say I am dying. Come at once here Hôtel Louvre. Matter of life
and death. Am wiring Quixtus also. For Heaven’s sake both come.—Will
Hammersley.”
It was a shock. Hammersley’s letter of a few weeks ago had prepared her
for his indefinite advent; but the thought of death had not come to her.
Will Hammersley was dying, apparently alone, in an hotel at Marseilles;
dying, too, in an atmosphere of mystery, for he must see her, and
Quixtus too, before he died. The message was urgent, the appeal
imperative.
“Oh, Clementina, I hope it’s not bad news,” cried Etta.
Clementina handed the telegram to Tommy.
“It’s from the sick man of Shanghai who pined for the English lanes.”
“Poor chap,” said Tommy very gently. “Poor chap! I remember him well. A
fine upstanding fellow, one of the best. Once he gave me a cricket-bat.”
The artist in him shivered. “It’s awful to think of a man like that
dying. What are you going to do?”
“What do you think?”
“Take the night train to Marseilles,” replied Tommy.
“Then why did you ask?” said Clementina.
“But what shall we do?” cried Etta.
“Oh, you and Tommy can stay here till I come back.”
Etta gasped and blushed crimson. “That would be very nice—but—but—I
don’t think dad would quite like it.”
“Oh Lord!” cried Clementina, “I was forgetting those confounded
conventions. They do complicate life so. And I suppose I can’t send you
away with Tommy in the motor either. And now I come to think of it, I
can’t go away to-night and leave you two to travel together to London
to-morrow. What on earth are women put in the world for, especially
young ones? They’re more worry than they’re worth. And if I left Tommy
here and took you with me to Marseilles, you’d be as handy to travel
with, in the circumstances, as a wedding-cake. I don’t know what to do
with you.”
Etta suggested that the Jacksons—the friends whom she had visited the
previous day—might take her in till Clementina came back. Indeed, they
had invited her to stay with them.
“Go and telephone them at once,” said Clementina.
“You’ll have Uncle Ephraim as a travelling companion,” Tommy remarked as
Etta was leaving them.
Clementina rubbed a distracted brow, not to the well-being of her front
hair.
“Lord save us! He’ll be worse than Etta.”
“Poor dear Clementina,” he said, and turned away to administer help and
counsel to his beloved in the complicated matter of the telephone.
Suddenly Clementina started to her feet. Perhaps Quixtus’s telegram had
not been forwarded as hers had been. In this contingency it was her duty
to let him know the unhappy news, and she must let him know at once. An
ordinary woman would have sent Tommy round with the telegram. But
Clementina; accustomed all her life long to act for herself, gave no
thought to this possibility. She bolted out of the door of the hotel and
made her way back to the tea-room.
The crowd had thinned, but Quixtus and his friends still lingered. Mrs.
Fontaine, her elbows on the table, leaning her cheek against her
daintily gloved hands, was engaged in earnest talk with him, to the
exclusion of the other pair. Lady Louisa Mailing was eating pastry and
drinking chocolate with an air of great enjoyment, while Huckaby, hands
in pockets, leant back in his seat, a very bored Mephistopheles. He had
exhausted his Martha’s conversation long ago, and he was weary of the
eternal companionship. Why should not Faust have a turn at Martha now
and again? Decidedly it was an unfair world. To add, also, to his
present discomfort, the confused frame of mind in which he had
originally introduced his patron to Mrs. Fontaine had gradually become
more tangled. Clean living had grown more to his taste, abstinence from
whisky much more simple to accomplish than his most remorseful dreams of
reform had ever conceived. And that morning a letter from Billiter had
filled him with disgust. Billiter upbraided him for silence; wanted to
know what was going on, hinted that a dividend ought to be due by this
time, and expressed, none too delicately, a suspicion of his partner’s
business integrity. The cheap tavern-supplied note-paper offended
against the nicety of Huckaby’s refined surroundings. The gross
vulgarity of Billiter himself revolted him. A week had passed and Mrs.
Fontaine had shown no signs of having accomplished her ends. He had not
dared question her. He had begun; too; to loathe his part in the sordid
plot. But that morning he had summoned up courage enough to say to Mrs.
Fontaine;
“I’ve just had a letter from Billiter.”
Whereupon her pale cheeks had flushed red and her alluring eyes had
gleamed dangerously.
“I wish to God I had never seen that brute in all my life!”
And he had said; “I wish to God I had never done so either.”
She had looked at him full, searchingly, inscrutably, for a long moment
and saying nothing, had turned away. What was to be the outcome of it
all? Huckaby was perplexed. The week had passed pleasantly. Even his
enforced and sardonic attendance on Martha had not been able to spoil
the charm of the new life, bastard though it was. Mrs. Fontaine had
continued not to let her friends in Paris know of her presence in the
city, and the week had been a history of peaceful jaunts—to Chantilly,
Fontainebleau, Sèvres (where Monsieur Sardanel had spread before their
ravished eyes his collection of Mexican rattles and masks and
obsidian-edged swords); to “Robinson” on the island in the Seine, where
they had lunched in the tree restaurant; in a word, to all sorts of
sweet summer places where the trees were green and the world was bathed
in sunshine and innocence. The week had evidently passed pleasantly for
Quixtus, who had given no intimation of the date of his return to
London. He was lotus eating; obviously, too, under the charm of the
sorceress, wax in her hands. Of his fiendish purpose Huckaby still had
no suspicion. As far as Huckaby could see, Mrs. Fontaine had made an
easy conquest of his patron, and why she had up to now forborne to carry
out the essential part of the plot, he could not understand. Perhaps she
loathed the idea as much as he did. Her outburst against Billiter gave
weight to the theory. It was all very complicated. And here were these
two engaged in a deep and semi-sentimental conversation while Lady
Louisa stuffed herself with chocolate, and he, Huckaby, was bored to
death. What was going to happen?
The thing that did happen was Clementina’s inrush. She marched straight
up to the table, and, disregarding startled eyes, thrust the telegram
into Quixtus’s hand.
“Read that. You may find one like it at your hotel, or you may not. I
thought it right to bring it.”
Mrs. Fontaine kept her elbows on the table, and regarded Clementina with
well-bred insolence. Lady Louisa finished her chocolate. Quixtus read
the telegram and his face grew a shade paler and his fingers trembled a
little. Huckaby rose and, drawing a chair from another table, offered it
to Clementina. She waved it away, with a curt acknowledgment. Quixtus
looked up at her.
“This is terrible—Will Hammersley dying——”
He made an attempt to rise, but Clementina put her hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t get up. I’m going.”
A sudden hardening change came over Quixtus’s features.
“Stay,” said he. “It was very kind of you to bring this; but I’m afraid
it has nothing to do with me.”
“Nothing to do with you?”
She regarded him in amazement. “Your lifelong friend is dying and
implores you to come to him, and you say it’s nothing to do with you?”
“He was a villain, a base villain,” said Quixtus, with quivering lips.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Clementina indignantly.
Had the man gone absolutely crazy after all?
“I am saying what I know,” he returned darkly. “He was no friend to me.”
“And he wants you to go to his death-bed?” asked Mrs. Fontaine, taking
her elbows off the table. “How very painful!”
“You had better put such lunatic ideas out of your head, and take the
night train to Marseilles,” said Clementina roughly.
Quixtus bit his knuckles and stared at the litter of tea in front of
him. The orchestra for their last number played a common little jiggety
air.
“Are you coming?” asked Clementina.
“Why should Dr. Quixtus,” said Mrs. Fontaine; “travel all the way to
Marseilles to witness the death of a man whom he dislikes? I think it’s
unreasonable to ask it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Quixtus. “It’s unreasonable.”
“And it would break up our pleasant little party,” pleaded Lady Louisa.
“Confound your party!” exclaimed Clementina; whereat Lady Louisa
withered up in astonishment. “I’m telling him to perform an act of
humanity.”
“He was my enemy,” said Quixtus in a low voice.
“And so you can hardly ask him to go and gloat over his death,” said
Lady Louisa stupidly.
“Eh? What’s that?” cried Quixtus, straightening himself up.
“We’re dealing with Christian gentlemen, not devils,” Clementina
retorted.
“No, not devils—oh, certainly not devils,” said Quixtus with a
chuckling catch in his voice.
Clementina plucked him by the sleeve.
“I can’t stand here all the afternoon arguing with you. Even if you have
got it into your head that the man offended you, you did care for him
once, and it’s only common charity to go to him now that he’s at the
point of death. Are you going or not?”
Quixtus looked helplessly from one woman to the other.
“There’s such a thing as straining quixotism too far, my dear Dr.
Quixtus,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “I see no reason why you should go.”
“I’m a decent woman and I see every reason,” said Clementina, infuriated
at the other’s intervention. “I’ll see that he goes. I’ll get tickets
now from Cook’s and come round to the Continental in a taxi and fetch
you.”
Quixtus rose and extended his hand to Clementina.
“I shall go. I promise you,” he said with all his courtliness of manner.
“And I shall not trouble you to get my ticket or call for me. _Au
revoir._”
He accompanied her to the door. On parting he said with a smile;
“I have my reasons for going—reasons that no one but myself can
understand.”
And when he returned to Mrs. Fontaine, who was biting her lips with
annoyance at Clementina’s apparent victory, he repeated the words with
the same smile and the curious gleam of cunning that sometimes marred
the blandness of his eyes. He had his reasons.
“After all,” said the lady, during their Faust and Marguerite walk to
the Hôtel Continental entrance in the Rue Castiglione, “I can’t blame
you. It’s an errand of mercy. Doubtless he wishes to absolve his
conscience from the wrong, whatever it was, that he did you. Your
_pétroleuse_ friend was right. It is a noble action.”
“I have my reasons,” said Quixtus.
“We have become such friends,” she said, after a little pause—“at least
I hope so—that I shall miss you very much. I have very few friends,”
she added with a sigh.
“If I am one, I esteem it a great honour,” said Quixtus.
“I wonder whether you’ll care to see me when you get back to Paris.”
“Will you still be here?”
“If you promise to stay a little while and finish up our holiday.”
He met her upturned alluring eyes. For all his visionary malignancy he
was a man—and a man who never before had been in the hands of the
seductress; an unaccustomed thrill ran through him, causing him to catch
his breath.
“I promise,” said he huskily, “to stay here as long as it is your good
pleasure.”
“Then you do care to see me?”
“You ought to know,” said the infatuated one.
“What signs have you given me?”
“Signs that every woman must read.”
She laughed. “Every man to his method. I like yours. It’s neither
Cinquecento nor Louis XV. nor Directoire. The nearest to it is Jane
Austen. But it’s really Quixtine.”
Now nothing can flatter a man more than to be assured that he has an
original method of love-making. Quixtus glowed with conscious
idiosyncrasy. He also felt most humanly drawn towards the flatterer.
“You may count on my returning to you at the earliest possible moment,”
said he. “May I be commonplace enough to remark that I shall count the
hours?”
“Everything beautiful on the earth,” she replied with a sweet
sentimentalism, “is but the apotheosis of the commonplace.”
The shrieking siren of a passing motor-car drowned this last remark. He
begged her to repeat it and bowed his ear to her lips. Her breath caught
his cheek and made his pulses throb.
“I have a plan,” she said, as they entered the hotel. “Why shouldn’t we
have a little dinner to ourselves? Your train doesn’t go till 9.35. I’m
learned in trains, you see. And I’m also learned in Paris restaurants.”
“Nothing could be more delightful,” said Quixtus.
* * * * *
It was only when he found himself alone in his room and reflected on the
“reasons” for his journey to Marseilles that the crazy part of his brain
summed up his amatory situation. He laughed sedately. He held the
woman’s heart in his hands. At any hour he could dash it on the pavement
of Paris, whereon so many hearts of women had been broken. At any hour
could he work this great wickedness. But not to-night. To-night he would
take the heart in a firmer grip. He would dally with the delicious
malignity. Besides, his fastidiousness forbade an orgy of pleasure. One
wickedness at a time. Was he not bound even now for Marseilles, on a
merciless errand? This deed of darkness must be accomplished swiftly.
The other could wait. As a crown to his contentment came the realisation
that these, his supreme projects of devildom, lay hidden in his own
heart, secret from Huckaby and his fellow minions. They were futile
knaves, all of them. Well, perhaps not Huckaby. Huckaby had more than
once expressed the desire to reform. . . .
By the way, what should be done with Huckaby during his absence in
Marseilles? He was useless in Paris. Why not send him back to London?
He summoned Huckaby to his room, and, whilst packing, laid the question
before him.
“For God’s sake don’t,” said Huckaby, almost in terror.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I can’t go back,” said he, tugging at his beard, no longer straggly,
but neatly cut to a point. “I can’t go back to it all—to the squalor
and drunkenness—it’s no use mincing words with you—I can’t do it.
You’ve set me on the clean road, and you’ve got to see that I keep
there. You’ve given me chances in the past and I abused them. You have
the power to give me another—and I won’t abuse it. I swear I won’t. To
kick me back again would be hellish wickedness.”
“You’re quite right,” replied Quixtus gravely, balancing in his hand an
ill-folded pair of trousers which he was about to put into his
suit-case. “I appreciate your position perfectly. But, as I have implied
to you before, in a similar conversation, hellish wickedness is what
I—what I, in fact, am devoting my life to accomplish.”
He packed the trousers and walked up and down the room, pondering
darkly. It was a tempting piece of villainy to kick Huckaby back into
the gutter. In a flash it could be done. But, as in all his attempted
acts of vileness, the co-ordination between brain and will failed at the
critical moment. A new aspect of the case flashed upon his disordered
mind, showing an even more diabolical way of achieving Huckaby’s ruin
than throwing him back into the gutter. By a curious transmogrification,
it was he, Quixtus, who now blazed luridly as the Master of Mischief,
and Huckaby as the shrinking innocent. The enforced association of the
shrinking innocent with the Master of Mischief could have no other
result than the constant sapping of the victim’s volition and the
gradual but certain degradation of his soul. To accomplish this was a
refinement of devilry far beyond the imagination of his favourite fiend
Macathiel. He decided promptly and halted in front of his former
myrmidon. It was once more necessary for him, however, like the villain
in the old melodrama, to dissemble. He smiled and laid his hand on
Huckaby’s shoulder.
“All right,” said he, in the old, kind voice that in the past had so
often stabbed Huckaby’s conscience. “I’ll give you the chance. Just
stick loyally to me. Stay with the ladies in Paris, and when I come back
we can talk about things.”
Huckaby gripped his hand.
“Thank you, Quixtus. I wish I could tell you—I’ve known all along—” he
stammered in a hoarse voice—“Oh, I’ve played the devil with
everything—and I don’t know which is the damneder fool of us two.”
“I am quite certain,” said Quixtus with a conscious smile, which he
assumed was Mephistophelean. “I am quite certain, my dear Huckaby, that
you are.”
In spite of the exultation that he felt (or deluded himself into
feeling) at the triple wickedness wherewith he purposed to burden his
soul, Quixtus dined with Mrs. Fontaine in a subdued frame of mind. It
was not the fault of the dinner, for it was carefully selected by Mrs.
Fontaine, who smiled pityingly at Quixtus’s gastronomic ignorance; nor
was it that of the place, a cosy little restaurant in the Passage
Jouffroy; nor that of the lady, who appeared bent on pleasing. Deep down
in his soul were stirrings of pity which his clouded brain could not
interpret. Their effect, however, was a mild melancholy. Mrs. Fontaine’s
trained senses quickly noticed it, and she tuned her talk in key. She
prided herself on being a sympathetic woman. By this time she had
learned to discount his pessimistic utterances which she knew proceeded
from the same psychological source as the lunatic desire to break a
woman’s heart which had been the inspiration of the plot. She discerned
the essential gentleness of the man, his tender impulses, his integral
innocence, and established him in her own eyes as a pathetic spectacle.
As to the heart-breaking, she felt secure. It was the only element of
humour in the ghastly game, which day by day had grown more repulsive.
It was in this chastened mood that she met Huckaby, on their return to
the Continental. Quixtus went up to his room by the lift, and left them
standing in the lounge.
“I can’t do it,” she said hurriedly. “Billiter and the whole lot of you
can go to the devil. I’m out of it. With a man who can take care of
himself, yes. I’ve no compunction. It’s a fair fight. But this is too
low down. It’s like robbing a blind beggar. It revolts me.
Understand—this is the end of it.”
“Will you believe me,” said Huckaby, “when I say that it’s more than I
can swallow either? I’m honest. I’m out of it too. Billiter can go to
the devil.”
She looked at him, as she had done before that day; long and
searchingly, and her hard eyes gradually softened.
“Yes, I believe you.”
Huckaby bowed. “I thank you, Mrs. Fontaine. And as we are on this
painful subject, I should like to be frank with you. You know how this
thing started. I began it in the first place as a joke, a wild jest, to
humour him in his madness. The idea of Quixtus breaking a woman’s heart
is comic. But—God knows how—it developed into our—our association.
The important part now is this—if you think you have been fooling him
to the top of his bent, you’re mistaken. When it came to the point of
beginning his heart-breaking career, he shied at it. Told me the whole
thing was profoundly distasteful and I must never mention the matter
again.”
“Well?” asked Mrs. Fontaine, “what does that mean?”
“It means,” said Huckaby, “that you’ve succeeded in making him fond of
your society, for its own sake.”
She drew a deep breath. “Thank goodness, this nightmare of a farce is
over.”
“Now, I suppose you’ll go back to London,” said Huckaby.
She looked away from him, unseeing, down the long lounge, and her gloved
hands unconsciously gripped each other hard; her bosom heaved. In the
woman’s dark soul strange things were happening, a curious, desperate
hope was dawning. She remained like this for a few moments while
Huckaby, unconscious of tensity, selected and lit a cigarette.
“No, I shan’t go to London,” she said at last, without turning her head.
“I’ll stay in Paris. I owe myself a holiday.”
Ten minutes afterwards Quixtus had gone. They watched the wheels of the
taxi that was carrying him to the Lyons station disappear beneath the
great archway, and, with something like a sigh, they returned slowly to
the lounge. Lena Fontaine threw herself on a seat, her hands by her
side, in an attitude of weariness.
“Oh God, I’m tired,” she whispered.
Huckaby suggested bed. She shrugged her shoulders. It was not her body
that was tired, she explained, but the ridiculous something that people
called a soul. That was dead beat. She looked up at him as he stood
before her wondering to hear her talk so frankly.
“What was it that played the devil with you? A woman?”
“Drink,” replied Huckaby laconically.
“I hadn’t even that excuse,” said Lena Fontaine. She laughed
mirthlessly. “Don’t you wish you were good?”
He sat down by her side.
“Why shouldn’t we try to be?”
“Because the world isn’t a Sunday School, my dear friend.”
Huckaby ventured to touch her hand with the tip of his finger.
“Let us try,” said he.
She smiled—this time only in half derision.
“Let us,” she said.
A great silence fell upon them, and they sat there side by side for a
long, long time, pretending to watch, like many other couples and groups
in the lounge, the shifting life of the great hotel, but really far away
from it all, feeling drawn together in their new-found shame like two
dreary souls who had escaped from Purgatory and were wandering through
darkness they knew not whither.