IV

Students of sociology have of recent years made great strides in their

alleviation of the conditions prevailing among the poor; but is it not a

fact that, as a notorious daily paper lately asked, the study of those

conditions appears to attract the interest of only the lighter sort of

society people and the pens of only the most ambitious novelists? And

that the benefits of this study, at least to novelists, are not mean,

was proved beyond all doubt only the other day, when perhaps the

wealthiest of contemporary writers increased his fortune by writing a

tale about a miser in a slum. No one, on the other hand, will deny that

the achievements of sociologists among the poor are as nothing compared

with those of students of hospitality who, poor and unrewarded though

they remain, have of late years done yeoman work in alleviating the

conditions prevailing among the rich. It is to the generous spadework of

men such as these that American hostesses in Europe owe the betterment

of their lot; and it is by the support of their merciful hands that

ladies burdened with great wealth are prevented from sinking down in

the rarefied atmosphere to which they have been called.

Mere students of hospitality had not, however, been strong enough to

support the ailing burden of Mrs. Omroy Pont when that lady had first

come over from America at the call of certain voices that had advised

her that her mission lay in European society. It had needed graduates of

that brotherhood, lean with endeavour in ball-rooms and browned with the

suns of the Riviera, to prevent that ample lady from succumbing to the

exhaustion of carrying her wealth through the halls of her houses in

London and Paris among guests who had failed to catch her name on being

introduced. But the Good Samaritans had worked unceasingly on her

behalf, and since Mrs. Omroy Pont had both great wealth and infinite

insensibility she was soon in a position to give a ball at which quite

half the guests knew her by sight.

The morning after the Duke’s arrival in Paris there was this notice in

the Continental _Daily Mail_: “The Duke of Mall has arrived at his

residence in the Avenue du Bois, and will spend the spring in Paris.”

And presently the good Mrs. Omroy Pont was on the telephone, first here,

then there and finally to the Duke himself, saying: “My dear Duke, how

do you do, how do you do? I am so glad you are in Paris just now, Paris

is so attractive in the spring. You mustn’t fail to see the tulips in

the Tuileries, they are as beautiful as _débutantes_. My dear Duke, I am

giving a party to-morrow night, you must come, you really must come, now

don’t say you won’t because I can’t bear that, and really I must say,

my dear Duke, that your unfortunate inability to accept any of my

invitations so far has seemed almost marked, whereas----”

“I am afraid,” began the Duke, who had not the faintest intention of

going anywhere near one of Mrs. Omroy Pont’s parties, for she bored him

and life is short.

“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear Duke,

I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone

who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling

your leg----”

“Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud:

“Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an

extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement----”

“It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just

come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be

such fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to

sleep just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct

the conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.”

V

The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs.

Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his

meeting with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit,

hadn’t seemed any less sensible to the pleasant quality of their

companionship. A beautiful girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest

in the passing moment and a delicious capacity for deriving pleasure

from the twists in conversation which came so naturally to the Duke but

were become, it has to be confessed, a shade familiar to his friends.

She hadn’t, he reflected over his morning coffee, said anything

throughout the evening that didn’t interest and entertain; and, since

she had come to Europe for the first time but the other day, had amused

him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any means all

favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity; which

was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy.

All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning

coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have

emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he

had talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature

that she couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him.

What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who

knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since

the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does

seem to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually

meet. Now between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you

dared swear, so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and

symmetry of feature. But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on

earth should there be or need there be or could there be, since Leonora

and she had been twins as punctually to the second as was possible?

A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the

sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression,

capacity for attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said,

contribute far more than actual looks to mark the difference between one

woman and another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for

whereas both the Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and

immense blue eyes generally affected by American ladies for the conquest

of Europe, the Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded

here to the deep lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of

Byzantine amber--the Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while

Miss Lamb’s was as near black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who

is without Irish blood.

In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s

dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the

differences between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he

had thought it only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had

decided, for each their sakes, to break their marriage; and he had

thought it only fair to himself to point his confession with a sigh, a

sigh which he explained, after a silence quite beautifully bridged by an

understanding look from her, as being forced from him by the fact that

there was no pleasing some women.

“You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d added wretchedly, “that I am

trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but----”

“Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was

another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss

Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess

had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic

monotony of the mother-tongue.

To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment,

was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions

undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a

touch of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by

American ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of

all visitors to a bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady.

And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young

Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily

from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the

consequences of her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply

she disapproved of that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his

tongue from exploring further into that misguided sister’s character--it

had meant so much that he had been content to wait on her understanding

even before she’d quietly added: “Oh, I understand----”

“But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence

present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a

delicious talent for silence.

“My dear”--it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally,

quite wonderfully--“if only other women were like you! To understand, I

mean, just to understand!”

“And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible

unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that

she too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind.

“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall

gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite

charmed him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora

Mall for the way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into

that worldliness which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.

“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of men?”

“Enough surely, surely!”

“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in

jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”

“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew

nothing of men?”

“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just

because, like all rare people, you’re--well, fastidious!”

“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem to

have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t

know....”

“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many

quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to

wait.”

“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”

“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss

Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”

“But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were alone.

The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes humbly. “Are

you so sure you’ve waited long enough--I mean, my friend, for time to

bring the best out of someone you love?”

“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you

see, the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I

have quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”

Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve

wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It

hurts to hear this. It hurts me--for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”

The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that

I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me

no more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss

Lamb.”

“You _say_ that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and

you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find

her crying for her lost love.”

“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a

matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as

though--look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss

Lamb? I’d rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after

that fashion. But let us talk of something else. Of you!”

“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”

“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”

“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”

“Bravo, bravo!”

“So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.”

“What, you feel it beating!”

“Perhaps. A little.”

“Oh!”

“At being in Paris, Duke.”

“I deserved the snub. Go on, please.”

“My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of

my dreams. When I was a girl I had--oh, such dreams!”

“Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use the

sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh,

I know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents

that befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been,

Miss Lamb dear, most utterly married.”

“I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!”

“Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she

certainly was born to be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never

let me forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her

birth.”

“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no!

My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”

The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone on

the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs

Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde

hung in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard

below them a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the

_concierge’s_ wife talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide

pavement men looked up at the lighted windows with pale astonished

faces. Far up on the right, served by long processions of lights from

all the corners of the world, the Arc de Triomphe stood high against the

pale spring night. Most massive of monuments, built high to the god of

war upon the blood of a hundred battlefields, upon the bones of

uncountable men and horses, upon the anguish of ravished countries--the

miraculous art of men to worship their own misery has raised the

monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a dark proud jewel on the

brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried: “Look, the stars

are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is like a gate

into the kingdom of the stars!”

The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make

me think of all that is impossible.”

Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of the

cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one

small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the

Seine shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that

adorn the Bridge of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the

night to the dignity of fallen archangels driving chariots to the

conquest of the Heavens. And a three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash

from the _beau quartier_ about the Place Victor Hugo.

“There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of

Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent----”

“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”

“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely

name for a town built by men to have!”

And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on

yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be

enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted--and all, honest to God,

by companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so

confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to

renew all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to

increase it, for wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise

enough to appreciate enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like

this girl, why, since they were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a

little of Ava’s warm attention and quick understanding? And again the

Duke, in solace for self-pity, cast back to yesternight, how he had

warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of Paris and had told her the

tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and the way of that was

this:

“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small

and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of

the dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of

France. Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I

mean. Now that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to

rest himself after the tumult of battle with the worship of art and

beauty, which is not at all the fashion among princes nowadays, because

of course we have progressed so far since then. And so our prince, when

he had killed as many natives of the conquered country as the honour of

war demands, chained the rest with iron chains and put them to the

building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And when at last the city

was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the world, as all

who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young prince hated

argument.

“All went well until they came to the christening of the city, when it

transpired that no one had the faintest idea what name to call it. Here

was a to-do! Nameless they could not leave so great a city, yet what

name would embrace all these marvels of architecture, how could they

call so fair a city by any such commonplace kind of label as Rome,

Jerusalem or Wapping? Therefore the young prince fell weeping with

mortification for that his city must remain nameless just because it

was the fairest city in the world, when an ancient man rose up in the

assembly and said: ‘This here is not the fairest city in the world. But

the magic city of Is in the land of Brittany has got it so beat that

this looks like a slum beside it. I have spoken.’ Not that he ever had a

chance to again, even though it presently was proved that not the

fairest city in the world could be fairer than Is in Brittany, and so

the prince made the best of a bad job and called his city the Equal to

Is, which is Par-Is, which is Paris. Shall we dance?”

But she said: “No, no! They are playing an old-fashioned fox-trot.

Besides, one can always dance; there are so many men with whom one can

only dance, for what have they to talk about? Duke, I did love your

legend of the christening of Paris! Did you make it up?”

Now these words had chanced to cast a gloom about the young Duke, and he

had said: “But there is another legend, a more private legend. It tells,

sister, of the house of Mall, how the golden cock on the weather-vane of

St. James’s tower shall crow thrice at the birth of the greatest of the

Dukes of Mall. And, although I say it who shouldn’t, this very miracle

attended the birth of him who now stands beside you. And the legend

further tells that when the golden cock on St. James’s tower again crows

thrice the greatest of the Dukes of Mall shall die. Ava, to-night I find

myself in fear of my fate. That which is written shall come to pass, and

no man may defy the passage of his destiny--but to-night, Ava, I am

troubled with a foreboding that the second crowing of that beastly cock

is not far distant from this dear moment.”

Very sweetly she had tried to soothe his foreboding, but it was heavy in

him and he had not listened, saying: “I’ve never but once before been

vexed with this depression, and that was on the night of the day I fell

in love with Leonora Lamb.”

“Let us dance,” she had said shyly, but they had not danced very

enjoyably owing to the number of the students of hospitality who were

generously supporting Mrs. Omroy Pont on so memorable an occasion.

And thus it was on the first night between Miss Ava Lamb and the young

Duke of Mall.