"But why?"
"Don't presume to interrupt me. My intentions are to leave your
assignation-house and have you horsewhipped."
Paliser had been served with strong drink before, but none ever as
strong as that. It steadied him. He had expected that when it got to
her, as eventually it must, there would be the passionate upbraidings,
the burst of sobs, the Oh! Oh's!, the What will become of me?, the usual
run up and down the scale and the usual remedies which a bank account
supplies. He had expected all that. He had prescribed for it often.
There was not a symptom for which he did not know the proper dose and
just when to administer it. But barely had he crossed the threshold
before he realised that all his science would be in default.
Cassy presented an entirely new case, but, fortunately, in the drink
which she had served, he saw or thought he saw how to treat it.
He gestured again. "I never cared for scenes. But this house, which it
has pleased you to describe from your knowledge of other establishments,
is----"
Whatever he may have intended to add, was interrupted. Cassy, previously
inexorable as fate, but converted then into a fury, dropped the bundle
and caught up the vase. Missing him, it hit the door, where musically it
crashed and shattered.
He turned, looked at it, looked at her, at the table. Barring the
gold-backed brushes, the jade platter and that bundle, there was nothing
that she could conveniently shy, and, in his Oxford voice, but civilly
enough, he gave it to her.
"Allow me. There is no necessity whatever for your acting in this
manner. The situation, such as it is, it had been my intention to
remedy. It had been my intention, I say. But yesterday it came to my
knowledge that it is because of your relations with Lennox that his
engagement is broken."
Take that, he mentally added and continued aloud: "I might not have
believed the story, but I was told that Lennox admitted it." Take that,
too, he mentally resumed. I shall be treated to tears in a minute and in
no time it will be "Kamerad!"
Sidewise he looked at the ruin of the vase, on which Daughters of Heaven
and an ablated dynasty may have warmed their eyes. It affronted his own.
Insult, yes, that could be tossed about, but not art, not at least the
relatively unique.
With a crease in his lips which now were dry no longer, he looked at
Cassy. The awaited tears were not yet visible. But the blood-madness
that had seized her, must have let her go, routed, as haematomania may
be, by the trivial and, in this instance, by a lie. That lie suffocated
her. It was as though, suddenly, she had been garroted.
The condition was only momentary, but, during it, a curtain fell on this
vulgar drama, which was to affect so many lives. Before the girl a
panorama passed. She saw herself leaving Lennox' rooms. She saw Margaret
Austen, saw the woman with her, saw the former's candid eyes; saw the
latter's ridiculous airs, saw the construction which between them they
had reached and saw, too, the consequences that had resulted. The dirt
with which she had been besplattered she did not see. The panorama did
not display it. What it alone revealed was Lennox' disaster. Of herself
she did not think and regarding Margaret she did not care. That which
occupied her was Lennox.
But was it true? In Paliser nothing was true, not even his lies. For it
was unaccountable that a matter so simple could not have been cleared
with a word. But it was not unaccountable at all. It was obvious.
Margaret, a born snob, had given Lennox no chance for that word. Some
one, Paliser probably, had invented the admission and she had refused to
see him, after condemning him unheard.