LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the
arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in
celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling
matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so
forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer
legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to
South America solely in order to witness prize fights.
As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not
yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her
much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as
that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced
pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The
number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the
lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing
on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting,
could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the
record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme
had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how
to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to
herself why.
Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days
were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme
was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on
a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on
Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially
when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be
done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she
forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley.
The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady
Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe
with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.
That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife
and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his
fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again
and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s
attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or
three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.
“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.
He gave her the card.
“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.
Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
“Why--do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.
“Not I.”
“Well then?”
“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’
name--eh? Pimpernel.”
He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
Holme was again looking at the card.
“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.
“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”
“Tuesday--Monday--I don’t know.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation before the reply.
“What colour?
“Oh!--not Albino.”
Lord Holme stared.
“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”
“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am.”
“Is she as pretty as you?
“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to
something--presently.”
In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
“Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her.”
“Very well. You shall.”
“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged
out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That
was evident.
Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already
mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course,
duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady
Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the
woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the
practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she
used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the
popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations
she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated
this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in
Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon
the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her
fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing
it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical
resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the
dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her
an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was
only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of
her delicate revenge.
That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called
more--of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.
Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world
who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little
ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits
of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally
natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on,
and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious
had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went
a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The
wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on
the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had
been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like
Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing
it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing
the cause of their amusement.
Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed
his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete
failure to capture the London public as an actress.
“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.
“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.
“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”
Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and
_ennui_, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved
to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but
anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
filled up.
With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark
and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was
sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong
sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”
“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.
Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.
“Sorry. I’ll go.”
“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”
Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room
of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite
Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague
and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a
strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”
He struck a match on his boot.
“You like to shut out London,” he continued.
“Yes. Yet I live in it.”
“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an
unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
Yet one can’t get away from it.”
“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”
“Didn’t Persia?”
“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”
“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”
“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
within me.”
He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”
“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”
“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”
Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
“That is it.”
“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”
“I beg your pardon.”
He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
photograph.
“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.
“Well--Italy obviously.”
“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”
“Maggiore?”
“No, Como.”
“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”
“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
D’Este sometimes.”
“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”
“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”
The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in
the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.
To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall
overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it
more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a
flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway
with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was
written, “_Casa Felice_.”
“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
“You think the name inappropriate?”
“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”
“From to-day.”
“Old--of course?”
“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”
“What is it?”
“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”
“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”
“For eight years.”
“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”
“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
silver with her lover.”
Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph,
which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
whisky-and-soda he started.
“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.
He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,”
he added.
“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
has been a hermitage ever since.”
“Ah!”
“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”
“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman
if ever a house did.”
“What sort of woman?”
Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking
with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that
are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can
sing them into the islands of the sirens.”
“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”
“Don’t you know it?”
He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”
“The one of whom I was thinking.”
“Lady Holme?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”
“Horribly, horribly. Unless--”
“Unless?”
“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like
a man at a street corner, that--” He broke off, then added abruptly,
“Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”
“I do.”
“When will you be going there?”
“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you
come then?”
“The house is ready for you?”
“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
furnished.”
“The lovers’ furniture?”
“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my
wanderings.”
“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to
think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible
bore in a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa
Felice--Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”
“Would you advise me to?”
“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I
should keep it.”
He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
Schley.
Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.
“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.
“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me
uninteresting and common.”
“She is.”
“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
uncommon.”
“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day
she lives.”
“Why?”
“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”
“You are a woman-hater?”
“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.
Now you want to get on with that poem.”
Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme
and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter
to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up
her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by
no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin
about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have
faded away long before the clock strikes one.
Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
“gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her
cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,”
on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her
husband would be likely to play her false this time.
“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.
“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”
“I’m going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House
ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”
She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
serious indeed.
“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”
“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
say something silly and run out again.”
“Who’s comin’?”
“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”
Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a
puzzled boy at a _viva voce_ examination.
“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that
night,” he said with depression.
“Why not?”
She hastily added:
“But why should you? You ought to be here.”
“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to
Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too
long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”
He looked at her for support.
“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.
It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied
that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor
of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy
indeed--speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first
of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began
gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their
cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many
tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven
resembled a flood-tide.
Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid
a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black.
Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most
people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House
ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had
recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually
young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase,
smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce
coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret
uneasinesses--they could scarcely be called tremors--which had recently
oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly,
by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the
States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband.
How could it matter to her what such a little person--she always called
Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts--did or did not do?
As Robin came towards her she almost--but not quite--wished that the
speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as
they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her,
looking enormous and enormously bored.
“What a crowd!”
“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”
Robin nodded.
“Take me in to supper there.”
“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”
“Really!”
At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just
caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel
Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter
happened to be dressed in black.
“Bye-bye!” she added.
Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather
preoccupied.
Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more
slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that
had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly
like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on
no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin
look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s.
She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a
pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid--a too splendid--foil to her.
The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very
much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were
scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested
oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake,
looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if
he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had
accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme
vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure
slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the
electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and
sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that
their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as
if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not
wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem
vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s
shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as
an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone
who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while
Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly
accentuated her smile.
“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her
one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for
a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear
many jewels.
“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss
Schley.
“Does she know London?”
“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”
Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale
young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but
who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s
eyes.
“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured.
“Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”
She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight
tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if
she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a
slight flaw in it.
“My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope
he’ll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some
dreadful speeches afterwards. I can’t think why elderly men always want
to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner.
It’s so bad for the digestion and the--ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to
turn up. Your boy’s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to
call, and he’s never been near me.”
Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
arrived at the top of the stairs.
“Leo’s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
you. He only came back to-night.”
“Then I’m not quite so hurt. He’s always running about, I suppose, to
kill things, like my husband.”
“He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
House ball you’ll meet him there. He and his wife are both--”
“How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it
wasn’t the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this.
Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her
up. Tell her what’ll win the Cup. She’s pale and peaky with ignorance
about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you
say? Bring your son to me, won’t you? But of course you’re a wise man
trotting off to bed.”
“No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so--”
“Perfect. We’ll meet then. They say it’s really locomotor ataxia, poor
fellow I but--ah, there’s Fritz!”
Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound
in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His
immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice
dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from
where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner
to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had
the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good
time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms.
They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to
Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein
was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with
almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding
sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air,
which always suggested the old nursery game, “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s
ground, picking up gold and silver.” Lady Manby was laughing in a corner
with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress.
Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase,
moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or
sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme
was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.
“A giant refreshed with wine,” he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled,
looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued
chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed
it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to
be the most short-sighted man in London.
“Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?” he murmured to his hostess.
“I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on
these occasions.”
“He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him
to come back in--How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell
the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course
Melba’s splendid in it, and all that, but still--”
Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
evil-minded baby. Lord Holme’s brown face was full in view, grinning.
His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
“How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after--”
“I say, Vi, why didn’t you tell me?”
Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
“Tell you what, Fritz?”
“That Miss Schley was comin’ to-night. Everyone’s talking about her. I
sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin’. Told me she was to be here
and I didn’t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?”
“Somewhere in the rooms.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh!--I don’t know. She’s in black. Go and look for her.”
Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
“I say, Bry, d’you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?”
“Naturally.”
“Come with me, there’s a good chap, and--what’s she like?”
As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
“Some people say she’s like Lady Holme.”
“Like Vi! Is she? Laycock’s been simply ravin’--simply ravin’--and
Laycock’s not a feller to--where is she?
“We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
to-night?”
Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
“There’s the vestal tending her lamp,” said Mr. Bry a moment later.
“The what up to what?”
“Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.”
“Where?”
“There.”
“Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn’t it? She is deuced like
Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she’s singin’. Doesn’t
she, though? Eh?”
He went on towards her.
Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
“The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.”