"Good Lord!"
There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:
"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it----"
"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before
you came down with--_his_ wire."
"By the Living Tinker, then it _was_ a genuine honeymoon after all!" A
faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.
"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice
gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."
"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me
that."
Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with
a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.
"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and
squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some
display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind
my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or
explode."
"I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em--that South
Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo,
smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets.
"Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that
you'd just stopped short at----"
"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If
you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind
me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on
my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"
"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to
the coffee-room window.
Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they
crack again.
"I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----"
"So were a lot of other young idiots."
"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."
"Of course, I"--Bingo's large face becomes very red--"I inferred nothing
in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I
ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."
"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in
rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.
"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"
"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in
speaking of the--the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was
very much in love. She had--kept house with a man I knew, before we came
together, and there may have been other affairs--for all I can tell, at
least--I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face
seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was
awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and
the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I--I lost my head."
"It's--it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.
There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's
verandah see the same vision--lime-lights of varying shades and colours
thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where
impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall
tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus
of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling
human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering
antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in
her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists,
gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle
on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes
encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of
theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a
measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no
more.
"It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that stage day-dream,
"with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a muff-chain of turquoise and
brilliants, and ended up with----"
"With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. Oh Lord, what
thunderin' donkeys we fellows are!" groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his
head, which has hair of a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp
blushes pinkly through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation
into the brain inside it.
"I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her birthday," goes on
the boy. "She's a year or two older than me----"
"And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns the end of the
sentence in a giant sneeze. "Must have caught cold last night without
knowin' it. Dashed treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge
of a pocket-handkerchief. "And so you bought the cottage for Lessie?
Another nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing up for
you,--what? And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other stream
you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by
the Living Tinker!"
"Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy,
with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his
young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny
clown and listen."
"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure
you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my
dear chap, and that's the truth."
"You wouldn't wonder if you knew ... Oh, damn it, Wrynche!"--the young
voice breaks in a miserable sob--"I'm so thundering miserable. And all
because there--there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its
mother."
"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal
whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in
the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer.
"Was that how you fell into the----" He is obviously going to say "trap,"
but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the
thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded
newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.
"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains
Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar--a benevolent old cock in a large
white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy--wasn't
sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."
"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.
"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders--the
discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the
appointment," goes on the boy. "And--I was gladder than I cared to know at
getting away. She--Lessie--meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up
to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not
finish the sentence.
"I suppose she's fond of you--what?" hazards Captain Bingo.
"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going,
and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of
money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night
before sailing, I'd have broken the--the truth to my mother then, only
something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge,
the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a
snowball. But on the voyage out"--a change comes into the weary, level
voice in which Beauvayse has told his story--"I forgot to grouse, and by
the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what
I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done
it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing
hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that
were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since
October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only
remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the
wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my
sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a
mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind
somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a
question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling himself
into creases, and give your name and say, 'No, there's no impediment,' and
put on the ring and pay a fee--I believe it was seven-and-six--and take a
blotchy certificate and walk out--married."
"It never does take long, by Gad!" agrees Captain Bingo with fervour, "to
do any of the things that can't be undone again."
"Undone ...!" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his miserable,
beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed face of his listener.
"Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo
it, ever since I first set eyes on Lynette Mildare!"
Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal whistles. Then he
gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, and begins:
"I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another woman's at the
bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a bit sick at having brought an
outsider--a rank outsider, by Gad!--into the family stud; you're not a rap
ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as
well as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had your
fling, you'd have come in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary
Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having broken your mother's
heart, though you know in the bottom of your soul that she scented this
marriage in the wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down
on her knees to him--her knees, by the Living Tinker!--to give you the
chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection!"
Beauvayse is out of his chair now. "Is that true--about my mother?" he
demands, blazing.
"I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states Captain Bingo
huffily.
"Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you
find--that--out?"
"Your cousin Townham told me."
"Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy, pratin' little
scandalmonger!"
Captain Bingo retorts irately:
"Damn him if you please; he's no friend of mine. As yours, what I ask you
is, between man and man, how far have you gone in this fresh affair?"
Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his patched flannels,
and says, adjusting a footstool with his toe over a crack in the
board-flooring, as though the operation were a delicate one upon which
much depended:
"I've told her how I feel where she's concerned, and that I care for her
as I never cared yet, and never shall care, for anyone else."
The faint grin dawns again on Captain Wrynche's large, kindly, worried
face.
"How many times have you met?"
"Only four or five times in all," says Beauvayse. "I'd set eyes on her
twice before I was introduced. I couldn't rest for thinking about her. She
drew me and drew me.... And when we did meet, there was no strangeness
between us, even from the first minute. She just seemed waiting for what I
had to own up. And when I spoke, I--I seemed to be only saying what I was
meant to say.... From the beginning of the world! And you'd understand
better if you'd seen her near----"
"I have seen her in the distance, walking with the Mother-Superior of the
Convent. A tall, slight girl. Looks like a lady," says Bingo, "and has
jolly hair."
"It's the colour of dead leaves in autumn sunshine or a squirrel's back,"
raves the boy, "and she's beautiful, Wrynche. My God! so beautiful that
your heart stops beating when you look into her face, and nearly jumps out
of your body when a fold of her gown brushes against you. And I swear
there's no other woman for me in life or death!"
"I shouldn't be in such a cast-iron hurry to swear if I were you," Captain
Bingo replies judicially. "And--I've heard you say the same about the
others----"
"It was never true before. And she's a lady," pleads Beauvayse hotly. "A
lady in manners, and education, and everything. The sort of girl one
respects; the sort of girl one can talk to about one's mother and
sisters----"
"You'd talk about your mother to a Kaffir washerwoman," Captain Bingo
blurts out. "Better you should, than go hanging about a Convent-bred
schoolgirl and telling her you'll never care for anybody else, when you've
got a legal wife, and, for all you know, a family of twins at home in
England."
The footstool, impelled by a scientific lift of Beauvayse's toe, flies to
the other end of Nixey's verandah. "Is one mistake to ruin a man's life?
I'll get a divorce from my wife. I will, by Heaven!"
"You told me not to maunder just now," says Bingo, with ponderous sarcasm.
"Who is the maunderer, I'd like to know? By the Living Tinker, I should
have thought that this siege life would have put iron into a man's blood
instead of--of Creme de Menthe. Are you takin' those dashed morphia
tabloids of Taggart's for bad-water collywobbles again? Yes? I thought as
much. Chuck 'em to the aasvogels; stick to your work--you can't complain
of its lackin' interest or variety--and let this girl alone. She's a lady,
and the adopted daughter of an old friend of my wife's, and don't you
forget it!" Bingo's gills are red, and he puffs and blows as large,
excited, fleshy men are wont to. "If you do you'll answer to me!"
"I tell you," Beauvayse cries, white-hot with passion, and raising his
voice incautiously, "that I mean to marry her. I tell you again that I
will div----"
"Do you want the man in the street and every soul in the hotel to know
your private affairs?" demands Bingo. "If so, go on shoutin'. As to your
bein' a widower, the chances are on the other side.... Gueldersdorp ain't
exactly what you would call a healthy place just now. And as to divorcin'
your wife, how do you know she'll ever be accommodatin' enough to give you
reason? And if she did, do you think a girl brought up in a Catholic
Convent would marry you, even if you called to ask her with a copy of the
decree absolute pasted on your chest? Hang it, man, your mother's son you
ought to know better! And--oh come, I say!"
For Beauvayse sits down astride an iron chair, and lays his shirt-sleeved
arms on the back-rail, and his golden, crisply-waved head upon them.
"I--I love her so, Wrynche. And to stand by and see another man cut in and
win what I've lost by my own rotten folly hurts so--so damnably." His
mouth is twisted with pain.
"Is there another chap who wants to cut in?" Bingo demands.
"You know one gets a bit clairvoyant when one is mad about a woman," says
Beauvayse, lifting his shamed wet eyes and haggard young face from the
pillow of his folded arms. "Well, I'm dead certain that there is another
man who--who is as badly hit as me."
"Who is the other man?"
"Saxham!"
"The Doctor! Shouldn't have supposed a fellow of that type would be
susceptible now," says Bingo. "Gives an uncompromisin' kind of impression,
with his chin like the bows of an Armoured Destroyer, and his eyebrows
like another chap's moustaches."
"And eyes like a pair of his own lancets underneath 'em. But he's a
frightfully clever beast," says Beauvayse. "And what he wants in looks he
makes up in brains. And--and if he knew there was a scratch against me, he
might force the running and win hands down. So hang on to my secret by
your eyelids, old fellow, and don't give me reason to be sorry I told----"
"You have my word, haven't you? And, talking about scratch entries," says
Bingo, inspired by a sudden rush of recollection, "I ain't so sure that
the Doctor--though, mind you, this is between ourselves--is the sort of
wooer a parent of strict notions would be likely to encourage. Do you
happen to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty little Alderman
Brooker?--a Town Guardsman who runs a general store in the Market
Place--that's his place of business with the boarding up, and the end
butted in by a Creusot shell that didn't burst, luckily for Brooker. Well,
this beast buttonholed me months ago, and began to spin a cuffer about
Saxham."
"What had the dirty little bounder got to say?" asked Beauvayse,
stiffening in disgust, "about a man he isn't fit to black the boots of?"
"Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his London connection through
getting involved in a mess with a woman," says the big Dragoon.
"Don't we all get into messes of that kind? What more?" demands Beauvayse.
"Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty badly here. Pitched me
a tale of his--Brooker's--having often acted as the Mayor's Deputy on the
Police Court Bench, Brooker being an Alderman, and swore that he'd had
Saxham up before him a dozen times at least in the last three years, along
with the Drunks and Disorderlies."
"It sounds like a hanged lie!"
"If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain Bingo, "I shut him
up like a box by referrin' politely to glass houses, knowin' Brooker had
been squiffy himself one night on guard, and by remindin' him that men who
talk scandal of their superior officers under circumstances like the
present are liable to be Court-Martialled and given beans. And as the
Chief, and Saxham with him, dropped on Brooker in the act of smuggling
lush into the trenches the other day, I fancy Brooker's teeth are fairly
drawn. Though he swore to me that there isn't a saloon-keeper or a
saloon-loafer in the town that doesn't know Saxham by the nickname of the
Dop Doctor."
"The man don't exist who objects to hear of the disqualifications, mental
and physical, of a fellow who he's thought likely to enter the lists with
him in the--in the dispute for a woman's favour," says Beauvayse, with a
pleasant air of candour. "And though the story sounds like a lie, as I've
said, there's a possibility of its being the other thing. I'm sorry for
Saxham--that goes without sayin'--though I don't like his overbearin'
scientific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a record
of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like Lynette Mildare is
horrible, intolerable, Wrynche; and while, for the man's own sake, I
should respect his beastly secret, for _her_ sake and in _her_ interests,
and if I consider that he's putting himself forward at the risk of my--my
prospects and my hopes, I shall make use of what I know."
"You don't mean you'd split on the man!" splutters Bingo; "because, if you
do----"
"All's fair in Love and War," says Beauvayse, with a ring of defiance in
his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam of triumph in his beautiful sleepy
eyes. "And this is Love in War. You've put a trump card in my hand against
Saxham, whether you meant to or not, and when the time comes, I shall play
it."
He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo, emitting another wailing
whistle as he slews round to stare after the tall, retreating figure with
the crisp, golden head, is sure of nothing so certainly as that Beauvayse
will play that trump card. He is repentant for having broached the
Doctor's secret as he climbs up by the narrow iron stair that leads out
upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, to relieve his commanding officer at the
binoculars.