Simon the Jester Part 29

"Devil a bit," said I.

She did not answer, but settled herself more comfortably in the carriage and relapsed into mournful silence. I, having said my say, lit a cigarette. Save for the clanging past of an upward or downward tram, the creeping drive up the hill through the long winding street was very quiet; and as we mounted higher and left the shops behind, the only sounds that broke the afternoon stillness were the driver's raucous admonition to his horses and the wind in the trees by the wayside. At different points the turns of the road brought to view the panorama of the town below and the calm sweep of the bay.

"Exquisite, isn't it?" I said at last, with an indicative wave of the hand.

"What's the good of anything being exquisite when you feel mouldy?"

"It may help to charm away the mouldiness. Beauty is eternal and mouldiness only temporal. The sun will go on shining and the sea will go on changing colour long after our pains and joys have vanished from the world. Nature is pitilessly indifferent to human emotion."

"If so," she said, her intuition finding the weakness of my slipshod argument, "how can it touch human mouldiness?"

"I don't know," said I. "The poets will tell you. All you have to do is to lie on the breast of the Great Mother and your heartache will go from you. I've never tried it myself, as I've never been afflicted with heartache."

"Is that true?" she asked, womanlike catching at the personal.

I smiled and nodded.

"I'm glad on your account," she said sincerely. "It's the very devil of an ache. I've always had it."

"Poor Lola," said I, prompted by my acquired instinct of eumoiriety. "I wish I could cure you."

"You?" She gave a short little laugh and then turned her head away.

"I had a very comfortable crossing," she remarked a moment later.

I gave her into the keeping of the manager of the hotel and did not see her again until she came down somewhat late for dinner. I met her in the vestibule. She wore a closely fitting brown dress, which in colour matched the bronze of her hair and in shape showed off her lithe and generous figure.

I thought it my duty to cheer her by a well-deserved compliment.

"Are you aware," I said, with a low bow, "that you're a remarkably handsome woman?"

A perfectly unnecessary light came into her eyes and a superfluous flush to her cheeks. "If I'm at least that to you, I'm happy," she said.

"You're that to the dullest vision. Follow the _maitre d'hotel_,"

said I, as we entered the _salle a manger_, "and I'll walk behind in reflected glory."

We made an effective entrance. I declare there was a perceptible rattle of soup-spoons laid down by the retired Colonels and maiden ladies as we pa.s.sed by. Colonel Bunnion returned my nod of greeting in the most distracted fashion and gazed at Lola with the frank admiration of British Cavalry. I felt foolishly proud and exhilarated, and gave her at my table the seat commanding a view of the room. I then ordered a bottle of champagne, which I am forbidden to touch.

"It isn't often that I have the pleasure of dining with you," I said by way of apology.

"This is the very first time," she said.

"And it's not going to be the last," I declared.

"I thought you were going to ship me back to Ma.r.s.eilles to-morrow."

She laughed lazily, meeting my eyes. I smiled.

"It would be inhuman. I allow you a few day's rest."

Indeed, now she was here I had a curious desire to keep her. I regarded the failure of my eumoirous little plans with more than satisfaction.

I had done my best. I had found (through the dwarf's agency) Captain Vauvenarde. I had satisfied myself that he was an outrageous person, thoroughly disqualified from becoming Lola's husband, and there was an end of the matter. Meanwhile Fate (again through the agency of Anastasius) had brought her many hundreds of miles away from Dale and had moreover brought her to me. I was delighted. I patted Destiny on the back, and drank his health in excellent Pommery. Lola did not know in the least what I meant, but she smiled amiably and drank the toast. It was quite a merry dinner. Lola threw herself into my mood and jested as if she had never heard of an undesirable husband who had been kicked out of the French Army. We talked of many things. I described in fuller detail my adventure with Anastasius and Saupiquet, and we laughed over the debt of fifteen sous and the elaborate receipt.

"Anastasius," she said, "is childish in many ways--the doctors have a name for it."

"Arrested development."

"That's it; but he is absolutely cracked on one point--the poisoning of my horse Sultan. He has reams of paper which he calls the dossier of the crime. You never saw such a collection of rubbish in your life. I cried over it. And he is so proud of it, poor wee mite." She laughed suddenly.

"I should love to have seen you hobn.o.bbing with him and Saupiquet."

"Why?"

"You're so aristocratic-looking," she did me the embarra.s.sing honour to explain in her direct fashion. "You're my idea of an English duke."

"My dear Lola," I replied, "you're quite wrong. The ordinary English duke is a stout, middle-aged gentleman with a beard, and he generally wears thick knickerbockers and shocking bad hats."

"Do you know any?"

"Two or three," I admitted.

"And d.u.c.h.esses, too?"

I again pleaded guilty. In these democratic days, if one is engaged in public and social affairs one can't help running up against them. It is their fault, not mine.

"Do tell me about them," said Lola, with her elbows on the table.

I told her.

"And are earls and countesses just the same?" she asked with a disappointed air.

"Just the same, only worse. They're so ordinary you can't pick them out from common misters and missuses."

Saying this I rose, for we had finished our dessert, and proposed coffee in the lounge. There we found Colonel Bunnion at so wilful a loose end that I could not find it in my heart to refuse him an introduction to Lola. He manifested his delight by lifting the skirt of his dinner-jacket with his hands and rising on his spurs like a bantam c.o.c.k.

I left her to him for a moment and went over to say a civil word to the Misses Bostock of South Shields. I regret to say I noticed a certain frigidity in their demeanour. The well-conducted man in South Shields does not go out one night with a revolver tucked away in the pocket of his dress-suit, and turn up the next evening with a striking-looking lady with bronze hair. Such goings-on are seen on the stage in South Shields in melodrama, and they are the goings-on of the villain. In the eyes of the gentle ladies my reputation was gone. I was trying to rehabilitate myself when the cha.s.seur brought me a telegram. I asked permission to open it, and stepped aside.

The words of the telegram were like a ringing box on the ears.

"Tell me immediately why Lola has joined you in Algiers. --KYNNERSLEY."

Not "Dale," mark you, as he has signed himself ever since I knew him in Eton collars, but "Kynnersley." Why has Lola joined you? Why have you run off with Lola? What's the reason of this treacherous abduction?

Account for yourself immediately. Stand and deliver. I stood there gaping at the words like an idiot, my blood tingling at the implied accusation. The peremptoriness of it! The impudence of the boy! The wild extravagance of the idea! And yet, while my head was reeling with one buffet a memory arose and gave me another on the other side. I remembered the preposterous att.i.tude in which Dale had found us when he rushed from Berlin into Lola's drawing-room.

I took the confounded telegram into a remote corner of the lounge, like a dog with a bone, and growled over it for a time until the humour of the situation turned the growl into a chuckle. Even had I been in sound health and strength, the idea of running off with Lola would have been absurd. But for me, in my present eumoirous disposition of mind; for me, a half-disembodied spirit who had cast all vain and disturbing human emotions into the mud of Murglebed-on-Sea; for me who had a spirit's calm disregard for the petty pa.s.sions and interests of mankind and walked through the world with no other object than healing a few human woes; for me who already saw death on the other side of the river and found serious occupation in exchanging airy badinage with him; for me with an abominable little pain inside inexorably eating my life out and wasting me away literally and perceptibly like a shadow and twisting me up half a dozen times a day in excruciating agony; for me, in this delectable condition of soul and this deplorable condition of body, to think of running hundreds of miles from home with--to say the least of it--so inconvenient a creature as a big, bronze-haired woman, the idea was inexpressibly and weirdly comic.

I stepped into the drawing-room close by and drew up a telegram to Dale.