Simon the Jester Part 33

"In that case, before we carry this interview further, the Family Council and Madame would do well to have a private consultation."

"Monsieur," he cried, completely losing his temper. "I forbid you to use that tone to me. You are making a mock of me. You are insulting me. I bore with you long enough to see how much further your insolence would dare to go. I'm not to have a hand in the administration of my wife's money? I'm to forsake a plentiful means of livelihood? I'm to become a commercial traveller? I'm to expatriate myself? I'm to explain, too, the reasons why I left the army? I would not condescend. Least of all to you."

"May I ask why, Monsieur?"

"_Tonnerre de Dieu_!" He stamped his foot. "Do you take me for a fool?

Here I am--I came at my wife's request, ready to take her back as my wife, ready to condone everything--yes, Monsieur, as a man of the world--you think I have no eyes, no understanding--ready to take her off your hands--"

I leaped to my feet.

"Monsieur!" I thundered.

Lola gave a cry and rushed forward. I pushed her aside, and glared at him. I was in a furious rage. We glared at each other eye to eye. I pointed to the door.

"_Monsieur, sortez_!"

I went to it and flung it wide. Anastasius Papadopoulos trotted into the room.

His entrance was so queer, so unexpected, so anti-climatic, that for the moment the three of us were thrown off our emotional balance.

"I have heard all, I have heard all," shrieked the little man. "I know you for what you are. I am the champion of the _carissima signora_ and the protector of the English statesman. You are a traitor and murderer--"

Vauvenarde lifted his hand in a threatening gesture.

"Hold your tongue, you little abortion!" he shouted.

But Anastasius went on screaming and flourishing his bundle of papers.

"Ask him if he remembers the horse Sultan; ask him if he remembers the horse Sultan!"

Lola took him by the shoulders.

"Anastasius, you must go away from here--to please me. It's my orders."

But he shook himself free, and the silk hat which he had not removed fell off in the quick struggle.

"Ask him if he remembers Saupiquet," he screamed, and then banged the door.

A malevolent devil put a sudden idea into my head and prompted speech.

"_Do_ you remember Saupiquet?" I asked ironically.

"Monsieur, meddle with your own affairs and let me pa.s.s. You shall hear from me."

The dwarf planted himself before the door.

"You shall not pa.s.s till you have answered me. Do you remember Saupiquet? Do you remember the five francs you gave to Saupiquet to let you into Sultan's stable? Ah! Ha! Ha! You wince. You grow pale. Do you remember the ball of poison you put down Sultan's throat?"

Lola started forward with flaming eyes and anguished face.

"You--you?" she gasped. "You were so ign.o.ble as to do that?"

"The accursed brute!" shouted Vauvenarde. "Yes, I did it. I wish I had burned out his entrails."

Anastasius sprang at him like a tiger cat. I had a quick vision of the dwarf clinging in the air against the other's bulky form, one hand at his throat, and then of an incredibly swift flash of steel. The dwarf dropped off and rolled backwards, revealing something black sticking out of Vauvenarde's frock-coat--for the second I could not realise what it was. Then Vauvenarde, with a ghastly face, reeled sideways and collapsed in a heap on the ground.

CHAPTER XV

Of what happened immediately afterwards I have but a confused memory. I remember that Lola and I both fell on our knees beside the stabbed man, and I remember his horrible staring eyes and open mouth. I remember that, though she was white and shaky, she neither shrieked, went into hysterics, nor fainted. I remember rushing down to the manager; I remember running with him breathlessly through obscure pa.s.sages of the hotel in search of a doctor who was attending a sick member of the staff. I remember the rush back, the doctor bending over the body, which Lola had partially unclothed, and saying:

"He is dead. The blade has gone straight through his heart."

And I have in my mind the unforgettable and awful picture of Anastasius Papadopoulos disregarded in a corner of the room, with his absurd silk hat on--some reflex impulse had caused him to pick it up and put it on his head--sitting on the floor amid a welter of doc.u.ments relating to the death of the horse Sultan, one of which he was eagerly perusing.

After this my memory is clear. It was only the first awful shock and horror of the thing that dazed me.

The man was dead, said the doctor. He must lie until the police arrived and drew up the _proces-verbal_. The manager went to telephone to the police, and while he was gone I told the doctor what had occurred.

Anastasius took no notice of us. Lola, holding her nerves under iron control, stood bolt upright looking alternately at the doctor and myself as we spoke. But she did not utter a word. Presently the manager returned. The alarm had not been given in the hotel. No one knew anything about the occurrence. Lola went into her bedroom and came back with a sheet. The manager took it from her and threw it over the dead man. The doctor stood by Anastasius. The end of a strip of sunlight by the window just caught the dwarf in his corner.

"Get up," said the doctor.

Anastasius, without raising his eyes from his papers, waved him away.

"I am busy. I am engaged on important papers of identification. He had a white star on his forehead, and his tail was over a metre long."

Lola approached him.

"Anastasius," she said gently. He looked up with a radiant smile. "Put away those papers." Like a child he obeyed and scrambled to his feet.

Then, seeing the unfamiliar face of the doctor for the first time, he executed one of his politest and most elaborate bows. The doctor after looking at him intently for a while, turned to me.

"Mad. Utterly mad. Apparently he has no consciousness of what he has done."

He lured him to the sofa and sat beside him and began to talk in a low tone of the contents of the papers. Anastasius replied cheerfully, proud at being noticed by the stranger. The papers referred to a precious secret, a gigantic combination, which he had spent years in maturing. I shivered at the sound of his voice, and turned to Lola.

"This is no place for you. Go into your bedroom till you are wanted."

I held the door open for her. She put her hands up to her face and reeled, and I thought she would have fallen; but she roused herself.

"I don't want to break down--not yet. I shall if I'm left alone--come and sit with me, for G.o.d's sake."

"Very well," said I.

She pa.s.sed me and I followed; but at the door I turned and glanced round the cheerful, sunny room. There, against the background of blue sky and tree tops framed by the window, sat Anastasius Papadopoulos, swinging his little legs and talking bombastically to the tanned and grizzled doctor, and opposite stood the correctly attired hotel manager in the att.i.tude in which he habitually surveyed the lay-out of the table d'hote, keeping watch beside the white-covered shape on the floor. I was glad to shut the sight from my eyes. We waited silently in the bedroom, Lola sitting on the bed and hiding her face in the pillows, and I standing by the window and looking out at the smiling mockery of the fair earth. An agonising spasm of pain--a _momento mori_--shot through me and pa.s.sed away. I thanked G.o.d that a few weeks would see the end of me. I had always enjoyed the comedy of life. It had been to me a thing of infinite jest. But this stupid, meaningless tragedy was carrying the joke too far. My fastidiousness revolted at its vulgarity. I no longer wished to inhabit a world where such jests were possible... . I had never seen a man die before. I was surprised at the swiftness and the ugliness of it... . I suddenly realised that I was smoking a cigarette, which I was quite unconscious of having lit. I threw it away.

A minute afterwards I felt that if I did not smoke I should go crazy. So I lit another... . The ghastly silliness of the murder! ... Colonel Bunnion's loud laugh rose from the terrace below, jarring horribly on my ears. A long green praying mantis that had apparently mounted on the bougainvillea against the hotel wall appeared in meditative stateliness on the window-sill. I picked the insect up absent-mindedly, and began to play with it. Lola's voice from the bed startled me and caused me to drop the mantis. She spoke hoa.r.s.ely.

"Tell me--what are they going to do with him?"