The Mountebank Part 50

Thanks for your interesting letter. I've adopted a mongrel Irish Terrier--the most fascinating skinful of sin the world has ever produced. I'll show him to you some day.

Yours,

Auriol

I wrote back in a fury: something about never wanting to see her or her infernal dog as long as I lived. I was angry and depressed. I don't know why. It was none of my business. But I felt that I had been scandalously treated by this young woman. I felt that I had subscribed to their futile romance an enormous fund of interest and sympathy. This chilly end of it left me with a sense of bleak disappointment. I was not rendered merrier a short while afterwards by an airy letter from Horatio Bakkus enclosing a flourishing announcement in French of his marriage with the Veuve Elodie Marescaux, nee Figa.s.so. "Behold me," said the fellow, "cooing with content in the plenitude of perfect connubiality." I did not desire to behold him at all. His cooing left me cold. I bore on my shoulders the burden of the tragio-comedy of Auriol and Lackaday.

If she had never seen him as Pet.i.t Patou, all might have been well, in spite of Elodie who had been somewhat destructive of romantic glamour. But the visit to the circus, I concluded, finished the business. Beneath the painted monster in green silk tights the dignified soldier whom she loved was eclipsed for ever. And then a thousand commonplace social realities arose and stood stonily in her path. And Lackaday--well! I suppose he was faced with the same unscalable stone wall of convention.

Lackaday's letters were brief, and, such as they were, full of Arbuthnot.

He was sailing as soon as he could find a berth. I gave the pair up, and went to an elder brother's place in Inverness-shire for rest and shooting and rain and family criticism and such-like amenities. Among my fellow-guests I found young Charles Verity-Stewart and Evadne nominally under governess tutelage. The child kept me sane during a dreadful month.

Having been sick of the sound of guns going off during the war, I found, to my dismay, scant pleasure in explosions followed by the death of little birds. And then--I suppose I am growing old--the sport, in which I once rejoiced, involved such hours of wet and weary walking that I renounced it without too many sighs. But I had nothing to do. My pre-war dilettante excursions into the literary world had long since come to an end. I was obsessed by the story of Lackaday; and so, out of sheer _taedium vitae_, and at the risk of a family quarrel, I shut myself up with the famous ma.n.u.script and my own reminiscences, and began to reduce things to such coherence as you now have had an opportunity of judging.

It was at breakfast, one morning in November, that the butler handed me a telegram. I opened the orange envelope. The missive, reply paid, ran:

Will you swear that there are real live cannibals in the Solomon Islands? If not, it will be the final disillusion of my life.--AURIOL

I pa.s.sed the paper to my neighbour Evadne, healthily deep in porridge. She glanced at it, gla.s.s of milk in one hand, poised spoon in the other. With the diabolical intuition of eternal woman and the ironical imperturbability of the modern maiden, she raised her candid eyes to mine and declared:

"She's quite mad. But I told you all about it years ago."

This lofty calmness I could not share. I suddenly found myself unable to stand another minute of Scotland. Righteous indignation sped me to London.

I found the pair together in Lady Auriol's drawing-room. Without formal greeting I apostrophized them.

"You two have behaved disgracefully. Here have I been utterly miserable about you, and all the time you've left me in the dark."

"Where we were ourselves, my dear Hylton, I a.s.sure you," said Lackaday.

"I shed light as soon as I could," said Auriol. "We b.u.mped into each other last Monday evening in Bond Street and found it was us."

"I told her I was going to the Solomon Islands."

"And I thought I wanted to go there too."

"From which I gather," said I, "that you are going to get married."

Lady Auriol smiled and shook her head.

"Oh dear no."

I was really angry. "Then what on earth made you drag me all the way from the North of Scotland?"

"To congratulate us, my dear friend," said Lackaday. "We were married this morning."

"I think you're a pair of fools," said I later, not yet quite mollified.

"Why--for getting married?" asked Auriol.

"No," said I. "For putting it off to a fortuitous b.u.mp in Bond Street."

The End