The Paliser case Part 18

Paliser helped himself to another clam. "You speak feelingly and that is only right. This is a very important matter. It is a shame that romance should have pa.s.sed with the post-chaise. Why should it not revisit us in the motor?"

Ca.s.sy sipped and considered it. "There ought to be a law on the subject."

"There is one. You may be summoned for speeding and get your name in the papers."

"Then the dignity of danger remains."

"But not in clams. Aren't you going to eat any?"

Ca.s.sy laughed. "I had some yesterday with Ma Tamby. They did not seem to agree with her. She became very noisy about a Mrs. Beamish. Who is she?"

"Mrs. Beamish?" Paliser repeated. He also had forgotten. But, with a click, memory raised a latch. From behind it the lady emerged. "Oh, she's a cousin of mine."

"Rather distant, I should fancy," said Ca.s.sy, who was conscious of the delay, though not of the click. The delay she had noticed without, however, divining the cause. But how could she possibly imagine that Mrs. Beamish had been evolved for the sole purpose of providing her with basilica opportunities? Yet the fault, if fault there were, resided in her education. She had never read Eliphas Levi. She did not know that genii can be evoked.

"Well, she is more my sister's cousin than mine," Paliser anxious to get out of it, threw in. "I mean my sister has a more cousinly nature."

"I did not know you had a sister," said Ca.s.sy, who not only did not know but did not care. "Though, come to think of it, a sister with a cousinly nature must be so gratifying. Another distant relative, isn't she?"

"Very. She is in Petrograd."

That too was evocative. Ca.s.sy began talking about the biggest cropper that history has beheld--a tsar tossed from the saddle to Siberia!

Paliser, glad to be rid of Mrs. Beamish, took it up. The sordid story of the Russian chief of staff, bought by Hindenburg and shot by the Grand-Duke Nicholas, whom the tsar then exiled, was told once more.

"What else could you expect of that Hun?" Paliser concluded.

"A Hun!" Ca.s.sy exclaimed. "Why he is a Romanov."

"No more than you are," Paliser replied. "The last of the Romanovs married Catherine the Greater. There the breed ended. Paul, who followed and who married a German drab, was Catherine's son but not her husband's. The rest of the litter, down to the father of the recent inc.u.mbent, all married German drabs. The father of the ex-tsar married a Dane. The fellow is therefore one-eighth Dane and seven-eighths Hun.

Totally apart from which, a grocer who knew his business would not have had him for clerk. His family knew that and, before he had time to be tsar, tried to poison him. To the misfortune, not of Russia merely, but of Christendom, they failed. If they had succeeded the eastern front would be secure. As for his wife, I saw her once. It was in the Winter Palace which, before it was sacked, was a palace. Since the palace of the Caliphs of Cordova crumbled, there has never been a palace like it.

It outshone them all. Well, that woman tarnished it."

Meanwhile dishes were brought and removed by servants, wooden-faced, yet with ears alert. The subject of elopements had seemed promising, but it led to nothing. At their own table, talk was gayer.

Ca.s.sy enjoyed the food, the diluted wine, Paliser's facile touch. He appeared to know a lot and she surprised herself by so telling him. "I wish I did," she added. "I am ignorant as a carp."

"You know how to charm," he replied. But, seeing her stiffen, he resumed, "With your voice. That is enough. It would be a mistake for you to be versatile. Versatility is for the amateur. The artist is a flower, never a bouquet."

It was decently said. In the decency of it, the agreeable insult which a compliment usually is was so chastened that Ca.s.sy flushed and felt that she had. It annoyed her, and she attributed it to the wine.

It was not the wine. Other influences were at work on this girl, born to a forsaken purple and whose soul was homesick for it. But purple is perhaps picturesque. It was not that for which her soul sighed, but the dream that hides behind it, the dream of going about and giving money away. To her the dream had been the dream of a dream, realisable only on the top rungs of the operatic ladder, which, later, she felt she was not destined to scale. None the less there are dreams that do come true, though usually, beforehand, there is a desert to cross.

"I wonder if I might have a cavatina?" Paliser asked, rising and moving to her.

Ca.s.sy shrugged. I have to pay for my dinner, she thought, but she too got up.

Preceding her, he led the way to a room of which the floor, inlaid and waxed, was rugless. The windows were not curtained, they were shuttered.

In the centre was a grand and a bench. Afar, at the other end, masking a door, was a portiere, the colour of hyacinth. Near it, were two unupholstered chairs; one, white; the other, black. Save for these, save too for a succession of mirrors and of lights, the room was bare. In addition, it was s.p.a.cious, a long oblong, ceiled high with light frescoes, the proper aviary for a song-bird.

Ca.s.sy curtsied to it. At table she had not wanted to sing. The mere sight of this room inspired.

Paliser opened the piano and, seating himself, ran his long thin fingers over the keys. He was heating them, preluding a score, pa.s.sing from it to another. Presently he looked up; she nodded and the _Ah, non giunge_ floated from her.

"Brava!" Paliser muttered as the final trill drifted away. Again he looked up. "You will be a very great artist."

He did not mean it. He judged her voice colourful but lacking in carriage.

Ca.s.sy, leaning forward, struck the keys, giving him the note and again she sang, this time the _Libiamo_, which, old as the hills, claptrap, utterly detestable, none the less served to display the bravura quality of her voice.

When it pa.s.sed, Paliser sprang up, faced her. "Open your mouth! There!

Wide!"

Ca.s.sy, familiar with the ritual, obeyed. Paliser peered into the strawberry of her throat. It was deep as a well and he moved back.

"You have the organ but you do not know how to use it. You don't know how to breathe."

Ca.s.sy forgot that he was young, that she was, that in the great room in the great house they were alone. Through the shutters came the smell of lilacs, the sorceries of spring. In the s.e.xlessness of art these things were unnoticed. For the first time she liked him. It was his frankness that drew her, though if he had been a frank old woman she would have liked him as well.

"My father says that. He says it is Ma Tamby's fault. He can't bear her."

For a while they discussed it. Paliser maintaining that were it not for the war she ought to go to Paris and Ca.s.sy a.s.serting, though without conviction, that the specialty of the Conservatoire consisted in dried fruit.

Finally she said: "It must be late. I have a wrap somewhere and oh! my orchids."

The young person was summoned. The wrap was recovered, the orchids reappeared.

Paliser, helping Ca.s.sy with the wrap, said: "Shall I see it here again?"

He knew he would but he thought it civil to ask.

Ca.s.sy too had her thoughts. The freedom with which, during the ham-and-eggs episode, his eyes had investigated her, where was it? On Sunday he had bored her to tears. That also had gone. During the past hour or two he had shown himself reasonably intelligent, unpresuming, without offensiveness of any kind. With a movement of the hand she lifted the wrap at her neck. "Here?"

It occurred to her that she did not know where the polished and inlaid floor on which she stood was located. Nor did she particularly care.

Besides if her geography were vague, the floor was pleasant, a bit slippery perhaps, though just how slippery she was yet to learn.

"Yes. The day after to-morrow. Why not? I would like to run over a score or two with you."

"Good heavens! You are not composing an opera, are you?"

Paliser laughed. "I want to lead you away from painted mush into the arms of----"

"Not Strauss?" Ca.s.sy interrupted. "Art does not recognise frontiers but the Huns do not either and I will not recognise a Hun. Is the car at the door?"

He saw her out and away, and reentering the house went to a room in the wing. It was lined with bookcases that you did not have to break your back to examine. They began four feet from the floor and ended two feet higher. The room contained other objects of interest.

From among the latter, Paliser helped himself to a brandy and soda. It had been dry work. The drink refreshed him. It stimulated too. Also it suggested. He put the gla.s.s down and lightly swore at it.

"d.a.m.n Benny! He has only one thumb."