The Paliser case Part 31

Without, some one knocked and, getting no answer, accepted the invitation as most people do.

"Beg pardon, Mrs. Paliser. The car is at the door."

Ca.s.sy half turned. "What?"

Emma reconstructed it. "Whenever you are ready, mem, the car will be waiting."

Ca.s.sy turned away. "That will do."

"Thank you, mem."

With that air which servants a.s.sume, Emma pursed her lips, reopened them, thought better of it, closed them and closed too the door.

Facing it still, Ca.s.sy sat in the brocaded chair. Anger had shaken her and gone, taking with it its sp.a.w.n which hatred is. What inhabited her then was disgust.

I am in a nice mess, she told herself. But she told it without surprise, as though all along it was something which she might have known, could have avoided, but into which she had put her foot. A momentary vision of the red-crossed Lady Bountiful returned and she even smiled at it. It was a sad little smile though.

Abstractedly, she had been turning and twisting the rings. The motion aroused her. It drew her attention to them. They also had something to say. Something which they had been saying ever since the smoke curled from the pipe. She had not heard it then. There had been too many things tumbling about her. But now she did hear. She took them off, stood up and dropped them on the table where they fell between gold-backed brushes and a vase, gorgeous in delicacy, the colour of ox-blood.

From a cupboard she took the rowdy frock, the tam, the basilica underwear and, for a moment, searched and searched vainly for a pair of stockings. In hunting for them she unearthed the bundle, and that together with the other things, she threw on the bed, which was not brocaded, or even daised. It was silver. A few days before, when she had first seen it, she had clapped her hands. The vase too she had applauded. Now the lovely room, that had seemed so lovely, a curl of smoke had turned into a lupanar.

Quickly, one after another, the modish hat, the delicious frock, the things that could be drawn through a ring, were removed and replaced. In the mirror she looked, stopped, looked again, adjusted the tam and was going to the bed for the bundle when she heard a horn. Head-drawn, she listened.

She would have so much preferred to leave without seeing him or speaking to him. If she could, she would have gone without a word, silently, in the only dignified manner that was possible. But, apparently, matters had arranged themselves otherwise. She went to the bed, took the bundle, moved back to the table and waited.

She did not wait long. Paliser, with the pretence of a knock and a smile on his lips walked in--but not far. That frock, that bundle, the sight of her there, sufficed. He knew. With an awkwardness that was unusual with him, he closed the door and twisted his hat. The smile had gone from his lips. They were dry.

Then as he looked at her and she looked at him--and with what a look!--words seemed such poor things. It was as though already everything had been said, as perhaps in the silent temples of their being, everything, accusations, recriminations, all the futilities of speech had been uttered, impotently, a moment since. A moment earlier she had said her say. As he looked at her he knew that she had and knew too, that before he entered the room, already she had heard his replies.

The consciousness of this, equally shared by both, was so intense that, for a second, Ca.s.sy felt that everything happening then had happened ages ago, that she was taking part in a drama rehea.r.s.ed on a stage that memory cannot reconstruct but which stood, and, it may be, still stands, back of those doors that close behind our birth.

The hallucination, if it be one, and which, given certain crises of the emotions, is common enough, vanished abruptly as it had come. But two seconds had gone since Paliser entered the room, yet, in those seconds, both recognised that eternity had begun between them.

With his hat, a hat studiously selected, made to order, Paliser motioned and with the same studiousness, selecting a plat.i.tude, he produced it.

"I was going to take you out."

"After taking me in," Ca.s.sy in reviewing the situation subsequently commented. But at the time she said nothing. She merely looked. Her rage was gone, her anger spent. Only disgust remained. It was that which her face expressed. It was withering.

Paliser, steadying himself and, as was perhaps only natural, hedging still, resumed: "But apparently you have other intentions."

What a cad that blackguard is! thought Ca.s.sy who still said nothing.

"May I ask what they are?"

Ca.s.sy threw up her chin. "My intentions are to leave----"

"But why?"

"Don't presume to interrupt me. My intentions are to leave your a.s.signation-house and have you horsewhipped."

Paliser had been served with strong drink before, but none ever as strong as that. It steadied him. He had expected that when it got to her, as eventually it must, there would be the pa.s.sionate upbraidings, the burst of sobs, the Oh! Oh's!, the What will become of me?, the usual run up and down the scale and the usual remedies which a bank account supplies. He had expected all that. He had prescribed for it often.

There was not a symptom for which he did not know the proper dose and just when to administer it. But barely had he crossed the threshold before he realised that all his science would be in default.

Ca.s.sy presented an entirely new case, but, fortunately, in the drink which she had served, he saw or thought he saw how to treat it.

He gestured again. "I never cared for scenes. But this house, which it has pleased you to describe from your knowledge of other establishments, is----"

Whatever he may have intended to add, was interrupted. Ca.s.sy, previously inexorable as fate, but converted then into a fury, dropped the bundle and caught up the vase. Missing him, it hit the door, where musically it crashed and shattered.

He turned, looked at it, looked at her, at the table. Barring the gold-backed brushes, the jade platter and that bundle, there was nothing that she could conveniently shy, and, in his Oxford voice, but civilly enough, he gave it to her.

"Allow me. There is no necessity whatever for your acting in this manner. The situation, such as it is, it had been my intention to remedy. It had been my intention, I say. But yesterday it came to my knowledge that it is because of your relations with Lennox that his engagement is broken."

Take that, he mentally added and continued aloud: "I might not have believed the story, but I was told that Lennox admitted it." Take that, too, he mentally resumed. I shall be treated to tears in a minute and in no time it will be "Kamerad!"

Sidewise he looked at the ruin of the vase, on which Daughters of Heaven and an ablated dynasty may have warmed their eyes. It affronted his own.

Insult, yes, that could be tossed about, but not art, not at least the relatively unique.

With a crease in his lips which now were dry no longer, he looked at Ca.s.sy. The awaited tears were not yet visible. But the blood-madness that had seized her, must have let her go, routed, as haematomania may be, by the trivial and, in this instance, by a lie. That lie suffocated her. It was as though, suddenly, she had been garroted.

The condition was only momentary, but, during it, a curtain fell on this vulgar drama, which was to affect so many lives. Before the girl a panorama pa.s.sed. She saw herself leaving Lennox' rooms. She saw Margaret Austen, saw the woman with her, saw the former's candid eyes; saw the latter's ridiculous airs, saw the construction which between them they had reached and saw, too, the consequences that had resulted. The dirt with which she had been besplattered she did not see. The panorama did not display it. What it alone revealed was Lennox' disaster. Of herself she did not think and regarding Margaret she did not care. That which occupied her was Lennox.

But was it true? In Paliser nothing was true, not even his lies. For it was unaccountable that a matter so simple could not have been cleared with a word. But it was not unaccountable at all. It was obvious.

Margaret, a born sn.o.b, had given Lennox no chance for that word. Some one, Paliser probably, had invented the admission and she had refused to see him, after condemning him unheard.

I will attend to that, Ca.s.sy decided.

At once the suffocation ceased, the panorama sank, the scene shifted, the curtain parted, the drama proceeded and she found herself staring at Paliser, who was staring at her.

"As it is----" he tentatively resumed and would have said more, a lot, anything to coerce the tears to her eyes and with them surrender.

She gave him no chance. She took the bundle and, before he could continue, she pa.s.sed him, opened the door, slammed it with a din that had in it the clatter of muskets, went down the stair and out to the perron, before which stood a car.

"The station!" she threw at the mechanician.

The house now, jarred a moment earlier by the crash of porcelain and the slamming door, had recovered its silence.

From within, Emma, very agreeably intrigued, a footman with a white sensual face beside her, looked out with slanting eyes.

XXV

Harris, wrinkled as a sweetbread and thin as an umbrella, blinked at Ca.s.sy. "Mr. Lennox is out, mem."

"Then go and fetch him."