The Paliser case Part 34

The Park took her.

XXVI

When Ca.s.sy had gone, Jones went back to his rooms. He went absently, his mind not on her story, which was old as the Palisades, but on a situation, entirely new, which it had suggested.

"Nice girl," he remarked as he re-entered the workshop. "Suppose we go and have dinner."

Sombrely Lennox looked up. At the table where he sat, he had been fingering some papers. He threw them down.

"I am going to have a word with Paliser."

Jones c.o.c.ked an eye at him. "See here, you are not a knight-errant. The age of chivalry is over." The novelist paused and exclaimed: "What am I saying! The age of chivalry is not over. It can't be. Last night, Verelst dined with a monster!"

Lennox pushed at the papers. "If I were alone concerned, I would thank Paliser. He has done me a good turn. He has set me straight."

Then, to the listening novelist, who later found the story very useful, Lennox repeated Ca.s.sy's version of the rhyme and reason of the broken engagement.

The tale of it concluded, Lennox flicked at a speck. "I am grateful to Paliser for that, but for the manner in which he treated her, I shall have a word with him. Just one."

Jones sat down. "A word, eh? Well, why not? Flipping a man in the face with a glove was fashionable in the days of Charles II. Tweaking the nose was Georgian. The horsewhip went out with Victoria. Posting your man was always rather coffee-house and a rough-and-tumble very hooligan.

If I were you, which I am not, but if I were, I would adopt contemporaneous methods. To-day we just sit about and backbite. That is progress. Let me commend it to you."

With a wide movement, Lennox swept the papers, shoved them into a pocket and stood up.

Jones also stood up. "Got an appet.i.te? Well, dining has the great disadvantage of taking it away. Come along."

Lennox put on his hat. "I am going first to Park Avenue."

No you're not, thought Jones, who, with an agility which for him was phenomenal, hurried to the door and backed against it.

Lennox motioned him aside.

Jones, without budging, lied. "They're out of town." It was very imbecile. He knew it was, knew, too, that Lennox knew it, and, for the imbecile lie, he subst.i.tuted another. "I mean they are dining out."

"What the devil are you driving at?" Lennox asked, and not very civilly either.

"A windmill, I suppose. You look like one. I----"

Jones broke off. The expression on Lennox' face arrested him. The attempt at interference, the stupid evasions, the conviction which these things produced, that there was something behind them, something secreted, something about Margaret that Jones knew and which he was concealing, made him livid.

"Out with it."

Jones looked at him, looked away, adjusted his neckcloth, vacated the door, crossed the room and sat down. He did not know to what saint to vow himself. But realising that it was all very useless, that everything is, except such solicitude as one pilgrim may show to another, and that, anyway, Lennox would soon hear it, he gave it to him.

"She is engaged to Paliser."

Lennox, who was approaching, stopped short. "Miss Austen is?"

Jones nodded.

"To Paliser?"

But it seemed too rough and, to take the edge off, Jones added. "It may not be true."

"How did you hear?"

"Verelst told me. He dined there last night."

Lennox turned on his heel. Futilely in that h.e.l.l to which one may look back and see that it was not h.e.l.l but purgatory prior to paradise, futilely there he had sought the reason of his d.a.m.nation. A few minutes before he had thought that Ca.s.sy's story revealed it. In the light of it he had seen himself condemned, as many another has been, for crimes which he had not committed. But he had seen, too, the order of release.

He had only a word to say. He was going to Park Avenue to say it.

When Jones was below with Ca.s.sy so he had thought and not without grat.i.tude to Paliser either. If the cad had held his tongue, enlightenment might have been withheld until to his spirit, freed perhaps in Flanders, had come the revelation. Personally he was therefore grateful to Paliser. But vicariously he was bitter. For his treatment of that girl, punishment should follow.

That girl! Obscurely, in the laboratory of the senses where, without our knowledge, often against our will, our impulses are dictated, a process, intricate and interesting, which Stendhal called crystallisation, was at work.

Unaware of that, conscious only of the moment, to his face had come the look and menace of the wolf.

Now----!

"There is a book over there," Jones, who was watching him, cut in. "It is Seneca's 'De animae tranquilitate.' Take a peek at it. It will tell you, what it has told me, that whatever happens, happens because it had to happen and because it could not happen otherwise. There is no sounder lesson in mental tranquillity."

But for all Lennox heard of that he might then have been dead. Without knowing what he was doing, he sat down. Paliser, Margaret! Margaret, Paliser! Before him, on encephalic films, their forms and faces moved as clearly as though both were in the room. He saw them approaching, saw them embrace. The obsession of jealousy that creates the image, projected it. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands. The image got behind them. It persisted but less insistently. The figures were still there. It was their consistence that seemed to fade. Where they had been were shadows--evil, shallow, malign, perverse, lurid as torches and yet but shades. For the jealousy that inflames love can also consume it and, when it does, it leaves ashes that are either sterile with indifference or potent with hate. At the shadows that were torches Lennox looked with closed eyes. Obscurely, without his knowledge, in the laboratory of his senses, crystallisation was at work.

Jones, leaning forward, touched him. "I say, old chap!"

Lennox had been far away, on a journey from which some men return, but never as they went. At Jones' touch he dropped his hands. The innate sentiment of form repossessed him. He straightened, looked about and, after the manner of the deeply preoccupied, who answer a question ten minutes after it is put, said evenly:

"Suppose we do."

Do what? But Jones, getting it at once, stood up. "Come along, then."

On the way to the neighbourly Athenaeum, the novelist talked endlessly about the disadvantages of not being born, which is a very safe subject.

Talking still, he piloted Lennox to the dining-room where, the advantages of sedatives occurring to him, he ordered a bottle of Pommard, which is mother's milk.

But when it was brought Lennox would not touch it. He wanted brandy and soda and told Johnson, a captain, to see to it.

In the great high-ceiled room, other members were dining. From one of the tables Ogston sauntered over and, noting that Jones and Lennox had not dressed, which he had, and very beautifully, remarked brilliantly: "You fellers aren't going to the opera, are you? It's the last night."

It was another safe subject and Jones smiled falsely at him. "But you are, eh? Sit down."

Ogston put a hand on the novelist's chair. "No. I'm off to a theatre-party. But I have a ticket for the Metropolitan. You don't either of you want it, do you?"

"Let me see, what is it, to-night?" Jones, with that same false smile, enquired. "And where is the seat?"