The Pretty Lady Part 30

"I've had enough of that," he said, and followed her to the illuminated boudoir, where after a certain hesitation she left him.

Alone in the boudoir he felt himself to be a very shamed and futile person, and he was still extremely angry. The next moment Concepcion entered the boudoir.

"Ah!" he murmured, curiously appeased.

"You're quite right," said Concepcion simply.

He said:

"Can you give me any reason, Con, why we should make a present of ourselves to the Hun?"

Concepcion repeated:

"You're quite right."

"Is she coming?"

Concepcion made a negative sign. "She doesn't know what fear is, Queen doesn't."

"She doesn't know what sense is. She ought to be whipped, and if I got hold of her I'd whip her."

"She'd like nothing better," said Concepcion.

G.J. removed his overcoat and sat down.

Chapter 34

IN THE BOUDOIR

"We aren't so desperately safe even here," said G.J., firmly pursuing the moral triumph which Concepcion's very surprising and comforting descent from the roof had given him.

"Don't go to extremes," she answered.

"No, I won't." He thought of the valetry in the cellars, and the impossible humiliation of joining them; and added: "I merely state."

Then, after a moment of silence: "By the way, was it only _her_ idea that I should come along, or did the command come from both of you?"

The suspicion of some dark, feminine conspiracy revisited him.

"It was Queen's idea."

"Oh! Well, I don't quite understand the psychology of it."

"Surely that's plain."

"It isn't in the least plain."

Concepcion loosed and dropped her cloak, and, not even glancing at G.J., went to the fire and teased it with the poker. Bending down, with one hand on the graphic and didactic mantelpiece, and staring into the fire, she said:

"Queen's in love with you, of course."

The words were a genuine shock to his sarcastic and rather embittered and bullying mood. Was he to believe them? The vibrant, uttering voice was convincing enough. Was he to show the conventional incredulity proper to such an occasion? Or was he to be natural, brutally natural?

He was drawn first to one course and then to the other, and finally spoke at random, by instinct:

"What have I been doing to deserve this?"

Concepcion replied, still looking into the fire: "As far as I can gather it must be your masterful ways at the Hospital Committee that have impressed her, and especially your unheard-of tyrannical methods with her august mother."

"I see.... Thanks!"

It had not occurred to him that he had treated the Marchioness tyrannically; he treated her like anybody else; he now perceived that this was to treat her tyrannically. His imagination leapt forward as he gazed round the weird and exciting room which Queen had brought into existence for the ill.u.s.tration of herself, and as he pictured the slim, pale figure outside clinging in the night to the vast chimney, and as he listened to the faint intermittent thud of far-off guns.

He had a spasm of delicious temptation. He was tempted by Queen's connections and her prospective wealth. If anybody was to possess millions after the war, Queen would one day possess millions. Her family and her innumerable powerful relatives would be compelled to accept him without the slightest reserve, for Queen issued edicts; and through all those big people he would acquire immense prestige and influence, which he could use greatly. Ambition flared up in him--ambition to impress himself on his era. And he reflected with satisfaction on the strangeness of the fact that such an opportunity should have come to him, the son of a lawyer, solely by virtue of his own individuality. He thought of Christine, and poor little Christine was shrunk to nothing at all; she was scarcely even an object of compa.s.sion; she was a prost.i.tute.

But far more than by Queen's connections and prospective wealth he was tempted by her youth and beauty; he saw her beautiful and girlish, and he was s.e.xually tempted. Most of all he was tempted by the desire to master her. He saw again the foolish, elegant, brilliant thing on the chimney pretending to defy him and mock at him. And he heard himself commanding sharply: "Come down. Come down and acknowledge your ruler.

Come down and be whipped." (For had he not been told that she would like nothing better?) And he heard the West End of London and all the country-houses saying, "She obeys _him_ like a slave." He conceived a new and dazzling environment for himself; and it was undeniable that he needed something of the kind, for he was growing lonely; before the war he had lived intensely in his younger friends, but the war had taken nearly all of them away from him, many of them for ever.

Then he said in a voice almost resentfully satiric, and wondered why such a tone should come from his lips:

"Another of her caprices, no doubt."

"What do you mean--another of her caprices?" said Concepcion, straightening herself and leaning against the mantelpiece.

He had noticed, only a moment earlier, on the mantelpiece, a large photograph of the handsome Molder, with some writing under it.

"Well, what about that, for example?"

He pointed. Concepcion glanced at him for the first time, and her eyes followed the direction of his finger.

"That! I don't know anything about it."

"Do you mean to say that while you were gossiping till five o'clock this morning, you two, she didn't mention it?"

"She didn't."

G.J. went right on, murmuring:

"Wants to do something unusual. Wants to astonish the town."

"No! No!"

"Then you seriously tell me she's fallen in love with me, Con?"

"I haven't the slightest doubt of it."

"Did she say so?"

There was a sound outside the door. They both started like plotters in danger, and tried to look as if they had been discussing the weather or the war. But no interruption occurred.