Kitabı oku: «The Paliser case», sayfa 11

Cassy 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. Cassy, 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 Cassy. The awaited tears were not yet visible. But the blood-madness that had seized her, must have let her go, routed, as hæmatomania 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 passed. 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 snob, 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, Cassy 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 passed 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 Cassy. "Mr. Lennox is out, mem."

"Then go and fetch him."

Past the servant, Cassy forced her way through the vestibule, into the sitting-room, where the usual gloom abided, but where, unusually, were a smell of camphor, two overcoats, two trunks and a bag.

Cassy, putting down the bundle, exclaimed at them. "He is not leaving town?"

"Yes, mem, to-morrow morning, for Mineola." He spoke grudgingly, looking as he spoke like a little old mule at bay.

Cassy, noticing that, said: "See here, I don't mean to bully you, but it is most important that I should see Mr. Lennox – important for him, do you hear?"

"I hear you, mem, but I don't know where he is."

"Then find out. There must be a telephone."

Harris scratched his head but otherwise he did nothing.

"Come!" Cassy told him. "Hurry!"

Harris shifted. "I don't know as how he'd like it. He's been that upset these last few days. I – " He hesitated. Visibly an idea had visited him with which he was grappling. "You're not from Miss Austen, now, are you?"

Cassy caught at it. To confirm it would be fanciful. To deny it would be extravagant. Choosing an in-between for the benefit of this servant whom she knew to be English, she produced it.

"I am the Viscountess of Casa-Evora."

Harris wiped his mouth. A viscountess who had come only the other day with a bundle, and who now forced her way in with another bundle, did not coincide with such knowledge as he had of the nobility. But she was certainly overbearing enough to be anybody.

He turned. "Very good, your ladyship, I'll telephone."

Don't ladyship me, Cassy was about to reply, but judging that impolitic, she sat down.

On the train in she had debated whether she would go first to Harlem or to Lennox and in either case what afterward she should do. She had a few dollars which her father would need. The thought of these assets reminded her that in changing her clothes she had omitted to change back into her own stockings. Well, when she changed again she would return the pair which she had on and, as she determined on that, she saw Paliser's face as she had seen it when she threw the vase. That relapse into the primitive shamed her. She had behaved like a fish-wife. But though she regretted the violence, she regretted even more deeply the vase. The destruction of art is so despicably Hun! For moxa, she evoked the Grantly masquerade.

The entire lack of art in that seemed to her incongruous with the surface Paliser whom she had known. But had she even known the surface which itself was a mask? Yet behind the mask was an intelligence which at least was not ordinary, yet which, none the less, had descended to that! She could not understand it. She could not understand, what some one later explained to her, that a high order of intellect does not of itself prevent a man from soiling it and, with it, himself and his hands. The explanation came later, when other matters were occupying her and when Paliser, headlined in the papers, was dead.

Meanwhile the train had landed her in the Grand Central and she decided to go to Lennox first.

Now as she sat in his sitting-room where, for all she knew, she might have to sit for hours, it comforted her to think that she had so decided. If she had put it off until the morrow, Lennox would, by then, have gone to the aviation-field, where he might be killed before she could patch things up. At thought of that, she wondered whether he might not stay out undiscoverably all night and send for his things to be fetched to the station.

But in that case, Cassy promptly reflected, I'll go to her, pull her out of bed, drag her there – and no thanks either. I didn't do it for you, I did it for him. He's too good for you.

On the mantel, a clock struck, while thinly, through a lateral entrance, Harris emerged.

"The hall-porter at Mr. Lennox' club says he's just gone out with Mr. Jones. Yes, ma'am."

"Mr. Jones! What Mr. Jones? The novelist?"

"I'm thinking so, ma'am. A very haffable gentleman."

"Try to get him. Ask if Mr. Lennox, is there. Or, no, I'll do the talking."

Then presently she was doing it, collaborating rather in the dialogue that ensued.

"Mr. Jones?"

"Yes, darling."

Cassy, swallowing it, resumed: "Mr. Jones, forgive a stranger for intruding, I – "

"Beautiful voice, forgive me. Triple brute that I am, I thought it was my aunt."

"Then let me introduce myself. This is Miss Cara."

"Casta diva! You do me infinite honour!"

"Mr. Jones, I must see Mr. Lennox. It is a matter of life and death."

"Lennox is engaged with death now."

"What!"

"He is preparing for the great adventure. At this moment he is making his will. Miss Cara?"

"Yes?"

"Lennox takes even serious matters gravely."

"But he is with you?"

"In my workshop and at your service as I am."

"You will let me come there?"

"Enthusiastically and yet with all humility for I have no red carpet to run down the stair."

"Then hold on to him, please."

Ouf! sighed Cassy, as she hung it up. Another man who might be Mrs. Yallum's husband! She took the telephone-book, found and memorised the address and turned to Harris. "Thank you very much. Will you mind giving me that package?"

"Beg pardon, ma'am," the little man said, as he opened the door for her. "There's nothing more amiss, is there?"

Cassy covered him with her lovely eyes. "When Mr. Lennox comes back here, he may tell you to unpack."

"Then may God bless your ladyship."

Cassy went on.

At Jones' shop, a floor in a reconstructed private house, a man who had the air of performing a feat, showed her into a room that was summarily, but not spartanly, furnished. On one side was a bookcase supported by caryatides. Above, hung a stretch of silk on which was a flight of dragons. Above the silk was an ivory mask. Fronting the bookcase was the biggest table that Cassy had ever seen.

Jones, vacating the table, advanced to greet her. Perched on his shoulder, was a cat that peered at her. It had long hair, the colour of smoke; a bushy tail; the eyes of an angel and a ferocious moustache.

Although Cassy had other matters in hand, she exclaimed at it. "What a duck!"

Jones, who saw, and at once, that she had not come to ask the time of day, exclaimed also: "Yes, but ducky is as ducky does. That cat talks in her sleep."

But now Lennox, advancing too, had taken her hand.

Withdrawing it, she put the bundle on the table, on which were papers, and, noticeably, a dagger, brilliant, wicked, thin as a shadow. On the blade was a promise – Penetrabo.

She looked up. Jones and the cat had gone. She looked at Lennox. "I don't know where to begin."

Lennox could not tell her. On learning that she wanted to see him, he had supposed it was about her father and he had said as much to Jones. But in greeting her, the novelist knew from her vibrations that whatever her object might be, at least it was not ordinary. Then, taking the cat, he had gone.

Now, though, Cassy was at it. "The day you loaned me a hundred, you remember? As I went out I had the money in my hand. In the hall was Miss Austen. You had just shown me her picture. I recognised her at once. With her was a woman, thin-faced, thin-lipped, thin-minded. She saw me, saw the money, gave me a look. I did not forget it. But it is only to-day that I learned what it meant. It meant that I am no better than I ought to be – or you either."

Lennox had one hand on the table. He raised the other. "Who told you this?"

"Paliser. He said it was the reason your engagement was broken."

In the palm of the upraised hand, the fingers moved forward and back, regularly, methodically, mechanically. Lennox was unaware of it. He was unaware of anything except the monstrous perversity of the tale.

"I came directly from him to your rooms. Your man said you were going away. Thank goodness, I am not too late."

Cassy had seated herself, but now, reaching for the bundle, she stood up. Across the street, in the house opposite, a boy was lowering a shade. It seemed to Cassy that she had raised one. But there are explanations that explain nothing. To Lennox there was a shade suspended before Margaret, who had judged him unheard. It obscured her. He could not see her at all.

Over the way, the boy lowered a second shade and Cassy, as though prompted by it, raised another. "Paliser said you admitted it."

From the obscurity Lennox turned, but it was still about him. "Admitted what?"

Cassy reddened. "What I told you."

With the movement of the head that a bull has when he is going for you, Lennox bent his own. The movement, which was involuntary, was momentary. The shade had lifted. He saw Margaret, but behind her he saw others holding her back, telling her he was not fit to be spoken to. He was going for them. Meanwhile he had forgotten Cassy. He looked up, saw her, remembered the part attributed to her in the story and struck the table.

"It is damnable that such a thing should be said of you."

"Oh," Cassy put in. "It was not at all on my account that I told you. I – " She stopped short. The promised horsewhipping occurred to her.

Lennox took up the knife, gave it a turn, shoved it away. It was very much as though he had twisted it in somebody's gizzards. The idea had come to him that Paliser had concocted the admission. But, as he was unable to conceive what his object could be, he dismissed it. None the less, for what the man had said, he deserved to be booted down the club steps.

Cassy had stopped short. The story behind the story did not concern Lennox, yet as he might wonder how Paliser had ventured with her on such a subject, she began at it again.

"We were married recently, or anyway I thought so. To-day I discovered that the ceremony was bogus. Then I told him a thing or two and he told me that."

Lennox stared. Angry already, angry ever since the rupture, angry with that intensity of anger which only those who love – or who think they do – and who are thwarted in it ever know, and all the angrier because he had no one and could have no one to vent it on, until he got to the front and got at the Huns, at that last fillip from Cassy he saw some one on whom he could vent it, and yet to whom none the less he felt strangely grateful. For, whatever Paliser had done or omitted, at any rate, he had completely clarified the situation.

"I must run," said Cassy. "But you can tell Miss Austen, can't you?"

Lennox, controlling himself, motioned. "Would you mind repeating this to Jones?"

Cassy's eyebrows arched themselves. "It was hard enough to tell you. Were it not for your engagement, I wouldn't have said anything. When dreadful things happen to a girl, people always think that she must be dreadful herself. Isn't that nice of them? I – "

"See here," Lennox interrupted, "you can't leave it like this. Something has got to be done. I can give Paliser a hiding and I will. But that isn't enough. I don't know whether a criminal action will lie, but I do know that you can get damages and heavy ones."

Cassy's lovely eyes searched the room. "Who was that speaking? It wasn't you, was it?"

Lennox, recognising the rebuke, acknowledged it. "Forgive me. I forgot whom I was addressing. Jones will be less stupid. Let us have him in."

But when Jones, immediately requisitioned, appeared, Cassy again putting down her bundle, protested. "Mr. Lennox regards me as an Ariadne and expects me to act like a young lady in a department-store. Either rôle is too up-stage."

Jones, taken with her mobile mouth, her lovely eyes, the oval of her handsome face, said lightly: "It seems to me that you might assume any part."

Lennox struck out. "Paliser hocuspocused her with a fake marriage. He – "

"Oh," Cassy gently put in, "I have no one to blame but myself. I ought to have known better."

Jones nodded. "Probably you did know. The misadventure is rare of which we are not warned in advance. We cannot see the future but the future sees us. It sends us messages which we call premonitions."

Instantly Cassy was back in the Tamburini's room, where she had seen both beauty and horror. She had not reached the latter yet and the sudden vision Lennox dissipated.

"Stuff and nonsense! Haven't you anything else to say?"

Amiably Jones turned to him. "I can say that no one is wise on an empty stomach." He turned to Cassy. "The Splendor is not far. Will you dine with us, Mrs. Paliser?"

Violently Lennox repeated it; "Mrs. Paliser! Miss Cara is no more Mrs. Paliser than you are."

"To err is highly literary," Jones with great meekness replied. "I hear that it is even human."

Cassy reached again for the bundle. "It is only natural. If I had been told in advance, I could not have believed it. I could not have believed that mock marriages occur anywhere except in cheap fiction. But we live and unlearn. Now I must run."

Lennox took her hand. "I owe you a debt. Count on me."

He spoke gravely and the gravity of it, the force that he exhaled, comforted Cassy's bruised little heart and the comfort, the first that she had had, made her lip twitch. None of that, though! Reacting she rallied and smiled.

"Good-bye – and good luck!"

Jones saw her to the door, followed her out, followed her down to the street, where for a moment he detained her.

"Just a word, if you don't mind. You have been abominably treated and you seek no revenge. That is very fine. You have been abominably treated and you bear no malice. That is superior. You have been abominably treated and you accept it with a smile. That is alchemy. It is only a noble nature that can extract the beautiful from the base. Where do you live?"

At the change of key Cassy laughed but she told him. "Good-bye," she added. "My love to your cat."

She passed on into the sunset. The bundle seemed heavy now, but her heart was lighter. She had got it off, Lennox knew, presently a young woman would be informed and though she could not be expected to dance at the wedding, yet, after all —

The Park took her.

XXVI

When Cassy 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 cocked 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 Cassy'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 appetite? 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 substituted 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 hell to which one may look back and see that it was not hell but purgatory prior to paradise, futilely there he had sought the reason of his damnation. A few minutes before he had thought that Cassy'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 Cassy so he had thought and not without gratitude 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 animæ 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 Athenæum, 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?"

"In Paliser's box. He's to be alone and left it here with a note asking me to join him."

Deeply, beneath his breath, Jones swore, but with the same smile, he tried to shift the subject. "You're quite a belle, aren't you?"

"See here, Ogston," Lennox put in, "let me have it."

Ogston, fumbling in his white waistcoat, extracted the ticket and handed it over.

"By the way, Lennox, do you mind my doing a little touting for Cantillon? He's with Dunwoodie. Give him your law business – some of it, anyhow."

"I'll give him some, when I have it," answered Lennox, who was to have some, and sooner and far more monumentally, than either he, or even Jones, suspected.

"Good for you, Lennox. Good-night, Jones." The brilliant and beautifully dressed young man nodded and passed on.

But now the captain was bearing down on them.

Jones looked at Lennox. "You will have to come back to my shop after dinner. There is a phrase in your will that I omitted. I forgot the 'seized and possessed.'"

Lennox drank before he spoke. Then he said: "After dinner, I shall do for Paliser."

Jones, waiting until the captain had gone, looked at Lennox again. "The greatest revenge is the disdain of any."

Lennox made no reply. A waiter put a plate before him and another before Jones. Members passed, going to their tables or leaving them. Occasionally one of them stopped, exchanged the time of day and then passed on. In each exchange Jones collaborated. Lennox said nothing. The food before him he tormented, poking at it with a fork, but not eating it.

Presently he asked for coffee, drank a cup and got up.

Jones, too, got up and, to stay him, put out a hand.

Lennox, treating it, and him, like a cobweb, went on.

Afterward, Jones thought of the Wild Women of whom Æschylus tells, the terrible Daughters of Hazard that lurk in the shadows of coming events which, it may be, they have marshalled.

Afterward he thought of them. But at the moment, believing that Lennox would do nothing and realising that, in any case, nothing can be more futile than an attempt to avert the inevitable, he was about to resume his seat, when something on the floor attracted him. He bent over, took it, looked at it and tucked it in a pocket.

Then, sitting down again, mentally he followed Lennox, whom later he was to follow farther, whom he was to follow deep in the depths where the Wild Women, lurking in wait, had thrown him.