"Do you believe I am your friend?"

"I am sure of it, my dear Professor."

"Then I'll betray a sacred confidence. The carissima signora loves you. You didn't know it. But she loves you."

I stared for a moment at the dwarf as if he had been a reasonable being. Something seemed to click inside my head, like a clogged cog-wheel that had suddenly freed itself, and my mind went whirling away straight through the past few weeks. I tried to smile, and I said:

"You are quite mistaken."

"Oh, no," he replied, wagging his Napoleonic head. "Anastasius Papadopoulos is never mistaken. She told me so herself. She wept. She put her beautiful arms round my neck and sobbed on my shoulder."

I found myself reproving him gently. "You should not have told me this, my dear Professor. Such confidences are locked up in the heart of un galant homme, and are not revealed even to his dearest friend."

But my voice sounded hollow in my own ears, and what he said for the next few minutes I do not remember. The little man had told the truth to me, and Lola had told the truth to him. The realisation of it paralysed me. Why had I been such a fool as not to see it for myself? Memories of a hundred indications came tumbling one after another into my head—the forgotten glove, the glances, the changes of mood, the tears when she learned of my illness, the mysterious words, the abrupt little "You?" of yesterday. The woman was in love, deeply in love, in love with all the fervour of her big nature. And I had stood by and wondered what she meant by this and by that—things that would have been obvious to a coalheaver. I thought of Dale and I felt miserably guilty, horribly ashamed. How could I expect him to believe me when I told him that I had not wittingly stolen her affections from him. And her affections? Bon Dieu! What on earth could I do with them? What is the use of a woman's love to a dead man? And did I want it even for the tiny remainder of life?

Anastasius, perceiving that I paid but scant attention to his conversation, wriggled off his chair and stood before me with folded arms.

"You adore each other with a great passion," he said. "She is my Madonna, and you are my friend and benefactor. I will be your protection and defence. I will never let her go away with that infamous, gambling and murdering scoundrel. My gigantic combinations have matured. I bless your union."

He lifted his little arms in benediction. The situation was cruelly comical. For a moment I hated the mournful-visaged, posturing monkey, and had a wild desire to throw him out of the window and have done with him. I rose and, towering over him, was about to lecture him severely on his impertinent interference, when the sight of his scared face made me turn away with a laugh. What would be the use of reproaching him? He would only sit down on the floor and weep. So I paced the room, while he followed me with his eyes like an uncertain spaniel.

"Look here, Professor," said I at last. "Now that you've found Captain Vauvenarde, brought Madame Brandt and him together, and told me that she is in love with me, don't you think you've done enough? Don't you think your cats need your attention? Something terrible may be happening to them. I dreamed last night," I added with desperate mendacity, "that they were turned into woolly lambs."

"Monsieur," said the dwarf loftily, "my duty is here. And I care not whether my cats are turned into the angels of Paradise."

I groaned. "You are wasting a great deal of money over this affair," I urged.

"What is money to my gigantic combinations?"

"Tell me," I cried with considerable impatience. "What are your confounded combinations?"

He began to tremble violently. "I would rather die," said he, "than betray my secret."

"It's all some silly nonsense about that wretched horse!" I exclaimed.

He covered his ears with his hands. "Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Don't utter it!"

In another moment he was cowering on his knees before me.

"You, of all men, mustn't blaspheme. You whom I love like my master. You whom the divine lady loves. I can't bear it!" He continued to gibber unintelligibly.

He was stark mad. There was no question of it. For a moment I stood irresolute. Then I lifted him to his feet and patted his head soothingly.

"Never mind," said I. "I was wrong. It was a beautiful horse. There never was such a horse in the world. If I had a picture of him I would hang it up on the wall over my bed."

"Would you?" he cried joyfully. "Then I will give you one."

He trotted over to the bundle of papers that reposed in his hat on the floor, searched through them, and to my dismay handed me a faded, unmounted, and rather torn and crumpled photograph of the wonderful horse.

"There!" said he.

"I could not rob you of it," I protested.

"It will be my joy to know that you have it—that it is hanging over your bed. See—have you a pin? I myself will fix it for you."

While he was searching my table for pins the chasseur of the hotel came with a message from Madame Brandt. Would Monsieur come at once to Madame in her private room?

"I'll come now," I said. "Professor, you must excuse me."

"Don't mention it. I shall occupy myself in hanging the picture in the most artistic way possible."

So I left him, his mind apparently concentrated on the childish task of pinning the photograph of the ridiculous horse on my bedroom wall, and went with the most complicated feelings downstairs and through the corridors to Lola's apartments.

She rose to meet me as I entered.

"It's very kind of you to come," she said in her fluent but Britannic French. "May I present my husband, Monsieur Vauvenarde."

Monsieur Vauvenarde and I exchanged bows. I noticed at once that he wore the Frenchman's costume when he pays a visite de ceremonie, frock-coat and gloves, and that a silk hat lay on the table. I was glad that he paid her this mark of respect.

"I have had the pleasure of meeting you before, Monsieur," said he, "in circumstances somewhat different."

"I remember perfectly," said I.

"And your charming but inexperienced little friend—is he well?"

"He is at present decorating my room with photographs of Madame's late horse, Sultan," said I.

He was startled, and gave me a quick, sharp look. I did not notice it at the time, but I remembered it later. Then he broke into an indulgent laugh.

"The poor animal!" He turned to Lola. "How jealous I used to be of him! And how quickly the time flies. But give yourself the trouble of seating yourself, Monsieur."

He motioned me to a chair and sat down. He was a man of polished manner and had a pleasant voice. I guessed that in the days when he paid court to Lola, he had been handsome in his dark Norman way, and possessed considerable fascination. Evil living and sordid passions had coarsened his features, produced bagginess under the eyes and a shiftiness of glance. Idleness and an inverted habit of life were responsible for the nascent paunch and the rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He suggested the revivified corpse of a fine gentleman that had been unnaturally swollen. I had disliked him at the Cercle Africain; now I detested him heartily. The idea of Lola entering the vitiated atmosphere of his life was inexpressibly repugnant to me.

Contrary to her habit, Lola sat bolt upright on the stamped-velvet suite, the palms of her hands pressing the seat on either side of her. She caught the shade of disgust that swept over my face, and gave me a quick glance that pleaded for toleration. Her eyes, though bright, were sunken, like those of a woman who has not slept.

"Monsieur," said Vauvenarde, "my wife informs me that to your disinterested friendship is due this most charming reconciliation."

"Reconciliation?" I echoed. "It was quickly effected."

"Mon Dieu," he said. "I have always longed for the comforts of a home. My wife has grown tired of a migratory existence. She comes to find me. I hasten to meet her. There is nothing to keep us apart. The reconciliation was a matter of a few seconds. I wish to express my gratitude to you, and, therefore, I ask you to accept my most cordial thanks."

"It has always been a pleasure to me," said I very frigidly, "to place my services at the disposal of Madame Brandt."

"Vauvenarde, Monsieur," he corrected with a smile.

"And is Madame Vauvenarde equally satisfied with the—reconciliation?" I asked.

"I think Monsieur Vauvenarde is somewhat premature," said Lola, with a trembling lip. "There were conditions—"

"A mere question of protocol." He waved an airy hand.

"I don't know what that is," said Lola. "There are conditions I must fix, and I thought the advice of my friend, Monsieur de Gex—"

"Precisely, my dear Lola," he interrupted. "The principle is affirmed. We are reconciled. I proceed logically. The first thing I do is to thank Monsieur de Gex—you have a French name, Monsieur, and you pronounce it English fashion, which is somewhat embarrassing—But no matter. The next thing is the protocol. We have no possibility of calling a family council, and therefore, I acceded with pleasure to the intervention of Monsieur. It is kind of him to burden himself with our unimportant affairs."

The irony of his tone belied the suave correctitude of his words. I detested him more and more. More and more did I realise that the dying eumoirist is capable of petty human passions. My vanity was being sacrified. Here was a woman passionately in love with me proposing to throw herself into another man's arms—it made not a scrap of difference, in the circumstances, that the man was her husband—and into the arms of such a man! Having known me to decline—etcetera, etcetera! How could she face it? And why was she doing it? To save herself from me, or me from herself? She knew perfectly well that the little pain inside would precious soon settle that question. Why was she doing it? I should have thought that the first glance at the puffy reprobate would have been enough to show her the folly of her idea. However, it was comforting to learn that she had not surrendered at once.

"If I am to have the privilege, Monsieur," said I, "of acting as a family council, perhaps you may forgive my hinting at some of the conditions that doubtless are in Madame's mind."

"Proceed, Monsieur," said he.

"I want to know where I am," said Lola in English. "He took everything for granted from the first."

"Are you willing to go back to him?" I asked also in English.

She met my gaze steadily, and I saw a woman's needless pain at the back of her eyes. She moistened her lips with her tongue, and said:

"Under conditions."

"Monsieur," said I in French, turning to Vauvenarde, "forgive us for speaking our language."

"Perfectly," said he, and he smiled meaningly and banteringly at us both.

"In the first place, Monsieur, you are aware that Madame has a little fortune, which does not detract from the charm you have always found in her. It was left her by her father, who, as you know, tamed lions and directed a menagerie. I would propose that Madame appointed trustees to administer this little fortune."

"There is no necessity, Monsieur," he said. "By the law of France it is hers to do what she likes with."

"Precisely," I rejoined. "Trustees would prevent her from doing what she liked with it. Madame has indeed a head for affairs, but she also has a woman's heart, which sometimes interferes with a woman's head in the most disastrous manner."

"Article No. 1 of the protocol. Allez toujours, Monsieur."

I went on, feeling happier. "The next article treats of a little matter which I understand has been the cause of differences in the past between Madame and yourself. Madame, although she has not entered the arena for some time, has not finally abandoned it." I smiled at the look of surprise on Lola's face. "An artist is always an artist, Monsieur. She is willing, however, to renounce it for ever, if you, on your side, will make quite a small sacrifice."

"Name it, Monsieur."

"You have a little passion for baccarat——"

"Surely, Monsieur," said he blandly, "my wife would not expect me to give up what is the mere recreation of every clubman."

"As a recreation pure and simple—she would not insist too much, but——" I shrugged my shoulders. I flatter myself on being able to do it with perfect French expressiveness. I caught, to my satisfaction, an angry gleam in his eye.

"Do you mean to say, Monsieur, that I play for more than recreation?"

"How dare I say anything, Monsieur. But Madame is prejudiced against the Cercle Africain. For a bachelor there is little to be said against it—but for a married man—you seize the point?" said I.

"Bien, Monsieur," he said, swallowing his wrath. "And Article 3?"

"Since you have left the army—would it not be better to engage in some profession—unless your private fortune dispenses you from the necessity."

He said nothing but: "Article 4?"

"It would give Madame comfort to live out of Algiers."

"Moi aussi," he replied rather unexpectedly. "We have the whole of France to choose from."

"Would not Madame be happier if she lived out of France, also? She has always longed for a social position."

"Eh, bien? I can give her one in France."

"Are you quite sure?" I asked, looking him in the eyes.

"Monsieur," said he, rising and giving his moustache a swashbuckler twist upward, "what are you daring to insinuate?"

I leaned back in my chair and fingered the waxed ends of mine.

"Nothing, Monsieur; I ask a simple question, which you surely can have no difficulty in answering."

"Your questions are the height of indiscretion," he cried angrily.

"In that case, before we carry this interview further, the Family Council and Madame would do well to have a private consultation."

"Monsieur," he cried, completely losing his temper. "I forbid you to use that tone to me. You are making a mock of me. You are insulting me. I bore with you long enough to see how much further your insolence would dare to go. I'm not to have a hand in the administration of my wife's money? I'm to forsake a plentiful means of livelihood? I'm to become a commercial traveller? I'm to expatriate myself? I'm to explain, too, the reasons why I left the army? I would not condescend. Least of all to you."

"May I ask why, Monsieur?"

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" He stamped his foot. "Do you take me for a fool? Here I am—I came at my wife's request, ready to take her back as my wife, ready to condone everything—yes, Monsieur, as a man of the world—you think I have no eyes, no understanding—ready to take her off your hands—"

I leaped to my feet.

"Monsieur!" I thundered.

Lola gave a cry and rushed forward. I pushed her aside, and glared at him. I was in a furious rage. We glared at each other eye to eye. I pointed to the door.

"Monsieur, sortez!"

I went to it and flung it wide. Anastasius Papadopoulos trotted into the room.

His entrance was so queer, so unexpected, so anti-climatic, that for the moment the three of us were thrown off our emotional balance.

"I have heard all, I have heard all," shrieked the little man. "I know you for what you are. I am the champion of the carissima signora and the protector of the English statesman. You are a traitor and murderer—"

Vauvenarde lifted his hand in a threatening gesture.

"Hold your tongue, you little abortion!" he shouted.

But Anastasius went on screaming and flourishing his bundle of papers.

"Ask him if he remembers the horse Sultan; ask him if he remembers the horse Sultan!"

Lola took him by the shoulders.

"Anastasius, you must go away from here—to please me. It's my orders."

But he shook himself free, and the silk hat which he had not removed fell off in the quick struggle.

"Ask him if he remembers Saupiquet," he screamed, and then banged the door.

A malevolent devil put a sudden idea into my head and prompted speech.

"Do you remember Saupiquet?" I asked ironically.

"Monsieur, meddle with your own affairs and let me pass. You shall hear from me."

The dwarf planted himself before the door.

"You shall not pass till you have answered me. Do you remember Saupiquet? Do you remember the five francs you gave to Saupiquet to let you into Sultan's stable? Ah! Ha! Ha! You wince. You grow pale. Do you remember the ball of poison you put down Sultan's throat?"

Lola started forward with flaming eyes and anguished face.

"You—you?" she gasped. "You were so ignoble as to do that?"

"The accursed brute!" shouted Vauvenarde. "Yes, I did it. I wish I had burned out his entrails."

Anastasius sprang at him like a tiger cat. I had a quick vision of the dwarf clinging in the air against the other's bulky form, one hand at his throat, and then of an incredibly swift flash of steel. The dwarf dropped off and rolled backwards, revealing something black sticking out of Vauvenarde's frock-coat—for the second I could not realise what it was. Then Vauvenarde, with a ghastly face, reeled sideways and collapsed in a heap on the ground.



CHAPTER XV

Of what happened immediately afterwards I have but a confused memory. I remember that Lola and I both fell on our knees beside the stabbed man, and I remember his horrible staring eyes and open mouth. I remember that, though she was white and shaky, she neither shrieked, went into hysterics, nor fainted. I remember rushing down to the manager; I remember running with him breathlessly through obscure passages of the hotel in search of a doctor who was attending a sick member of the staff. I remember the rush back, the doctor bending over the body, which Lola had partially unclothed, and saying:

"He is dead. The blade has gone straight through his heart."

And I have in my mind the unforgettable and awful picture of Anastasius Papadopoulos disregarded in a corner of the room, with his absurd silk hat on—some reflex impulse had caused him to pick it up and put it on his head—sitting on the floor amid a welter of documents relating to the death of the horse Sultan, one of which he was eagerly perusing.

After this my memory is clear. It was only the first awful shock and horror of the thing that dazed me.

The man was dead, said the doctor. He must lie until the police arrived and drew up the proces-verbal. The manager went to telephone to the police, and while he was gone I told the doctor what had occurred. Anastasius took no notice of us. Lola, holding her nerves under iron control, stood bolt upright looking alternately at the doctor and myself as we spoke. But she did not utter a word. Presently the manager returned. The alarm had not been given in the hotel. No one knew anything about the occurrence. Lola went into her bedroom and came back with a sheet. The manager took it from her and threw it over the dead man. The doctor stood by Anastasius. The end of a strip of sunlight by the window just caught the dwarf in his corner.

"Get up," said the doctor.

Anastasius, without raising his eyes from his papers, waved him away.

"I am busy. I am engaged on important papers of identification. He had a white star on his forehead, and his tail was over a metre long."

Lola approached him.

"Anastasius," she said gently. He looked up with a radiant smile. "Put away those papers." Like a child he obeyed and scrambled to his feet. Then, seeing the unfamiliar face of the doctor for the first time, he executed one of his politest and most elaborate bows. The doctor after looking at him intently for a while, turned to me.

"Mad. Utterly mad. Apparently he has no consciousness of what he has done."

He lured him to the sofa and sat beside him and began to talk in a low tone of the contents of the papers. Anastasius replied cheerfully, proud at being noticed by the stranger. The papers referred to a precious secret, a gigantic combination, which he had spent years in maturing. I shivered at the sound of his voice, and turned to Lola.

"This is no place for you. Go into your bedroom till you are wanted."

I held the door open for her. She put her hands up to her face and reeled, and I thought she would have fallen; but she roused herself.

"I don't want to break down—not yet. I shall if I'm left alone—come and sit with me, for God's sake."

"Very well," said I.

She passed me and I followed; but at the door I turned and glanced round the cheerful, sunny room. There, against the background of blue sky and tree tops framed by the window, sat Anastasius Papadopoulos, swinging his little legs and talking bombastically to the tanned and grizzled doctor, and opposite stood the correctly attired hotel manager in the attitude in which he habitually surveyed the lay-out of the table d'hote, keeping watch beside the white-covered shape on the floor. I was glad to shut the sight from my eyes. We waited silently in the bedroom, Lola sitting on the bed and hiding her face in the pillows, and I standing by the window and looking out at the smiling mockery of the fair earth. An agonising spasm of pain—a momento mori—shot through me and passed away. I thanked God that a few weeks would see the end of me. I had always enjoyed the comedy of life. It had been to me a thing of infinite jest. But this stupid, meaningless tragedy was carrying the joke too far. My fastidiousness revolted at its vulgarity. I no longer wished to inhabit a world where such jests were possible. . . . I had never seen a man die before. I was surprised at the swiftness and the ugliness of it. . . . I suddenly realised that I was smoking a cigarette, which I was quite unconscious of having lit. I threw it away. A minute afterwards I felt that if I did not smoke I should go crazy. So I lit another. . . . The ghastly silliness of the murder! . . . Colonel Bunnion's loud laugh rose from the terrace below, jarring horribly on my ears. A long green praying mantis that had apparently mounted on the bougainvillea against the hotel wall appeared in meditative stateliness on the window-sill. I picked the insect up absent-mindedly, and began to play with it. Lola's voice from the bed startled me and caused me to drop the mantis. She spoke hoarsely.

"Tell me—what are they going to do with him?"

I turned round. She had raised a crushed face from the pillows, and looked at me haggardly. I noticed a carafe of brandy and a siphon by the bedside. I mixed her a strong dose, and, before replying, made her drink it.

"They'll place him under restraint, that's all. He's not responsible for his actions."

"He did that once before—I told you—but without the knife—I wish I could cry—I can't—You don't think it heartless of me—but my brain is on fire—I shall always see it—I wish to God I had never asked him to come—Why did I? My God, why did I?—It was my fault—I wanted to see him—to judge for myself how much of the old Andre was left—there was good in him once—I thought I might possibly help him—There was nothing for me to do in the world—Without you any kind of old hell was good enough—That's why I sent for him—When he came, after a bit, I was afraid, and sent for you——"

"Afraid of what?" I asked.

"He asked me at once what money I had—Then there seemed to be no doubt in his mind that I would join him—We spoke of you—the friend who could advise me—He never said—what he said afterwards—I thought it kind of him to consent to see you—I rang the bell and sent the chasseur for you. I supposed Anastasius had gone home—I never thought of him. The poor little man was sweet to me, just like a dog—a silent, sympathetic dog—I spoke to him as I would to something that wouldn't understand—all sorts of foolish things—Now and then a woman has to empty her heart"—she shivered—her hands before her face.

"It's my fault, it's my fault."

"These things are no one's fault," I said gently. But just as I was beginning to console her with what thumb-marked scraps of platitude I could collect—the only philosophy after all, such is the futility of systems, adequate to the deep issues of life—the door opened and the manager announced that the police had arrived.

We went through the ordeal of the proces-verbal. Anastasius, confronted with his victim, had no memory of what had occurred. He shrieked and shrank and hid his face in Lola's dress. When he was forced to speak he declared that the dead man was not Captain Vauvenarde. Captain Vauvenarde was at the Cercle Africain. He, himself, was seeking him. He would take the gendarmes there, and they could arrest the Captain for the murder of Sultan of which his papers contained indubitable proofs. Eventually the poor little wretch was led away in custody, proud and smiling, entirely convinced that he was leading his captors to the arrest of Captain Vauvenarde. On the threshold he turned and bowed to us so low that the brim of his silk hat touched the floor. Then Lola's nerve gave way and she broke into a passion of awful weeping.

The commissaire de police secured the long thin knife (how the dwarf had managed to conceal it on his small person was a mystery) and the bundle of documents, and accompanied me to my room to see whether he had left anything there to serve as a piece de conviction. We found only the crumpled picture of the horse Sultan neatly pinned against my bedroom wall, and on the floor a ribbon tied like a garter with a little bell opposite the bow. On it was written "Santa Bianca," and I knew it was the collar of the beloved cat which he must have been carrying about him for a talisman. The commissaire took this also.



If you desire to know the details of the judicial proceedings connected with the murder of Andre Marie-Joseph Vauvenarde, ex-Captain in the Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the trial of Anastasius Papadopoulos, I must refer you to the Algerian, Parisian, and London Press. There you will find an eagerly picturesque account of the whole miserable affair. Now, not only am I unable to compete with descriptive verbatim reporters on their own ground, but also a consecutive statement, either bald or graphic, of the tedious horrors Lola Brandt and I had to undergo, would be foreign to the purpose of these notes, however far from their original purpose an ironical destiny has caused them to wander. You know nearly all that is necessary for you to know, so that when I am dead you may not judge me too harshly. The remainder I can summarise in a few words. At any rate, I have told the truth, often more naively than one would have thought possible for a man who prided himself as much as I did on his epicurean sophistication.

These have been days, as I say, of tedious horror. There have been endless examinations, reconstructions of the crime, exposures in daring publicity of the private lives of the protagonists of the lunatic drama. The French judges and advocates have accepted the account given by Lola and myself of our mutual relations with a certain mocking credulity. The Press hasn't accepted it at all. It took as a matter of course the view held by the none too noble victim. At first, seeing Lola shrug her shoulders with supreme indifference as to her own reputation, I cared but little for these insinuations. I wrote such letters to my sisters and to Dale as I felt sure would be believed, and let the long-eared, gaping world go hang. Besides, I had other things to think of. Physical pain is insistent, and I have suffered damnable torture. The pettiness of the legal inquiry has been also a maddening irritation. Nothing has been too minute for the attention of the French judiciary. It seemed as though the whole of the evil gang of the Cercle Africain were called as witnesses. They testified as to Captain Vauvenarde's part proprietorship of the hell—as to wrong practices that occurred there—as to the crazy conduct of both Anastasius and myself on the occasion of my insane visit. Officers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique were compelled further to blacken the character of the dead man—he had been a notorious plucker of pigeons during most of his military career, and when at last he was caught red-handed palming the king at ecarte, he was forced to resign his commission. Arabs came from the slums with appalling stories. Even the stolid Saupiquet, dragged from Toulon, gave evidence as to the five-franc bribe and the debt of fifteen sous, and identified the horse Sultan by the crumpled photograph. Lola and I have been racked day after day with questions—some, indeed, prompted by the suspicion that Vauvenarde might have met his death directly by our hand instead of that of Anastasius. It was the Procureur-general who said: "It can be argued that you would benefit by the decease of the defunct." I replied that we could not benefit in any way. My sole object was to effect a reconciliation between husband and wife. "Will you explain why you gave yourself that trouble?" I never have smiled so grimly as I did then. How could I explain my precious pursuit of the eumoirous to a French Procureur-general? How could I put before him the point of view of a semi-disembodied spirit? I replied with lame lack of originality that my actions proceeded from disinterested friendship. "You are a pure altruist then?" said he. "Very pure," said I. . . . It was only the facts of the scabbard of the knife having been found attached to the dwarf's person beneath his clothes, and of certain rambling menaces occurring in his Sultan papers that saved us from the indignity of being arrested and put into the dock. . . .

During all this time I remained at the hotel at Mustapha Superieur. Lola moved to a suite of rooms in another hotel a little way down the hill. I saw her daily. At first she shrank from publicity and refused to go out, save in a closed carriage to the town when her presence was necessary at the inquiries. But after a time I persuaded her to brave the stare of the curious and stroll with me among the eucalyptus woods above. We cut ourselves off from other human companionship and felt like two lost souls wandering alone through mist. She conducted herself with grave and simple dignity. . . . Once or twice she visited Anastasius in prison. She found him humanely treated and not despondent. He thought they had arrested him for the poisoning of the horse, and laughed at their foolishness. As they refused to return him his dossier, he occupied himself in reconstructing it, and wrote pages and pages of incoherence to prove the guilt of Captain Vauvenarde. He was hopelessly mad. . . . The bond of pain bound me very close to Lola.

"What are you going to do with your life?" I asked her one day.

"So long as I have you as a friend, it doesn't greatly matter."

"You forget," I said, "that you can't have me much longer."

"Are you going to leave me? It's not because I have dragged you through all this dirt and horror. Another woman might say that of another man—but not I of you. Why are you going to leave me? I want so little—only to see you now and then—to keep the heart in me."

"Can't you realise, that what I said in London is true?"

"No. I can't. It's unbelievable. You can't believe it yourself. If you did, how could you go on behaving like anybody else—like me for instance?"

"What would you do if you were condemned to die?"

She shuddered. "I should go mad with fear—I——" She broke off and remained for some moments reflective, with knitted brow. Then she lifted her head proudly. "No, I shouldn't. I should face it like you. Only cowards are afraid. It's best to show things that you don't care a hang for them."

"Keep that sublime je m'en fich'isme up when I'm dead and buried," said I, "and you'll pull through your life all right. The only thing you must avoid is the pursuit of eumoiriety."

"What on earth is that?" she asked.

"The last devastating vanity," said I.

And so it is.

"When you are gone," she said bravely, "I shall remember how strong and true you were. It will make me strong too."

I acquiesced silently in her proposition. In this age of flippancy and scepticism, if a human soul proclaims sincerely its faith in the divinity of a rabbit, in God's name don't disturb it. It is something whereto to refer his aspirations, his resolves; it is a court of arbitration, at the lowest, for his spiritual disputes; and the rabbit will be as effective an oracle as any other. For are not all religions but the strivings of the spirit towards crystallisation at some point outside the environment of passions and appetites which is the flesh, so that it can work untrammelled: and are not all gods but the accidental forms, conditioned by circumstance, which this crystallisation takes? All gods in their anthropo-, helio-, thero-, or what-not-morphic forms are false; but, on the other hand, all gods in their spiritual essence are true. So I do not deprecate my prospective unique position in Lola Brandt's hagiology. It was better for her soul that I should occupy it. Even if I were about to live my normal life out, like any other hearty human, marry and beget children, I doubt whether I should attempt to shake my wife's faith in my heroical qualities.

This was but a fragment of one among countless talks. Some were lighter in tone, others darker, the mood of man being much like a child's balloon which rises or falls as the strata of air are more rarefied or more dense. Perhaps during the time of strain, the atmosphere was more often rarefied, and our conversation had the day's depressing incidents for its topics. We rarely spoke of the dead man. He was scarcely a subject for panegyric, and it was useless to dwell on the memory of his degradation. I think we only once talked of him deeply and at any length, and that was on the day of the funeral. His brother, a manufacturer at Clermont-Ferrand, and a widowed aunt, apparently his only two surviving relatives, arrived in Algiers just in time to attend the ceremony. They had seen the report of the murder in the newspapers and had started forthwith. The brother, during an interview with Lola, said bitter things to her, reproaching her with the man's downfall, and cast on her the responsibility of his death.

"He spoke," she said, "as if I had suggested the murder and practically put the knife into the poor crazy little fellow's hand."

The Vauvenardes must have been an amiable family.

"Before I came," she said a little while later, "I still had some tenderness for him—a woman has for the only man that has been—really—in her life. I wish I could feel it now. I wish I could feel some respect even. But I can't. If I could, it would lessen the horror that has got hold of me to my bones."

It was a torture to her generous soul that she could not grieve for him. She could only shudder at the tragedy. In her heart she grieved more for Anastasius Papadopoulos, and in so doing she was, in her feminine way, self-accusative of callous lack of human feeling. It was my attempt to bring her to a more rational state of mind that caused us to review the dead man's career, and recapitulate the unpleasing incidents of the last interview.

Of Captain Vauvenarde, no more. He has gone whither I am going. That his soul may rest in peace is my earnest prayer. But I do not wish to meet him.

Lola went tearless and strong through the horrible ordeal of the judicial proceedings. She said I gave her courage. Perhaps, unconsciously, I did. It was only when the end came that she broke down, although she knew exactly what the end would be. And I, too, felt a lump in my throat when they sentenced Anastasius Papadopoulos to the asylum, and I saw him for the last time, the living parody of Napoleon III, frock-coated and yellow-gloved, the precious, newly written dossier in his hand, as he disappeared with a mournful smile from the court, after bowing low to the judge and to us, without having understood the significance of anything that had happened.

In the carriage that took us home she wept and sobbed bitterly.

"I loved him so. He was the only creature on earth that loved me. He loved me as only a dog can love—or an angel."

I let her cry. What could I say or do?



These have been weeks of tedious horror and pain. With the exception of Colonel Bunnion, I have kept myself aloof from my fellow creatures in the hotel, even taking my meals in my own rooms, not wishing to be stared at as the hero of the scandal that convulsed the place. And with regard to Colonel Bunnion shall I be accused of cynicism if I say that I admitted him—not to my confidence—but to my company, because I know that it delighted the honest but boring fellow to prove to himself that he could rise above British prejudice and exhibit tact in dealing with a man in a delicate position? For, mark you, all the world—even those nearest and dearest to me as I soon discovered—believed that the wife of the man who was murdered before my eyes was my mistress. Colonel Bunnion was kind, and he meant to be kind. He was a gentleman for all his wearisomeness, and his kindness was such as I could accept. But I know what I say about him is true. Ye gods! Haven't I felt myself the same swelling pride in my broadmindedness? When a man is going on my journey he does not palter with truth.

Though I held myself aloof, as I say, from practically all my fellow creatures here, I have not been cut off from the outside world. My sisters, like this French court in Algiers, have accepted my statement with polite incredulity. Their letters have been full of love, half-veiled reproach, anxiety as to their social position, and an insane desire to come and take care of me. This I have forbidden them to do. The pain they would have inflicted on themselves, dear souls, would have far outweighed the comfort I might have gained from their ministrations. Then I have had piteous letters from Dale.

". . . Your telegram reassured me, though I was puzzled. Now I get a letter from Lola, telling me it's all off—that she never loved me—that she valued my youth and my friendship, but that it is best for us not to meet again. What is the meaning of it, Simon? For Heaven's sake tell me. I can't think of anything else. I can't sleep. I am going off my head. . . ."

Again. ". . . This awful newspaper report and your letter of explanation—I have them side by side. Forgive me, Simon. I don't know what to believe, where to turn. . . . I have looked up to you as the best and straightest man I know. You must be. Yet why have you done this? Why didn't you tell me she was married? Why didn't she tell me? I can't write properly, my head is all on a buzz. The beastly papers say you were living with her in Algiers—but you weren't, were you? It would be too horrible. In fact, you say you weren't. But, all the same, you have stolen her from me. It wasn't like you. . . . And this awful murder. My God! you don't know what it all means to me. It's breaking my heart. . . ."

And Lady Kynnersley wrote—with what object I scarcely know. The situation was far beyond the poor lady's by-laws and regulations for the upbringing of families and the conduct of life. The elemental mother in her battled on the side of her only son—foolishly, irrationally, unkindly. Her exordium was as correct as could be. The tragedy shocked her, the scandal grieved her, the innuendoes of the Press she refused to believe; she sympathised with me deeply. But then she turned from me to Dale, and feminine unreason took possession of her pen. She bitterly reproached herself for having spoken to me of Madame Brandt. Had she known how passionate and real was this attachment, she would never have interfered. The boy was broken-hearted. He accused me of having stolen her from him—his own words. He took little interest in his electioneering campaign, spoke badly, unconvincingly; spent hours in alternate fits of listlessness and anger. She feared for her darling's health and reason. She made an appeal to me who professed to love him—if it were honourably possible, would I bring Madame Brandt back to him? She was willing now to accept Dale's estimate of her worth. Could I, at the least, prevail on Madame Brandt to give him some hope—of what she did not know—but some hope that would save him from ruining his career and "doing something desperate"?

And another letter from Dale:

". . . I can't work at this election. For God's sake, give her back to me. Then I won't care. What is Parliament to me without her? And the election is as good as lost already. The other side has made as much as possible of the scandal. . . ."

The only letters that have not been misery to read have come from Eleanor Faversham. There was one passage which made me thank God that He had created such women as Eleanor—

"Don't fret over the newspaper lies, dear. Those who love you—and why shouldn't I love you still?—know the honourable gentleman that you are. Write to me if it would ease your heart and tell me just what you feel you can. Now and always you have my utter sympathy and understanding."

And this is the woman of whose thousand virtues I dared to speak in flippant jest.

Heaven forgive me.

After receiving Lady Kynnersley's appeal, I went to Lola. It was just before the case came on at the Cour d'Assises. She had finished luncheon in her private room and was sitting over her coffee. I joined her. She wore the black blouse and skirt with which I have not yet been able to grow familiar, as it robbed her of the peculiar fascinating quality which I have tried to suggest by the word pantherine. Coffee over, we moved to the window which opened on a little back garden—the room was on the ground floor—in which grew prickly pear and mimosa, and newly flowering heliotrope. I don't know why I should mention this, except that some scenes impress themselves, for no particular reason, on the memory, while others associated with more important incidents fade into vagueness. I picked a bunch of heliotrope which she pinned at her bosom.

"Lola," I said, "I want to speak to you seriously."

She smiled wanly: "Do we ever speak otherwise these dreadful days?"

"It's about Dale. Read this," said I, and I handed her Lady Kynnersley's letter. She read it through and returned it to me.

"Well?"

"I asked you a week or two ago what you were going to do with your life," I said. "Does that letter offer you any suggestion?"

"I'm to give him some hope—what hope can I give him?"

"You're a free woman—free to marry. For the boy's sake the mother will consent. When she knows you as well as we know you she will—"

"She will—what? Love me?"

"She's a woman not given to loving—except, in unexpected bursts, her offspring. But she will respect you."

She stood for a few moments silent, her arm resting against the window jamb and her head on her arm. She remained there so long that at last I rose and, looking at her face, saw that her eyes were full of tears. She dashed them away with the back of her hand, gave me a swift look, and went and sat in the shadow of the room. An action of this kind on the part of a woman signifies a desire for solitude. I lit a cigarette and went into the garden.

It was a sorry business. I saw as clearly as Lola that Lady Kynnersley desired to purchase Dale's immediate happiness at any price, and that the future might bring bitter repentance. But I offered no advice. I have finished playing at Deputy Providence. A madman letting off fireworks in a gunpowder factory plays a less dangerous game.

Presently she joined me and ran her arm through mine.

"I'll write to Dale this afternoon," she said. "Don't let us talk of it any more now. You are tired out. It's time for you to go and lie down. I'll walk with you up the hill."

It has come to this, that I must lie down for some hours during the day lest I should fall to pieces.

"I suppose I'll have to," I laughed. "What a thing it is to have the wits of a man and the strength of a baby."

She pressed my arm and said in her low caressing voice which I had not heard for many weeks: "I shouldn't be so proud of those man's wits, if I were you."

I knew she said it playfully with reference to masculine non-perception of the feminine; but I chose to take it broadly.

"My dear Lola," said I, "it has been borne in upon me that I am the most witless fool that the unwisdom of generations of English country squires has ever succeeded in producing."

"Don't talk rot," she said, with foolishness in her eyes.

She accompanied me bareheaded in the sunshine to the gate of my hotel.

"Come and dine with me, if you're well enough," she said as we parted.

I assented, and when the evening came I went. Did I not say that we were like two lost souls wandering alone in the mist?

It was only when I rose to bid her good-night that she referred to Dale.

"I wrote to him this afternoon," she announced curtly.

"You said you would do so."

"Would you like to know what I told him?"

She put her hands behind her back and stood facing me, somewhat defiantly, in all her magnificence. I smiled. Women, much as they scoff at the blindness of our sex, are often transparent.

"It's your firm determination to tell me," said I. "Well?"

She advanced a step nearer to me, and looked me straight in the eyes defiantly.

"I told him that I loved you with all my heart and all my soul. I told him that you didn't know it; that you didn't care a brass curse for me; that you had acted as you thought best for the happiness of himself and me. I told him that while you lived I could not think of another man. I told him that if you could face Death with a smile on your face, he might very well show the same courage and not chuck things right and left just because a common woman wouldn't marry him or live with him and spoil his career. There! That's what I told him. What do you think?"

"Heaven knows what effect it will have," said I, wearily, for I was very, very tired. "But why, my poor Lola, have you wasted your love on a shadow like me?"

She answered after the foolish way of women.



I have not heard from either Dale or Lady Kynnersley. A day or two ago, in reply to a telegram to Raggles, I learned that Dale had lost the election.

This, then, is the end of my apologia pro vita mea, which I began with so resonant a flourish of vainglory. I have said all that there is to be said. Nothing more has happened or is likely to happen until they put me under the earth. Oh, yes, I was forgetting. In spite of my Monte Cristo munificence, poor Latimer has been hammered on the Stock Exchange. Poor Lucy and the kids!

I shall have, I think, just enough strength left to reach Mentone—this place is intolerable now—and there I shall put myself under the care of a capable physician who, with his abominable drugs, will doubtless begin the cheerful work of inducing the mental decay which I suppose must precede physical dissolution.

I must confess that I am disappointed with the manner of my exit. I had imagined it quite different. I had beheld myself turning with a smile and a jest for one last view of the faces over which I, in my eumoirous career, had cast the largesse of happiness, and the vanishing with a gallant carelessness through the dusky portals. Instead of that, here am I sneaking out of life by the back door, covering my eyes for very shame. And glad? Oh, God, how glad I am to slink out of it!

I have indeed accomplished the thing which I set out to do. I have severed a boy from the object of his passion. What an achievement for the crowning glory of a lifetime! And at what a cost: one fellow-creature's life and another's reason. On me lies the responsibility. Vauvenarde, it is true, did not adorn this grey world, but he drew the breath of life, and, through my jesting agency, it was cut off. Anastasius Papadopoulos, had he not come under my malign influence would have lived out his industrious, happy and dream-filled days. Lesser, but still great price, too, has been paid. Jealous hatred, misery and failure for the being I care most for in the world, the shame of a sordid scandal to those that hold me dear, the hopeless love and speedy mourning of a woman not without greatness.

I have tried to make a Tom Fool of Destiny—and Destiny has proved itself to be the superior jester of the two, and has made a grim and bedraggled Tom Fool of me.

. . . I must end this. I have just fallen in a faint on the floor, and Rogers has revived me with some drops Hunnington had given me in view of such a contingency.

These are the last words I shall write. Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.



CHAPTER XVI

It is many weeks since I wrote those words which I thought were to be my last. I read them over now, and laugh aloud. Life is more devilishly humorous than I in my most nightmare dreams ever imagined. Instead of dying at Mentone as I proposed, I am here, at Mustapha Superieur, still living. And let me tell you the master joke of the Arch-Jester.

I am going to live.

I am not going to die. I am going to live. I am quite well.

Think of it. Is it farcical, comical, tragical, or what?

This is how it has befallen. The last thing I remember of the old conditions was Rogers packing my things, and a sudden, awful, excruciating agony. I lost consciousness, remained for days in a bemused, stupefied state, which I felt convinced was death, and found particularly pleasant. At last I woke to a sense of bodily constriction and discomfort, and to the queer realisation that what I had taken for the Garden of Prosperpine was my own bedroom, and that the pale lady whom I had so confidently assumed was she who, crowned with calm leaves, "gathers all things mortal with cold, immortal hands" was no other than a blue-and-white-vested hospital nurse.

"What the——" I began.

"Chut!" she said, flitting noiselessly to my side. "You mustn't talk." And then she poured something down my throat. I lay back, wondering what it all meant. Presently a grizzled and tanned man, wearing a narrow black tie, came into the room. His face seemed oddly familiar. The nurse whispered to him. He came up to the bed, and asked me in French how I felt.

"I don't know at all," said I.

He laughed. "That's a good sign. Let me see how you are getting on." He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and held my pulse. These formalities completed, he turned up the bedclothes and did something with my body. Only then did I realise that I was tightly bandaged. My impressions grew clearer, and when he raised his face I recognised the doctor who had sat on the sofa with Anastasius Papadopoulos.

"Nothing could be better," said he. "Keep quiet, and all will be well."

"Will you kindly explain?" I asked.

"You've had an operation. Also a narrow escape."

I smiled at him pityingly. "What is the good of taking all this trouble? Why are you wasting your time?"

He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then he laughed as the light came to him.

"Oh, I understand! Yes. Your English doctors had told you you were going to die. That an operation would be fatal—so your good friend Madame Brandt informed us—but we—nous autres Francais—are more enterprising. Kill or cure. We performed the operation—we didn't kill you—and here you are—cured."

My heart sickened with a horrible foreboding. A clamminess, such as others feel at the approach of death, spread over my brow and neck.

"Good God!" I cried, "you are not trying to tell me that I'm going to live?"

"Why, of course I am!" he exclaimed, brutally delighted. "If nothing else kills you, you'll live to be a hundred."

"Oh, damn!" said I. "Oh, damn! Oh, damn!" and the tears of physical weakness poured down my cheeks.

"Ce sont des droles de gens, les Anglais!" I heard him whisper to the nurse before he left the room.

Belonging to a queer folk or not, I found the prospect more and more dismally appalling according as my mind regained its clarity. It was the most overwhelming, piteous disappointment I have ever experienced in my life. I cursed in my whimpering, invalid fashion.

"But don't you want to get well?" asked the wide-eyed nurse.

"Certainly not! I thought I was dead, and I was very happy. I've been tricked and cheated and fooled," and I dashed my fist against the counterpane.

"If you go on in this way," said the nurse, "you will commit suicide."

"I don't care!" I cried—and then, they tell me, fainted. My temperature also ran up, and I became lightheaded again. It was not until the next day that I recovered my sanity. This time Lola was in the room with the nurse, and after a while the latter left us together. Even Lola could not understand my paralysing dismay.

"But think of it, my dear friend," she argued, "just think of it. You are saved—saved by a miracle. The doctor says you will be stronger than you have ever been before."

"All the more dreadful will it be," said I. "I had finished with life. I had got through with it. I don't want a second lifetime. One is quite enough for any sane human being. Why on earth couldn't they have let me die?"

Lola passed her cool hand over my forehead.

"You mustn't talk like that—Simon," she said, in her deepest and most caressing voice, using my name somewhat hesitatingly, for the first time. "You mustn't. A miracle really has been performed. You've been raised from the dead—like the man in the Gospel——"

"Yes," said I petulantly, "Lazarus. And does the Gospel tell us what Lazarus really thought of the unwarrantable interference with his plans? Of course he had to be polite—"

"Oh, don't!" cried, Lola, shocked. In a queer unenlightened way, she was a religious woman.

"I'm sorry," said I, feeling ashamed of myself.

"If you knew how I have prayed God to make you well," she said. "If I could have died for you, I would—gladly—gladly——"

"But I wanted to die, my dear Lola," I insisted, with the egotism of the sick. "I object to this resuscitation. I say it is monstrous that I should have to start a second lifetime at my age. It's all very well when you begin at the age of half a minute—but when you begin at eight-and-thirty years——"

"You have all the wisdom of eight-and-thirty years to start with."

"There is only one thing more disastrous to a man than the wisdom of thirty-eight years," I declared with mulish inconvincibility, "and that is the wisdom he may accumulate after that age."

She sighed and abandoned the argument. "We are going to make you well in spite of yourself," she said.

They, namely, the doctor, the nurse, and Lola, have done their best, and they have succeeded. But their task has been a hard one. The patient's will to live is always a great factor in his recovery. My disgust at having to live has impeded my convalescence, and I fully believe that it is only Lola's tears and the doctor's frenzied appeals to me not to destroy the one chance of his life of establishing a brilliant professional reputation that have made me consent to face existence again.

As for the doctor, he was pathetically insistent.

"But you must get well!" he gesticulated. "I am going to publish it, your operation. It will make my fortune. I shall at last be able to leave this hole of an Algiers and go to Paris! You don't know what I've done for you! I've performed an operation on you that has never been performed successfully before. I thought it had been done, but I found out afterwards my English confreres were right. It hasn't. I've worked a miracle in surgery, and by my publication will make you as the subject of it famous for ever. And here you are trying to die and ruin everything. I ask you—have you no human feelings left?"

At the conclusion of these lectures I would sigh and laugh, and stretch out a thin hand. He shook it always with a humorous grumpiness which did me more good than the prospect of acquiring fame in the annals of the Ecole de Medicine.

Here am I, however, cured. I have thrown away the stick with which I first began to limp about the garden, and I discourage Lola and Rogers in their efforts to treat me as an invalid. Like the doctor, I have been longing to escape from "this hole of an Algiers" and its painful associations, and, when I was able to leave my room, it occurred to me that the sooner I regained my strength the sooner should I be able to do so. Since then my recovery has been rapid. The doctor is delighted, and slaps me on the back, and points me out to Lola and the manager and the concierge and the hoary old sinner of an Arab who displays his daggers, and trays, and embroideries on the terrace, as a living wonder. I believe he would like to put me in a cage and carry me about with him in Paris on exhibition. But he is reluctantly prepared to part with me, and has consented to my return in a few days' time, to England, by the North German Lloyd steamer. He has ordered the sea voyage as a finishing touch to my cure. Good, deluded man, he thinks that it is his fortuitous science that has dragged me out of the Valley of the Shadow and set me in the Garden of Life. Good, deluded man! He does not realise that he has been merely the tool of the Arch-Jester. He has no notion of the sardonic joke his knife was chosen to perpetrate. That naked we should come into the world, and naked we should go out is a time-honoured pleasantry which, as far as the latter part of it is concerned, I did my conscientious best to further; but that we should come into it again naked at the age of eight-and-thirty is a piece of irony too grim for contemplation. Yet am I bound to contemplate it. It grins me in the face. Figuratively, I am naked.

Partly by my own act, and partly with the help of Destiny (the greater jester than I) I have stripped myself of all these garments of life which not only enabled me to strut peacock-fashion in the pleasant places of the world, but also sheltered me from its inclemencies.

I had wealth—not a Rothschild or Vanderbilt fortune but enough to assure me ease and luxury. I have stripped myself of it. I have but a beggarly sum remaining at my bankers. Practically I am a pauper.

I had political position. I surrendered it as airily as I had achieved it; so airily, indeed, that I doubt whether I could regain it even had I the ambition. For it was a game that I played, sometimes fascinating, sometimes repugnant to my fastidious sense of honourable dealing, for which I shall never recapture the mood. Mood depends on conditions, and conditions, as I am trying to show, are changed.

I had social position. I did not deceive myself as to its value in the cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots and the morning hot water brought into my bedroom. I liked it. I suspect that it has fled into eternity with the spirit of Captain Vauvenarde. The penniless hero of an amazing scandal is not usually made an idol of by the exclusive aristocracy of Great Britain.

I had a sweet and loyal woman about to marry me. I put Eleanor Faversham for ever out of my life.

I had the devotion and hero-worship of a lad whom I thought to train in the paths of honour, love and happiness. In his eyes I suppose I am an unconscionable villain.

I have stripped myself of everything; and all because the medical faculty of my country sentenced me to death. I really think the Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians ought to pay me an indemnity.

And not only have I stripped myself of everything, but I have incurred an incalculable debt. I owe a woman the infinite debt of her love which I cannot repay. She sheds it on me hourly with a lavishness which scares me. But for her tireless devotion, the doctor tells me, I should not have lived. But for her selfish forbearance, sympathy, and compassion I should have gone as crazy as Anastasius Papadopoulos. Yet the burden of my debt lies iceberg cold on my heart. Now that we are as intimate as man and woman who are still only friends can be, she has lost the magnetic attraction, that subtle mystery of the woman—half goddess, half panther—which fascinated me in spite of myself, and made me jealous of poor young Dale. Now that I can see things in some perspective, I confess that, had I not been under sentence of death, and, therefore, profoundly convinced that I was immune from all such weaknesses of the flesh, I should have realised the temptation of languorous voice and sinuous limbs, of the frank radiation of the animal enchanted as it was by elusive gleams of the spiritual, of the Laisdom—in a word, of all the sexual damnability of a woman which, as Francois Villon points out, set Sardanapalus to spin among the women, David to forget the fear of God, Herod to slay the Baptist, and made Samson lose his sight. Whether I should have yielded to or resisted the temptation is another matter. Honestly speaking, I think I should have resisted.

You see, I should still have been engaged to Eleanor Faversham. . . . But now this somewhat unholy influence is gone from her. She has lifted me in her strong arms as a mother would lift a brat of ten. She has patiently suffered my whimsies as if I had been a sick girl. She has become to me the mere great mothering creature on whom I have depended for custard and the removal of crumbs and creases from under my body, and for support to my tottering footsteps. The glamour has gone from before my eyes. I no longer see her invested in her queer splendour. . . .

My invalid peevishness, too, has accentuated my sensitiveness to shades of refinement. There is about Lola a bluffness, a hardihood of speech, a contempt for the polite word and the pretty conventional turning of a phrase, a lack of reticence in the expression of ideas and feelings, which jar, in spite of my gratitude, on my unstrung nerves. Her ignorance, too, of a thousand things, a knowledge of which is the birthright of such women as Eleanor Faversham, causes conversational excursions to end in innumerable blind alleys. I know that she would give her soul to learn. This she has told me in so many words, and when, in a delicate way, I try to teach her, she listens humbly, pathetically, fixing me with her great, gold-flecked eyes, behind which a deep sadness burns wistfully. Sometimes when I glance up from my book, I see that her eyes, instead of being bent on hers have been resting long on my face, and they say as clearly as articulate speech: "Teach me, love me, use me, do what you will with me. I am yours, your chattel, your thing, till the end of time."

I lie awake at night and wonder what I shall do with my naked life sheltered only by the garment of this woman's love, which I have accepted and cannot repay. I groan aloud when I reflect on the irremediable mess, hash, bungle I have made of things. Did ever sick man wake up to such a hopeless welter? Can you be surprised that I regarded it with dismay? Of course, there is a simple way out of it, and into the shadowy world which I contemplated so long, at first with mocking indifference and then with eager longing. A gentleman called Cato once took it, with considerable aplomb. The means are to my hand. In my drawer lies the revolver with which the excellent Colonel Bunnion (long since departed from Mustapha Superieur) armed me against the banditti of Algiers, and which I forgot to return to him. I could empty one or more of the six chambers into my person and that would be the end. But I don't think history records the suicide of any humorist, however dismal. He knows too well the tricks of the Arch-Jester's game. Very likely I should merely blow away half my head, and Destiny would give my good doctor another chance of achieving immortal fame by glueing it on again. No, I cannot think seriously of suicide by violent means. Of course, I might follow the example of one Antonios Polemon, a later Greek sophist, who suffered so dreadfully from gout that he buried himself alive in the tomb of his ancestors and starved to death. We have a family vault in Highgate Cemetery, of which I possess the key. . . . No, I should be bored and cold, and the coffins would get on my nerves; and besides, there is something suggestive of smug villadom in the idea of going to die at Highgate.

Lola came up as I was scribbling this on my knees in the garden.

"What are you writing there?"

"I am recasting Hamlet's soliloquy," I replied, "and I feel all the better for it."

"Here is your egg and brandy."

I swallowed it and handed her back the glass.

"I feel all the better for that, too."

As I sat in the shade of the little stone summer-house within the Greek portico, she lingered in the blazing sunshine, a figure all glorious health and supple curves, and the stray brown hairs above the brown mass gleamed with the gold of a Giotto aureole. She stood, a duskily glowing, radiant emblem of life against the background of spring greenery and rioting convolvulus. I drew a full breath and looked at her as if magnetised. I had the very oddest sensation. She seemed, in Shakespearean phrase, to rain influence upon me. As if she read the stirrings of my blood, she smiled and said:

"After all, confess, isn't it good to be alive?"

A thrill of physical well-being swept through me. I leaped to my feet.

"You witch!" I cried. "What are you doing to me?"

"I?" She retreated a step, with a laugh.

"Yes, you. You are casting a spell on me, so that I may eat my words."

"I don't know what you are talking about, but you haven't answered my question. It is good to be alive."

"Well, it is," I assented, losing all sense of consistency.

She flourished the egg-and-brandy glass. "I'm so glad. Now I know you are really well, and will face life as you faced death, like the brave man that you are."

I cried to her to hold. I had not intended to go as far as that. I confronted death with a smile; I meet life with the wriest of wry faces. She would have none of my arguments.

"No matter how damnable it is—it's splendid to be alive, just to feel that you can fight, just to feel that you don't care a damn for any old thing that can happen, because you're strong and brave. I do want you to get back all that you've lost, all that you've lost through me, and you'll do it. I know that you'll do it. You'll just go out and smash up the silly old world and bring it to your feet. You will, Simon, won't you? I know you will."

She quivered like an optimistic Cassandra.

"My dear Lola," said I.

I was touched. I took her hand and raised it to my lips, whereat she flushed like a girl.

"Did you come here to tell me all this?"

"No," she replied simply. "It came all of a sudden, as I was standing here. I've often wanted to say it. I'm glad I have."

She threw back her head and regarded me a moment with a strange, proud smile; then turned and walked slowly away, her head brushing the long scarlet clusters of the pepper trees.



CHAPTER XVII

The other day, while looking through a limbo of a drawer wherein have been cast from time to time a medley of maimed, half-soiled, abortive things, too unfitted for the paradise of publication, and too good (so my vanity will have it) for the damnation of the waste-paper basket, I came across, at the very bottom, the manuscript of the preceding autobiographical narrative, the last words of which I wrote at Mustapha Superieur three years ago. At first I carried it about with me, not caring to destroy it and not knowing what in the world to do with it until, with the malice of inanimate things, the dirty dog's-eared bundle took to haunting me, turning up continually in inconvenient places and ever insistently demanding a new depository. At last I began to look on it with loathing; and one day in a fit of inspiration, creating the limbo aforesaid, I hurled the manuscript, as I thought, into everlasting oblivion. I had no desire to carry on the record of my life any further, and there, in limbo, it has remained for three years. But the other day I took it out for reference; and now as I am holiday-making in a certain little backwater of the world, where it is raining in a most unholiday fashion, it occurs to me that, as everything has happened to me which is likely to happen (Heaven knows I want no more excursions and alarums in my life's drama), I may as well bring the narrative up to date. I therefore take up the thread, so far as I can, from where I left off.

Lola, having nothing to do in Algiers, which had grown hateful to us both, accompanied me to London. As, however, the weather was rough, and she was a very bad sailor, I saw little of her on the voyage. For my own part, I enjoyed the stormy days, the howling winds and the infuriated waves dashing impotently over the steamer. They filled me with a sense of conflict and of amusement. It is always good to see man triumphing over the murderous forces of nature. It puts one in conceit with one's kind.

At Waterloo I handed Lola over to her maid, who had come to meet her, and, leaving Rogers in charge of my luggage, I drove homeward in a cab.

It was only as I was crossing Waterloo Bridge and saw the dark mass of the Houses of Parliament looming on the other side of the river, and the light in the tower which showed that the House was sitting, that I began to realise my situation. As exiles in desert lands yearn for green fields, so yearned I for those green benches. In vain I represented to myself how often I had yawned on them, how often I had cursed my folly in sitting on them and listening to empty babble when I might have been dining cosily, or talking to a pretty woman or listening to a comic opera, or performing some other useful and soul-satisfying action of the kind; in vain I told myself what a monument of futility was that building; I longed to be in it and of it once again. And when I realised that I yearned for the impossible, my heart was like a stone. For, indeed, I, Simon de Gex, with London once a toy to my hand, was coming into it now a penniless adventurer to seek my fortune.

The cab turned into the Strand, which greeted me as affably as a pandemonium. Motor omnibuses whizzed at me, cabs rattled and jeered at me, private motors and carriages passed me by in sleek contempt; policemen regarded me scornfully as, with uplifted hand regulating the traffic, they held me up; pavements full of people surged along ostentatiously showing that they did not care a brass farthing for me; the thousands of lights with their million reflections, from shop fronts, restaurants, theatres, and illuminated signs glared pitilessly at me. A harsh roar of derision filled the air, like the bass to the treble of the newsboys who yelled in my face. I was wearing a fur-lined coat—just the thing a penniless adventurer would wear. I had a valet attending to my luggage—just the sort of thing a penniless adventurer would have. I was driving to the Albany—just the sort of place where a penniless adventurer would live. And London knew all this—and scoffed at me in stony heartlessness. The only object that gave me the slightest sympathy was Nelson on top of his column. He seemed to say, "After all, you can't feel such a fool and so much out in the cold as I do up here."

At Piccadilly Circus I found the same atmosphere of hostility. My cab was blocked in the theatre-going tide, and in neighbouring vehicles I had glimpses of fair faces above soft wraps and the profiles of moustached young men in white ties. They assumed an aggravating air of ownership of the blazing thoroughfare, the only gay and joyous spot in London. I, too, had owned it once, but now I felt an alien; and the whole spirit of Piccadilly Circus rammed the sentiment home—I was an alien and an undesirable alien. I felt even more lost and friendless as I entered the long, cold arcade (known as the Ropewalk) of the Albany.

I found my sister Agatha waiting for me in the library. I had telegraphed to her from Southampton. She was expensively dressed in grey silk, and wore the family diamonds. We exchanged the family kiss and the usual incoherent greetings of our race. She expressed her delight at my restoration to health and gave me satisfactory tidings of Tom Durrell, her husband, of the children, and of our sister Jane. Then she shook her head at me, and made me feel like a naughty little boy. This I resented. Being the head of the family, I had always encouraged the deferential attitude which my sisters, dear right-minded things, had naturally assumed from babyhood.

"Oh, Simon, what a time you've given us!"

She had never spoken to me like this in her life.

"That's nothing, my dear Agatha," said I just a bit tartly, "to the time I've given myself. I'm sorry for you, but I think you ought to be a little sorry for me."

"I am. More sorry than I can say. Oh, Simon, how could you?"

"How could I what?" I cried, unwontedly regardless of the refinements of language.

"Mix yourself up in this dreadful affair?"

"My dear girl," said I, "if you had got mixed up in a railway collision, I shouldn't ask you how you managed to do it. I should be sorry for you and feel your arms and legs and inquire whether you had sustained any internal injuries."

She is a pretty, spare woman with a bird-like face and soft brown hair just turning grey; and as good-hearted a little creature as ever adored five healthy children and an elderly baronet with disastrous views on scientific farming.

"Dear old boy," she said in milder accents, "I didn't mean to be unkind. I want to be good to you and help you, so much so that I asked Bingley"—Bingley is my housekeeper—"whether I could stay to dinner."

"That's good of you—but this magnificence——?"

"I'm going on later to the Foreign Office reception."

"Then you do still mingle with the great and gorgeous?" I said.

"What do you mean? Why shouldn't I?"

I laughed, suspecting rightly that my sisters' social position had not been greatly imperilled by the profligacy of their scandal-bespattered brother.

"What are people saying about me?" I asked suddenly.

She made a helpless gesture. "Can't you guess? You have told us the facts, and, of course, we believe you; we have done our best to spread abroad the correct version—but you know what people are. If they're told they oughtn't to believe the worst, they're disappointed and still go on believing it so as to comfort themselves."

"You cynical little wretch!" said I.

"But it's true," she urged. "And, after all, even if they were well disposed, the correct version makes considerable demands on their faith. Even Letty Farfax—"

"I know! I know!" said I. "Letty Farfax is typical. She would love to be on the side of the angels, but as she wouldn't meet the best people there, she ranges herself with the other party."

Presently we dined, and during the meal, when the servants happened to be out of the room, we continued, snippet-wise, the inconclusive conversation. Like a good sister Agatha had come to cheer a lonely and much abused man; like a daughter of Eve she had also come to find out as much as she possibly could.

"I think I must tell you something which you ought to know," she said. "It's all over the town that you stole the lady from Dale Kynnersley."

"If I did," said I, "it was at his mother's earnest entreaty. You can tell folks that. You can also tell them Madame Brandt is not the kind of woman to be stolen by one man from another. She is a thoroughly virtuous, good, and noble woman, and there's not a creature living who wouldn't be honoured by her friendship."

As I made this announcement with an impetuosity which reminded me (with a twinge of remorse) of poor Dale's dithyrambics, Agatha shot at me a quick glance of apprehension.

"But, my dear Simon, she used to act in a circus with a horse!"

"I fail to see," said I, growing angry, "how the horse could have imbued her with depravity, and I'm given to understand that the tone of the circus is not quite what it used to be in the days of the Empress Theodora."

A ripple passed over Agatha's bare shoulders, which I knew to be a suppressed shrug.

"I suppose men and women look at these things differently," she remarked, and from the stiffness of her tone I divined that the idea of moral qualities lurking in the nature of Lola Brandt occasioned her considerable displeasure.

"I hope——" She paused. There was another ripple. "No. I had better not say it. It's none of my business, after all."

"I don't think it is, my dear," said I.

Rogers bringing in the cutlets ended the snippet of talk.

It was not the cheeriest of dinners. I took advantage of the next interval of quiet to inquire after Dale. I learned that the poor boy had almost collapsed after the election and was now yachting with young Lord Essendale somewhere about the Hebrides. Agatha had not seen him, but Lady Kynnersley had called on her one day in a distracted frame of mind, bitterly reproaching me for the unhappiness of her son. I should never have suspected that such fierce maternal love could burn beneath Lady Kynnersley's granite exterior. She accused me of treachery towards Dale and, most illogically, of dishonourable conduct towards herself.

"She said things about you," said Agatha, "for which, even if they were true, I couldn't forgive her. So that's an end of that friendship. Indeed, it has been very difficult, Simon," she continued, "to keep up with our common friends. It has placed us in the most painful and delicate position. And now you're back, I'm afraid it will be worse."

Thus under all Agatha's affection there ran the general hostility of London. Guilty or not, I had offended her in her most deeply rooted susceptibilities, and as yet she only knew half the imbroglio in which I was enmeshed. Over coffee, however, she began to take a more optimistic view of affairs.

"After all, you'll be able to live it down," she said with a cheerful air of patronage. "People soon forget. Before the year is out you'll be going about just as usual, and at the General Election you'll find a seat somewhere."

I informed her that I had given up politics. What then, she asked, would I do for an occupation?

"Work for my living," I replied.

"Work?" She arched her eyebrows, as if it were the most extraordinary thing a man could do. "What kind of work?"

"Road-sweeping or tax-collecting or envelope-addressing."

She selected a cigarette from the silver box in front of her, and did not reply until she had lit it and inhaled a puff or two.

"I wish you wouldn't be so flippant, Simon."

From this remark I inferred that I still was in the criminal dock before this lady Chief Justice. I smiled at the airs the little woman gave herself now that I was no longer the impeccable and irreproachable dictator of the family. Mine was the experience of every fallen tyrant since the world began.

"My dear Agatha, I've had enough shocks during the last few weeks to knock the flippancy out of a Congregational minister. In November I was condemned to die within six months. The sentence was final and absolute. I thought I would do the kind of good one can't do with a lifetime in front of one, and I wasted all my substance in riotous giving. In the elegant phraseology of high society I am stone-broke. As my training has not fitted me to earn my living in high-falutin ways, I must earn it in some humble capacity. Therefore, if you see me call at your house for the water rate, you'll understand that I am driven to that expedient by necessity and not by degradation."

Naturally I had to elaborate this succinct statement before my sister could understand its full significance. Then dismay overwhelmed her. Surely something could be done. The fortunes of Jane and herself were at my disposal to set me on my feet again. We were brother and sisters; what was theirs was mine; they couldn't see me starve. I thanked her for her affection—the dear creatures would unhesitatingly have let me play ducks and drakes with their money, but I explained that though poor, I was still proud and prized the independence of the tax-collector above the position of the pensioner of Love's bounty.

"Tom must get you something to do," she declared.

"Tom must do nothing of the kind. Let me say that once and for all," I returned peremptorily. "I've made my position clear to you, because you're my sister and you ought to be spared any further misinterpretation of my actions. But to have you dear people intriguing after billets for me would be intolerable."

"But what are you going to do?" she cried, wringing her hands.

"I'm going for my first omnibus ride to-morrow," said I heroically.

Upon which assertion Rogers entered announcing that her ladyship's carriage had arrived. A while later I accompanied her downstairs and along the arcade.

"I shall be so miserable, thinking of you, poor old boy," she said affectionately, as she bade me good-bye.

"Don't, I am going to enjoy myself for the first time in my life."

These were "prave 'orts," but I felt doleful enough when I re-entered the chambers where I had lived in uncomplaining luxury for fourteen years.

"There's no help for it," I murmured. "I must get rid of the remainder of my lease, sell my books and pictures and other more or less expensive household goods, dismiss Rogers and Bingley, and go and live on thirty shillings a week in a Bloomsbury boarding-house. I think," I continued, regarding myself in the Queen Anne mirror over the mantelpiece, "I think that it will better harmonise with my fallen fortunes if I refrain from waxing the ends of my moustache. There ought to be a modest droop about the moustache of a tax-collector."

The next morning I gave my servants a months' notice. Rogers, who had been with me for many years, behaved in the correctest manner. He neither offered to lend me his modest savings nor to work for me for no wages. He expressed his deep regret at leaving my service and his confidence that I would give him a good character. Bingley wept after the way of women. There was also a shadowy housemaidy young person in a cap who used to make meteoric appearances and whom I left to the diplomacy of Bingley. These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, the auctioneer so delighted at the chance of selling my effects, that I felt myself forthwith turned neck and crop out of doors. It was a bright morning in early spring, with a satirical touch of hope in the air. London, no longer to be my London, maintained its hostile attitude to me. If any one had prophesied that I should be a stranger in Piccadilly, I should have laughed aloud. Yet I was.

Walking moodily up Saint James's street I met the omniscient and expansive Renniker. He gave me a curt nod and a "How d'ye do?" and passed on. I felt savagely disposed to slash his jaunty silk hat off with my walking-stick. A few months before he would have rushed effusively into my arms and bedaubed me with miscellaneous inaccuracies of information. At first I was furiously indignant. Then I laughed, and swinging my stick, nearly wreaked my vengeance on a harmless elderly gentleman.

It was my first experience of social ostracism. Although I curled a contumelious lip, I smarted under the indignity. It was all very well to say proudly "io son' io"; but io used to be a person of some importance who was not cavalierly "how d'ye do'd" by creatures like Renniker. This and the chance encounters of the next few weeks gave me furiously to think. I knew that in one respect my sister Agatha was right. These good folks who shied now at the stains of murder with which my reputation was soiled would in time get used to them and eventually forget them altogether. But I reflected that I should not forget, and I determined that I should not be admitted on sufferance, as at first I should have to be admitted, into any man's club or any woman's drawing-room.

One day Colonel Ellerton, Maisie Ellerton's father, called on me. He used to be my very good friend; we sat on the same side of the House and voted together on innumerable occasions in perfect sympathy and common lack of conviction. He was cordial enough, congratulated me on my marvellous restoration to health, deplored my absence from Parliamentary life, and then began to talk confusedly of Russia. It took a little perspicacity to see that something was weighing on the good man's mind; something he had come to say and for his honest life could not get out. His plight became more pitiable as the interview proceeded, and when he rose to go, he grew as red as a turkey-cock and began to sputter. I went to his rescue.

"It's very kind of you to have come to see me, Ellerton," I said, "but if I don't call yet awhile to pay my respects to your wife, I hope you'll understand, and not attribute it to discourtesy."

I have never seen relief so clearly depicted on a human countenance. He drew a long breath and instinctively passed his handkerchief over his forehead. Then he grasped my hand.

"My dear fellow," he cried, "of course we'll understand. It was a shocking affair—terrible for you. My wife and I were quite bowled over by it."

I did not attempt to clear myself. What was the use? Every man denies these things as a matter of course, and as a matter of course nobody believes him.

Once I ran across Elphin Montgomery, a mysterious personage behind many musical comedy enterprises. He is jewelled all over like a first-class Hindoo idol, and is treated as a god in fashionable restaurants, where he entertains riff-raff at sumptuous banquets. I had some slight acquaintance with the fellow, but he greeted me as though I were a long lost intimate—his heavy sensual face swagged in smiles—and invited me to a supper party. I declined with courtesy and walked away in fury. He would not have presumed to ask me to meet his riff-raff before I became disgustingly and I suppose to some minds, fascinatingly, notorious. But now I was hail-fellow-well-met with him, a bird of his own feather, a rogue of his own kidney, to whom he threw open the gates of his bediamonded and befrilled Alsatia. A pestilential fellow! As if I would mortgage my birthright for such a mess of pottage.

So I stiffened and bade Society high and low go packing. I would neither seek mine own people, nor allow myself to be sought by Elphin Montgomery's. I enwrapped myself in a fine garment of defiance. My sister Jane, who was harder and more worldly-minded than Agatha, would have had me don a helmet of brass and a breastplate of rhinoceros hide and force my way through reluctant portals; but Agatha agreed with me, clinging, however, to the hope that time would not only reconcile Society to me, but would also reconcile me to Society.

"If the hope comforts you, my dear Agatha," said I, "by all means cherish it. In the meantime, allow me to observe that the character of Ishmael is eminently suited to the profession of tax-collecting."

During these early days of my return the one person with whom I had no argument was Lola. She soothed where others scratched, and stimulated where others goaded. The intimacy of my convalescence continued. At first I acquainted her, as far as was reasonably necessary, with my change of fortune, and accepted her offer to find me less expensive quarters. The devoted woman personally inspected every flat in London, with that insistence of which masculine patience is incapable, and eventually decided on a tiny bachelor suite somewhere in the clouds over a block of flats in Victoria Street where the service is included in the rent. Into this I moved with such of my furniture as I withdrew from the auctioneer's hammer, and there I prepared to stay until necessity should drive me to the Bloomsbury boarding-house. I thought I would graduate my descent. Before I moved, however, she came to the Albany for the first and only time to see the splendour I was about to quit. In a modest way it was splendour. My chambers were really a large double flat to the tasteful furnishing of which I had devoted the thought and interest of many years. She went with me through the rooms. The dining-room was all Chippendale, each piece a long-coveted and hunted treasure; the library old oak; the drawing-room a comfortable and cunning medley. There were bits of old china, pieces of tapestry, some rare prints, my choice collection of mezzotints, a picture or two of value—one a Lancret, a very dear possession. And there were my books—once I had a passion for rare bindings. Every thing had to me a personal significance, and I hated the idea of surrender more than I dared to confess even to myself. But I said to Lola: