Clementina sat in the vestibule and fanned herself with the telegram. It was from Marseilles and had been telegraphed on from London. It ran: “Doctors say I am dying. Come at once here H?tel Louvre. Matter of life and death. Am wiring Quixtus also. For Heaven’s sake both come.—Will Hammersley.”
It was a shock. Hammersley’s letter of a few weeks ago had prepared her for his indefinite advent; but the thought of death had not come to her. Will Hammersley was dying, apparently alone, in an hotel at Marseilles; dying, too, in an atmosphere of mystery, for he must see her, and Quixtus too, before he died. The message was urgent, the appeal imperative.
“Oh, Clementina, I hope it’s not bad news,” cried Etta.
Clementina handed the telegram to Tommy.
“It’s from the sick man of Shanghai who pined for the English lanes.”
“Poor chap,” said Tommy very gently. “Poor chap! I remember him well. A fine upstanding fellow, one of the best. Once he gave me a cricket-bat.” The artist in him shivered. “It’s awful to think of a man like that dying. What are you going to do?”
“What do you think?”
“Take the night train to Marseilles,” replied Tommy.
“Then why did you ask?” said Clementina.
“But what shall we do?” cried Etta.
“Oh, you and Tommy can stay here till I come back.”
Etta gasped and blushed crimson. “That would be very nice—but—but—I don’t think dad would quite like it.”
“Oh Lord!” cried Clementina, “I was forgetting those confounded conventions. They do complicate life so. And I suppose I can’t send you away with Tommy in the motor either. And now I come to think of it, I can’t go away to-night and leave you two to travel together to London to-morrow. What on earth are women put in the world for, especially young ones? They’re more worry than they’re worth. And if I left Tommy here and took you with me to Marseilles, you’d be as handy to travel with, in the circumstances, as a wedding-cake. I don’t know what to do with you.”
Etta suggested that the Jacksons—the friends whom she had visited the previous day—might take her in till Clementina came back. Indeed, they had invited her to stay with them.
“Go and telephone them at once,” said Clementina.
“You’ll have Uncle Ephraim as a travelling companion,” Tommy remarked as Etta was leaving them.
Clementina rubbed a distracted brow, not to the well-being of her front hair.
“Lord save us! He’ll be worse than Etta.”
“Poor dear Clementina,” he said, and turned away to administer help and counsel to his beloved in the complicated matter of the telephone.
Suddenly Clementina started to her feet. Perhaps Quixtus’s telegram had not been forwarded as hers had been. In this contingency it was her duty to let him know the unhappy news, and she must let him know at once. An ordinary woman would have sent Tommy round with the telegram. But Clementina; accustomed all her life long to act for herself, gave no thought to this possibility. She bolted out of the door of the hotel and made her way back to the tea-room.
The crowd had thinned, but Quixtus and his friends still lingered. Mrs. Fontaine, her elbows on the table, leaning her cheek against her daintily gloved hands, was engaged in earnest talk with him, to the exclusion of the other pair. Lady Louisa Mailing was eating pastry and drinking chocolate with an air of great enjoyment, while Huckaby, hands in pockets, leant back in his seat, a very bored Mephistopheles. He had exhausted his Martha’s conversation long ago, and he was weary of the eternal companionship. Why should not Faust have a turn at Martha now and again? Decidedly it was an unfair world. To add, also, to his present discomfort, the confused frame of mind in which he had originally introduced his patron to Mrs. Fontaine had gradually become more tangled. Clean living had grown more to his taste, abstinence from whisky much more simple to accomplish than his most remorseful dreams of reform had ever conceived. And that morning a letter from Billiter had filled him with disgust. Billiter upbraided him for silence; wanted to know what was going on, hinted that a dividend ought to be due by this time, and expressed, none too delicately, a suspicion of his partner’s business integrity. The cheap tavern-supplied note-paper offended against the nicety of Huckaby’s refined surroundings. The gross vulgarity of Billiter himself revolted him. A week had passed and Mrs. Fontaine had shown no signs of having accomplished her ends. He had not dared question her. He had begun; too; to loathe his part in the sordid plot. But that morning he had summoned up courage enough to say to Mrs. Fontaine;
“I’ve just had a letter from Billiter.”
Whereupon her pale cheeks had flushed red and her alluring eyes had gleamed dangerously.
“I wish to God I had never seen that brute in all my life!”
And he had said; “I wish to God I had never done so either.”
She had looked at him full, searchingly, inscrutably, for a long moment and saying nothing, had turned away. What was to be the outcome of it all? Huckaby was perplexed. The week had passed pleasantly. Even his enforced and sardonic attendance on Martha had not been able to spoil the charm of the new life, bastard though it was. Mrs. Fontaine had continued not to let her friends in Paris know of her presence in the city, and the week had been a history of peaceful jaunts—to Chantilly, Fontainebleau, Sèvres (where Monsieur Sardanel had spread before their ravished eyes his collection of Mexican rattles and masks and obsidian-edged swords); to “Robinson” on the island in the Seine, where they had lunched in the tree restaurant; in a word, to all sorts of sweet summer places where the trees were green and the world was bathed in sunshine and innocence. The week had evidently passed pleasantly for Quixtus, who had given no intimation of the date of his return to London. He was lotus eating; obviously, too, under the charm of the sorceress, wax in her hands. Of his fiendish purpose Huckaby still had no suspicion. As far as Huckaby could see, Mrs. Fontaine had made an easy conquest of his patron, and why she had up to now forborne to carry out the essential part of the plot, he could not understand. Perhaps she loathed the idea as much as he did. Her outburst against Billiter gave weight to the theory. It was all very complicated. And here were these two engaged in a deep and semi-sentimental conversation while Lady Louisa stuffed herself with chocolate, and he, Huckaby, was bored to death. What was going to happen?
The thing that did happen was Clementina’s inrush. She marched straight up to the table, and, disregarding startled eyes, thrust the telegram into Quixtus’s hand.
“Read that. You may find one like it at your hotel, or you may not. I thought it right to bring it.”
Mrs. Fontaine kept her elbows on the table, and regarded Clementina with well-bred insolence. Lady Louisa finished her chocolate. Quixtus read the telegram and his face grew a shade paler and his fingers trembled a little. Huckaby rose and, drawing a chair from another table, offered it to Clementina. She waved it away, with a curt acknowledgment. Quixtus looked up at her.
“This is terrible—Will Hammersley dying——”
He made an attempt to rise, but Clementina put her hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t get up. I’m going.”
A sudden hardening change came over Quixtus’s features.
“Stay,” said he. “It was very kind of you to bring this; but I’m afraid it has nothing to do with me.”
“Nothing to do with you?”
She regarded him in amazement. “Your lifelong friend is dying and implores you to come to him, and you say it’s nothing to do with you?”
“He was a villain, a base villain,” said Quixtus, with quivering lips.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Clementina indignantly.
Had the man gone absolutely crazy after all?
“I am saying what I know,” he returned darkly. “He was no friend to me.”
“And he wants you to go to his death-bed?” asked Mrs. Fontaine, taking her elbows off the table. “How very painful!”
“You had better put such lunatic ideas out of your head, and take the night train to Marseilles,” said Clementina roughly.
Quixtus bit his knuckles and stared at the litter of tea in front of him. The orchestra for their last number played a common little jiggety air.
“Are you coming?” asked Clementina.
“Why should Dr. Quixtus,” said Mrs. Fontaine; “travel all the way to Marseilles to witness the death of a man whom he dislikes? I think it’s unreasonable to ask it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Quixtus. “It’s unreasonable.”
“And it would break up our pleasant little party,” pleaded Lady Louisa.
“Confound your party!” exclaimed Clementina; whereat Lady Louisa withered up in astonishment. “I’m telling him to perform an act of humanity.”
“He was my enemy,” said Quixtus in a low voice.
“And so you can hardly ask him to go and gloat over his death,” said Lady Louisa stupidly.
“Eh? What’s that?” cried Quixtus, straightening himself up.
“We’re dealing with Christian gentlemen, not devils,” Clementina retorted.
“No, not devils—oh, certainly not devils,” said Quixtus with a chuckling catch in his voice.
Clementina plucked him by the sleeve.
“I can’t stand here all the afternoon arguing with you. Even if you have got it into your head that the man offended you, you did care for him once, and it’s only common charity to go to him now that he’s at the point of death. Are you going or not?”
Quixtus looked helplessly from one woman to the other.
“There’s such a thing as straining quixotism too far, my dear Dr. Quixtus,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “I see no reason why you should go.”
“I’m a decent woman and I see every reason,” said Clementina, infuriated at the other’s intervention. “I’ll see that he goes. I’ll get tickets now from Cook’s and come round to the Continental in a taxi and fetch you.”
Quixtus rose and extended his hand to Clementina.
“I shall go. I promise you,” he said with all his courtliness of manner. “And I shall not trouble you to get my ticket or call for me. Au revoir.”
He accompanied her to the door. On parting he said with a smile;
“I have my reasons for going—reasons that no one but myself can understand.”
And when he returned to Mrs. Fontaine, who was biting her lips with annoyance at Clementina’s apparent victory, he repeated the words with the same smile and the curious gleam of cunning that sometimes marred the blandness of his eyes. He had his reasons.
“After all,” said the lady, during their Faust and Marguerite walk to the H?tel Continental entrance in the Rue Castiglione, “I can’t blame you. It’s an errand of mercy. Doubtless he wishes to absolve his conscience from the wrong, whatever it was, that he did you. Your pétroleuse friend was right. It is a noble action.”
“I have my reaso............