Simon the Jester Part 18

"I am!" I cried triumphantly. And now I come to think of it, I spoke truly. If a man reckons his capital as half a year's income, doubles it, and works out the capital that such a yearly income represents, he is the possessor of a mint of money.

"I am," I cried; "and I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll settle five thousand on Lucy and the children, so that they needn't accompany you in your singing excursions. I shouldn't like them to catch cold, poor dears, and ruin their voices."

In tones more than telephonically agonised he bade me not make a jest of his misery. I nearly threw the receiver at the blockhead.

"I'm not jesting," I bawled; "I'm deadly serious. I knew Lucy before you did, and I kissed her and she kissed me years before she knew of your high existence; and if she had been a sensible woman she would have married me instead of you--what? The first time you've heard of it? Of course it is--and be decently thankful that you hear it now."

It is pleasant sometimes to tell the husbands of girls you have loved exactly what you think of them; and I had loved Lucy Latimer. She came, an English rose, to console me for the loss of my French _fleur-de-lis_, Clothilde. Or was it the other way about? One does get so mixed in these things. At any rate, she did not marry me, her first love, but jilted me most abominably for Latimer. So I shall heap five thousand pounds on her head.

I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. I wonder why? Which reminds me that I made the identical remark to Lucy Latimer a month or two ago.

(She is a plump, kind, motherly, unromantic little person now.) She had the audacity to reply that I had never had any.

"_You_, Lucy Crooks, dare say such a thing!" I exclaimed indignantly.

She smiled. "Are there many more qualified than I to give the opinion?"

I remember that I rose and looked her sternly in the face.

"Lucy Crooks or Lucy Latimer," said I, "you are nothing more or less than a common hussy."

Whereupon she laughed as if I had paid her a high compliment.

I maintain that I have been unfortunate in my love affairs. First, there was an angel-faced widow, a contemporary of my mother's, whom I wooed in Greek verses--and let me tell the young lover that it is much easier to write your own doggerel and convert it into Greek than to put "To Althea" into decent Anacreontics. I also took her to the Eton and Harrow match, and talked to her of women's hats and the things she loved, and neglected the cricket. But she would have none of me. In the flood tide of my pa.s.sion she married a s...o...b..tic archdeacon of the name of Jugg.

Then there was a lady whose name for the life of me I can't remember. It was something ending in "-ine." We quarrelled because we held divergent views on Mr. Wilson Barrett. Then there was Clothilde, whose tragical story I have already unfolded; Lucy Crooks, who threw me over for this dear, amiable, wooden-headed stockjobbing Latimer; X, Y and Z--but here, let me remark, I was the hunted--mammas spread nets for me which by the grace of heaven and the ungraciousness of the damsels I escaped; and, lastly, my incomparable Eleanor Faversham. Now, I thought, am I safe in harbour? If ever a match could have been labelled "Pure heaven-made goods, warranted not to shrink"--that was one. But for this rupture there is an all-accounting reason. For the others there was none. I vow I went on falling in love until I grew absolutely sick and tired of the condition. You see, the vocabulary of the pastime is so confoundedly limited. One has to say to B what one has said to A; to C exactly what one has said to A and B; and when it comes to repeating to F the formularies one has uttered to A, B, C, D and E one grows almost hysterical with the boredom of it. That was the delightful charm of Eleanor Faversham; she demanded no formularies or re-enactment of raptures.

The _Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise_ has arrived. It is a volume of nearly eighteen hundred pages, and being uncut both at top and bottom and at the side it is peculiarly serviceable as a work of reference.

I attacked it bravely, however, hacking my way into it, paperknife in hand. But to my dismay, the more I hacked the less could I find of Captain Vauvenarde. I sought him in the Alphabetical Repertory of Colonial Troops, in the list of officers _hors cadre_, in the lists of seniority, in the list of his regiment, wherever he was likely or unlikely to be. There is no person in the French army by the name of Vauvenarde.

I went straight to Lola Brandt with the hideous volume and the unwelcome news. Together we searched the pages.

"He _must_ be here," she said, with feminine disregard of fact.

"Are you quite certain you have got the name right?" I asked.

"Why, it is my own name!"

"So it is," said I; "I was forgetting. But how do you know he was in the army at all?"

He might have been an adventurer, a Captain of Kopenick of the day, who had poured a gallant but mendacious tale into her ears.

"I hardly ever saw him out of uniform. He was quartered at Ma.r.s.eilles on special duty. I knew some of his brother officers."

"Then," said I, "there are only two alternatives. Either he has left the army or he is----"

"Dead?" she whispered.

"Let us hope," said I, "that he has left the army."

"You must find out, Mr. de Gex," she said in a low voice. "I took it for granted that my husband was alive. It's horrible to think that he may be dead. It alters everything, somehow. Until I know, I shall be in a state of awful suspense. You'll make inquiries at once, won't you?"

"Did you love your husband, Madame Brandt?" I asked.

She looked at the fire for some time without replying. She stood with one foot on the fender.

"I thought I did when I married him," she said at last. "I thought I did when he left me."

"And now?"

She turned her golden eyes full on me. It is a disconcerting trick of hers at any time, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling; but on this occasion it was startling. They held mine for some seconds, and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman's soul.

Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.

"Now?" she echoed. "Many things have happened between then and now. If he is alive and I go to him, I'll try to think again that I love him. It will be the only way. It will save me from playing h.e.l.l with my life."

"I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light," said I.

"I wasn't thinking of Dale," she said calmly.

"Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?"

She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained gestures.

"You are quite right," she said, with an odd note of hardness in her voice. "You're quite right in what you said the other day--that it was high time I went back to my husband. I pray G.o.d he is not dead. I have a feeling that he isn't. He can't be. I count on you to find him and ask him to meet me. It would be better than writing. I don't know what to say when I have a pen in my hand. You must find him and speak to him and send me a wire and I'll come straight away to any part of the earth. Or would you like me to come with you and help you find him? But no; that's idiotic. Forget that I have said it. I'm a fool. But he must be found.

He must, he must!"

She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into s.p.a.ce, she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature is baffles me. Although I contemplate with equanimity my little corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a disembodied spirit, yet I do not like to be baffled. It makes me angry.

But during this interview with Lola Brandt I had not time to be angry.

I am angry now. In fact I am in a condition bordering on that of a mad dog. If Rogers came and disturbed me now, as I am writing, I would bite him. But I will set calmly down the story of this appalling afternoon.

Lola stood before me wringing her hands.

"What are you going to do?"

"I can get an introduction to the _Chef de bureau_ of the information department of the _Ministere de la Guerre_ in Paris," I replied after a moment's reflection. "He will be able to tell me whether Captain Vauvenarde is alive or dead."

"He is alive. He must be."

"Very well. But I doubt whether Captain Vauvenarde keeps the office informed of his movements."

"But you'll go in search of him, won't you?"

"The earth is rather a large place," I objected. "He may be in Dieppe, or he may be on top of Mount Popocatapetl."

"I'm sure you'll find him," she said encouragingly.

"You'll own," said I, "that there's something humourous in the idea of my wandering all over the surface of the planet in search of a lost captain of Cha.s.seurs. It is true that we might employ a private detective."

"Yes!" she cried eagerly. "Why not? Then you could stay here--and I could go on seeing you till the news came. Let us do that."

The swiftness of her change of mood surprised me.