Jason Part 15

And after hesitating awhile uneasily, Captain Stewart turned back into the room; but for some time thereafter Ste. Marie was aware that a vigilant eye was being kept upon them and that their host was by no means at his ease.

When they were left alone together the girl turned to him and patted his arm affectionately. She said:

"Ah, but it is very good to see you again, mon cher ami! It has been so long!" She gave an abrupt frown. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

And she said an unkind thing about her fellow-guests. She called them "canaille." She said:

"Why are you wasting your time among these canaille? This is not a place for you. Why did you come?"

"I don't know," said Ste. Marie. He was still a little resentful, and he said so. He said: "I didn't know it was going to be like this. I came because Stewart went rather out of his way to ask me. I'd known him in a very different milieu."

"Ah, yes!" she said, reflectively. "Yes, he does go into the world also, doesn't he? But this is what he likes, you know." Her lips drew back for an instant, and she said: "He is a pig-dog!"

Ste. Marie looked at her gravely. She had used that offensive name with a little too much fierceness. Her face had turned for an instant quite white, and her eyes had flashed out over the room a look that meant a great deal to any one who knew her as well as Ste. Marie did. He sat forward and lowered his voice. He said:

"Look here, Olga! I'm going to be very frank for a moment. May I?"

For just an instant the girl drew away from him with suspicion in her eyes, and something else, alertly defiant. Then she put out her hands to his arm.

"You may be what you like, dear Ste. Marie," she said, "and say what you like. I will take it all--and swallow it alive--good as gold. What are you going to do to me?"

"I've always been fair with you, haven't I?" he urged. "I've had disagreeable things to say or do, but--you knew always that I liked you and--where my sympathies were."

"Always! Always, mon cher!" she cried. "I trusted you always in everything. And there is no one else I trust. No one! No one!--Ste.

Marie!"

"What then?" he asked.

"Ste. Marie," she said, "why did you never fall in love with me, as the other men did?"

"I wonder!" said he. "I don't know. Upon my word, I really don't know."

He was so serious about it that the girl burst into a shriek of laughter. And in the end he laughed, too.

"I expect it was because I liked you too well," he said, at last. "But come! We're forgetting my lecture. Listen to your grandpere Ste. Marie!

I have heard--certain things--rumors--what you will. Perhaps they are foolish lies, and I hope they are. But if not, if the fear I saw in Stewart's face when you came here to-night, was--not without cause, let me beg you to have a care. You're much too savage, my dear child. Don't be so foolish as to--well, turn comedy into the other thing. In the first place, it's not worth while, and, in the second place, it recoils always. Revenge may be sweet. I don't know. But nowadays, with police courts and all that, it entails much more subsequent annoyance than it is worth. Be wise, Olga!"

"Some things, Ste. Marie," said the golden lady, "are worth all the consequences that may follow them."

She watched Captain Stewart across the room, where he stood chatting with a little group of people, and her beautiful face was as hard as marble and her eyes were as dark as a stormy night, and her mouth, for an instant, was almost like an animal's mouth--cruel and relentless.

Ste. Marie saw, and he began to be a bit alarmed in good earnest. In his warning he had spoken rather more seriously than he felt the occasion demanded, but he began at last to wonder if the occasion was not in reality very serious, indeed. He was sure, of course, that Olga Nilssen had come here on this evening to annoy Captain Stewart in some fas.h.i.+on.

As he put it to himself, she probably meant to "make a row," and he would not have been in the least surprised if she had made it in the beginning, upon her very dramatic entrance. Nothing more calamitous than that had occurred to him. But when he saw the woman's face turned a little away and gazing fixedly at Captain Stewart, he began to be aware that there was tragedy very near him--or all the makings of it.

Mlle. Nilssen turned back to him. Her face was still hard, and her eyes dark and narrowed with their oddly Oriental look. She bent her shoulders together for an instant and her hands moved slowly in her lap, stretching out before her in a gesture very like a cat's when it wakes from sleep and yawns and extends its claws, as if to make sure that they are still there and ready for use.

"I feel a little like Samson to-night," she said. "I am tired of almost everything, and I should like very much to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it--except you, Ste. Marie, dear; except you!--and be crushed under the ruins!"

"I think," said Ste. Marie, practically--and the speech sounded rather like one of Hartley's speeches--"I think it was not quite the world that Samson pulled down, but a temple--or a palace--something of that kind."

"Well," said the golden lady, "this place is rather like a temple--a Chinese temple, with the pig-dog for high-priest."

Ste. Marie frowned at her.

"What are you going to do?" he demanded, sharply. "What did you come here to do? Mischief of some kind--bien entendu--but what?"

"Do?" she said, looking at him with her narrowed eyes. "I? Why, what should I do? Nothing, of course! I merely said I should like to pull the place down. Of course, I couldn't do that quite literally, now, could I?

No. It is merely a mood. I'm not going to do anything."

"You're not being honest with me," he said.

And at that her expression changed, and she patted his arm again with a gesture that seemed to beg forgiveness.

"Well, then," she said, "if you must know, maybe I did come here for a purpose. I want to have it out with our friend Captain Stewart about something. And Ste. Marie, dear," she pleaded, "please, I think you'd better go home first. I don't care about these other animals, but I don't want you dragged into any row of any sort. Please be a sweet Ste.

Marie and go home. Yes?"

"Absolutely, no!" said Ste. Marie. "I shall stay, and I shall try my utmost to prevent you from doing anything foolish. Understand that! If you want to have rows with people, Olga, for Heaven's sake don't pick an occasion like this for the purpose. Have your rows in private!"

"I rather think I enjoy an audience," she said, with a reflective air, and Ste. Marie laughed aloud because he knew that the nave speech was so very true. This lady, with her many good qualities and her bad ones--not a few, alas!--had an undeniable pa.s.sion for red fire that had amused him very much on more than one past occasion.

"Please go home!" she said once more.

But when the man only shook his head, she raised her hands a little way and dropped them again in her lap, in an odd gesture which seemed to say that she had done all she could do, and that if anything disagreeable should happen now, and he should be involved in it, it would be entirely his fault because she had warned him.

Then quite abruptly a mood of irresponsible gayety seemed to come upon her. She refused to have anything more to do with serious topics, and when Ste. Marie attempted to introduce them she laughed in his face. As she had said in the beginning she wished to do, she harked back to old days (the earlier stages of what might be termed the Morrison regime), and it seemed to afford her great delight to recall the happenings of that epoch. The conversation became a dialogue of reminiscence which would have been entirely unintelligible to a third person, and was, indeed, so to Captain Stewart, who once came across the room, made a feeble effort to attach himself, and presently wandered away again.

They unearthed from the past an exceedingly foolish song all about one "Little Willie" and a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick. It was set to a well-known air from _Don Giovanni_, and when Duval, the ba.s.so, heard them singing it he came up and insisted upon knowing what it was about. He laughed immoderately over the English words when he was told what they meant, and made Ste. Marie write them down for him on two visiting-cards. So they made a trio out of "Little Willie," the great Duval inventing a ba.s.s part quite marvellous in its ingenuity, and they were compelled to sing it over and over again, until Ste. Marie's falsetto imitation of a tenor voice cracked and gave out altogether, since he was by nature barytone, if anything at all.

The other guests had crowded round to hear the extraordinary song, and when the song was at last finished several of them remained, so that Ste. Marie saw he was to be allowed an uninterrupted tete-a-tete with Olga Nilssen no longer. He therefore drifted away, after a few moments, and went with Duval and one of the other men across the room to look at some small jade objects--snuff-bottles, bracelets, buckles, and the like--which were displayed in a cabinet cleverly reconstructed out of a j.a.panese shrine. It was perhaps ten minutes later when he looked round the place and discovered that neither Mlle. Nilssen nor Captain Stewart was to be seen.

His first thought was of relief, for he said to himself that the two had sensibly gone into one of the other rooms to "have it out" in peace and quiet. But following that came the recollection of the woman's face when she had watched her host across the room. Her words came back to him: "I feel a little like Samson to-night.... I should like very much to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it!" Ste. Marie thought of these things, and he began to be uncomfortable. He found himself watching the yellow-hung doorway beyond, with its intricate Chinese carving of trees and rocks and little groups of immortals, and he found that unconsciously he was listening for something--he did not know what--above the chatter and laughter of the people in the room. He endured this for possibly five minutes, and all at once found that he could endure it no longer. He began to make his way quietly through the groups of people toward the curtained doorway.

As he went, one of the women near by complained in a loud tone that the servant had disappeared. She wanted, it seemed, a gla.s.s of water, having already had many gla.s.ses of more interesting things. Ste. Marie said he would get it for her, and went on his way. He had an excuse now.

He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room much smaller than the other. There was a round table in the centre, so he thought it must be Stewart's dining-room. At the left a doorway opened into a place where there were lights, and at the other side was another door closed. From the room at the left there came a sound of voices, and though they were not loud, one of them, Mlle. Olga Nilssen's voice, was hard and angry and not altogether under control. The man would seem to have been attempting to pacify her, and he would seem not to have been very successful.

The first words that Ste. Marie was able to distinguish were from the woman. She said, in a low, fierce tone:

"That is a lie, my friend! That is a lie! I know all about the road to Clamart, so you needn't lie to me any longer. It's no good."

She paused for just an instant there, and in the pause St. Marie heard Stewart give a sort of inarticulate exclamation. It seemed to express anger and it seemed also to express fear. But the woman swept on, and her voice began to be louder. She said:

"I've given you your chance. You didn't deserve it, but I've given it you--and you've told me nothing but lies. Well, you'll lie no more. This ends it."

Upon that Ste. Marie heard a sudden stumbling shuffle of feet and a low, hoa.r.s.e cry of utter terror--a cry more animal-like than human. He heard the cry break off abruptly in something that was like a cough and a whine together, and he heard the sound of a heavy body falling with a loose rattle upon the floor.

With the sound of that falling body he had already reached the doorway and torn aside the heavy portiere. It was a sleeping-room he looked into, a room of medium size with two windows and an ornate bed of the Empire style set sidewise against the farther wall. There were electric lights upon imitation candles which were grouped in sconces against the wall, and these were turned on, so that the room was brightly illuminated. Midway between the door and the ornate Empire bed Captain Stewart lay huddled and writhing upon the floor, and Olga Nilssen stood upright beside him, gazing down upon him quite calmly. In her right hand, which hung at her side, she held a little flat black automatic pistol of the type known as Brownings--and they look like toys, but they are not.

Ste. Marie sprang at her silently and caught her by the arm, twisting the automatic pistol from her grasp, and the woman made no effort whatever to resist him. She looked into his face quite frankly and unmoved, and she shook her head.