That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the
Egerland,--reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been
hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took
all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but
they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round
Paris trying to get _laissez-passers_." She turned her lovely eyes upon
a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining
with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs.
"Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"
"Beparr?"
Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia
uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot
of bosom friends, repeated the query:
"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"
"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust
that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of
his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his
mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL
NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have
undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of
forty-eight hours! Mph!"
So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head
rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He
uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out
a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in
the very act of returning it to his pocket--fell asleep again.
"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to
Kittums.
"_How_ I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not
having gone abroad!"
"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows
that resembled musical slurs.
"Was it so--" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost
of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by
stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is
horrid!--if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to
suffocating excess merits the term--" She loosened the quadruple string
of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and
went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your
friends--in tatters after a suffocating struggle!--packed with sixty
other squalid wretches in a luggage-van _en route_ for Dieppe! If to
sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested
humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat--if to fight as with
beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway--if to fall in a heap on the
sodden deck--to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves
that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly
crawling nearer!--if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the
term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"
Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet
mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were
her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia
Charterhouse:
"_Who_ would have _dreamed_ only three weeks ago, when that excessively
long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and
talked to us about German women and German Supermen--that we should be
at War to-day with Germany?"
"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as
though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That
dreadful report in _The Wire_ made the Franzenbad treatment disagree
with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing,
upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he
hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor
dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a
tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to
have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von
Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large
interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal
gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot.
Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first
draught of real freedom to young German girls!"
Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:
"Miss Saxham bears up--under the circumstances!"
"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading
aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out
her characteristic laugh:
"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris.
The mere _rapprochement_ of _atomes crochus_! Miss Saxham and Lady
Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was
certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and
figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so
heavily--did not please him. He found the effect--I think his term
was--'too crepuscular.'"
"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of
hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham
went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular
tresses changed to terra-cotta!"
"_Not_ saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own
green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have
called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the
bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under
four hundred and fifty francs!"
"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse--" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.
"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted
capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they
are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do
you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"
For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had
suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had
entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a
tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve
displayed a band of black significantly new.
"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!--her type is so unusual! Not
having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not
quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in
Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the
tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette
before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk
application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known
Miss Saxham?"
"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"
Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete
pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.
"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce
with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now
though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"
"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I
deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs.
Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.
"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know
happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night
in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie
pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was
wearing--that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the
appointment for her, with Wiber--'_Pastiches Artistiques_,' and so on,
_Rue de la Paix_. He bragged of it afterwards at the _Cercle Moderne_!
Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em?
Bounders that kiss and tell!"
There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of
laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and
dozed again. Then----
"Now we _know_ who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in
dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:
"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. _How_ far had the
affair _really_ gone?"
"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly.
"Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"
"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair--" began Mrs. Charterhouse,
languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends
and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the
reputation of an unmarried girl....
"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little
figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the
scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing
between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"--the little voice was
crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will
understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin,
Alan Sherbrand."--Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband,
he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and
so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the
match!"
There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then
Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:
"Really, Kitts, it was--hardly cricket not to have warned us!"
While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:
"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did
you say her _fiance_ was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the
son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel
Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him
before--people left off!"
"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and--most people cut
him! But he is _dead_," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if
we have no--" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid
crimson--"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met
him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she
didn't tint her hair to please _him_."
"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas--it was the other man
who paid!"
"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling
laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young
gentleman over there--who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond
Norman style--and who is going to marry Miss Saxham--succeeds to Lord
Norwater in--a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear
Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep
the cousin out of the House of Peers!"
"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little
teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with--_that_!
How dare--" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her
eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from
the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.
"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive
us, my dinkie! What _pigs_ we have been!"
"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I
rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed
herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are
horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady
Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything
cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is