Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.
"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning of the Midsummer Half term--a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a lecture--the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"
And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying Milord. He--Milord--must be sure to make no noise in changing for dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming, was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a _potion calmante_ of orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of Milord....
"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!--though I thought angels never went to bed--flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto, though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my love...."
And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.
It was to have been a dinner of eight people--Brayham the host, with Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!--a man unknown who was to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley--ripping good fellow old Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class Cruiser--damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New York--pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress, Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity--good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.
Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue--gettin' elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley Street--handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced Thinker--according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.
With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven, counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies Bergere or the Theatre Marigny--or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he, Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?
The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping--the orange-flower water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified to his masculine strength of will.
*CHAPTER IX*
*SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS*
You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.
You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble, wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze. And possibly you need no introduction to the deity--plain and middle-aged--in whose honour Brayham--the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division--in the remote mid-Victorian era a famous Q.C.--made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the South African War of 1900.
Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to sparkle as never before.
"The '_Chronique Scandaleuse_' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and _raconteuse_, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and wreathed smiles.
Upon this night of the Grand Prix--won, you will remember, by Baron M. de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"--the little lady's jests fizzled and coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey tempt the yellow-and-black marauders to the board. And yet from the soup to the _entremets_, Franky listened in dour and smileless silence, unable to conjure up a grin at the sharpest of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that invariably followed the naughtiest of her _double-entendres_.
"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in a sympathetic undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's cheerless countenance behind the bare, convulsed back and snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse, who occupied the intervening chair.
"Putridly off colour.... Walked in the Bois, and got a touch of the sun, I fancy!" Franky whispered back too loudly, drawing upon himself the Goblin's _equivoque_:
"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater? Dear me!" the Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing! You've revived a long-lost Early Victorian art."
"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim and distant era?" asked the friendly Brayham, not in the least comprehending Franky's discomfiture, yet desirous of diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from her victim's scarlet face.
"It was the art that concealed Heart--or assumed it!" Lady Wathe retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning her tight-skinned, large-eyed, wide-mouthed ugliness upon the speaker, and nodding her little round head until the huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed tiara that crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed blinding sparks of violet and red and emerald splendour in the mellow-toned radiance of the electric lights.
The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself, as the angry blood stopped humming in his ears, and his complexion regained its normal shade. The bad pun that had bowled him over had possibly been uttered without malicious intent.... Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous suite upon the floor below the Norwater apartments, and one of her three lady's-maids might have been pumping Pauline.... What was she saying? ... Why was everybody cackling? ...
The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story. Its _denouement_--worked up with skill and related with point--evoked peal upon peal of laughter from the guests at Brayham's table, with the sole exception of Franky, whom the anecdote found sulky and left glum. He said to himself that if Lady Beauvayse, _nee_ Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New York, sole child and heiress of a Yankee who had made millions out of Chewing Gum, chose to forget her position as the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his children, by Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out. If the big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with amusement, as he recapitulated the chief points of the story for the benefit of the girl who sat next him, it was his affair. But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who oughtn't to see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its saltness, made Franky feel sick--on this particular night.