"'Patrine' is your name.... Now I know it I will not forget it! Tell me!"--he spoke in lowered tones--"why do you carry your cigarette-case just in that place?"
She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly lifting her big white shoulders. "Simply for convenience--when I'm in evening kit. Dressmakers don't allow us poor women pockets in these days."
"It may be so!" As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated roughness that he had found useful in dealing with many women, he took the cigarette-case from her, momentarily covering her hand with his own. As his curving fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince at the contact. Her black brows drew together, her sleepy agate eyes shot him a hostile sidewise glance.
"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety. And she answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk, and laughter of the others:
"No! ... Only--I hate to be touched, that's all."
He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache, and his large, well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.
"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But--about your cigarette-case--you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more subtle. You carry that thing there--under your corsage--to make live men envious of an object that cannot feel!"
"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"
The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big, warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood--you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature--her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.
*CHAPTER XI*
*PATRINE SAXHAM*
Who was the girl--the woman rather--who diffused around her so powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal Nature had dowered with such opulence of bodily splendour, that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments borrowed from her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold and purple tissues--of Anatole France's Queen of Sheba treading the lapis-lazuli and sardonyx pavements of King Solomon's palace in her jewelled sandals of gilded serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow of her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his cushions of purple byssus, between the golden lions of his ivory throne?
What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung. Soft and velvety like that dead-white skin of hers. The tortoiseshell case he held in his big palm still glowed with the rich vital warmth of her. His blood tingled and raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous, and his mouth relaxed into sensuousness. He said almost stupidly, so keen was his enjoyment:
"You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think."
"Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"
She asked the queer question, not defiantly, but bluntly. Her strange eyes laughed a little, as she saw Franky wince. "Lord Norwater hates me. Well, that's about the limit!" she told herself. "And I helped on his love-affair for little Margot's sake!" "I beg your pardon, Lord Norwater! You were saying something? ..."
"You're an Advanced Thinker, aren't you, Miss Saxham? At least, my wife tells me so," Franky began. "Well, I'm not! But I've got my doubts as to whether vice is pleasant, for one thing--and for another, whether the general run of women in these days aren't quite as vicious as the men?"
"He wants to be nasty.... Poor boy, what have I done to him?" passed through the brain topped by the bizarre diadem. But before its wearer could reply, von Herrnung interposed:
"Naturally they are vicious--if they desire to please men. A dash of vice--that is the last touch to perfect an exquisite woman. It is the chilli in the _mayonnaise_, the garlic and citron in the _ragout_, the perfume of the carnation, the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite in the kiss! ..."
"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!" thought Franky, whose attack of propriety had reached the acute stage. Patrine Saxham repeated slowly, and with brows that frowned a little:
"'_The bite in the kiss_'...."
"You pretend not to understand..." said the guttural voice of von Herrnung, speaking so that his wine- and cigar-scented breath stirred the heavy hair that hid her small white ear. "But you are wiser than you would have me believe. Are you not? Tell me!--am I not right?"
He bent closer, and she broke a web that seemed in the last few moments to have been spun about her, invisible, delicate, strong, making captive the body and the mind. Her odd agate-coloured eyes laughed into his jeeringly. Her wide red mouth curved and split like a ripe pomegranate, showing the sharp white teeth that, backed by a vigorous appetite and seconded by a splendid digestion, had done justice to every course of Brayham's choice menu.
Men always waxed sentimental or enterprising towards the close of a rattling good dinner. Patrine didn't care, not a merry little hang! They might say and look what they liked, as long as they kept their hands off. At a touch, the quick revulsion came.
"You are amused.... I understand...." Von Herrnung spoke between his teeth, in a tone of stifled anger. "Always to rot; it is your English fashion.... When you encourage a man to make love to you, you are rotting. When you say sweet things to him--possibly you are rotting too?"
She turned her face away from him, striving to control her irresistible laughter. In vain; it took her as a sudden gale takes a pennant at the masthead--seized and shook her--as von Herrnung could have shaken her had they been alone. He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak to Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy hand to his deafest ear. Von Herrnung repeated his utterance. Brayham goggled in astonishment. Courtley murmured to Franky:
"Hear what the blighter's saying.... No keeping him down, is there? ... Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"
They looked and listened. Brayham's thick bull-neck was shortening as his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears. They caught a sound between a snort and a bellow. Then Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of the rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend.... Count Tido wanted to propose a toast, the custom in dear, sentimental Germany.... Why shouldn't he? Rather amusing. She begged him to go on. Said von Herrnung:
"To-night the laugh goes much against me. I have been most frightfully rotted. Now, in my country it is the custom when a guest has been made game of that those who have laughed at him must drink a toast with him--to show there is no ill-will."
"Never heard of such a custom--and I've lived in Germany a good deal."
This from Brayham. The German persisted:
"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?" He went on, now addressing the company generally: "Here at the Spitz they have a Tokayer that is very old and very excellent. If I might order some? It would be amusing if you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."
The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of the attendants. Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey hair erect, stared, as at a new and surprising type of the human kind.
But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken out of his mouth. A swift glance had passed between the English Naval officer and the rather stupid, titled young Guardsman occupying the seat left of von Herrnung. And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord Norwater, lobster-red and rather flurried, turned to von Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet clearly enough to be heard by every guest at the table:
"Stop! Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not order that wine, I think!"
"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.
"I--don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our Governments--we've done that since the year One--far as I can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes--it ain't so much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"