The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was "not even faithful"--that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.
Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.
"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"
"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.
Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of Gentlemen--an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.
For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.
An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:
BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.
The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father's life?
She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.
She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred--seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, _si paisible_....
*CHAPTER XV*
*THE BITE IN THE KISS*
But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:
"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish _mantilla_. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."
"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"
"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre--too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair--not yellow, nor yet orange--nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And--all the women would be crazy with jealousy--and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then--you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"
"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle stagily. "What do you bet me I don't--do what you said?"
"Bleach and dye...?"
"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of--what was it? 'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."
"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin. And I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks--that is twenty pounds English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say--Done? ..."
"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"
He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:
"I will lend you twenty pounds--it will cost you twenty pounds to have your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be _sehr schoen_--the money will be well spent. No? ..."--for she had shaken her head, frowning. "It is offered--why will you not accept?"
"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at. Borrowing money's one of them."
"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl--you may have seen it"--he displayed the ornamented little finger--"against that not-very-good diamond you wear on your left hand."
She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the Palais Royal. Well, done with you!"
"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had a new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London--when? ... The day after to-morrow.... _Gut!_ ... I have myself to visit London upon business--I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more. An address where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here! ..."
Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end of this avenue--with all the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about it--surely that's the _Pavilion de la Danse_?"
"_Halt den Mund!_" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as light measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it seemed, to somebody ahead:
"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse----"
"He's calling me. It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine persisted.
"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London address!"
She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.
"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly, West.' That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."
"_Sehr gut_! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"
"Write it on your cuff!"
"It is written in a safer place," he told her. "We Prussian officers are trained to remember without writing things down. A face, an address, a conversation, the outlines of a country. Though for _reconnaissance_ there is nothing like _die Photographie_." He added: "When we meet in London I shall be able to tell you everything you wore to-night."
"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a mental inventory?"
They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently quitted. He walked with noiseless strides behind the tall, supple figure as it moved between the trellised vines and roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem, robed in the insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.
"As you say. I shall be able to tell you that the back of your _mantel_ was cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your waist-line. Shall I tell you why?"