Ellen Agnes, wan-eyed, anaemic, slipshod, and overworked, supported the statement. Only in April it 'ad 'appened, and Ellen Agnes 'ad never 'eld 'er 'ead up properly since. And little Elbert the 'ealthiest of children. Rising three and never a nillness till the pewmonia carried 'im orf. 'Ad only 'ad 'im phortographed three days before it 'appened! with 'is lovely little limbs and body naked, sitting on a fur rug, the blessed dear!
Ellen Agnes not appearing to recognise any connecting link between the nude pose and the pneumonia, Patrine suppressed the obvious suggestion. Both women meant well, but their talkative sympathy oppressed her. She imagined how, when Sherbrand ate alone, the stout aunt and the thin niece would hover round his table, assailing his ears with their Cockney voices, making their common, vulgar comments on the happenings of the day.
Perhaps her disrelish showed, for the kind women presently slackened their attentions. There was nothing then to divert Sherbrand's attention from his guest, beyond the undeniable attractions of the hastily spread board.
So they ate the pie, all of it. Patrine cried, in frank astonishment at the evaporation of her second plateful:
"But I am a wolf or something. No! Not even salad. What must you think of me? Crying my eyes out one minute and stodging pigeon-pie the next! Do the rest of the friends you feed here behave as badly as that?"
Sherbrand returned, ignoring the mention of other guests:
"Now, what should I think? Nothing but that you wanted something to buck you, and I was pretty ravenous myself. It was pretty parky up there at 10,000." He answered to her question how high that was: "Why, comparatively, you might imagine it about nine times as high as the top of St. Paul's Cross from the level of the ground."
Little the speaker dreamed then of aerial battles to be fought at 20,000. She asked whether he had "felt giddy" and he shook his head, saying:
"If I had felt inclined to giddiness I should have put off climbing until I felt fitter. I sympathise with Opera Stars who disappoint full houses, because some high C or lower G is a hairsbreadth off the bull. The singer can't afford a false note. It's death to a reputation. And the Flying Man can't risk brain-swim, because it means possibly nose-dive and smash. So I stay out of my sky unless I'm sure of myself. There's nothing on earth like being sure."
He had a way of saying "my sky" that was queer and rather beautiful. Just as though he had been a lark, occurred to Patrine. And indeed, in the beaky, jutting nose, and the full, bright eyes set forward and flush with the wide orbital arches, there was some resemblance between the man and the bird.
Patrine sunned herself in the lighter moment. She who had lain through the night sleepless--had risen still a bond-slave--realized that her fetters were broken now that her evil genius had flown. Taking with him her beloved, she fully believed in malice. Piercing though that knowledge was, it could not mar the blissful sense of freedom, mental and physical.
Bawne would be brought back. Meanwhile, one's blood sang through one's being, mere living was riotous ecstasy, mere breathing sheerest delight. The joy of life radiated from her. And to Sherbrand, sitting opposite at the little coarse-clothed table, she grew momentarily more and more like the girl of the Milles Plaisirs.
True, instead of cloudy black, her hair vied in tone with the banner of coppery flame that streams from the crater of an active volcano, or burns above some giant crucible of molten metal ready to be poured forth. Her long eyes under her wide level brows looked the colour of peat-water, in the electric light that contracted their pupils to pin-heads, and brought out against the yellow-distempered walls the creamy whiteness of her wonderful skin. When she leaned her round elbows on the table-cloth and smiled at him, it was the frank, generous smile that had warmed his heart when he stood solitary and unfriended on the rose-pink carpet near the gilt turnstile on the Upper Promenade.
He would put it to the test. He beckoned the pallid Ellen Agnes, asked for the bill, slipped his hand into a breast-pocket and drew from it a tiny white silk purse.
"Oh! You found ..."
With an indescribable emotion, half pain, half pleasure, she saw her missing property in the broad extended palm. He said:
"It flashed on me, even as I blackguarded Davis, that you must have paid that Commissionaire-fellow at the turnstile or he'd have been breathing vengeance at my back. So I ran back to find you and ask for an address where I might send the money. You were gone! He had got this purse in his hand. So I--bluffed the brute for all I was worth, and got him to give it me!--a stroke of luck--for I'd no money left to bribe him with! Be kind and tell me how much you gave the fellow!"
The deep dimple Sherbrand remembered showed in the full oval of one of her white cheeks. Slowly the pale rose-flush sweetened and warmed the whiteness. Her eyes were dusky stars under the barbaric wealth of beech-leaf tresses. A slow smile curved her mouth, the scarlet lips parted widely, showing two perfect rows of gleaming teeth.
"Two half-jimmies!" said the rich, mellow woman's baritone. Why did it talk such awful slang? "Half my screw for one whole week of letter-writing, running errands, doing shopping, and generally sheepdogging for my friend, Lady Beauvayse!"
"Then please take this!" This was a fat bright sovereign. "And be kind and say that I may stick to the purse?"
"If you care to--" Patrine began, dubiously.
"I care--most awfully!" He went on quickly. "Lady Beauvayse--your friend--I've seen her--if she's very pretty and tremendously American?"
She nodded.
"You've spotted her! That's Lady Beau--the dear thing! But she only talks Yankee Doodle to bounders or fogies, or people who seem to expect it from her. Her English is as good as mine."
"You don't mean it!" His keen face crinkled with laughter. She was superbly unconscious of its cause. He went on, rather ashamed of having made fun of her: "That accounts for the Old Kent Road-_cum_-Whitechapel I've heard from the august lips of British duchesses. At cricket-matches when Eton and Harrow were playing 'Varsity."
"Does it? I think not! The duchesses weren't amusing themselves, or trying to snub swankers. They were just mothers--_real_ mothers--trying to talk cricket to their boys. And the boys--the sweets!--grinning up their blessed young sleeves, and saying 'Yes'm!' and 'No'm!' How I do love boys! Don't you?" Her smile contracted with a spasm of anguish. "And I'm sitting here, gobbling and gabbling, when my darling!--" She rose taller than ever, from the little table, caught up her feather stole from a chairback near and slung it vigorously round her, straightened the tinsel hat with a side-glance at the strip of a looking-glass nailed in a frame of cheap gilt beading on the matchboarded wall at her right hand, picked up the vanity-bag and the long-sticked sunshade, and declared herself ready to go.
*CHAPTER XXXIX*
*A NIGHT IN JULY*
She reached the door before him. He had turned to say considerately to the good woman of the restaurant:
"We shall be late.... Frightfully, I expect! Promise me you won't sit up!"
"Oh! but I can't promise! One never knows! Best to have people up an' ready when there might be need of 'em!" Patrine heard, as she wrenched at the handle of the green curtained glass door.
"No--no! Let me!"
His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp thrill had traversed her. "_Vile, hateful creature!_" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew--the other woman within her, whom she loathed. "_Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?_" Then as she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. She recoiled, saying in awed and shaken tones:
"Why! What has happened? What does it mean? ... How horrible!"
The door had shut behind them. Now the round dome of the sky showed not black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian darkness, upon the surface of which figures--were they men or devils?--moved....
"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham! It's nothing ... though I ought to have wanted you...!"
Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his voice was unsteady as he went on:
"I was rather a brute to forget! ... It's a night-flare to guide--possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped in petrol, burning in iron buckets round our landing-place.'