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II

Urquhart stopped his tale again, to wheel round the platform on which I sat, so as to get me more in profile.

“This looks marvellously like stuff for a story,” I said to him as he set to work again upon the clay. “My professional interests are fully aroused. Please go on.”

He smiled again.

“I am charmed to find you can be so easily entertained,” said he. “After all, what is it? Merely a trifling incident. Every other man who went through the Peninsular campaign came on experiences, I am sure, far more curious. My little story would have ended in the lane of Ciudad Rodrigo had not three companies of the 71st – mainly invalids after Badajos – been sent to Scotland for a whiff of their native air, and the fascination of recruits. I had got a spent ball in the chest at Badajos. I, too, had that gay vacation. I went with my silver drum to the county it came from. It was glorious summer weather. For three weeks we were billeted in the county town; for a fortnight I would not have changed places with King George himself.”

“Mr Urquhart,” I said, “I have a premonition. Here comes in the essential lady.”

The sculptor smiled.

“Here, indeed,” he said, “comes in the lady. There are, I find, no surprises for a novelist. We were one day (to resume my story) in the burgh square, where a market was being held, and hopes were entertained by our captain that a few landward lads might nibble at the shilling. Over one side of the square towered a tall whitewashed house of many windows; and as I, with a uniform tunic that was the pride of the regimental tailor, five feet eleven, twenty-one years of age, and the vanity of a veteran, played my best to half a dozen fifes, I noticed the lady at a window – the only window in all that massive house-front to manifest any interest in our presence or performance. I turned my silver drum a little round upon my leg that it might reflect more dazzlingly the light of the afternoon sun, and threw into my beats and rolls the most graceful style that was at my command, all the while with an eye on madam. It was my youthful conceit that I had caught her fancy when, a little later – our sergeants busy among the rustics – she came out from the house and over where I sat apart beside my drum on the steps of the market cross. She was younger than myself, a figure so airy and graceful, you would swear that if she liked she could dance upon blue-bells without bruising a petal; she had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.

“‘Excuse me,’ said she, ‘but I must look at the darling drum – the sweet drum,’ and caught the silken cords in her fingers, and ran a palm of the daintiest hand I had ever seen over the shining barrel.

“I thought she might, with more creditable human sentiment, have had less interest in my drum and more in me, but displayed my instrument with the best grace I could command.

“‘Do you know why I am so interested?’ she asked in a little, looking at me out of deep brown eyes in which I saw two little red-coated drummers, a thing which gave me back my vanity and made me answer her only with a smile. Her cheek for the first time reddened, and she hurried to explain. ‘They are Kildalton’s drums. Mr Fraser of Kildalton was my father, who is dead, and my mother is dead too; and I pleated and tied these cords and tassels first. How beautifully you keep them!’

“‘Well, Miss Fraser,’ said I, ‘I assure you I could not keep them better if I tried; but, after this, I shall have a better reason than ever for keeping them at their best,’ a soldier’s speech she smiled at as she turned away. As she went into the tall white house again she paused on the threshold and looked back for a moment at me, smiling, and for the first time since I took the bounty I rued my bargain, and thought I was meant for something more dignified than drumming. From that hour I lived in the eyes of Kildalton’s daughter Margory. Once a week we went fifing and drumming through the square. She was on these occasions never absent from her window; there was never a smile awanting for the smart young gentleman who beat the silver drum. A second and a third time she came into the square to speak to me. I made the most of my opportunities, and she was speedily made to discover in the humble drummer a fellow of race and education, a fellow with a touch of poetry, if you please. She was an orphan, as I have indicated – the ward of an uncle, a general, at the time abroad. She lived on the surviving fortune of Kildalton, in the tall white house, with an elderly aunt and a servant. At our third interview – we have a way of being urgent in the Army – she had trysted to meet me that evening in the wood behind the town.

“Let me do the girl justice, and say that the drum of Kildalton brought her there, and not the drummer. At least, she was at pains to tell me so, for I had mentioned to her, with some of the gift of poetry I have mentioned, how infinitely varied were the possibilities of an instrument she would never have a proper chance to judge of in the routine of a fife-and-drum parade.

“My billet was at the back of the town, on the verge of a wood, with the window of my room opening on a sort of hunting-path that went winding through the heart of what I have called a wood, but was in actual fact a forest of considerable dimensions. I went out by the window that evening with my drum, and walked, as had been arranged, about a mile among the trees till I came to a narrow glen that cleft the hills, a burn of shallow water from the peaty uplands bickering at the bottom of it. A half moon swung like a halbert over the heights that were edged by enormous fir-trees, and the wood was melancholy with the continuous call of owls. They were soon silenced, for I began to play the silver drum.

“I began with the reveille, though it was a properer hour for the tattoo, playing it lightly, so that while it silenced the hooting owls it did not affright the whole forest. She came through the trees timidly, clothed, as I remember, in a gown of green. She might have been the spirit of the pine-plantings; she might have been a dryad charmed from the swinging boughs. ‘Margory! Margory!’ I cried, my heart more noisy than my drum had been, and clasped her to my arms. ‘Here’s a poor drummer, my dear,’ I said, ‘and you a queen. If you do not love me you were less cruel to take this dirk and stab me to the heart than act the heartless coquette.’

“She faintly struggled. He hair fell loose in a lock or two from under her hat, surged on her shoulder, and billowed about my lips. Her cheek was warm; her eyes threw back the challenge of the silver moon over the tops of pine.

“‘For a young gentleman from a kirk manse, Master Drummer, you have considerable impertinence,’ said she, panting in my arms.

“‘My name, dear Margory, is George, as I have told you,’ I whispered, and I kissed her.

“‘George, dear George,’ said she, ‘have done with folly! Let me hear the drumming and go home.’

“I swung her father’s drum again before me and gave, in cataracts of sound, or murmuring cascades, the sentiments of my heart.

“‘Wonderful! Oh, wonderful!’ she cried, entranced; so I played on.

“The moon went into a cloud; the glade of a sudden darkened; I ceased my playing, swung the drum again behind, and turned for Margory.

“She was gone!

“I cried her name as I ran through the forest, but truly she was gone.”

Urquhart stopped his story and eagerly dashed some lines upon the clay. “Pardon!” he said. “Just like that, for a moment. Ah! that is something like it!”

“Well, well!” I cried. “And what followed?”

“I think – indeed, I know – she loved me, but – I went back to the war without a single word from her again.”

“Oh, to the deuce with your story!” I cried at that, impatient. “I did not bargain for a tragedy.”

“In truth it is something of a farce, as you shall discover in a moment,” said the sculptor. “Next day the captain sent for me. ‘Do you know General Fraser?’ said he, looking at a letter he held in his hand. I told him I had not the honour. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘it looks as if the family had a curious penchant for the drum, to judge from the fact that his brother gave yours to the regiment, and also’ – here he smiled slyly – ’from the interest of his niece. He is not an hour returned from Spain to his native town when he asks me to send you with your drum to his house at noon.’

“‘Very good, sir,’ I answered, with my heart thundering, and went out of the room most hugely puzzled.

“I went at noon to the tall white house, and was shown into a room where sat Margory, white to the lips, beside the window, out of which she looked after a single hopeless glance at me. A middle-aged gentleman in mufti, with an empty sleeve, stood beside her, and closely scrutinised myself and my instrument as I entered.

“‘This is the – the person you have referred to?’ he asked her, and she answered with a sob and an inclination of her head.

“‘You have come – you are reputed to have come of a respectable family,’ he said then, addressing me; ‘you have studied at Edinburgh; you have, I am told, some pretensions to being something of a gentleman.’

“‘I hope they are no pretensions, sir,’ I answered warmly. ‘My people are as well known and as reputable as any in Argyll, though I should be foolishly beating a drum.’

“‘Very good,’ said he, in no way losing his composure. ‘I can depend on getting the truth from you, I suppose? You were with the 71st as drummer at Ciudad Rodrigo?’

“‘I was, sir,’ I replied. ‘Also at Badajos, at Talavera, Busaco – ’

“‘An excellent record!’ he interrupted. ‘I might have learned all about it later had not my wound kept me two months in hospital after Ciudad. By the way, you remember being sent as drummer with a picket of men down a lane?’

“I started, gave a careful look at him, and recognised the General whose life I had doubtless saved from the pillaging Portuguese.

“‘I do, sir,’ I answered. ‘It was you yourself who sent me.’

“He turned with a little air of triumph to Margory. ‘I told you so, my dear,’ said he. ‘I got but a distant glimpse of him this forenoon, and thought I could not be mistaken.’ And Margory sobbed.

“‘My lad,’ he said, visibly restraining some emotion, ‘I could ask your drum-major to take the cords of Kildalton my brother’s drum and whip you out of a gallant corps. I sent you with a picket – a brave lad, as I thought any fellow should be who played Kildalton’s drum, and you came back a snivelling poltroon. Nay – nay!’ he cried, lifting up his hand and checking my attempt at an explanation. ‘You came out of that infernal lane whimpering like a child, after basely deserting your comrades of the picket, and made the mutilated condition of your drum the excuse for refusing my order to go back again, and I, like a fool, lost a limb in showing you how to do your duty.’

“‘But, General – ’ I cried out.

“‘Be off with you!’ he cried. ‘Another word, and I shall have you thrashed at the triangle.’

“He fairly thrust me from the room, and the last I heard was Margory’s sobbing.

“Next day I was packed off to the regimental depot, and some weeks later played a common drum at Salamanca.”

The sculptor rubbed the clay from his hands and took off his overall.

“That will do to-day, I think,” said he. “I am much better pleased than I was yesterday,” and he looked at his work with satisfaction.

“But the story, my dear Mr Urquhart. You positively must give me its conclusion!” I demanded.

“Why in the world should that not be its conclusion?” said he, drawing a wet sheet over the bust. “Would you insist on the hackneyed happy ending?”

“I am certain you did not take your quittance from the General in that way. You surely wrote to Margory or to him with an explanation?”

The sculptor smiled.

“Wrote!” cried he. “Do you think that so obvious an idea would not occur to me? But reflect again, I pray you, on the circumstances, – an obscure and degraded drummer – the daughter of one of the oldest families in the Highlands – the damning circumstantiality of her uncle’s evidence of my alleged poltroonery. My explanation was too incredible for pen and paper; and the poltroon himself, the man who had brought the disgrace upon me, was beyond my identification, even had I known where to look for him.”

“And yet, Mr Urquhart,” I insisted, all my instincts as romancer assuring me of some other conclusion to a tale that had opened on a note so cheerful, “I feel sure it was neither a tragedy nor a farce in the long-run.”

“Well, you are right,” he confessed, smiling. “It was my drum that lost me the lady before ever I met her, as it were, and it was but fair that my drum should be the means of my recovering her ten years later. A reshuffling of the cards of fortune in my family brought me into a position where I was free to adopt the career of Art, and by-and-by I had a studio of my own in Edinburgh. It was the day of the portrait bust in marble. To have one’s own effigy in white, paid for by one’s own self, in one’s own hall, was, in a way, the fad of fashionable Edinburgh. It was profitable for the artist, I admit, but – but – ”

“But it palled,” I suggested.

“Beyond belief! I grew to hate the appearance of every fresh client, and it was then that I sought the solace of this drum. When a sitter had gone for the day I drummed the vexation out of me, feeling that without some such relief I could never recover a respect for myself. And by-and-by I began to discover in the instrument something more than a relief for my feelings of revolt against the commercial demands on my art. I found in it an inspiration to rare emotions: I found in it memory. I found, in the reveilles and chamades that I played in fields of war and in the forest to my Marjory, love revived and mingled with a sweet regret, and from these – memory, regret, and love – I fashioned what have been my most successful sculptures.

“One day a gentleman came with a commission for his own portrait. It was General Fraser! Of course, he did not recognise me. Was it likely he should guess that the popular sculptor and the lad he had sent in disgrace from the tall white house in the distant Highland burgh town were one? Nor did I at first reveal myself. Perhaps, indeed, he would never have discovered my identity had not his eyes fallen on my drum.

“‘You have had a military subject lately?’ he said, indicating the instrument.

“‘No, General,’ I answered on an impulse. ‘That is a relic of some years of youthful folly when I played Kildalton’s silver drum, and it serves to solace my bachelor solitude.’

“‘Heavens!’ he cried; ‘you, then, are the drummer of Ciudad Rodrigo?’

“‘The same,’ I answered, not without a bitterness. ‘But a very different man from the one you imagine.’ And then I told my story. He listened in a curious mingling of apparent shame, regret, and pleasure, and when I had ended was almost piteous in his plea for pardon. ‘The cursed thing is,’ he said, that Margory maintains your innocence till this very day.’

“That she should have that confidence in me,’ said I, ‘is something of a compensation for the past ten years. I trust Miss Margory – I trust your niece is well.’

“The General pondered for a moment, then made a proposition.

“‘I think, Mr Urquhart,’ said he, ‘that a half-winged old man is but a poor subject for any sculptor’s chisel, and, with your kind permission, I should prefer to have a portrait of Miss Margory, whom I can swear you will find quite worthy of your genius.’

“And so,” said Urquhart in conclusion, “and so, indeed, she was.”

“There is but one dénouement possible,” I said with profound conviction, and, as I said it, a bar of song rose in the garden, serene and clear and unexpected like the first morning carol of a bird in birchen shaws. Then the door of the studio flung open, and the singer entered, with the melody checked on her lips whenever she saw the unexpected stranger. She had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.

“My daughter Margory,” said the sculptor. “Tell your mother,” he added, “that I bring our friend to luncheon.”

THE SCOTTISH POMPADOUR

SEVERAL years ago there was no figure more conspicuous on the boulevards of Paris at the fashionable hour than that of the dandy called le Pompadour écossais by the journals. He had what will command attention anywhere, but most of all in Paris – the mould of an Apollo, a tailor of genius, the money of a Monte Cristo, and above all, Mystery. In the speech of this tall, dark, and sober-visaged exquisite there was no hint of a foreign nationality. His French was perfect; his idioms were correctly chosen; only his title, Lord Balgowie, and a foible for the use of the checkered stuff his countrymen call tartan, in his waistcoats, proclaimed that he was a Scot. That he should elect to spend his time in Paris seemed but natural to the boulevardiers: it is the only place for young gentlemen of spirit and the essential cash; but why should he feed himself like an anchorite while he surfeited his friends? why, with such a gay exterior, should be allied a mind so sober, private character so blameless and austere? These problems exercised the speculations of the café tables all the summer.

In the rue Adolphe Yvon, one of the most exclusive and expensive streets in Paris, near enough to the Bois de Boulogne to be convenient for morning exercise, but far enough removed to be without the surge and roar of the tides of life that beat there in the afternoons, the Pompadour écossais had a mansion like a palace, where he entertained the fashionable world with the aid of a cook who seemed possessed of magic powers to startle and delight, a wine-cellar incredibly comprehensive, and a retinue of servants such as the President of the Republic himself could not command. If he dined at his house alone, he dined with all the grandiose formality of Lucullus; if he patronised a restaurant, he must have his private cabinet and a menu unbelievingly extravagant. But strictly speaking, he never dined alone, either in the rue Adolphe Yvon, Voisin’s, or Paillard’s: he was invariably accompanied by a fellow-countryman, who was his secretary or companion – a fellow saturnine and cynical, who ate and drank voraciously, while his master was content with the simplest viands and a glass of water.

They had come in spring to the Ville Lumière, and stepped, as it were, from the wagon-lit of the P.L.M. train from the South into the very vortex of frivolity. You saw the Pompadour écossais in the morning riding in the Bois on a snowy Irish hunter, wearing garments of a tone and cut that promptly set the fashion to the gommeaux, with a boutonnière of orchids; driving his coach through the avenues of Versailles in the afternoon with a coat of gendarme blue with golden buttons; at the clubs, the galleries, the opera, the cafés, the coulisses of the theatre – always the very latest cry in fashion, ever splendid and inscrutable! Withal, he never had so much as a sou in his pocket to buy a newspaper; his secretary paid for all, and paid with nothing less than gold. Balgowie, arbiter of elegance, envied by young men for his style, was adored by the most fastidious and discerning women for his sensibility, which was curiously out of keeping with his life of waste.

Quite as deeply interested in the Pompadour as any of the butterflies who fluttered round him in the rue Adolphe Yvon was a poor old widow, wholly unknown, in Scotland, for every Saturday she had a letter from her son, Balgowie’s secretary. She read of childish escapades, inordinate and unwholesome pleasures, reckless prodigality.

“What a miserable life!” she would exclaim at the news of some fresh imbecility, as it seemed to her. “A hundred pounds for a breakfast! Five hundred pounds for a picture to a lady! Oh, Jamie, Jamie, what a master!”

She grieved, indeed, exceedingly about the sinful course of life in which her son was implicated, and more than once, for his soul’s sake, asked him to come back to Scotland, but always he temporised. With Lord Balgowie he enjoyed a comfortable salary; he had no profession at his hands, although he had had the best of educations, thanks to his parents’ self-denial, and he saw himself doomed for a term of years to follow the progress of his rakish patron.

Her only comfort was in the shrewd and sober nature of his comments on his master’s follies. “I have looked at his manner of life in all ways, mother,” he wrote, “and it seems to me deplorable. Once I had the notion to be wealthy for the sake of the independence and the power for good that money can command; now I can see it has a cankering influence on the soul. I have gone with my lord to every part of Europe, looking for content and – in his own state – simple honesty, for friends to trust, and a creditable occupation for the mind. Nothing in all the capitals among the rich but idleness and riot and display, cunning intrigue, self-seeking, and calculation. Thank God that you’re poor!”

Not so very poor, though, for he sent her thirty shillings every week, a benefaction that enabled her to share among the really poor who were her neighbours. For years that sum had come to her with his letters every Saturday, often from towns whose names in their foreign spelling were unknown to her; a sense of opulence that caused her some uneasiness had more than once compelled her to protest. “I am sure you deprive yourself,” she wrote, “and half that money would do me finely. You should be saving, laddie; some day you will want to marry.”

“Marry,” he wrote her back, incontinent; “I am here in a world of mannequins, and have yet to see the woman I could be happy to sit with in auld age by a Scottish fire.”

But he was not always to be of that mind. One day her weekly letter held the fabulous sum of twenty pounds, and a hint of his infatuation for a lady he had met in Paris. His mother read his rhapsodies about the lass; they were, she noticed, more about her wit and beauty than about her heart. And in his letter was an unfamiliar undertone of apprehension, secrecy, evasion, which her mother sense discerned.

* * * * *

The Pompadour écossais rose one morning from his bed, which once belonged to Louis Quatorze, in the rue Adolphe Yvon; broke his fast on a bowl of coffee and a roll, and having dressed himself, as he always did, without a valet, with as much fastidiousness as if he were the Duke de Morny, rode for an hour in the wood, and later drove his English coach, with his English horses, English grooms, and English post-horn, out to the garden of St Germain. He was unusually resplendent, from his hat of silk, broad-brimmed, widely banded with bombazine, to high-heeled military shoes which seemed moulded to his feet, and had never known an unguent, but were polished daily to a fine dull lustre by the shin-bone of a deer. Upon his coat lapel was a green carnation that had cost a louis; his secretary sat behind him on the box, a man of undistinguished presence, wearing a sardonic smile; on the seats behind him was a company of guests for whom the lord had sieved the most exclusive salons of the capital – Prevost and Chatran, Chelmonski the Napoleonic painter, Paul Delourade the poet, half a dozen women of the most impeccable repute, and among them Mathilde de Langan with her ponderous mother, who was overjoyed to think that, after years of fruitless strategy, she was like to find an eminently eligible son-in-law in Lord Balgowie.

The girl was altogether lovely, exquisitely moulded, in the delicious gush of health and youthfulness, a miracle of grace with an aspect that recalled the pictures of Italian Madonnas; a brow benign and calm, a little tender mouth designed rather for prayer than for kissing, eyes purple black, profound as wells and prone to an alluring pensiveness.

They reached St Germain; stabled the horses, lunched upon the terrace that looks widely over the plain of Paris; obsequious silent servants hung about the tables; food and banter, wine and laughter, fruit and flowers engaged the company as it sat between the parterres, under awnings; and apart a little, looking on with eyes that gleamed at times with furtive and malicious entertainment, sat the secretary.

“That is a singular man of yours, milord,” remarked Mathilde, who sat beside the Pompadour. “I have never seen him smile but in derision.”

“He is a man with a peculiar sense of humour,” said the Pompadour, regarding her with gravely tender eyes. “I should not be surprised if the whole interior of that apparently saturnine body is at this moment rumbling with laughter.”

“Vraiment? What should he be laughing at?” asked the lady, whose judicious mother with discreet consideration sought a wicker arm-chair, screened herself with a quite unnecessary sunshade, and prepared to nap.

“At what he must think the folly of – of my quest for pleasure. He is, you know, my countryman, and the happy-starred among us find content and joy in the very cheapest, simplest entertainment. The cost of – of those flowers alone, perhaps he calculates at this moment, would suffice to keep his mother a fortnight.”

“Mon Dieu! has he got a mother?” said the lady airily. “To look at that rugged form and the square hard countenance, I would have thought he had been chipped from granite. But I hope the dear mother is not really hungry. Do you know her?”

“I am privileged to read her letters once a week,” said the Pompadour.

“That must be most amusing.”

“It is at least instructive; she has her own ideas of the life of fashion, and the character of le Pompadour.”

“Does she laugh, too, internally?”

“I fancy not,” said the Pompadour reflectively; “I think it is more likely that she prays.”

“How droll!” said the saintly lips. “But I suppose it is the best that one can do when one is poor. If I were so rich as you, and derived so much edification from her epistles, I should give her money.”

“More than she has from her son, who loves her, would make her miserable. Sixty years of strict frugality spoil the constitution for excess, and two guineas a week would make her as uncomfortable as one of Joseph’s dinners would.”

“You, at least, do not show appreciation of your Joseph’s dinners; you seem content with meagre soup and dry biscuits; one might think you were a physician, and we the subjects of experiment in indigestion.”

Madame de Langan slept assuredly; the egrets on her hat bobbed most grotesquely; now and then she gurgled. The company had scattered, some to see the old home of the exiled James of England, some to walk on the forest fringes.

“Mathilde,” said the Pompadour in a whisper, taking her hand in his and bending towards her with a look of burning concentration. “If I – if I were poor, could you love me?”

She started, bit her lip at a certain gaucherie in the question, but did not withdraw her hand. “I – I cannot say,” she stammered; “isn’t that a point for the little mother?” and she glanced at the sunshade hiding the ponderous sleeper.

“I know! I know! I know!” said the Pompadour in a fury of impatience. “But this is our Scottish fashion; first I must know from you, and then I shall consult your mother. Meanwhile, do you love me?”

“I have had no experience,” said the lady, not much embarrassed. “You have not told me yet if you love me, which is, I understand, the customary ritual.”

“Mon Dieu!” said he in an excess of fervour, “I’m in a flame of passion and worship of you,” and he crushed unconsciously her fingers in his two strong hands.

She winced. “Oh, ce n’est pas gentil,” she exclaimed, pulling away her hand. “You hurt me horribly.” Then she smiled up in his face, provocatively coquettish, whispering, “To-morrow,” for the other guests came trooping back upon the terrace.

On the following evening, when the dark was falling upon Paris, and the lamps began to bloom along the boulevards like flowers of fire, a little woman, simple, elderly, and timid, drove to the door of the mansion in the rue Adolph Yvon, and asked to see his lordship’s secretary.

“He is from home, madam,” said the English servant, looking with curiosity at the homely figure.

“From home!” she exclaimed, beset with fears, and realising now more poignantly than ever all the hazards of her scheme. “I must see him to-night; I am his mother.”

“He is meantime with his lordship at the restaurant of Voisin,” said the domestic kindly. “Will you come in and wait for him?”

“Thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed; “but, if it were possible, I should like to see him now.”

He put her in a cab, and gave the name of Voisin to the driver.

Voisin’s, in the rue Cambon, is a quiet and unpretentious restaurant, dear to aristocratic Paris, since it looks so cheap and really is expensive. So quiet, so discreet, so restrained externally, men from the rural parts have been known to go boldly in, misapprehending, and before they had recovered from the blinding radiance of its tables, ask for a brioche and a mug of beer.

To-night it had, more speciously than usual, the aspect of a simple village inn: a hush prevailed; its waiters moved about on list, and spoke in whispers; le Pompadour écossais dined en prince upstairs with a merry company, in a chamber upon which the whole attention of the house was concentrated, from M. le Gerant down to the meanest kitchen scullion, for the evening’s entertainment was upon a scale of reckless cost. Nothing would satisfy this wonderful man to-night but curious foods far-borne from foreign lands, strange rare beverages, golden vessels that had only once or twice been used in the Tuileries in the last days of the Empire. If diamonds could be crushed and turned by some miracle of alchemy into a palatable bouillon, he, or properly his secretary, would have cheerfully paid the cost. In an alcove screened by palms a string quartette played the most sensuous music, so exquisitely modulated that it seemed deliberately designed to harmonise with rallies of wit and peals of laughter.

Mathilde, who sat to the right of the host, and by her saintly aspect seemed at times incongruous with that company of fashion’s fools, was for once silent, thoughtful, and demure.