by Grant Allen
Paul sighed a faint sigh. He had never yet dared to confide to Mr. Lionel the painful announcement that he was no longer intent on the prospective pursuit of the British heiress, but he admitted to himself the justice of the other plea that he needed change; for, indeed, of late he had been sticking a great deal too close to the literature of his country. So, after a moment’s hesitation, he rose from his desk, and, putting off his working coat, endued himself in his best editor-visiting clothes for the afternoon’s stroll, and sallied forth into the street with Mr. Lionel.
As they went toward the Park, Mr. Lionel regaled his fellow-lodger with various amusing anecdotes of Mr. Solomons’ cuteness, and of the care with which he audited his nephew’s accounts, paying special attention to the item of sundries in the expenditure column. At these anecdotes Paul was somewhat surprised, for Mr. Solomons had always seemed to him lavish in only one respect; and that was on Mr. Lionel’s personal expenses. He had fancied, indeed — and he still continued to fancy — that Mr. Solomons spoilt his nephew. That was not Mr. Lionel’s own opinion, however. He descanted much upon his uncle’s “closeness,” and upon his want of sympathy with a fellow’s natural wish to “see life.”
“Never mind, though,” Mr. Lionel remarked at last, with a significant gesture of his protruding lips. “The two old men’ll drop off before long; and then, Gascoyne, you and I will have our innings.”
Paul was shocked at the heartless levity of the phrase, and, indeed, the whole point of view was one entirely foreign to him. “I don’t feel like that myself,” he said, drawing back, a little disgusted. “I hope my father will live for many years yet. And I’m sure Mr. Solomons has always been very good to you.”
Mr. Lionel’s face broke into a genial smile. “Come, come,” he said frankly, “none of that humbug, you know. We’re alone, and I aint going to peach on you to the worthy governor. Don’t go trying to talk any nonsense to me, for it don’t go down. You must want to succeed to your title, naturally.”
Paul hardly even liked to continue the discussion, his companion’s tone was so intensely distasteful to him; but he felt called upon to dissent. “You’re mistaken,” he said curtly. “I’m not talking humbug. My father is extremely near and dear to me. And as to the baronetcy, I hate the very idea of it. Had it rested from the first outset with me to take it or leave it, I don’t think I’d ever so much as have even claimed it.”
“Well, you are a rum chap!” Mr. Lionel interjected, much amused. “For my own part, you know, I’d give a thousand pounds down to have such prospects as you have. And it won’t be so long before you come into them, either. The old man drove me up to my uncle’s the last time I was at Hillborough, and I thought he was looking precious shaky. I only wish my own respected uncle was one-half as near popping off the hooks as he is. But that’s the worst of my old boy. He’s a tough sort, he is: belongs to the kind that goes on living forever. The doctors say there’s something the matter with his heart, to be sure, and that he mustn’t excite himself. But, bless your soul! the stingy old beggar’s too cunning to excite himself. He’ll live till he’s ninety, I verily believe, just on purpose to stick to his tin and spite me. And I, who’d make so much better a use of the money than he does — I’ll be turned sixty, I expect, before ever I come into it.”
Paul was too disgusted even to answer. His own obligations to Mr. Solomons, if any, were far less in every way than Mr. Lionel’s; but he couldn’t have endured so to speak or think of any man to whom he owed the very slightest gratitude.
They went on into the Park with more or less of conversation, and strolled up and down the Row for some time, Mr. Lionel, with a flower gaily stuck in his button-hole and a cane poised gracefully in his lemon-gloved hand, staring hard into the face of every girl he passed, and Paul half-regretting in his own soul he had consented to come out before the eyes of the town in such uncongenial company. At last, as they neared the thronged corner by Hyde Park Gate, Paul was roused from a reverie into which he had momentarily fallen by hearing a familiar voice at his side fall musically on his ear, exclaiming with an almost imperceptible foreign accent, “What! you here, Mr. Gascoyne? How charming! How delightful!”
The heir to the baronetcy turned quickly round, and beheld on a chair in the well-dressed crowd the perennial charms of little Mme. Ceriolo.
She looked younger and prettier even than she had looked at Mentone. Mme. Ceriolo made a point, in fact, of looking always her youngest and prettiest in London — for hers was the beauty which is well under the control of its skillful possessor. To be pretty in London may pay any day. A great city incloses such endless possibilities. And indeed, there, among the crowd of unknown faces, where he felt acutely all the friendless loneliness of the stranger in a vast metropolis, Paul was really quite pleased to see the features of the good-humored little adventuress. He shook hands with her warmly in the innocence of his heart, and stopped a moment to exchange reminiscences. Mme. Ceriolo’s face lighted up at once (through the pearl powder) with genuine pleasure. This was business, indeed. She saw she had made a momentary conquest of Paul, and she tried her best to follow it up, in order, if possible, to insure its permanence. For a British baronet, mark you, is never to be despised, above all by those who have special need of a guarantee passport to polite society.
“So I have to congratulate you,” she said archly, beaming on him through her glasses, “upon securing the little American heiress. Ah, you thought I didn’t know; but a little bird told me. And to tell you the truth, I felt sure of it myself the moment I saw you with her on the hills at Mentone.”
Paul, glancing round with burning cheeks, would have given anything that minute to sink into the ground. There, before the face of assembled London! and the people on all the neighboring chairs just craning their necks to catch the smallest fragments of their conversation.
“I — I don’t quite understand,” he stammered out nervously.
“Oh, yes,” Mme. Ceriolo went on, as cool as a cucumber and still smiling benignly. “She’d made up her mind to be Lady Gascoyne, I know, or to perish in the attempt; and now, we hear, she’s really succeeded.”
As she spoke, Mme. Ceriolo cast furtive eyes to right and left to see whether all her neighbors duly observed the fact that she was talking to a prospective man of title. At that open acknowledgment of Paul’s supposed exalted place in the world the necks of the audience craned still more violently. A young man of rank, then, in the open marriage market, believed to have secured a wealthy American lady!
“You’re mistaken,” Paul answered, speaking rather low and trembling with mortification. “I am not engaged to Miss Boyton at all.” Then he hesitated for a second, and, after a brief pause, in spite of Mr. Lionel’s presence (as witness for Mr. Solomons to so barefaced a dereliction of duty) he added the further incriminating clause, “And I don’t mean to be.”
The interest of the bystanders reached its highest pitch. It was as good as a paragraph in a society paper. The young man of title disclaimed the hand of the American heiress!
“But Mr. Armitage told me so,” Mme. Ceriolo retorted, with womanly persistence.
“Mr. Armitage is hardly likely to be so well informed on the point as I am myself,” Paul answered, flushing red.
“Why, it was Miss Boyton herself who assured him of the fact,” Mme. Ceriolo went on, triumphant. “And I suppose Miss Boyton ought at least to know about her own engagement.”
“You’re mistaken,” Paul answered, lifting his hat curtly and moving off at once to cut short the painful colloquy. And the bystanders, whispering low behind their hands and fans to one another, opined there would soon be a sensation for society in the shape of another aristocratic breach-of-promise case.
As they mingled in the crowd once more, Mr. Lionel, turning to his companion, exclaimed with very marked approbation, “That’s a devilish fine woman, anyhow, Gascoyne. Who the dickens is she?”
Paul explained in a few words what little he knew about Mme. Cerio
lo’s position and antecedents.
“I like that woman,” Mr. Lionel went on, with the air of a connoisseur in female beauty. “She’s got fine eyes, by Jove, and I’m death on eyes. And then her complexion! Why didn’t you introduce me? I should like to cultivate her.”
“I’ll introduce you if we pass her again,” Paul answered, preoccupied. He was wondering in his own mind what Mr.
Lionel would think of this awful resolution of his about the American heiress.
For the moment, however, Mr. Lionel, intent on his own thoughts, was wholly absorbed in his private admiration of Mme. Ceriolo’s well-developed charms. “As fine looking a young woman as I’ve seen for a fortnight,” he went on meditatively. “And did you notice, too, how very hard she looked at me?”
“No, I didn’t,” Paul answered, just stifling a faint smile of contempt; “but, to tell you the truth, I think she’d look hard at anybody upon earth who looked hard at her. And she’s scarcely young. She’s not far off forty, if anything, I fancy.” (At twenty-two, as we all know, forty seems quite mediaeval.)
“Let’s go back and pass her again,” Lionel exclaimed with effusion, turning round once more.
Paul shrank from the ordeal of facing those craning bystanders a second time; but he hadn’t the courage to say no to his impetuous companion. Mr. Lionel’s enthusiasm was too torrential to withstand. So they threaded their way back among the crowd of loungers.
Fortunately, by this time, Mme. Ceriolo had risen from her seat, after taking her full pennyworth, and was walking briskly and youthfully toward them. She met them once more — not quite undesignedly either — with a sweet smile of welcome on those cherry lips of hers. (You buy the stuff for ten sous a stick at any coiffeur’s in the Palais Royal.)
“My friend was anxious to make your acquaintance,” Paul said, introducing him. “Mr. Lionel Solomons — Mme. Ceriolo.”
“Not a son of Sir Saul Solomons?” Mme. Ceriolo exclaimed, inventing the existence of that eponymous hero on the spot with ready cleverness to flatter her new acquaintance’s obvious snobbery.
“No, not a son,” Mr. Lionel answered airily, rising to the fly at once; “but we belong, I believe, to the same family.” Which, if Sir Saul Solomons had possessed any objective reality at all, would, no doubt, in a certain broad sense, have been about as true as most other such claims to distinguished relationship.
Mme. Ceriolo measured her man accurately on the spot. “Ah, that dear Sir Saul,” she said, with a gentle sigh. “He was so good, so clever; I was always so fond of him! And you’re like him, too! The same profile! The same features! The same dark eyes and large full-browed forehead!” This was doubtless, also, in an ethical sense, strictly correct; for Mr. Lionel’s personal characteristics were simply those of the ancient and respected race to whom he owed his existence, and of which, apparently, the hypothetical Sir Saul was likewise a bright and shining example.
“May we walk your way?” Mr. Lionel said, gallantly ogling his fair companion.
Mme. Ceriolo was always professionally amiable. She accorded that permission with her most marked amiability.
They walked and talked for half an hour in the Park. Then Paul got tired of his subordinate part, and strolled off by himself obligingly. Mr. Lionel waited, and had ten minutes alone with his new-found charmer.
“Then I may really come and call upon you?” he asked at last in a melting tone, as he grasped her hand — somewhat hard — at parting.
Mme. Ceriolo’s eyes darted a glance into his that might have intoxicated a far stronger man than Lionel Solomons. “There’s my card,” she said, with a gracious smile, producing the famous pasteboard with the countess’ coronet stamped on it in relief. “A humble hotel — but I like it myself, because it reminds me of my beloved Tyrol.
Whenever you like, Mr. Solomons, you may drop in to see me. Any relation of that admirable Sir Saul, I need hardly say, is always welcome.”
Mr. Lionel went home to his rooms in Pimlico that afternoon half an inch taller — which would make him fully five feet six in his high-heeled walking shoes on a modest computation.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE WILES OF THE STRANGE WOMAN.
“ZEBIE,” Mme. Ceriolo cried in a shrill voice to the maid-in-waiting, “je ne reçois pas aujourd’ hui, entends-tu, imbecile?”
Mlle. Eusébie, more shortly known to her intimates as Zébie, was the fille de chambre and general upstairs factotum of the Hôtel de l’Univers, in Clandon Street, Soho. Mme. Ceriolo preferred that modest hostelry to the more usual plan of West End lodging; partly, to be sure, because it helped to keep up the partial fiction of her noble birth and Tyrolese ancestry, but partly also because it lent itself more readily to practical Bohemianism than do the straitlaced apartments of Notting Hill or Bayswater. In Clandon Street, Soho, one can live as one chooses, no man hindering; and Mme. Ceriolo chose to live à la Zingari. “On y est si bien,” she said with a delicate shrug of those shapely shoulders to her respectable acquaintances when she was doing propriety; “and besides, the landlord, you know, is one of my poor compatriots. I take such an interest in his wife and children, in this foggy London, so far from the fresh breeze of our beloved mountains.” For Mme. Ceriolo was strong on the point of sensibility, and sighed (in public) for her native pine-clad valleys.
“And if Mr. Armitage calls?” Zébie asked inquiringly.
“I am not to deny madame, I suppose, at least to Mr. Armitage.”
“Zébie,” Mme. Ceriolo exclaimed, looking up at her sharply, “tu es d’une inconvenance — mais d’une inconvenance!” Madame paused and reflected. “Well no,” she went on, after a brief mental calculation. “I’m not at home, even to Mr. Armitage.”
“Tiens” Zébie answered;— “c’est drôle. Et cependant—”
“Wait,” Mme. Ceriolo continued, reflecting profoundly. “There is yet one thing. If an ugly little Jew calls” — and madame swept her finger rapidly through the air in burlesque representation of Mr. Lionel’s well-marked profile—” nose so, lips so, bulging curly hair, forehead, odor of hair oil — gives his name, I fancy, as Mr. Lionel Solomons—”
“Well, madame?” Zébie repeated dutifully, with her hand on the door-edge.
“If he calls,” madame went on, gathering her robe around her, “you may tell him I’m indisposed — a slight indisposition, and will see nobody. But say to him, after a while, with ever so little hesitation, you’ll take up his card and inquire if I can receive him. And, then, you may show him meanwhile into the salon. That’ll give me time, of course, to change my peignoir.”
It was four o’clock gone, in the afternoon, a few days later than their meeting in the Park; and madame, who had been up late to a little supper the evening before, was still in the intimacy of dressing gown and curl papers.
“Parfaitement, Madame,” Zébie responded cheerfully, in the tone of one well accustomed to receiving such delicate orders, and left the room; while madame lounged back on the sofa of her little sitting room, and glanced lazily over the feuilleton of yesterday’s Figaro.
The hotel was of the usual London-French type — a dingy, uncomfortable, dead-alive little place — mean and dear, yet madame liked it. She could receive her callers and smoke her cigarettes here without attracting attention. She was rolling a bit of rice-paper, in fact, with practiced skill between those dainty plump fingers ten minutes later, when Zébie reappeared at the door once more, with a card in her hand, and a smile on her saucy Parisian features. “The monsieur madame expected,” she said; “he attends you in the salon.”
Madame jumped up, and roused herself at once. “My blue gown, Zébie,” she cried. “No, not that, stupid. Yes, that’s the one, with the pleats in front. Now, just give me time to slip myself into it, and to comb out my fringe, and touch up my cheeks a bit, and then you may bring the flamin up to me. Poor little imbecile! Tell him I’m in bed, and meant to receive nobody — but hearing it was him, in spite of my migraine, I decided to make an effort a
nd raise myself.”
“Parfaitement, Madame,” Zébie echoed once more, with ready acquiescence, and disappeared down the stairs to deliver her message.
“So it’s you, Mr. Solomons,” madame cried, looking up from the sofa, where-she lay in her shawls and her becoming tea-gown, with a hasty lace-wrap flung coquettishly round her pearl-white neck, as Mr. Lionel entered. “How very good of you to come and look me up so soon. Now admit, monsieur, that I am not ungrateful. I was ill in bed when my maid brought me up your card just now, and for nobody else in the world would I have thought of stirring myself. But when I heard it was you” — she gave him a killing glance from beneath those penciled lashes—” I said to Eusébie, ‘Just hand me the very first dress you can come across in my wardrobe, and tell the gentleman I’ll see him directly.’ And so up I got, and here I am; and now I’m sure you’ll excuse my lighting a wee little cigarette, just a cigarette of my own rolling, because I’ve made my poor fluttering heart beat so with the exertion.”
Mr. Lionel would have excused a hundred cigarettes, so enchanted was he with this gracious reception. In fact he admitted to a weakness for the fragrant Latakia himself, and in two minutes more he was actually inhaling the breath of one, deftly manufactured for his special use by Mme. Ceriolo’s own cunning fingers.
Mine. Ceriolo twisted him as she twisted the cigarettes. He sat there, intoxicated with her charms, for more than an hour, in the course of which time the little woman, by dexterous side-pressure, had pumped him of all he knew or thought far more effectually than even Armitage himself could have done it. She handled him gingerly with infinite skill. “No, you’re not in the City!” she exclaimed once, with well assumed surprise, when Mr. Lionel happened incidentally to allude to the nature of his own accustomed pursuits. “You’re trying to take me in. You don’t mean to tell me you’re really in the City?”