A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Mountebank

W >> William J. Locke >> The Mountebank




"And possibly you'll see Lady Auriol," I hazarded, this being the first
time her name was mentioned.

His brow clouded and he shook his head sadly.

"I think not," said he. And, as I was about to protest, he checked me with
a gesture. "That's all done with."

"My dear, distinguished idiot," said I.

"It can never be," he declared with an air of finality.

"You'll break Bakkus's heart."

"Sorry," said he.

"You'll break mine."

"Sorrier still. No, no, my dear friend," he said gently, "don't let us talk
about that any more."

After he had gone I experienced a severe attack of anticlimax, and feeling
lonely I wrote to Lady Auriol. In the coarse phraseology of the day,
I spread myself out over that letter. It was a piece of high-class
descriptive writing. I gave her a beautiful account of the elopement and,
as an interesting human document, I enclosed a copy of Bakkus's letter. As
I had to wait a day or two for her promised address--her letter conveying
it gave me no particular news of herself--I did not receive her answer
until I reached London.

It was characteristic:

My Dear Tony,

Thanks for your interesting letter. I've adopted a mongrel Irish
Terrier--the most fascinating skinful of sin the world has ever
produced. I'll show him to you some day.

Yours,

Auriol

I wrote back in a fury: something about never wanting to see her or her
infernal dog as long as I lived. I was angry and depressed. I don't know
why. It was none of my business. But I felt that I had been scandalously
treated by this young woman. I felt that I had subscribed to their futile
romance an enormous fund of interest and sympathy. This chilly end of it
left me with a sense of bleak disappointment. I was not rendered merrier a
short while afterwards by an airy letter from Horatio Bakkus enclosing a
flourishing announcement in French of his marriage with the Veuve Elodie
Marescaux, née Figasso. "Behold me," said the fellow, "cooing with content
in the plenitude of perfect connubiality." I did not desire to behold him
at all. His cooing left me cold. I bore on my shoulders the burden of the
tragio-comedy of Auriol and Lackaday.

If she had never seen him as Petit Patou, all might have been well, in
spite of Elodie who had been somewhat destructive of romantic glamour. But
the visit to the circus, I concluded, finished the business. Beneath the
painted monster in green silk tights the dignified soldier whom she loved
was eclipsed for ever. And then a thousand commonplace social realities
arose and stood stonily in her path. And Lackaday--well! I suppose he was
faced with the same unscalable stone wall of convention.

Lackaday's letters were brief, and, such as they were, full of Arbuthnot.
He was sailing as soon as he could find a berth. I gave the pair up, and
went to an elder brother's place in Inverness-shire for rest and
shooting and rain and family criticism and such-like amenities. Among my
fellow-guests I found young Charles Verity-Stewart and Evadne nominally
under governess tutelage. The child kept me sane during a dreadful month.
Having been sick of the sound of guns going off during the war, I found,
to my dismay, scant pleasure in explosions followed by the death of little
birds. And then--I suppose I am growing old--the sport, in which I once
rejoiced, involved such hours of wet and weary walking that I renounced
it without too many sighs. But I had nothing to do. My pre-war dilettante
excursions into the literary world had long since come to an end. I was
obsessed by the story of Lackaday; and so, out of sheer _tædium vitæ_,
and at the risk of a family quarrel, I shut myself up with the famous
manuscript and my own reminiscences, and began to reduce things to such
coherence as you now have had an opportunity of judging.

It was at breakfast, one morning in November, that the butler handed me a
telegram. I opened the orange envelope. The missive, reply paid, ran:

Will you swear that there are real live cannibals in the Solomon
Islands? If not, it will be the final disillusion of my life.--AURIOL

I passed the paper to my neighbour Evadne, healthily deep in porridge. She
glanced at it, glass of milk in one hand, poised spoon in the other. With
the diabolical intuition of eternal woman and the ironical imperturbability
of the modern maiden, she raised her candid eyes to mine and declared:

"She's quite mad. But I told you all about it years ago."

This lofty calmness I could not share. I suddenly found myself unable to
stand another minute of Scotland. Righteous indignation sped me to London.

I found the pair together in Lady Auriol's drawing-room. Without formal
greeting I apostrophized them.

"You two have behaved disgracefully. Here have I been utterly miserable
about you, and all the time you've left me in the dark."

"Where we were ourselves, my dear Hylton, I assure you," said Lackaday.

"I shed light as soon as I could," said Auriol. "We bumped into each other
last Monday evening in Bond Street and found it was us."

"I told her I was going to the Solomon Islands."

"And I thought I wanted to go there too."

"From which I gather," said I, "that you are going to get married."

Lady Auriol smiled and shook her head.

"Oh dear no."

I was really angry. "Then what on earth made you drag me all the way from
the North of Scotland?"

"To congratulate us, my dear friend," said Lackaday. "We were married this
morning."

"I think you're a pair of fools," said I later, not yet quite mollified.

"Why--for getting married?" asked Auriol.

"No," said I. "For putting it off to a fortuitous bump in Bond Street."



The End

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.