CHAPTER IV
“My dear Lady Poynter, it was so good of you and Sir Nelson to honor us—Mrs. March, so glad,” said Mrs. Fair, advancing to greet them.
“Good evening, good evening, everybody,” blustered old Sir Nelson, with a red face and a warm heart. “And, Fair, my lad, I see that those shares that you put me into behaved rather well today. You must have made a rather neat turn in them. Come, now, how was it?”
“Pretty well, Sir Nelson,” answered Fair. “I sold out just before the close at two hundred and seventy-five.”
“Then you must have cleared a hundred thousand net?” said Sir Nelson.
“A bit over double that amount, I think my brokers said,” replied Fair, with no more feeling than he would have shown in announcing a change in the weather.
“Hear that, now,” pouted Mrs. March. “Why can’t you gentlemen ever think of the widow and the fatherless when you, as you say, ‘put in’ your friends on such occasions?”
This little lady was by general consent the most charming widow in the world, her brilliant mind, plump person and winsome manner having beguiled no end of confirmed bachelors into forgetting their resolutions—but without success, for Mrs. March remained Mrs. March season after season.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. March,” protested Allyne the incomprehensible, “what heresy! Just fancy what a pity it would be if widows and younger sons and all other picturesque people were to be made commonplace by money. A widow’s charm lies in her delicious appeal to the protection of all men. With a million in the funds, a widow would find no end of chaps asking her to protect them—and so the charm would be gone. And as for us younger sons—well, just contrast that solemn ass, my brother the viscount, and the penniless, the clever, the dashing, the—how shall I do justice to a thing so lovely as I? No, Sir Nelson, if you ever put me into any of your vulgar good things, I’ll cut you, by Jove—and society will owe you a grudge for having robbed it of its chief ornament—a younger son who is a very younger son indeed.”
“I am afraid that Mr. Allyne’s philosophy is too deep for me,” laughed Mrs. Fair, and Travers remarked sweetly, “Allyne, you’re an idiot.”
“But such a blissful idiot,” smilingly went on the very younger son. “Awfully funny, but nobody can ever deny what I say. We pity Mrs. March, the widow, and envy Mrs. Fair, the wife—but, you know, by Jove, I’d turn it the other way about, don’t you know? No offense, Fair—nothing personal. No, my friends, appearances are deceitful. I’ll lay you a thousand guineas that Fair can’t get what he wants with all his Empire shares and the rest of it, whereas I have everything I want, besides several elder brothers that I do not want. I have everything I want, I tell you.”
“Yes,” retorted Mrs. March, “of course you have, since all that you care to have is an absurd idea of your own importance.”
“A hit, a palpable hit!” roared Sir Nelson as they all laughed.
“Cruel,” protested Allyne. “And to punish you, Mrs. March, I shall ask Mrs. Fair to allow me to take you down to dinner.”
“I protest,” shouted Sir Nelson with fine gallantry; “I claim her.”
“Jealous,” sneered Allyne. “Shame! Why, Poynter, your bald spot is as big as your brain area—and Lady Poynter here, too. Fie on you!”
“But Mrs. Fair can’t give Mrs. March any such sentence as placing her at your mercy, Allyne,” said Travers; “for it is a principle of law that it is unlawful to inflict any unusual and cruel punishments.”
“Well, since you men can’t talk of anything except Mrs. March, I for one am jealous,” cheerily put in Lady Poynter, with her cap bobbing about prettily, “and I hope that Mrs. Fair will punish her by making her listen to Mr. Allyne for two hours.”
“But, I say, you know,” broke in Sir Poynter, while all the men added their protests to such a disposition of the widow.
“Just hear them all, will you?” cried Mrs. Fair, lifting her hands. “I fear, my dear Lady Poynter, that to have a husband is fatal to success. Every blessed one of them wants to sit by Mrs. March.”
“Of course we do,” exclaimed Allyne. “You see, my dear Mrs. Fair, that, while we all love you and dear Lady Poynter, we can’t quite go those ridiculous appendages of yours, to wit., Mr. Fair and Sir Nelson. If you could get rid of them, you know—and there are several ways—then you would give even the peerless Mrs. March a close run.”
“Why have you never married?” asked Mrs. March.
“Can’t, you know—regularly can’t,” replied Allyne, with a woebegone expression. “I could never think of marrying anyone but a widow, and, as I consider widows the only desirable women, it would be against my principles to reduce their number by marrying one of them, you know.”
“But you might increase their number,” returned Mrs. March spiritedly, “by marrying a girl and then atoning for the wrong you had done her in so marrying her by dying at once.”
“By Jove, do you know, I had never thought of that,” Allyne replied, adding after a moment of serious consideration, “but, suppose I didn’t die, you know? Deucedly uncertain thing, dying. Suicide, of course, is out of the question in my case, as I am far too unselfish to seek my own happiness at the frightful cost of depriving the world of my presence. And English women are so fastidious that I might find it difficult to persuade my wife to shoot—Look, look, Fair—Mrs. Fair is ill.”
While he was rattling along with his stream of nonsense Mrs. Fair, who was standing a little behind the rest, swayed forward and would have fallen had not Allyne’s exclamation called attention to her.
“Quick, she is faint!” cried Lady Poynter sympathetically.
But Mrs. Fair almost at once recovered herself, and said: “Pray, don’t mind. I have these foolish turns at times. They amount to nothing. You were saying, Mr. Allyne, that——”
“Allyne was saying, my dear,” hastily put in Fair to head off Allyne, “Allyne was saying that English women are so narrow in their views that they hesitate to make the idiots of themselves that Englishmen are ever so ready to do.”
“I was saying nothing of the sort,” retorted Allyne, in spite of a kick surreptitiously administered to him by Travers. “On the contrary, I——”
“My lady is served,” gravely announced Baxter, pulling aside the portières and awaiting the forming procession which, to judge from his solemn bearing, might have been the funeral cortège of a great personage.
“Come, friends,” smiled Mrs. Fair. “Mrs. March, I will be merciful and ask Mr. Travers to take you down. Sir Nelson, your arm.”
Fair led the way with Lady Poynter, Sir Nelson with his hostess brought up the rear, while Allyne walked in solitary, philosophical mood, much as he chose.
“It’s too bad, Mr. Allyne,” said Mrs. Fair, looking over her shoulder at him, “but if you will be good, you may have some sweets. Come along.”
“I appreciate your fine discrimination,” he replied as he executed a flank movement and placed himself beside her.
So they went downstairs chatting and laughing, leaving that gruesome chest to silence and forgetfulness, and none of them saw the thin, sly man who smiled as they passed within three feet of his hiding-place in the little closet beneath the stairs.