“It isn’t my affair, thank God!”
“Oh, that’s as it may turn out! Au revoir, then, in half an hour!”
He succeeded in leaving me in about as bewildered a state of mind as I have ever been in in all my life; I, who have often had to decide whether a politician was an honest man or not!——
CHAPTER XXIII
THE BANQUET
SINCE I was not to play host that evening, I decided to let Arsenio be first on the gaudy scene which he had prepared. He should receive the other guests; he should take undivided responsibility for the decorations. I waited until I heard him come down and speak to Louis, and even until I heard—as I very well could, in my little bedroom adjoining the salon—Louis announcing first “Monsieur Froost,” and then—no, it was fat old Amedeo who effected the second announcement, arrogating to himself the rights of an old family servant—that of the most excellent and noble Signora Donna Lucinda Valdez. Thereupon I entered, Amedeo favoring me with no laudatory epithets, but leaving me to content myself with Louis’ brief “Monsieur Reelinton.”
Lucinda was in splendor; she was—as I, at least, had never before seen her—a grown woman in a grown woman’s evening finery. Through all her wanderings she must have dragged this gown about, a relic of her pre-war status—for all I knew, part of the trousseau of the prospective Mrs. Waldo Rillington! But it did not look seriously out of fashion. (If I remember right, women dressed on substantially the same lines just before the war as they did in the first months after it.) It was a white gown, simple but artistic, of sumptuous material. She wore no ornaments—it was not difficult to conjecture the reason for that—only her favorite scarlet flower in her fair hair; yet the effect of her was one of magnificence—of a restrained, tantalizing richness, both of body and of raiment.
Whether she had arrayed herself thus in kindness or in cruelty, or in some odd mixture of the two, indulging Arsenio’s freak with one hand, while the other buffeted him with a vision of what he had lost, I know not; but a glance at her face showed that her tenderer mood was now past. Arsenio’s decorations had done for it! She was looking about her with brows delicately raised, with amusement triumphant on her lips and in her eyes. If Arsenio’s frippery had been meant to appeal to anything except her humor, it had failed disastrously. It had driven her back to her scorn, back to her conception of him as a trickster, a mountebank, a creature whose promises meant nothing, whose threats meant less; an amusing ape—and there an end of him!