She laughed lightly. “A business risk would never have brought the splendor of to-night!” She smiled round at the ridiculously festooned walls.
We were quickly disposing of an excellent, well-served dinner; Louis was quick and quiet, fat Amedeo more sensible than he looked, undoubtedly a good cook was in the background. Growing physically very comfortable, I got largely rid of the queer apprehensions which had haunted me; I paid less heed to Arsenio, and more to the secret subtle duel which seemed to be going on between the other two. Arsenio played more with his topic—birth, death, life, love—all gambles into which men and women were involuntarily thrown, with no choice but to play the cards or handle the dice; all true and obvious in a superficial sort of way, but it seemed rather trifling—a mood in which life can be regarded, but one in which few men or women really live it. That he was one of the few himself, however, I was quite prepared to concede; the magnitude of his gains—and of his loss—as convincing.
Louis and Amedeo served us with coffee and Louis set a decanter of brandy in front of Arsenio.
Then they left us alone. Arsenio poured himself out a glass of brandy, and handed the decanter round. Holding his glass in his hand, he turned to Lucinda. “Will you drink with me—to show that you forgive my sins?”
Her eyes widened a little at the suddenness of the appeal; but she smiled still, and answered lightly, “Oh, I’ll drink with you——” She sipped her brandy—“in memory of old days, Arsenio!”
“I see,” he said, nodding his head at her gravely. She had refused to drink with him on his terms; she would do it only on her own. “Still—you shall forgive,” he persisted with one of his cunning smiles. Then he turned suddenly to Godfrey Frost with a change of manner—with a cold malice that I had never seen in him before, a malice with no humor in it, a straightforward viciousness. “Then let us drink together, my friend!” he said. “It was with that object that I brought you here to-night. We’ll drink together, as we have failed together, Godfrey Frost! A business risk you spoke of just now! It wasn’t a bad speculation! A couple of hundred or so—Oh, I had more from your cousin, but her motives were purely charitable, eh?—just a beggarly couple of hundred for a chance at that!” A gesture indicated Lucinda. His voice rose; it took on its rhetorical note, and the words fell into harmony with it. “To buy a man’s honor and beauty like that for a couple of hundred—not a bad risk!”
Godfrey looked as if he had been suddenly hit in the face; he turned a deep red and leant forward towards his host—his very queer host. He was too shaken up to be ready with a reply. Lucinda sat motionless, apparently aloof from the scene. But a very faint smile was still on her lips.
“What the devil’s the use of this sort of thing?” I expostulated—in a purely conventional spirit, with one’s traditional reprobation of “scenes.” My feeling somehow went no deeper. It seemed then an inevitable thing that these three should have it out, before they went their several ways; the conventions were all broken between them.
“Because the truth’s good for him—and for me; for both of us who trafficked in her.”
Lucinda suddenly interposed, in a delicate scorn, an unsparing truthfulness. “It’s only because you’ve failed yourself that you’re angry with him, Arsenio. Let him alone; he’s had enough truth from me this afternoon—and a lot of good advice. I told him to go home—to Nina Dundrannan. And for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about ‘trafficking,’ as if you were some kind of a social reformer!”