"One moment, if you please," said I to Madame, who supplied me with these details. "I perceive that both the rooms, yours and Rust's, were upon the second floor. Is it in this way, you shameless woman, that you preserved from reproach the honour of the late imaginary stove man?"
Madame sighed, and turned upon me the look which, in my mind, I have labelled "Innocence unjustly traduced." One of these days, with German thoroughness, I shall prepare a numbered and annotated catalogue of Madame Gilbert's looks and tones. Though it cannot teach her sex anything which the youngest member does not already know, it will be full of valuable instruction and warning for the innocent male.
"Am I responsible," wailed Madame, "for the allotment of rooms by hoteliers?"
"Most certainly," I said severely. "I do not know your methods. It is not given to man to penetrate the unfathomable duplicity of woman. But I am convinced that had you wished it, you would have been placed an premier, and Rust consigned to the uttermost cock-loft in the roof."
Madame and Rust dined that first evening at separate tables, but discovered in one another old friends when they accidentally met afterwards in the lounge…. "What happiness, can it indeed be le Capitaine Rouille, the friend closer than a brother of my poor slain husband?" … "Madame Guilbert! Can it be you whom I meet thus unexpectedly? You whom I have not seen since that dreadful never-to-be-forgotten day upon which I broke to you the news, the terrible news—" Rust's voice failed; even Madame, who thinks little of his ability, admits that he performed on this occasion to admiration. The rencontre was a most affecting one, conducted in voluble French in the full blaze of publicity in a crowded hotel lounge. The English audience was impressed and honestly sympathetic; our insular reserve has been melted in the fires of war. "It is a French lady, poor thing, who has lost her husband," they whispered, the one to another, "and that handsome fellow in ordinary evening-dress is her man's brother officer, who was with him at the last, and who brought the sad news to her. How sweet she looks, and how tenderly sympathetic he is!" The eyes of the men had already been drawn to Madame's royal beauty and those of the women to her dress, a masterpiece of Paquin. Now that she had met Rust the men were sorrowful, regretting a vanished opportunity of making her acquaintance, and the women were relieved. She was too formidable a rival to be at large, alone and unattended, but now she would be monopolised naturally and properly by her good-looking compatriot. So when Madame and Rust slipped away to a corner of the lounge, kindly eyes followed them, and the voices of the censorious had no excuse to be raised. "You are a wonder, madame," whispered Rust. "And you, my friend, did not so badly," replied Madame in frank approval.
They separated early that evening, for Madame, who knew not what it was to feel really tired, shammed fatigue as a reason for retiring betimes. To her came Marie, a little dark French femme de chambre of the second floor, imploring to be allowed to assist at the night toilet of a desolate widow of France. While Marie brushed out the long, rich, copper hair the two chattered unceasingly of France and the Army of steel-hearted poilus which held the frontiers of civilisation away yonder in Picardy, Artois, Champagne, and the Vosges. Marie herself had a man out there of whose welfare she had heard nothing since the war began. She had received no letters, and the French publish no casualty lists. "Mon cher petit homme est mort, madame. C'est certain, mais j'espere toujours." There are many, many Frenchwomen to whom the death of their loved ones is certain, though they hope always. "I felt rather a pig talking fibs to the poor girl," confessed Madame.
Madame Gilbert had made her plans with thoughtful care, and proposed to carry them out with hardihood. She had determined to work so adroitly on the Saturday upon the curiosity and "poor strained heart" of Rust that he would be speeded up to run big risks. He did not know that, however judiciously frail her conduct might be, she was a very dragon of virtue in defence of her honour. "I gave my heart," said she to me quite seriously, "to the Signor Guilberti, one far, far different from le mari imaginaire of le Grand Couronne. Until, if ever, I give my heart again no man shall possess me. I play, I kiss, I philander—as you call it—but what are these trifles? Des bagatelles, rien de tout!" He did not realise her serene indifference to the small change of love and her respect for its true gold. But I do not think that Rust, when Madame consented to be his companion at Brighton, seriously misjudged her motives. He did not know, of course, or in the last degree suspect that she designed his capture as a professional victim.
Again and again she had told him that she was an agent of the English police, and again and again, as she intended, he had disbelieved her. She was so incomparably his intellectual superior that she could make him believe or disbelieve precisely as she chose. She made him think that she had come to Brighton for companionship, and as a proof of her kindly forgiveness of a grave indiscretion. He believed; for never was Rust, even Rust, so idiotic as to suppose that she had succumbed before his charms and had come to throw herself into his arms.
But for the machinations of Madame the visit would, I am sure, have passed without incident. Rust would not have lost his turnip of a head. He would, out of loyalty to his orders from Froissart, have tried to grab the despatch-case and ravish its secrets. But he would not have done what he did, at the risk of compromising the bloom of her so precious reputation, if she had not deliberately worked him up to do it. Therefore, while I acquit Rust of evil intention, my reproofs, my grave reproofs—at which she laughs and snaps her fingers—are reserved for that unscrupulous Madame.
At breakfast Madame Gilbert and Captain Rust found that a private table, a table of the best in a bay window facing the sea, had been reserved for them by orders of the patron. The news of their pitiful rencontre in the lounge had sped to his ears; he had wept copiously before his sympathetic staff, and declared that the bereaved widow and the so gallant captain should lack for nothing in his hotel. "If it were not that I feared to offend their delicacy I would refrain from presenting to them l'addition. Make, I pray you, mademoiselle du bureau, their charges of the lowest." He was a most noble patron.