Madame started from her chair and clutched Herbert’s hand.
“Oh!—how terrible! No! you could not have told her!—I would never have liked you again if you had told her. Oh! I am so glad you didn’t!”
“There was nothing else to do, madame,” said Herbert thoughtfully, his eyes gazing into space as if the recital had again brought the scene before him.
“Pray God she never found out!” said the marquise under her breath.
“That has always been my consolation, madame. So far as I know she never did find out. She is dead now.”
“And I wish we had never found out either!” groaned Louis. “Why in the world do you want to make goose-flesh crawl all over a fellow! An awful, frightful story. I say, Herbert, if you’ve got any more horrors keep ’em for another night. I move we have a rest. Drag out that spinet, Brierley, and give us some music.”
“No, please don’t!” cried the marquise. “Tell us another. I wish this one of Monsieur Herbert’s was in print, so that I could read it over and over. Think how banal is our fiction; how we are forever digging in the same dry ground, turning up the same trivialities—affairs of the heart, domestic difficulties—thin, tawdry romances of olden times, all the characters masquerading in modern thought—all false and stupid. Oh! how sick I am of it all! But this epic of Monsieur Herbert means the clash of races, the meeting of two civilizations, the world turning back, as it were, to measure swords with that from which it sprung. And think, too, how rare it is to meet a man who in his own life has lived them both—the savage and the civilized. So please, Monsieur Herbert, tell us another—something about the savage himself. You know so many things and you are so human.”
“He doesn’t open his lips, madame, until I get some fresh air!” cried Louis. “Throw back that door, Lemois, and let these hobgoblins out! No more African horrors of any kind! Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the distinguished spinetist, Herr Brierley, of Pont du Sable, play one of his soul-stirring melodies! Up with you, Brierley, and take the taste out of our mouths!”