“If you write to Mabel or her mother, you might comment upon my hatred of letter writing. I am going to the Continent and shall remain away exactly a week. If I think best, I shall write or telegraph Mabel from there, but it hardly matters. I shall have returned before she will have had time to think much about it.”

Lady Bridgminster was given no opportunity to remonstrate, for he walked swiftly to his waiting hansom and drove off. But considering that she was a lady too philosophical to cut wrinkles in her complexion by worrying over the inevitable, she looked almost blanched and thoughtful as she settled herself with a magazine and recalled all she had heard of her son’s friendship this year and last for Margarethe Styr.

“Johnny!” she thought. “Of all men! It must be serious indeed.”

LVII
THE LAST CARD

Ordham, having felt himself expelled from those orderly conditions in which so many men dwell for a lifetime with only an occasional abortive protest, shot out by the dynamic power of angry human forces too long accumulating, had no mind to indulge in futile regrets. He did not pretend to assert that his will was too weak to continue its inhibitions had he chosen, but he had suddenly realized that he did not choose, and that was the end of it. Accordingly, he banished the very memory of Mabel, declared war on menacing fingers shaking over the ramparts still erect to protect his future, and untormented for the first time in many weeks, inveigled sleep the moment his head touched the pillow of his berth. The passage was quiet and he slept until the boat reached Flushing. He slept again in the train, and, upon being informed in Cologne that the Munich express was an hour late, he sensibly went to a hotel and took a bath. The rest of the journey seemed interminable. It was the season for tourists, the dust and heat were insufferable. But as the train ambled into the great dépôt of Munich, he forgot discomforts, and, all his being quivering, he suddenly felt that this beautiful city of beautiful memories would give him back his youth; he had even a whimsical idea that he had left it there and she was holding it for him intact; he had but to ask for it.

He sprang from the carriage almost before the train halted, and without waiting for Hines to do all the work, walked rapidly up the platform to secure a cab. He actually had his ticket ready as he passed through the gate, instead of keeping the mob cursing behind him after his usual fashion. His head was in the air, he saw no one in the waiting crowd, until he almost ran over a tall footman who planted himself directly in his path.

“Sir,” began this person. “I beg your pardon—” He almost fell back, for the eyes he encountered were like those of a wild beast at bay. Ordham had recognized the man at once as one of the servants of the British Legation, and for the first time in his life was possessed with the lust to slay. But he recovered himself instantly, and although he felt as if the sudden fire in his veins were falling to ashes with youth and hope and life itself, he asked the man calmly enough what he wanted.

“Mr. Trowbridge sent three of us, sir, to stand at different points. Six telegrams have come for you to-day. Thomas has them. He is outside by the cabs, sir.”

Ordham followed the man, half resolving to tear up the telegrams and scatter them over the stones of Munich. There was neither pity nor sympathy in him. He felt pure flint, and had he been suddenly translated into Mabel’s presence, she would have been welcome to the discovery that he hated her. But, automatically, noblesse oblige did its work. When the telegrams were handed to him, he arranged them methodically in the order of their dates, and read them through. From them he learned that Mabel’s self-control had deserted her even in the moment of his departure. She had sent a servant to follow his cab and had discovered that he had taken the train for the Continent. She had governed her agitation in a degree until her suspicions were confirmed, but it then had become uncontrollable, and a somewhat premature confinement was the result. Then he read that the child was dead, and that, her excitement resisting all attempts to alleviate it, there was practically no question of her death unless she could be assured that he would return at once. In the final telegram Mrs. Cutting humbled herself to the dust. The doctor also had telegraphed.

Ordham, still acting under the compulsion of that little engine which civilization has attached to the modern brain, and which so often, automatically, gets up steam and keeps the track no matter how palsied the hand or blinding the mists, turned to Hines and told him to send a telegram to London and reserve a compartment for the train that left at eleven o’clock. Then he went to a hotel and took another bath and changed his linen, almost grateful to the grime of the hot and dusty day which forced him to observe these commonplace formalities. Resolving to walk to Schwabing, as much to settle his nerves as to avoid Styr’s supper hour, he left his hotel, which was in the Dinerstrasse, and strolled along endeavouring to adjust himself to the present. He had enough to agitate him, aside from the fact that he must leave Munich that night. As Styr had not sent him a line since her departure, he was convinced that her frame of mind had been no more enviable than his. He had subscribed for the principal daily newspapers of Munich and knew that she had, as ever, compelled the admiration of those critics not in league with the cabal; but since the first of July the opera house had been closed and he could appreciate how the sudden idleness must afflict her. He was not even sure that she was in Munich. She might already have gone on a Gastspiel. If that were the case, he must wait another month at least—he wondered if he should!