"And Ste. Marie, dear," she pleaded, "please, I think you'd better go home first. I don't care about these other animals, but I don't want you dragged into any row of any sort. Please, be a sweet Ste. Marie and go home. Yes?"
"Absolutely, no!" said Ste. Marie. "I shall stay, and I shall try my utmost to prevent you from doing anything foolish. Understand that! If you want to have rows with people, Olga, for Heaven's sake don't pick an occasion like this for the purpose. Have your rows in private!"
"I rather think I enjoy an audience," she said with a reflective air, and Ste. Marie laughed aloud because he knew that the naïve speech was so very true. This lady, with her many good qualities and her bad ones—not a few, alas!—had an undeniable passion for red fire that had amused him very much on more than one past occasion.
"Please, go home!" she said once more. But when the man only shook his head, she raised her hands a little way and dropped them again in her lap in an odd gesture, which seemed to say that she had done all she could do, and that if anything disagreeable should happen now, and he should be involved in it, it would be entirely his fault because she had warned him.
Then quite abruptly a mood of irresponsible gaiety seemed to come upon her. She refused to have anything more to do with serious topics, and when Ste Marie attempted to introduce them she laughed in his face. As she had said in the beginning she wished to do, she harked back to old days—the earlier stages of what might be termed the Morrison régime, and it seemed to afford her great delight to recall the happenings of that epoch. The conversation became a dialogue of reminiscence which would have been entirely unintelligible to a third person, and was indeed so to Captain Stewart, who once came across the room, made a feeble effort to attach himself, and presently wandered away again.
They unearthed from the past an exceedingly foolish song all about one "Little Willie" and a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick. It was set to a well-known air from Don Giovanni, and when Duval, the basso heard them singing it, he came up and insisted upon knowing what it was about. He laughed immoderately over the English words when he was told what they meant, and made Ste. Marie write them down for him on two visiting cards. So they made a trio out of "Little Willie," the great Duval inventing a bass part quite marvellous in its ingenuity, and they were compelled to sing it over, and over again, until Ste. Marie's falsetto imitation of a tenor voice cracked and gave out altogether, since he was by nature baritone, if anything at all.
The other guests had crowded round to hear the extraordinary song, and when the song was at last finished several of them remained, so that Ste. Marie saw he was to be allowed an uninterrupted tête-à-tête with Olga Nilssen no longer. He therefore drifted away, after a few moments, and went with Duval and one of the other men across the room to look at some small jade objects—snuff-bottles, bracelets, buckles and the like—which were displayed in a cabinet cleverly reconstructed out of a Japanese shrine. It was perhaps ten minutes later when he looked round the place and discovered that neither Mlle. Nilssen nor Captain Stewart were to be seen.
His first thought was of relief, for he said to himself that the two had sensibly gone into one of the other rooms to "have it out" in peace and quiet. But following that came the recollection of the woman's face when she had watched her host across the room. Her words came back to him: "I feel a little like Samson to-night.... I should very much like to pull the world down on top of me and kill everybody in it." Ste. Marie thought of these things and he began to be uncomfortable. He found himself watching the yellow-hung doorway beyond, with its intricate Chinese carving of trees and rocks and little groups of immortals, and he found that unconsciously he was listening for something—he did not know what—above the chatter and laughter of the people in the room. He endured this for possibly five minutes, and all at once found that he could endure it no longer. He began to make his way quietly through the group of people towards the curtained doorway.
As he went one of the women near by complained in a loud tone that the servant had disappeared. She wanted, it seemed, a glass of water having already had many glasses of more interesting things. Ste. Marie said he would get it for her and went on his way. He had an excuse now.
He found himself in a square dimly lighted room, much smaller than the other. There was a round table in the centre so he thought it must be Stewart's dining-room. At the left a doorway opened into a place where there were lights, and at the other side was another door closed. From the room at the left there came a sound of voices, and though they were not loud, one of them, Mlle. Olga Nilssen's voice, was hard and angry and not altogether under control. The man would seem to have been attempting to pacify her, and he would seem not to have been very successful.