"See here, my poor boy," he said. "I am commissioned by persons who have a regard for you to provide for you. You need not worry about your pay. I will take care of all that. For months I have tried to find you to tell you this. I am Adrian Savage, a cousin of your late father, and his executor."
The tears ceased, and the young man's face was overspread by an expression of almost imbecile rapture. Adrian turned sick. Exactly thus had Joanna looked, more than once.
"Is my father dead, then?" Bibby asked.
"Yes, he is dead," Adrian replied, in bewilderment.
Bibby reeled forward and squatted on the broad footboard of the car, his head thrown back, holding his sides, his thin, loose-jointed limbs and body writhing with and shaken by hysterical laughter.
"Dead!" he quavered out—"dead! By God! they've got him at last, then—got him, the stinking, slave-driving old hypocrite! And, please God, they're cooking him now—now—at this very identical minute—cooking him to a turn, down in hell."
CHAPTER VI
CONCERNING A CURSE, AND THE MANNER OF ITS GOING
HOME TO ROOST
The room, furnished in dark walnut, was upholstered in red Utrecht velvet, the walls hung with a striped fawn-and-red paper. A mirror, in a florid gilt frame, was fixed above the low mantel-shelf. The atmosphere held odors reminiscent of cigarettes, patchouli, and food in process of cooking. The dinner-table had, by Adrian's orders, been placed near the central window, the two casements of which stood open to the ground. After so many hours spent in the open air, dining in present company he felt the necessity of such freshness as he could by any means get. In the center of the long flagged courtyard the big palmate leaves of a row of pollarded chestnuts caught the light coming from the offices on the left. White-coated, white-capped chefs and scullions passed to and fro. An old liver-colored bitch, basset as to her legs and pointer as to her body, waddled after them, her nose in the air, sniffing, permanently hopeful of scraps. On the flags, just outside the salon window, three tabby kittens played—stalking one another round pots of fuchsia and musk, bouncing out, leaping in the air, spitting, galloping sideways, highly diabolic with teapot-handle tails. Farther along the courtyard, hidden by the lower branches of the intervening trees, a stable-helper sang and whistled as he washed down the hotel omnibus. The servants talked, laughed, scolded over their work. Almost incessantly from the rue Jeanne d'Arc came the long-drawn rattle and swish of the electric trams. And opposite to Adrian at table, clad in a complete outfit of his, Adrian's clothes—a white flannel suit with a faint four-thread black stripe on it, a soft, pale blue shirt, an immaculate collar and narrow black tie—sat William Smyrthwaite, outwardly, at all events, surprisingly transformed.
Adrian had hesitated to propose him as an inmate; but an up-to-date motor-car, a ruffling chauffeur, a well-built suit-case and kit-bag bearing an English name, a very good Paris address, are calculated to promote not only faith, but charity. The hotel proprietor, a short, fat, bland little man with a dancing step and a shrewd, rapacious Norman eye, was sympathy itself.