Hector Storm V.C. had, it seemed, left her every penny. Storm, steel, Sheffield. “Fine boy, Storm,” said Hilary, pulling at a stiff grey thing which I forgot to mention he wore on his upper lip without, however, succeeding in looking anything but clean-shaven. “Boy Fenwick left her all he had too, but she wouldn’t, naturally, touch a penny of it. You would think the world was upside down when you came to inquire into the moral sense of an Iris! Strict as steel here, unbending as iron there—and then! She gave all Boy Fenwick’s fortune over to old Aunt Fenwick, since when the old hag has called Iris every name out of the Apocrypha for her pains.”
“But, Hilary!” I said. Hilary says now that I was white in the face. “But did you say Boy Fenwick? Boy ... Fenwick?”
“Her first husband,” said Hilary; and he pushed his port-glass an inch or two up the polished surface of the table and stared at it. “You couldn’t,” he said, “do better than young Fenwick.... But before your time, I suppose....”
“I never dreamt,” I think I said, “that Mrs. Storm had been the Mrs. Fenwick....”
“Mrs. Storm,” smiled Hilary queerly to his port-glass, “has been everything.”
But Boy Fenwick! And the shameless, shameful lady of the green hat as the tragic Mrs. Fenwick! So there was “Felix Burton” and his ideal of purity! And there, plain as hate could make her, there was “Ava Foe,” and somewhere there was the reason for Gerald’s mediæval hatred for his sister! Somewhere there, but exactly where? For no one knew less of Boy Fenwick’s death than I did, that being a legend of “a little before my time....”
“I knew Iris,” Hilary was saying thoughtfully, playing with the stem of his glass, “when she was so high. They had a house in Cambridge Square then, and she used to go to that school in South Audley Street where they all go to. I’d see her walking along with her governess, a long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes. Hm. She was adorable.”
There was a pause ... and suddenly he turned his face to me, that long, thin, grey-looking face with the kind, muddled features. And it was as though it had, suddenly, profoundly lost all its inner calm. Hilary’s outward calm, in spite of his detached air—“Mr. Townshend, the imperturbable champion of procedure”—was always rather like a Gruyère cheese, a sort of smooth surface with gaps. But this was different, this was as though a tap had been wrenched loose inside him, letting run a savage, hurt bewilderment which didn’t quite reach his skin. “And now,” he said softly, yet looking at me as though accusing me of something. “And now! The last I heard of Iris was that she was seen night after night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who is said to have made a fortune by exporting medicated champagne to America. There’s the long little thing, all brown stockings and blue eyes....”
“But,” I began, and decided that it was better not. But it was absurd, that “night after night.” That wasn’t, I knew, Iris Storm. Not “night after night.” She might very possibly have sat one night in a Russian cabaret in Vienna with an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne to America, but certainly not “night after night.” Unless, that is, she had changed a great deal since then. After all, one couldn’t be more unattractive than an Italian Jew who exported medicated champagne to America. No, really, that was too much.
“Your generation,” said Hilary thoughtfully, “is a mess. Have some brandy?”