The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.
"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her. "'Somebody's playing off a joke on us,' would be the first thing that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!—let 'em think what they choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you. Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."
"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's. "They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through his nose. "Wait—and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike them entre les yeux. But a place must be found for the friend of Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so. A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other. Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an excellent view of—shall I call it—the spectacle?"
The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music. Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "La Barbançonne." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:
"Après des siècles, des siècles d'esclavage
Le Beige sortant du tombeau
A reconquis par son courage
Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
Et ta main souveraine et fière
Peuple désormais indompte
Grava sur ta vielle bannière
Le roi, la Loi, la Liberté!"
"Sapristi! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars. "Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged the entr'acte?"
The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in an old sorrowful singing mouth:
"O Belgique, O mère chérie,
A toi nos coeurs, à tot nos bras,
A toi noire sang, O Patrie——"
While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,—wondering that within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a baby at her breast.
CHAPTER LVII