He would give her half the sum then and there, Ponsonby said, with a gleam of strategic cunning, and the other half when she was fairly outside the hall-door—not before.
The Pantheress nodded, and clutched the first installment from his hand greedily, and caught her dirty bonnet from the table and threw it on her head. “No larks!� she said warningly—“come on!� and moved to the room door, where she paused. “Ain’t you got manners enough to open it for a lady?� she remarked in an aggrieved tone. Ponsonby, hastily restoring the tell-tale second glass to the sideboard, sprang forward and grasped the handle—and dropped it as though it had been red-hot, for he had caught the sound of footsteps—light, regular, measured footsteps—descending the stairs. He could not utter a word. He turned a white face and glaring eyes upon the Pantheress. And the steps came nearer. As the dining-room door opened, he fell back, helplessly, behind it. The wall seemed to open and swallow him—thick, suffocating folds fell before his face; he had backed into the curtained recess whence the Pantheress had emerged thirty fateful minutes previously. Through a three-cornered rent in the stuff, just the height of his eye from the ground, and through which that beast of prey had probably watched him, he looked—and saw his wife!
She wore a loose white wrapping gown; her hair—the hair—hung in waves about her shoulders. Barring the bedroom candle she carried, and losing sight of her prosaic nineteenth-century surroundings, she resembled one of Burne Jones’s angels. But her calm expression changed, and her voice was tuned to a key of unangelic indignation, as her glance lighted on the painted, brazen Defiance, erect and bristling, before her.
“You ... a woman, what do you want? How did you?—how dared you come here?�
The Pantheress was about, in answer, to launch the first of an elaborate flight of insults, couched in the easy vernacular of Leicester Square, when she stopped short. Her thick lips rolled back from her gleaming fangs in a triumphant grin. She bent forward, with her hands upon her thighs, and made a close inspection of the face of Ponsonby’s wife.
“What! Luce?�...
The other recoiled, with a slight cry. And Ponsonby, in his retirement, was conscious of a deadly qualm—for Mrs. Ponsonby’s Christian name was Lucy! When he opened his shut eyes and peeped through the rent again, it was only to receive a fresh shock—for Mrs. Ponsonby and the Pantheress were sitting, one on either side of the table, chatting like old friends.
“Luck was poor,� the Pantheress was saying, “and me low down in my spirits. So when I found the door of a swell house like this open, ‘I’ll pop in,’ says I to myself, ‘and look about for a snack of something and a drop to drink, and then make off if I can, clear, or else go to quod—like a lady.’ And I did pop in—and I did look about—and the first thing that turns up is—you! On a smooth lay, ain’t you? Always a daring one, you were. A clergyman’s daughter, and an orphan! We’ve most of us been clergymen’s daughters and orphans in our time, but not a girl of us ever looked it more than you. And you’re married! Ha! ha! With a swell church service, and singin’, and a Continental tour to give the orphan a little change of scenery. She’d seen so little in her time, the poor dear! Lord! I shall die of it!�
The woman rocked with silent laughter. It seemed to the man behind the curtain that her eyes, across his wife’s shoulder, glared full into his—that her coarse jeers were leveled at him. He could not have uttered a sound, or stirred a finger, for the dear life. A kind of catalepsy had possessed him. But he saw them drink together, and heard them talk ... turning over with conversational pitchforks the unspeakable horrors of the dunghill whence his white butterfly had taken wing.... Ponsonby had never been an imaginative man, but that midnight conference wrought his sensibilities to such a pitch that, leaning against the wall in the corner of the curtained recess, he quietly fainted.