"Mitching Dean!" the tweed suit repeated, with a befogged intonation.
"Yes. Its butter, its roof, its roses——"
"Roses!" said the suit, as if trying to break an intolerable spell. "Ah! the English roses are exquisite! I have some dark-red ones in my room here."
Mrs. Verulam coughed sharply. Mr. Rodney's face grew a dull brick-red.
"Dark-red roses in your room?" he said. He looked rapidly at all the drawing-room vases, and then cast a pale and reproachful glance at Mrs. Verulam. Then he got up slowly. He felt that his investigation into the relations of the pretty widow and the divorced American orange-grower could not be pursued satisfactorily in such a moment of confusion and despair. He must have time for thought. To-night he would free himself as early as might be from the thraldom of the Bun Emperor. He would wander amid the japanned-tin groves of the Crystal Palace. He would seek the poetical solitude afforded by an exhibition of motor-cars, or plunge into the peaceful villages of the chocolate-hued and inanimate Burmese. To-night! to-night! He must think; he must collect himself; he must reason; he must plan.
"My train," he murmured a little frantically; "I must catch it. I must go! I must indeed!"
He spoke as if multitudes were endeavouring to hold him, and keep him back from a stern purpose. He pressed Mrs. Verulam's hand. "Cruel!" he murmured. He bowed to the tweed suit. "Au revoir!" He was at the door. "My train! Good-bye!" He was gone, and instantly Mrs. Verulam on her sofa, the tweed suit on its chair, were in violent hysterics.
Had Mr. Rodney left his hat behind by mistake and returned to fetch it, he must have stood on the threshold petrified. As there is often a method in madness, so there is sometimes a hilarity in hysteria. There is the frantic laughter of the human soul making a sudden and distracted exit from the prison in which it has been gradually accumulating a frightful excess of emotion. It leaps out with hyæna cry, and with the virulent cachinnations of a thing inhuman. Mrs. Verulam's shriek of laughter as the hall-door closed behind Mr. Rodney's thin back was far more terrible than Chloe Van Adam's burst of tears. It flew up like a monstrous and horrible balloon, seeming to take form, to sway, to swell as a gas-filled bladder, to burst with a tearing desperation, to die down in a chuckle of agony. And as the laughter of Mrs. Verulam faded with the sharp swiftness of hysteria into a flood of tears, the tears of Chloe Van Adam bloomed into a shriek of laughter. The two women took it in turns, as the children say, to leap to the opposite poles of emotion, until the footman James, below stairs, the faithful Marriner above, heard and trembled.
But all things must have an end, and at last the waves of tumult receded and receded, the laughter leaped lower, the sobs subsided, and presently an awful silence reigned, broken only by the sound of female pants—not the rustle of rational dress, but the murmur of escaping breaths, long, bronchial, and persistent. And then even these died away, till you might have heard the note of the falling pin upon the receptive carpet.
"Chloe!"