“It does not surprise me. She asked me to accompany her and to introduce her, but I couldn’t get back from here in time.”
“She asked you, well knowing that you were tied by the leg—eh?” laughed Jack. “Well, my dear fellow,” he sighed, “I think you’re terribly foolish to continue the acquaintanceship. It can only bring you grief and sorrow. Think of what she was, and what she is now. Can any girl rise from obscurity in such a short time without the golden ladder? Ask yourself.”
“You need not cast ugly insinuations,” was Hubert’s angry retort, yet truth to tell, that fact had ever been in his mind—a suspicion the first seeds of which had been sown one night in the Casino Club, and which had now grown within his heart.
“Please forgive me if I’ve hurt your feelings, but we’re old friends and you know how very blunt I am. It’s my failing,” he said in a tone of apology. “But the name of the fair Beatriz has of late been coupled with half a dozen admirers. When I was in Madrid four months ago I heard that Enrique de Egas, the director of the opera, was her very intimate friend, and also that young Juan Ordonez had given her a pearl necklace worth eighteen thousand pounds, while there were whispers concerning Pedro de Padras, Conrado Giaquinto, Sanchez Ferrer and several other nuts of the Spanish nobility with whom you are acquainted. They laugh at you behind your back.”
“Yes,” Hubert responded, quite undisturbed. “But surely you know that it gratifies the vanity of those young bloods of Madrid if their names are coupled with that of a pretty woman. It is the same in Vienna, the same in Rome.”
“Ah, my dear fellow, I see you are hopelessly in love,” declared the other. “I was—once. But the scales fell from my eyes just in time, as I sincerely hope they will fall from yours.”
Waldron remained silent. In his pocket lay a letter which he had received only that morning from Beatriz, dated from the Carlton Hotel in London, a letter full of expressions of undying affection, and of longing to be again at his side.
Were those her true sentiments, he wondered? Had Jack Jerningham, on the other hand, told him the bitter truth? He had first met her a couple of months after her arrival in Madrid when she, poor and simply dressed, was dancing at the Trianon, and as yet unknown. Young Regan, one of the attachés, had introduced her, and the trio had had supper together at Lhardy’s, in the Carrera de San Jeronimo, and on the following day he had taken her for a drive in the El Retero, the beautiful park of Madrid, and afterwards to the Plaza de Toros where the famous Sevilian Espada Ricardo Torres, known to all Spain as “Bombita,” dispatched five bulls after some marvellous pases de pecho, redondos and cambiados before giving the estocada, or death-blow.
He remembered the hot afternoon and the breathless tension of the multitude as “Bombita” with his red cloth met the rush of the infuriated bull, stepped nimbly aside and then plunged his sword downwards through the animal’s neck into its heart. Then came the roar of wild applause in which his dark-haired companion joined with such enthusiasm that her cheeks glowed red with excitement.
In that crowded bar, thick with tobacco smoke and noisy with the laughter of well-dressed men, the beautiful face of the dancer who, since that blazing well-remembered day, had won fame all over Europe, rose before him in the mists. Did he really love her, he asked himself as Jack Jerningham sat at his side, now smoking in silence. Yes he did, alas! he did.