Part 79

"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"

"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in speaking of the--the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was very much in love. She had--kept house with a man I knew, before we came together, and there may have been other affairs--for all I can tell, at least--I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I--I lost my head."

"It's--it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.

There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's verandah see the same vision--lime-lights of varying shades and colours thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennæ, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists, gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no more.

"It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that stage day-dream, "with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a muff-chain of turquoise and brilliants, and ended up with----"

"With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. Oh Lord, what thunderin' donkeys we fellows are!" groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his head, which has hair of a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp blushes pinkly through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation into the brain inside it.

"I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her birthday," goes on the boy. "She's a year or two older than me----"

"And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns the end of the sentence in a giant sneeze. "Must have caught cold last night without knowin' it. Dashed treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge of a pocket-handkerchief. "And so you bought the cottage for Lessie? Another nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing up for you,--what? And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other stream you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by the Living Tinker!"

"Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen."

"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and that's the truth."

"You wouldn't wonder if you knew ... Oh, damn it, Wrynche!"--the young voice breaks in a miserable sob--"I'm so thundering miserable. And all because there--there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its mother."

"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer. "Was that how you fell into the----" He is obviously going to say "trap," but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.

"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar--a benevolent old cock in a large white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy--wasn't sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."

"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.

"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders--the discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the appointment," goes on the boy. "And--I was gladder than I cared to know at getting away. She--Lessie--meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not finish the sentence.

"I suppose she's fond of you--what?" hazards Captain Bingo.

"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going, and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night before sailing, I'd have broken the--the truth to my mother then, only something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge, the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a snowball. But on the voyage out"--a change comes into the weary, level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story--"I forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling himself into creases, and give your name and say, 'No, there's no impediment,' and put on the ring and pay a fee--I believe it was seven-and-six--and take a blotchy certificate and walk out--married."

"It never does take long, by Gad!" agrees Captain Bingo with fervour, "to do any of the things that can't be undone again."

"Undone ...!" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his miserable, beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed face of his listener. "Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo it, ever since I first set eyes on Lynette Mildare!"

Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal whistles. Then he gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, and begins:

"I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another woman's at the bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a bit sick at having brought an outsider--a rank outsider, by Gad!--into the family stud; you're not a rap ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as well as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had your fling, you'd have come in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having broken your mother's heart, though you know in the bottom of your soul that she scented this marriage in the wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down on her knees to him--her knees, by the Living Tinker!--to give you the chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection!"

Beauvayse is out of his chair now. "Is that true--about my mother?" he demands, blazing.

"I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states Captain Bingo huffily.

"Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you find--that--out?"

"Your cousin Townham told me."

"Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy, pratin' little scandalmonger!"

Captain Bingo retorts irately:

"Damn him if you please; he's no friend of mine. As yours, what I ask you is, between man and man, how far have you gone in this fresh affair?"