Part 48 (2/2)
Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.
”Of course you never did.” The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. ”Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or explode.”
”I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em--that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth,” says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets.
”Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just stopped short at----”
”At making a blithering idiot of myself,” interpolates Beauvayse. ”If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you how it happened. n.o.body listening?”
”Not a soul,” says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.
Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they crack again.
”I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----”
”So were a lot of other young idiots.”
”That's a pleasant reflection. They were.”
”Of course, I”--Bingo's large face becomes very red--”I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beauvayse.”
”Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in rather too much,” says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.
”Wouldn't it be as well,” hints Captain Bingo, ”to get used to it?”
”No,” Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. ”And don't a.s.sume 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 b.u.t.terfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennae, flas.h.i.+ng 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 m.u.f.f-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 a.s.sure you!” a.s.severates 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, d.a.m.n 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.”
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