Part 100 (2/2)
”In--in everything essential,” she stammered, avoiding his intolerable gaze.
”Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday affairs!” The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. ”Didn't you regard it as essential that I should wash?”
She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.
”Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on marrying you was that you were invariably _propre comme un sou neuf_.”
”I thought, on mature reflection,” said Bingo, lying down under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, ”that you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!”
The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at sight of her ladys.h.i.+p, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven countenance.
”Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands,” she announced, ”I'll go and get some breakfast.”
”Haven't you ... You're joking!” The tray shot from the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly a.s.sumed the perpendicular. ”You don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging myself like--like a boa-constrictor?” he demanded furiously. ”Why on earth are women such blessed----”
”--Idiots?” she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian shaft. ”Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!”
The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections with a sigh.
”Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladys.h.i.+p to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!”
”O Lord! What a liar I am!” he murmured fervently, addressing his reflection in the gla.s.s. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly a.s.sumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene:
”So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?”
”Blessed angel, you mean!” said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. ”You banged the door before I'd got out the word!”
”If I could believe that!” she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, ”perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence.”
”Concernin'----?”
”Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche.”
”Well, what of her?”
She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.
”This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless, ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and other people into hot water.” She made a little affected grimace that masked a genuine smart. ”Not hot water only--boiling lava sometimes--fizzling vitriol----”
He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:
”Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts; his spots are in his skin! See?”
”_Merci du compliment!_” Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-gla.s.s. Now his sudden bellow made her drop the comb.
”My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't swot at it any more; let that a.s.s Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!” he pleaded.
”Darling!--dearest!--you haven't--you've never!... The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!” His strong left arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, sc.r.a.ping way, admitting:
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