The Return of the Prodigal Part 42

"Quite certain. Unless she has been taken ill."

"What did you say? Taken ill? Taken ill?"

"I did not say she was taken ill, papa; I said nothing but illness would keep her from coming."

"Ah, a very different thing." He turned to Durant, blus.h.i.+ng and bridling in his stiff collar as if the important distinction had been a subtlety of his own.

He curled himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect of another victim?

Who the devil, he wondered, is Mrs. Fazakerly?

II

Mrs. Fazakerly did not keep him wondering long. Already she was tripping into the room with a gleeful and inquisitive a.s.surance. A small person, with a round colorless face and snub features finished off with a certain piquant ugliness. Her eyes seemed to be screwed up by a habit of laughter, and the same cheerful tendency probably accounted for the twisting of her eyebrows. Mrs. Fazakerly must have been forty and a widow. She was dressed with distinction in the half-mourning of a very black silk gown and a very white neck and shoulders. She greeted Miss Tancred affectionately, glanced at Durant with marked approval, and swept the Colonel an exaggerated curtsey, playfully implying that she had met him before that day. It struck Durant that nature had meant Mrs. Fazakerly to be vulgar, and that it spoke well for Mrs. Fazakerly that so far she had frustrated the designs of nature. He rather thought he was going to like Mrs.

Fazakerly; she looked as if she would not bore him.

If Mrs. Fazakerly was going to like Durant, as yet her glance merely indicated that she liked the look of him. Durant, as it happened, was almost as plain for a man as Miss Tancred was for a woman; but he was interesting, and he looked it; he was distinguished, and he looked that, too; he was an artist, and he did not look it at all; he cultivated no eccentricities of manner, he indulged in no dreamy fantasies of dress. Other people besides Mrs. Fazakerly had approved of Maurice Durant.

Unfortunately the Colonel's instant monopoly of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circ.u.mstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs.

Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes of humorous observation, used a _pince-nez_, which invariably leaped from the bridge of her nose in her subsequent excitement. It was leaping now.

"Mr. Durant, Miss Tancred is trying to say something to you."

He turned with a dim, belated courtesy as his hostess repeated for the third time her innocent query, "I hope you like your room?"

He murmured some a.s.sent, laying stress on his appreciation of the flowers and the books.

"You must thank Mrs. Fazakerly for those; it was she who put them there."

"Indeed? That was very pretty of Mrs. Fazakerly."

"Mrs. Fazakerly is always doing pretty things. I can't say that I am."

In Miss Tancred's eyes there was none of the expectancy that betrays the fisher of compliments. If she had followed that gentle craft she must have abandoned it long ago; no fish had ever risen to wriggling worm, to phantom minnow or to May-fly, to Miss Tancred's groveling or flirting or flight; no breath of flattery could ever have bubbled in men's eyes--those icy waters where she, poor lady, saw her own face. Durant would have been highly amused if she had angled; as it was, he was disgusted with her. It is the height of bad taste for any woman to run herself down, and the more sincere the depreciation the worse the offense, as implying a certain disregard for your valuable opinion. Apparently it had struck Mrs. Fazakerly in this light, for she shook her head reproachfully at Miss Tancred.

"If Mr. Durant had been staying with _me_, I should have packed him into the bachelor's bedroom with his Bible and his Shakespeare."

Miss Tancred, accused of graciousness, explained herself away. "I put you on the south side because you've just come from the Mediterranean; I thought you would like the sun."

Why could he not say that it was pretty of Miss Tancred?

The Colonel had p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at the illuminating word.

"What sort of weather did you have when you were in Italy?"

It was the first time that he had shown the faintest interest in Durant's travels. He seemed to regard him as a rather limited young man who had come to Coton Manor to get his mind let out an inch or two.

Durant replied that as far as he could remember it was fine when he arrived in Rome two years ago, and it was fine when he left Florence the other day.

The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I don't call that weather.

I like a variable barometer. I cannot stand monotony." As he spoke he looked at his daughter. In a less perfect gentleman there would have been significance in the look. As it was, it remained unconscious.

"The Colonel," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "is studying the meteorology of Wicks.h.i.+re."

It seemed that Mrs. Fazakerly was studying the Colonel, that it was her business to expound and defend him. She had implied, if it were only by the motion of an eyelid, that all they had heard hitherto was by way of prologue; that the Colonel had not yet put forth his full powers. Her effervescent remark was, as it were, the breaking of the champagne bottle, the signal that launched him.

Meteorology apart, the Colonel, like more than one great philosopher, held that science was but another name for ignorance.

"But with meteorology," he maintained, "you are safe. You've got down to the bed-rock of fact, and it's observation all along the line. I've got fifteen little memorandum books packed with observations. Taken by myself. It's the only way to keep clear of fads and theories. Look at the nonsense that's talked in other departments, about microbes, for instance. Fiddlesticks! A microbe's an abstraction, a fad. But take a man like myself, take a man of even ordinary intelligence, who has faced the facts, don't tell me that he hasn't a better working knowledge of the subject than a fellow who calls himself a bacteriologist, or some other absurd name."

Durant remarked meekly that he didn't know, he was sure. But the Colonel remained implacable; his s.h.i.+rt-front dilated with his wrath; it was wonderful how so gentle a voice as the Colonel's contrived to convey so much pa.s.sion. Meanwhile Miss Tancred sat absorbed in her dinner and let the storm pa.s.s over her head. Perhaps she was used to it.

"Fiddlesticks! If you don't know, you ought to know; you should make it your business to know. If I've got cholera I want to be told what'll cure me. I don't care a hang whether I'm killed by a comma bacillus or----"

"A full-stop bacillus," suggested Mrs. Fazakerly.

"The full-stop bacillus for choice--put you sooner out of your agony."

"For shame, Mr. Durant; you encourage him."

"I, Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Yes, you. It was you who brought the _Nineteenth Century_ into the house, wasn't it? Depend upon it, he's been reading something that he's disagreed with, or that's disagreed with him."

Durant remembered. There were things about bacteriology in that _Nineteenth Century_, and about hypnotism; the Colonel had apparently seized on them as on fuel for a peris.h.i.+ng fire.

Heedless of the frivolous interruption, the little gentleman was working himself into a second intellectual fury.

"Take hypnotism again--there's another abstraction for you----"

Here Mrs. Fazakerly threw up her hands. "My dear Colonel, _de grace!_ If it's an abstraction, why get into a pa.s.sion about it?

Life isn't long enough. You're worrying your brain into fiddlesticks--fiddlestrings I mean, of course. This child doesn't look after you. You ought to have something tied over your head to keep it down; it's like a Jack-in-the-box, a candle blazing away at both ends, a sword wearing out its what's-his-name; it's wearing out your friends, too. _We_ can't live at intellectual high pressure, if you can."

The Colonel softened visibly under the delicious flattery of her appeal; he smiled at her and at Durant; he came down from his heights and made a concession to the popular taste. "Well, then, take influenza----"

"We'd very much rather not take it, if it's all the same to you."

"Take what?"

"Why, the influenza--the bacilli, or whatever they are. Or do the bacilli take _you_?"

"My dear lady, you don't know what you're talking about. The bacilli theory is--is--is a silly theory."

And Durant actually smiled; for his own brain was softening under the debilitating influence. He would not be surprised at anything he might do himself; he might even sink into that sickly state in which people see puns in everything and everything in puns; it would be the effect of the place.

"Well, it made you very ill last winter, that's all I know."

The wrinkles stopped dancing over the Colonel's face; his s.h.i.+rt-front sank; he was touched with an infinite tenderness and pity for himself.