The Pagan Madonna Part 15

"I know it. He would give anything to be rid of me. But go on."

"With what?"

"Your past."

"Well, I'm something like him physically. We are both so strong that we generally burst through rather than take the trouble to go round. I'm honestly sorry for him. Not a human being to love or be loved by. He never had a dog. I don't recollect my mother; she died when I was three; and that death had something to do with the iron in his soul. Our old butler used to tell me that Father cursed horribly, I mean blasphemously, when they took the mother out of the house. There are some men like that, who love terribly, away and beyond the average human ability. After the mother died he plunged into the money game. He was always making it, piling it up ruthlessly but honestly. Then that craving petered out, and he took a hand in the collecting game. What will come next I don't know. As a boy I was always afraid of him. He was kind to me, but in the abstract. I was like an extra on the grocer's bill. He put me into the hands of a tutor--a lovable old dreamer--and paid no more attention to me. He never put his arms round me and told me fairy stories."

"Poor little boy! No fairy stories!"

"Nary a one until I began to have playmates."

"Do the ropes hurt?"

"They might if I were alone."

"What do you make of the beads?"

"Only that they have some strange value, or father wouldn't be after them.

Love beads! Doesn't sound half so plausible as Cunningham's version."

"That handsome man who limped?"

"Yes."

"A real adventurer--the sort one reads about!"

"And the queer thing about him, he keeps his word, too, for all his business is a shady one. I don't suppose there is a painting or a jewel or a book of the priceless sort that he doesn't know about, where it is and if it can be got at. Some of his deals are aboveboard, but many of them aren't. I'll wager these beads have a story of loot."

"What he steals doesn't hurt the poor."

"So long as the tigers fight among themselves and leave the goats alone, it doesn't stir you. Is that it?"

"Possibly."

"And besides, he's a handsome beggar, if there ever was one."

"He has the face of an angel!"

"And the soul of a vandal!"--with a touch of irritability.

"Now you aren't fair. A vandal destroys things; this man only transfers----"

"For a handsome monetary consideration----"

"Only transfers a picture from one gallery to another."

"Well, we've seen the last of him for a while, anyhow."

"I wonder."

"Will you answer me a question?"

"Perhaps."

"Do you know where those beads are?"

"A little while gone I smelt tobacco smoke," she answered, dryly.

"I see. We'll talk of something else then. Have you ever been in love?"

"Have you?"

"Violently--so I believed."

"But you got over it?"

"Absolutely! And you?"

"Oh, I haven't had the time. I've been too busy earning bread and b.u.t.ter.

What was she like?"

"A beautiful mirage--the lie in the desert, you might say. Has it ever occurred to you that the mirage is the one lie Nature utters?"

"I hadn't thought. She deceived you?"

"Yes."

A short duration of silence.

"Doesn't hurt to talk about her?"

"Lord, no! Because I wasn't given fairy stories when I was little, I took them seriously when I was twenty-three."

"Puppy love."

"It went a little deeper than that."

"But you don't hate women?"

"No. I never hated the woman who deceived me. I was terribly sorry for her."

"For having lost so nice a husband?"--with a bit of malice.

He greeted this with laughter.

"It is written," she observed, "that we must play the fool sometime or other."

"Have you ever played it?"