The fact that it was sugared with revenge hardly enhanced it at all, nor did the fact that whereas you got two thousand pounds out of me, I got four thousand out of you. You have been like a monkey dancing on a hot plate. I have been the hot plate.”
Whately was scarcely listening; with chattering teeth he looked at the huge ominous van in the street, and Lord Peebles followed his gaze.
“You deserve that that van should be Black Maria,” he went on in injured tones, “to take you to Wormwood Scrubs, where I am visitor.”
“Is—isn’t it?” asked Whately.
Lord Peebles peered into the fog.
“The harmless, necessary pantechnicon,” he said.
Then he subsided into a chair and his great bulk began to shake with spasms of ungovernable laughter. And gradually the colour came back to Whately’s face, and shortly after an uncertain smile hovered on his mouth.
“And is it all over?” he asked.
Lord Peebles took a small sausage of sovereigns out of his pocket.
“I brought these along with me,” he said, “please count them; they are all marked, and there are twenty-eight of them. I will exchange them with those you possess marked with an interrogation point.”
“You shall!” said Whately. “God bless you!”
“I was not certain, when I came here,” continued Lord Peebles, disregarding this interruption, “whether I should put you out of your suspense or not, but your haggard and emaciated appearance, my dear fellow, decided me. Besides, I am two thousand pounds to the good, or nearly so, for I owe some small sum to detectives. If I did not have mercy on you, you would probably be too unwell to give your party for the princess on the 23rd, and I should be sorry to miss that. Otherwise I might have let you have a week or so more of excitement. I had several other little notions, little tunes for you to dance to.”
“You shall sit next her,” said Whately with quivering lips.
THE DANCE ON THE BEEFSTEAK
This Midsummer day, the early hours of which were bathed in so serene a sunshine, has ended in storm and hurly-burly. Only this morning the general outlook was as unclouded as is now the velvet blue of the star-scattered Italian sky, but this evening our verv souls are driven like dead leaves before a shrivelling blast. Nature, unsympathetic, indifferent, still holds on her great unruffled courses; the stars wheel, the north wind blows lightly from across the gulf; the little ripples shed themselves in lines of phosphorescent flame; Naples lies a necklace of light on the edge of the sea, the loveliness of the Southern night is undiminished. But Mrs. Mackellar has danced on the beefsteak, and she has dismissed Seraphina.
To the dweller in cities or other light-minded and populous places this may appear but the most farcical of tragedies, worthy of no more than the scoffing laugh of a passer-by. But such do not know Mrs. Mackellar, nor Seraphina, nor life in Alatri. For in Alatri as a rule nothing happens—certainly nothing unpleasant—our lives are as smooth as the halcyon summer seas, and it will, I am afraid, be impossible to give to any but the most imaginative reader an adequate idea of the devastating nature of the catastrophe.… It will be necessary in any case to recount in brief the events of the last twenty-four hours.
Yesterday afternoon we were all en fête; Mrs. Mackellar gave a party for two reasons, either of which was amply justifiable. The first was that the engagement of Seraphina her cook to Antonio her man-servant was definitely sanctioned by her, and so made food for public rejoicing; the second that Seraphina had been with her as cook for an entire year. Now in Alatri servants do not, as a rule, stop with Mrs. Mackellar more than a few weeks. Then they leave. There is no dissatisfaction expressed and no public quarrel. They just lose their nerve and go away. But the days had added themselves into weeks, and the weeks into months, and before any of us knew where we were, Seraphina had been a year with Mrs. Mackellar. Hence the party.
There were in fact two parties, for Seraphina and Antonio entertained their friends in the kitchen, while Mrs. Mackellar received on the house-roof. She is an immense Scotchwoman, broad in bosom and in accent, and feels the heat acutely. Consequently when I received an invitation for four o’clock on an afternoon in the middle of June, it was clear that she must have a real desire to celebrate the event.
The Duchess of Alatri—to her more intimate friends, Bianca—came with me by special invitation.
Her Grace is a huge white Campagna sheep-dog, so tall that she can, when sitting down, put her chin on an ordinary dining-room table and eat your bread when you are not looking. At rest she resembles a large rug (and as such is not infrequently trodden on), and when in motion she resembles nothing that I have ever seen. Her sole method of progression is a trot; she never walks, and she cannot gallop, but the trot varies from a pace so surprisingly slow that she appears only to be marking time, to that of the passage of an express train. The other day she was investigating interesting smells in the piazza, when out for a walk with me, and so got left behind. I did not miss her till I was some half-mile away, and looking round saw a distant white speck where the road leaves the town. I whistled shrilly on my fingers, and without appreciable interval she was with me. She belongs not, alas, to me, but to an American, who has left the enchanted island for the summer (unless perhaps it is more just to say that he belongs to her), and committed Her Grace to my care. Her passions are being combed, cheese, and dancing.
This latter I discovered by a happy accident. For the first afternoon that she was with me she was very sorrowful, and though I ran up the Stars and Stripes on the flagstaff, instead of the Union Jack, wondering if this would give her the thrill of home, she remained dispirited. But shortly before going to bed, hoping in some vague way to cheer her, and being myself futile, I danced round her, snapping my ringers. The effect was magical. The rug shuffled swiftly to its feet, and began gambolling. She jumped in the air, she turned briskly round and round, she took little leaps with her head down like a bucking pony, she upset a small table on which was standing an open tin of biscuits, and scarcely pausing to sweep up the greater part with her tongue she lurched heavily into an oleander-tub on the veranda, snapping the shrub off short. And when, about ten minutes later, I sank into a chair breathless and exhausted, the Duchess was herself again. Only once when passing her old home did she show any desire to remain there, and even then I had but to execute two fantastic steps down the path, when she gave a sort of choking cry, her apology for a bark, and came after me behaving like a rocking-horse.
So Bianca and I went up the steep path to Mrs. Mackellar’s shortly after four yesterday afternoon. She lives in a stucco castle with battlements. There was already a tarantella going on in the kitchen—Seraphina is a notable dancer—and Bianca brightened up. She said, “This is the place for me,” and brushing rudely by me, trotted down the backstairs, and I saw her no more. So I went alone to the house-roof.
“All Alatri” was there, perspiring under an Oriental awning, which Mrs. Mackellar had put up for the shelter of her guests. It seemed calculated to concentrate the heat of the sun, and to exclude all air. The German doctor, who has not left the island, even to go to Naples, for nine years, was talking the native dialect to a Swedish painter; the mysterious Russian widow who plays picquet every evening with her man cook was chattering voluble French to a circle of mixed nationality; and Mrs. Mackellar, resplendent in tartan, was treating bewildered listeners to the Peebles speech. The ices had transformed themselves into a delicious fruit-cream, and the sugar was melting like tallow off the cakes. We indulged in the usual topics, the impossibility of leaving Alatri that summer, the promise of a fine vintage, the apocryphal shark three metres long, whose dorsal fin had appeared only a few yards from the shore of the Bagno, the iniquity of servants in general, and the conspicuous virtue of Seraphina.
Mrs.
