orchestra had already played it eleven times that day, four times by desire and seven times from force of habit, but the familiar strains were greeted with the rapture due to a revelation. A murmur of much humming rose from half the tables in the room, and some of the more overwrought listeners laid down knife and fork in order to be able to burst in with loud clappings at the earliest permissible moment.
“And the Canetons à la mode d’Amblève? In stupefied, sickened wonder Aristide watched them grow cold in total neglect, or suffer the almost worse indignity of perfunctory pecking and listless munching while the banqueters lavished their approval and applause on the music-makers. Calves’ liver and bacon, with parsley sauce, could hardly have figured more ignominiously in the evening’s entertainment. And while the master of culinary art leaned back against the sheltering pillar, choking with a horrible brain-searing rage that could find no outlet for its agony, the orchestra leader was bowing his acknowledgments of the hand-clappings that rose in a storm around him. Turning to his colleagues he nodded the signal for an encore. But before the violin had been lifted anew into position there came from the shadow of the pillar an explosive negative.
“‘Noh! Noh! You do not play thot again!’
“The musician turned in furious astonishment. Had he taken warning from the look in the other man’s eyes he might have acted differently. But the admiring plaudits were ringing in his ears, and he snarled out sharply, ‘That is for me to decide.’
“‘Noh! You play thot never again,’ shouted the chef, and the next moment he had flung himself violently upon the loathed being who had supplanted him in the world’s esteem. A large metal tureen, filled to the brim with steaming soup, had just been placed on a side table in readiness for a late party of diners; before the waiting staff or the guests had time to realize what was happening, Aristide had dragged his struggling victim up to the table and plunged his head deep down into the almost boiling contents of the tureen. At the further end of the room the diners were still spasmodically applauding in view of an encore.
“Whether the leader of the orchestra died from drowning by soup, or from the shock to his professional vanity, or was scalded to death, the doctors were never wholly able to agree. Monsieur Aristide Saucourt, who now lives in complete retirement, always inclined to the drowning theory.”
THE QUEST
An unwonted peace hung over the Villa Elsinore, broken, however, at frequent intervals, by clamorous lamentations suggestive of bewildered bereavement. The Momebys had lost their infant child; hence the peace which its absence entailed; they were looking for it in wild, undisciplined fashion, giving tongue the whole time, which accounted for the outcry which swept through house and garden whenever they returned to try the home coverts anew. Clovis, who was temporarily and unwillingly a paying guest at the villa, had been dozing in a hammock at the far end of the garden when Mrs. Momeby had broken the news to him.
“We’ve lost Baby,” she screamed.
“Do you mean that it’s dead, or stampeded, or that you staked it at cards and lost it that way?” asked Clovis lazily.
“He was toddling about quite happily on the lawn,” said Mrs. Momeby tearfully, “and Arnold had just come in, and I was asking him what sort of sauce he would like with the asparagus—”
“I hope he said hollandaise,” interrupted Clovis, with a show of quickened interest, “because if there’s anything I hate—”
“And all of a sudden I missed Baby,” continued Mrs. Momeby in a shriller tone. “We’ve hunted high and low, in house and garden and outside the gates, and he’s nowhere to be seen.”
“Is he anywhere to be heard?” asked Clovis; “if not, he must be at least two miles away.”
“But where? And how?” asked the distracted mother.
“Perhaps an eagle or a wild beast has carried him off,” suggested Clovis.
“There aren’t eagles and wild beasts in Surrey,” said Mrs. Momeby, but a note of horror had crept into her voice.
“They escape now and then from travelling shows. Sometimes I think they let them get loose for the sake of the advertisement. Think what a sensational headline it would make in the local papers: ‘Infant son of prominent Nonconformist devoured by spotted hyaena.’ Your husband isn’t a prominent Nonconformist, but his mother came of Wesleyan stock, and you must allow the newspapers some latitude.”
“But we should have found his remains,” sobbed Mrs. Momeby.
“If the hyaena was really hungry and not merely toying with his food there wouldn’t be much in the way of remains. It would be like the small-boy-and-apple story—there ain’t going to be no core.”
Mrs. Momeby turned away hastily to seek comfort and counsel in some other direction. With the selfish absorption of young motherhood she entirely disregarded Clovis’s obvious anxiety about the asparagus sauce. Before she had gone a yard, however, the click of the side gate caused her to pull up sharp. Miss Gilpet, from the Villa Peterhof, had come over to hear details of the bereavement. Clovis was already rather bored with the story, but Mrs. Momeby was equipped with that merciless faculty which finds as much joy in the ninetieth time of telling as in the first.
“Arnold had just come in; he was complaining of rheumatism—”
“There are so many things to complain of in this household that it would never have occurred to me to complain of rheumatism,” murmured Clovis.
“He was complaining of rheumatism,” continued Mrs. Momeby, trying to throw a chilling inflection into a voice that was already doing a good deal of sobbing and talking at high pressure as well.
She was again interrupted.
“There is no such thing as rheumatism,” said Miss Gilpet. She said it with the conscious air of defiance that a waiter adopts in announcing that the cheapest-priced claret in the wine-list is no more. She did not proceed, however, to offer the alternative of some more expensive malady, but denied the existence of them all.
Mrs. Momeby’s temper began to shine out through her grief.
“I suppose you’ll say next that Baby hasn’t really disappeared.”
“He has disappeared,” conceded Miss Gilpet, “but only because you haven’t sufficient faith to find him. It’s only lack of faith on your part that prevents him from being restored to you safe and well.”
“But if he’s been eaten in the meantime by a hyaena and partly digested,” said Clovis, who clung affectionately to his wild beast theory, “surely some ill-effects would be noticeable?”
Miss Gilpet was rather staggered by this complication of the question.
“I feel sure that a hyaena has not eaten him,” she said lamely.
“The hyaena may be equally certain that it has. You see, it may have just as much faith as you have, and more special knowledge as to the present whereabouts of the baby.”
Mrs. Momeby was in tears again. “If you have faith,” she sobbed, struck by a happy inspiration, “won’t you find our little Erik for us? I am sure you have powers that are denied to us.”
Rose-Marie Gilpet was thoroughly sincere in her adherence to Christian Science principles; whether she understood or correctly expounded
