The Judgment House | Page 7

chambers to avoid the telegrams and
notes of congratulation which were arriving in great numbers. He had
gone for his morning ride in Battersea Park instead of the Row to
escape observation; had afterwards spent two hours at the house he was
building in Park Lane; had then come to the club, where he had
encountered Ian Stafford and had heard the news which overwhelmed
him.
"Well, an opera cloak did the work better than an overcoat would have
done," Stafford answered, laughing. "It was a flash of real genius to
think of it. You did think it all out in the second, didn't you?"
Stafford looked at him curiously, for he wondered if the choice of a soft
cloak which could more easily be wrapped round the burning woman
than an overcoat was accidental, or whether it was the product of a
mind of unusual decision.
Byng puffed out a great cloud of smoke and laughed again quietly as he
replied:
"Well, I've had a good deal of lion and rhinoceros shooting in my time,
and I've had to make up my mind pretty quick now and then; so I
suppose it gets to be a habit. You don't stop to think when the trouble's
on you; you think as you go. If I'd stopped to think, I'd have funked the
whole thing, I suppose--jumping from that box onto the stage, and
grabbing a lady in my arms, all in the open, as it were. But that
wouldn't have been the natural man. The natural man that's in most of
us, even when we're not very clever, does things right. It's when the
conventional man comes in and says, Let us consider, that we go wrong.
By Jingo, Al'mah was as near having her beauty spoiled as any woman

ever was; but she's only got a few nasty burns on the arm and has
singed her hair a little."
"You've seen her to-day, then?"
Stafford looked at him with some curiosity, for the event was one likely
to rouse a man's interest in a woman. Al'mah was unmarried, so far as
the world knew, and a man of Byng's kind, if not generally
inflammable, was very likely to be swept off his feet by some unusual
woman in some unusual circumstance. Stafford had never seen
Rudyard Byng talk to any woman but Jasmine for more than five
minutes at a time, though hundreds of eager and avaricious eyes had
singled him out for attention; and, as it seemed absurd that any one
should build a palace in Park Lane to live in by himself, the glances
sent in his direction from many quarters had not been without
hopefulness. And there need not have been, and there was not, any loss
of dignity on the part of match-making mothers in angling for him, for
his family was quite good enough; his origin was not obscure, and his
upbringing was adequate. His external ruggedness was partly natural;
but it was also got from the bitter rough life he had lived for so many
years in South Africa before he had fallen on his feet at Kimberley and
Johannesburg.
As for "strange women," during the time that had passed since his
retum to England there had never been any sign of loose living. So, to
Stafford's mind, Byng was the more likely to be swept away on a
sudden flood that would bear him out to the sea of matrimony. He had
put his question out of curiosity, and he had not to wait for a reply. It
came frankly and instantly:
"Why, I was at Al'mah's house in Bruton Street at eight o'clock this
morning--with the milkman and the newsboy; and you wouldn't believe
it, but I saw her, too. She'd been up since six o'clock, she said. Couldn't
sleep for excitement and pain, but looking like a pansy blossom all the
same, rigged out as pretty as could be in her boudoir, and a nurse doing
the needful. It's an odd dark kind of beauty she has, with those full lips
and the heavy eyebrows. Well, it was a bull in a china-shop, as you
might judge--and thank you kindly, Mr. Byng, with such a jolly laugh,

and ever and ever and ever so grateful and so wonderfully--thoughtful,
I think, was the word, as though one had planned it all. And wouldn't I
stay to breakfast? And not a bit stagey or actressy, and rather what you
call an uncut diamond--a gem in her way, but not fine beur, not exactly.
A touch of the karoo, or the prairie, or the salt-bush plains in her, but a
good chap altogether; and I'm glad I was in it last night with her. I
laughed a lot at breakfast--why yes, I stayed to breakfast.