The Lady Paramount | Page 9

such
frocks--and eyes. Oh, my dear!" He kissed his fingers, and wafted the
kiss to the sky. "Eyes! Imagine twin moons rising over a tropical--"
"Allons donc," Anthony repressed him. "Contain yourself. Where is
Madame Torrebianca's husband?"
"Ah," said Adrian, with a sudden lapse of tone. "Where is Madame
Torrebianca's husband? That's the question. Where?" And he winked
suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you that,
you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with uncongenial
and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the country, like
this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you the secretest
secrets of the sages, and I should be making my everlasting fortune--oh,
but money hand over fist--as the oracle of a general information bureau,
in Bond Street, or somewhere. I should be a millionaire, and a celebrity,
and a regular cock-of-the-walk. Where is Madame Torrebianca's
husband? Ay! Gentle shepherd, tell me where?"
"Ah?" wondered Anthony, off his guard. "A mysterious
disappearance?"
"Bravo!" crowed Adrian, gleefully. "I am not only witty myself, but the
cause of wit in others." He patted Anthony on the shoulder. "A
mysterious disappearance. The mot is capital. That's it, to a hair's
breadth. Oft thought before, but ne'er so well expressed. The gentleman

(as the rude multitude in their unfeeling way would put it) is dead."
"On the whole," mused Anthony, looking him up and down with a
reflective eye, "you 're an effulgent sort of egotist, as egotists go; but
you yield much cry for precious little wool."
"Yes, dead," Adrian repeated, pursuing his own train of ideas. "Donna
Susanna is a widow, a poor lone widow, a wealthy, eligible widow.
You must be kind to her."
"Why don't you marry her?" Anthony enquired.
"Pooh," said Adrian.
"Why don't you?" Anthony insisted. "If she 's really rich? You don't
dislike her--you respect her--perhaps, if you set your mind to it, you
could even learn to love her. She 'd give you a home and a position in
the world; she 'd make a sober citizen of you; and she 'd take you off
my hands. You know whether you 're an expense--and a responsibility.
Why don't you marry her? You owe it to me not to let such an occasion
slip."
"Pooh," said Adrian. But he looked conscious, and he laughed a
deliriously conscious laugh. "What nonsense you do talk. I 'm too
young, I 'm far too young, to think of marrying."
"See him blush and giggle and shake his pretty curls," said Anthony,
with scorn, addressing the universe.
By this time they had skirted the house, and come round to the southern
front, where the sunshine lay unbroken on the lawn, and the smell of
the box hedges, strong in the still air, seemed a thing almost ponderable:
the low, long front, a mellow line of colour, with the purple of its old
red bricks and the dark green of its ivy, sunlit against the darker green
of the park, and the blue of the tender English sky. The terrace steps
were warm under their feet, as they mounted them. In terra-cotta urns,
at intervals upon the terrace balustrade, roses grew, roses red and white;
and from larger urns, one at either side of the hall-door, red and white

roses were espaliered, intertwining overhead.
The hall-door stood open; but the hall, as they entered it from the
brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then, little
by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined itself:--"that
hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard Adrian lament,
"which connotes immediately a lost will, a family secret, and the ghost
of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square and spacious,
characteristic of the period when halls were meant to serve at need as
guard-rooms," says the County History.
Square and spacious it was certainly, perhaps a hackneyed type none
the less: the ceiling and the walls panelled in dark well-polished oak;
the floor a pavement of broad stone flags, covered for the most part
now by a faded Turkey carpet; the narrow windows, small-paned and
leaded, set in deep stone embrasures; a vast fireplace jutting across a
corner, the Craford arms emblazoned in the chimney-piece above; and
a wide oak staircase leading to the upper storey. The room was
furnished, incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather
shabbily, and I daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs
and settles, all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books
and periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled
sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door,
lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The rest
of the room