The Mountebank | Page 8

youth, so that Lady Verity-Stewart felt herself
in full sympathy with Charles's chief, and bored the good man
considerably with accounts of the boy's earlier escapades. To Lady
Auriol he talked mainly about the war, of which she appeared to have
more complete information than he himself.
"I suppose you think," she said at last with a swift side glance, "that I'm
laying down the law about things I'm quite ignorant of."
He said: "Not at all. You're in a position to judge much better than I.
You people outside the wood can see it, in its entirety. We who are in
the middle of the horrid thing can't see it for the trees."
It was this little speech so simple, so courteous and yet not lacking a
touch of irony, that first made Lady Auriol, in the words which she
used when telling me of it afterwards, sit up and take notice.
Bridge, the monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity-Stewart's

courtly soul, pinned Lady Auriol down to the green-covered table for
the rest of the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her
entirely unreprehensible curiosity concerning Colonel Lackaday.
Lady Auriol, born with even more curiosities than are the ordinary
birthright of a daughter of Eve, had spent most of her life in trying to
satisfy them. In most cases she had been successful. Here be it said that
Lady Auriol was twenty-eight, unmarried, and almost beautiful when
she took the trouble to do her hair and array herself in becoming
costume. As to maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well--as a child
of her epoch--she knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to
be a curiosity at all. Besides, love--she had preserved a girl's faith in
beauty--was a psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold
empirical methods which could be employed in the solution of other
problems. I must ask you to bear this in mind when judging Lady
Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love with an Italian poet, an
Antinous-like young man of impeccable manners, boasting an authentic
pedigree which lost itself in the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.
None of your vagabond ballad-mongers. A guest when she first met
him of the Italian Ambassador. To him, Prince Charming, knight and
troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things.
He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on
buttercups. He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she
learned that these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan which
he shared with a naughty little opera singer of no account, she
dismissed Prince Charming offhand, and betook herself alone to the
middle of Abyssinia to satisfy her curiosity as to the existence there of
dulcimer-playing maidens singing of Mount Abora to whom Coleridge
in his poem assigns such haunting attributes.
Lady Auriol, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all
over the world--anybody can do that--but she had gone all through the
world. Alone, she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with
other geographical exploits, her journey through Abyssinia was but a
trip to Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed
China. She had fooled about Saghalien.... In her schooldays, hearing of
the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, she had imagined the Sanjak to be a funny

little man in a red cap. Riper knowledge, after its dull exasperating way,
had brought disillusion; but like Mount Abora the name haunted her
until she explored it for herself. When she came back, she knew the
Sanjak of Novi Bazar like her pocket.
Needless to say that Lady Auriol had thrown all her curiosities, her
illusions--they were hydra-headed--her enthusiasms and her splendid
vitality into the war. She had organized and directed as Commandant a
great hospital in the region of Boulogne. "I'm a woman of business,"
she told Lackaday and myself, "not a ministering angel with
open-worked stockings and a Red Cross of rubies dangling in front of
me. Most of the day I sit in a beastly office and work at potatoes and
beef and army-forms. I can't nurse, though I daresay I could if I tried;
but I hate amateurs. No amateurs in my show, I assure you. For my job
I flatter myself I'm trained. A woman can't knock about the waste
spaces of the earth by herself, head a rabble of pack-carrying savages,
without gaining some experience in organization. In fact, when I'm not
at my own hospital, which now runs on wheels, I'm employed as a sort
of organizing expert--any old where they choose to send me. Do you
think I'm talking swollen-headedly, Colonel Lackaday?"
She turned suddenly round on him, with a defiant flash of