THE BANQUET

SINCE I was not to play host that evening, I decided to let Arsenio be first on the gaudy scene which he had prepared. He should receive the other guests; he should take undivided responsibility for the decorations. I waited until I heard him come down and speak to Louis, and even until I heard—as I very well could, in my little bedroom adjoining the salon—Louis announcing first “Monsieur Froost,” and then—no, it was fat old Amedeo who effected the second announcement, arrogating to himself the rights of an old family servant—that of the most excellent and noble Signora Donna Lucinda Valdez. Thereupon I entered, Amedeo favoring me with no laudatory epithets, but leaving me to content myself with Louis’ brief “Monsieur Reelinton.”

Lucinda was in splendor; she was—as I, at least, had never before seen her—a grown woman in a grown woman’s evening finery. Through all her wanderings she must have dragged this gown about, a relic of her pre-war status—for all I knew, part of the trousseau of the prospective Mrs. Waldo Rillington! But it did not look seriously out of fashion. (If I remember right, women dressed on substantially the same lines just before the war as they did in the first months after it.) It was a white gown, simple but artistic, of sumptuous material. She wore no ornaments—it was not difficult to conjecture the reason for that—only her favorite scarlet flower in her fair hair; yet the effect of her was one of magnificence—of a restrained, tantalizing richness, both of body and of raiment.

Whether she had arrayed herself thus in kindness or in cruelty, or in some odd mixture of the two, indulging Arsenio’s freak with one hand, while the other buffeted him with a vision of what he had lost, I know not; but a glance at her face showed that her tenderer mood was now past. Arsenio’s decorations had done for it! She was looking about her with brows delicately raised, with amusement triumphant on her lips and in her eyes. If Arsenio’s frippery had been meant to appeal to anything except her humor, it had failed disastrously. It had driven her back to her scorn, back to her conception of him as a trickster, a mountebank, a creature whose promises meant nothing, whose threats meant less; an amusing ape—and there an end of him!

But perhaps the plate and the festoons might impress the third guest, who completed Arsenio’s party. Godfrey Frost did not, at first sight, seem so much as to notice them, to know that they were there. His eyes were all for Lucinda. Small wonder, indeed! but they did not seek or follow her in frank and honest admiration, nor yet in the chivalrous though sorrowful longing of unsuccessful love. There was avidity in them, but also anger and grudge; rancor struggling with desire. He was not looking amiable, the third guest. He set me wondering what had passed on the Lido that afternoon.

Arsenio sat down with the air of a man who had done a good day’s work and felt justified in enjoying his dinner and his company. He set Lucinda to his right at the little square table, Godfrey to his left, myself opposite. He gave a glance round the three of us.

“Ah, you’re amused,” he said to Lucinda, with his quick reading of faces. “Well, you know my ways by now!” His voice sounded good-humored, free from chagrin or disappointment. “And, after all, it’s my first and last celebration of the bit of luck that Number Twenty-one at last brought me.”

“The first and last bit of luck too, I expect,” she said; but she too was gay and easy.

“Yes, I shall back it no more; its work is done. Not bad champagne, is it, considering? Louis got it somehow. I told you he’d bring luck, Julius! Louis, fill Mr. Frost’s glass!” He sipped at his own, and then went on. “The charm of a long shot, of facing long odds—that’s what I’ve always liked. That’s the thing for us gamblers! And who isn’t a gambler—willingly or malgrÉ lui? He who lives gambles; so does he who dies—except, of course, for the saving rites of the Church.”

“You were a little late with that reservation, Arsenio,” I remarked.

“You heretics are hardly worthy of it at all,” he retorted, smiling. “But, to gamble well, you must gamble whole-heartedly. No balancing of chances, no cutting the loss, no trying to have it both ways. Don’t you agree with me, Frost?”

“I don’t believe that Mr. Frost agrees with you in the least,” Lucinda put in. “He thinks it’s quite possible to have it both ways. Don’t you, Mr. Frost? To win without losing is your idea!”

He gave her a long look, a reluctant sour smile. She was bantering him—over something known to them, only to be conjectured by Arsenio and me; something that had passed on the Lido? She had for him a touch of the detached scornful amusement which Arsenio’s decorations had roused in her, but with a sharper tang in it—more bite to less laughter.

“I’m not a gambler, though I’m not afraid of a business risk,” he answered.

She laughed lightly. “A business risk would never have brought the splendor of to-night!” She smiled round at the ridiculously festooned walls.

We were quickly disposing of an excellent, well-served dinner; Louis was quick and quiet, fat Amedeo more sensible than he looked, undoubtedly a good cook was in the background. Growing physically very comfortable, I got largely rid of the queer apprehensions which had haunted me; I paid less heed to Arsenio, and more to the secret subtle duel which seemed to be going on between the other two. Arsenio played more with his topic—birth, death, life, love—all gambles into which men and women were involuntarily thrown, with no choice but to play the cards or handle the dice; all true and obvious in a superficial sort of way, but it seemed rather trifling—a mood in which life can be regarded, but one in which few men or women really live it. That he was one of the few himself, however, I was quite prepared to concede; the magnitude of his gains—and of his loss—as convincing.

Louis and Amedeo served us with coffee and Louis set a decanter of brandy in front of Arsenio.

Then they left us alone. Arsenio poured himself out a glass of brandy, and handed the decanter round. Holding his glass in his hand, he turned to Lucinda. “Will you drink with me—to show that you forgive my sins?”

Her eyes widened a little at the suddenness of the appeal; but she smiled still, and answered lightly, “Oh, I’ll drink with you——” She sipped her brandy—“in memory of old days, Arsenio!”

“I see,” he said, nodding his head at her gravely. She had refused to drink with him on his terms; she would do it only on her own. “Still—you shall forgive,” he persisted with one of his cunning smiles. Then he turned suddenly to Godfrey Frost with a change of manner—with a cold malice that I had never seen in him before, a malice with no humor in it, a straightforward viciousness. “Then let us drink together, my friend!” he said. “It was with that object that I brought you here to-night. We’ll drink together, as we have failed together, Godfrey Frost! A business risk you spoke of just now! It wasn’t a bad speculation! A couple of hundred or so—Oh, I had more from your cousin, but her motives were purely charitable, eh?—just a beggarly couple of hundred for a chance at that!” A gesture indicated Lucinda. His voice rose; it took on its rhetorical note, and the words fell into harmony with it. “To buy a man’s honor and beauty like that for a couple of hundred—not a bad risk!”

Godfrey looked as if he had been suddenly hit in the face; he turned a deep red and leant forward towards his host—his very queer host. He was too shaken up to be ready with a reply. Lucinda sat motionless, apparently aloof from the scene. But a very faint smile was still on her lips.

“What the devil’s the use of this sort of thing?” I expostulated—in a purely conventional spirit, with one’s traditional reprobation of “scenes.” My feeling somehow went no deeper. It seemed then an inevitable thing that these three should have it out, before they went their several ways; the conventions were all broken between them.

“Because the truth’s good for him—and for me; for both of us who trafficked in her.”

Lucinda suddenly interposed, in a delicate scorn, an unsparing truthfulness. “It’s only because you’ve failed yourself that you’re angry with him, Arsenio. Let him alone; he’s had enough truth from me this afternoon—and a lot of good advice. I told him to go home—to Nina Dundrannan. And for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about ‘trafficking,’ as if you were some kind of a social reformer!”

She turned to me, actually laughing; and I began to laugh too. Well, Godfrey looked absurd—like a dog being whipped by two people at once, not knowing which he most wanted to bite, not sure whether he dared bite either—possibly thinking also of a third whipping which would certainly befall him if he followed Lucinda’s good advice. And Arsenio, cruelly let down from his heroics, looked funnily crestfallen too. He was not allowed to be picturesquely, rhetorically indignant—not with Godfrey, not even with himself!

“Besides,” she added, “he did offer to stick to his engagement to lunch with me that day at Cimiez!”

The mock admiration and gratitude with which she recalled this valiant deed—to which she might, in my opinion, well have dedicated a friendlier tone, since it was no slight exploit for him to beard his Nina in that fashion—put a limit to poor Godfrey’s tongue-tied endurance.

“Yes, you were ready enough to take my lunches, and what else you could get!” he sneered.

Lucinda gave me just a glance; here was a business reckoner indeed! Of course he had some right on his side, but he saw his right so carnally; why couldn’t he have told her that they’d been friends—and who could be only a friend to her? That was what, I expect, he meant in his heart; but his instincts were blunt, and he had been lashed into soreness.

Still, though I was feeling for him to that extent, I could not help returning Lucinda’s glance with a smile, while Arsenio chuckled in an exasperating fashion. It was small wonder really that he pushed back his chair from the table and, looking round at the company, groaned out, “Oh, damn the lot of you!”

The simplicity of this retort went home. I felt guilty myself, and Lucinda was touched to remorse, if not to shame. “I told you not to come to-night,” she murmured. “I told you that he only wanted to tease you. You’d better go away, perhaps.” She looked at him, and his glance obeyed hers instantly; she put out her hand and laid it on one of his for just a moment. “And, after all, I did like the lunches. You’re quite right there! Arsenio, can’t we part friends to-night—since we must part, all of us?”

“Oh, as you like!” said Arsenio impatiently. A sudden and deep depression seemed to fall upon him; he sat back, staring dejectedly at the table. He reminded one of a comedian whose jokes do not carry. This banquet was to have been a great, grim joke. But it had fallen flat—sunk now into just a wrangle. And at last his buoyant malice failed to lift it—failed him indeed completely. We three men sat in a dull silence; I saw Lucinda’s eyes grow dim with tears.

Godfrey broke the silence by rising to his feet, clumsily, almost with a stumble; I think that he caught his foot in the tablecloth, which hung down almost to the floor.

“I’ll go,” he said. “I’m sorry for all this. I’ve made a damned fool of myself.”

Nobody else spoke, or rose.

“If it’s any excuse”—he almost stumbled in his speech, as he had almost stumbled with his feet—“I love Lucinda. And you’ve used her damnably, Valdez.”

“For what I’ve done, I pay. For you—go and learn what love is.” This, though as recorded it sounds like his theatrical manner, was not so delivered. It came from him in a low, dreary voice, as though he were totally dispirited. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece; it had gone ten o’clock; he seemed to shiver as he noted the hour. He looked across at me with a helpless appeal in his eyes. He looked like an animal in a trap; a trap bites no less deeply for being of one’s own devising.

Godfrey was staring at him now in a dull, uncomprehending bewilderment. Lucinda put her elbows on the table, and supported her chin in her hands, her eyes set inquiringly on his face. I myself stretched out my hand and clasped one of his. But he shook off my grasp, raised his hands in the air and let them fall with a thud on the table; all the things on it rattled; even the heavy plate that he had bought or hired—I didn’t know which—for his futile banquet. Then he blurted out, in the queerest mixture of justification, excuse, defiance, bravado: “Oh, you don’t understand, but to me it means damnation! And I can’t do it; now—now the time’s come, I can’t!” There was no doubt about his actual, physical shuddering now.

Lucinda did not move; she just raised her eyes from where he sat to where Godfrey stood. “You’d better go,” she said. “Julius and I must manage this.” Her tone was contemptuous still.

I got up and took Godfrey’s arm. He let me lead him out of the room without resistance, and, while I was helping him on with his hat and coat, asked in a bewildered way, “What does it mean?”

“He meant to go out in a blaze of glory—with a beau geste! But he hasn’t got the pluck for it at the finish. That’s about the size of it.”

“My God, what a chap! What a queer chap!” he mumbled, as he began to go downstairs. He turned his head back. “See you to-morrow?”

“Lord, I don’t know! I’ve got him to look after. He might find his courage again! I can’t leave him alone. Good-night.” I watched him down to the next landing, and then went back towards the salon. I did not think of shutting the outer door behind me.

Just on the threshold of the salon I met Arsenio himself in the act of walking out of the room, rather unsteadily. “Where are you going?” I demanded angrily.

“Only to get some whisky. I’ve a bottle in my room. I want a whisky-and-soda. It’s all right; it really is now, old fellow.”

“I shall come with you.” I knew of a certain thing that he had in his own room upstairs, and was not going to trust him alone.

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, but made no further objection. “We’ll be back in a minute,” I called out to Lucinda, who was still sitting at the table, her attitude unchanged. Then Arsenio and I passed through the open door and went up the stairs together. As we started on our way, he said, with a curious splutter that was half a sob in his voice, “Lucinda knows me best, and you see she’s not afraid. She didn’t try to stop me.”

“She’s never believed you meant it at all; but I did,” I answered.