“Ceased to interest you? Are you not to marry her?”
Andre-Louis expelled a cloud of smoke. “You cannot wish to be offensive. Yet you almost suggest that I live on other men’s leavings.”
“My God!” said Leandre, overcome, and he stared awhile. Then he burst out afresh. “Are you quite heartless? Are you always Scaramouche?”
“What do you expect me to do?” asked Andre-Louis, evincing surprise in his own turn, but faintly.
“I do not expect you to let her go without a struggle.”
“But she has gone already.” Andre-Louis pulled at his pipe a moment, what time Leandre clenched and unclenched his hands in impotent rage. “And to what purpose struggle against the inevitable? Did you struggle when I took her from you?”
“She was not mine to be taken from me. I but aspired, and you won the race. But even had it been otherwise where is the comparison? That was a thing in honour; this—this is hell.”
His emotion moved Andre-Louis. He took Leandre’s arm. “You’re a good fellow, Leandre. I am glad I intervened to save you from your fate.”
“Oh, you don’t love her!” cried the other, passionately. “You never did. You don’t know what it means to love, or you’d not talk like this. My God! if she had been my affianced wife and this had happened, I should have killed the man—killed him! Do you hear me? But you… Oh, you, you come out here and smoke, and take the air, and talk of her as another man’s leavings. I wonder I didn’t strike you for the word.”
He tore his arm from the other’s grip, and looked almost as if he would strike him now.
“You should have done it,” said Andre-Louis. “It’s in your part.”
With an imprecation Leandre turned on his heel to go. Andre-Louis arrested his departure.
“A moment, my friend. Test me by yourself. Would you marry her now?”
“Would I?” The young man’s eyes blazed with passion. “Would I? Let her say that she will marry me, and I am her slave.”
“Slave is the right word—a slave in hell.”
“It would never be hell to me where she was, whatever she had done. I love her, man, I am not like you. I love her, do you hear me?”
“I have known, it for some time,” said Andre-Louis. “Though I didn’t suspect your attack of the disease to be quite so violent. Well, God knows I loved her, too, quite enough to share your thirst for killing. For myself, the blue blood of La Tour d’Azyr would hardly quench this thirst. I should like to add to it the dirty fluid that flows in the veins of the unspeakable Binet.”
For a second his emotion had been out of hand, and he revealed to Leandre in the mordant tone of those last words something of the fires that burned under his icy exterior. The young man caught him by the hand.
“I knew you were acting,” said he. “You feel—you feel as I do.”
“Behold us, fellows in viciousness. I have betrayed myself, it seems. Well, and what now? Do you want to see this pretty Marquis torn limb from limb? I might afford you the spectacle.”
“What?” Leandre stared, wondering was this another of Scaramouche’s cynicisms.
“It isn’t really difficult provided I have aid. I require only a little. Will you lend it me?”
“Anything you ask,” Leandre exploded. “My life if you require it.”
Andre-Louis took his arm again. “Let us walk,” he said. “I will instruct you.”
When they came back the company was already at dinner. Mademoiselle had not yet returned. Sullenness presided at the table. Columbine and Madame wore anxious expressions. The fact was that relations between Binet and his troupe were daily growing more strained.
Andre-Louis and Leandre went each to his accustomed place. Binet’s little eyes followed them with a malicious gleam, his thick lips pouted into a crooked smile.
“You two are grown very friendly of a sudden,” he mocked.
“You are a man of discernment, Binet,” said Scaramouche, the cold loathing of his voice itself an insult. “Perhaps you discern the reason?”
“It is readily discerned.”
“Regale the company with it!” he begged; and waited. “What? You hesitate? Is it possible that there are limits to your shamelessness?”
Binet reared his great head. “Do you want to quarrel with me, Scaramouche?” Thunder was rumbling in his deep, voice.
“Quarrel? You want to laugh. A man doesn’t quarrel with creatures like you. We all know the place held in the public esteem by complacent husbands. But, in God’s name, what place is there at all for complacent fathers?”
Binet heaved himself up, a great towering mass of manhood. Violently he shook off the restraining hand of Pierrot who sat on his left.
“A thousand devils!” he roared; “if you take that tone with me, I’ll break every bone in your filthy body.”
“If you were to lay a finger on me, Binet, you would give me the only provocation I still need to kill you.” Andre-Louis was as calm as ever, and therefore the more menacing. Alarm stirred the company. He protruded from his pocket the butt of a pistol—newly purchased. “I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I’ll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble—a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can’t suffer to sit at table with you. It turns my stomach.”
He pushed away his platter and got up. “I’ll go and eat at the ordinary below stairs.”
Thereupon up jumped Columbine.
“And I’ll come with you, Scaramouche!” cried she.
It acted like a signal. Had the thing been concerted it couldn’t have fallen out more uniformly. Binet, in fact, was persuaded of a conspiracy. For in the wake of Columbine went Leandre, in the wake of Leandre, Polichinelle and then all the rest together, until Binet found himself sitting alone at the head of an empty table in an empty room—a badly shaken man whose rage could afford him no support against the dread by which he was suddenly invaded.
He sat down to think things out, and he was still at that melancholy occupation when perhaps a half-hour later his daughter entered the room, returned at last from her excursion.
She looked pale, even a little scared—in reality excessively self-conscious now that the ordeal of facing all the company awaited her.
Seeing no one but her father in the room, she checked on the threshold.
“Where is everybody?” she asked, in a voice rendered natural by effort.
M. Binet reared his great head and turned upon her eyes that were blood-injected. He scowled, blew out his thick lips and made harsh noises in his throat. Yet he took stock of her, so graceful and comely and looking so completely the lady of fashion in her long fur-trimmed travelling coat of bottle green, her muff and her broad hat adorned by a sparkling Rhinestone buckle above her adorably coiffed brown hair. No need to fear the future whilst he owned such a daughter, let Scaramouche play what tricks he would.
He expressed, however, none of these comforting reflections.
“So you’re back at last, little fool,” he growled in greeting. “I was beginning to ask myself if we should perform this evening. It wouldn’t greatly have surprised me if you had not returned in time. Indeed,