Chapter III

The whole house was topsy-turvy. The secret of the mortgage was out, for one thing. Everybody knew that the Squire had proposed to Podge, that Podge had said “No” to him, in spite of father’s dignified commands, and that the Squire had rushed out of the house, foaming at the mouth, with his coat half on and half off, stormed his way round to the stables, where he saddled his horse himself, and galloped homeward, scattering objurgations, threats, and imprecations right and left.

“Stuck-up paupers! Make Parksop know better! Sell ’em up, stick and stone! Prefer d--d curate to me, Thomas Braddlebury! Fool! Must be crazy!”

Roddy and I and everybody else agreed with him, except Podge. She was regularly downright obstinate. She had given in to all of us all her life, and now, just when her giving in meant so much, she wouldn’t. What was the good of beginning, we asked, if she didn’t intend to go on? We were very severe with her, because she deserved it. Falling in love at her size--like a milkmaid--and with an elderly curate--an old-young man, with shabby clothes and a stoop! Belle had put up with his staring at our pew when he read the Litany on Sundays, but now that she was quite sure he hadn’t been doing it because of her, she regarded it as an unpardonable insult. She stirred up father to write to the Rector demanding Mr. Noel’s instant dismissal, and the Rector sent back an old, unsettled claim for tithe money, and referred father to the Bishop of the diocese.

Meanwhile, Podge was the victim of love. It was really funny. She cried quarts at night, according to Belle. Her red nose and swollen eyes made her funnier still. And old Noel stooped more going about his parish work. He was a gentleman--that was one thing to be said for him--and if two perfectly healthy lives had not stood between him and the title, he’d have been a baronet, with a rent roll worth having, the Rector’s wife said.

They say dropping wears away a stone. We dropped on Podge from morning till night, and she gave in at last. She put on her hat and trotted down to the Rectory--waddled would be the best word. She saw Noel, and had it out _vivâ voce_. She’d tried to do it by letter--Belle found a torn-up note of dismissal in her room, beginning “My lost Darling.” We yelled over the notion of old Noel being Podge’s lost darling; almost before we’d done yelling she was back again, and had smothered the little ones all round, and gone to the library with a flag of truce--a wet pocket handkerchief--to announce the capitulation to father. She spoke to me afterward, looked appealing, as if she wanted to be praised for doing a simple thing like that for her family! I didn’t praise her, and Roddy gave her even less encouragement.

The Squire was sent for by special messenger, and came without hurrying. He said he was glad she’d come to her senses and showed a proper appreciation of the gifts Providence had placed within her reach. He brought a diamond engagement ring, which wouldn’t go on the proper finger. We laughed again at that; we were always laughing in those days. And he gave father one of the title deeds back, and stayed to dinner, and had a little music in the drawing-room afterward, and kissed Podge when he went away, at which Roddy and I and Belle nearly went into convulsions, and in a little time the wedding day was fixed.

As it came near, Podge didn’t get any thinner. She ate her dinner just as usual, and smothered the children a good deal. She was to have half a dozen or so of them to live with her; she stipulated for that, and the Squire grinned and scowled and said, “All right, for the present!” He turned out to be quite generous, and tipped us sovereigns and Belle jewelry and new frocks, and she said every time she tried them on that she had quite come to regard him as a relative. Everybody had except Podge, and I dare say if you’d asked her she’d have said she was the person whose opinion mattered most. You never know how selfish unselfish people can be till they’re tried! It’s true the Squire was awfully ugly and as rough as a bear, and a little too fond of drinks that made his temper uncertain and his legs unsteady. But he had done a great deal for the family, and women can’t expect us men to be angels.

Podge was a little too quiet as the wedding drew near. You know, there’s no fun in pinning a cockchafer that doesn’t spin round lively. The presents came in and the invitations went out, the breakfast was planned, the cake came from London, with heaps of other things; but she kept quiet. The night before the wedding it rained. Somebody wanted her for one of the thousand things people were always wanting her for, and she couldn’t be found. She stayed out so long that father sent word to the stablemen and gardeners to take torches and drag the pond. Of course, he was anxious, for you can’t have a wedding without a bride. But why the pond? A thin girl might have tried that without seeming ridiculous, but not a fat one, and Podge couldn’t have sunk if she’d tried! She came in at last among us, looking very queer, and wet to the skin, with only a thin cloak on over her evening dress. She said she’d been to the churchyard, to mother’s grave, praying that we might be forgiven. She laughed the next moment, catching a glimpse of her own droll figure in the drawing-room glass.

Next day was the wedding day. Everybody had new clothes, and the bridesmaids’ lockets had the initials of Podge and the Squire, “C” and “R,” in diamonds. Roddy and I had pins to match--Hunt and Roskell’s. I forget how many yards of white satin went into Podge’s wedding gown, but it measured thirty-eight inches round the waist--no larks. She cried all the way going to church, so that father was nearly washed out of the brougham.

How did the wedding go off? It never came off at all! There were the county people in the smart clothes they’d taken the shine off in London; there were the school children, with washed faces and clean pinafores, and baskets of rose leaves all ready to strew on the path of the happy pair. There were the decorations, palms and lilies, as if the occasion had been a kind of martyr’s festival; and there was the Bishop at the altar rails, with the Rector, waiting to tie the knot; and the Squire, in a blue frock-coat, buff waistcoat, and shepherd’s plaid trousers, with a whole magnolia in his buttonhole, waiting for Podge.

Father tried to lead her up the aisle, but it was too narrow, so he walked behind. Just as she put her foot on the chancel step, out comes old Noel out of the vestry, to everybody’s surprise, looking flushed and excited. He said something I didn’t hear, and then Podge calls out, “Oh, I can’t! Have mercy!” or something like that, and surged down with a flop, like the sound a big wave makes dashing into a cave’s mouth, on the red and white tiles. Old Noel ran to lift her up, but couldn’t do it. The Squire called out, “D---- you! Let my wife alone!” And the Bishop rebuked him for swearing in a sacred edifice. Then father and the Squire and old Noel hoisted Podge up--for two of ’em weren’t strong enough--and tottered with her into the vestry.

What happened? I got in, and so I know all about it. We sprinkled Podge with water, and set fire to a feather duster and held it under her nose, and she came to, with her hair down, and her wreath and veil hanging by one hairpin. And old Noel bent over her, and said, “Dearest Charlotte, there is no need for the sacrifice now!” And he pulled a newspaper out of his pocket and handed it to father, who said, “What! what! how dare you, man?” and then dropped his eye on a paragraph marked in red ink, and said in the best Parksop manner, “I really beg your pardon, Sir Clement! Your uncle and his son both drowned yachting in the Mediterranean? Most deplorable! but really affords you no excuse for--ah--interrupting a solemn ceremony in so extraordinary a manner.” And then he and old--I mean Sir Clement Noel--had a few confidential words in a corner, and I heard old--I mean the Baronet--say, “On my word and honor, a sacred pledge!” And father astounded everybody by turning on the Squire, and telling him in the most gentlemanly way to go about his business, which he did, swearing awfully, while Podge was crying for joy, and Sir Noel comforting her with his arm round her waist--I mean as far as it would go.

That happened three years ago, and Podge and Sir Clement Noel have been married three years all but a week. We all live with Podge and her husband--I don’t think they’ve ever been alone together for a day since their honeymoon. Father is very fond of Charlotte now, and says the baby is a real Parksop. That always makes Sir Clement Noel wild--I can’t think why.

I’ve often thought since, after seeing what they call a domestic drama, that what happened to Podge and Noel might have happened to the hero and heroine of one. Only, a hero never has gray hair and a stoop, and there never yet was a heroine who measured as much as thirty-eight inches round the waist. It’s impossible!

IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION

The balloon ascended from the Chiswick Gasworks at twelve-thirty, amid the thin cheers of an outer fringe of Works _employés_ and an inner circle composed of members of the Imperial Air Club, who had motored down expressly for the start. It was by courtesy a summer day, a June gale having blown itself out over night, a June frost having nipped vegetation over morn. Now there was not a breath of wind, and the sky vault arching over London and the suburbs was of purplish-gray, through which a broad ray of white-hot sunshine pierced slantingly with weird effect as the order “Hands off!” was given, and the _Beata_, of forty-five thousand cubic feet, owner Captain the Honorable H. Maudslay-Berrish, of the I. A. C., soared rapidly upward.

Hitherto Maudslay-Berrish, occupied with the thousand cares devolving on the aeronaut, had not looked directly at either of his traveling companions. These were his wife’s friend and his wife. We all remember the sumptuous Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion and other West End comedy theaters. Many of the masculine readers of this truthful record have laid offerings of hot-house flowers, jewelry, sweetmeats, and settlements, at those high-arched insteps in their pre-nuptial days, and not all have had cause to mourn the rejection of the same. But Maudslay-Berrish, son of a philanthropic Nonconformist peer, to whom the theater is the antechamber to the Pit, married her, and, as too far south is north, the men of his set thenceforth tacked on “Poor chap!” or “Poor beggar!” to the mention of his name, when another stage triumph of his gifted wife, who did not resign her profession, was recorded in the newspapers.

The friend of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish, whom we may know as “Teddy,” gasped one or two private gasps as the _Beata_ shot up to an altitude of three thousand feet, and Chiswick Gasworks fell away underneath her into a tinted relief map of West London, and then was buried under a sea of swirling dun-gray vapors. The hoot of a motor-car--the needle-sharp screech of a railway locomotive--were the last sounds to reach the ears of the _Beata’s_ three passengers. Then the sounds of Earth sank into the silence of Eternity. And the soul of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s friend felt very thin and small, knowing itself adrift upon that tideless sea. The wicker car seemed also small--small to unsafeness--and the ropes as frail as the strands of a spider web. Cautiously Teddy put forth his immaculately gloved hand and touched one. Madness, to have trusted limb and life to things like these. Madness, to have left the good solid ground, where there were clubs and comfort and other men to keep you from feeling alone--for Teddy realized with vivid clearness that in this particular moment and at this particular point Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish counted for nothing. He even forgot to look to see if she was there. But she was there, and looking at him across her husband’s back. For Maudslay-Berrish was in the middle of the oblong basket, and he was leaning over, peering down into the swirling gray sea below, his folded arms upon the wicker car edge, his chin upon them.

As matter of fact, he did not wish his wife and her friend to see how heartily he was laughing. When you have set a trap for two beings whom you hate with an intensity beyond all the range of human expression, and waited patiently for years--it had taken him, Maudslay-Berrish, just three years to qualify as a member of the Air Club--to see them fall into it, you laugh when it happens. And if they chance to see your face while you are doing it, it makes them feel uncomfortable.... And when they know!... The purple veins swelled upon his narrow forehead under the leather peak of his Club cap. His muscles cracked, his shoulders heaved with that hidden, terrible, convulsive laughter.

“Harwood,” cried his wife, her strong voice ringing loud in the thin, untainted air, “what is the matter? Is anything wrong?”

“The balloon is not leaking, the valve is in proper order, there is plenty of ballast on board, the car is sound, the ropes are new and have been tested,” said Maudslay-Berrish. “There is scarcely a breath of wind to move us, and yet something _is_ wrong. What are you trying to ask me, Beryl ... whether we are in danger? At the risk of spoiling your evident enjoyment of your first ascent, I answer ‘Yes!’”

Then he straightened his bowed figure and turned so as to face the wife who had betrayed him so often, and Teddy, her friend. She, Beryl, looked at him with wild eyes set in a face suddenly grown sharp and thin. She clenched her gloved left hand upon a rope of the car, and the splitting of the glove back revealed her wedding ring and its keeper of sparkling diamonds. At the sight of that consecrated symbol another gust of mad laughter seized Maudslay-Berrish, and the tears poured down his purple face, and he roared and roared again, until every fiber of the car vibrated with his ugly merriment.

“For God’s sake, Berrish, don’t laugh like that!” shrieked Teddy, blue-white and gibbering. “Are you mad, or what?”

“Were you sane, you infernal fool--you two infernal fools--when you got into this car with the man whom you have outraged?” shrieked Maudslay-Berrish. “Haven’t you dragged my good name in the mud, made me a by-word and a laughing-stock, a mockery even to myself--even to myself, in the last five years! Why, you d---- ----” (he called Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish an unlovely name) “my very servants sneer at me, the people at the theater grin when I come loafin’ round behind the scenes. They’re quite aware of what I’ve swallowed without gaggin’. They know I’ve lived on your money when I’d got through my own, quite fly as to where most of it came from”--he pointed a shaking finger at the stricken Teddy--“and as downy as you pleased. Teddy, old chap, I’ve _called_ that blue-gilled funker there, and half a dozen like him. Well, Teddy, old chap, say your prayers quick, for you’re going to die suddenly!”

The woman and her lover knew now what their late dupe and butt meant to do. He had the ripping cord half-hitched about his left wrist--the ripping cord, a sharp tug at which will, when a balloon is dangerously dragged during a descent, take an entire panel out of the envelope in two seconds, immediately deflating the bag. And in his right hand Maudslay-Berrish manipulated a neat little revolver.

Certainly he played the star part in the drama, and held the audience breathless. Half of the audience, that is, for Teddy, old chap, was at his prayers. Down on his knees at the bottom of the car, his gloved hands rigidly clasped, his handsome, weak face turned up to the sustaining ball of gas that hovered in its imprisoning net above, between him and the Illimitable Void, he cowered and slavered. In pleading for Heaven’s mercy upon a miserable sinner, he set forth that his Eve had tempted him; he asked for time to make up, another chance, a year, six months, a week only of sweet life. Hearing him, Eve herself grew sick with contempt of his infinite littleness, and even Maudslay-Berrish half turned away his eyes.

“Why don’t _you_ pray?” he said, sneeringly, to his wife. “Why don’t _you_ grovel like that thing you have kissed?”

Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion, would have held an audience mute and breathless by the quiet scorn conveyed in Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s look and tone.

“I dare say when you have done what you are going to do, I shall wake up in Hell,” she said; “and I believe I shall have earned it!”

Teddy, still spinning out the smeared records of his Past, was now prostrate and bathed in tears.

“If I doubted the existence of such a place before, I do not now. For I have loved that man”--she bit her white underlip sharply--“and I have seen and heard him. Henceforth there can be nothing worse to bear, here or hereafter. Why do you delay? Pull the cord and have done with it, or I shall say _you_ are afraid!”

* * * * *

The _Beata_ came sailing gently down upon a delightful green expanse of turf at Aldershot--the tennis ground, in fact, of a dandy Cavalry Regiment. The anchor dropped and caught in a pollard oak; a dozen delightfully pink lieutenants in correct flannels assisted the handsome Miss Fennis, of the West End theaters, to alight from the basket. Maudslay-Berrish, calm and imperturbable as usual, followed. In the midst of congratulations and offers of luncheon, a lieutenant exclaimed:

“Great Scott! Why didn’t you say you’d another passenger in the car? Here’s a man lying in a dead faint at the bottom of it!”

And they brought out Teddy, very white and limp, and gave him brandy.

“Heart weak, what?” said the lieutenant who had exclaimed.

“He has certainly had some--cardiac trouble,” returned Maudslay-Berrish placidly; “but I think he will be less liable to the--ahem!--the weakness after this little trip of ours together in the Fourth Dimension.”

And he smiled as he lighted a very large cigar.

THE GEWGAW

The iron doors of the auction-room were closed tightly as the valves of an oyster shell; the forward rush of a smartly attired throng awaited their rolling back in the polished steel grooves. It was to be a woman’s field day; the contents of a notable jewel casket were to be dispersed under the hammer. And the _bonne-mouche_ of the occasion--a superb blue diamond of sixty-five carats, a gem worthy to rank among the historic stones of the world, fit to be counted among the treasures of a Sultan or to blaze upon the bosom of an Empress--was discussed by watering mouths. Some of them were old and some of them were young, but all were tinted with the newest shade in lip bloom, and all wore the same expression of almost sensual desire. Paradise plumes fought together as wonderfully hatted heads bent and swayed and nodded in animated discussion. The stone had brought a hundred thousand louis and the Grand Monarque’s own patent of nobility to the Portuguese adventurer who had stolen it from a Hindu temple midway in the seventeenth century. It had gleamed between the wicked, white breasts of the Duchesse de Berry, the shameless daughter of the Régent d’Orleans, at that final supper on the Terrace of Meudon. It had been seized by the Revolutionists in the stormy days of 1792, and had mysteriously vanished from the Garde Meuble, to reappear in the taloned clutches of a London money lender and gem dealer, notorious as a rogue among the spendthrift fine gentlemen of White’s and Crockford’s. And it had been bought by a big banker, and bid for by a Tsar, and sold to a great Tory nobleman, and left as an heirloom, and given to an Italian opera singer, and got back by arbitration and made a ward in Chancery, and sold in Paris by sanction of the Court; and now the woman who had bought and owned and worn it--sometimes as the swinging central stone of a tiara, at other times as the pendant to a matchless collar of black pearls--was dead, and Briscoe’s famous auction-room, which is the chief clearing-place of the world, was about to witness a new record in progressive bidding.

The live women who had known and envied the dead owner of the blue diamond clustered thick about the iron doors, and loaded the atmosphere of the crowded place with their perfumes, and chattered like the inmates of the parrot house at the Zoological Gardens. Not one of them but would have given her soul in exchange for even a lesser jewel if Satan had appeared at her elbow and suggested the exchange. He did come to one of them. She was a pretty woman, still almost young; she was beautifully dressed in painted silken muslin, and wore a whole king bird of Paradise in her Paris hat. The bronze-gold wires of the wonderful tail, tipped with vivid emerald at the ends, curved and sprang about the wearer’s well-waved and well-dressed head like living snakes of incredible slenderness. The rich red plumage of the dead creature’s head and throat gleamed like rubies; the delicate feather tufts that sprang from beneath the wings quivered with her every movement; the orange bill held a seed, cunningly placed; the cobalt-blue legs were perched upon a rose stem. To insure such beauty in the plumage the skin must be torn from the living bird. Any woman might be happy in possessing such a hat; but this one was miserable.... She wanted the big blue diamond.... And this urbane, polished person, elegantly attired, had told her that, if she chose, it might be hers in exchange for a possession only half believed in--to wit, the woman’s soul--disposed of to a personage held, until that psychological moment, to be non-existent.

This was not the devil of St. Dunstan, with horns and a tail, or the cloaked and ribald wine seller of St. Anthony, or the lubberly fiend of Luther, or the clawed and scaly tempter of Bunyan. Nor did this personage bear the least resemblance to the swaggering, scarlet-and-black, sinister Mephistopheles of Goethe, as represented by the late Sir Henry Irving--upon whom be the Peace of Heaven!--but the woman entertained no doubt that it was the very devil himself. In this urbane and polished gentleman in the light gray, tight-waisted frock-coat and trousers of Bond Street cut, from beneath whose snowy, polished double collar flowed a voluminous cascade of pearl-colored cravat pinned with a small but perfect pigeon’s-blood ruby; whose lapel bore a mauve orchid, whose immaculate white spats, perfectly polished patent boots, slender watch-chain, jade-headed walking stick, and pale buff gloves, betokened the most studied refinement and the most elegant taste, the daughter of Eve recognized the hereditary enemy of the Human Race.

She did not scream or turn ghastly with mortal fear; her Crême Magnolia and Rose Ninon were quite too thick for that. But her heart gave a sickening jolt, and fear immeasurable paralyzed her faculties, and her veins ran liquid ice--or was it liquid fire?--and for one swooning instant, under the regard of those intolerably mocking, unspeakably hateful eyes, the life in her seemed to dwindle to a mere pin’s point of consciousness. But she revived and rallied, and the terror passed.

“Come!” he said, “you do not fear me--we have been friends too long; and to me, who know the world so well, and to you, who know it and are of it, there is nothing so undesirable as to create a scene.” His voice was polished, gracious. It caressed like the touch of velvet, even if it crisped the nerves as velvet does. “You know me.... I know you, and how your heart is set upon this jewel that is to be sold to-day. Rest easy! Though you have with you in that gold chain purse-bag notes for fifteen thousand pounds, ten thousand of it raised by what rigorous moralists ... those unpleasant persons! ... might call unlawful means....”

“Hush!” she cried, trembling, unable to remove her eyes from that face--long, oval, benevolent--with wide, arched brows and features exquisitely regular, framed in long waving hair--dark auburn mingled with gray--which fell nearly to his collar and mingled with a curling beard of natural growth. She trembled as the thought shot through her that it caricatured a Face that hung, pictured with a Crown of Thorns, above the cot in her child-daughter’s nursery; and her thought was mirrored in those intolerable eyes, and the sculpturesque lips smiled in impious mockery.

“Ah, yes! It seems to you I bear some likeness to--shall I say a distant--or an estranged Friend of yours.... But I have many other faces, and you have ... other friends. Do not be afraid, or waste time in denying, the money is only borrowed; you are your young daughter’s mother, as well as trustee and executor under her father’s will.... And, surely, you may borrow the ten thousand pounds at a pinch for an investment? Besides, you will put it back before any unpleasant inquiries are made by your fellow-guardian and co-trustee. The manager of the Bank was quite deceived by the second signature upon the deed of withdrawal, so admirably counterfeited, so.... No, no, I do not wish to alarm you! Be quite at ease upon this matter, really so innocent and easily explained away. But with regard to your project of buying the Blue Diamond--you have no chance of carrying out your plan, not the faintest. Between those sedate persons already assembled by high privilege behind these shut iron doors an understanding has already been arrived at. The Diamond will be put up to public auction and actively bid for, it is true; but the Diamond is already bought and sold.” His tone was of the gentlest sympathy, but the mockery in his glance and the gibing irony of his dreadful smile were to the baffled woman like white-hot irons laid upon a bleeding wound. “Mr. Ulysses Wanklyn, whose great duel with Mr. Cupid Bose at the De Lirecourt sale over that Régence commode of marqueterie thrilled all London, will be the winner of the treasure at ninety-four thousand guineas. Paragraphs in the afternoon papers--most excellent publications I find them, and supremely useful--will refer to the coup as ‘the climax of screeching finance,’ and ‘the hall-mark on an enhanced standard of jewel-values.’ And Messrs. Moreen and Blant, who will retire, ostensibly beaten, from the field after a bid of eighty-eight thousand, will be condoled with by writers who are quite aware that Wanklyn, Bose, Moreen, Blant, and half a dozen others constitute the Blue Diamond Purchasing Syndicate, capital ninety-four thousand guineas.”

The wearer of the king bird of Paradise caught a sharp breath, and bit her sensuous, scarlet-dyed underlip fiercely. Stung to desperate courage by baffled desire and the thwarted jewel-lust that had robbed even her child and made of her a forger, she even dared to question....

“If that is so,” she said, with angry, dark eyes and a rebelliously-heaving bosom, “why did you whisper to me just now that I could have the Diamond for my own if I gave you ... as the people do in the old German legends ... my Soul in exchange for it?”

He smiled, and caressed the strange, orchidaceous flower he wore with perfectly-gloved fingers.

“Have you not heard me called the Father of Lies ... the Arch-Deceiver?”

Rage intolerable possessed and rent her. She said hoarsely, and in tones unlike her own:

“You can give me the Blue Diamond, and I will have it--_at your price_!”

“You are really a woman of excellent sense,” he said--and she was afraid to look because she knew how he was smiling. “Present good for future gain!... Doubtless you will recall the quotation, but so uncertain a futurity is well bartered for such a jewel as they have in there. Think--you will snatch it from the great dealers--from the private connoisseurs. You will hold and display and flaunt it in the face of society. You will be beautiful--wearing it! You should be envied, wearing it! You may be happy--doubtless you will be so! And now, just as a mere form, prick your left wrist slightly with this diamond-pointed pencil and inscribe your name upon a leaf of these ebony tablets. First, though, be pleased to remove that ... ahem!... miniature religious symbol from your golden chain. The Crucifix means nothing to you--you do not even remove it when you draw your wedded lover to your embrace--but I am an old-fashioned personage, and my prejudice extends back over nineteen hundred years--to the reign of Herod Antipas, and is practically unalterable. So ... thanks! That will serve me excellently!”

From the woman’s hand something fell with a golden tinkle to the parqueted floor. A surge of the crowd drove her forward, her French heel crushed what she had dropped. The diamond pencil pricked the white wrist between the buttons of her dainty glove; she withdrew it, a little scarlet bead glistening on the shining point, and hesitated, only an instant, looking at the offered tablets of ebony and gold.

“Come, sign!... It will be over in an instant, and, believe me, you will feel far more comfortable afterward!” She remembered that her dentist had employed the same phrases only a day or two before in persuading her to consent to the removal of a decayed incisor. That tooth’s successor--a perfect, polished example of human ivory--gleamed as her lips drew back in a nervous laugh provoked by the absurdity of the analogy. She scrawled her signature, and the promise was fulfilled. She was calm--at ease--had no more worrying doubts and silly scruples. He wore no indiscreet expression of proprietorship; his lips did not even smile. And if there was mocking triumph in his eyes, his discreetly dropped lids concealed it.... He bowed profoundly as he took the ebony tablets, and then he lifted his gloved left hand and laid a finger on the iron doors. And they rolled apart, revealing the great safe with many patent locks, and the auctioneer at his desk, and the clerk at his; and the chosen already in their seats, and the elaborate preparations for the elaborate farce that was to be played, all ready. A savage rage boiled up in her as she looked at the smug faces of the secret Syndicate, actors well-versed in their separate parts. But the pressure of the chattering, screaming, perfumed crowd behind her carried her over the threshold, and her companion too. Packed tightly as sardines in the confined space about the rostrum, Society waited the great event. And a bunch of master-keys was produced by the senior partner of Briscoe’s, and with much juggling of patent locks the great safe gave up the big, square jewel-case containing the famous collection, and a sibilant “_Ss’s!_” of indrawn breaths greeted the lifting of its lid.

“Do not look at me! Listen--and look at the jewels,” whispered the smooth, caressing voice in the ear of the woman who had just signed away her soul in exchange for the sensation of the day. And as a giant commissionaire bearing pearl ropes and tiaras, bracelets and rings and necklaces, nervously paraded up and down the central aisle left for his convenience, and the chattering and screaming of the society cockatoos redoubled, in envious admiration of each swaggering, glittering, covetable gewgaw, the devil told the woman very plainly how the thing was to be done.

“The stone that I shall give you is an exact replica in a newly-invented paste of the stone that is the price of what I have bought from you. When the commissionaire brings round the Blue Diamond, touch the jewel boldly--take it in your hand, as it is permissible to do--and substitute the paste. Have no fear! I will undertake that the act is undetected. Thenceforth wear your prize undismayed; boast of it as you will. The one--the only--drawback to your perfect happiness must be that society will believe your jewel to be false, while you have the exquisite joy of knowing it to be genuine. So take _this_, and act as I have counseled. Two hours to wait before you can dare to escape with it, for the Blue Diamond will be the last lot of the day. But what are two hours, even spent in a vitiated atmosphere, with such a prize your own, hidden in your glove or in your hand? A mere nothing! And here comes the commissionaire with the Diamond.... Only an alumina in hexagonal arrangement crystallized in the cooling of this planet you call ‘the World’ as arrogantly as though there were no others, and yet how unique, how exquisite! See how the violet rays leap from the facets, even the noblest sapphire looks cold and pale beside the glorious gem. Murder has been committed for its shining sake over and over again in ages of which your history has no cognizance. It has purchased the faith of Emperors and the oaths of Kings. Rivers of blood have flowed because of it. Peerless women have laid down their honor to gain it. And it will be yours ... yours! Quick, the commissionaire is coming. School your hand to steadiness; no need to hide your lust, for all faces wear the same look here. Only be quick, and have no fear!”

The eyes of the commissionaire were fastened upon the woman’s white, ringed, well-manicured hand, as in its turn it lifted the Blue Diamond--slightly set in platinum as a pendant--from its pale green velvet bed. But yet she effected the exchange. The substituted paste jewel was borne on--the paroquets and cockatoos chattered and screamed as loudly over the false stone as they had over the real, which lay snugly hidden in the thief’s fair bosom. The syndicate of dealers played out their farce to its end, and Mr. Ulysses Wanklyn, to the infinite chagrin of Mr. Cupid Bose, and the gnashing discomfiture of Messrs. Moreen and Blant, secured the paste diamond at ninety-four thousand pounds. And amidst cries and congratulations the day ended. And the woman, with her price in her bosom, escaped into the open air, and signaled to the chauffeur waiting with her motor-brougham and drove home. Fear and triumph filled her. When would the theft be discovered? How soon would voices in the streets begin to clamor of the stolen gem? How should she who had stolen it ever dare to wear or to vaunt it, with Scotland Yard--with the detective eyes of all the world upon her? She had been befooled, duped, defrauded; she moaned as she bit her lace handkerchief through.... She reached her dainty boudoir just in time to have hysterics behind its locked and bolted doors. And when she had quieted herself with ether and red lavender, she drew the Blue Diamond from its hiding-place, and it gleamed in her palm with a diabolical splendor, as though the stone were sentient, and knew what it had cost. Could the great dealers be deceived--a probability quite impossible--she would be at liberty to wear this joy, this glory, to see its myriad splendors reflected in envious eyes. She kissed it as she had never kissed her child or any of her lovers--with passion, until its sharp facets cut her lips. And, as she kissed it, her quick ears were alert to catch the shoutings of the newsmen in the streets. But there were none. She dined in her boudoir, and slept, with the aid of veronal; and in the morning’s newspaper there was not a wail, not a word! She gave the king bird of Paradise hat to her maid--she was so pleased, so thankful! The afternoon papers, and those of the next day and the next, were dumb upon the subject of the daring theft of the big Blue Diamond from Briscoe’s famous auction-room. She grew more and more secure. And one never-to-be-forgotten night she put on a Paquin gown and went to a great reception at a ducal house with the Blue Diamond as pendant to her pearl-and-brilliant collar. She counted on the cockatoos screeching, but they did not screech. The eyes that dwelt on the Blue Diamond were astonished, surprised, covertly amused, contemptuous.

“That is for luck, I suppose, dear?” cooed one of her intimate friends. “I mean that large blue crystal you are wearing.... I bought some last winter at a jeweler’s in the bazaar at Rangoon--they find them with moonstones and olivines and those other things in the _débris_ at the Ruby Mines, I understood. I must have mine mounted. By the way, do you know that----” (she mentioned the name of a great financier of cosmopolitan habits and international fame) “has bought the Blue Diamond from Ulysses Wanklyn for a hundred and ten thousand pounds: _She_”--her voice dropped a little as she referred to a lady upon whom the great financier was reputed to have bestowed his plutocratic affections--“will be here to-night. Probably she will wear it! They say she was absolutely determined on his getting it for her, and so.... _À porte basse, passant courbé_, especially when the circumstances are pretty. _What_ do you say? You heard it had been discovered by the dealers that the Blue Diamond had been found to be false ... a paste imitation, or a cut crystal like that thing you are wearing? Oh, my dear, how quite too frightfully absurd a _canard_! As though Ulysses Wanklyn and Cupid Bose and Blant, and all the other connoisseurs, could be deceived! What a very remarkable-looking man that is who is bowing to you!... The graceful person with the Apostolic profile and the beautiful silky beard”--and the intimate friend gave a little shudder. “And the extraordinary eyes that give one a crispation of the nerves?...”

It was he--her Purchaser--moving suddenly toward her through the throng of naked backs and bare bosoms.

“I hope,” he said, and bowed and smiled, “that you are satisfied with the result of our ... negotiations the other day?” Then, as the fashionable crowd parted and the Great Financier walked through the rooms, his imperious mistress upon his arm, her husband looking amiable behind them, he added, indicating the swinging central pendant of the lady’s superb diamond tiara, with a wave of a slender white-gloved hand, “My substitute was convincing, you think; you suppose it has deceived even the experts? Not in the least--the substitution of the paste stone for the Blue Diamond was discovered as soon as the public had quitted the auction-room. But Messrs. Wanklyn and Bose and my other very good friends who lay down the law in jewels as in other things, to Society, agreed not to lose by the fraud. The paste has the _cachet_ of their approval, and has been sold for a great sum. ‘What water!’ the world is crying. ‘What luster!’ ‘How superb a gem!’ While you, my poor friend, who display upon your bosom the real stone, have merely been credited with a meretricious taste for wearing Palais Royal jewelry. Pardon! I have not deceived you--or not in the way you imagine.... I said the Blue Diamond should be yours.... It is! I said you should be envied; you should, certainly. It is a thousand pities you are only sneered at. I said you might be happy.... It is most regrettable that you do not find the happiness you looked for. _Au revoir_, dear lady, _au revoir_!”

She felt indisposed, and went home....

THE NIGHT OF POWER

IN TWO PARTS