he say? He had suspected her before, and she had been good enough to overlook that suspicion. She had done more, she had produced a brother. There was nothing to prevent her now from producing a sister. With a lady so resourceful conversation was futile.
Wyvill looked at his watch. It was after two, much later than he had thought. Trella must have been asleep for hours. But the obsession had left him restless as a panther. Through the open window he stepped out to the lawn.
It was a perfect night, starful, silent, serene. From beyond, the recurrent hush and retreating wash of the waves accentuated the quiet, calming him unconsciously, allaying his restlessness, reducing the tension of his nerves. Under their influence he sauntered about the grounds a while, and then, turning back, reached Trella’s window.
Through the curtains a dim light filtered. As he looked at it, there was projected on the curtains a silhouette, faint but defined. If he hesitated, he never knew it. The window, undefended, opened at his grasp, and tearing the curtains aside, he sprang into the room, sprang at a man that was there, and, with a blow that would have felled a bullock, struck him between the eyes, hurling him backward against a mantel where, falling, his head struck. It cracked like a nut.
Satisfied but not satiated, he turned to Trella. Before he could reach her, the window had become a passageway. A cry, “Au secours!” had rent the night, and men in plain clothes that guard the mighty were tumbling into the room.
“Hors d’ici, canaille!” Wyvill shouted. “Out of here, or I’ll brain the lot of you!”
Raising a chair above his head, with all his force he flung it at them, but, deflected in flight, it went crashing against the wall; he was struggling with three men at once, while a fourth, falling at the foot of the mantel, was screaming, “My God! my God! he has killed his Royal Highness!”
“Tant mieux,” Wyvill, struggling still, threw back. But he was struggling with men who had no wish to struggle, who were seeking and uttering words of pacification.
“On ne veut pas faire du mal à Monsieur le Comte,” one kept repeating. “N’est ce pas, Paul? n’est ce pas, Jules? Seulement—”
With a manoevre which Wyvill had acquired in arguments with bargees on the Isis, Paul went spinning one way, Jules another, their mate rolling doubled in a corner.
“Hors d’ici!” he shouted again. “Hors d’ici, canaille, et enlevez votre crapule de prince.”
He turned in search of Trella. In the commotion she had vanished. But a door leading to the hall beyond was open, and leaving the men, in plain, and now tolerably tattered clothes, to their duty, through the door he passed to have a word with her.
Without, were scared and huddling servants. Scattering them to their quarters, Wyvill ransacked the house, searched the grounds. All he discovered was that an obsession had fled, and that Trella had got away through the night to her mother. Then, divining, perhaps, that she would regard any attempt to follow her as an excess of civility, he turned in and went to bed.
It was as well, perhaps. For what shall a man say to a woman who has ceased to care for him? That she has cared for him? It is better to let the subject drop. So, at least, Wyvill decided. Afterward he was glad that he had not tried to pursue the conversation further, glad that the dear departed had dispensed with the formality of farewell. And so, in the end, matters adjusted themselves, as, in the end, all matters do.
The next day the lady, chaperoned by her mother, journeyed from France, proceeded to this country and then to the land of the Dakotas, where, on the entirely justified plea of cruelty, complicated with desertion, she solicited and obtained a divorce.
The decree was received with general satisfaction. As a nation we do not approve of these matches. Moreover, through Mrs. Verelst, everybody knew that Wyvill was a sullen drunkard, with whom no self-respecting woman could live. Trella was more indulgent. She admitted that Wyvill was not, perhaps, all that he might have been, but she declared that she forgave him entirely. That certainly was very nice of her.
Of Thule she never spoke. The press of two worlds gave it out that he died of pneumonia, suddenly, as mortals do die, but decorously, as royals should. Trella never undeceived a soul on the subject. That certainly was nice of her, too.
The Nameless Shame
“It is most unusual!” said the Duchess of Kincardine. “Most!” she added. Then, rallying, she exclaimed: “What is the world coming to?”
There had been a stupid discussion that had arisen, how, the Lord only knows, apropos of the tea things, perhaps, on the subject of poached eggs. I had ventured to state that it was sinful to poach them in water, that no one with any sense of self-respect would touch an egg that had not been cooked in milk and mushrooms.
“Why not in champagne and pineapples?” Agatha, the duchess’ daughter, had suggested. “Yes, why not?”
But here solemnities were interrupted. Yorke—the Honorable Eric—a beautifully preserved young man of forty, glided in.
“Ferrol is dead,” he soothingly announced. “Howdy do? He was found on the floor. Good afternoon. Thanks, very much. No sugar.”
“Dead!” cried a fat, rancid-faced woman, known as Lady Massingbird. “How shocking! And his engagement to Miss Rivers off only yesterday! But what was it? A fit?”
“No,” Yorke replied, in the same soothing way. “No. It appears that somebody strangled him.”
It was at this juncture that the Duchess of Kincardine made her notable exclamation.
The duchess, it is hardly more than worth while to relate, was née, as you may remember, not merely retroussé, but Genevieve Bridgewater, of Washington Square. The story of her marriage to a Scotch bankrupt is common property. It is also ancient
