I was but trying to calm the poor devil; trying, however stupidly, to get him to accept the inevitable. I might as well have attempted to supply him with conjectures on the orbits of skylarking comets. He ignored me utterly. With something almost terrieresque in his eagerness, he was pointing.
Beyond, through a lateral entrance of the palm room, that trio, at this moment, appeared.
“Now we are in for it!” I told myself, and, from the spectacle, turned to Converse again.
With a grimace, he turned to me. “Is that your clergyman?”
“Not mine at all,” I was about to tell him, but he was so obviously preparing for action that, instead, I put a hand on his arm. “Don’t,” I admonished. “The greatest revenge is the disdain of any.”
He shook me off. “You are ridiculous with your revenge.”
As he spoke, he started, I following, toward the palm room, where already the three were seated, and where now a Greek omnibus was supplying them with great glasses of ice water.
The girl’s back was toward us. She did not see our approach. The Greek did not care. But Bundy said something, the clergyman looked deeply into his glass, and that wonderful hat half turned. I had no time to notice more. We had reached the table. In the air now were the vibrations of hostilities begun.
Immediately Converse let go. “Margaret—”
Bundy rose at the charge. Instantly, insolently, and invincibly, he fired. “I will thank you to address my wife as Mrs. Bundy.”
With that he had thought, perhaps, to bowl the foe over. Converse omitted to so much as blink. He was looking at the bride, who was looking at him. And what a look! Could eyes assassinate, hers would have killed. In their blight it occurred to me that for her to hate him to the death, she must also love him to distraction. But there was no love on exhibition then. Before her still was the affront of the moving picture.
That picture, with one lunge, Converse demolished. “Margaret, the woman you saw with me was my sister.” Another crash followed. “What’s more, Bundy knew it.”
“I!” Bundy cried. “I—” The explosion had staggered him. His protest rang false. But the field was his. The girl was his wife. He fired again: “Sister or no sister—”
If anyone heard, no one heeded. Manlius stood up. The bride, too, was rising. She was looking from Converse to Bundy, from Bundy to Converse.
Converse helped her: “You can’t doubt me, but if you do, look at him.”
She was looking. She looked as if looking on some dreadful dream. But she looked, too, as if she saw Bundy for the first time.
“I appear to have been tricked.”
It was she who spoke. It was Manlius who answered: “Ahem! I think—really, I must be going.”
But now Bundy had got back at it. “Sister or no sister,” he was shouting, “you are married to me.”
Yes, but there are marriages that can be annulled, I told myself, and was about to say as much to Converse, but Bundy had turned to him:
“As for you—”
“Don’t run into excesses,” Converse threw at him. “Nor you, either,” he threw at Manlius. As he spoke, he looked the clergyman up and down. “The last time I saw you, sir, was in a Fifth Avenue bus. You were then quite bald.”
“Really,” Manlius expostulated, edging, as he spoke, away. “Really—”
Converse caught at him. “Now just tell this lady that she is not married.”
“What infernal nonsense is this?” Bundy noisily protested.
But Converse, who, with one hand, was holding the cleric, with the other abruptly tore from him an opulent wig, a false if pointed beard; and there, even in the prelate’s garb, even to me, perhaps, too, to Bundy, my old schoolmate. Raritan, who had talked so agreeably of the Sicilian poets, and whom the police were seeking, stood revealed. I nodded at him, but he failed to notice.
“Converse,” he was pleading, readjusting the while his disguise as best he could. “Converse, let me go.”
Converse nodded. “Then tell this lady you are not a clergyman.”
I turned to the girl. The Greek, open-mouthed, was staring. Bundy, his lips twisted with amazement and rage, was staring also. Suddenly, with an intake of the breath, he gulped and looked shiftily at Miss Dayce, who, limply, had sunk into a chair.
The fire had been a bit hot for her. Not one bomb only, but two, had exploded. There were ruins all about. In them an illusion had fainted, and jealousy lay dead. There were ruins all about, but in them there was light.
“Tell her—” Converse was saying.
She half raised a hand. Her eyes had filled. Her lip quivered. “No. I can see. Let him go. And, perhaps, you will ask him to take—to take—him with him.”
Her voice had broken, but it was bravely said, and, in the saying of it, she had drawn from a finger a ring which, her head averted, she extended behind her to where Bundy stood.
Bundy looked at her, at it. The ring fell, with a tinkle, on the floor. For a second his eyes followed it. But the tinkle must have sounded to him his finish. At once, with an uplift of the chin, he squared his shoulders, glanced at us, put his hat on, turned on his heel. But it was still all a bit too much. Margaret bowed her head. A sob shook her.
Converse busied himself immediately. Caressingly his arm went about her. “There! There!” he said, much as though she were a baby. “We will have some of that caviar and champagne that I have been hearing about, and then we’ll get a license of our own.
“Here,” he interrupted himself to inquire. “Where’s the waiter?” As he spoke, he turned to me. “Don’t stand dawdling there. You make me nervous. Sit down;
