As she opened the door of the bedroom Madame Wachner waddled up behind her.
“Wait a moment!” she cried. “Or perhaps, dear friend, you do not want a light? You see, we have been rather upset today, for L’Ami Fritz has to go away for two or three days, and that is a great affair! We are so very seldom separated. ‘Darby and Joan,’ is not that what English people would call us?”
“The moon is so bright I can see quite well,” Sylvia was taking off her hat; she put it, together with a little fancy bag in which she kept the loose gold she played with at the gambling tables, on Madame Wachner’s bed. She felt vaguely uncomfortable, for even as Madame Wachner had spoken she had become aware that the bedroom was almost entirely cleared of everything belonging to its occupants. However, the Wachners, like Anna Wolsky, had the right to go away without telling anyone of their intention.
As they came back into the dining-room together, Mrs. Bailey’s host, who was already sitting down at table, looked up.
“Words! Words! Words!” he exclaimed harshly. “Instead of talking so much why do you not both come here and eat your suppers? I am very hungry.”
Sylvia had never heard the odd, silent man speak in such a tone before, but his wife answered quite good-humouredly,
“You forget, Fritz, that the cabman is coming. Till he has come and gone we shall not have peace.”
And sure enough, within a moment of her saying those words there came a sound of shuffling footsteps on the garden path.
Monsieur Wachner got up and went out of the room. He opened the front door, and Sylvia overheard a few words of the colloquy between her host and his messenger.
“Yes, you are to take it now, at once. Just leave it at the Villa du Lac. You will come for us—you will come, that is, for me”—Monsieur Wachner raised his voice—“tomorrow morning at half-past six. I desire to catch the 7:10 train to Paris.”
There was a jingle of silver, and then Sylvia caught the man’s answering, “Merci, c’est entendu, M’sieur.”
But L’Ami Fritz did not come back at once to the dining-room. He went out into the garden and accompanied the man down to the gate.
When he came back again he put a large key on the dining-table.
“There!” he said, with a grunt of satisfaction. “Now there will be nothing to disturb us any more.”
They all three sat down at the round dining-table. To Sylvia’s surprise a very simple meal was set out before them. There was only one small dish of galantine. When Sylvia Bailey had been to supper with the Wachners before, there had always been two or three tempting cold dishes, and some dainty friandises as well, the whole evidently procured from the excellent confectioner who drives such a roaring trade at Lacville. Tonight, in addition to the few slices of galantine, there was only a little fruit.
Then a very odd thing happened.
L’Ami Fritz helped first his wife and himself largely, then Sylvia more frugally. It was perhaps a slight matter, the more so that Monsieur Wachner was notoriously forgetful, being ever, according to his wife, absorbed in his calculations and “systems.” But all the same, this extraordinary lack of good manners on her host’s part added to Sylvia’s feeling of strangeness and discomfort.
Indeed, the Wachners were both very unlike their usual selves this evening. Madame Wachner had suddenly become very serious, her stout red face was set in rather grim, grave lines; and twice, as Sylvia was eating the little piece of galantine which had been placed on her plate by L’Ami Fritz, she looked up and caught her hostess’s eyes fixed on her with a curious, alien scrutiny.
When they had almost finished the meat, Madame Wachner suddenly exclaimed in French.
“Fritz! You have forgotten to mix the salad! Whatever made you forget such an important thing? You will find what is necessary in the drawer behind you.”
Monsieur Wachner made no answer. He got up and pulled the drawer of the buffet open. Taking out of it a wooden spoon and fork, he came back to the table and began silently mixing the salad.
The two last times Sylvia had been at the Châlet des Muguets, her host, in deference to her English taste, had put a large admixture of vinegar in the salad dressing, but this time she saw that he soused the lettuce-leaves with oil.
At last, “Will you have some salad, Mrs. Bailey?” he said brusquely, and in English. He spoke English far better than did his wife.
“No,” she said. “Not tonight, thank you!”
And Sylvia, smiling, looked across at Madame Wachner, expecting to see in the older woman’s face a humorous appreciation of the fact that L’Ami Fritz had forgotten her well-known horror of oil.
Mrs. Bailey’s dislike of the favourite French salad-dressing ingredient had long been a joke among the three, nay, among the four, for Anna Wolsky had been there the last time Sylvia had had supper with the Wachners. It had been such a merry meal!
Tonight no meaning smile met hers; instead she only saw that odd, grave, considering look on her hostess’s face.
Suddenly Madame Wachner held out her plate across the table, and L’Ami Fritz heaped it up with the oily salad.
Sylvia Bailey’s plate was empty, but Monsieur Wachner did not seem to notice that his guest lacked anything. And at last, to her extreme astonishment, she suddenly saw him take up one of the two pieces of meat remaining on the dish, and, leaning across, drop it on his wife’s plate. Then he helped himself to the last remaining morsel.
It was such a trifling thing really, and due of course to her host’s singular absentmindedness; yet, even so, taken in connection with both the Wachners’ silence and odd manner, this lack of the commonest courtesy struck Sylvia with a kind of fear—with fear and with
