The City of Masks.
by George Barr McCutcheon.
CHAPTER I
LADY JANE THORNE COMES TO DINNER
THE Marchioness carefully draped the dust-cloth over the head of an andiron and, before putting the question to the parlour-maid, consulted, with the intensity of a near-sighted person, the ornate French clock in the centre of the mantelpiece. Then she brushed her fingers on the voluminous ap.r.o.n that almost completely enveloped her slight person.
"Well, who is it, Julia?"
"It"s Lord Temple, ma"am, and he wants to know if you"re too busy to come to the "phone. If you are, I"m to ask you something."
The Marchioness hesitated. "How do you know it is Lord Eric? Did he mention his name?"
"He did, ma"am. He said "this is Tom Trotter speaking, Julia, and is your mistress disengaged?" And so I knew it couldn"t be any one else but his Lordship."
"And what are you to ask me?"
"He wants to know if he may bring a friend around tonight, ma"am. A gentleman from Constantinople, ma"am."
"A Turk? He knows I do not like Turks," said the Marchioness, more to herself than to Julia.
"He didn"t say, ma"am. Just Constantinople."
The Marchioness removed her ap.r.o.n and handed it to Julia. You would have thought she expected to confront Lord Temple in person, or at least that she would be fully visible to him despite the distance and the intervening buildings that lay between. Tucking a few stray locks of her snow-white hair into place, she approached the telephone in the hall. She had never quite gotten over the impression that one could be seen through as well as heard over the telephone. She always smiled or frowned or gesticulated, as occasion demanded; she was never languid, never bored, never listless. A chat was a chat, at long range or short; it didn"t matter.
"Are you there? Good evening, Mr. Trotter. So charmed to hear your voice." She had seated herself at the little old Italian table.
Mr. Trotter devoted a full two minutes to explanations.
"Do bring him with you," cried she. "Your word is sufficient. He _must_ be delightful. Of course, I shuddered a little when you mentioned Constantinople. I always do. One can"t help thinking of the Armenians.
Eh? Oh, yes,--and the harems."
Mr. Trotter: "By the way, are you expecting Lady Jane tonight?"
The Marchioness: "She rarely fails us, Mr. Trotter."
Mr. Trotter: "Right-o! Well, good-bye,--and thank you. I"m sure you will like the baron. He is a trifle seedy, as I said before,--sailing vessel, you know, and all that sort of thing. By way of Cape Town,--pretty well up against it for the past year or two besides,--but a regular fellow, as they say over here."
The Marchioness: "Where did you say he is stopping?"
Mr. Trotter: "Can"t for the life of me remember whether it"s the "Sailors" Loft" or the "Sailors" Bunk." He told me too. On the water-front somewhere. I knew him in Hong Kong. He says he has cut it all out, however."
The Marchioness: "Cut it all out, Mr. Trotter?"
Mr. Trotter, laughing: "Drink, and all that sort of thing, you know.
Jolly good thing too. I give you my personal guarantee that he--"
The Marchioness: "Say no more about it, Mr. Trotter. I am sure we shall all be happy to receive any friend of yours. By the way, where are you now--where are you telephoning from?"
Mr. Trotter: "Drug store just around the corner."
The Marchioness: "A booth, I suppose?"
Mr. Trotter: "Oh, yes. Tight as a sardine box."
The Marchioness: "Good-bye."
Mr. Trotter: "Oh--h.e.l.lo? I beg your pardon--are you there? Ah, I--er--neglected to mention that the baron may not appear at his best tonight. You see, the poor chap is a shade large for my clothes.
Naturally, being a sailor-man, he hasn"t--er--a very extensive wardrobe.
I am fixing him out in a--er--rather abandoned evening suit of my own.
That is to say, I abandoned it a couple of seasons ago. Rather n.o.bby thing for a waiter, but not--er--what you might call--"
The Marchioness, chuckling: "Quite good enough for a sailor, eh? Please a.s.sure him that no matter what he wears, or how he looks, he will not be conspicuous."
After this somewhat ambiguous remark, the Marchioness hung up the receiver and returned to the drawing-room; a prolonged search revealing the dust-cloth on the "nub" of the andiron, just where she had left it, she fell to work once more on the velvety surface of a rare old Spanish cabinet that stood in the corner of the room.
"Don"t you want your ap.r.o.n, ma"am?" inquired Julia, sitting back on her heels and surveying with considerable pride the leg of an enormous throne seat she had been rubbing with all the strength of her stout arms.
Her mistress ignored the question. She dabbed into a tiny recess and wriggled her finger vigorously.
"I can"t imagine where all the dust comes from, Julia," she said.
"Some of it comes from Italy, and some of it from Spain, and some from France," said Julia promptly. "You could rub for a hundred years, ma"am, and there"d still be dust that you couldn"t find, not to save your soul.
And why not? I"d bet my last penny there"s dust on that cabinet this very minute that settled before Napoleon was born, whenever that was."
"I daresay," said the Marchioness absently.
More often than otherwise she failed to hear all that Julia said to her, or in her presence rather, for Julia, wise in a.s.sociation, had come to consider these lapses of inattention as openings for prolonged and rarely coherent soliloquies on topics of the moment. Julia, by virtue of long service and a most satisfying avoidance of matrimony, was a privileged servant between the hours of eight in the morning and eight in the evening. After eight, or more strictly speaking, the moment dinner was announced, Julia became a perfect servant. She would no more have thought of addressing the Marchioness as "ma"am" than she would have called the King of England "mister." She had crossed the Atlantic with her mistress eighteen years before; in mid-ocean she celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday, and, as she had been in the family for ten years prior to that event, even a child may solve the problem that here presents a momentary and totally unnecessary break in the continuity of this narrative. Julia was English. She spoke no other language.
Beginning with the soup, or the _hors d"oeuvres_ on occasion, French was spoken in the house of the Marchioness. Physically unable to speak French and psychologically unwilling to betray her ignorance, Julia became a model servant. She lapsed into perfect silence.
The Marchioness seldom if ever dined alone. She always dined in state.
Her guests,--English, Italian, Russian, Belgian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Austrian, German,--conversed solely in French. It was a very agreeable way of symphonizing Babel.
The room in which she and the temporarily imperfect though treasured servant were employed in the dusk of this stormy day in March was at the top of an old-fashioned building in the busiest section of the city, a building that had, so far, escaped the fate of its immediate neighbours and remained, a squat and insignificant pygmy, elbowing with some arrogance the lofty structures that had shot up on either side of it with incredible swiftness.
It was a large room, at least thirty by fifty feet in dimensions, with a vaulted ceiling that encroached upon the s.p.a.ce ordinarily devoted to what architects, builders and the Board of Health describe as an air chamber, next below the roof. There was no elevator in the building. One had to climb four flights of stairs to reach the apartment.
From its long, heavily curtained windows one looked down upon a crowded cross-town thoroughfare, or up to the summit of a stupendous hotel on the opposite side of the street. There was a small foyer at the rear of this lofty room, with an entrance from the narrow hall outside.
Suspended in the wide doorway between the two rooms was a pair of blue velvet Italian portieres of great antiquity and, to a connoisseur, unrivaled quality. Beyond the foyer and extending to the area wall was the rather commodious dining-room, with its long oaken English table, its high-back chairs, its ma.s.sive sideboard and the chandelier that is said to have hung in the Doges" Palace when the Bridge of Sighs was a new and thriving avenue of communication.
At least, so stated the dealer"s tag tucked carelessly among the crystal prisms, supplying the observer with the information that, in case one was in need of a chandelier, its price was five hundred guineas. The same curious-minded observer would have discovered, if he were not above getting down on his hands and knees and peering under the table, a price tag; and by exerting the strength necessary to pull the sideboard away from the wall, a similar object would have been exposed.
In other words, if one really wanted to purchase any article of furniture or decoration in the singularly impressive apartment of the Marchioness, all one had to do was to signify the desire, produce a check or its equivalent, and give an address to the competent-looking young woman who would put in an appearance with singular promptness in response to a couple of punches at an electric b.u.t.ton just outside the door, any time between nine and five o"clock, Sundays included.
The drawing-room contained many priceless articles of furniture, wholly antique--(and so guaranteed), besides rugs, draperies, tapestries and stuffs of the rarest quality. Bronzes, porcelains, pottery, things of jade and alabaster, sconces, candlesticks and censers, with here and there on the walls lovely little "primitives" of untold value. The most exotic taste had ordered the distribution and arrangement of all these objects. There was no suggestion of crowding, nothing haphazard or bizarre in the exposition of treasure, nothing to indicate that a cheap intelligence revelled in rich possessions.