THE WILES OF THE STRANGE WOMAN.
“ZEBIE,” Mme. Ceriolo cried in a shrill voice to the maid-in-waiting, “je ne reçois pas aujourd’ hui, entends-tu, imbecile?”
Mlle. Eusébie, more shortly known to her intimates as Zébie, was the fille de chambre and general upstairs factotum of the Hôtel de l’Univers, in Clandon Street, Soho. Mme. Ceriolo preferred that modest hostelry to the more usual plan of West End lodging; partly, to be sure, because it helped to keep up the partial fiction of her noble birth and Tyrolese ancestry, but partly also because it lent itself more readily to practical Bohemianism than do the straitlaced apartments of Notting Hill or Bayswater. In Clandon Street, Soho, one can live as one chooses, no man hindering; and Mme. Ceriolo chose to live à la Zingari. “On y est si bien,” she said with a delicate shrug of those shapely shoulders to her respectable acquaintances when she was doing propriety; “and besides, the landlord, you know, is one of my poor compatriots. I take such an interest in his wife and children, in this foggy London, so far from the fresh breeze of our beloved mountains.” For Mme. Ceriolo was strong on the point of sensibility, and sighed (in public) for her native pine-clad valleys.
“And if Mr. Armitage calls?” Zébie asked inquiringly.
“I am not to deny madame, I suppose, at least to Mr. Armitage.”
“Zébie,” Mme. Ceriolo exclaimed, looking up at her sharply, “tu es d’une inconvenance — mais d’une inconvenance!” Madame paused and reflected. “Well no,” she went on, after a brief mental calculation. “I’m not at home, even to Mr. Armitage.”
“Tiens” Zébie answered;— “c’est drôle. Et cependant—”
“Wait,” Mme. Ceriolo continued, reflecting profoundly. “There is yet one thing. If an ugly little Jew calls” — and madame swept her finger rapidly through the air in burlesque representation of Mr. Lionel’s well-marked profile—” nose so, lips so, bulging curly hair, forehead, odor of hair oil — gives his name, I fancy, as Mr. Lionel Solomons—”
“Well, madame?” Zébie repeated dutifully, with her hand on the door-edge.
“If he calls,” madame went on, gathering her robe around her, “you may tell him I’m indisposed — a slight indisposition, and will see nobody. But say to him, after a while, with ever so little hesitation, you’ll take up his card and inquire if I can receive him. And, then, you may show him meanwhile into the salon. That’ll give me time, of course, to change my peignoir.”
It was four o’clock gone, in the afternoon, a few days later than their meeting in the Park; and madame, who had been up late to a little supper the evening before, was still in the intimacy of dressing gown and curl papers.
“Parfaitement, Madame,” Zébie responded cheerfully, in the tone of one well accustomed to receiving such delicate orders, and left the room; while madame lounged back on the sofa of her little sitting room, and glanced lazily over the feuilleton of yesterday’s Figaro.
The hotel was of the usual London-French type — a dingy, uncomfortable, dead-alive little place — mean and dear, yet madame liked it. She could receive her callers and smoke her cigarettes here without attracting attention. She was rolling a bit of rice-paper, in fact, with practiced skill between those dainty plump fingers ten minutes later, when Zébie reappeared at the door once more, with a card in her hand, and a smile on her saucy Parisian features. “The monsieur madame expected,” she said; “he attends you in the salon.”
Madame jumped up, and roused herself at once. “My blue gown, Zébie,” she cried. “No, not that, stupid. Yes, that’s the one, with the pleats in front. Now, just give me time to slip myself into it, and to comb out my fringe, and touch up my cheeks a bit, and then you may bring the flamin up to me. Poor little imbecile! Tell him I’m in bed, and meant to receive nobody — but hearing it was him, in spite of my migraine, I decided to make an effort and raise myself.”
“Parfaitement, Madame,” Zébie echoed once more, with ready acquiescence, and disappeared down the stairs to deliver her message.
“So it’s you, Mr. Solomons,” madame cried, looking up from the sofa, where-she lay in her shawls and her becoming tea-gown, with a hasty lace-wrap flung coquettishly round her pearl-white neck, as Mr. Lionel entered. “How very good of you to come and look me up so soon. Now admit, monsieur, that I am not ungrateful. I was ill in bed when my maid brought me up your card just now, and for nobody else in the world would I have thought of stirring myself. But when I heard it was you” — she gave him a killing glance from beneath those penciled lashes—” I said to Eusébie, ‘Just hand me the very first dress you can come across in my wardrobe, and tell the gentleman I’ll see him directly.’ And so up I got, and here I am; and now I’m sure you’ll excuse my lighting a wee little cigarette, just a cigarette of my own rolling, because I’ve made my poor fluttering heart beat so with the exertion.”
Mr. Lionel would have excused a hundred cigarettes, so enchanted was he with this gracious reception. In fact he admitted to a weakness for the fragrant Latakia himself, and in two minutes more he was actually inhaling the breath of one, deftly manufactured for his special use by Mme. Ceriolo’s own cunning fingers.
Mine. Ceriolo twisted him as she twisted the cigarettes. He sat there, intoxicated with her charms, for more than an hour, in the course of which time the little woman, by dexterous side-pressure, had pumped him of all he knew or thought far more effectually than even Armitage himself could have done it. She handled him gingerly with infinite skill. “No, you’re not in the City!” she exclaimed once, with well assumed surprise, when Mr. Lionel happened incidentally to allude to the nature of his own accustomed pursuits. “You’re trying to take me in. You don’t mean to tell me you’re really in the City?”
“Why not?” Mr. Lionel asked, with a flush of pride.
“Oh, you’re not in the very least like a city man,” Mme. Ceriolo replied, looking up at him archly. “Why, I thought from your manners you were one of the people who pass their lives dawdling between their club and the Row. I never should have believed you could possibly be in the city. What is your club, by the way?” she added with an afterthought, “in case I should ever want to write to you.”
Mr. Lionel’s lips trembled with pleasure. “I’m down for the Garrick,” he said (which was, in point of fact, an inexact remark); “but until I get in there, you know — it’s such a long job nowadays — I hang out for the present at the Junior Financial. It’s a small place in Duke Street, St. James’. If ever you should do me the honor to write to me, though, I think you’d better write to my chambers in Pimlico.” He called them “chambers” instead of lodgings, because it sounded more swell and rakish. And he produced a card with his name and address on it.
Mme. Ceriolo placed it with marked care in an inner compartment of her pretty little tortoiseshell purse — the purse with the coronet and initials on the case, which had been given her in Paris by — well, never mind those forgotten little episodes. “And so you live with Mr. Gascoyne!” she said, noting the address. “Dear Mr. Gascoyne! so quaint, so original! Though we all laughed at him, we all liked him. He was the life and soul of our party at Mentone.”
“Well, I live with him only because I find it convenient,” Mr. Lionel interposed. “He’s not exactly the sort of chap I should take to naturally.”
Mme. Ceriolo caught at her cue at once. “I should think not,” she echoed. “A deal too slow for you, one can see that at a glance. A very good fellow in his way, of course; but, oh my! so strait-laced, so absurdly puritanical.” And she laughed melodiously.
“And how about the American heiress you spoke of in the Park?” Mr. Lionel inquired with professional eagerness.
“Oh, that was all chaff,” Mme. Ceriolo answered, after an imperceptible pause, to gain time for her invention. She was a good-natured little swindler, after all, was Mme. Ceriolo; and, from the way he asked it, she jumped to the conclusion he wanted the information for no friendly purpose, so she withheld it sternly. Why should she want to do a bad turn to the poor little scallywag?
So the conversation glided off upon Paul, his Quixotic ideas and his moral absurdities; and, before it had ended, the simple minded young cynic, like clay in the hands of the easy-going but cunning adventuress, had told her all about Mr. Solomons and himself, and the plan for exploiting the British baronet, and the confounded time an uncle always contrived to live, and the difficulty of extracting blood from a stone, and the trials and troubles of the genus nephew in its endeavor to perform that arduous surgical operation. To all of which Mme. Ceriolo, feeling her way with caution by tentative steps, had extended a ready and sympathetic ear, and had made a rapid mental note, “Bad heart, weak head, good material to work upon — fool, vain, impressionable, unscrupulous.” Such men as that were madame’s stock-in-trade. She battened on their money, sucked them dry as fast as she could, and then left them. —
Not that madame was ever what British respectability in its exactest sense describes as disreputable. The wise adventuress knew a more excellent way than that. Never throw away the essentials of a good name. She traded entirely upon promises and expectations. Her method was to make a man head over ears in love, and then to delude him into the fallacious belief that she meant to marry him. As soon as he was reduced to the flaccid condition, by constant draining, she retired gracefully. Some day, when she found a man rich enough and endurable enough, she intended to carry the programme of marriage into execution and end her days in the odor of respectability. But that was for the remote future, no doubt. Meanwhile, she was content to take what she could get by her drainage operations, and live her own Bohemian life untrammeled.
At last, most unwillingly, Mr. Lionel rose and took up his hat to go. “I may come again soon?” he said interrogatively.
Madame’s professional amiability never forsook her in similar circumstances. “As often as you like,” she answered, smiling a benign smile upon the captured victim; “I’m always glad to see nice people; except on Fridays,” she added after a pause. Friday was the day when Armitage most often called, and she didn’t wish to let her two principal visitors clash unnecessarily.
At the door Mr. Lionel pressed her hand with a tender squeeze. Mme. Ceriolo returned the pressure with a demure and well-calculated diminution of intensity. It doesn’t do to let them think they can make the running too fast or too easily. Draw them on by degrees and they stick the longer. Mr. Lionel gazed into those languid eyes of hers. Mme. Ceriolo dropped the lids with most maidenly modesty. “Don’t mention to Mr. Gascoyne,” she murmured, withdrawing her hand, which Lionel showed a tendency to hold too long, “that you’ve been here this afternoon, I beg of you as a favor.”
“How curious!” her new admirer exclaimed with surprise. “Why, I was just going to ask you not to say anything to him for worlds about it.”
“Sympathy,” Mme. Ceriolo murmured. “The common brain-wave. When people arc cast in corresponding molds these curious things often happen pat, just so. Figurez-vous si je suis sympathique.” And she took his hand once more and let it drop suddenly; then she turned and fled, like a girl, to the sofa, as if half ashamed of her own unwise emotion.
Mr. Lionel went down the stairs in the seventh heaven. At last he had found a beautiful woman really to admire him. She saw his good points and appreciated him at once at his full worth. Forty? What malevolent, ill-natured nonsense. Not a day more than twenty-seven, he’d be bound on affidavit. And then, what mattered the disparity of age? Such grace, such knowledge of the world and society, such noble birth, such a countess’ coronet embroidered on her handkerchief.
“Zébie,” madame cried from her sofa in the corner, as that well-trained domestic answered her double ring (“sonnez deux fois pour la fille de chambre”) — while Lionel’s footfall still echoed on the stair, “if that little fool of a Jew calls again you can show him up straight off at any time. Do you understand, idiot? at any time — unless Mr. Armitage is here already.”