The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell [smart ebook reader .TXT] 📗

pigeons could not, he considered, but constitute some password to which Kennaston had failed to give the proper response.

The mystery had some connection with what he had written in his book as to the sigil of Scoteia.⁠ ⁠… And he could not find he had written anything very definite. The broken disk was spoken of as a talisman in the vague terms best suited to a discussion of talismans by a person who knew nothing much about them. True, the book told what the talisman looked like; it looked like that bit of metal he had picked up in the garden.⁠ ⁠… He wondered if he had thrown away that bit of metal; and, searching, discovered it in the desk drawer, where it had lain for several months.

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his protruding heavy brows over the characters with which it was inscribed. That was what the sigil looked like⁠—or, rather, what half the sigil looked like, because Ettarre still had the other half. How could the personage have known anything about it? unless there were, indeed, really some secret and some password through which men won to place and the world’s prizes?⁠ ⁠… Blurred memories of Eugène Sue’s nefarious Jesuits and of Balzac’s redoubtable Thirteen arose in the background of his mental picturings.⁠ ⁠…

No, the personage had probably been tasting beverages more potent than sherry; there were wild legends, since disproved, such as seemed then to excuse that supposition: or perhaps he was insane, and nobody but Felix Kennaston knew it.⁠ ⁠… What could a little mirror, much less pigeons, have to do with this bit of metal?⁠—except that this bit of metal, too, reflected light so that the strain tired your eyes, thus steadily to look down upon the thing.⁠ ⁠…

XV Of Vain Regret and Wonder in the Dark

“Madam,” he was insanely stating, “I would not for the world set up as a fit exponent for the mottoes of a copybook; but I am not all base.”

“You are,” flashed she, “a notorious rogue.”

It was quite dark. Kennaston could not see the woman with whom he was talking. But they were in an open paved place, like a courtyard, and he was facing the great shut door against which she stood, vaguely discernible. He knew they were waiting for someone to open this door. It seemed to him, for no reason at all, that they were at Tunbridge Wells. But there was no light anywhere. Complete darkness submerged them; the skies showed not one glimmer overhead.

“That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack both grounds and inclination to deny. Yet I am not so through choice. Believe me, I am innately of well-nigh ducal disposition; and by preference, an ill name is as obnoxious to me as⁠—shall we say?⁠—soiled linen or a coat of last year’s cut. But then, que voulez-vous? as our lively neighbors observe. Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty pocket; and I am thus compelled to the commission of diverse profitable peccadilloes, once in a blue moon, by the dictates of that same haphazard chance which tonight has pressed me into the service of innocence and virtue.”

She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded wonder as to what this dream, so plainly recognized as such, was all about, and as to whence came the words which sprang so nimbly to his lips, and as to what was the cause of his great wistful sorrow. Perhaps if he listened very attentively to what he was saying, he might find out.

“You do not answer, madam. Yet think a little. I am a notorious rogue: the circumstance is conceded. But do you think I have selfishly become so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you that Newgate, the wigged judge, the jolting cart, the gallows, is no pleasant dream o’ nights. But what choice had I? Cast forth to the gutter’s miring in the susceptible years of infancy, a girl of the town’s byblow, what choice had I, in heaven’s name? If I may not live as I would, I must live as I may; in emperors and parsons and sewer-diggers and cheese-mites that claim is equally allowed.”

“You are a thief?” she asked, pensively.

“Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in life’s hard school an indifferent Latinist, by occasionally confounding meum with tuum.”

“A murderer?”

“Something of the sort might be my description in puritanic mouths. You know at least what happened at The Cat and Hautbois.”

(“But what in the world had happened there?” Kennaston wondered.)

“And yet⁠—” The sweet voice marveled.

“And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfraville? Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe through a half-eaten apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere that those who are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often cling desperately to one stray spar of virtue.”

He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door. “Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a question?”

“A thousand. (So I am Vanringham.)”

“I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, a considerable fortune in my own right. It would be easy for a strong man⁠—and, sure, your shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cutthroat!⁠—very easy for him to stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my honor, I would have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered man. Is this not truth?”

“It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her well. O dea certé!”

“I am not absolutely hideous, either?” she queried, absentmindedly.

“Dame Venus,” Kennaston observed, “may have made a similar demand of the waves at Cythera when she first rose among their billows: and I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amorously clutching at her far whiter feet, laughed and murmured the answer I would give did I not know your question was put in a