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Above the mantelpiece a stick-rack was affixed to the wall, and here were sticks and riding-whips. Steinmetz selected a heavy whip. His eyes were shot with blood; his mouth worked beneath his mustache. "So," he said, "I am going to settle with you at last." De Chauxville kicked and struggled, but he could not get free. He only succeeded in half choking himself.
De Chauxville laughed again in an unemotional way. "You alter little," he said. "Your plainness of speech takes me back to Petersburg. Yes, I admit that Mrs. Sydney Bamborough rather interested me. But I assume too much; that is no reason why she should interest you." "She does not, my good friend, but you do. I am all attention."
Miss Delafield, being a healthy-minded young English person of that simplicity which is no simplicity at all, but merely simple-heartedness, had her own ideas of what a man should be, and M. de Chauxville had the misfortune to fall short of those ideas. He was too epigrammatic for her, and beneath the brilliancy of his epigram she felt at times the presence of something dark and nauseous.
When De Chauxville came in, a few minutes later, Catrina was at the piano. The room was brilliantly lighted, and on the table gleamed and glittered the silver tea-things. The intermediate meal had been disposed of, but the samovar had been left alight, as is the habit at Russian afternoon teas. Catrina looked up when the Frenchman entered, but did not cease playing.
So Paul ignored the probability that De Chauxville had lamed his horse on purpose, and offered him refreshment while his saddle was being transferred to the back of a fresh mount. Farther than that he did not go. He did not consider himself called upon to offer a night's hospitality to the man who had attempted to murder him a week before.
She did not answer, but turned with a smile to greet Paul. "I think you know each other," she said gracefully when she had shaken hands, and the two men bowed. They were foreigners, be it understood. There were three languages in which they could understand each other with equal ease. "Where is Maggie?" exclaimed Mrs. Bamborough. "She is always late." "When I am here," reflected De Chauxville.
For in that flash of thought Claude de Chauxville saw Paul's secrets given to him; Paul's wealth meted out to him; Paul in exile; Paul dead in Siberia, where death comes easily; Paul's widow Claude de Chauxville's wife. He wiped all the thoughts away, and showed to Vassili a face that was as composed and impertinent as usual. "You said 'her eh husband," he observed. "Why?
Such a proceeding requires a certain courage, but a higher form of intrepidity is required to face the lion standing before the exit. De Chauxville looked at Steinmetz with shifty eyes. He was very like the mask of the lynx in the smoking-room, even to the self-conscious, deprecatory smile on the countenance of the forest sneak.
"And I am not such a fool, M. de Chauxville, as to allow myself to be dragged into a vulgar intrigue, borrowed from a French novel, to satisfy your vanity." De Chauxville's dull eyes suddenly flashed. "I will trouble you to believe, madame," he said, in a low, concentrated voice, "that such a thought never entered my head. A De Chauxville is not a commercial traveller, if you please.
He dislikes you. I should take care to give M. de Chauxville a wide berth if I were you, Paul." She had risen, after glancing at the clock. She turned down the page of her book, and looking up suddenly, met his eyes, for a moment only. "We are not likely to drop into a close friendship," said Paul. "But he is coming to Thors, twenty miles from Osterno."
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