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Malcourt continued to roll his cigarette, but after a while he spoiled it and began to construct another. "Are you, Louis?" "What?" "Coming back here soon?" "If I if it's the thing to do. I don't know yet. You mustn't press the matter now." "You think there's a chance that you won't come back at all!" exclaimed Portlaw, aghast. Malcourt's cigarette fell to pieces in his fingers.
Other things also began about that time, including a lawsuit against Portlaw, the lilacs, jonquils, and appleblossoms in Shiela's garden, and Malcourt's capricious journeys to New York on business concerning which he offered no explanation to anybody.
He met Portlaw, later, at the Beach Club for luncheon; and, as the latter looked particularly fat, warm, and worried, Malcourt's perverse humour remained in the ascendant, and he tormented Portlaw until that badgered gentleman emitted a bellow of exasperation. "What on earth's the matter?" asked Malcourt in pretended astonishment. "I thought I was being funny." "Funny!
Malcourt's marriage to an heiress was the perfectly obvious incentive of the visit. And when they wrote that they were coming to New York, it amused Malcourt exceedingly to invite them to Luckless Lake. But he said nothing about it to Portlaw or his wife. Then, for another thing, the regeneration and development, ethically and artistically, of Dolly Wilming amused him.
The rattle of the buckboard on the wet gravel drive brought Portlaw to his feet. A servant appeared with Malcourt's suit-case and overcoat. "There's a trunk to follow; Williams is to pack what I need.... Good-bye, Billy. I wouldn't go if I didn't have to." Portlaw took his offered hand as though dazed.
The recitation seemed endless; Malcourt's voice grew hoarse with the repetition; letter after letter was added to the apparently meaningless sequence on Shiela's pad. "Is there any sense in it so far?" asked Lady Tressilvain. "I cannot find any," said Shiela, striving with her pencil point to divide the string of letters into intelligible words.
The late morning sun flung a golden net across Malcourt's bed; he lay asleep, dark hair in handsome disorder, dark eyes sealed too young to wear that bruised, loose mask so soon with the swollen shadows under lid and lip.
In an hour the Villa Cardross was silent and dark, save that, in the moonlight which struck through the panes of Malcourt's room, an unquiet shadow moved from window to window, looking out into the mystery of night.
Then, in the silence, the heavy throb of his heart unnerved his hand, rendering his pen unsteady as he signed each rendered bill: "O.K. for $ ," and affixed his signature, "John Garret Hamil, Architect." The aroma of the lilies hung heavy in the room, penetrating as the scent of Malcourt's spiced Chinese gums afire and bubbling.
Which laudable effort toward intellectual and artistic uplift Hamil never laughed at; and there ensued always the most astonishing causerie concerning art that two men in a wilderness ever engaged in. Young Hastings, a Yale academic and forestry graduate, did fairly well in Malcourt's place, and was doing better every day.
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