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Updated: June 5, 2025
I've found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character." Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes burning. "He's married already " she gasped. "Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you." Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round Fendihook's throat.
I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know the nature of Jaffery's scheme.
The pathos of her broken life moved him to an anguish of pity. For her soothing he would give all that life held for him, save one thing which was no longer his to give. Another man glib of tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He could not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life.
He passed a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose end in London during the height of the season. In despair he went to The Daily Gazette office and proclaimed himself ready for a job. But for the moment the earth was fairly calm and the management could find no field for Jaffery's special activities.
"Where?" I asked. "The Savoy. So is Euphemia " Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape. "Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her." "Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?" "She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears. "Why not bring her down with Euphemia?" "I want a couple of days off.
The way Prescott spoiled her and indulged her, as though she were a little dressed-up cat in a London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman accustomed to throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head, was simply sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's way. . . .
I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph over me. During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness she had an eerie way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn. That was his home.
What creature of Jaffery's temperament could be contented with a soft bed in the centre of civilisation, when he had the chance of sleeping in verminous caravanserais with a saddle for pillow? In spite of his amazing predilections, Jaffery was very human.
I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor.
"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady manners. "The very thing," said I. Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm. "But why shouldn't they have me?
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