The room, an oblong, was furnished after a fashion of long ago. The daised bed was ascended by low, wide steps. Beyond stood a table of lapis-lazuli. A mantel of the same material was surmounted by a mirror framed in jasper. Beneath the mirror, a fire burned dimly. The lights too were dim. They were diffused by tall wax candles that stood shaded in high gold sticks. On the table there were three of them.
The chair was near this table, at which M. P. had been occupied very laboriously, in doing nothing, a task that he performed in preparation for the bed, which was always ready for him, and for sleep, which seldom was. There he had been told. It had shaken him to his feet, shaken apoplexy at him and shaken him back in the chair.
Now, as he looked at the servant's wooden mask, for a moment he relived an age, not a pleasant one either and of which this blow, had he known it, was perhaps the karma. He did not know it. He knew nothing of karma. None the less, with that curious intuition which the great crises induce, he too divined the woman and wished to God that he had kept his hands off, wished that he had not interfered and told Monty to put her in a flat and be damned to her! It was she, he could have sworn it. At once, precisely as he wished he had let her alone, he hoped and quite as fervently that she had covered her tracks, that there would be no trial, nothing but inept conjectures and that forgetfulness in which all things, good and bad, lose their way.
The futility of wishing passed. The time for action had come. He motioned. "Is Benny here?"
The butler did not know whether to lie or not, but seeing no personal advantage in either course, he hedged. "Very little, sir."
That little, the old man weighed. A little is often enough. It may be too much.
"He said a lady was stopping there. Yes, sir."
The butler shuffled. "He said she was very pretty, sir."
"Well, sir, it seems there was a joke about it. The young lady thought she was married."
"I'm not supposed to know, sir. But from what was let on, Benny was rigged out as a dominie and it made 'em laugh."
The old man ran his head out like a turtle. "Damnation, what has that to do with it?"
"No, sir, he pretended to marry her to Mr. Monty."