‘You have a Miss Fenwick staying with you, haven’t you?’ he said.
Lady Wetherby beamed.
‘Do you know Claire?’
‘Yes, rather!’
‘She’s my best friend. We used to be in the same company when I was in England.’
‘So she has told me.’
‘She was my bridesmaid when I married Lord Wetherby.’
‘Yes.’
Lady Wetherby was feeling perfectly happy now, and when Lady Wetherby felt happy she always became garrulous. She was one of those people who are incapable of looking on anybody as a stranger after five minutes’ acquaintance. Already she had begun to regard Bill as an old friend.
‘Those were great days,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘None of us had a bean, and Algie was the hardest up of the whole bunch. After we were married we went to the Savoy for the wedding-breakfast, and when it was over and the waiter came with the check, Algie said he was sorry, but he had had a bad week at Lincoln and hadn’t the price on him. He tried to touch me, but I passed. Then he had a go at the best man, but the best man had nothing in the world but one suit of clothes and a spare collar. Claire was broke, too, so the end of it was that the best man had to sneak out and pawn my watch and the wedding-ring.’
The room rang with her reminiscent laughter, Bill supplying a bass accompaniment. Bill was delighted. He had never hoped that it would be granted to him to become so rapidly intimate with Claire’s hostess. Why, he had only to keep the conversation in this chummy vein for a little while longer and she would give him the run of the house.
‘Miss Fenwick isn’t in now, I suppose?’ he asked.
‘No, Claire’s out with Dudley Pickering. You don’t know him, do you?’
‘No.’
‘She’s engaged to him.’
It is an ironical fact that Lady Wetherby was by nature one of the firmest believers in existence in the policy of breaking things gently to people. She had a big, soft heart, and she hated hurting her fellows. As a rule, when she had bad news to impart to any one she administered the blow so gradually and with such mystery as to the actual facts that the victim, having passed through the various stages of imagined horrors, was genuinely relieved, when she actually came to the point, to find that all that had happened was that he had lost all his money. But now in perfect innocence, thinking only to pass along an interesting bit of information, she had crushed Bill as effectively as if she had used a club for that purpose.
‘I’m tickled to death about it,’ she went on, as it were over her hearer’s prostrate body. It was I who brought them together, you know. I wrote telling Claire to come out here on the -Atlantic,- knowing that Dudley was sailing on that boat. I had an idea they would hit it off together. Dudley fell for her right away, and she must have fallen for him, for they had only known each other for a few weeks when they came and told me they were engaged. It happened last Sunday.’
‘Last Sunday!’
It had seemed to Bill a moment before that he would never again be capable of speech, but this statement dragged the words out of him. Last Sunday! Why, it was last Sunday that Claire had broken off her engagement with him!
‘Last Sunday at nine o’clock in the evening, with a full moon shining and soft music going on off-stage. Real third-act stuff.’
Bill felt positively dizzy. He groped back in his memory for facts. He had gone out for his walk after dinner. They had dined at eight. He had been walking some time. Why, in Heaven’s name, this was the quickest thing in the amatory annals of civilization! His brain was too numbed to work out a perfectly accurate schedule, but it looked as if she must have got engaged to this Pickering person before she met him, Bill, in the road that night.
‘It’s a wonderful match for dear old Claire,’ resumed Lady Wetherby, twisting the knife in the wound with a happy unconsciousness. ‘Dudley’s not only a corking good fellow, but he has thirty million dollars stuffed away in the stocking and a business that brings him in a perfectly awful mess of money every year. He’s the Pickering of the Pickering automobiles, you know.’