They both burst out laughing, to my discomfiture.
"What do you take me for? A circus rider? Performing in a tent and living in a caravan? You think I jump through a hoop in tights?"
"All I can say," I murmured, by way of apology, "is that it's a mendacious world. I'm deeply sorry."
Why had I been misled in this shameful manner?
Madame Brandt with lazy good nature accepted my excuses.
"I'm what is professionally known as a
dompteuse
," she explained. "Of course, when I was a kid I was trained as an acrobat, for my father was poor; but when he grew rich and the owner of animals, which he did when I was fourteen, I joined him and worked with him all over the world until I went on my own. Do you mean to say you never heard of me?"
"Madame Brandt," said I, "the last thing to be astonished at is human ignorance. Do you know that 30 per cent of the French army at the present day have never heard of the Franco-Prussian War?"
"My dear Simon," cried Dale, "the two things don't hang together. The Franco-Prussian War is not advertised all over France like Beecham's Pills, whereas six years ago you couldn't move two steps in London without seeing posters of Lola Brandt and her horse Sultan."
"Ah, the horse!" said I. "That's how the wicked circus story got about."
"It was the last act I ever did," said Madame Brandt. "I taught Sultan—oh, he was a dear, beautiful thing—to count and add up and guess articles taken from the audience. I was at the Hippodrome. Then at the Nouveau Cirque at Paris; I was at St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin—all over Europe with Sultan."
"And where is Sultan now?" I asked.
"He is dead. Somebody poisoned him," she replied, looking into the fire. After a pause she continued in a low voice, singularly like the growl of a wrathful animal, "If ever I meet that man alive it will go hard with him."
At that moment the door opened and the servant announced:
"Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos!"
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