XCIII
The laugh went round. Men said there was thoroughly fine stuff in that fellow. Women wanted to know what he was like? Lady Stratclyffe hoped he had a mother to be proud of him. Cardillon was tugging at his auburn whiskers and, thinking of the missing head and tail-pieces of the bedsteads destined for the Hospital, wondered how many of them lay at the bottom of the holds under the munitions? Two or three hundred, he guessed, knowing the Jowellian methods. Damn the man! You came across him everywhere. He really went a bit too far!
The Ambassador’s wife went on to tell him of the four miles of mattresses already laid upon the pavement in default of bedsteads, and ranged in double rows down the sides of the Barrack Hospital corridors. She was afraid the stones would strike cold, and that the long passages would be draughty in the winter.
“The men won’t complain,” Cardillon told her. “But are all the wards so full?”
“Four large wards,” she answered him, “and half-a-dozen small rooms were found available. But there are sixteen hundred sick and wounded—including cholera patients—already within the walls. And nearly six hundred in the General Hospital, of which Ada also has superintendence.... And if the patients there, lie in filth and misery such as I saw yesterday....”
Her brows contracted and her fine lips quivered. He asked:
“You went through the wards yesterday?”
“Yesterday morning, with Ada and the Sisters of Charity. And the horrors of them were like nothing ofwhich I ever heard or read. To start with, the condition of the floors was indescribable. Luckily we thought of Turkish clogs. And mounted on them we followed Ada through the Inferno——”
He gloomed. Oblivious of his displeasure, she went on: “There were no vessels for water, or utensils of any kind. They had no soap, or towels, or Hospital clothing. The sick were lying in their uniforms, stiff with filth, upon the dreadful pallets. Unwashed—untended—covered with vermin—”
She could not go on. He said between his teeth:
“I have said from the first that women have no business in War-Hospitals. They’re the necessary complement of the camp and the battle-field, and they’ll be horrible and ghastly as long as the world lasts. The things that are seen in them are too grim to be talked about! But why need we talk? We can’t better things by talking!”
“I agree with you perfectly,” she said, with a fine smile of sarcasm. “But the condition of things I have described is, since yesterday, astonishingly improved.... To begin with, those Augean floors have been thoroughly scrubbed!”
“Surely not by—ladies?”
“By the Sisters of Charity, aided by the Hospital orderlies who had told them—‘It cannot be done!’ They said: ‘It must’—and set the example forthwith!”
He commented:
“That’s the pace that kills. They’ll never be able to hold on at it!”
“Wait and prove! I credit Ada and her nuns with immense reserves of energy. They waste no words. But, oh! Lord Cardillon, when I think that all this abomination and misery lay close at our doors—here in Constantinople—and that I and others never knew of it—never dreamed of it!—I burn with shame and sicken with disgust. No! I do not exaggerate!”
Her sewing had fallen to the deck. Her white hands wrung themselves in her lap. Her matronly calm face was contracted and quivering. She continued:
“I sent from our kitchen at the Embassy quantities of broth and jelly and other articles of invalid diet. Wine from the cellars and so on. But neither I nor Stratclyffeever went there—to our shame never thought of going there! And but for those articles in the English papers we never should have known——”
He ground his spurred heel into the deck, and something very like an oath escaped from him.
“Confound the London newspapers! As for the men who came out here to cater for news—paid Paul Prys and chiels in butcher-boots and traveling-caps, taking notes—they go too far. It is unbearable espionage—presumption!—insolence! I’d hang up every one of them, if I had the authority and the privileges the Provost-Marshal enjoys! Why, one of those rags of papers actually published information as to where we’d stored our powder! What business have Fleet Street journalists nosing about at the Seat of War?”
She said with spirit:
“They make mistakes occasionally, like the rest of us. But nearly all of them are gentlemen of education, good sense, and good feeling. Could anything but honest, fearless indignation have penned those articles in theTimes? And—if there is maladministration—lack of organization—are they not right in pointing where the fault lies? The British Public, who give their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers to the service of the country—surely have a right to know how they fare!... Lord Cardillon!—could not much of this horrible suffering and waste of life have been prevented by a little forethought?”
He frowned, but answered:
“Since you will have it—yes!” He added, as she thanked him with a look for the truth, seeing that it had galled in the utterance:
“Please, no more now on that subject. Here’s Miss Delavayle!” And their conversation ended with the rustling arrival of a tall, elegant woman, who hurried up and sank down into a chair between them, saying with an affectation of breathlessness:
“I’m dead, hearing people sing your praises, and telling them that you don’t deserve any!”
She was a blonde of rather hard and brilliant coloring, dressed as brilliantly as a tropical bird. Her cheeks and eyes were burning with suppressed, none the less evident, excitement; her nerves seemed tense and strung. As she looked at the man, her glance was feverishly bright andhungrily possessive. He moved uneasily as though he felt it so.
“Rest; why don’t you rest?” he said to her. “But you never rest. I wonder when you will?”
Lady Stratclyffe had risen and joined the Ambassador’s circle. The answer was given:
“When your wife dies, and we’re married; then I shall rest—not before!”
He moved restlessly and bit his lip. She went on:
“Do you think I didn’t see you playing the gallant with Madame de Roux? Don’t protest! I’ve eyes in the middle of my back,” she said, quivering, “for every petticoat that comes near you. Don’t I know your charming ways with women, poor idiots that we are!”
“Laura!” he muttered, as her ringed hand clenched upon his chair-arm, and her fever-bright eyes shot challenges at him. “For Heaven’s sake don’t make me a scene of jealousy!”
“All right! Tell me what you thought when the Brigade got fairly in movement. Was it anything about me?”
“By Gad! no!” he said, wounding her unintentionally. “What I thought to myself was: ‘Here goes the last of the Paradynes!’”
“Trot! Canter! Gallop! Charge!” She imitated the staccato tones of the officer commanding. “Why wasn’t I born a man, so that I might have followed you—and fought for you—and died for you when I got my chance! There! Lady Granbyson is beckoning to me.... I’m compromising myself hopelessly, sitting here with you like Darby and Joan....”
She flashed a disdainful eye-dart at Lady Granbyson, a portly dowager in voluminous cinnamon satin, fluttering in distress afar off, like a large maternal hen. Then she rose, and stooped over him, clasping the wrist of the unwounded arm that he had thrown across the chair-back, and whispered, with her blazing eyes looking into his, as her burning breath beat upon his cheek, and a long, snaky ringlet of her hot-colored golden hair trailed across the tarnished Brandenbourgs of his Hussar jacket:
“Do you know what I would have done if the last of the Paradyneshadgone that way? Drowned myself in the Bosphorus when the news came from the Front!”...
He flushed crimson to the temples and caught his breath.
“Laura!”
But she was gone—and the attendant ladies, who had melted into the background when she drew near, were bearing down on him. He cursed women, in his heart, for the mulls they dragged one into. Compunction, pity, strove in him with anger and resentment. Poor Laura! Yet how the clasp of her hand had burned, and how green her eyes had gleamed with jealousy! He foresaw hideous complications with her family—more terrible with his wife’s people. Confound it! And just now when one’s Sovereign—always down like bricks upon conjugal offenders—notoriously strict in matters of morals—might be expected to smile on a popular Brigadier....
“No, Lady Hathermore, no iced lemonade, thank you. You’re too kind, Madame de Mirecourt, but I’ve three cushions and a footstool now!”
So forbidding was his frown, that they rustled away in search of more accessible divinities. Then—lovely eyes—greenish hazel with golden lights and dusky shadows playing in them—looked down into his and a lovely mouth smiled bewilderingly. A small white hand with clusters of rubies and diamonds like drops of blood mingled with tears sparkling on its slender, pink-tipped fingers, held under his nose a little bunch of violets....
Henriette had charmed—she must charm again—she had been asked for a single flower—she must give the whole bunch in her lavishness. You remember that she could never say No! to a man?...
“I was unkind just now.... You asked—and I denied you. See—I will make amends! Smell them—are they not sweet?”
“Divinely sweet!—both the gift and the giver!” He forgot his new-born prejudice against her sex, as she sank with a whispering rustle of silken draperies into the vacant chair at his side. Suave enchantress! Exquisite witch! How these ivory-white, supple, small-boned creatures vulgarized high-colored, big-boned women! Laura, who would presently have to lead her own forlorn hope down into the Valley of Death under the plunging fire of the eyes of Society, was high-colored and big of bone.
“You were angry with me, and for good cause.... I offended, and I have been punished....”
She said, delighting him with her voice, with her smile, with the play of her mobile features:
“The fault lay not in your words, Milord, or in your actions, but in your eyes. Men with such blue eyes are inimical to me. I believe ‘unlucky’ is your English word? Ah, no! Do not suppose I do not like the color.... Unhappily, I liked it but too well!”
Her glance was enchantment. Her voice was a song. She allured and drew and provoked him. Laura, under cover of her chaperon’s parasol, glared at him tigerishly from the other side of the deck. But he had forgotten Laura. He wondered, noting the delicate spider-lines about Henriette’s lovely eyes, and on her ivory temples, where the blue veins melted in the bluish shadows of her jetty, silken hair, how old she was? Thirty-four or five. Worth a dozen of younger women. He thought this as he asked whether she was not staying at the Embassy?
“No, not at the French Legation.... I am engaged to visit there when I return from the Crimea. For the present I share, with Madame de Bessarine, some rooms at the Hotel of Missiri.” She added, as he asked if he might not call? “Alas! I leave for the Crimea so soon—it will not be possible to receive visitors!”
But Cardillon pressed for an appointment and she yielded.
“You are an angel of kindness!” he declared.
She returned, with lovely gravity:
“You are of those who have faith in Angels and Heaven? You believe in the existence of another world beyond this earth of ours?”
“Certainly. But you could make this earth so sweet for a man that he wouldn’t barter it for Mahomet’s Paradise.”
She said, ignoring the compliment:
“When you were near to death—not long ago, did you feel more sure of the existence of that other world than your tone now indicates?”
He answered with reluctance:
“I cannot say. To be sure, one would have to die, and come back to life again.”
She rose up with her supple exquisite grace, and moved to the yacht’s side, and stood with one jeweled hand upon the taffrail looking over at the opposite shore of Asia, asfrom the thousand minarets of Stamboul came clear musical voices calling the Faithful to the prayer of afternoon.
“I am sure, because I once died, and returned to life again. And I came back out of that dim, strange country that lies beyond this world, with a secret to tell, and a gift to bestow. And he to whom I would tell my secret, and give my gift, had departed—where I know not! It may be we shall never meet on earth any more! And well for him if it were so! For I have come to believe that if he is ever to know peace or happiness, his path and mine must never cross again!”
What strange impulse of confidence moved her? One cannot answer. She went on, not looking at the Brigadier:
“This seems strange to you—will seem stranger when I tell you that I go to the East to marry another.... But Love and Marriage—are they not different things, Milord? Does not your experience teach you so?”
He was silent. Her voice sighed on:
“The gift I spoke of but now, is Love—perhaps you have guessed it? I tell you that a woman may yield to passion—may be much beloved, without ever having learned that!... It was revealed to me when I lay as one dead, and one whom I had despised and ill-used stood by what he and another believed to be a dead body. And in the face of scandal, dishonor—the mockery and contempt of the world!—he said—I shall never forget the tone in which he said it: ‘Because that other man has left you, I stay beside you here!’”
Cardillon said, possessed by a sudden, savage jealousy:
“Was that the man with the blue eyes?”
She shook her head. The pearly line of her white profile, as she turned her face from him, seemed the subtlest thing he had ever looked on. Her plume of herons’ feathers gleamed black-blue against the night of her coiled and knotted hair. The little delicate shell-like ear had a ruby hanging from it, like a blood-drop. She said, in that voice of exquisite, sighing cadences, looking at a shabby caïque containing a single passenger, that was being paddled from the steamer-quay of Tophaneh across to the landing-place of Scutari,—and half-consciously noting the struggles of the little craft as it battled against the stiff rush of the current that sweeps past the promontory where transformed Io landed....
“No, Milord. This man had black eyes. When they looked at you....Ayme!... Madre de Dios, misericordia! C’est lui!—c’est lui!”
The final words were unheard; they had exhaled in a sigh from lips suddenly bleached pale as poplar-leaves. As her head fell forwards on her breast, and the tall, rounded, supple figure swayed as though about to fall, Cardillon threw his strong unwounded arm about her; knowing by the dead weight that the swoon was unfeigned—wondering what had brought it about?
Nothing had happened to alarm her. Only the toiling rower had pulled up-stream diagonally, as though making for the point above the landing-place of Scutari, and had then let the head of the frail craft swing round. And the pasenger, a white-haired, black-eyed man, in worn gray traveling dress, had thus been brought plainly into view of those on the steam-yacht’s after-deck.
The man had never glanced at the two people who leaned upon the rail, talking. His eyes were for the green slope and the great quadrangle of yellow stone masonry reared by Sultan Suleiman....
Madame de Roux recovered almost instantly. The caïque had shot out of sight past the bend of the promontory. The traveler had landed and passed on about his business—an accidental likeness had deceived her, that was all. She lifted her head, smiled with lips still white, and declared herself well again. And the Brigadier, whose keen light eyes had the instant before seen a European lady—seated in a caïque with others—start back and hide her face in horror, as something grim and shapeless rose up at the boat’s side, said:
“Do not explain! I can guess what happened. You were looking at the water.... One of those dead men!...”
She said, with a shadowy, troubled glance at the deep, rushing tide that swept downwards round the promontory of Scutari:
“I do not fear the dead. The living can be more terrible sometimes!”
“Still,” he said, with an effort of unselfishness, “if certain sights affect you so painfully, it would be well not to wait to see the arrival of the Hospital-ships.”
“Are we not all assembled,” she asked, “to honor thebrave unfortunate? And, if I could not support tragic, or grim, or squalid spectacles, should I be now upon my journey to the scene of war?”
“Must you go there? Is Grandguerrier so exigent? Have you really set your hearts upon being married amidst the tragic spectacles to which you refer?”
She told him, with her shadowy smile:
“I go, not because I desire to, but because I am destined to.... All my life long I have done what I wished not to do, at the bidding of an inexorable Fate....”
He did not know how true it was. But the sensual fever she had kindled in his veins abated. He looked at her with more sympathy and less desire. She went on:
“Besides, I must tell you that I have campaigned with my first husband’s regiment in Algeria, and helped to nurse the wounded. Recently at Toulon and Marseilles I visited the transports that had brought in our invalided soldiers from the War-Hospitals of the Levant. Now I would cry, ‘Bravo, mes amis!’ and wave my handkerchief to your wounded heroes of Alma and Balaklava and Inkerman.... Listen, Milord! Surely that was a salute of guns!”