He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same strain, as before.
"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been easier."
"In a little while?"
"There will be a child."
Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.
"What?" he said. "And you—you——Thousand thunders, these Americans here!"
At this Stainton himself grew angry.
"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."
"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to theceiling. "Hear him! 'It is far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the 'Avis Important' he there has posted on the door."
It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of maturity.
"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it not,hein? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly. Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men, they I think no more wise."
Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. Hedid this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.
His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.
"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."
She did not open her eyes.
"Yes," she said.
"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."
"Yes."
"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely in Lyons, and I shall be busy—very busy. Now, I know you don't like Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."
Muriel was silent.
"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."
"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.
"Yes, dear."
"And he——"
"He said the—the change was what I needed."
He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and bent over her.
"Good-bye," he said.
She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he knew was that she kissed him.
Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.
In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class, who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.
She hailed a passing cab.
"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.
The driver nodded.
Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.
Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chathamand left it with a suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at thebureauthat her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for five days.
"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with monsieur."
Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.
Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to meet him, and he embraced her warmly.
"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's good to be with you again!"
"What wire?" asked Muriel.
"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come here."
"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."
"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back here."
"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me before those strangers."
"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our two selves—just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now," he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is gone—going, going, gone—and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri Duperré Boussingault et Cie., for——I told you the figure, didn't I—ourfigure? Isn't it splendid?"
"I am glad," said Muriel.
"You don't really object?" he asked.
"Why should I? Of course I am glad."
"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell it."
"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember—but you showed me how foolish that was."
He laughed happily.
"I am a great converter," he said. "If you couldonly have heard me converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel—and mostly through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."
"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."
"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"
"Yes, Jim."
"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked that?"
"I should——" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.
"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind? Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the Boussingaults."
Muriel sat upon his knee.
"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.
"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.
"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.
"But, dearest, how—What?—Where were you? You mean to say that you stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"
She nodded.
Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.
"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"
Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.
"I don't know," she said. "I—Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"
"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then you never got my letters?"
She shook her head.
"Muriel! And you pretended—Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She said she would call the afternoon that I left."
"I suppose she did."
"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"
"I didn't see her. I left word at thebureauthat Iwas out. I left word that I had gone to Lyons with you."
"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that you weren't with me."
She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.
Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.
"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand, dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel——"
"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.
"I was. Yes, I was."
"You are the best man in the world, only—only——"
"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt, dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"
"I had to."
"Out of consideration for me."
"No."
"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought foranything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave, lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in your condition!"
She drew from him.
"Jim——" she said.
"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.
"But, Jim——"
"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults. Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell him."
"Don't tell him, Jim."
"We'll see; we'll see."
"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him again."
"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."
"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am—I dare say I am as bad——"
"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not. Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and soon"—he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child—"in a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."
"Don't!" said Muriel.
But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.
"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make a tour of the shops."
She lifted her face with a troubled smile.
"I have everything I want," she said.
"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."
"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."
"All?" smiled her husband.
"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them. You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."
"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those—some little things—some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know I am."
Muriel's voice faltered.
"So soon——" she said.
"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come along."
She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes. She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last broke down and fainted in theirtaxi-mètre.
The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.
"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"
"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."
"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."
They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains and stood looking out upon a grey day.
"I don't want to think it over," she said.
"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."
"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I want to go to-day."
"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed it.
"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."
He softened.
"Aren't you well?"
"No."
"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.
"Don't call me that," she said.
"Why not, Muriel?"
"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim——" She put her hand in his—"I'm horrid, I know——"
"You're never that!"
"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."
Again Muriel took refuge at the window.
"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."
"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"
"I don't think so."
"It'll be cold, dear."
"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."
She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make arrangements. In an hour he was back.
"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of mail sent on as far as Neuchâtel. We can get a train in forty-five minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English—and here are the tickets. Can you be ready?"
She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly distracting journey.
The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard, then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel andemerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchâtel with the white Sentis to the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.
But a day at Neuchâtel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted to move on. She made enquiries.
"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.
"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly protested.
"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no business and nothing else to do."
So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne, through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg, past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of Königsfelden,where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to Zurich.
They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on their way to the Gross-Münster, Muriel said:
"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here. Let's go on to-morrow."
It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.
"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back to the hotel this minute and lie down."
She would not hear of that.
"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"
Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.
"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself downto sleep, eight hours later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."
Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.
"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."
"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"
"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"
"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."
"We've seen it, haven't we?"
"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to Innsbruck."
Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the door.
"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.
"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am about done up."
Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruinsof Gräphang and, on the great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.
Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer, saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.
"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte and Twain and Do-nelli."
"Our what?" asked Jim.
"Please?"
"I didn't catch that last name."
"Donelli—Ignatius Donelli."
"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly—yes."
"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"
The Austrian left the train just before they reached the six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:
"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"
Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name hadnot been mentioned more than twice between them since they had left theFriedrich Barbarossa.
"Why, no," she answered.
"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."
"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."
Stainton reflected.
"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed rather to neglect us in Paris."
"MyAustrian? Why mine?"
"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"
"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."
He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.
Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale spring sunshine and where, in rôles of gallants to the fashionable ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediæval roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."
Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf. So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure these things—and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.
Muriel was again in tears.
"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."
"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear. Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."
"But I'm tired of looking and waiting—we've been doing that ever since we went away. Let's go back to Paris."
Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions—and now she wanted to go back to Paris!
"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.
"I know; but now it will be spring there—real spring—and everyone says that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."
"Yet the climate——"
"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."
"Do you think"—Stainton put his hand upon hers—"do you think that you can rest there: really rest?"
"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful. I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German, either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been hurrying—hurrying—hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"
"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked sixty years old.
"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't knowwhat'sthe matter with me; but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back home."
This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more quartered at the Chatham.
"A gentleman to see madame."
The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up" at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris, there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of Captain von Klausen.
"I am not at home," said Muriel.
"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added: "This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed disappointed."
"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.
This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the sitting-roomagain opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen downstairs and had brought him along.
In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it. Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.
Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.
Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, atleast appeared to see no more. He remained to tea.
"Why on earth did you bringhimhere?" asked Muriel as soon as the door had closed on the Austrian.
"Why, did you mind?"
"I told you that I didn't like him."
"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."
"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have remembered that I said I didn't like him."
"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the lobby."
"How did he know that we were here?"
"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."
"But we have been and gone and returned since then."
"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did: in the hotel news of theDaily Mail."
"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told the servant when his card was sent up."
"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew you would be lonely up here without me."
Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.
"You know I don't like him," she repeated.
"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you have for your prejudice?"
"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's generally good ground for it."
"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a mere boy."
"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than I am."
"Are you so very aged, my dear?"
"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."
Stainton kissed her.
"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any more about von Klausen."
Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He tookthem to the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to dine.
It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he and Muriel that evening left the hotel.
"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all. They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."
He turned to Muriel.
"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel, and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"
Muriel smiled.
"I'll try," she said.
"You won't be bored?"
"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."
"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs. Stainton."
"Your services?" asked Muriel.
"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think of you as wholly deserted—is it not, sir?"
The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain; Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to readhis letter before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.
"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"
"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."
"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.
"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."
"An imposition—Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure you, sir."
"But your duties at the Embassy?"
"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather. If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the Bois——"
"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."
Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.
He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.
"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.
"For what?"
"For getting you into that confounded engagementwith young von Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into it."
"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."
"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and so I hope you'll pardon——"
"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."
That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Forêt de Rouvray and the Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets and the Champs Elysées, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.
"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.
Muriel hesitated.
"Why?" she enquired.
"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you have been good enough to visit."
His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inférieur, with its shaded banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in imitation of a Swisschalet. She was resolved to prefer this to his Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the Austrian Tyrol as his own.
"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.
"Better? But—why?"
"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and inviting."
"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen, smiling.
He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain turned to the driver.
"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.
There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.
"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."
Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."
"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after your return from your visit to my country."
"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have not been thinking much about you one way or the other."
"I am sorry," said von Klausen.
"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."
"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."
"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.
"Yes."
She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.
"How dared you?" she gasped.
"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."
"Well, you shan't know."
"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to plead in his own defence?"
"You are not accused—and you aren't judged."
"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how is that possible?"
"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"
"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none. Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in another of them."
Muriel bit her red under-lip.
"Let us go back," she said.
"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."
They walked a few steps forward.
"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.
"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are presumptuous."
"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."
"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."
"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."
"What nonsense!"
"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret, madame."
Muriel's eyes flashed.
"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."
Von Klausen bowed.
"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to the reference."
"I did not."
"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close acquaintanceship."
"I required nothing—and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was the merest trifle."
Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.
"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to your husband."
She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky cheeks were aflame.
"How low of you!" she cried.
But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.
"To mention the truth?" he murmured.
"To bring up such a trifle—to trade on such a confidence—to make of an impulsive action and of the consequences of that action—you know—I told you at the time, and you must know—that I didn't mention the circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you would not want your terror known."
"Ah—so you did think of me, then?"
"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."
They were now half-way along the Lac Inférieur. Under the arching trees in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling companion. His lithe figure trembled, hispink cheeks burned; in his blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.
"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always—think of me deeply. I cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must listen. I tell you now, once and forever—I tell you——"
Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly unloosed—the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite of all the hampering harness of convention—and she was undeniably curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something else—something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of ancestral training, which, once unleashed,shatters every barrier of elaborately conceived convention.
Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.
"Stop!" said Muriel.
Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.
"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and slowly; now——"
Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.
Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her soul—and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the moment before.
She raised a trembling hand.
"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would—I believe he would kill you."
Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.
"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no man that lives."
"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered: "afraid and ashamed."
"Not afraid."
"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way. Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."
It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result. Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was somehow inexplicably true.
Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him. His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he was pleadingforgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.
Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.
"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry—very sorry. We will never speak of it again—not to ourselves—and not to anybody else."
"But we shall be friends?" he asked.
"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.
When one is young such promises are lightly made.
"Never," he vowed.
"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this affair to me?"
"Never again, dear lady."
"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in—in that way."
He pressed her hand ever so slightly.
"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."
"But the thoughts are wrong."
"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions. I shall remember always his words."
She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them to fall, upon trivial things.
"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the subject of her fevered trip with Jim.
"We didn't get anywhere near it. I—we were in a hurry to get back to Paris. We—we thought it would be warmer in Paris."
"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"
"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came right back here."
"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it. It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafés, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebière or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime—you and your husband."
"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I."
"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."
She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.
"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau—the particular point that I mean—a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises almost to the clouds. Nearly at itstop, a precipice below and a precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelène spent, in penance, the last thirty years of her life."
He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.
Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.
"You have been there, then?" she asked.
"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot—the silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."
That evening there came the beginning of the end.
The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate any sort of fête of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von Klausen had promised his two American friends, thegrand boulevardwould be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the Madelaine.
"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."
He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of the dull routine of the Embassy.
Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own part, though she told herself religiouslythat she had done no wrong, she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.
"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.
"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description of the evening before the fête. If he felt somewhat worn from the now unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome this chance for novel amusement.
"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our pilot, Captain?"
Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.
"If," he said, "you will do me the honour—you and Mrs. Stainton—to dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of her drive this morning?"
Jim, too, looked at Muriel.
"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the Austrian's.
Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.
"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."
"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all." He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."
"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during the remainder of the afternoon——"
"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every minute. Youaresure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"
Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.
"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by motoring to Versailles and back."
So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odéon and dined oncroûte consommé,filetof cod, andcanard sauvage à la presse. After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.
When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as riotously happy as only a fête-day crowd in Paris can be.
Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton was lost.
They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on this side, andagain they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away, Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts, he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.
Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the fête-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.
"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said—and, as he had to bend to her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a loose strand of her dark hair—"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."
"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves—at once—at once! Call a cab."
Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her, bending to her ear.
"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far—if you are not too tired?"
"No, no, I'm not too tired—or I won't be if we can only hurry."
They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.
"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are afraid—of me?"
His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.
"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't——"
"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this morning."
"Not afraid—even then. And now—well, I remember the talk we had afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."
Again his lips were near her neck.
"I shall never forget it," he vowed.
Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed. She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel.
"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met.
The servant thought not.
"Ask at thebureau."
Stainton had not yet come back.
"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room."
Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors—perhaps the greatest—that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her. She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.
"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my—in the sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."
For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and she sought refuge in platitude.
"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."
"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."
There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes narrowed.
"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.
"Only what has happened to us. He—I think he will be here soon."
Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that. She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence. She wished devoutly that Jim would return.
"It—it is rather close here," she said.
"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes from her. He did not move.
"Yes," she answered. "Will you—will you be so good as to open the window?"
He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice, and he turned to the window.
The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a tinkle of falling glass.
Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.
"What is it?" she asked.
She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.
"You are hurt?" she cried.
Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.
"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."
The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.