At eight o'clock in the morning, when the warm sun beat upon the sea and flooded the rooms of the villa, Stainton, still clad in his travelling clothes, returned to the drawing-room and rang the bell for the maid.
"Go to Mrs. Stainton's room," he said to the maid, who spoke more or less English, "and tell her that, as soon as she is ready to see me, I——"
"But, monsieur——"
"You may add that I won't keep her fifteen minutes."
"But, monsieur, it is since an hour madame is gone out."
"Gone out?" Why had she gone so early and so silently? Had she not tried to conceal her exit, he would have heard her. The natural suspicion flashed through Stainton's mind. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"Madame say you are not to be disturbed."
"Hum. I see. Did she leave any message?"
"But, yes; she leave this note here. She say the note to be given to monsieur only when monsieur demanded her whereabout."
Stainton took the envelope that the girl handed tohim and, as the maid left the room, opened it. He was reading it through for the twentieth time when the domestic reappeared.
"A gentleman to see monsieur," she said.
"What gentleman?" asked Stainton, though he guessed the answer to his question.
The maid presented a card.
"Show Captain von Klausen up here," said Jim.
A moment later, husband and lover stood alone together.
"Good-morning," said Stainton.
He held out his hand, and von Klausen, after a swift hesitation, took it.
The Austrian's expression was disturbed. He was unshaven. It was obvious that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. The sight seemed, somehow, to restore his host's self-confidence.
"You will please to pardon for this early intrusion——" von Klausen began.
Stainton smiled.
"You are always so pleasant, Captain," he said, "that you never intrude. Besides, the earlier the better. As it happens, I was just this moment thinking of you."
Von Klausen bowed. There was a brief pause, the Austrian's blue eyes wandering about the room in an endeavour to escape Stainton's glance, and Stainton's eyes fastened thoughtfully upon the Austrian.
"Well?" asked the husband.
Von Klausen coughed.
"Madame is—is——" he started, but stopped short.
"You asked for me. Did you expect to find her up at this time of day?"
"Oh, no—no: certainly not. Pardon me. I forgot the hour."
"Ah, you often forget the hour, don't you, Captain?"
The Austrian braced himself. He raised his chin defiantly. He met the issue directly.
"You refer," he asked, "to my late call of last evening—yes?"
"More or less. I am rather curious about that call."
"Sir, there is nothing about it to excite your curiosity. You asked me to call. There is nothing of my call that you may not learn from your wife."
"No doubt. Of course not; but it may be that I prefer to ask you."
Von Klausen was in a corner. Anger he could have met with anger, but here was something that he did not comprehend.
"I can answer no question," he said, stiffly, "that you have not asked of Mrs. Stainton."
"How do you know that I haven't asked her?"
"I do not know that you have."
"You are sure of that?"
"What do you wish to say, Mr. Stainton?"
"I mean: are you sure that you haven't seen her since you left here last night?"
The Austrian's face expressed a bewilderment that Stainton could not mistrust.
"How is that possible?" inquired von Klausen.
"Oh, of course!" Stainton, convinced, shrugged his shoulders. "However, I do want to make a few inquiries of you."
"Then I prefer to wait until your wife descends, so that you may make them in her presence."
Stainton still held in his left hand the letter that Muriel had addressed to him. He tapped it upon the knuckles of his right hand.
"I am afraid," he said, "that I can't conveniently wait so long. Captain von Klausen, are you in love with my wife?"
The Austrian rose precipitately. His blond moustache bristled.
"Sir!" said he.
"I merely wanted to know."
"At your question I am amazed, sir."
"Oh, I really had a good reason for asking."
"In my country no reason suffices for such a question."
"Hum. Well, you see, neither my wife nor I belong to your country, and you are not in your country now. However, there is no need for you to get excited,Captain. I am sorry if I seem to have intruded on your confidence with a lady; but, to tell you the truth, as my wife has admitted that she is in love with you, I was not unnaturally somewhat curious to discover whether you reciprocated her affection."
Von Klausen's eyes protruded. This husband was, obviously, mad. He might have been driven mad by his discovery. The discovery seemed a thing accomplished. With a great in-taking of breath, the Austrian made answer:
"You have loved your wife. Why shouldIbe ashamed to say that I love her?"
If von Klausen expected an explosion, he was disappointed.
"Well," said Stainton, calmly, "that is one way of looking at it."
"Please?"
"Never mind. You say you love her?"
"Yes."
Stainton looked at him narrowly, from under heavy brows. He regularly tapped his knuckles with the envelope.
"For a day?" he asked.
"Sir?"
"I mean: is this a world-without-end business so far as you are concerned, or is it one of your little amusements by the way?"
The Austrian clenched his teeth.
"Do you mean to insult me, sir?"
"I assure you that I mean nothing of the sort."
"Then you insult your wife!"
"Not at all. I am sorry that you should suppose I could think ill of her."
"If you do not think ill of her, you have no right to ask such a question as this which you have asked."
"It's not impossible that I should be a trifle interested, you know."
"I cannot understand, sir, how you can have the calmness——"
"Why not? She is my wife, you see. What I want to know is whether you are genuinely, sincerely in love with her. You know what I mean. As between man and man now: is this a for-ever-and-ever affair with you?"
The Austrian's bewilderment found vent in a long sigh.
"It is," said he.
"Good," said Stainton. He thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets and bent forward. "If I let her get a divorce from me, will you marry her?" he asked.
"Do you make a joke?"
"I don't consider this a joking matter, Captain. I ask you a frank question and I want a frank answer."
Von Klausen doubted his ears, but he replied:
"I would desire nothing better, but my faith forbids."
"You're sincere in that?"
"Absolutely."
"I mean about your faith, you know."
"Whatever else may be charged against me, sir, heresy or infidelity may not be charged."
"Have a cigar," said Stainton.
He produced his cigar-case, gave the Austrian a cigar, held a steady match while his guest secured a light, and then, with a cigar between his teeth, began to walk rapidly up and down the room, puffing quietly, his hands clasped behind his back.
"Look here," he said. "I am the kind of man that lives to look ahead and prepare for all contingencies. I do not always succeed, but I see no harm in trying. Well. When I first began to think about this thing, I said I would be prepared for the worst, if the worst came. I remembered your prejudices, and I had a fellow do some research work for me at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and yesterday I spent some time in the seminary library at Avignon. My dear fellow, you haven't got a leg to stand on."
"No leg?"
"Not in your objections to divorce and remarriage."
"The Church——"
"Was founded by, or at any rate pretends allegiance to, Jesus of Nazareth. Now, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said—it's not certain—something that may seem to bear out your theories; but that somethingwhich may be twisted to your way was said just about two thousand years ago to a small, outlying, semi-barbarous province. Are you going to try to apply it to civilisation to-day?"
The Austrian had philosophically seated himself in the chair against which Jim had leaned the night before.
"I apply the Sermon on the Mount," said von Klausen.
"Do you? I didn't think you did. But we'll pass that. Your faith bases its argument on the interpretation of that text made by the Early Church, and the Christian Fathers interpreted it in just about two dozen different ways."
"So?" said von Klausen: he would humour this lunatic.
"In the first place, at the beginning of the Christian Era marriage in Rome was a private partnership that the parties could dissolve by mutual consent, or by one notifying the other, as in any other partnership; that was part of Roman law, and for centuries neither the Church nor its Fathers disputed that law. In all the history of the first phase of Christianity in Rome you can't find one time when the whole Church accepted the idea that marriage was indissoluble. Once or twice the Church tried to get the law to require the Church's sanction before decree of divorce would be legally valid, but that was not a denial of divorce; itwas a recognition and an endeavour to capture the control and exploitation of divorces."
"That matters nothing," said von Klausen. "These things were determined otherwise. With all my heart I wish not, but they were."
"How? The Church began by having nothing to do with marriages. Weddings were not held in the churches and so of course marriage was not considered a sacrament. I can give you chapter and verse for everything I say. About the only early council that tried to interfere with the law was the Council of 416, or some time near that. It tried to make Rome abolish divorce, but no emperor listened to it till early in the ninth century—Charlemagne, and he practised divorce himself. Only a little earlier—I think it was in 870—the Church officially allowed dissolution of marriage. In the Middle Ages the episcopal courts allowed divorce and were supported by the popes."
"Did you not find that the Council of Trent declared marriage indissoluble?"
"I expected to, but I didn't. All it said was that if anyone said the Church erred in regarding marriage as indissoluble,anathema sit. The Council of Trent seems to have been trying to patch up a peace with the Eastern Church, which never did regard marriage as indissoluble." He shook his head at von Klausen, smiling gravely, "You see, it won't do," he said.
"You have not quoted the Fathers," the Austrian almost mockingly said.
"I can. I took care of that. I can go back to St. Paul: he allowed divorce when a husband and wife had religious differences. Chrysostom tolerated divorce. So did Justin Martyr and Tertullian. Origen was so afraid of women that he—he mutilated himself, but he allowed divorce for certain causes, and when he condemned it in certain phases, he was careful to say that he was 'debating' rather than affirming."
"St. Augustine is the authority in this matter."
"And no one other person ever said so many contradictory things about it. Why, he thought his marriage was almost as wrong as his affairs without marriage. He considered the social evil a necessity and wouldn't condemn downright polygamy. In one place he admits divorce for adultery; in another he merely 'doubts' if there is any other good cause, and in the third he won't have it at all. When he finally gets down to bed-rock, he says that the text on which the anti-divorce people take their stand is so hazy that anybody is justified in making a mistake."
Stainton paused to relight his cigar.
"But you are talking of divorce," said von Klausen, "not of remarriage."
"Remarriage follows logically," Jim responded. "The one flows from the other."
Von Klausen shrugged.
"Yes," persisted Jim. "Jerome declared against a second marriage after the death of the first husband or wife, but your faith doesn't follow him, does it? The Fathers differed in this just as they did in everything else connected with the subject. The early bishops publicly blessed the remarriage of at least one woman that had divorced her husband on the ground of adultery. Epiphanius said that if a divorced person remarried the Church would absolve him from blame. It was weakness, he said, and I suppose it is, but the Church would tolerate the weakness and wouldn't reject him from its rites or its salvation. Origen didn't approve of remarriage, but he said that it was no more than mere technical adultery, and the furthest that St. Augustine himself could go was to have 'grave doubts' about it."
The Austrian, despite his nervousness, had shown an intellectual interest in Stainton's exposition, but the interest was only intellectual.
"It makes no matter what they said the Church should do," he insisted; "it is what the Church has done. The Church has made marriage a sacrament."
"Doesn't the Church rule that a marriage can be consummated only by an act of the flesh?"
"Yes."
"Then how can what is done by the flesh be a sacrament?"
"I do not know. I know that it is. The Church,whether early or late, has spoken and it has said that marriage is a sacrament indissoluble save by the death of the husband or the wife."
Stainton put down his cigar.
"Captain," he said, "you are in earnest, aren't you?"
The Austrian flushed, but did not flinch.
"I am," said he.
"You love her?"
"I do."
"Truly?"
"With heart and soul, both."
"And there is no changing your faith?"
"No way."
"There isn't any short-cut, any quick trail over the mountain, any bridle-path? A fellow cannot get an Indulgence—nothing of that sort?"
"I wish—I wish deeply that one might; but—no."
"No," said Jim with a little sigh, "I suppose not nowadays. I looked that up, too. Public opinion is pretty strong, and as wrong as usual." He seemed to shake the subject from him. "And," he ended, "now that I have bored you with my cheap pedantry, I remember that I have been a bad host: I have not asked you your errand."
What change was coming over the madman now?
"My errand?" asked von Klausen.
"Exactly. You come here at about 9 A.M., and Itake up your valuable time with a discussion of ecclesiastical polity. What was it that you wanted to see me about?"
What the Austrian had wanted he had long since learned. He had no sooner left the villa on the night previous than he began to doubt whether his supposition that Stainton was unsuspicious was quite so well founded as he had at first imagined. He recalled a certain constraint in the husband's deportment, and then he imagined other tokens that had not been displayed. In the end, he decided to return to Muriel's home at the earliest possible moment, discover whether there were any real danger and, if there was, face its consequences. Now, however he learned that Muriel had made some sort of confession to Stainton and that Stainton had received that confession in a manner inexplicable to von Klausen. Confronted with Jim's abrupt question, he did not know what to say, and so he found himself saying:
"I should like to see Mrs. Stainton."
Stainton whistled.
"I wish you could," he answered. "Indeed, indeed, I wish you could, my boy; but I am sorry to say that it is out of the question."
"You forbid it?" Von Klausen wished that these confounded Americans could be brought to see the simplicity of settling complex difficulties by the code of honour.
"I didn't say that I forbade it; I said it was out of the question. I meant that it was out of the question."
The Austrian bent forward, hot anger in his eyes.
"Do you dare to deprive her of her liberty?" he asked.
"On the contrary, my dear sir, she has taken her liberty. She has gone away."
The thing seemed incredible to von Klausen:
"Away from Marseilles?"
Stainton nodded.
"That's it," he agreed.
There shot through von Klausen's mind the thought that this lunatic had killed her. If so, he would surely kill the lunatic or be killed in the attempt.
"I don't believe it," he said. "I believe that you are——"
"Captain von Klausen, I have learned all that I want to know about your religious faith, and I am not in the slightest degree interested in the question of your other beliefs. I say to you that my wife has gone away, and I am afraid that, whether you like it or not, you are obliged, for the present, to accept my word."
"I will not accept your word!"
"Pardon me, but I don't see what else you can very well do. Of course, you might watch the house, but the Corniche gets very hot by midday."
"You joke. You can joke about such a thing!"
"I have never been so serious as I am now."
Stainton emphasised his words with a gesture of his left hand, in which he held the now crumpled letter.
"That letter!" said von Klausen with sudden inspiration. "It is from her!"
"It is."
"Ah, you have intercepted a letter from her to me!"
"I am not in the habit of reading my wife's personal letters to other people—when she writes any. This note is addressed to me, and it is this note that tells me of her departure."
"It tells you where she is going?"
"It tells me that and more. It tells me that she is sorry for a wound she thinks she has inflicted on my feelings, and she proposed to look for rest in a certain secluded place."
The Austrian's blue eyes brightened.
"A secluded place?" he repeated, excitedly.
"Exactly; but I shall not tell you its name. I shall keep that to myself until I have had another interview with my wife."
The Captain looked closely at Stainton.
"You mean to follow and chastise her?" he asked.
"There," said Stainton, quietly, "I think we reach a point where the matter becomes entirely my own affair."
If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:
"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus (5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) Gémenos to the (4 hrs.) Hôtellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the (5½ M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the Hôtellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, ¾ hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees—The Ste. Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the mountains among which it lies."
So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen'slast residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it might quite as well be across the celestial border.
Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.
The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.
She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before, assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised herselfto him in that long ago and far away New York—how tall and strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master, of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed her to his breast—how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of such short life?
In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement, as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of any physical contact with him made her shiver.
Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?
Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In herprimal impulses she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding, wanted to hide and suffer alone.
She had some money in her purse—a thousand francs. She wrote the note to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.
It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas, they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes, looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view, only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve thatshowed even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came, among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hôtellerie that had for many years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of its builders.
They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.
A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon her knees and prayed.
She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.
She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of smooth rock that leanedfar forward from the clouds as if it were about to fall.
Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted natural balcony, was the grotto.
Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primæval forest, to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered von Klausen's words:
"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant sheep-bells, and the memory——"
She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.
He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.
"You followed?"
He nodded briefly.
"Why did you follow me?" she asked.
It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke he spoke calmly and gently.
"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last night."
Muriel braced herself against the parapet.
"Very well," said she.
He understood her.
"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.
His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up, far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where, somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little chapel of St. Pilon.
"Why not?" she asked.
"Wait and you will understand."
She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear. She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.
"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for, but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you—I promised to love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be loved, you deserve it. And yetI don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with you. If you want me to, we can start right away."
But Stainton would not yet hear of that.
"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"
"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"
"I could never do that, Muriel."
"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you—you, my husband—and I do—I do——"
The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:
"You do love him?"
She bowed her dark head in assent.
"You are very sure?" he asked.
"Very, very sure."
"So that it was not"—he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to put the question—"it was not merely passion?"
Muriel looked straight into his eyes.
"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only twice even so much as kissed him."
Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been baser.
There was a long pause.
"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."
He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.
"And—von Klausen," he presently pursued—"you will let me ask it, won't you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure that his love for you is—is of the same sort that yours is for him?"
"Quite."
"Why?"
"On the same evidence."
"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."
She gave a short cry.
"Is he hurt?" she asked.
"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by motor-bus, to learn—what I have learned; and to say—what I am about to say."
"You told him where I was?"
"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving a note in which you told methat you were bound for a certain secluded spot to be alone."
Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.
"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me of this place—told me only the other day in much those words."
Stainton smiled a little.
"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."
"But he will follow!"
"No doubt."
"You—you—why do you speak so?"
"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably come the whole way by motor."
"He will—he will! He will know that you have come——"
"I told him that I meant to."
"And he will think you mean to punish me——"
"Yes."
"And—oh, don't you see?—he will come to protect me!"
The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.
"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do—and what I feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spokeout plainly to me, and I am beginning to see—even I, who wish not to see it—that you were not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."
He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.
"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age and—something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours. I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong it. I decided that youth was a state of mind—that it could be retained by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."
He released her arm.
"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat of passionfused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I thought I could hold you. Hold you—as if that could be love which must be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'—but—I was giving you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."
Her large eyes were tender with tears.
"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean—all this?"
"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must pay the price."
Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth, generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of all the world can silence it.
"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."
Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured that he was speaking truth.
"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each other, I mean to step aside."
She looked at him blankly.
"Step aside?" she repeated.
"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."
Muriel's face quivered.
"So that I—that we——" she started.
"So that you and von Klausen may marry."
"But we can't anyhow! Oh—that's the horror of it! That's why the thing can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."
Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of pain.
"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and now——"
"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage——"
"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am only wondering——"
His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases of the colloquial.
"Look there!" he broke off.
Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was bounding: fevered, lithe, young.
Muriel clutched the parapet.
"It's Franz!" she said.
"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hôtellerie. He must have left the car there and come right on."
"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what shall I do?"
"See him, of course."
"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it all over again? I'm tired—I'm so tired!"
Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward translate into a good-bye.
"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."
"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life—you've said so yourself."
Stainton smiled.
"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to Marseilles—Try it,Muriel—for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never say die!"
He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer. He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down the steps.
She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young head and shoulders came above the steps.
"Franz!" she cried.
The Austrian hurried to her.
Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously, his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations:the sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St. Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the death that he had all his life feared.
He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the panorama of the Chaîne de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles, from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue, cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke that was blue.
He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it and the drop; looked over and then instinctivelyfell on his knees and so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.
He saw below him—far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue rock—the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the parapet, the precipice continue to the primæval forest, the trees of which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him. Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.
He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open. He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman thing....
Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.
He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that thought his thoughts lost allorder. He recalled how happy he had been with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?
He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell—a foot, over a stone.
He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.
Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he gained the edge, looked over——
One little push would do it; one leap.
His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocksbefore him until his fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the chapel and to safety.
He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined. He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love, to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she, unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him detest each other.
The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a secret, a secret of which they mightnever rid themselves. He, unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.
He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.
They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.
"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly ridiculous."
Stainton was thinking:
"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."
What he said was:
"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I had a little tumble."
They both started forward.
"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.
"No—no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You can't fix it up?"
She shook her head.
He looked at von Klausen.
"You"—he wet his lips with his thick tongue—"you won't change your prejudices?"
The Austrian flushed.
"I cannot change my religion," said he.
Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.
"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry, Captain; but the bus leaves the Hôtellerie in half an hour, and we've got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."
HER SOUL AND HER BODY, by Louise Closser Hale
The struggle between the spirit and the flesh of a young girl early in life compelled to make her own way. Exposed to the temptations of life in a big city, the contest between her better and lower natures is described with psychological analysis and tender sympathy. Absorbingly interesting.
HELL'S PLAYGROUND, by Ida Vera Simonton
This book deals with primal conditions in a land where "there ain't no ten commandments"; where savagery, naked and unashamed, is not confined to the blacks. It is a record of the life in the African tropics and it is a powerful and fascinating story of a scene that has rarely been depicted in fiction.
THE MYSTERY OF No. 47, by J. Storer Clouston
This is a most ingenious detective story—a thriller in every sense of the word. The reader is led cleverly on until he is at a loss to know what to expect, and, completely baffled, is unable to lay the book down until he has finished the story and satisfied his perplexity.
THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
Author of "The House of Bondage," etc.
By "The Sentence of Silence" is meant that sentence of reticence pronounced upon the subject of sex. That which means the continuance of the human race is the one thing of which no one is permitted to speak. In this book the subject is dealt with frankly.
THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
Author of "The House of Bondage," etc.
The inexpressible conditions of human bondage of many young girls and women in our cities demand fearless and uncompromising warfare. The terrible peril that lingers just around the corner from every American home must be stamped out with relentless purpose.
TO-MORROW, by Victoria Cross
Author of "Life's Shop Window," etc.
Critics agree that this is Victoria Cross' greatest novel. Those who have read "Life's Shop Window," "Five Nights," "Anna Lombard," and similar books by this author will ask no further recommendation. "To-morrow" is a real novel—not a collection of short stories.
Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
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TO-DAY, by George H. Broadhurst and Abraham S. Schomer
If you want real human interest, real heart throbs, be sure to read "To-Day."
If you loved your wife and she committed the greatest wrong, would you forgive her?
Get your answer in the sensational novel hit of the year.
AT BAY, by Page Philips
Who was the culprit?
The police accused a prominent society girl, and Aline Graham herself thought she was guilty. This remarkable detective story unravels the mystery in a series of thrilling scenes.
THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, by Owen Davis
Sometimes a respectable father revolts from the bondage imposed upon him by an extravagant wife and family.
Charles Nelson needed affection. Lacking it at home, he sought it elsewhere, thereby stumbling into a most amazing entanglement.
THE SECRET OF THE NIGHT, by Gaston Leroux
Rouletabille has returned! The hero of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room!" He appears again in the most successful mystery story of the year.
THE APPLE OF DISCORD, by Henry C. Rowland
Calvert Lanier, and his floating studio, obtrudes himself upon an exclusive summer colony and succeeds in kissing the three most exclusive and fairest members of the colony, and later, gets all at sea, in more senses than one, with two of them.
RUNNING SANDS, by Reginald Wright Kauffman
In the skillful hands of the author this novel runs admirably and convincingly true to life; it reveals a depth of insight into human nature, a grasp of the real forces of life.
Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
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SIMPLY WOMEN, by Marcel Prévost
"Marcel Prévost, of whom a critic remarked that his forte was the analysis of the souls and bodies of a type half virgin and half courtesan, is now available in a volume of selections admirably translated by R. I. Brandon-Vauvillez."—San Francisco Chronicle.
GUARDIAN ANGELS, by Marcel Prévost
"'Guardian Angels' is elegance and irony—and only for those youths who are dedicated to sex hygiene and eugenic lore."—New York Times.
A true picture of Parisian life with all its glitter and fascination.
WHOSO FINDETH A WIFE, by J. Wesley Putnam
Being an answer to Hall Caine's "The Woman Thou Gavest Me"
Elizabeth Ferris marries without love. How she comes to a broader conception of life and to love her husband in time to prevent a tragedy is told in this story.
THE ADVENTURES OF A NICE YOUNG MAN, by Aix. Joseph and Potiphar's Wife Up-to-Date
A handsome young man, employed as a lady's private secretary, is bound to meet with interesting adventures.
HER REASON, Anonymous
A frank exposure of Modern Marriage. "Her Reason" shows the deplorable results of the process at work to-day among the rich, whose daughters are annually offered for sale in the markets of the world.
LIFE OF MY HEART, by Victoria Cross
How Love revenges herself on those who disregard her plainest promptings is the theme of this novel, full of humor, pathos, and fidelity to the facts of life.
THE NIGHT OF TEMPTATION, by Victoria Cross
The self-sacrifice of woman in love. The heroine gives herself to a man for his own sake. He is her hero, her god, and she declines to marry him until satisfied that he cannot live without her.
THE LAW OF LIFE, by Carl Werner
Helen Willoughby is beautiful and attractive. Among her lovers there are two, both strong, both determined to win her, who presently enter into a bitter rivalry for her hand.
Wherever you bought this volume you can purchase any other of the Crown Series at the same price; or they can be obtained from the publishers.
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