The cat that fell from the top of the Washington monument, and scampered off unhurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a certain painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been seen to depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated Norman stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone wall of good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered pebble, some ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected over the wall, snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned aforetime; it was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the painter-man.
I could count on little less than a week of idleness within the confines of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker long-chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were strutting on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest from the ample figure of our maitre d’hotel reposing in a rustic chair which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when first occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee’s upper eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a hazy gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon his left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant jerk, without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou, rolling and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac, watched with button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost of some convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter.
A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a deep inquiring rumble—the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in the direction of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply for a moment to make sure I had heard aright.
The name was repeated.
“Here I am,” I called, “in the pavilion, if you wish to see me.”
“Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir.” With that the professor’s great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside. “I have come to condole with you, if you allow it.”
“To smoke with me, too, I hope,” I said, not a little pleased.
“That I will do,” he returned, and came in slowly, walking with perceptible lameness. “The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi” he continued, seating himself with a cavernous groan. “I am your confrere in illness, my dear sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back.”
“I hope it is not painful.”
“Ha, it is so-so,” he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his eyes, dazzled by the sun. “There is more of me than of most men—more to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war.”
“You’ll take a cigarette?”
“I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe.”
He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch. “Always my pipe for me,” he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. “Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul.” And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, “It is my first pipe since yesterday.”
“That is being a good smoker,” I ventured sententiously; “to whet indulgence with abstinence.”
“My dear sir,” he protested, “I am a man without even enough virtue to be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now.”
“He has never smoked, your young friend?” I asked, glancing at my visitor rather curiously, I fear.
“Mr. Saffren has no vices.” Professor Keredec replaced his silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence. “He is in good condition, all pure, like little children—and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very much from the window”—there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor’s torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle—“yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady some days ago.”
“You say your young friend’s name is Saffren?”
“Oliver Saffren.” The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the seeming shadow upon my visitor’s forehead became a reality, deepening to a look of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: “It is about him that I have come to talk to you.”
“I shall be very glad,” I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality aside with a gesture of remonstrance.
“Ha, my dear sir,” he cried; “but you are a man of feeling! We are both old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth! It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman’s excuses when he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject; it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!”
“No, no,” I protested hastily. “The name of Professor Keredec—”
“The name of NO man,” he thundered, interrupting, “can protect his reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I know what you think. You think, ‘He is a nice fine man, that old professor, oh, very nice—only he hides behind the curtains sometimes! Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.’ Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you have been thinking, my dear sir!”
“Not at all,” I laughed; “I thought you might fear thatIwas a spy.”
“Eh?” He became sharply serious upon the instant. “What made you think that?”
“I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter.”
“So! And THAT is all,” he returned, with evident relief. “No, my dear sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what kind of a man you are. And so,” he concluded with an opening of the hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for concealment, “and so I have watched you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The explanation is so simple: it was necessary.”
“Because of—of Mr. Saffren?” I said slowly, and with some trepidation.
“Precisely.” The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Because I am sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am—how should it be said?—perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian.”
“I see.”
“Forgive me,” he rejoined quickly, “but I am afraid you do not see. I am not his guardian by the law.”
“I had not supposed that you were,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case—his case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane.”
“Ha, my dear sir, you are right!” exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me, much pleased. “You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now much MORE sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like the little children’s mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more—ha, at the greatest, a year from now—and he will not be different any longer; he will be like the rest of us. Only”—the professor leaned forward and his big fist came down on the arm of his chair—“he shall be better than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now,” he continued, leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential tone, “it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily, those same people might meet him again after a while. ‘Ha,’ they would say, ‘there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!’ And so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this quiet place where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any foolish people. But, my dear sir”—he leaned forward again, and spoke emphatically—“it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening but every evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone. It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the world, but—a thousand saints!—let us be civilised to one another!”
“With all my heart,” I said.
“Ha! I wish you to know my young man,” Keredec went on. “You will like him—no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him—and he is your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make friends, for he needs them.”
“I think he has a host of them,” said I, “in Professor Keredec.”
My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and sighed. “That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor Keredec. And yet,” he went on sadly, “it is all the friends that poor boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?”
Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: “You will join me at the table on my veranda, won’t you? I can hobble that far but not much farther.”
Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most closely screened by the vines and said:
“May the table be placed yonder?”
“Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone.”
“Ha, that is good,” he exclaimed. “It is not human for a Frenchman to eat in the house in good weather.”
“It is a pity,” I said, “that I should have been such a bugbear.”
This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions were altogether due to my presence at the inn.
And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Keredec’s mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.
“The reproach is deserved,” he returned, after a pause. “It is to be wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we had the courage, or the slyness”—he laughed—“to investigate.”
I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his back as he rose.
“Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!”
He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.
We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse. He crossed our vision and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a quick picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she was not in white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in recognising her. At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of foot-steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled pigeons fluttered up from the garden-path, betaking themselves to flight, and “that other monsieur” came leaping across the courtyard, through the archway and into the road.
“Glouglou! Look quickly!” he called loudly, in French, as he came; “Who is that lady?”
Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth. Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway, carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.
“That lady, monsieur?” he gasped, checking himself at the young man’s side and gazing after the trap, “that is Madame d’Armand.”
“Madame d’Armand,” Saffren repeated the name slowly. “Her name is Madame d’Armand.”
“Yes, monsieur,” said Amedee complacently; “it is an American lady who has married a French nobleman.”
Like most painters, I have supposed the tools of my craft harder to manipulate than those of others. The use of words, particularly, seemed readier, handier for the contrivance of effects than pigments. I thought the language of words less elusive than that of colour, leaving smaller margin for unintended effects; and, believing in complacent good faith that words conveyed exact meanings exactly, it was my innocent conception that almost anything might be so described in words that all who read must inevitably perceive that thing precisely. If this were true, there would be little work for the lawyers, who produce such tortured pages in the struggle to be definite, who swing riches from one family to another, save men from violent death or send them to it, and earn fortunes for themselves through the dangerous inadequacies of words. I have learned how great was my mistake, and now I am wishing I could shift paper for canvas, that I might paint the young man who came to interest me so deeply. I wish I might present him here in colour instead of trusting to this unstable business of words, so wily and undependable, with their shimmering values, that you cannot turn your back upon them for two minutes but they will be shouting a hundred things which they were not meant to tell.
To make the best of necessity: what I have written of him—my first impressions—must be taken as the picture, although it be but a gossamer sketch in the air, instead of definite work with well-ground pigments to show forth a portrait, to make you see flesh and blood. It must take the place of something contrived with my own tools to reveal what the following days revealed him to me, and what it was about him (evasive of description) which made me so soon, as Keredec wished, his friend.
Life among our kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes. Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely shifting object for subject—and his wife’s face, when he shines for a circle, is worth a glance. With no further apology, I declare that I am a person who has felt few positive likes or dislikes for people in this life, and I did deeply like my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons. Liking for both men increased with acquaintance, and for the younger I came to feel, in addition, a kind of championship, doubtless in some measure due to what Keredec had told me of him, but more to that half-humourous sense of protectiveness that we always have for those young people whose untempered and innocent outlook makes us feel, as we say, “a thousand years old.”
The afternoon following our first dinner together, the two, in returning from their walk, came into the pavilion with cheerful greetings, instead of going to their rooms as usual, and Keredec, declaring that the open air had “dispersed” his rheumatism, asked if he might overhaul some of my little canvases and boards. I explained that they consisted mainly of “notes” for future use, but consented willingly; whereupon he arranged a number of them as for exhibition and delivered himself impromptu of the most vehemently instructive lecture on art I had ever heard. Beginning with the family, the tribe, and the totem-pole, he was able to demonstrate a theory that art was not only useful to society but its primary necessity; a curious thought, probably more attributable to the fact that he was a Frenchman than to that of his being a scientist.
“And here,” he said in the course of his demonstration, pointing to a sketch which I had made one morning just after sunrise—“here you can see real sunshine. One certain day there came those few certain moment’ at the sunrise when the light was like this. Those few moment’, where are they? They have disappeared, gone for eternally. They went”—he snapped his fingers—“like that. Yet here they are—ha!—forever!”
“But it doesn’t look like sunshine,” said Oliver Saffren hesitatingly, stating a disconcerting but incontrovertible truth; “it only seems to look like it because—isn’t it because it’s so much brighter than the rest of the picture? I doubt if paint CAN look like sunshine.” He turned from the sketch, caught Keredec’s gathering frown, and his face flushed painfully. “Ah!” he cried, “I shouldn’t have said it?”
I interposed to reassure him, exclaiming that it were a godsend indeed, did all our critics merely speak the plain truth as they see it for themselves. The professor would not have it so, and cut me off.
“No, no, no, my dear sir!” he shouted. “You speak with kindness, but you put some wrong ideas in his head!”
Saffren’s look of trouble deepened. “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “I thought you said always to speak the truth just as I see it.” “I have telled you,” Keredec declared vehemently, “nothing of the kind!”
“But only yesterday—”
“Never!”
“I understood—”
“Then you understood only one-half! I say, ‘Speak the truth as you see it, when you speak.’ I did not tell you to speak! How much time have you give’ to study sunshine and paint? What do you know about them?”
“Nothing,” answered the other humbly.
A profound rumbling was heard, and the frown disappeared from Professor Keredec’s brow like the vanishing of the shadow of a little cloud from the dome of some great benevolent and scientific institute. He dropped a weighty hand on his young friend’s shoulder, and, in high good-humour, thundered:
“Then you are a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it warms you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about them to a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the night and the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the ocean. You will tell that to the astronomer? Ha! The truth is what the masters see. When you know what they see, you may speak.”
At dinner the night before, it had struck me that Saffren was a rather silent young man by habit, and now I thought I began to understand the reason. I hinted as much, saying, “That would make a quiet world of it.”
“All the better, my dear sir!” The professor turned beamingly upon me and continued, dropping into a Whistlerian mannerism that he had sometimes: “You must not blame that great wind of a Keredec for preaching at other people to listen. It gives the poor man more room for himself to talk!”
I found his talk worth hearing.
I would show you, if I could, our pleasant evenings of lingering, after coffee, behind the tremulous screen of honeysuckle, with the night very dark and quiet beyond the warm nimbus of our candle-light, the faces of my two companions clear-obscure in a mellow shadow like the middle tones of a Rembrandt, and the professor, good man, talking wonderfully of everything under the stars and over them,—while Oliver Saffren and I sat under the spell of the big, kind voice, the young man listening with the same eagerness which marked him when he spoke. It was an eagerness to understand, not to interrupt.
These were our evenings. In the afternoons the two went for their walk as usual, though now they did not plunge out of sight of the main road with the noticeable haste which Amedee had described. As time pressed, I perceived the caution of Keredec visibly slackening. Whatever he had feared, the obscurity and continued quiet of LES TROIS PIGEONS reassured him; he felt more and more secure in this sheltered retreat, “far out of the world,” and obviously thought no danger imminent. So the days went by, uneventful for my new friends,—days of warm idleness for me. Let them go unnarrated; we pass to the event.
My ankle had taken its wonted time to recover. I was on my feet again and into the woods—not traversing, on the way, a certain poppy-sprinkled field whence a fine Norman stallion snorted ridicule over a wall. But the fortune of Keredec was to sink as I rose. His summer rheumatism returned, came to grips with him, laid him low. We hobbled together for a day or so, then I threw away my stick and he exchanged his for an improvised crutch. By the time I was fit to run, he was able to do little better than to creep—might well have taken to his bed. But as he insisted that his pupil should not forego the daily long walks and the health of the forest, it came to pass that Saffren often made me the objective of his rambles. At dinner he usually asked in what portion of the forest I should be painting late the next afternoon, and I got in the habit of expecting him to join me toward sunset. We located each other through a code of yodeling that we arranged; his part of these vocal gymnastics being very pleasant to hear, for he had a flexible, rich voice. I shudder to recall how largely my own performances partook of the grotesque. But in the forest where were no musical persons (I supposed) to take hurt from whatever noise I made, I would let go with all the lungs I had; he followed the horrid sounds to their origin, and we would return to the inn together.
On these homeward walks I found him a good companion, and that is something not to be under-valued by a selfish man who lives for himself and his own little ways and his own little thoughts, and for very little else,—which is the kind of man (as I have already confessed) that I was—deserving the pity of all happily or unhappily married persons.
Responsive in kind to either a talkative mood or a silent one, always gentle in manner, and always unobtrusively melancholy, Saffren never took the initiative, though now and then he asked a question about some rather simple matter which might be puzzling him. Whatever the answer, he usually received it in silence, apparently turning the thing over and over and inside out in his mind. He was almost tremulously sensitive, yet not vain, for he was neither afraid nor ashamed to expose his ignorance, his amazing lack of experience. He had a greater trouble, one that I had not fathomed. Sometimes there came over his face a look of importunate wistfulness and distressed perplexity, and he seemed on the point of breaking out with something that he wished to tell me—or to ask me, for it might have been a question—but he always kept it back. Keredec’s training seldom lost its hold upon him.
I had gone back to my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I sat in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding harlequin for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm in the woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects within hearing they must have been asleep; the quivering flight of a butterfly in that languid air seemed, by contrast, quite a commotion; a humming-bird would have made a riot.
I heard the light snapping of a twig and a swish of branches from the direction in which I faced; evidently some one was approaching the glade, though concealed from me for the moment by the winding of the path. Taking it for Saffren, as a matter of course (for we had arranged to meet at that time and place), I raised my voice in what I intended for a merry yodel of greeting.
I yodeled loud, I yodeled long. Knowing my own deficiencies in this art, I had adopted the cunning sinner’s policy toward sin and made a joke of it: thus, since my best performance was not unsuggestive of calamity in the poultry yard, I made it worse. And then and there, when my mouth was at its widest in the production of these shocking ulla-hootings, the person approaching came round a turn in the path, and within full sight of me. To my ultimate, utmost horror, it was Madame d’Armand.
I grew so furiously red that it burned me. I had not the courage to run, though I could have prayed that she might take me for what I seemed—plainly a lunatic, whooping the lonely peace of the woods into pandemonium—and turn back. But she kept straight on, must inevitably reach the glade and cross it, and I calculated wretchedly that at the rate she was walking, unhurried but not lagging, it would be about thirty seconds before she passed me. Then suddenly, while I waited in sizzling shame, a clear voice rang out from a distance in an answering yodel to mine, and I thanked heaven for its mercies; at least she would see that my antics had some reason.
She stopped short, in a half-step, as if a little startled, one arm raised to push away a thin green branch that crossed the path at shoulder-height; and her attitude was so charming as she paused, detained to listen by this other voice with its musical youthfulness, that for a second I thought crossly of all the young men in the world.
There was a final call, clear and loud as a bugle, and she turned to the direction whence it came, so that her back was toward me. Then Oliver Saffren came running lightly round the turn of the path, near her and facing her.
He stopped as short as she had.
Her hand dropped from the slender branch, and pressed against her side.
He lifted his hat and spoke to her, and I thought she made some quick reply in a low voice, though I could not be sure.
She held that startled attitude a moment longer, then turned and crossed the glade so hurriedly that it was almost as if she ran away from him. I had moved aside with my easel and camp-stool, but she passed close to me as she entered the path again on my side of the glade. She did not seem to see me, her dark eyes stared widely straight ahead, her lips were parted, and she looked white and frightened.
She disappeared very quickly in the windings of the path.
He came on more slowly, his eyes following her as she vanished, then turning to me with a rather pitiful apprehension—a look like that I remember to have seen (some hundreds of years ago) on the face of a freshman, glancing up from his book to find his doorway ominously filling with sophomores.
I stepped out to meet him, indignant upon several counts, most of all upon his own. I knew there was no offence in his heart, not the remotest rude intent, but the fact was before me that he had frightened a woman, had given this very lovely guest of my friends good cause to hold him a boor, if she did not, indeed, think him (as she probably thought me) an outright lunatic! I said:
“You spoke to that lady!” And my voice sounded unexpectedly harsh and sharp to my own ears, for I had meant to speak quietly.
“I know—I know. It—it was wrong,” he stammered. “I knew I shouldn’t—and I couldn’t help it.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth; I couldn’t!”
I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had said was only the truth. “I don’t understand; it was all beyond me,” he added huskily.
“What was it you said to her?”
“I spoke her name—‘Madame d’Armand.’”
“You said more than that!”
“I asked her if she would let me see her again.”
“What else?”
“Nothing,” he answered humbly. “And then she—then for a moment it seemed—for a moment she didn’t seem to be able to speak—”
“I should think not!” I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical laughter. He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following the aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting his flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter: this spectacle of a grown man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered confession.
“But she did say something to you, didn’t she?” I asked finally, with the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.
“Yes—after that moment.”
“Well, what was it?”
“She said, ‘Not now!’ That was all.”
“I suppose that was all she had breath for! It was just the inconsequent and meaningless thing a frightened woman WOULD say!”
“Meaningless?” he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.
“Did you take it for an appointment?” I roared, quite out of patience, and losing my temper completely.
“No, no, no! She said only that, and then—”
“Then she turned and ran away from you!”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing painfully.
“That PLEASED you,” I stormed, “to frighten a woman in the woods—to make her feel that she can’t walk here in safety! You ENJOY doing things like that?”
He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.
I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said. This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude until I had finished—and more than finished.
“There—and that’s all!” I said desperately, when the things were strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. “Let’s be off, in heaven’s name!”
At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see that he had grown very pale.
“I wouldn’t have frightened her for the world,” he said, and his voice and his whole body shook with a strange violence. “I wouldn’t have frightened her to please the angels in heaven!”
A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers Keredec’s training had built for his protection, they were down now.
“You think I told a lie!” he cried. “You think I lied when I said I couldn’t help speaking to her!”
“No, no,” I said earnestly. “I didn’t mean—”
“Words!” he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling vehemence. “And what does it matter? You CAN’T understand. When YOU want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I look back—AH!” He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent syllable. “I look back and it’s all—BLIND! All these things you CAN do and CAN’T do—all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows—butIdon’t know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don’t know. I haven’t HAD my life. It’s gone! All I have is words that Keredec has said to me, and it’s like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d’Armand? Can life itself teach you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
“I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body,” he went on, with the same wild intensity, “rather than trouble her or frighten her, but I couldn’t help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to see her again—the feeling that I MUST—whatever you say or do, whatever Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do. And I will! It isn’t a thing to choose to do, or not to do. I can’t help it any more than I can help being alive!”
He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain. I made nervous haste to seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly:
“But if it should distress the lady?”
“Yes—then I could keep away. But I must know that.”
“I think you might know it by her running away—and by her look,” I said mildly. “Didn’t you?”
“NO!” And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.
“Well, well,” I said, “let’s be on our way, or the professor will be wondering if he is to dine alone.”
Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward home. He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain control of himself. I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were upon the main road near the Baudry cottage. Then he said in a steadier voice:
“Why should it distress her?”
“Well, you see,” I began, not slackening the pace “there are formalities—”
“Ah, I know,” he interrupted, with an impatient laugh. “Keredec once took me to a marionette show—all the little people strung on wires; they couldn’t move any other way. And so you mustn’t talk to a woman until somebody whose name has been spoken to you speaks yours to her! Do you call that a rule of nature?”
“My dear boy,” I laughed in some desperation, “we must conform to it, ordinarily, no matter whose rule it is.”
“Do you think Madame d’Armand cares for little forms like that?” he asked challengingly.
“She does,” I assured him with perfect confidence. “And, for the hundredth time, you must have seen how you troubled her.”
“No,” he returned, with the same curious obstinacy, “I don’t believe it. There was something, but it wasn’t trouble. We looked straight at each other; I saw her eyes plainly, and it was—” he paused and sighed, a sudden, brilliant smile upon his lips—“it was very—it was very strange!”
There was something so glad and different in his look that—like any other dried-up old blunderer in my place—I felt an instant tendency to laugh. It was that heathenish possession, the old insanity of the risibles, which makes a man think it a humourous thing that his friend should be discovered in love.
But before I spoke, before I quite smiled outright, I was given the grace to see myself in the likeness of a leering stranger trespassing in some cherished inclosure: a garden where the gentlest guests must always be intruders, and only the owner should come. The best of us profane it readily, leaving the coarse prints of our heels upon its paths, mauling and man-handling the fairy blossoms with what pudgy fingers! Comes the poet, ruthlessly leaping the wall and trumpeting indecently his view-halloo of the chase, and, after him, the joker, snickering and hopeful of a kill among the rose-beds; for this has been their hunting-ground since the world began. These two have made us miserably ashamed of the divine infinitive, so that we are afraid to utter the very words “to love,” lest some urchin overhear and pursue us with a sticky forefinger and stickier taunts. It is little to my credit that I checked the silly impulse to giggle at the eternal marvel, and went as gently as I could where I should not have gone at all.
“But if you were wrong,” I said, “if it did distress her, and if it happened that she has already had too much that was distressing in her life—”
“You know something about her!” he exclaimed. “You know—”
“I do not,” I interrupted in turn. “I have only a vague guess; I may be altogether mistaken.”
“What is it that you guess?” he demanded abruptly. “Who made her suffer?”
“I think it was her husband,” I said, with a lack of discretion for which I was instantly sorry, fearing with reason that I had added a final blunder to the long list of the afternoon. “That is,” I added, “if my guess is right.”
He stopped short in the road, detaining me by the arm, the question coming like a whip-crack: sharp, loud, violent.
“Is he alive?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, beginning to move forward; “and this is foolish talk—especially on my part!”
“But I want to know,” he persisted, again detaining me.
“And I DON’T know!” I returned emphatically. “Probably I am entirely mistaken in thinking that I know anything of her whatever. I ought not to have spoken, unless I knew what I was talking about, and I’d rather not say any more until I do know.”
“Very well,” he said quickly. “Will you tell me then?”
“Yes—if you will let it go at that.”
“Thank you,” he said, and with an impulse which was but too plainly one of gratitude, offered me his hand. I took it, and my soul was disquieted within me, for it was no purpose of mine to set inquiries on foot in regard to the affairs of “Madame d’Armand.”
It was early dusk, that hour, a little silvered but still clear, when the edges of things are beginning to grow indefinite, and usually our sleepy countryside knew no tranquiller time of day; but to-night, as we approached the inn, there were strange shapes in the roadway and other tokens that events were stirring there.
From the courtyard came the sounds of laughter and chattering voices. Before the entrance stood a couple of open touring-cars; the chauffeurs engaged in cooling the rear tires with buckets of water brought by a personage ordinarily known as Glouglou, whose look and manner, as he performed this office for the leathern dignitaries, so awed me that I wondered I had ever dared address him with any presumption of intimacy. The cars were great and opulent, of impressive wheel-base, and fore-and-aft they were laden intricately with baggage: concave trunks fitting behind the tonneaus, thin trunks fastened upon the footboards, green, circular trunks adjusted to the spare tires, all deeply coated with dust. Here were fineries from Paris, doubtless on their way to flutter over the gay sands of Trouville, and now wandering but temporarily from the road; for such splendours were never designed to dazzle us of Madame Brossard’s.
We were crossing before the machines when one of the drivers saw fit to crank his engine (if that is the knowing phrase) and the thing shook out the usual vibrating uproar. It had a devastating effect upon my companion. He uttered a wild exclamation and sprang sideways into me, almost upsetting us both.
“What on earth is the matter?” I asked. “Did you think the car was starting?”
He turned toward me a face upon which was imprinted the sheer, blank terror of a child. It passed in an instant however, and he laughed.
“I really didn’t know. Everything has been so quiet always, out here in the country—and that horrible racket coming so suddenly—”
Laughing with him, I took his arm and we turned to enter the archway. As we did so we almost ran into a tall man who was coming out, evidently intending to speak to one of the drivers.
The stranger stepped back with a word of apology, and I took note of him for a fellow-countryman, and a worldly buck of fashion indeed, almost as cap-a-pie the automobilist as my mysterious spiller of cider had been the pedestrian. But this was no game-chicken; on the contrary (so far as a glance in the dusk of the archway revealed him), much the picture for framing in a club window of a Sunday morning; a seasoned, hard-surfaced, knowing creature for whom many a head waiter must have swept previous claimants from desired tables. He looked forty years so cannily that I guessed him to be about fifty.
We were passing him when he uttered an ejaculation of surprise and stepped forward again, holding out his hand to my companion, and exclaiming:
“Where did YOU come from? I’d hardly have known you.”
Oliver seemed unconscious of the proffered hand; he stiffened visibly and said:
“I think there must be some mistake.”
“So there is,” said the other promptly. “I have been misled by a resemblance. I beg your pardon.”
He lifted his cap slightly, going on, and we entered the courtyard to find a cheerful party of nine or ten men and women seated about a couple of tables. Like the person we had just encountered, they all exhibited a picturesque elaboration of the costume permitted by their mode of travel; making effective groupings in their ample draperies of buff and green and white, with glimpses of a flushed and pretty face or two among the loosened veilings. Upon the tables were pots of tea, plates of sandwiches, Madame Brossard’s three best silver dishes heaped with fruit, and some bottles of dry champagne from the cellars of Rheims. The partakers were making very merry, having with them (as is inevitable in all such parties, it seems) a fat young man inclined to humour, who was now upon his feet for the proposal of some prankish toast. He interrupted himself long enough to glance our way as we crossed the garden; and it struck me that several pairs of brighter eyes followed my young companion with interest. He was well worth it, perhaps all the more because he was so genuinely unconscious of it; and he ran up the gallery steps and disappeared into his own rooms without sending even a glance from the corner of his eye in return.
I went almost as quickly to my pavilion, and, without lighting my lamp, set about my preparations for dinner.
The party outside, breaking up presently, could be heard moving toward the archway with increased noise and laughter, inspired by some exquisite antic on the part of the fat young man, when a girl’s voice (a very attractive voice) called, “Oh, Cressie, aren’t you coming?” and a man’s replied, from near my veranda: “Only stopping to light a cigar.”
A flutter of skirts and a patter of feet betokened that the girl came running back to join the smoker. “Cressie,” I heard her say in an eager, lowered tone, “who WAS he?”
“Who was who?”
“That DEVASTATING creature in white flannels!”
The man chuckled. “Matinee sort of devastator—what? Monte Cristo hair, noble profile—”
“You’d better tell me,” she interrupted earnestly—“if you don’t want me to ask the WAITER.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“I saw you speak to him.”
“I thought it was a man I met three years ago out in San Francisco, but I was mistaken. There was a slight resemblance. This fellow might have been a rather decent younger brother of the man I knew. HE was the—”
My strong impression was that if the speaker had not been interrupted at this point he would have said something very unfavourable to the character of the man he had met in San Francisco; but there came a series of blasts from the automobile horns and loud calls from others of the party, who were evidently waiting for these two.
“Coming!” shouted the man.
“Wait!” said his companion hurriedly, “Who was the other man, the older one with the painting things and SUCH a coat?”
“Never saw him before in my life.”
I caught a last word from the girl as the pair moved away.
“I’ll come back here with a BAND to-morrow night, and serenade the beautiful one.
“Perhaps he’d drop me his card out of the window!”
The horns sounded again; there was a final chorus of laughter, suddenly ceasing to be heard as the cars swept away, and Les Trois Pigeons was left to its accustomed quiet.
“Monsieur is served,” said Amedee, looking in at my door, five minutes later.
“You have passed a great hour just now, Amedee.”
“It was like the old days, truly!”
“They are off for Trouville, I suppose.”
“No, monsieur, they are on their way to visit the chateau, and stopped here only because the run from Paris had made the tires too hot.”
“To visit Quesnay, you mean?”
“Truly. But monsieur need give himself no uneasiness; I did not mention to any one that monsieur is here. His name was not spoken. Mademoiselle Ward returned to the chateau to-day,” he added. “She has been in England.”
“Quesnay will be gay,” I said, coming out to the table. Oliver Saffren was helping the professor down the steps, and Keredec, bent with suffering, but indomitable, gave me a hearty greeting, and began a ruthless dissection of Plato with the soup. Oliver, usually, very quiet, as I have said, seemed a little restless under the discourse to-night. However, he did not interrupt, sitting patiently until bedtime, though obviously not listening. When he bade me good night he gave me a look so clearly in reference to a secret understanding between us that, meaning to keep only the letter of my promise to him, I felt about as comfortable as if I had meanly tricked a child.