I had finished dressing, next morning, and was strapping my things together for the day’s campaign, when I heard a shuffling step upon the porch, and the door opened gently, without any previous ceremony of knocking. To my angle of vision what at first appeared to have opened it was a tray of coffee, rolls, eggs, and a packet of sandwiches, but, after hesitating somewhat, this apparition advanced farther into the room, disclosing a pair of supporting hands, followed in due time by the whole person of a nervously smiling and visibly apprehensive Amedee. He closed the door behind him by the simple action of backing against it, took the cloth from his arm, and with a single gesture spread it neatly upon a small table, then, turning to me, laid the forefinger of his right hand warningly upon his lips and bowed me a deferential invitation to occupy the chair beside the table.
“Well,” I said, glaring at him, “what ails you?”
“I thought monsieur might prefer his breakfast indoors, this morning,” he returned in a low voice.
“Why should I?”
The miserable old man said something I did not understand—an incoherent syllable or two—suddenly covered his mouth with both hands, and turned away. I heard a catch in his throat; suffocated sounds issued from his bosom; however, it was nothing more than a momentary seizure, and, recovering command of himself by a powerful effort, he faced me with hypocritical servility.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked indignantly.
“But I did not laugh,” he replied in a husky whisper. “Not at all.”
“You did,” I asserted, raising my voice. “It almost killed you!”
“Monsieur,” he begged hoarsely, “HUSH!”
“What is the matter?” I demanded loudly. “What do you mean by these abominable croakings? Speak out!”
“Monsieur—” he gesticulated in a panic, toward the courtyard. “Mademoiselle Ward is out there.”
“WHAT!” But I did not shout the word.
“There is always a little window in the rear wall,” he breathed in my ear as I dropped into the chair by the table. “She would not see you if—”
I interrupted with all the French rough-and-ready expressions of dislike at my command, daring to hope that they might give him some shadowy, far-away idea of what I thought of both himself and his suggestions, and, notwithstanding the difficulty of expressing strong feeling in whispers, it seemed to me that, in a measure, I succeeded. “I am not in the habit of crawling out of ventilators,” I added, subduing a tendency to vehemence. “And probably Mademoiselle Ward has only come to talk with Madame Brossard.”
“I fear some of those people may have told her you were here,” he ventured insinuatingly.
“What people?” I asked, drinking my coffee calmly, yet, it must be confessed, without quite the deliberation I could have wished.
“Those who stopped yesterday evening on the way to the chateau. They might have recognised—”
“Impossible. I knew none of them.”
“But Mademoiselle Ward knows that you are here. Without doubt.”
“Why do you say so?”
“Because she has inquired for you.”
“So!” I rose at once and went toward the door. “Why didn’t you tell me at once?”
“But surely,” he remonstrated, ignoring my question, “monsieur will make some change of attire?”
“Change of attire?” I echoed.
“Eh, the poor old coat all hunched at the shoulders and spotted with paint!”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” I hissed, thoroughly irritated. “Do you take me for a racing marquis?”
“But monsieur has a coat much more as a coat ought to be. And Jean Ferret says—”
“Ha, now we’re getting at it!” said I. “What does Jean Ferret say?”
“Perhaps it would be better if I did not repeat—”
“Out with it! What does Jean Ferret say?”
“Well, then, Mademoiselle Ward’s maid from Paris has told Jean Ferret that monsieur and Mademoiselle Ward have corresponded for years, and that—and that—”
“Go on,” I bade him ominously.
“That monsieur has sent Mademoiselle Ward many expensive jewels, and—”
“Aha!” said I, at which he paused abruptly, and stood staring at me. The idea of explaining Miss Elizabeth’s collection to him, of getting anything whatever through that complacent head of his, was so hopeless that I did not even consider it. There was only one thing to do, and perhaps I should have done it—I do not know, for he saw the menace coiling in my eye, and hurriedly retreated.
“Monsieur!” he gasped, backing away from me, and as his hand, fumbling behind him, found the latch of the door, he opened it, and scrambled out by a sort of spiral movement round the casing. When I followed, a moment later—with my traps on my shoulder and the packet of sandwiches in my pocket—he was out of sight.
Miss Elizabeth sat beneath the arbour at the other end of the courtyard, and beside her stood the trim and glossy bay saddle-horse that she had ridden from Quesnay, his head outstretched above his mistress to paddle at the vine leaves with a tremulous upper lip. She checked his desire with a slight movement of her hand upon the bridle-rein; and he arched his neck prettily, pawing the gravel with a neat forefoot. Miss Elizabeth is one of the few large women I have known to whom a riding-habit is entirely becoming, and this group of two—a handsome woman and her handsome horse—has had a charm for all men ever since horses were tamed and women began to be beautiful. I thought of my work, of the canvases I meant to cover, but I felt the charm—and I felt it stirringly. It was a fine, fresh morning, and the sun just risen.
An expression in the lady’s attitude, and air which I instinctively construed as histrionic, seemed intended to convey that she had been kept waiting, yet had waited without reproach; and although she must have heard me coming, she did not look toward me until I was quite near and spoke her name. At that she sprang up quickly enough, and stretched out her hand to me.
“Run to earth!” she cried, advancing a step to meet me.
“A pretty poor trophy of the chase,” said I, “but proud that you are its killer.”
To my surprise and mystification, her cheeks and brow flushed rosily; she was obviously conscious of it, and laughed.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said.
“Yes, you, poor man! I suppose I couldn’t have more thoroughly compromised you. Madame Brossard will never believe in your respectability again.”
“Oh, yes, she will,” said I.
“What? A lodger who has ladies calling upon him at five o’clock in the morning? But your bundle’s on your shoulder,” she rattled on, laughing, “though there’s many could be bolder, and perhaps you’ll let me walk a bit of the way with you, if you’re for the road.”
“Perhaps I will,” said I. She caught up her riding-skirt, fastening it by a clasp at her side, and we passed out through the archway and went slowly along the road bordering the forest, her horse following obediently at half-rein’s length.
“When did you hear that I was at Madame Brossard’s?” I asked.
“Ten minutes after I returned to Quesnay, late yesterday afternoon.”
“Who told you?”
“Louise.”
I repeated the name questioningly. “You mean Mrs. Larrabee Harman?”
“Louise Harman,” she corrected. “Didn’t you know she was staying at Quesnay?”
“I guessed it, though Amedee got the name confused.”
“Yes, she’s been kind enough to look after the place for us while we were away. George won’t be back for another ten days, and I’ve been overseeing an exhibition for him in London. Afterward I did a round of visits—tiresome enough, but among people it’s well to keep in touch with on George’s account.”
“I see,” I said, with a grimness which probably escaped her. “But how did Mrs. Harman know that I was at Les Trois Pigeons?”
“She met you once in the forest—”
“Twice,” I interrupted.
“She mentioned only once. Of course she’d often heard both George and me speak of you.”
“But how did she know it was I and where I was staying?”
“Oh, that?” Her smile changed to a laugh. “Your maitre d’hotel told Ferret, a gardener at Quesnay, that you were at the inn.”
“He did!”
“Oh, but you mustn’t be angry with him; he made it quite all right.”
“How did he do that?” I asked, trying to speak calmly, though there was that in my mind which might have blanched the parchment cheek of a grand inquisitor.
“He told Ferret that you were very anxious not to have it known—”
“You call that making it all right?”
“For himself, I mean. He asked Ferret not to mention who it was that told him.”
“The rascal!” I cried. “The treacherous, brazen—”
“Unfortunate man,” said Miss Elizabeth, “don’t you see how clear you’re making it that you really meant to hide from us?”
There seemed to be something in that, and my tirade broke up in confusion. “Oh, no,” I said lamely, “I hoped—I hoped—”
“Be careful!”
“No; I hoped to work down here,” I blurted. “And I thought if I saw too much of you—I might not.”
She looked at me with widening eyes. “And I can take my choice,” she cried, “of all the different things you may mean by that! It’s either the most outrageous speech I ever heard—or the most flattering.”
“But I meant simply—”
“No.” She lifted her hand and stopped me. “I’d rather believe that I have at least the choice—and let it go at that.” And as I began to laugh, she turned to me with a gravity apparently so genuine that for the moment I was fatuous enough to believe that she had said it seriously. Ensued a pause of some duration, which, for my part, I found disturbing. She broke it with a change of subject.
“You think Louise very lovely to look at, don’t you?”
“Exquisite,” I answered.
“Every one does.”
“I suppose she told you—” and now I felt myself growing red—“that I behaved like a drunken acrobat when she came upon me in the path.”
“No. Did you?” cried Miss Elizabeth, with a ready credulity which I thought by no means pretty; indeed, she seemed amused and, to my surprise (for she is not an unkind woman), rather heartlessly pleased. “Louise only said she knew it must be you, and that she wished she could have had a better look at what you were painting.”
“Heaven bless her!” I exclaimed. “Her reticence was angelic.”
“Yes, she has reticence,” said my companion, with enough of the same quality to make me look at her quickly. A thin line had been drawn across her forehead.
“You mean she’s still reticent with George?” I ventured.
“Yes,” she answered sadly. “Poor George always hopes, of course, in the silent way of his kind when they suffer from such unfortunate passions—and he waits.”
“I suppose that former husband of hers recovered?”
“I believe he’s still alive somewhere. Locked up, I hope!” she finished crisply.
“She retained his name,” I observed.
“Harman? Yes, she retained it,” said my companion rather shortly.
“At all events, she’s rid of him, isn’t she?”
“Oh, she’s RID of him!” Her tone implied an enigmatic reservation of some kind.
“It’s hard,” I reflected aloud, “hard to understand her making that mistake, young as she was. Even in the glimpses of her I’ve had, it was easy to see something of what she’s like: a fine, rare, high type—”
“But you didn’t know HIM, did you?” Miss Elizabeth asked with some dryness.
“No,” I answered. “I saw him twice; once at the time of his accident—that was only a nightmare, his face covered with—” I shivered. “But I had caught a glimpse of him on the boulevard, and of all the dreadful—”
“Oh, but he wasn’t always dreadful,” she interposed quickly. “He was a fascinating sort of person, quite charming and good-looking, when she ran away with him, though he was horribly dissipated even then. He always had been THAT. Of course she thought she’d be able to straighten him out—poor girl! She tried, for three years—three years it hurts one to think of! You see it must have been something very like a ‘grand passion’ to hold her through a pain three years long.”
“Or tremendous pride,” said I. “Women make an odd world of it for the rest of us. There was good old George, as true and straight a man as ever lived—”
“And she took the other! Yes.” George’s sister laughed sorrowfully.
“But George and she have both survived the mistake,” I went on with confidence. “Her tragedy must have taught her some important differences. Haven’t you a notion she’ll be tremendously glad to see him when he comes back from America?”
“Ah, I do hope so!” she cried. “You see, I’m fearing that he hopes so too—to the degree of counting on it.”
“You don’t count on it yourself?”
She shook her head. “With any other woman I should.”
“Why not with Mrs. Harman?”
“Cousin Louise has her ways,” said Miss Elizabeth slowly, and, whether she could not further explain her doubts, or whether she would not, that was all I got out of her on the subject at the time. I asked one or two more questions, but my companion merely shook her head again, alluding vaguely to her cousin’s “ways.” Then she brightened suddenly, and inquired when I would have my things sent up to the chateau from the inn.
At the risk of a misunderstanding which I felt I could ill afford, I resisted her kind hospitality, and the outcome of it was that there should be a kind of armistice, to begin with my dining at the chateau that evening. Thereupon she mounted to the saddle, a bit of gymnastics for which she declined my assistance, and looked down upon me from a great height.
“Did anybody ever tell you,” was her surprising inquiry, “that you are the queerest man of these times?”
“No,” I answered. “Don’t you think you’re a queerer woman?”
“FOOTLE!” she cried scornfully. “Be off to your woods and your woodscaping!”
The bay horse departed at a smart gait, not, I was glad to see, a parkish trot—Miss Elizabeth wisely set limits to her sacrifices to Mode—and she was far down the road before I had passed the outer fringe of trees.
My work was accomplished after a fashion more or less desultory that day; I had many absent moments, was restless, and walked more than I painted. Oliver Saffron did not join me in the late afternoon; nor did the echo of distant yodelling bespeak any effort on his part to find me. So I gave him up, and returned to the inn earlier than usual.
While dressing I sent word to Professor Keredec that I should not be able to join him at dinner that evening; and it is to be recorded that Glouglou carried the message for me. Amedee did not appear, from which it may be inferred that our maitre d’hotel was subject to lucid intervals. Certainly his present shyness indicated an intelligence of no low order.
The dining-room at Quesnay is a pretty work of the second of those three Louises who made so much furniture. It was never a proper setting for a rusty, out-of-doors painter-man, nor has such a fellow ever found himself complacently at ease there since the day its first banquet was spread for a score or so of fine-feathered epigram jinglers, fiddling Versailles gossip out of a rouge-and-lace Quesnay marquise newly sent into half-earnest banishment for too much king-hunting. For my part, however, I should have preferred a chance at making a place for myself among the wigs and brocades to the Crusoe’s Isle of my chair at Miss Elizabeth’s table.
I learned at an early age to look my vanities in the face; I outfaced them and they quailed, but persisted, surviving for my discomfort to this day. Here is the confession: It was not until my arrival at the chateau that I realised what temerity it involved to dine there in evening clothes purchased, some four or five or six years previously, in the economical neighbourhood of the Boulevard St. Michel. Yet the things fitted me well enough; were clean and not shiny, having been worn no more than a dozen times, I think; though they might have been better pressed.
Looking over the men of the Quesnay party—or perhaps I should signify a reversal of that and say a glance of theirs at me—revealed the importance of a particular length of coat-tail, of a certain rich effect obtained by widely separating the lower points of the waistcoat, of the display of some imagination in the buttons upon the same garment, of a doubled-back arrangement of cuffs, and of a specific design and dimension of tie. Marked uniformity in these matters denoted their necessity; and clothes differing from the essential so vitally as did mine must have seemed immodest, little better than no clothes at all. I doubt if I could have argued in extenuation my lack of advantages for study, such an excuse being itself the damning circumstance. Of course eccentricity is permitted, but (as in the Arts) only to the established. And I recall a painful change of colour which befell the countenance of a shining young man I met at Ward’s house in Paris: he had used his handkerchief and was absently putting it in his pocket when he providentially noticed what he was doing and restored it to his sleeve.
Miss Elizabeth had the courage to take me under her wing, placing me upon her left at dinner; but sprightlier calls than mine demanded and occupied her attention. At my other side sat a magnificently upholstered lady, who offered a fine shoulder and the rear wall of a collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table. This was a prince, ending in “ski”: he permitted himself the slight vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I should not have known her.
Fragments reaching me in my seclusion indicated that the various conversations up and down the long table were animated; and at times some topic proved of such high interest as to engage the comment of the whole company. This was the case when the age of one of the English king’s grandchildren came in question, but a subject which called for even longer (if less spirited) discourse concerned the shameful lack of standard on the part of citizens of the United States, or, as it was put, with no little exasperation, “What is the trouble with America?” Hereupon brightly gleamed the fat young man whom I had marked for a wit at Les Trois Pigeons; he pictured with inimitable mimicry a western senator lately in France. This outcast, it appeared, had worn a slouch hat at a garden party and had otherwise betrayed his country to the ridicule of the intelligent. “But really,” said the fat young man, turning plaintiff in conclusion, “imagine what such things make the English and the French think of US!” And it finally went by consent that the trouble with America was the vulgarity of our tourists.
“A dreadful lot!” Miss Elizabeth cheerfully summed up for them all. “The miseries I undergo with that class of ‘prominent Amurricans’ who bring letters to my brother! I remember one awful creature who said, when I came into the room, ‘Well, ma’am, I guess you’re the lady of the house, aren’t you?’”
Miss Elizabeth sparkled through the chorus of laughter, but I remembered the “awful creature,” a genial and wise old man of affairs, whose daughter’s portrait George painted. Miss Elizabeth had missed his point: the canvasser’s phrase had been intended with humour, and even had it lacked that, it was not without a pretty quaintness. So I thought, being “left to my own reflections,” which may have partaken of my own special kind of snobbery; at least I regretted the Elizabeth of the morning garden and the early walk along the fringe of the woods. For she at my side to-night was another lady.
The banquet was drawing to a close when she leaned toward me and spoke in an undertone. As this was the first sign, in so protracted a period, that I might ever again establish relations with the world of men, it came upon me like a Friday’s footprint, and in the moment of shock I did not catch what she said.
“Anne Elliott, yonder, is asking you a question,” she repeated, nodding at a very pretty gal down and across the table from me. Miss Anne Elliott’s attractive voice had previously enabled me to recognise her as the young woman who had threatened to serenade Les Trois Pigeons.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, addressing her, and at the sound my obscurity was illuminated, about half of the company turning to look at me with wide-eyed surprise. (I spoke in an ordinary tone, it may need to be explained, and there is nothing remarkable about my voice).
“I hear you’re at Les Trois Pigeons,” said Miss Elliott.
“Yes?”
“WOULD you mind telling us something of the MYSTERIOUS Narcissus?”
“If you’ll be more definite,” I returned, in the tone of a question.
“There couldn’t be more than one like THAT,” said Miss Elliott, “at least, not in one neighbourhood, could there? I mean a RECKLESSLY charming vision with a WHITE tie and WHITE hair and WHITE flannels.”
“Oh,” said I, “HE’S not mysterious.”
“But he IS,” she returned; “I insist on his being MYSTERIOUS! Rarely, grandly, STRANGELY mysterious! You WILL let me think so?” This young lady had a whimsical manner of emphasising words unexpectedly, with a breathless intensity that approached violence, a habit dangerously contagious among nervous persons, so that I answered slowly, out of a fear that I might echo it.
“It would need a great deal of imagination. He’s a young American, very attractive, very simple—”
“But he’s MAD!” she interrupted.
“Oh, no!” I said hastily.
“But he IS! A person told me so in a garden this VERY afternoon,” she went on eagerly; “a person with a rake and EVER so many moles on his chin. This person told me all about him. His name is Oliver Saffren, and he’s in the charge of a VERY large doctor and quite, QUITE mad!”
“Jean Ferret, the gardener.” I said deliberately, and with venom, “is fast acquiring notoriety in these parts as an idiot of purest ray, and he had his information from another whose continuance unhanged is every hour more miraculous.”
“How RUTHLESS of you,” cried Miss Elliott, with exaggerated reproach, “when I have had such a thrilling happiness all day in believing that RIOTOUSLY beautiful creature mad! You are wholly positive he isn’t?”
Our dialogue was now all that delayed a general departure from the table. This, combined with the naive surprise I have mentioned, served to make us temporarily the centre of attention, and, among the faces turned toward me, my glance fell unexpectedly upon one I had not seen since entering the dining-room. Mrs. Harman had been placed at some distance from me and on the same side of the table, but now she leaned far back in her chair to look at me, so that I saw her behind the shoulders of the people between us. She was watching me with an expression unmistakably of repressed anxiety and excitement, and as our eyes met, hers shone with a certain agitation, as of some odd consciousness shared with me. It was so strangely, suddenly a reminder of the look of secret understanding given me with good night, twenty-four hours earlier, by the man whose sanity was Miss Elliott’s topic, that, puzzled and almost disconcerted for the moment, I did not at once reply to the lively young lady’s question.
“You’re hesitating!” she cried, clasping her hands. “I believe there’s a DARLING little chance of it, after all! And if it weren’t so, why would he need to be watched over, day AND night, by an ENORMOUS doctor?”
“This IS romance!” I retorted. “The doctor is Professor Keredec, illustriously known in this country, but not as a physician, and they are following some form of scientific research together, I believe. But, assuming to speak as Mr. Saffren’s friend,” I added, rising with the others upon Miss Ward’s example, “I’m sure if he could come to know of your interest, he would much rather play Hamlet for you than let you find him disappointing.”
“If he could come to know of my interest!” she echoed, glancing down at herself with mock demureness. “Don’t you think he could come to know something more of me than that?”
The windows had been thrown open, allowing passage to a veranda. Miss Elizabeth led the way outdoors with the prince, the rest of us following at hazard, and in the mild confusion of this withdrawal I caught a final glimpse of Mrs. Harman, which revealed that she was still looking at me with the same tensity; but with the movement of intervening groups I lost her. Miss Elliott pointedly waited for me until I came round the table, attached me definitely by taking my arm, accompanying her action with a dazzling smile. “Oh, DO you think you can manage it?” she whispered rapturously, to which I replied—as vaguely as I could—that the demands of scientific research upon the time of its followers were apt to be exorbitant.
Tables and coffee were waiting on the broad terrace below, with a big moon rising in the sky. I descended the steps in charge of this pretty cavalier, allowed her to seat me at the most remote of the tables, and accepted without unwillingness other gallantries of hers in the matter of coffee and cigarettes. “And now,” she said, “now that I’ve done so much for your DEAREST hopes and comfort, look up at the milky moon, and tell me ALL!”
“If you can bear it?”
She leaned an elbow on the marble railing that protected the terrace, and, shielding her eyes from the moonlight with her hand, affected to gaze at me dramatically. “Have no distrust,” she bade me. “Who and WHAT is the glorious stranger?”
Resisting an impulse to chime in with her humour, I gave her so dry and commonplace an account of my young friend at the inn that I presently found myself abandoned to solitude again.
“I don’t know where to go,” she complained as she rose. “These other people are MOST painful to a girl of my intelligence, but I cannot linger by your side; untruth long ago lost its interest for me, and I prefer to believe Mr. Jean Ferret—if that is the gentleman’s name. I’d join Miss Ward and Cressie Ingle yonder, but Cressie WOULD be indignant! I shall soothe my hurt with SWEETEST airs. Adieu.”
With that she made me a solemn courtesy and departed, a pretty little figure, not little in attractiveness, the strong moonlight, tinged with blue, shimmering over her blond hair and splashing brightly among the ripples of her silks and laces. She swept across the terrace languidly, offering an effect of comedy not unfairylike, and, ascending the steps of the veranda, disappeared into the orange candle-light of a salon. A moment later some chords were sounded firmly upon a piano in that room, and a bitter song swam out to me over the laughter and talk of the people at the other tables. It was to be observed that Miss Anne Elliott sang very well, though I thought she over-emphasised one line of the stanza:
“This world is a world of lies!”
Perhaps she had poisoned another little arrow for me, too. Impelled by the fine night, the groups upon the terrace were tending toward a wider dispersal, drifting over the sloping lawns by threes and couples, and I was able to identify two figures threading the paths of the garden, together, some distance below. Judging by the pace they kept, I should have concluded that Miss Ward and Mr. Cresson Ingle sought the healthful effects of exercise. However, I could see no good reason for wishing their conversation less obviously absorbing, though Miss Elliott’s insinuation that Mr. Ingle might deplore intrusion upon the interview had struck me as too definite to be altogether pleasing. Still, such matters could not discontent me with my solitude. Eastward, over the moonlit roof of the forest, I could see the quiet ocean, its unending lines of foam moving slowly to the long beaches, too far away to be heard. The reproachful voice of the singer came no more from the house, but the piano ran on into “La Vie de Boheme,” and out of that into something else, I did not know what, but it seemed to be music; at least it was musical enough to bring before me some memory of the faces of pretty girls I had danced with long ago in my dancing days, so that, what with the music, and the distant sea, and the soft air, so sparklingly full of moonshine, and the little dancing memories, I was floated off into a reverie that was like a prelude for the person who broke it. She came so quietly that I did not hear her until she was almost beside me and spoke to me. It was the second time that had happened.
“Mrs. Harman,” I said, as she took the chair vacated by the elfin young lady, “you see I can manage it! But perhaps I control myself better when there’s no camp-stool to inspire me. You remember my woodland didoes—I fear?”
She smiled in a pleasant, comprehending way, but neither directly replied nor made any return speech whatever; instead, she let her forearms rest on the broad railing of the marble balustrade, and, leaning forward, gazed out over the shining and mysterious slopes below. Somehow it seemed to me that her not answering, and her quiet action, as well as the thoughtful attitude in which it culminated, would have been thought “very like her” by any one who knew her well. “Cousin Louise has her ways,” Miss Elizabeth had told me; this was probably one of them, and I found it singularly attractive. For that matter, from the day of my first sight of her in the woods I had needed no prophet to tell me I should like Mrs. Harman’s ways.
“After the quiet you have had here, all this must seem,” I said, looking down upon the strollers, “a usurpation.”
“Oh, they!” She disposed of Quesnay’s guests with a slight movement of her left hand. “You’re an old friend of my cousins—of both of them; but even without that, I know you understand. Elizabeth does it all for her brother, of course.”
“But she likes it,” I said.
“And Mr. Ward likes it, too,” she added slowly. “You’ll see, when he comes home.”
Night’s effect upon me being always to make me venturesome, I took a chance, and ventured perhaps too far. “I hope we’ll see many happy things when he comes home.”
“It’s her doing things of this sort,” she said, giving no sign of having heard my remark, “that has helped so much to make him the success that he is.”
“It’s what has been death to his art!” I exclaimed, too quickly—and would have been glad to recall the speech.
She met it with a murmur of low laughter that sounded pitying. “Wasn’t it always a dubious relation—between him and art?” And without awaiting an answer, she went on, “So it’s all the better that he can have his success!”
To this I had nothing whatever to say. So far as I remembered, I had never before heard a woman put so much comprehension of a large subject into so few words, but in my capacity as George’s friend, hopeful for his happiness, it made me a little uneasy. During the ensuing pause this feeling, at first uppermost, gave way to another not at all in sequence, but irresponsible and intuitive, that she had something in particular to say to me, had joined me for that purpose, and was awaiting the opportunity. As I have made open confession, my curiosity never needed the spur; and there is no denying that this impression set it off on the gallop; but evidently the moment had not come for her to speak. She seemed content to gaze out over the valley in silence.
“Mr. Cresson Ingle,” I hazarded; “is he an old, new friend of your cousins? I think he was not above the horizon when I went to Capri, two years ago?”
“He wants Elizabeth,” she returned, adding quietly, “as you’ve seen.” And when I had verified this assumption with a monosyllable, she continued, “He’s an ‘available,’ but I should hate to have it happen. He’s hard.”
“He doesn’t seem very hard toward her,” I murmured, looking down into the garden where Mr. Ingle just then happened to be adjusting a scarf about his hostess’s shoulders.
“He’s led a detestable life,” said Mrs. Harman, “among detestable people!”
She spoke with sudden, remarkable vigour, and as if she knew. The full-throated emphasis she put upon “detestable” gave the word the sting of a flagellation; it rang with a rightful indignation that brought vividly to my mind the thought of those three years in Mrs. Harman’s life which Elizabeth said “hurt one to think of.” For this was the lady who had rejected good George Ward to run away with a man much deeper in all that was detestable than Mr. Cresson Ingle could ever be!
“He seems to me much of a type with these others,” I said.
“Oh, they keep their surfaces about the same.”
“It made me wishIhad a little more surface to-night,” I laughed. “I’d have fitted better. Miss Ward is different at different times. When we are alone together she always has the air of excusing, or at least explaining, these people to me, but this evening I’ve had the disquieting thought that perhaps she also explained me to them.”
“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Harman, turning to me quickly. “Didn’t you see? She was making up to Mr. Ingle for this morning. It came out that she’d ridden over at daylight to see you; Anne Elliott discovered it in some way and told him.”
This presented an aspect of things so overwhelmingly novel that out of a confusion of ideas I was able to fasten on only one with which to continue the conversation, and I said irrelevantly that Miss Elliott was a remarkable young woman. At this my companion, who had renewed her observation of the valley, gave me a full, clear look of earnest scrutiny, which set me on the alert, for I thought that now what she desired to say was coming. But I was disappointed, for she spoke lightly, with a ripple of amusement.
“I suppose she finished her investigations? You told her all you could?”
“Almost.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t trust ME with the reservation?” she asked, smiling.
“I would trust you with anything,” I answered seriously.
“You didn’t gratify that child?” she said, half laughing. Then, to my surprise, her tone changed suddenly, and she began again in a hurried low voice: “You didn’t tell her—” and stopped there, breathless and troubled, letting me see that I had been right after all: this was what she wanted to talk about.
“I didn’t tell her that young Saffren is mad, no; if that is what you mean.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said slowly, sinking back in her chair so that her face was in the shadow of the awning which sheltered the little table between us.
“In the first place, I wouldn’t have told her even if it were true,” I returned, “and in the second, it isn’t true—though YOU have some reason to think it is,” I added.
“I?” she said. “Why?”
“His speaking to you as he did; a thing on the face of it inexcusable—”
“Why did he call me ‘Madame d’Armand’?” she interposed.
I explained something of the mental processes of Amedee, and she listened till I had finished; then bade me continue.
“That’s all,” I said blankly, but, with a second thought, caught her meaning. “Oh, about young Saffren, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I know him pretty well,” I said, “without really knowing anything about him; but what is stranger, I believe he doesn’t really know a great deal about himself. Of course I have a theory about him, though it’s vague. My idea is that probably through some great illness he lost—not his faculty of memory, but his memories, or, at least, most of them. In regard to what he does remember, Professor Keredec has anxiously impressed upon him some very poignant necessity for reticence. What the necessity may be, or the nature of the professor’s anxieties, I do not know, but I think Keredec’s reasons must be good ones. That’s all, except that there’s something about the young man that draws one to him: I couldn’t tell you how much I like him, nor how sorry I am that he offended you.”
“He didn’t offend me,” she murmured—almost whispered.
“He didn’t mean to,” I said warmly. “You understood that?”
“Yes, I understood.”
“I am glad. I’d been waiting the chance to try to explain—to ask you to pardon him—”
“But there wasn’t any need.”
“You mean because you understood—”
“No,” she interrupted gently, “not only that. I mean because he has done it himself.”
“Asked your pardon?” I said, in complete surprise.
“Yes.”
“He’s written you?” I cried.
“No. I saw him to-day,” she answered. “This afternoon when I went for my walk, he was waiting where the paths intersect—”
Some hasty ejaculation, I do not know what, came from me, but she lifted her hand.
“Wait,” she said quietly. “As soon as he saw me he came straight toward me—”
“Oh, but this won’t do at all,” I broke out. “It’s too bad—”
“Wait.” She leaned forward slightly, lifting her hand again. “He called me ‘Madame d’Armand,’ and said he must know if he had offended me.”
“You told him—”
“I told him ‘No!’” And it seemed to me that her voice, which up to this point had been low but very steady, shook upon the monosyllable. “He walked with me a little way—perhaps It was longer—”
“Trust me that it sha’n’t happen again!” I exclaimed. “I’ll see that Keredec knows of this at once. He will—”
“No, no,” she interrupted quickly, “that is just what I want you not to do. Will you promise me?”
“I’ll promise anything you ask me. But didn’t he frighten you? Didn’t he talk wildly? Didn’t he—”
“He didn’t frighten me—not as you mean. He was very quiet and—” She broke off unexpectedly, with a little pitying cry, and turned to me, lifting both hands appealingly—“And oh, doesn’t he make one SORRY for him!”
That was just it. She had gone straight to the heart of his mystery: his strangeness was the strange PATHOS that invested him; the “singularity” of “that other monsieur” was solved for me at last.
When she had spoken she rose, advanced a step, and stood looking out over the valley again, her skirts pressing the balustrade. One of the moments in my life when I have wished to be a figure painter came then, as she raised her arms, the sleeves, of some filmy texture, falling back from them with the gesture, and clasped her hands lightly behind her neck, the graceful angle of her chin uplifted to the full rain of moonshine. Little Miss Elliott, in the glamour of these same blue showerings, had borrowed gauzy weavings of the fay and the sprite, but Mrs. Harman—tall, straight, delicate to fragility, yet not to thinness—was transfigured with a deeper meaning, wearing the sadder, richer colours of the tragedy that her cruel young romance had put upon her. She might have posed as she stood against the marble railing—and especially in that gesture of lifting her arms—for a bearer of the gift at some foredestined luckless ceremony of votive offerings. So it seemed, at least, to the eyes of a moon-dazed old painter-man.
She stood in profile to me; there were some jasmine flowers at her breast; I could see them rise and fall with more than deep breathing; and I wondered what the man who had talked of her so wildly, only yesterday, would feel if he could know that already the thought of him had moved her.
“I haven’t HAD my life. It’s gone!” It was almost as if I heard his voice, close at hand, with all the passion of regret and protest that rang in the words when they broke from him in the forest. And by some miraculous conjecture, within the moment I seemed not only to hear his voice but actually to see him, a figure dressed in white, far below us and small with the distance, standing out in the moonlight in the middle of the tree-bordered avenue leading to the chateau gates.
I rose and leaned over the railing. There was no doubt about the reality of the figure in white, though it was too far away to be identified with certainty; and as I rubbed my eyes for clearer sight, it turned and disappeared into the shadows of the orderly grove where I had stood, one day, to watch Louise Harman ascend the slopes of Quesnay. But I told myself, sensibly, that more than one man on the coast of Normandy might be wearing white flannels that evening, and, turning to my companion, found that she had moved some steps away from me and was gazing eastward to the sea. I concluded that she had not seen the figure.
“I have a request to make of you,” she said, as I turned. “Will you do it for me—setting it down just as a whim, if you like, and letting it go at that?”
“Yes, I will,” I answered promptly. “I’ll do anything you ask.”
She stepped closer, looked at me intently for a second, bit her lip in indecision, then said, all in a breath:
“Don’t tell Mr. Saffren my name!”
“But I hadn’t meant to,” I protested.
“Don’t speak of me to him at all,” she said, with the same hurried eagerness. “Will you let me have my way?”
“Could there be any question of that?” I replied, and to my astonishment found that we had somehow impulsively taken each other’s hands, as upon a serious bargain struck between us.