Miss Elliott’s expression, when I turned to observe the effect of the intruder upon her, was found to be one of brilliant delight. With glowing eyes, her lips parted in a breathless ecstasy, she gazed upon the newcomer, evidently fearing to lose a syllable that fell from his lips. Moving closer to me she whispered urgently:
“Keep him. Oh, keep him!”
To detain him, for a time at least, was my intention, though my motive was not merely to afford her pleasure. The advent of the young man had produced a singularly disagreeable impression upon me, quite apart from any antagonism I might have felt toward him as a type. Strange suspicions leaped into my mind, formless—in the surprise of the moment—but rapidly groping toward definite outline; and following hard upon them crept a tingling apprehension. The reappearance of this rattish youth, casual as was the air with which he strove to invest it, began to assume, for me, the character of a theatrical entrance of unpleasant portent—a suggestion just now enhanced by an absurdly obvious notion of his own that he was enacting a part. This was written all over him, most legibly in his attitude of the knowing amateur, as he surveyed Miss Elliott’s painting patronisingly, his head on one side, his cane in the crook of his elbows behind his back, and his body teetering genteelly as he shifted his weight from his toes to his heels and back again, nodding meanwhile a slight but judicial approbation.
“Now, about how much,” he said slowly, “would you expec’ t’ git f’r a pitcher that size?”
“It isn’t mine,” I informed him.
“You don’t tell me it’s the little lady’s—what?” He bowed genially and favoured Miss Elliott with a stare of warm admiration. “Pretty a thing as I ever see,” he added.
“Oh,” she cried with an ardour that choked her slightly. “THANK you!”
“Oh, I meant the PITCHER!” he said hastily, evidently nonplussed by a gratitude so fervent.
The incorrigible damsel cast down her eyes in modesty. “And I had hoped,” she breathed, “something so different!”
I could not be certain whether or not he caught the whisper; I thought he did. At all events, the surface of his easy assurance appeared somewhat disarranged; and, perhaps to restore it by performing the rites of etiquette, he said:
“Well, I expec’ the smart thing now is to pass the cards, but mine’s in my grip an’ it ain’t unpacked yet. The name you’d see on ‘em is Oil Poicy.”
“Oil Poicy,” echoed Miss Elliott, turning to me in genuine astonishment.
“Mr. Earl Percy,” I translated.
“Oh, RAPTUROUS!” she cried, her face radiant. “And WON’T Mr. Percy give us his opinion of my Art?”
Mr. Percy was in doubt how to take her enthusiasm; he seemed on the point of turning surly, and hesitated, while a sharp vertical line appeared on his small forehead; but he evidently concluded, after a deep glance at her, that if she was making game of him it was in no ill-natured spirit—nay, I think that for a few moments he suspected her liveliness to be some method of her own for the incipient stages of a flirtation.
Finally he turned again to the easel, and as he examined the painting thereon at closer range, amazement overspread his features. However, pulling himself together, he found himself able to reply—and with great gallantry:
“Well, on’y t’ think them little hands cud ‘a’ done all that rough woik!”
The unintended viciousness of this retort produced an effect so marked, that, except for my growing uneasiness, I might have enjoyed her expression.
As it was, I saved her face by entering into the conversation with a question, which I put quickly:
“You intend pursuing your historical researches in the neighborhood?”
The facial contortion which served him for a laugh, and at the same time as a symbol of unfathomable reserve, was repeated, accompanied by a jocose manifestation, in the nature of a sharp and taunting cackle, which seemed to indicate a conviction that he was getting much the best of it in some conflict of wits.
“Them fairy tales I handed you about ole Jeanne d’Arc and William the Conker,” he said, “say, they must ‘a’ made you sore after-WOIDS!”
“On the contrary, I was much interested in everything pertaining to your too brief visit,” I returned; “I am even more so now.”
“Well, m’friend”—he shot me a sidelong, distrustful glance—“keep yer eyes open.”
“That is just the point!” I laughed, with intentional significance, for I meant to make Mr. Percy talk as much as I could. To this end, remembering that specimens of his kind are most indiscreet when carefully enraged, I added, simulating his own manner:
“Eyes open—and doors locked! What?”
At this I heard a gasp of astonishment from Miss Elliott, who must have been puzzled indeed; but I was intent upon the other. He proved perfectly capable of being insulted.
“I guess they ain’t much need o’ lockin’ YOUR door,” he retorted darkly; “not from what I saw when I was in your studio!” He should have stopped there, for the hit was palpable and justified; but in his resentment he overdid it. “You needn’t be scared of anybody’s cartin’ off THEM pitchers, young feller! WHOOSH! An’ f’m the luks of the CLO’ES I saw hangin’ on the wall,” he continued, growing more nettled as I smiled cheerfully upon him, “I don’ b’lieve you gut any worries comin’ about THEM, neither!”
“I suppose our tastes are different,” I said, letting my smile broaden. “There might be protection in that.”
His stare at me was protracted to an unseemly length before the sting of this remark reached him; it penetrated finally, however, and in his sharp change of posture there was a lightning flicker of the experienced boxer; but he checked the impulse, and took up the task of obliterating me in another way.
“As I tell the little dame here,” he said, pitching his voice higher and affecting the plaintive, “I make no passes at a friend o’ her—not in front o’ her, anyways. But when it comes to these here ole, ancient curiosities”—he cackled again, loudly—“well, I guess them clo’es I see, that day, kin hand it out t’ anything they got in the museums! 'Look here,’ I says to the waiter, ‘THESE must be’n left over f’m ole Jeanne d’Arc herself,’ I says. ‘Talk about yer relics,’ I says. Whoosh! I’d like t’ died!” He laughed violently, and concluded by turning upon me with a contemptuous flourish of his stick. “You think I d’know what makes YOU so raw?”
The form of repartee necessary to augment his ill humour was, of course, a matter of simple mechanism for one who had not entirely forgotten his student days in the Quarter; and I delivered it airily, though I shivered inwardly that Miss Elliott should hear.
“Everything will be all right if, when you dine at the inn, you’ll sit with your back toward me.”
To my shamed surprise, this roustabout wit drew a nervous, silvery giggle from her; and that completed the work with Mr. Percy, whose face grew scarlet with anger.
“You’re a hot one, you are!” he sneered, with shocking bitterness. “You’re quite the teaser, ain’t ye, s’long’s yer lady-friend is lukkin’ on! I guess they’ll be a few surprises comin’ YOUR way, before long. P’raps I cudn’t give ye one now ‘f I had a mind to.”
“Pshaw,” I laughed, and, venturing at hazard, said, “I know all YOU know!”
“Oh, you do!” he cried scornfully. “I reckon you might set up an’ take a little notice, though, if you knowed ‘at I know all YOU know!”
“Not a bit of it!”
“No? Maybe you think I don’t know what makes you so raw with ME? Maybe you think I don’t know who ye’ve got so thick with at this here Pigeon House; maybe you think I don’t know who them people ARE!”
“No, you don’t. You have learned,” I said, trying to control my excitement, “nothing! Whoever hired YOU for a spy lost the money. YOU don’t know ANY-thing!”
“I DON’T!” And with that his voice went to a half-shriek. “Maybe you think I’m down here f’r my health; maybe you think I come out f’r a pleasant walk in the woods right now; maybe you think I ain’t seen no other lady-friend o’ yours besides this’n to-day, and maybe I didn’t see who was with her—yes, an’ maybe you think I d’know no other times he’s be’n with her. Maybe you think I ain’t be’n layin’ low over at Dives! Maybe I don’t know a few real NAMES in this neighbourhood! Oh, no, MAYBE not!”
“You know what the maitre d’hotel told you; nothing more.”
“How about the name—OLIVER SAFFREN?” he cried fiercely, and at last, though I had expected it, I uttered an involuntary exclamation.
“How about it?” he shouted, advancing toward me triumphantly, shaking his forefinger in my face. “Hey? THAT stings some, does it? Sounds kind o’ like a FALSE name, does it? Got ye where the hair is short, that time, didn’t I?”
“Speaking of names,” I retorted, “‘Oil Poicy’ doesn’t seem to ring particularly true to me!”
“It’ll be gud enough fer you, young feller,” he responded angrily. “It may belong t’ me, an’ then again, it maybe don’t. It ain’ gunna git me in no trouble; I’ll luk out f’r that. YOUR side’s where the trouble is; that’s what’s eatin’ into you. An’ I’ll tell you flat-foot, your gittin’ rough ‘ith me and playin’ Charley the Show-Off in front o’ yer lady-friends’ll all go down in the bill. These people ye’ve got so chummy with—THEY’LL pay f’r it all right, don’t you shed no tears over that!”
“You couldn’t by any possibility,” I said deliberately, with as much satire as I could command, “you couldn’t possibly mean that any sum of mere money might be a salve for the injuries my unkind words have inflicted?”
Once more he seemed upon the point of destroying me physically, but, with a slight shudder, controlled himself. Stepping close to me, he thrust his head forward and measured the emphases of his speech by his right forefinger upon my shoulder, as he said:
“You paint THIS in yer pitchers, m’ dear friend; they’s jest as much law in this country as they is on the corner o’ Twenty-thoid Street an’ Fif’ Avenoo! You keep out the way of it, or you’ll git runned over!”
Delivering a final tap on my shoulder as a last warning, he wheeled deftly upon his heel, addressed Miss Elliott briefly, “Glad t’ know YOU, lady,” and striking into the by-path by which he had approached us, was soon lost to sight.
The girl faced me excitedly. “What IS it?” she cried. “It seemed to me you insulted him deliberately—”
“I did.”
“You wanted to make him angry?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! I thought so!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “I knew there was something serious underneath. It’s about Mr. Saffren?”
“It is serious indeed, I fear,” I said, and turning to my own easel, began to get my traps together. “I’ll tell you the little I know, because I want you to tell Mrs. Harman what has just happened, and you’ll be able to do it better if you understand what is understandable about the rest of it.”
“You mean you wouldn’t tell me so that I could understand for myself?” There was a note of genuine grieved reproach in her voice. “Ah, then I’ve made you think me altogether a hare-brain!”
“I haven’t time to tell you what I think of you,” I said brusquely, and, strangely enough, it seemed to please her. But I paid little attention to that, continuing quickly: “When Professor Keredec and Mr. Saffren came to Les Trois Pigeons, they were so careful to keep out of everybody’s sight that one might have suspected that they were in hiding—and, in fact, I’m sure that they were—though, as time passed and nothing alarming happened, they’ve felt reassured and allowed themselves more liberty. It struck me that Keredec at first dreaded that they might be traced to the inn, and I’m afraid his fear was justified, for one night, before I came to know them, I met Mr. ‘Percy’ on the road; he’d visited Madame Brossard’s and pumped Amedee dry, but clumsily tried to pretend to me that he had not been there at all. At the time, I did not connect him even remotely with Professor Keredec’s anxieties. I imagined he might have an eye to the spoons; but it’s as ridiculous to think him a burglar as it would be to take him for a detective. What he is, or what he has to do with Mr. Saffren, I can guess no more than I can guess the cause of Keredec’s fears, but the moment I saw him to-day, saw that he’d come back, I knew it was THAT, and tried to draw him out. You heard what he said; there’s no doubt that Saffren stands in danger of some kind. It may be inconsiderable, or even absurd, but it’s evidently imminent, and no matter what it is, Mrs. Harman must be kept out of it. I want you to see her as soon as you can and ask her from me—no, persuade her yourself—not to leave Quesnay for a day or two. I mean, that she absolutely MUST NOT meet Mr. Saffren again until we know what all this means. Will you do it?”
“That I will!” And she began hastily to get her belongings in marching order. “I’ll do anything in the world you’ll let me—and oh, I hope they can’t do anything to poor, poor Mr. Saffren!”
“Our sporting friend had evidently seen him with Mrs. Harman to-day,” I said. “Do you know if they went to the beach again?”
“I only know she meant to meet him—but she told me she’d be back at the chateau by four. If I start now—”
“Wasn’t the phaeton to be sent to the inn for you?”
“Not until six,” she returned briskly, folding her easel and strapping it to her camp-stool with precision. “Isn’t it shorter by the woods?”
“You’ve only to follow this path to the second crossing and then turn to the right,” I responded. “I shall hurry back to Madame Brossard’s to see Keredec—and here”—I extended my hand toward her traps, of which, in a neatly practical fashion, she had made one close pack—“let me have your things, and I’ll take care of them at the inn for you. They’re heavy, and it’s a long trudge.”
“You have your own to carry,” she answered, swinging the strap over her shoulder. “It’s something of a walk for you, too.”
“No, no, let me have them,” I protested, for the walk before her WAS long and the things would be heavy indeed before it ended.
“Go your ways,” she laughed, and as my hand still remained extended she grasped it with her own and gave it a warm and friendly shake. “Hurry!” And with an optimism which took my breath, she said, “I know YOU can make it come out all right! Besides, I’ll help you!”
With that she turned and started manfully upon her journey. I stared after her for a moment or more, watching the pretty brown dress flashing in and out of shadow among the ragged greeneries, shafts of sunshine now and then flashing upon her hair. Then I picked up my own pack and set out for the inn.
Every one knows that the more serious and urgent the errand a man may be upon, the more incongruous are apt to be the thoughts that skip into his mind. As I went through the woods that day, breathless with haste and curious fears, my brain became suddenly, unaccountably busy with a dream I had had, two nights before. I had not recalled this dream on waking: the recollection of it came to me now for the first time. It was a usual enough dream, wandering and unlifelike, not worth the telling; and I had been thinking so constantly of Mrs. Harman that there was nothing extraordinary in her worthless ex-husband’s being part of it.
And yet, looking back upon that last, hurried walk of mine through the forest, I see how strange it was that I could not quit remembering how in my dream I had gone motoring up Mount Pilatus with the man I had seen so pitiably demolished on the Versailles road, two years before—Larrabee Harman.
Keredec was alone in his salon, extended at ease upon a long chair, an ottoman and a stool, when I burst in upon him; a portentous volume was in his lap, and a prolific pipe, smoking up from his great cloud of beard, gave the final reality to the likeness he thus presented of a range of hills ending in a volcano. But he rolled the book cavalierly to the floor, limbered up by sections to receive me, and offered me a hearty welcome.
“Ha, my dear sir,” he cried, “you take pity on the lonely Keredec; you make him a visit. I could not wish better for myself. We shall have a good smoke and a good talk.”
“You are improved to-day?” I asked, it may be a little slyly.
“Improve?” he repeated inquiringly.
“Your rheumatism, I mean.”
“Ha, yes; that rheumatism!” he shouted, and throwing back his head, rocked the room with sudden laughter. “Hew! But it is gone—almost! Oh, I am much better, and soon I shall be able to go in the woods again with my boy.” He pushed a chair toward me. “Come, light your cigar; he will not return for an hour perhaps, and there is plenty of time for the smoke to blow away. So! It is better. Now we shall talk.”
“Yes,” I said, “I wanted to talk with you.”
“That is a—what you call?—ha, yes, a coincidence,” he returned, stretching himself again in the long chair, “a happy coincidence; for I have wished a talk with you; but you are away so early for all day, and in the evening Oliver, he is always here.”
“I think what I wanted to talk about concerns him particularly.”
“Yes?” The professor leaned forward, looking at me gravely. “That is another coincidence. But you shall speak first. Commence then.”
“I feel that you know me at least well enough,” I began rather hesitatingly, “to be sure that I would not, for the world, make any effort to intrude in your affairs, or Mr. Saffren’s, and that I would not force your confidence in the remotest—”
“No, no, no!” he interrupted. “Please do not fear I shall misinterpretate whatever you will say. You are our friend. We know it.”
“Very well,” I pursued; “then I speak with no fear of offending. When you first came to the inn I couldn’t help seeing that you took a great many precautions for secrecy; and when you afterward explained these precautions to me on the ground that you feared somebody might think Mr. Saffren not quite sane, and that such an impression might injure him later—well, I could not help seeing that your explanation did not cover all the ground.”
“It is true—it did not.” He ran his huge hand through the heavy white waves of his hair, and shook his head vigorously. “No; I knew it, my dear sir, I knew it well. But, what could I do? I would not have telled my own mother! This much I can say to you: we came here at a risk, but I thought that with great care it might be made little. And I thought a great good thing might be accomplish if we should come here, something so fine, so wonderful, that even if the danger had been great I would have risked it. I will tell you a little more: I think that great thing is BEING accomplish!” Here he rose to his feet excitedly and began to pace the room as he talked, the ancient floor shaking with his tread. “I think it is DONE! And ha! my dear sir, if it SHOULD be, this big Keredec will not have lived in vain! It was a great task I undertake with my young man, and the glory to see it finish is almost here. Even if the danger should come, the THING is done, for all that is real and has true meaning is inside the soul!”
“It was in connection with the risk you have mentioned that I came to talk,” I returned with some emphasis, for I was convinced of the reality of Mr. Earl Percy and also very certain that he had no existence inside or outside a soul. “I think it necessary that you should know—”
But the professor was launched. I might as well have swept the rising tide with a broom. He talked with magnificent vehemence for twenty minutes, his theme being some theory of his own that the individuality of a soul is immortal, and that even in perfection, the soul cannot possibly merge into any Nirvana. Meantime, I wondered how Mr. Percy was employing his time, but after one or two ineffectual attempts to interrupt, I gave myself to silence until the oration should be concluded.
“And so it is with my boy,” he proclaimed, coming at last to the case in hand. “The spirit of him, the real Oliver Saffren, THAT has NEVER change! The outside of him, those thing that BELONG to him, like his memory, THEY have change, but not himself, for himself is eternal and unchangeable. I have taught him, yes; I have helped him get the small things we can add to our possession—a little knowledge, maybe, a little power of judgment. But, my dear sir, I tell you that such things are ONLY possessions of a man. They are not the MAN! All that a man IS or ever shall be, he is when he is a baby. So with Oliver; he had lived a little while, twenty-six years, perhaps, when pft—like that!—he became almost as a baby again. He could remember how to talk, but not much more. He had lost his belongings—they were gone from the lobe of the brain where he had stored them; but HE was not gone, no part of the real HIMSELF was lacking. Then presently they send him to me to make new his belongings, to restore his possessions. Ha, what a task! To take him with nothing in the world of his own and see that he get only GOOD possessions, GOOD knowledge, GOOD experience! I took him to the mountains of the Tyrol—two years—and there his body became strong and splendid while his brain was taking in the stores. It was quick, for his brain had retained some habits; it was not a baby’s brain, and some small part of its old stores had not been lost. But if anything useless or bad remain, we empty it out—I and those mountain’ with their pure air. Now, I say he is all good and the work was good; I am proud! But I wish to restore ALL that was good in his life; your Keredec is something of a poet.—You may put it: much the old fool! And for that greates’ restoration of all I have brought my boy back to France; since it was necessary. It was a madness, and I thank the good God I was mad enough to do it. I cannot tell you yet, my dear sir: but you shall see, you shall see what the folly of that old Keredec has done! You shall see, you shall—and I promise it—what a Paradise, when the good God helps, an old fool’s dream can make!”
A half-light had broken upon me as he talked, pacing the floor, thundering his paean of triumph, his Titanic gestures bruising the harmless air. Only one explanation, incredible, but possible, sufficed. Anything was possible, I thought—anything was probable—with this dreamer whom the trump of Fame, executing a whimsical fantasia, proclaimed a man of science!
“By the wildest chance,” I gasped, “you don’t mean that you wanted him to fall in love—”
He had reached the other end of the room, but at this he whirled about on me, his laughter rolling out again, till it might have been heard at Pere Baudry’s.
“Ha, my dear sir, you have said it! But you knew it; you told him to come to me and tell me.”
“But I mean that you—unless I utterly misunderstand—you seem to imply that you had selected some one now in France whom you planned that he should care for—that you had selected the lady whom you know as Madame d’Armand.”
“Again,” he shouted, “you have said it!”
“Professor Keredec,” I returned, with asperity, “I have no idea how you came to conceive such a preposterous scheme, but I agree heartily that the word for it is madness. In the first place, I must tell you that her name is not even d’Armand—”
“My dear sir, I know. It was the mistake of that absurd Amedee. She is Mrs. Harman.”
“You knew it?” I cried, hopelessly confused. “But Oliver still speaks of her as Madame d’Armand.”
“He does not know. She has not told him.”
“But why haven’t you told him?”
“Ha, that is a story, a poem,” he cried, beginning to pace the floor again—“a ballad as old as the oldest of Provence! There is a reason, my dear sir, which I cannot tell you, but it lies within the romance of what you agree is my madness. Some day, I hope, you shall understand and applaud! In the meantime—”
“In the meantime,” I said sharply, as he paused for breath, “there is a keen-faced young man who took a room in the inn this morning and who has come to spy upon you, I believe.”
“What is it you say?”
He came to a sudden stop.
I had not meant to deliver my information quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now, and I repeated the statement, giving him a terse account of my two encounters with the rattish youth, and adding:
“He seemed to be certain that ‘Oliver Saffren’ is an assumed name, and he made a threatening reference to the laws of France.”
The effect upon Keredec was a very distinct pallor. He faced me silently until I had finished, then in a voice grown suddenly husky, asked:
“Do you think he came back to the inn? Is he here now?”
“I do not know.”
“We must learn; I must know that, at once.” And he went to the door.
“Let me go instead,” I suggested.
“It can’t make little difference if he see me,” said the professor, swallowing with difficulty and displaying, as he turned to me, a look of such profound anxiety that I was as sorry for him now as I had been irritated a few minutes earlier by his galliard air-castles. “I do not know this man, nor does he know me, but I have fear”—his beard moved as though his chin were trembling—“I have fear that I know his employers. Still, it may be better if you go. Bring somebody here that we can ask.”
“Shall I find Amedee?”
“No, no, no! That babbler? Find Madame Brossard.”
I stepped out to the gallery, to discover Madame Brossard emerging from a door on the opposite side of the courtyard; Amedee, Glouglou, and a couple of carters deploying before her with some light trunks and bags, which they were carrying into the passage she had just quitted. I summoned her quietly; she came briskly up the steps and into the room, and I closed the door.
“Madame Brossard,” said the professor, “you have a new client to-day.”
“That monsieur who arrived this morning,” I suggested.
“He was an American,” said the hostess, knitting her dark brows—“but I do not think that he was exactly a monsieur.”
“Bravo!” I murmured. “That sketches a likeness. It is this ‘Percy’ without a doubt.”
“That is it,” she returned. “Monsieur Poissy is the name he gave.”
“Is he at the inn now?”
“No, monsieur, but two friends for whom he engaged apartments have just arrived.”
“Who are they?” asked Keredec quickly.
“It is a lady and a monsieur from Paris. But not married: they have taken separate apartments and she has a domestic with her, a negress, Algerian.”
“What are their names?”
“It is not ten minutes that they are installed. They have not given me their names.”
“What is the lady’s appearance?”
“Monsieur the Professor,” replied the hostess demurely, “she is not beautiful.”
“But what is she?” demanded Keredec impatiently; and it could be seen that he was striving to control a rising agitation. “Is she blonde? Is she brunette? Is she young? Is she old? Is she French, English, Spanish—”
“I think,” said Madame Brossard, “I think one would call her Spanish, but she is very fat, not young, and with a great deal too much rouge—”
She stopped with an audible intake of breath, staring at my friend’s white face. “Eh! it is bad news?” she cried. “And when one has been so ill—”
Keredec checked her with an imperious gesture. “Monsieur Saffren and I leave at once,” he said. “I shall meet him on the road; he will not return to the inn. We go to—to Trouville. See that no one knows that we have gone until to-morrow, if possible; I shall leave fees for the servants with you. Go now, prepare your bill, and bring it to me at once. I shall write you where to send our trunks. Quick! And you, my friend”—he turned to me as Madame Brossard, obviously distressed and frightened, but none the less intelligent for that, skurried away to do his bidding—“my friend, will you help us? For we need it!”
“Anything in the world!”
“Go to Pere Baudry’s; have him put the least tired of his three horses to his lightest cart and wait in the road beyond the cottage. Stand in the road yourself while that is being done. Oliver will come that way; detain him. I will join you there; I have only to see to my papers—at the most, twenty minutes. Go quickly, my friend!”
I strode to the door and out to the gallery. I was half-way down the steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren was already in the courtyard, coming toward me from the archway with a light and buoyant step.
He looked up, waving his hat to me, his face lighted with a happiness most remarkable, and brighter, even, than the strong, midsummer sunshine flaming over him. Dressed in white as he was, and with the air of victory he wore, he might have been, at that moment, a figure from some marble triumph; youthful, conquering—crowned with the laurel.
I had time only to glance at him, to “take” him, as it were, between two shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard flooded with sunshine, the figure of Madame Brossard emerging from her little office, Amedee coming from the kitchen bearing a white-covered tray, and, entering from the road, upon the trail of Saffren but still in the shadow of the archway, the discordant fineries and hatchet-face of the ex-pedestrian and tourist, my antagonist of the forest.
I had opened my mouth to call a warning.
“Hurry” was the word I would have said, but it stopped at “hur—.” The second syllable was never uttered.
There came a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a captured hen, and out of the passage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fantastically dressed in green and gold.
Her coarse blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from which her gown hung precariously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double-chinned, coarse, greasy, smeared with blue pencillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge.
At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly:
“Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari—c’est moi! C’est ta femme, mon coeur!”
She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical ferocity that was a very paroxysm of triumph.
“Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!” she cried.
Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, he flung her off with a violence surpassing her own, and with loathing unspeakable. She screamed that he was killing her, calling him “husband,” and tried to fasten herself upon him again. But he leaped backward beyond the reach of her clutching hands, and, turning, plunged to the steps and staggered up them, the woman following.
From above me leaned the stricken face of Keredec; he caught Saffren under the arm and half lifted him to the gallery, while she strove to hold him by the knees.
“O Christ!” gasped Saffren. “Is THIS the woman?”
The giant swung him across the gallery and into the open door with one great sweep of the arm, strode in after him, and closed and bolted the door. The woman fell in a heap at the foot of the steps, uttered a cracked simulation of the cry of a broken heart.
“Name of a name of God!” she wailed. “After all these years! And my husband strikes me!”
Then it was that what had been in my mind as a monstrous suspicion became a certainty. For I recognised the woman; she was Mariana—la bella Mariana la Mursiana.
If I had ever known Larrabee Harman, if, instead of the two strange glimpses I had caught of him, I had been familiar with his gesture, walk, intonation—even, perhaps, if I had ever heard his voice—the truth might have come to me long ago.
Larrabee Harman!
“Oliver Saffren” was Larrabee Harman.
I do not like to read those poets who write of pain as if they loved it; the study of suffering is for the cold analyst, for the vivisectionist, for those who may transfuse their knowledge of it to the ultimate good of mankind. And although I am so heavily endowed with curiosity concerning the people I find about me, my gift (or curse, whichever it be) knows pause at the gates of the house of calamity. So, if it were possible, I would not speak of the agony of which I was a witness that night in the apartment of my friends at Madame Brossard’s. I went with reluctance, but there was no choice. Keredec had sent for me.
... When I was about fifteen, a boy cousin of mine, several years younger, terribly injured himself on the Fourth of July; and I sat all night in the room with him, helping his mother. Somehow he had learned that there was no hope of saving his sight; he was an imaginative child and realised the whole meaning of the catastrophe; the eternal darkness.... And he understood that the thing had been done, that there was no going back of it. This very certainty increased the intensity of his rebellion a thousandfold. “I WILL have my eyes!” he screamed. “I WILL! I WILL!”
Keredec had told his tragic ward too little. The latter had understood but vaguely the nature of the catastrophe which overhung his return to France, and now that it was indeed concrete and definite, the guardian was forced into fuller disclosures, every word making the anguish of the listener more intolerable. It was the horizonless despair of a child; and that profound protest I had so often seen smouldering in his eyes culminated, at its crisis, in a wild flame of revolt. The shame of the revelation passed over him; there was nothing of the disastrous drunkard, sober, learning what he had done. To him, it seemed that he was being forced to suffer for the sins of another man.
“Do you think that you can make me believeIdid this?” he cried. “That I made life unbearable for HER, drove HER from me, and took this hideous, painted old woman in HER place? It’s a lie. You can’t make me believe such a monstrous lie as that! You CAN’T! You CAN’T!”
He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering from head to foot.
“My poor boy, it is the truth,” said Keredec, kneeling beside him and putting a great arm across his shoulders. “It is what a thousand men are doing this night. Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable—or more simple. Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and nothing to do. You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life. You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are right. When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were blind—you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down inside you, with its hands over its face. If it could have once stood straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away from her and from everything you had put in your life. But, in your suffering you must rejoice: the triumph is that your mind hates that old life as greatly as your soul hates it. You are as good as if you had never been the wild fellow—yes, the wicked fellow—that you were. For a man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never sinned. But though his emancipation can be so perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal, and each has a consequence that is never ending. And so, now, though you are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must abide it. Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing!—that suffering—compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!”
The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a broken-hearted child.
I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I lay upon my bed until dawn. Then I went for a long, hard walk, breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard’s in a peasant’s cart which was going that way.
I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever—as I told him.
“I have some news for you,” he said after the hearty greeting—“an announcement, in fact.”
“Wait!” I glanced at the interested attitude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led the way into the pavilion. “You may as well not tell it in the hearing of that young man,” I said, when the door was closed. “He is eccentric.”
“So I gathered,” returned Ward, smiling, “from his attire. But it really wouldn’t matter who heard it. Elizabeth’s going to marry Cresson Ingle.”
“That is the news—the announcement—you spoke of?”
“Yes, that is it.”
To save my life I could not have told at that moment what else I had expected, or feared, that he might say, but certainly I took a deep breath of relief. “I am very glad,” I said. “It should be a happy alliance.”
“On the whole, I think it will be,” he returned thoughtfully. “Ingle’s done his share of hard living, and I once had a notion”—he glanced smiling at me—“well, I dare say you know my notion. But it is a good match for Elizabeth and not without advantages on many counts. You see, it’s time I married, myself; she feels that very strongly and I think her decision to accept Ingle is partly due to her wish to make all clear for a new mistress of my household,—though that’s putting it in a rather grandiloquent way.” He laughed. “And as you probably guess, I have an idea that some such arrangement might be somewhere on the wings of the wind on its way to me, before long.”
He laughed again, but I did not, and noting my silence he turned upon me a more scrutinising look than he had yet given me, and said:
“My dear fellow, is something the matter? You look quite haggard. You haven’t been ill?”
“No, I’ve had a bad night. That’s all.”
“Oh, I heard something of a riotous scene taking place over here,” he said. “One of the gardeners was talking about it to Elizabeth. Your bad night wouldn’t be connected with that, would it? You haven’t been playing Samaritan?”
“What was it you heard?” I asked quickly.
“I didn’t pay much attention. He said that there was great excitement at Madame Brossard’s, because a strange woman had turned up and claimed an insane young man at the inn for her husband, and that they had a fight of some sort—”
“Damnation!” I started from my chair. “Did Mrs. Harman hear this story?”
“Not last night, I’m certain. Elizabeth said the gardener told her as she came down to the chateau gates to meet me when I arrived—it was late, and Louise had already gone to her room. In fact, I have not seen her yet. But what difference could it possibly make whether she heard it or not? She doesn’t know these people, surely?”
“She knows the man.”
“This insane—”
“He is not insane,” I interrupted. “He has lost the memory of his earlier life—lost it through an accident. You and I saw the accident.”
“That’s impossible,” said George, frowning. “I never saw but one accident that you—”
“That was the one: the man is Larrabee Harman.”
George had struck a match to light a cigar; but the operation remained incomplete: he dropped the match upon the floor and set his foot upon it. “Well, tell me about it,” he said.
“You haven’t heard anything about him since the accident?”
“Only that he did eventually recover and was taken away from the hospital. I heard that his mind was impaired. Does Louise—” he began; stopped, and cleared his throat. “Has Mrs. Harman heard that he is here?”
“Yes; she has seen him.”
“Do you mean the scoundrel has been bothering her? Elizabeth didn’t tell me of this—”
“Your sister doesn’t know,” I said, lifting my hand to check him. “I think you ought to understand the whole case—if you’ll let me tell you what I know about it.”
“Go ahead,” he bade me. “I’ll try to listen patiently, though the very thought of the fellow has always set my teeth on edge.”
“He’s not at all what you think,” I said. “There’s an enormous difference, almost impossible to explain to you, but something you’d understand at once if you saw him. It’s such a difference, in fact, that when I found that he was Larrabee Harman the revelation was inexpressibly shocking and distressing to me. He came here under another name; I had no suspicion that he was any one I’d ever heard of, much less that I’d actually seen him twice, two years ago, and I’ve grown to—well, in truth, to be fond of him.”
“What is the change?” asked Ward, and his voice showed that he was greatly disquieted. “What is he like?”
“As well as I can tell you, he’s like an odd but very engaging boy, with something pathetic about him; quite splendidly handsome—”
“Oh, he had good looks to spare when I first knew him,” George said bitterly. “I dare say he’s got them back if he’s taken care of himself, or been taken care OF, rather! But go on; I won’t interrupt you again. Why did he come here? Hoping to see—”
“No. When he came here he did not know of her existence except in the vaguest way. But to go back to that, I’d better tell you first that the woman we saw with him, one day on the boulevard, and who was in the accident with him—”
“La Mursiana, the dancer; I know.”
“She had got him to go through a marriage with her—”
“WHAT?” Ward’s eyes flashed as he shouted the word.
“It seems inexplicable; but as I understand it, he was never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half-stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him. There’s no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she’s taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman. She means to hang on.”
“I’m glad of that!” said George, striking his knee with his open palm. “That will go a great way toward—”
He paused, and asked suddenly: “Did this marriage take place in France?”
“Yes. You’d better hear me through,” I remonstrated. “When he was taken from the hospital, he was placed in charge of a Professor Keredec, a madman of whom you’ve probably heard.”
“Madman? Why, no; he’s a member of the Institute; a psychologist or metaphysician, isn’t he?—at any rate of considerable celebrity.”
“Nevertheless,” I insisted grimly, “as misty a vapourer as I ever saw; a poetic, self-contradicting and inconsistent orator, a blower of bubbles, a seer of visions, a mystic, and a dreamer—about as scientific as Alice’s White Knight! Harman’s aunt, who lived in London, the only relative he had left, I believe—and she has died since—put him in Keredec’s charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden for two years, the idea being literally to give him something like an education—Keredec’s phrase is ‘restore mind to his soul’! What must have been quite as vital was to get him out of his horrible wife’s clutches. And they did it, for she could not find him. But she picked up that rat in the garden out yonder—he’d been some sort of stable-manager for Harman once—and set him on the track. He ran the poor boy down, and yesterday she followed him. Now it amounts to a species of sordid siege.”
“She wants money, of course.”
“Yes, MORE money; a fair allowance has always been sent to her. Keredec has interviewed her notary and she wants a settlement, naming a sum actually larger than the whole estate amounts to. There were colossal expenditures and equally large shrinkages; what he has left is invested in English securities and is not a fortune, but of course she won’t believe that and refuses to budge until this impossible settlement is made. You can imagine about how competent such a man as Keredec would be to deal with the situation. In the mean time, his ward is in so dreadful a state of horror and grief I am afraid it is possible that his mind may really give way, for it was not in a normal condition, of course, though he’s perfectly sane, as I tell you. If it should,” I concluded, with some bitterness, “I suppose Keredec will be still prating upliftingly on the saving of his soul!”
“When was it that Louise saw him?”
“Ah, that,” I said, “is where Keredec has been a poet and a dreamer indeed. It was his PLAN that they should meet.”
“You mean he brought this wreck of Harman, these husks and shreds of a man, down here for Louise to see?” Ward cried incredulously. “Oh, monstrous!”
“No,” I answered. “Only insane. Not because there is anything lacking in Oliver—in Harman, I mean—for I think that will be righted in time, but because the second marriage makes it a useless cruelty that he should have been allowed to fall in love with his first wife again. Yet that was Keredec’s idea of a ‘beautiful restoration,’ as he calls it!”
“There is something behind all this that you don’t know,” said Ward slowly. “I’ll tell you after I’ve seen this Keredec. When did the man make you his confidant?”
“Last night. Most of what I learned was as much a revelation to his victim as it was to me. Harman did not know till then that the lady he had been meeting had been his wife, or that he had ever seen her before he came here. He had mistaken her name and she did not enlighten him.”
“Meeting?” said Ward harshly. “You speak as if—”
“They have been meeting every day, George.”
“I won’t believe it of her!” he cried. “She couldn’t—”
“It’s true. He spoke to her in the woods one day; I was there and saw it. I know now that she knew him at once; and she ran away, but—not in anger. I shouldn’t be a very good friend of yours,” I went on gently, “if I didn’t give you the truth. They’ve been together every day since then, and I’m afraid—miserably afraid, Ward—that her old feeling for him has been revived.”
I have heard Ward use an oath only two or three times in my life, and this was one of them.
“Oh, by God!” he cried, starting to his feet; “I SHOULD like to meet Professor Keredec!”
“I am at your service, my dear sir,” said a deep voice from the veranda. And opening the door, the professor walked into the room.