The dusk was deepening quickly into darkness. As she ran down the open stretch of hillside between her villa and the little town, she saw the lights blaze out upon the terrace of Monte Carlo. Far below her, upon her right, they shone like great opals, each with a heart of fire. Pamela stopped for a second to regain her breath before she reached Roquebrune. The sudden brightness of those lights carried her thoughts backwards to the years when the height of trouble for her had been the sickness of a favourite horse, and all her life was an eager expectation. On so many evenings she had seen those lights flash out through the gathering night while she had sat talking in her garden with the little schoolmaster whom she was now to revisit. To both of them those lights had been a parable. They had glowed in friendliness and promise--thus she had read the parable--out of a great, bright, gay world of men and women, upon a cool, twilit garden of youth and ignorance. She thought of what had come in place of all that imagined gaiety. To the schoolmaster, disappointment and degradation; while, as for herself, she felt very lonely upon this evening. "The world is a place of great sadness." Thus had M. Giraud spoken when Pamela had returned to Roquebrune from her first season in London, and the words now came back to her again.
She ran on through the narrow streets of Roquebrune, her white frock showing in the light from the shops and windows. She wore no hat upon her head, and more than one of the people in the street called to her as she passed and asked her whether she needed help. Help, indeed, she did need, but not from them. She came to the tiny square whence the steps led down to the station. On the west side of the square stood the school-house, and, close by, the little house of the schoolmaster. A light burned in a window of the ground floor. Pamela knocked loudly upon the door. She heard a chair grate upon the floor-boards. She knocked again, and the door was opened. It was the schoolmaster himself who opened it.
"M. Giraud!" she exclaimed, drawing her breath quickly. The schoolmaster leaned forward and stared at the white figure which stood in the darkness just outside his porch; but he made no reply.
"Let me in!" cried Pamela; and he made a movement as though to bar the way. But she slipped quickly past him into the room. He closed the door slowly and followed her.
The room was bare. A deal table, a chair or two, and a few tattered books on a hanging bookshelf made up all its furniture. Pamela leaned against the wall with a hand to her heart. M. Giraud saw her clearly now. She stood only a few feet from him, in the light of the room. She was in distress; yet he spoke harshly.
"Why have you come?" he cried; and she answered, piteously, "I want your help."
At that a flame of anger kindled within him. He saw her again, after all this long time of her absence--her whose equal he had never spoken with. Her dark hair, her eyes, the pure outline of her face, her tall, slim figure, the broad forehead--all the delicacy and beauty of her--was a torture to him. The sound of her voice, with its remembered accents, hurt him as he had thought nothing could ever hurt him again.
"Really!" he cried, in exasperation. "You want help; so you come to me. Without that need would you have come? No, indeed. You are a woman. Get your fine friends to help you!"
There were other follies upon his tongue, but he never spoke them. He looked at Pamela, and came to a stop.
Pamela had entered the cottage bent with a single mind upon her purpose--to avert a catastrophe at the little restaurant on the Corniche road. But M. Giraud was before her, face to face with her, as she was face to face with him. She saw him clearly in the light as he saw her; and she was shocked. The curé had prepared her for a change in her old comrade, but not for so complete a disfigurement. The wineshop had written its sordid story too legibly upon his features. His face was bloated and red, the veins stood out upon the cheeks, and the nose like threads of purple; his eyes were yellow and unwholesome. M. Giraud had grown stout in body, too; and his dress was slovenly and in disrepair. He was an image of degradation and neglect. Pamela was shocked, and betrayed the shock. She almost shrank from him at the first; there was almost upon her face an expression of aversion and disgust. But sorrow drove the aversion away, and immediately her eyes were full of pity; and these swift changes M. Giraud saw and understood.
She was still his only window on the outside world. That was the trouble. By her expression he read his own decline more surely than in his mirror. Through her he saw the world; through her, too, he saw what manner of figure he presented to the world. Never had he realised how far he had sunk until this moment. He saw, as in a picture, the young schoolmaster of the other days who had read French with the pupil, who was more his teacher than his pupil, upon the garden terrace of the Villa Pontignard--a youth full of dreams, which were vain, no doubt, but not ignoble. There was a trifle of achievement, too. For even now one of the tattered books upon his shelf was a copy of his brochure on Roquebrune and the Upper Corniche road. With perseverance, with faith--he understood it in a flash--he might have found, here, at Roquebrune, a satisfaction for those ambitions which had so tortured him. There was a field here for the historian, had he chosen to seize on it. Fame might have come to him, though he never visited the great cities and the crowded streets. So he thought, and then he realised what he had become. It was true he had suffered great unhappiness. Yet so had she--Pamela Mardale; and she had not fallen from her pedestal. Here shame seized upon him. He lowered his eyes from her face.
"Help!" he stammered. "You ask me to help you? Look at me! I can give you no help!"
He suddenly broke off. He sat down at the table, buried his face in his hands, and burst into tears. Pamela crossed to him and laid her hand very gently upon his shoulder. She spoke very gently, too.
"Oh yes, you can," she said.
He drew away from her, but she would not be repulsed.
"You should never have come to me at all," he sobbed. "Oh, how I hate that you should see me like this! Why did you come? I did not mean you to see me. You must have known that! You must have known, too, why. It was not kind of you, mademoiselle. No, it was not kind!"
"Yet I am glad that I came," said Pamela. "I came, thinking of myself, it is true--my need is so very great; but now I see your need is as great as mine. I ask you to rise up and help me."
"No, leave me alone!" he cried. And she answered, gently, "I will not."
M. Giraud grew quiet. He pressed his handkerchief to his eyes, and stood up.
"Forgive me!" he said. "I have behaved like a child; but you would forgive me if you knew how I have waited and waited for you to come back. But you never did. Each summer I said, 'She will return in the winter!' And the winter came, and I said, 'She will come in the spring.' But neither in winter nor in the spring did you return to Roquebrune. I have needed you so badly all these years."
"I am sorry," replied Pamela; "I am very sorry."
She did not reproach herself at all. She could not see, indeed, that she was to blame. But she was none the less distressed. Giraud's exhibition of grief was so utterly unfamiliar to her that she felt awkward and helpless in face of it. He was yet further disfigured now by the traces of weeping; his eyes were swollen and red. There was something grotesque in the aspect of this drink-swollen face, all convulsed with sorrow. Nothing could well lie less in sympathy with Pamela's nature than Giraud's outburst and display of tears; for she was herself reticent and proud. She held her head high as she walked through the world, mistress alike of her sorrows and her joys. But Mr. Mudge had spoken the truth when he had called upon her in Leicestershire. Imagination had come to her of late. She was able to understand the other point of view--to appreciate that there were other characters than hers which must needs fulfil themselves in ways which were not hers. She put herself now in M. Giraud's place. She imagined him waiting and waiting at Roquebrune, with his one window on the outside world closed and shuttered--a man in a darkened room who most passionately desired the air without. She said, with a trace of hesitation--
"You say you have needed me very much?"
"Oh, have I not?" exclaimed Giraud; and the very weariness of his voice would have convinced her, had she needed conviction. It seemed to express the dilatory passage of the years during which he had looked for her coming, and had looked in vain.
"Well, then, listen to me," she went on. "I was once told that to be needed by those whom one needs is a great comfort. I thought of the saying at the time, and I thought that it was a true one. Afterwards"--she began to speak slowly, carefully selecting her words--"it happened that in my own experience I proved it to be true--at all events, for me. Is it true for you also? Think well. If it is not true I will go away as you bade me at the beginning; but if it is true--why, then I may be of some little help to you, and you will be certainly a great help to me; for I need you very surely."
M. Giraud looked at her in silence for a little while. Then he answered her with simplicity, and so, for the first time during this interview, wore the proper dignity of a man.
"Yes, I will help you," he said. "What can I do?"
She held out the letter which she had written to Lionel Callon. She bade him carry it with the best speed he could to its destination.
"Lose no time!" she implored. "I am not sure, but it may be that one man's life, and the happiness of a man and a woman besides, all hang upon its quick receipt."
M. Giraud took his hat from the wall and went to the door. At the door he paused, and standing thus, with an averted face, he said in a whisper, recalling the words she had lately spoken--
"There is one, then, whom you need? You are no longer lonely in your thoughts? I should like to know."
"Yes," Pamela answered gently: "I am no longer lonely in my thoughts."
"And you are happy?" he continued. "You were not happy when you were at Roquebrune last. I should like to know that you, at all events, are happy now."
"Yes," said Pamela. In the presence of his distress she rather shrank from acknowledging the change which had come over her. It seemed cruel; yet he clearly wished to know. He clearly would be the happier for knowing. "Yes," she said; "I am happy."
"I am very glad," said M. Giraud, in a low voice; "I am very glad." And he went rather quickly out by the door.
Tony Stretton walked quickly down from the Villa Pontignard to the station. There he learned that an hour must elapse before a train to Eze was due. Inaction was at this moment intolerable to him. Even though he should get to Eze not a minute the sooner, he must hurry upon his way. He could not wait upon this platform for an hour, suspense so tortured him. He went out upon the road and began to run. He ran very quickly. The road turned sharply round the shoulder of a hill, and Stretton saw in front of him the lights of Monte Carlo. They were bunched in great white clusters, they were strung in festoons in the square and the streets. They made a golden crescent about the dark, quiet waters of the bay. Looking down from this shoulder of the hill upon the town at such an hour one seems to be looking upon a town of fairyland; one expects a sweet and delicate music to float upwards from its houses and charm the ears. Tony's one thought was that beyond that place of lights lay Eze. He came to an electric tram which was on point of starting. He entered it and it rattled him quickly down the hill.
At Monte Carlo he sprang into the first carriage which he saw waiting for a fare, and bade the coachman drive him quickly out to Eze. The night had come; above his head the stars shone very brightly from a dark sky of velvet. The carriage passed out of the town; the villas grew more scarce; the open road glimmered ahead of him a riband of white; the sea murmured languorously upon the shore.
At this moment, in the lonely restaurant towards which Tony was driving in such haste, Lionel Callon and Millie Stretton were sitting down to dinner. The table was laid in the small, daintily furnished room which opened on to the terrace. The windows stood wide, and the lazy murmur of the waves entered in. The white cloth shone with silver, a great bowl of roses stood in the centre and delicately perfumed the air. Thither Millie had come in fulfilment of that promise made on a midnight of early spring in Regent's Park. The colour burned prettily on her cheeks, she had dressed herself in a pink gown of lace, jewels shone on her arms and at her neck. She was, perhaps, a little feverish in her gaiety, her laughter was perhaps a little over loud. Indeed, every now and then her heart sank in fear within her, and she wished herself far away. But here Lionel Callon was at his ease. He knew the methods by which victory was to be won. There was no suggestion of triumph in his manner. He was considerate and most deferential, and with no more than a hint of passion in the deference.
"You have come," he said. His eyes rested upon hers, and he left them to express his gratitude. He raised her hand to his lips and gently took the cloak from her shoulders. "You have had a long journey. But you are not tired." He placed her chair for her at the table and sat opposite. He saw that she was uneasy. He spoke no word which might alarm her.
Meanwhile Tony was drawing nearer. He reached the hotel at Eze, and drove through its garden to the door.
"Is Lady Stretton in the hotel?" he asked.
"No, sir. Her ladyship went out to dinner nearly an hour ago."
"Thank you," said Tony. "She arrived this afternoon, I think?"
"Yes, sir. What name shall I give when she returns?"
"No name," said Tony. And he ordered his coachman to drive back to the road.
When he had reached it he directed the man again.
"Towards Beaulieu," he said; and in a little while, on his left hand, below the level of the road, he saw the lights of theRéserve. He stopped at the gate, dismissed his carriage, and walked down the winding drive to the door. He walked into the restaurant. It was empty. A waiter came forward to him.
"I wish you to take me at once to Mr. Callon," he said. He spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. But the waiter nevertheless hesitated. Tony wore the clothes in which he had travelled to Roquebrune. He was covered with dust, his face was haggard and stern. He had nothing in common with the dainty little room of lights and flowers and shining silver, and the smartly dressed couple who were dining there. The waiter guessed that his irruption would be altogether inconvenient.
"Mr. Callon!" he stammered. "He has gone out."
Tony heard the rattle of a metal cover upon a dish. He looked in the direction whence the sound came--he looked to the right-hand side of the restaurant. A door stood open there, and in the passage beyond the door he saw a waiter pass carrying the dish. Moreover, the man who had spoken to him made yet another mistake. He noticed the direction of Tony's glance, and he made a quick movement as though to bar that passage.
"He is here," said Tony; and he thrust the waiter aside. He crossed the restaurant quickly and entered the passage. The passage ran parallel to the restaurant; and, at the end towards the terrace, there was another door upon the opposite side. The waiter with the dish had his hand upon the door-handle, but he turned at the sound of Stretton's step. He, too, noticed the disorder of Tony's dress. At the same moment the man in the restaurant shouted in a warning voice--
"Jules!"
Jules stood in front of the door.
"Monsieur, this room is private," said he.
"Yet I will take the liberty to intrude," said Tony, quietly.
From behind the door there came the sound of a man's voice which Tony did not know. He had, indeed, never heard it before. Then a woman's laugh rang out; and the sound of it angered Tony beyond endurance. He recognised it beyond the possibility of mistake. It was his wife who was laughing so gaily there behind the closed door. He thought of the years he had spent in the determination to regain his wife's esteem, to free himself from her contempt. For the moment he could have laughed bitterly at his persistence as at some egregious folly. It seemed all waste--waste of time, waste of endeavour, waste of suffering. She was laughing! And with Lionel Callon for her companion! The cold, black nights of the North Sea and its gales; the arid sands of the Sahara; all his long service for her ending in that crowning act of desertion--the story was clear in his mind from beginning to end, detailed and complete. And she was laughing in there with Lionel Callon! Her laughter was to him as some biting epigram which epitomised the way in which she had spent the years of his absence. His anger got the better of his self-control.
"Stand away," he cried, in a low, savage voice, to the waiter. And since the man did not instantly move, he seized him by the shoulders and dragged him from the door.
"Monsieur!" the man cried aloud, in a frightened voice, and the dish which he was carrying fell with a clatter on to the floor. Inside the room the laughter suddenly ceased. Tony listened for a second. He could not hear even a whisper. There was complete silence. He smiled rather grimly to himself; he was thinking that this was not, at all events, the silence of contempt.
Could he have seen through the door into the room he would have been yet more convinced. All the gaiety vanished in an instant from Millie's face. She was sitting opposite the door; she sat and stared at it in terror. The blood ebbed from the cheeks, leaving them as white as paper.
"Monsieur!" she repeated, in so low a whisper that even Callon, on the other side of the small table, hardly heard the word. Her lips were dry, and she moistened them. "Monsieur!" she whispered again, and the whisper was a question. She had no definite suspicion who "Monsieur" was; she did not define him as her husband. She only understood that somehow she was trapped. The sudden clatter of the dish upon the floor, the loudness of the waiter's cry, which was not a mere protest, but also a cry of fear, terrified her; they implied violence. She was trapped. She sat paralysed upon her chair, staring across the table over Callon's shoulder at the door. Callon meanwhile said not a word. He had been sitting with his back to the door, and he twisted round in his chair. To both of them it seemed ages before the handle was turned. Yet so short was the interval of time that they could hardly have reached the terrace through the open window had they sprung up at the first sound of disturbance.
Thus they were sitting, silent and motionless, when the door was pushed open, and Tony stood in the doorway. At the sight of him Millie uttered one loud scream, and clapped her hands over her face. Callon, on the other hand, started up on to his feet. As he did so he upset his wine-glass over the table-cloth; it fell and splintered on the polished floor. He turned towards the intruder who so roughly forced his way into the room. The eyes of that intruder took no account of him; they were fixed upon Millie Stretton, as she sat cowering at the table with her hands before her face.
"What do you want?" cried Callon. "You have no right here!"
"I have every right here," said Tony. "That is my wife!"
It was still his wife at whom he looked, not at all towards Callon. Callon was startled out of his wits. Detection he had always feared; he had sought to guard against it by the use of every precaution known to his devious strategy. But it was detection by Pamela Mardale and her friends, who had once already laid him by the heels; the husband had never entered into his calculations. He had accepted without question Millie's version of the husband--he was the man who did not care. In some part of the world he wandered, but where no one knew; cut off from all his friends--indifferent, neglectful, and a fool. Even now he could not believe. This might be some new trick of Pamela Mardale's.
"Your wife!" he exclaimed. "That is not true."
"Not true?" cried Tony, in a terrible voice. He stretched out his arm and pointed towards Millie. "Look!"
Millie flinched as though she feared a blow. She dropped her head yet lower. She held her fingers over her eyelids, closing them tightly. She had looked once at Tony's face, she dared not look again. She sat in darkness, trembling. One question was in her mind. "Would he kill her?" Callon looked at her as he was bidden. Millie was wont to speak of her husband with indifference, and a suggestion of scorn. Yet it was her manifest terror which now convinced Callon that the husband was indeed before him. Here the man was, sprung suddenly out of the dark upon him, not neglectful, for he had the look of one who has travelled from afar very quickly, and slept but little on the way; not indifferent, for he was white with anger and his eyes were aflame. Callon cursed the luck which had for a second time brought him into such ill straits. He measured himself with Tony, and knew in the instant that he was no match for him. There was a man, tired, no doubt, and worn, but hard as iron, supple of muscle and limb, and finely trained to the last superfluous ounce of flesh; while he himself was soft with luxury and good living. He sought to temporise.
"That is no proof," said he. "Any woman might be startled----" And Tony broke fiercely in upon his stammered argument--
"Go out," he cried, "and wait for me!"
The door was still open. Outside it in the passage the waiters were clustered, listening. Inside the room Millie was listening. The order, roughly given, was just one which Callon for very shame could not obey. He would have liked to obey it, for confronting husbands was never to his liking; all his art lay in eluding them.
"Go out!" Tony repeated, and took a step forward. Callon could not cut so poor a figure as to slink from the room like a whipped schoolboy. Yet it would have gone better with him had he eaten his leek and gone.
"It would not be safe to leave you," he babbled. And suddenly Tony caught him by the throat, struck him upon the face, and then flung him violently away.
Callon reeled back through the open windows, slipped and fell at his full length upon the terrace. His head struck the stone flags with a horrible sound. He lay quite still in the strong light which poured from the room; his eyes were closed, his face quite bloodless. It was his business, as Mudge had said, to light amongst the teacups.
Tony made no further movement towards him. The waiters went out on to the terrace and lifted him up and carried him away. Then Tony turned towards his wife. She had risen up from her chair and overturned it when Tony had flung the interloper from the room. She now crouched shuddering against the wall, with her eyes fixed in terror upon her husband. As he turned towards her she uttered a sob and dropped upon her knees before him. That was the end of all her scorn. She kneeled in deadly fear, admiring him in the very frenzy of her fear. She had no memory for the contemptuous letters which she had written and Tony had carried under his pillow on the North Sea. Her little deceits and plots and trickeries to hoodwink her friends, her little pretence of passion for Lionel Callon--she knew at this moment that it never had been more than a pretence--these were the matters which now she remembered, and for which she dreaded punishment. She was wearing jewels that night--jewels which Tony had given her in the good past days when they lived together in the house in Deanery Street. They shook and glittered upon her hair, about her neck, upon her bosom and her arms. She kneeled in her delicate finery of lace and satin in this room of luxury and bright flowers. There was no need for Tony now to work to re-establish himself in her thoughts. She reached out her hands to him in supplication.
"I am not guilty," she moaned. "Tony! Tony!"
The man who was no good had his triumph then. Only triumph was not at all in his thoughts.
"Oh, please!" he said very quietly, "get up from your knees. I don't like to see you there. It hurts me."
Millie raised her eyes to him in wonder. He did not mean to kill her, then. All his violence, it seemed, was reserved for that poor warrior of the drawing-rooms who had just been carried away stunned and bleeding from the terrace. When Tony spoke to her his voice was rather that of a man very dispirited and sad. He had indeed travelled through the mountains of Morocco hot with anger against Callon the interloper; but now that he had come face to face again with Millie, now that he had heard her voice with its remembered accents, the interloper seemed of little account, a creature to punish and be done with. The sadness of his voice penetrated to Millie's heart. She rose and stood submissively before him.
In the passage outside the door the waiters were clustered whispering together. Tony closed the door and shut the whispers out. Upon the terrace, outside the window, a man was hesitating whether to enter or no. Tony went to the window.
"Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want?"
"I am Giraud, the schoolmaster of Roquebrune," said the man, timidly. "I bring a letter from Mademoiselle Mardale."
"Let me see it!" said Tony; and he held out his hand for the letter. He glanced at the superscription and gave it back. "It is not for me," he said, and M. Giraud went away from the terrace. Tony turned back to his wife. His mind was full of a comparison between the ways in which he and she had each spent the years of absence. For him they had been years of endeavour, persisted in through failure and perplexity until success, but for her, was reached. And how had Millie spent them? He looked at her sternly, and she said again in a faltering voice--
"I am innocent, Tony."
And he replied--
"Could you have said as much to-morrow had I not come back to-night?"
Millie had no answer to that question--she attempted none; and it was even at that moment counted to her credit by her husband. She stood silent for a while, and only the murmur of the sea breaking upon the beach filled the room. A light wind breathed through the open window, cool and fragrant, and made the shaded candles flicker upon the table. Millie had her one poor excuse to offer, and she pleaded it humbly.
"I thought that you had ceased to care what became of me," she said.
Tony looked sharply at her. She was sincere--surely she was sincere.
"You thought that?" he exclaimed; and he replaced her chair at the table. "Sit down here! Let me understand! You thought that I had ceased to care for you? When I ceased to write, I suppose?"
Millie shook her head.
"Before that?"
Tony dropped into the chair on which Callon had been sitting.
"Before that?" he exclaimed in perplexity. "When? Tell me!"
Millie sat over against him at the table.
"Do you remember the evening when you first told me that you had made up your mind to go away and make a home for both of us? It was on that evening. You gave your reason for going away. We had begun to quarrel--we were drifting apart."
"I remember," said Tony; "but we had not ceased to care then, neither you nor I. It was just because I feared that at some time we might cease to care that I was resolved to go away."
"Ah," said Millie; "but already the change had begun. Yes, yes! Things winch you thought you never could remember without a thrill you remembered already with indifference--you remembered them without being any longer moved or touched by the associations which they once had had. I recollect the very words you used. I sat as still as could be while you spoke them; but I never forgot them, Tony. There was a particular instance which you mentioned--a song----" And suddenly Tony laughed; but he laughed harshly, and there was no look of amusement on his face. Millie stared at him in surprise, but he did not explain, and she went on with her argument.
"So when you ceased to write I was: still more convinced that you had reaped to care. When you remained away after your father had died I was yet more sure."
Tony leaned across the white table-cloth with its glittering silver, and fixed his eyes on her.
"I will tell you why I ceased to write. Every letter which you wrote to me when I was in New York was more contemptuous than the letter which had preceded it. I had failed, and you despised me for my failure. I had allowed myself to be tricked out of your money----" And upon that Millie interrupted him--
"Oh no!" she cried; "you must not say that I despised you for that. No! That is not fair. I never thought of the money. I offered you what was left."
Tony had put himself in the wrong here. He recognised his mistake, he accepted Millie's correction.
"Yes, that is true," he said; "you offered me all that was left--but you offered it contemptuously; you had no shadow of belief that I would use it to advantage--you had no faith in me at all. In your eyes I was no good. Mind, I don't blame you. You were justified, no doubt. I had set out to make a home for you, as many a man has done for his wife. Only where they had succeeded I had failed. If I thought anything at all----" he said, with an air of hesitation.
"Well?" asked Millie.
"I thought you might have expressed your contempt with a little less of unkindness, or perhaps have hidden it altogether. You see, I was not having an easy time in New York, and your letters made it very much harder."
"Oh, Tony," she said, in a low voice of self-reproach. She was sitting with her hands clenched in front of her upon the table-cloth, her forehead puckered, and in her eyes a look of great pain.
"Never mind that," he replied; and he resumed his story. "I saw then quite clearly that with each letter which you received from me, each new instalment of my record of failure--for each letter was just that, wasn't it?--your contempt grew. I was determined that if I could help it your contempt should not embitter all our two lives. So I ceased to write. For the same reason I stayed away, even after my father had died. Had I come back then I should have come back a failure, proved and self-confessed. And your scorn would have stayed with you. My business henceforth was to destroy it, to prove to you that after all I was some good--if not at money-making, at something else. I resolved that we should not live together again until I could come to you and say, 'You have no right to despise me. Here's the proof.'"
Millie was learning now, even as Tony had learnt a minute ago. All that he said to her was utterly surprising and strange. He had been thinking of her, then, all the time while he was away! Indifference was in no way the reason of his absence.
"Oh, why did you not write this to me?" she cried. "It need not have been a long letter, since you were unwilling to write. But just this you might have written. It would have been better, kinder"--and she paused upon the word, uttering it with hesitation and a shy deprecating smile, as though aware that she had no claim upon his kindness. "It would have been kinder than just to leave me here, not knowing where you were, and thinking what I did."
"It is true," said Tony, "I might have written. But would you have believed me if I had? No."
"Then you might have come to me," she urged. "Once--just for five minutes--to tell me what you meant to do."
"I might," Tony agreed; "in fact, I very nearly did. I was under the windows of the house in Berkeley Square one night." And Millie started.
"Yes, you were," she said slowly.
"You knew that?"
"Yes; I knew it the next day." And she added, "I wish now, I think, that you had come in that night."
"Suppose that I had," said Tony; "suppose that I had told you of my fine plan, you would have had no faith in it. You would merely have thought, 'Here's another folly to be added to the rest.' Your contempt would have been increased, that's all."
It was quite strange to Millie Stretton that there ever could have been a time when she had despised him. She saw him sitting now in front of her, quiet and stern; she remembered her own terror when he burst into the room, when he flung Callon headlong through the windows, when he turned at last towards her.
"We have been strangers to one another."
"Yes," he replied; "I did not know you. I should never have left you--now I understand that. I trusted you very blindly, but I did not know you."
Millie lowered her eyes from his face.
"Nor I you," she answered. "What did you do when you went away that night from Berkeley Square?"
"I enlisted in the Foreign Legion in Algeria."
Millie raised her head again with a start of surprise.
"Soldiering was my trade, you see. It was the one profession where I had just a little of that expert knowledge which is necessary nowadays if you are to make your living."
Something of his life in the Foreign Legion Tony now told her. He spoke deliberately, since a light was beginning dimly to shine through the darkness of his perplexities. Of a set purpose he described to her the arduous perils of active service and the monotony of the cantonments. He was resolved that she should understand in the spirit and in the letter the life which for her sake he had led. He related his expedition to the Figuig oasis, his march into the Sahara under Tavernay. He took from his pocket the medals which he had won, and laid them upon the tablecloth before her.
"Look at them," he said; "I earned them. These are mine. I earned them for you; and while I was earning them what were you doing?"
Millie listened and looked. Wonder grew upon her. It was for her that he had laboured and endured and succeeded! His story was a revelation to her. Never had she dreamed that a man would so strive for any woman. She had lived so long among the little things of the world--the little emotions, the little passions, the little jealousies and rivalries, the little aims, the little methods of attaining them, that only with great difficulty could she realise a simpler and a wider life. She was overwhelmed now. Pride and humiliation fought within her--pride that Tony had so striven for her in silence and obscurity, humiliation because she had fallen so short of his example. It was her way to feel in superlatives at any crisis of her destiny, but surely she had a justification now.
"I never knew--I never thought! Oh, Tony!" she exclaimed, twisting her hands together as she sat before him.
"I became a sergeant," he said. "Then I brought back the remnants of the geographical expedition to Ouargla." He taxed his memory for the vivid details of that terrible retreat. He compelled her to realise something of the dumb, implacable hostility of the Sahara, to see, in the evening against the setting sun, the mounted figures of the Touaregs, and to understand that the day's march had not shaken them off. She seemed to be on the march herself, wondering whether she would live out the day, or, if she survived that, whether she would live out the night.
"But you succeeded!" she cried, clinging to the fact that they were both here in France, with the murmur of the Mediterranean in their ears. "You came back."
"Yes, I came back. One morning I marched my men through the gate of Ouargla--and what were you doing upon that day?"
Talking, perhaps, with Lionel Callon, in one of those unfrequented public places with which London abounds! Millie could not tell. She sat there and compared Lionel Callon with the man who was before her. Memories of the kind of talk she was wont to hold with Lionel Callon recurred to her, filling her with shame. She was glad to think that when Tony led his broken, weary force through the gate of Ouargla Lionel Callon had not been with her--had indeed been far away in Chili. She suddenly placed her hands before her face and burst into tears.
"Oh, Tony," she whispered, in an abasement of humiliation. "Oh, Tony."
"By that homeward march," he went on, "I gained my commission. That was what I aimed at all the while, and I had earned it at the last. Look!"
He took from his pocket the letter which his colonel had handed to him at Ain-Sefra. He had carefully treasured it all this while. He held it out to her and made her read.
"You see?" he said. "A commission won from the ranks in the hardest service known to soldiers, won without advantage of name, or friends, or money. Won just by myself. That is what I strove for. If I could win that I could come back to you with a great pride. I should be no longer the man who was no good. You yourself might even be proud of me. I used to dream of that--to dream of something else."
His voice softened a little, and a smile for a moment relaxed the severity of his face.
"Of what?" she asked.
"Out there among the sand hills, under the stars at night, I used to dream that we might perhaps get hold again of the little house in Deanery Street, where we were so happy together once. We might pretend almost that we had lived there all the time."
He spoke in a voice of great longing, and Millie was touched to the heart. She looked at Tony through her tears. There was a great longing astir within her at this moment. Was that little house in Deanery Street still a possibility? She did not presume to hope so much; but she wished that she could have hoped. She pressed the letter which she held against her breast; she would have loved to have held it to her lips, but that again she did not dare to do.
"At all events, you did succeed." she said; "I shall be glad to know that. I shall always be glad--whatever happens now."
"But I did not succeed," Tony replied. "I earned the commission, yes!--I never held it. That letter was given to me one Monday by my colonel at Ain-Sefra. You mentioned a song a minute ago, do you remember?... I had lost the associations of that song. I laughed when you mentioned it, and you were surprised. I laughed because when I received that letter I took it away with me, and that song, with all that it had ever meant, came back to my mind. I lay beneath the palm trees, and I looked across the water past the islands, and I saw the lights of the yachts in Oban Bay. I was on the dark lawn again, high above the sea, the lighted windows of the house were behind me. I heard your voice. Oh, I had got you altogether back that day," he exclaimed, with a cry. "It was as though I held your hands and looked into your eyes. I went back towards the barracks to write to you, and as I went some one tapped me on the shoulder and brought me news of you to wake me out of my dreams."
Just for a moment Millie wondered who it was who had brought the news; but the next words which Tony spoke drove the question from her mind.
"A few more weeks and I should have held that commission. I might have left the Legion, leaving behind me many friends and an honoured name. As it was, I had to desert--I deserted that night."
He spoke quite simply; but, nevertheless, the words fell with a shock upon Millie. She uttered a low cry: "Oh, Tony!" she said.
"Yes," he said, with a nod of the head, "I incurred that disgrace. I shall be ashamed of it all my life. Had I been caught, it might have meant an ignoble death; in any case, it would have meant years of prison--and I should have deserved those years of prison."
Millie shut her eyes in horror. Everything else that he had told her, every other incident--his sufferings, his perils--all seemed of little account beside this crowning risk, this crowning act of sacrifice. It was not merely that he had risked a shameful death or a shameful imprisonment. Millie was well aware that his whole nature and character must be in revolt against the act itself. Desertion! It implied disloyalty, untruth, deceit, cowardice--just those qualities, indeed, which she knew Tony most to hate, which perhaps she had rather despised him for hating. No man would have been more severe in the punishment of a deserter than Tony himself. Yet he had deserted, and upon her account. And he sat there telling her of it quietly, as though it were the most insignificant action in the world. He might have escaped the consequences--he would certainly not have escaped the shame.
But Millie's cup of remorse was not yet full.
"Yet I cannot see that I could do anything else. To-night proves to me that I was right, I think. I have come very quickly, yet I am only just in time." There was a long stain of wine upon the table-cloth beneath his eyes. There Callon had upset his glass upon Tony's entrance.
"Yes, it was time that I returned," he continued. "One way or another a burden of disgrace had to be borne--if I stayed, just as certainly as if I came away; I saw that quite clearly. So I came away." He forbore to say that now the disgrace fell only upon his shoulders, that she was saved from it. But Millie understood, and in her heart she thanked him for his forbearance. "But it was hard on me, I think," he said. "You see, even now I am on French soil, and subject to French laws."
And Millie, upon that, started up in alarm.
"What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly.
"There has been a disturbance here to-night, has there not? Suppose that the manager of this restaurant has sent for a gendarme!"
With a swift movement Millie gathered up the medals and held them close in her clenched hands.
"Oh, it does not need those to convict me; my name would be enough. Let my name appear and there's a deserter from the Foreign Legion laid by the heels in France. All the time we have been talking here I have sat expecting that door to open behind me."
Millie caught up a lace wrap which lay upon a sofa. She had the look of a hunted creature. She spoke quickly and feverishly, in a whisper.
"Oh, why did not you say this at once? Let us go!"
Tony sat stubbornly in his chair.
"No," said he, with his eyes fixed upon her. "I have given you an account of how I have spent the years during which we have been apart. Can you do the same?"
He waited for her answer in suspense. To this question all his words had been steadily leading; for this reason he had dwelt upon his own career. Would she, stung by her remorse, lay before him truthfully and without reserve the story of her years? If she did, why, that dim light which shone amidst the darkness of his perplexities might perhaps shine a little brighter. He uttered his question. Millie bowed her head, and answered--
"I will."
"Sit down, then, and tell me now."
"Oh no," she exclaimed; "not here! It is not safe. As we go back to Eze I will tell you everything."
A look of relief came upon Tony's face. He rose and touched the bell.
A waiter appeared.
"I will pay the bill," he said.
The waiter brought the bill and Tony discharged it.
"The gentleman--M. Callon," the waiter said. "A doctor has been. He has a concussion. It will be a little time before he is able to be moved."
"Indeed?" said Tony, with indifference. He walked with his wife out of the little gaily-lighted room into the big, silent restaurant. A single light faintly illuminated it. They crossed it to the door, and went up the winding drive on to the road. The night was dry and clear and warm. There was no moon. They walked in the pure twilight of the stars round the gorge towards Eze.