The young man drew a few francs from his pocket. "These, and a longish score at the hotel, where they are beginning to dun me. Watch gone, everything, but a pair of gold sleeve-links. Two horses at home, and a few sticks in barracks, and several bills to pay. So the game's played out."
"It looks dark," the Pole acknowledged, "but there may be a gleam somewhere."
"I've been so unlucky," the young man sighed—"everything against me."
"You've had exactly the luck you deserve in this matter, and much better than you deserve in others."
"Oh, hit a man when he is down! But I shouldn't have gone to the dogs ifshe'dhave stuck to me."
"What girl with any self-respect could stick to you in the company you kept?"
"If you mean that poor woman—a good-hearted creature and more sinned against than sinning—what harm was there in helping her out of a tight place?"
"A good many tight places, from the time you've been at it, I should say. While your mother was pinching and denying herself, and your sisters were deprived of all society and every pleasure natural to their age and station. While your cousin was out in the world, working for daily bread——"
"Whose fault but her own? My mother's house always was and is open to her. My mother has begged and implored her to stay; it is the greatest grief to her to lose her."
"Your cousin is not the kind of woman to add to the burdens of those dear to her. Do you know that she supplies your sisters with typewriting work?"
"My sisters? Typewriting? What on earth for?"
"To help keep the house over your mother's head. People don't go on selling stock without lessening their income."
"Selling stock?"
"How do you suppose widows raise money without selling stock, or land, or whatever they happen to possess?"
"But I thought—I thought—her money was safely tied up."
"There are such things as releases—when the beneficiaries are of age——"
"Then that is what Agatha meant. She was bound not to let it out; she only hinted. I wish I had blown my brains out this morning."
"You'd never have felt the loss."
"I'm not the first man driven to the dogs by a woman's falseness, and I shan't be the last. They're all alike—cold, and hard, and unforgiving, making no allowance for a man's temptations, which they can't understand. Heaven defend us all from good women, de Konski."
"The good woman to whom I suppose you allude, your cousin, has been a great blessing to me."
"Oh, has she? And how?"
"In many ways. Partly by the stimulus of a brave and beautiful nature, purified by suffering, and unselfish to the core. In a more material sense, as a most capable and useful and discreet secretary."
"Secretary? Private secretary? To you—to a man?"
"Certainly. The calling is recognized and honourable. There are many more arduous and less pleasant ways of earning a competence—for women. Still, I shall be glad for her sake when the day comes, as it surely will, for me to lose my valuable secretary by a suitable marriage, though I can't help being a little grateful to you for making it necessary for her to work."
"I? When I've been ready to marry her, and would have asked her any time this two years, but for her everlasting snubbing and coldness?"
"Oh, I thought you said she was false."
"When I implored her not to leave my mother——"
"Whose bread you were taking to help disreputable females out of tight places."
"By Heaven, de Konski, you hit hard! Of course I knew that my cousin was in some way working for pay, but somehow I didn't realize—— Oh, Lord, a private secretary! Mixed up in political intrigues! A paid secretary!"
"Who is to defend good women from dissipated boys? Yes, that sweet and noble lady's fate is hard indeed. And the boy's mother! If good women are hard, some of them have a pretty hard time of it."
"Well, they'll soon be shut of me, and the sooner the better. As for that other poor woman, she knows how to stand by a fellow when he's knocked out of time. She—she—well, never mind about her——"
"Is she going to help you out of a tight place?"
"She would. She'd raise half for six months and the whole for three, at five per cent."
"Does she think you would accept?"
"Do you?" he returned fiercely, giving de Konski's searching look steadily back. "Am I a cur?"
The bearded face softened in a smile that was almost tender. "Poor chap!" he said, laying a hand on his shoulder, and looking with unseeing eyes across the gorge and away over the sea to the faint mountain chain rising dim and dreamlike on the horizon.
"Iwas in a tight place once," said the Anarchist presently. "I had been playing the fool rather more than most young asses do. So I went straight to my chief and made a clean breast of it——"
"You were a soldier? I always thought so."
"And he put me on honour never to touch a card again—and helped and—saved me."
"Mine breaks a chap," the boy said wearily. "Chauffeurs get good pay, they say. I might be that, mightn't I?"
"What you have to do now is to raise this money, cut the whole thing, before it comes to your chief's ears, and go straight. He won't stand this kind of thing. I've heard him say it's incurable. But nothing is—except cruelty, perhaps. Yes; this money must be raised at once."
"But how?" the boy asked, looking up with wondering eyes and a gleam of incredulous hope.
De Konski was silent, smoking steadily with long, even puffs, and staring with close-drawn brows at the sea, over which the black hulls of battle-ships were now ranged in lines and squadrons half-hidden by the smoke of their guns, beginning to boom in the opening thunders of sham fight.
"But how?" the lad repeated, impatiently scanning the thoughtful face, that seemed to seek solution of the problem from those smoke-hidden monsters upon the velvety blue.
The firing was too fierce and incessant for any speech to be audible for some seconds; then it suddenly stopped, and de Konski turned and was about to reply, when his attention was arrested by the sound of a high treble voice coming round the bend of the rock-strewn bank on which they were sitting, screened from the sight of those approaching from Turbia. Many had come thence and passed in the last half-hour on their way to see the review off Villafranca.
"It's notorious," the high voice proclaimed. "She tried to pass as the wife oftheAllonby, the 'Storm and Stress' man, and took everybody in till I asked her straight out one day, and caught her on the hop. She was so taken aback that she let out she was not his wife at all—only a connexion by marriage. And I don't believe she's even that, or Mrs. Allonby at all, or Mrs. Anybody. Miss Nobody-in-particular,Ishould say. They ought to be more careful who they take in at these small hotels. Fast?Rather. A regular Monty harpy; lives on the tables, they say. That poor young Isidore is infatuated—absolutely. It's the talk of the hotel. She scarcely lets him out of her sight. One is always stumbling upon the pair—looking unutterable things at each other. Quite unpleasant for us. Pretty? That sort always are. But as for manners, and good breeding—well, anything goes down with foreigners and silly old owls like Welbourne. You know she has broken off Isidore's engagement."
The fair being who originated these remarks, having her face slightly turned to her companion, had not observed the presence of the two men screened by the bend of the bank on which they sat. Nor would the younger man have given a thought to these two ladies, but for the effect they produced upon his companion, who started and listened with blazing eyes and tense interest to every word that rang out on the still air. Not content with hearing what was said in passing, he rose, as if drawn by the voice, and followed the quick English steps, quickly outpacing them. Then, planting himself in front of the two ladies and raising his broad felt hat, he brought them to a standstill.
"I have heard," he said, addressing the speaker in slow, distinct French, "every word in the clear and accurate voice of Madame, and venture to suggest that it is a perilous thing to speak English in this country, unless you wish to be heard, English being now so generally understood, even when not spoken."
"Much obliged," returned Dorris sharply, meaning to pass on; "but it's nothing to me whether people hear what I say or not."
"Pardon me," he replied, barring her progress. "It may be much to you; it is a serious matter in this country to speak slander in public; it may have very grave consequences for you."
"Nonsense; I don't understand French—je ne comprends pas," she muttered hastily and brokenly, looking round as if for protection. Then, perceiving the younger man, "Mr. Paul," she cried piteously, "Mr. Paul."
"That is my name," he admitted, rising and raising his hat, but not approaching.
"Mr. Paul fully agrees with me upon the danger of speaking slanderous things in public," said the Pole coolly, in English.
"It's no slander," she protested; "let me go. We were going to see the review."
"Let us pass on; you have no right to stop people you don't know," shouted the other lady in a shaky voice.
"I happen to know the lady with whose name you were taking such unwarrantable liberties," continued the Pole, keeping his blazing eyes fixed on poor Dorris's terrified face. "She is incapable of any such conduct as you attribute to her. Once more let me warn you that you are in a country in which strange things happen; in which walls have eyes and trees ears; in which people sometimes take the law into their own hands with impunity."
"Mr. Paul," cried Dorris once more, with supplicating hands, "oh, Mr. Paul!"
"Awfully sorry," he replied, "but it's true. You have to jolly well mind what you say about people in this country."
"Good gracious! In what country?" cried the distressed damsel. "I thought we were—— Oh, where on earth are we, Emily?"
"Oh, I don't know, dear; let us go home. Never mind the review—never mind anything—only let us go home."
"You are practically, though not politically, in Italy, the land of hired avengers. But I will detain you no longer, ladies. I have sufficiently warned you of the peril in which slander places people," said the Pole, politely stepping aside with the ceremonious bow seldom seen this side the Channel. Then he resumed his seat on the rock, while Dorris and her friend, frightened out of their wits, fled without any ceremony at all at the top of their speed along the white road till a bend hid them from sight.
"I say, de Konski, you did give that girl beans. So you know Mrs. Allonby?" asked the young man when they were gone. "Then you must know the Johnnie they are making such a row about—the 'Storm and Stress' chap—eh?"
"Yes," the Pole replied absently, his fury not yet appeased. "I know them both—at least, I used to—especially him—rather well."
"Well! You did land that poor girl a nasty one. And, I say, youcanspeak English. You must have English blood in you somehow."
"Ah, yes! My—mother was English."
"Well, you never seemed like a foreigner to me. That's why I took to you. Why, you must have served under our colours!"
"Why not? But about this fix of yours?"
"Well, what I thought when I came this morning was, that a man like you, on secret service of some kind, knowing the ropes of most things, and speaking every known lingo, might be able to get at this beast, Mosson, and square him. Fake up some rot, as you did to those poor women. Bluff."
"My dear boy, there's only one way of squaring the Spider, and that is by paying him in full. Yes, I was hard on that poor fool of a girl. But a tongue like that! And think of the other, the slandered woman. By George! I could hardly keep my hands off the little liar. But the Spider. He's quite another matter. What the Spider doesn't know of the seamy side of life is not knowable. The only argument with him is hard cash down on the nail."
"But how to get it?" sighed the boy once more. And even as he sighed the fury of the Pole and the terror of the two women suddenly came before his mind in such an absurd light that he burst into a roar of light-hearted laughter. "My word! but you made that poor girl sit up," he shouted. "You couldn't have gone for her worse if the other woman had been your sister or mother."
With all her childishness and perversity, Ermengarde was not destitute of judgment and critical taste. Long before she reached the end of "Storm and Stress" she perceived that it was a really fine work, giving evidence of power and imagination and a knowledge of human nature, hitherto dormant and unsuspected in her husband. There was humour in it, unexpected flashes, that occasionally made little bursts of laughter startle the quiet of her room, and pathos poignant enough to bring hot, sudden tears to her eyes. She read on and on through the night, too much engrossed in the drama to think of the writer till overcome by sleep; and, when she woke, shivering in the cool dawn, read on to the end instead of going to bed.
Then she remembered that all this moving drama of intense thought and feeling, of insight into character, and vital, insoluble problems, came from the mind and heart of the man at whose side she had lived so long and so blindly, who had misunderstood her, and whom she had misunderstood, with whose real inward life and thought she had never once been in touch.
The man had lived a double life; he possessed two distinct selves, one of which was entirely strange to her. The Arthur she knew, the humdrum, irritating, fireside being of everyday life, could never have written "Storm and Stress"; he was absolutely devoid of the fire, the passion, and the imagination, the tenderness and poetry, the refined humour and delicate fancy, contained in that fine novel. He had never remotely hinted to her of the existence of these intricate social and political questions, so forcibly presented in this picture of actual life. And what could he know of the inner workings of a mother's heart—he who had misunderstood and wounded those of his own child's mother? Arthur, that cold, sarcastic being, that ambulant wet blanket upon all enthusiasms? No; she had married two men, and one was a stranger; she had unthinkingly mated with a genius, and never found it out; she was the wife of a man carrying a dark lantern that was always turned away from her.
It was humiliating; it was exasperating, the more so from the vague and haunting sense of remorse it kindled within her. Yet she was pleased, and in a way proud, to discover this rich mine of powerful imagination and intellectual vigour in the man so near her. But the thought that she was shut out and allowed no part in it chilled and cut her to the heart, even while conscience asked rather grimly why the publisher's parcel had remained so long unopened, receiving no adequate reply.
She came down late to her open-air breakfast, and found a table in a solitary corner, where she could take her coffee and roll unobserved of the few late lingerers on the sunny terrace, whose voices came clear upon the still and flower-scented air to her unheeding ears.
The beauty of that wide prospect of sea and mountain never staled; every change of hour and weather gave variety; morning after cloudless morning came always with a fresh surprise and novel charm.
Her corner was by the balustrade on the edge of the steep ravine, whence a wall of rock fell steep and far beneath. She sat with the morning sunlight behind her and the lemon terraces sinking away on one side to the platane-shadowed torrent by the road, where the people looked small as ants, and carts and waggons were toys, leading to the clean, bright-walled town embowered in dark foliage, with illimitable spaces of dark purple sea beyond it, all glowing in the clear brilliance of southern sun. Sounds of cheerful labour rose pleasantly from a saw-mill niched in the bottom of a narrow gorge, from carpenters' hammers, mingling with washerwomen's voices, the roll and clatter of wheels, the tramp of soldiers and confused noises of the town, and floated up, softened and mellowed, above the faint and far sea-murmurs. And before her, in the full morning light, so soft though so strong, the white-walled monastery towered high on its dark, wooded ridge, with gabled roof, quivering cypress flames and feathery eucalyptus tops traced clear on the dark blue sky. What a glow in the blue-black pine foliage, what mystery in the purply bloom of those olive-woods, climbing the steep summit far above the vines! How lovingly the golden light lay upon all, steeping it in splendour, caressing it with warm radiance, and bringing out every detail of shape and colour and shadowy distance. Contrasted with all this joyous colour and radiance, how solemnly beautiful was the convent-crested steep, and how grand and awe-inspiring the deep sweet blue of the broad, unbounded sea sweeping far away into unseen space!
Her troubled spirit and unquiet heart were soothed and calmed by this familiar but never-staling beauty; the sweet, sharp air, so light and pleasant to breathe, kindled fresh life with every inspiration; she seemed to drink it with her coffee and eat it with her crisp roll and butter.
And yet—and yet, with what different eyes she once saw it. Where was the mental elevation, the pure and healing emotion, of her first sight of this large, fresh, foreign beauty of purple-shadowed mountain and glowing sea? Talk about the gaming-tables, about petty vices and sordid troubles, had filled her with incredulous disgust then. But now? She had lost more than money on those green tables, and bartered something more precious than jewels in the glittering Monte Carlo shops; and here, in the pure and rose-scented air, some subtle soul-perfume had floated away and vanished, she knew not how.
A little breeze, shaking the palm-foliage close by, had the sadness of pattering rain, but it brought a wave of spiced carnation and heliotrope and sweet geranium mixed with rose. Ermengarde sighed with the breeze. Her unquiet breast told her that something was wrong within; she could not, perhaps would not, say what; she had fallen a little way from some height, but how she could not tell. Only she was quite sure she ought to have opened the publisher's parcel earlier; she was equally sure that she should have been given some knowledge of the importance of its contents beforehand. In any case, she had been the last to know of an event that altered the whole tenor of her own and her husband's lives. Arthur must have known at least that he had produced something of a higher quality, and greater aim and scope, than he had ever done before; yet he had lived under the same roof with her and never said a word; he had been like a man in a dream, absorbed, preoccupied, moving in a world apart, of which she had never been given the faintest glimpse. Perhaps her darkest suspicions were justified. And now, in the full blaze of a sudden fame, he had made no sign and given her no shadow of participation in his changed fortune. No one could make a first great success like that with indifference. He must have been deeply moved, if only by the prospect of a fresh vista of mental activity opening before him, or, less worthily, by the comparative wealth it assured. Yes; those huge sales of which she heard must mean a solid accretion of hard cash for the writer of the book, were publishers never so rapacious.
And his short, scrappy letters gave no hint of what must be an epoch, a turning-point, in his life. They were without address, because of that mysteriously prolonged business tour; they were evidently written some time before they reached her, while her answers, addressed to the home he appeared never to have seen since they parted, had presumably made long tours before he received them.
Where was Arthur?
An inquiry addressed to Herbert on the subject had met with an unsatisfactory reply. Her father and mother only mentioned her husband in answer to her questions; they had not seen him; he had not yet returned; he was a notoriously bad letter-writer, conducting his correspondence mainly by telegraph or telegrammatic post-cards, she heard. Things undoubtedly were more serious, the breach between them more deadly, than she had suspected. A very bad feature of the case was his refusal to finance the tour of which she had stood in such real need on the plea of poverty. Poverty! When he must have known that he was on the brink of a gold-mine.
Men know men. No doubt Herbert and her father knew more than they cared to say of the strained relations between husband and wife, and of the causes that had produced this bitter state of affairs. Well, at least Charlie was left. Poor little Charlie, whose short, stiff, pot-hook letters, written with such laborious effort, expressed nothing but that the child was executing a wearisome task, and whose solitary sentence, "Farther cent a good big Kake; The fellers ett it," was his sole allusion to him. Poor little Charlie!
Through tears evoked by the vision of a little, lonely, curly-headed boy bending with inky fingers and knitted brows over toilsome letters, all the bright and sunny beauty and the great peace of the vast sea-plains darkening and glowing on that solid blue horizon rim seemed full of rebuke and chiding. Snowy sails, flitting bird-like on the deep-blue splendour, and black hulls, trailing their smoke pennons above it, reproached her, and the quivering cypress-spires on the monastery height condemned her. For what? Then the shining lemon-foliage took up the tale, and rustled disapproval among the gleaming yellow fruit, and the voices and low laughter of people sitting in the sun vaguely excluded her, making her a thing apart from general sympathy. But why?
There was nobody to consult or confide in; even the woman of mystery, who, for all her presumable sins, was at least sincerely attached to her, was absent, probably on some errand of dubious integrity. Not that such sorrow as this could be confided to anybody except by vague hints, though it might in some measure be divined by sympathy. Best to go home. She had been growing more and more home-sick of late, especially since that last and worst afternoon at the tables.
Presently the thin man emerged from the lemon-foliage, and, seeing her, raised his hat and passed on with friendly smile and halting step. He had been a father to her, but for this emergency was probably supplied with no paternal counsels. Pacing the walk on the monastery ridge under the cypresses, the spare figure of Mr. Mosson, the philanthropist, was visible. That benefactor to his species appeared to be absorbed as usual in his morning devotions, intently perusing the red book that Mr. Welbourne had pronounced to be no Book of Hours or Breviary, as she had rashly conjectured. Should she throw herself upon his charity, and seek balm of him for at least one of her troubles? That something must be done before long to this effect was absolutely certain. The eighteen-guinea serge gown could not well be pawned, besides having lost some of its pristine freshness in excursions on the Azure Shore, and the jewel-box was perilously near emptiness.
The American lady was kind and cordial; but a marked indisposition to plank down indiscriminate dollars had always formed a feature in an estimate of trans-Atlantic character as conceived from early childhood; moreover, divorce laws being so varied by locality, and so light-heartedly sought and obtained, in the United States, citizens of that Republic could not logically be credited with sound views upon matrimonial duties and relationships.
The only person whom it was possible to consult upon questions of that delicate complexion, besides being absent and unattainable, happened to be the very person whose conduct was arraigned for judgment, and the most rabid democrat has not yet gone so far as to allow the criminal to be his own judge and jury.
Suddenly a light step on the gravel and a blithe "Bon jour, Madame," broke this current of melancholy thought, and evoked responsive brightness on her clouded face, as the laughing eyes and gay personality of M. Isidore appeared above the sun-steeped flowers. Madame was perhaps too tired for the usual Italian lesson, he conjectured.
"Do I look tired?" she asked, smiling cheerfully, and heard that there was a shadow on her face as of one who had not slept well.
What depth of sympathetic insight in this charming young fellow, the general utility person of the hotel!
"I have not slept at all," she replied gaily. "I sat up reading all night. That is why I am haggard and fishy-eyed this morning."
The appropriateness of these adjectives was promptly and warmly denied, with remarks to the effect that some faces only acquire fresh and spiritualized charm under the shadow of fatigue. There was further, she heard in elegant idiomatic French, a special quality of beauty peculiar to sadness and another to gaiety. Madame, it was thoughtfully averred, usually gave the impression of possessing gaiety andjoie de vivre.
"We all have our dark moods at times," she sighed, in Italian so outrageous that M. Isidore was obliged to repeat the sentence in an amended form, which he did with a sigh and an accent that made it the expression of his own intimate feelings.
Upon this the pupil commented that we live in a vale of tears. Having corrected this proposition, the teacher contradicted it as flatly as was consistent with politeness and good Italian.
"We live, on the contrary," he added, openingLe mie Prigioniat a turned-down page with a view to reading it aloud—"we others at Les Oliviers—we live in an earthly Paradise. Yes?" he asked, smiling and indicating all the sunny beauty with a sweep of the hand. "But," he added, with a deep sigh, and in wild Italian, "Paradise had its serpent and the Garden of the Hesperides its dragon. So also our Paradise here."
"Very true," the pupil corroborated, wondering what the serpent of the Oliviers Paradise was.
The thin man, she remembered, once said it was frogs. Miss Boundrish thought it was the absence of fashion shops. Her father considered it to be the badness of foreign tobacco and the late arrival of Money Market intelligence. Her mother held the inferiority of butcher's meat, together with the presence of foreigners, a fair equivalent for the Enemy of Mankind. A German Baron had been heard to mutter that it was the impossibility of escaping from "diese verrückten Engländer," and a Frenchman, the ubiquity of "ces Miss Anglaises maigres et à dents enormes."
After a thoughtful pause, M. Isidore hinted darkly in correct and melancholy French at griefs too poignant for expression, and entirely peculiar to Les Oliviers. The place, he added, lay under the spell of a powerful enchantment. Personally, he was unable to resist it. In some respects, he confessed, he was weak, powerless as an infant even. But he was fully aware that, as Madame had been gracious enough to observe, this was no place for him. His relations continually counselled, even commanded him, to leave it, but in vain. He was rooted to the spot; he was bound to the ridge with unbreakable chains; he had, under the terrible spell cast upon him, long ceased to be master of himself. Of course, he was fully aware that he ought not to make revelations of a character so intimate. He was abusing the angelic goodness of Madame; he was trespassing upon the gracious consideration, the sympathetic interest, she had been so obliging as to manifest for him; but, in short, he could not help it.
How well emotion became this handsome young foreigner; how natural and unaffected, how perfectly free from self-consciousness and false shame he was! The French certainly are a most fascinating people—at least, when young and good-looking, and of another sex—Madame reflected. "But I do wish the poor boy wasn't quite so hard hit. It might be awkward too."
"Pray don't apologize, dear M. Isidore," she replied, in the best English and the kindest possible manner. "You honour me by your confidence; it interests me exceedingly. It touches me. Don't hesitate," she added, in dulcet accents, suddenly remembering his lack of English, and speaking French, "to tell me anything that is on your mind, if—if it affords you the slightest relief.—For if," she reflected, "he really is so madly in love with me, he had better out with it at once, and I can laugh it off as a boy's fancy, and at the same time let him see how much higher and holier English views of such feelings and relationships are. It may be the turning-point, the beginning of a new era, a higher life to this young and ardent nature.—Tell me," she said with a gentle smile, "as you would tell your own mother."
"I have told my own mother. I went to Monte Carlo yesterday on purpose," he returned, with perfect simplicity. "And she entirely disapproves of my sentiments—of the whole affair, in short."
"Oh!" murmured Ermengarde, rather taken aback.
"But what would you?" he added. "Mothers are like that. It is perfectly natural. She counsels me to take refuge in flight. But there are sentiments, and those of the most sacred, the most exalted—there are crises of the soul—for which flight is of no avail."
"It depends——"
"There are enchantments that are only deepened and intensified by absence."
She had to confess that this was indubitable, and added vaguely that it was sad.
"My mother declares my passion to be an infatuation, a madness——"
"Perhaps it is, or a folly, or only a boy's fancy," she said, smiling softly, and then shrinking back in sudden terror.
For all at once he sprang to his feet, stamping and gesticulating, his face darkened and distorted with fury, clutching his head with both hands, with blazing eyes and gestures of indescribable scorn and anger. "Boy," he shouted, "boy! What immature, what puerile, breast could endure the strain of a passion so virile, so invincible, so beyond all conception, so far transcending anything that can possibly be imagined by any female mind, as this? Such a passion as mine is not to be trifled with, Madame; it is too mighty, too terrible in its virile power. Ah! if women did but know what depths they have power to stir in male hearts, what inextinguishable fires they have power to kindle!— Pardon me, Madame," he added, gasping, and all at once perceiving the deadly pallor and terrified gaze of Ermengarde's shrinking face, and the gestures with which she seemed to be vainly seeking some way of bodily escape from the explosion. "My transports render me ferocious, forgetful of the consideration due to your sex and weakness. There is more of the tiger than the boy in my ardent nature; my passionate adoration frightens you, as it devours, consumes, destroys me. Reassure yourself, dear Madame, I implore you. See, I am calm, penitent, desolated to have occasioned a momentary emotion of terror in a breast so gentle, in a heart so adorable, to which all homage, and consideration the most tender, is due."
So speaking, he sank gracefully before her, his voice now sweet and low, his gestures supplicatory, even caressing. "Pardon me," he murmured, with clasped hands and a face all sunshine, while poor Ermengarde was white and trembling and as scared as some small and mischievous boy meddling with prohibited gunpowder and hearing it bang and go off in all directions—"pardon me. The overwhelming force of my passion is my one, my ample, excuse."
She murmured faintly that there was nothing to pardon; only she hoped he would not do it again, and would he be so obliging as to rise from his penitential posture upon one knee? This he did with infinite grace, bowing low over her hand, which he appeared to kiss, wholly oblivious of the fact that the spot upon which this scene was enacted was raked by the fire of two blazing dark eyes from the office window.
Poor, frightened Ermengarde gasped a little, for it is one thing to be the object of a boy's distant, poetic homage and quite another to be raved at by a demented and exacting person, who describes himself as a tiger and his feelings as ferocious. She looked aimlessly over the lemons and olives to the deep dark blueness that glowed to a firm and rounded intensity against a pale sky, quite unable to put two words together, while M. Isidore, his eyes full of soft, inward light, and his features calm and composed as a sleeping babe's, looked as if nothing could disturb the sunny peace of his soul, and composedly suggested that they should continue to follow the melancholy experiences of "this poor M. Pellico," with which intention he took a seat at her side, and, placing the open book on the table between and before them, began to read aloud to ears confused with terror and remorse.
At this juncture the approach of Heinrich, the porter, not yet in his smart gold and green livery, but green-baize-aproned and shirt-sleeved, as his morning duties required, and with a curious smile in his great, soft, dark eyes, put a final stop to the Italian lesson by conveying a summons to the teacher to transact some homely business in those obscure back premises whither no visitor ever penetrated.
"Peste!" cried the impassioned lover, with darkening brows. "Zese dampt duties," he added in English, with a little shrug and a sunny smile, to the still pale and terrified Mrs. Allonby. "Our poor lesson! Madame excuses? Yes?A rivederla!" and with a bow and smile he was gone, and Ermengarde began to breathe more freely.
She looked at the monastery sitting on the wooded hill, at the velvety blue above it, the peacock blue below, at the violet-veined mountain peaks around; she watched great bees and hawk-moths plunging into the petals of stocks, and butterflies fluttering above the heads of people reading and basking in the blue and golden morning, drawing long breaths and wondering why everything seemed vaguely to accuse her. She turned to the towered village throned and shadowy beneath the eastern peak, and that, too, seemed to despise her. She felt unworthy of the very flower scents. Yet she had done nothing, and had meant so well. Could any reasonable being have foreseen this? Who, stroking the soft fur of some gamesome fireside pet, could expect the growl and clawing of a full-sized tiger?
Oh, for a good, full-flavoured, suffocating mouthful of London fog, for firelight dancing on china and polished surface in the murky noonday at home, instead of this perpetual, unnatural, homeless glare!
She went into the house, and, remembering something she wanted at the office, turned aside to the ever-open door, and found Mlle. Geneviève on duty at the desk.
But what had come to the young woman that she should receive her gentle address with scowling brow and eyes of smouldering flame, and, instead of replying, should turn her back upon her, and, calling something down a speaking-tube, walk slowly through the opposite door into private regions?
Ermengarde waited, uncertain for a moment whether to give up the trifling matter on which she had come, or to ring sharply for attendance. She was about to turn away, too full of inward disquiet to mind a small discourtesy, when the opposite door opened, disclosing the majestic presence of Madame Bontemps, to whom she listlessly made her request.
Silently then a drawer was opened, stamps and postcards silently handed out, money received and change returned, in dread and ominous stillness. Then was fulminated this bolt from the blue; she was informed in a dry and level voice, and with much regret, that her room would be required for another guest at the expiration of the week.
"But what do you mean?" cried Ermengarde. "People can't be allowed to take my room. Besides, I don't intend to give it up."
"Pardon me. Madame is mistaken. The room is already reserved for the date indicated, and there is no other in the house suitable to the requirements of Madame."
"Why, you are positively turning me out," she cried, incredulous with amazement.
The Padrone crossed her arms upon her ample breast and smiled a cast-iron smile. "It is not for me to contradict the assertion of Madame," she replied, with a fierce shrug and a stony eye.
Ermengarde turned white, and looked steadily in the hard and hostile face for a second.
"I see that I have been mistaken in the character of this house," she said coldly. "Be good enough to accept my notice to leave at my earliest convenience." Then, without waiting for a reply, she went out into the sunshine and paced slowly through the garden, her skirts brushing scent from oak-leaf geraniums and her cheek tapped by the rounded coolness of lemons on the garden boughs, and came out upon the path that led over the open mountain ridge, drawing a long breath.
"The insolence!" she burst out to an old woman, harmlessly knitting and leading her goat, who nodded and smiled in return, under the impression that kind remarks were being addressed to her—"the incredible insolence! All the people seem to have gone out of their senses this morning, or else I've gone out of mine."
The path immediately behind Les Oliviers, worn by the steps of many generations of mules and men, was steep and rugged, here and there sinking deeply and filled in with broken fragments and buttressed with rock slabs. A little further on the ridge ran up in an abrupt narrow steep; a clump of pines on its summit stood out clear and glowing upon the sky, with a straw-roofed hut under the dark boughs. Ermengarde loved that little clump of pine-trees soaring up above the house and grounds, whether, as now, in the full glow of forenoon, or in still, golden afternoons, or flushed with sunset upon a crimson and amber sky, or, later still, traced on the pale clear green of after-glow, or black against a blue-black vault pierced with shining stars. She had often and vainly tried to draw it; but even the thin man had failed to catch its charm; much paper had been spoiled and colour wasted in the attempt. When you gained that abrupt eminence you seemed to have reached the top of the world, which unrolled itself beneath, and spread blue and far to the unseen African shore; but when you turned from the sea, and saw the path winding higher along the wooded brink to mountain summits endlessly unfolding, you knew that you were still very far from the top.
The warm bright air was spiced with aromatic scents. Myrtle and lavender, cistus and juniper, rosemary, thyme, and pine, clothed and climbed every cliff and steep down to the torrent beds that ran on each side the ridge, and sprang from every crack and crevice in rock and cliff. Higher still, the ridge broadened into a pine-wood, and narrowed abruptly upon its steep wooded sides, then widened again into a grassy plateau, where the columnar trunks of hoary olives showed dim and solemn through shadows of drooping foliage shot with subdued, changing colour.
Where the pine-wood ended and the olive-grove began the ridge-side fell more gently, laying a slope of myrtle and rosemary open to the full south sun. Here Ermengarde sat, the mysterious murmur of pine-woods on one hand, the solemn stillness and blue-grey haze of olives on the other. The sunny bank was grey with massed rosemary blossom, into which countless bees plunged and buzzed drowsily in the warmth. Far below, forest and olive-terrace sank into purple bloom of shadow; the distance was closed by bare mountain peaks rolling up in great billows of stone above wooded slopes, and towered villages white in sunlight.
All this solemn beauty rebuked her and made her ashamed. She knew that she had forgotten the message and missed the healing of the mountains. She had played the fool and made herself a mark for fool's gossip. Oh, how small and cheap she felt, and how very sick of herself and her petty follies!
Such feelings are not at all comfortable; it was a relief to forget them in indignation at the indignity of being turned out of a hotel. How had the woman dared? Was she, Ermengarde Allonby, to submit to the creature's impertinence, to be driven away by the insolence of an unmannerly Frenchwoman? Never, though at first she had intended to go straight home.
Turned out of a hotel? Well, after all,à qui la perte? Les Oliviers was not the only house of entertainment on the Riviera. It would be something to escape from the eternal cackle of the Boundrish; there could not possibly be two Boundrishes along the Azure Shore. It was an opportunity to drop the undesirable friendship with the woman of mystery. Somehow, the prospect of dropping this friendship was not wholly agreeable. There was a dreadful fascination about that young woman, whose good points were undeniable. Besides, Ermengarde was so sorry for her, and so ready to do her any service short of selling doubtfully acquired jewellery for her. Then there was the moral regeneration of this frail sister to be considered. That certainly had not as yet made great progress; indeed, some faint hesitation as to her own power of effecting it was beginning to creep into Ermengarde's mind. She realized that she was herself hardly a saint. After all, there is not so much superfluous virtue floating loose in the world that people can afford to share any with erring brothers and sisters. Perhaps her own lamp wanted a little trimming and replenishing.
It would be lonely work to go into a strange hotel, and probably more expensive than staying here. No; she must go home—home to fogs and mud and east winds; home to a husband who, besides not being there, never had, and never would, care for her; who had been capable of becoming suddenly famous by writing the most powerful and remarkable novel of the last twenty years, and never telling her a word about it.
She had no home to go to; she had been turned out of a third-rate hotel. So many sorrows were out of proportion to her demerits; she was very, very sorry for herself. Warm sunshine drew out the fragrance of rosemary and myrtle; the still air was drowsy with the buzzing of innumerable bees; mountain peaks nodded, shadowy dells and wooded slopes heaved gently like summer waves; the humming deepened to a sea-surge, to organ-booming, and now Ermengarde sank back against a springy cushion of grey-white heather, her head pillowed on rosemary-bloom, fast asleep.
The bees went on humming in the rosemary, droning all sorts of suggestions into her ear. Now it was the hum of a schoolroom about a little curly-headed boy, with his fingers in his ears, his elbows on a desk, and his brows knitted over a dog's-eared book not unstained by tears. "Musa—a song,Musæ—of a song," he was drearily droning over and over again. Then it was an interminable clergyman in a lofty pulpit upon the crags, discoursing wearily of the sins of the woman of mystery and the follies of Ermengarde, for which there seemed to be no remedy. The clergyman was curiously like the thin man, and was beginning to be very wearisome on the indiscretions of the young Isidore, when he suddenly changed to Arthur, standing on the drawing-room hearthrug at home, and holding forth on the same topics with the name and identity of Ivor Paul confused with those of M. Isidore.
Arthur's voice was unmistakable; it was rather deep, and liable to become monotonous, especially when he discoursed upon excesses in hats and gowns, of the desirability of keeping accurate accounts, of never exceeding one's allowance or letting bills run on, of the excellent household management of his mother, and inferior capabilities of ladies of the present generation. The voice became clearer and more resonant, the dreamer grew conscious of rosemary-scent and sunshine, the grey columns of the olive-grove swam out of a haze of sunshot foliage, and became distinct above patches of golden light on flowery grass. Arthur's voice rumbled away in confused murmurs; there was a faint sound of skirts brushing herbage and a woman's lighter voice; finally, the well-known figures of the woman of mystery and the Anarchist were seen upon the path under the olives, leading away from the rosemary bank, and Ermengarde knew that she had been dozing, and was now wide awake again.
Her heart was beating hard; the dream of Arthur had been so vivid. She could not realize that it had only been a dream; it was as if he had actually been standing here on the thin grass under the pendent olive-branches in the tender shadowy light. The familiar voice was still in her ears, stirring all sorts of buried memories and slumbering feelings. Oh, why was he not with her? How was it that, with all the leisure and independence this great success must mean, he could not leave that miserable, so-called business of his, and come and take care of her, and rescue her from the insults of hotel-keepers and the persecutions of Anarchists? It was not as if he were obliged to stay in London. She was so lonely, so unfriended, so desperately home-sick. Yes, home-sick; that was the name of this lonely, gnawing heart-pang that grew worse from day to day.
The woman of mystery and her cavalier struck into a sloping path immediately in front of her, leading to the first terrace beneath the mule-path, where they were screened from the sight of people passing on the ridge, but not from the eyes of Ermengarde, whose reclining-place was behind a myrtle, through the stems of which she saw without being seen. The olives on this first terrace were gnarled and hoary, like those bordering the mule-path; the sunshot, lavender mist of their drooping boughs gave the same air of mystery and magic. The two figures actually standing on the grass, vivid with anemone and dark with violet, seemed less real than those of her dream.
She was too little interested to reflect that they were unaware of her presence, and might not wish to be seen. They kept close to the turfed wall behind them, and were screened by the massive olive-trunk in front, but only the thin myrtle-boughs came between her drowsy eyes and a full side-view of them. But they were too far off for anything more than confused murmurs of their conversation to reach her. It suddenly struck her that Agatha might be the Anarchist's wife, or even daughter, though she was undoubtedly English. An English wife might be very useful in all these "treasons, stratagems, and spoils" of his, though what but sudden and probably temporary insanity could have induced any Christian female to marry that hairy, unwashed Orson of a man was unimaginable to any sane observer.
Two red admirals fluttered past, one over the other, in pure joy of life; a lizard darted across the path at her feet. She saw the rosy bloom of a peach-tree far down on the last olive-terrace, and then became aware that the woman of mystery was agitated and the Anarchist silent and interested. There followed a brief bass murmur, and then something suddenly flashed in the sunlight, making Ermengarde's heart jump into her mouth.
But it was not a dagger, or any other murderous implement, she observed, after winking away the first dazzle; only the quivering brilliance of diamonds and sapphires glancing and dancing in Agatha's hands. It was, in fact, the necklace shown to her in the firelight on that wet afternoon, the improvised history of which had fallen on such sceptical ears—the necklace of doubtful origin but undoubted value that this mysterious and secretive young woman had asked her to sell for her. Why had she not asked the Anarchist in the first place, she wondered, or could he be the unlawful acquirer of that shining treasure? Had he suggested or commanded the making a cat's-paw of her? But, from the way in which he took and looked at the jewels, it seemed that they were new to him. He held them in this light and that, pushing the spectacles up to his forehead to examine them more closely, weighing them thoughtfully in his hand, and exchanging remarks upon them with Agatha, who presently took the necklace back, and held it this way and that, as if discussing its value. Finally, she clasped it round her neck over her white blouse, as she had done by the fire that day, with the same air of using herself to show off the jewels, and looked absently across the blue bloom of the ravine to the high mountains, while the Anarchist, thoughtfully stroking his beard, and with his goggles pushed up under his hat-brim, contemplated the necklace gem by gem, but not the wearer, evidently appraising the beauty and value of each sparkling drop and pendant as it flashed and quivered in the sun.
Then he turned and paced the grassy terrace, while Agatha took off the necklace and laid all the shining splendour carefully in its velvet bed, and again looked absently and sadly away across the blue bloom of distance to the mountain peaks. Then the Anarchist came back, said a few words, took the morocco case, and put it away in an inner breast-pocket, at the same time handing her a paper, which she read with interest and anxiety, and returned to him with a sigh and a look of relief. He held her hand a moment, then, saying something that made her turn her head away to hide tears, that Ermengarde saw sparkling in the sunshine, he sprang up the turf-banked terrace where it was a little broken, walked across the grass under the olives, and disappeared on the other side, where a steep path led by the olive-dresser's cottage and wound down the precipitous ridge-side to the high-road by the torrent-bed.
He could not have gone far down the steep, when he was seen emerging upon the olive-shadowed plateau once more, and hastily stepping back across it and down the bank to the woman of mystery, who was evidently more surprised than pleased at this return. Saying something quickly, he took out the morocco case, and, after some reluctance and apparent objection on her part, placed it in her hands, pointed, to Ermengarde's horror, towards her hiding-place, again climbed the terrace bank, hurried across the path, and vanished down the steep; while Agatha, after a short pause, as of indecision, suddenly seemed to become resolute, put the case in her pocket, turned and dashed quickly, almost at a run, straight along the terrace towards Ermengarde, who gave herself up for lost.
But before she could collect her senses sufficiently to decide whether to lie back and pretend to be asleep or get up and seem to be just emerging from the wood behind her, Agatha had flashed by like a whirlwind, her skirts brushing Ermengarde's feet, looking straight ahead and in too great a hurry to see what lay on the rosemary-bank behind the myrtle.
Then Ermengarde, petrified with amazement, got up and went back to the path over the ridge, remembering that the way taken by the woman of mystery through the wood was shorter than the mule-track along the ridge, so that there was no fear, unless she went at a much greater rate than Agatha, of overtaking her and leading her to suppose that she had been in the olive-garden during the interview.
She therefore walked slowly back along the mule-path, meditating upon the mysterious and nefarious proceedings of her young friend, and alternately blaming herself for watching the interview, and wondering what it meant, and congratulating herself on having accidentally been the witness of what justified her suspicions about that necklace, and reached the gate of the hotel just in time to see that same Agatha and Mr. Mosson coming out from a path on the wooded convent steep in earnest colloquy.
There was no reason why two of the hotel visitors should or should not be walking in the monastery grounds at the same time; but, as the descent by the hotel gate was very abrupt and much tangled by interlacing roots of pine-trees, there was every reason why Mr. Mosson, even if, instead of being a benefactor to his species, he had been a misanthrope (and from the grim set of his jaw and hard eyes, and thin, tight-drawn mouth, Ermengarde was inclined to think him that), should hand Miss Somers carefully over the snaky roots and crumbling ledges, as he did with the greatest politeness and deference, standing aside with raised hat to let her pass into the grounds before him, and on perceiving Ermengarde's approach from the opposite direction, extending the same courtesy to her. And yet the juxtaposition of these two seemed to confirm her suspicions concerning Agatha and stamp her with double intrigue. Was Mr. Mosson a suppositious uncle of Agatha's?—an aunt he clearly could not be—so she debated, walking by necessity at this suspicious young woman's side through the garden paths.
"Have you been up the ridge?" asked Agatha, with cheeks flushed and eyes over bright.
"I came back through the olives, so pleasant and peaceful," replied Ermengarde, observing a tremor in her companion's voice, and wondering what had been the last experience of the necklace. "And you?"
"I have been up by the monastery," she said. "Bordighera is very beautiful to-day: an indescribable peacock blue bloom upon it."
"Velvety, and yet with the clear brilliance of a jewel," Ermengarde commented pensively. "By the way, Miss Somers," as if struck by a sudden thought, "didyou ever succeed in selling that lovely necklace of yours?"
"Oh yes. I disposed of it quite satisfactorily," she returned in the half-bored way in which people refer to things long over and done with. "It cost me a pang."
"I wonder what it costhim?" Ermengarde mused, as they were merged in a stream of sun-burnt, sun-hatted people flocking in to luncheon in the cool shadow of the house.
For all his reputed benevolence and ascetic cast of face there was a curious feline quality in Mr. Mosson, Ermengarde observed. He sat at his solitary table in a corner, quietly intent on what was put before him, yet all the time stealthily watching people from under drooped eyelids, with an occasional hungry flash in his eyes when suddenly bent upon some individual, as, for instance, to-day upon Agatha, and slightly crouching in his chair like some great creature of the cat tribe, gathering itself together to spring on its prey.
So he might look at and spring upon her, she reflected with a shiver, if she put herself within reach of that quick, aggressive paw (now peeling oranges with slow and stealthy ferocity, as if they were alive and felt being skinned so closely), and so he might devour her, crunching her audibly, bones and all, as he crunched the crispzwiebackthat he slowly munched from time to time to fill in the pauses between courses. Was Agatha being slowly crunched and ground to powder by those cruel jaws? or was she on the tiger-man's side, a tool or decoy to bring his prey within range?
It was embarrassing to the last degree, and yet it was a sort of comfort, to find that Agatha was not only going down into Mentone—"down below," as it was pleasantly termed on the ridge—but was bent on accompanying her in her quest for fresh quarters.
Two people, the woman of mystery truly said, were better than one; they presented a more imposing front to the enemy—that is, the hotel-keeper—and in case of any bluffing or attempt at imposition, offered a double supply of the courage necessary to unmask and combat his stratagems of war.
"But why leave Les Oliviers?" she questioned, as they stepped down the ravine side together. "Surely there could be nothing more charming, or half as healthy, down below?"
To this Mrs. Allonby began with haughty reticence, to the effect that one had excellent reasons not always possible or desirable to explain, and ended, before they reached the town, by confiding to her that she had been turned out of Les Oliviers, the manner of which turning out she related not without humour, the absurd side of the catastrophe having suddenly presented itself to her imagination. The whole episode now showed itself in the light of an excellent joke and capital opportunity of getting a change. Les Oliviers was undoubtedly dull, euphemistically, restful. It had been remarked by foreign visitors that none but English could put up with the dulness of that high-placed, solitary house.
The woman of mystery observed that the onslaught of Madame Bontemps was sudden and apparently unprovoked, and Ermengarde returned that it was absolutely unprovoked; she had not so much as seen either mother or daughter for a couple of days at least, so that an opportunity of provocation had not been forthcoming even.
"I was out nearly all day yesterday," she said, "and went straight to my room when I came in at night, and I was down late this morning, and breakfasted alone in the corner looking down the gorge, and never moved till I went in. I couldn't move, in fact, because my Italian lesson came immediately afterwards."
"Oh, your Italian lesson," said Agatha, with a look of enlightenment. "Ah! and you found Mlle. Bontemps in the office? I see."
Having found the key to the mystery, she suddenly became so absent-minded as not to hear the question, "What do you see?" Then she began to warn Mrs. Allonby equally against the larger hotels and any in the Caravan Bay, and Ermengarde took the opportunity of finally refusing to drag her into the fag of hotel-hunting, and got into a tram going towards Caravan by herself.
But when, a couple of hours later, she found herself leaning on the balustrade by the sea on the Promenade du Midi, very tired and hot, and unable to find any room in the crowded hotels just visited, she was partly annoyed and partly pleased to see the tall, slight figure of this woman of mystery coming towards her.
"I never saw it more darkly and deeply blue," Agatha said, stopping and leaning at her side, "or the turquoise of the shoal water more clear and lovely."
The soft boom of surf on the rocks was very lulling and sweet, and the scent of the pure, azure-shadowed spray that dashed from waves breaking in fine curves of every shade of blue, with never a tint of green, fresh and vivifying. Even the subdued menace of the ground-swell was mellow, not harsh with the scream of dragged shingle, as in paler, greyer seas. It was restful to look and look, to plunge and steep the sight in the intense glowing blue, and wonder if it could be true, a real sea rolling through this mid-earth, and not some incredible splendour of "faery lands forlorn." Even the wickedness and cruelty of Arthur took a softer complexion in the light of that warm and clear dark sea. Far out towards the horizon the velvety depth of blue made the sky white by comparison; but nearer it had a liquid quality, a sparkling sweetness that promised to assuage thirst and renew failing pulses as with some divine elixir. One might drink deep of that clear wave and lose all memory of pain and grief, or, like the waters of Eunoe, it might bring to mind all that is beautiful—lost joys, forgotten aspirations, divine desires, old sweet loves.
But in a world of prose and fatigue tea was a more desirable, or at least a more attainable, elixir; for was not Rumpelmayer's hard by—Rumpelmayer's of the pure and perfumed China leaf and select company? Thither Ermengarde turned, and secured a table outside, with that broad purple splendour still in sight, and its salt freshness stealing through the palm-colonnade and rustling the feathery tops of the giant eucalyptus in the public gardens opposite; and thither, after some hesitation and consultation of her watch, the woman of mystery was persuaded to accompany her.
The last strains of the band were dying away in the dark greenery of the gardens; people were streaming off in every direction in the golden afternoon; Rumpelmayer's was rapidly filling to overflow inside and out—carriage after carriage rolling up and setting down charming costumes of muslin and pale summer tints of various texture, oddly finished with furs and sunshades of dainty hue. There was a cheery murmur of voices and laughter all around, with the solemn undertone of sea-surges booming through all. Ermengarde had left Agatha to fill the cups with that exquisite China fragrance, while she went in to choose cakes, and was just coming out with a heaped plate when she met the smiling gaze of Ivor Paul, who seemed to have been strolling aimlessly with the crowd, when he stopped to speak to Agatha, whose manner conveyed an impression of unrest and anxiety, rather than embarrassment, at this meeting.
"You may have forgotten Mr. Paul, who was at Les Oliviers some time since," she said; and Ermengarde, replying graciously, reflected that her opportunities of forgetting this young man had been singularly scanty. He positively haunted them; he was as persistent as a family ghost, or the Anarchist himself.
He proved more entertaining than either of those, however, discoursing most gaily and pleasantly about nothing, laughing at less, and listening with due sympathy to the sorrows and fatigues of Ermengarde in her expulsion from one hotel and ineffectual hunt for another, and observing that it was a beastly shame, and that hotel-keepers were a rotten lot, which confirmed her in a growing conviction that this turning-out was of the nature of an excellent joke and delightful adventure. Had Mrs. Allonby tried Pension Gilardoni? An aunt, or some such elderly and respectable relation, of his had wintered there, and found it most satisfactory and quite reasonable—altogether a ripping place. It was just along there on the west of the gardens by the sea. It would give him pleasure to conduct her to the house there and then.
But Ermengarde had had enough of hotel-hunting for that day, and after a little pressure accepted the woman of mystery's offer to go and explore the house for her, personally conducted by Mr. Paul; or rather, as she reflected when left to sip her second cup alone, the two young people had simply gone off at once upon this benevolent quest, without waiting for any consent or comment, vanishing among the palms before there was time to take breath, and leaving Agatha's steaming second cup to waste its perfume on the unthinking crowd.
"Do you know that you are half an hour before time?" Agatha said as soon as they were out of hearing in the gardens.
"Yes; but I didn't expect to find you yet. But when I spotted you at the tea-shop I had to come. I thought you were alone. The game's up at last, and no mistake. This is good-bye, sweetheart—good-bye for ever now!"
There was a sudden break in his voice. He wanted to tell her that he had hungered for a sight of her, and longed for a word to restore him to hope, courage, self-respect; that he had lost his bearings, and was drifting headlong upon hidden rocks and quicksands; but would not founder without throwing up some danger signal, and catching at any spar floating by or any rope flung to him. But he could find no words. The hoarse murmur of the broken surf and subdued roar of the ground-swell mingled with the heavy surging of blood in his ears, and dazed and stupefied him, as they walked in the nearly deserted gardens, their eyes on the ground.
Presently Agatha looked up and saw that the surface laughter had died from his face, which was white and drawn, and almost stern in its gravity.
"Now you look like your mother, Ivor," she said gently; and he retorted with sudden fierceness:
"Heaven forbid she should look like me! She is a good woman, Agatha; it was a bad day for her when she brought me into the world. I've always been in the wrong box, somehow. To go straight I ought to have been born rich; I'm made like that. But it's all done and over now. And I want you to tell her—tell her—I'm sorry for her sake—I've gone under. That's all."
"No, Ivor, not all. Let me tell her—for her sake, that you have risen again—as you can and must—for her sake."
"You talk like a woman," he said impatiently. "And what do women know?"
How could he tell her—not that he wished to—what had driven him there to be near her, if not actually with her, an hour before the time fixed, for succour and refuge from shipwreck more complete and terrible than that of which she knew—in part, at least—already? How could she enter ever so slightly into the passion and misery that were tearing him, into the struggle of all that was best in him enlisted on the side of all that was worst, of a weak and wavering will, drawn hither and thither by the fierce contention of honour and chivalry, gratitude and compunction—against despair and passion and a certain dire, half-conscious need of that tenderness, even protection, that weak woman often gives to strong man?
The dumb and piteous appeal in his eyes—great, soft eyes, like a loving repulsed dog's—went to her heart, but what did it mean? Was he only sorry for himself, this great man-child, helpless before his own passions, or was the spring of real penitence touched at last? Did he want comforting exculpation and the assurance that his mother would never know half or grieve for a quarter, and that all would come right by some mysterious magic? Silently, with a gentle pressure, she slipped her hand into his arm; he pressed it hard against his throbbing side, with a deep, gasping breath, and drew her to a bench, set back in shining foliage outside the gardens fronting the sea, where they sat looking absently at sunlit sails dipping and gliding over the broad blueness, and listening absently to the continuous plunge and break of tumbling waves.
He had been in quite other company that day, and was still tingling and throbbing with the sound of another voice and the excitement of a scene of sudden, unimagined passion, the thought of which made him press the hand in his own more convulsively to his side, as if it had power to save him, like a frightened child clinging to a mother.
It had come so suddenly. He had been loitering drearily in the Casino gardens in the forenoon to kill time till the appointed meeting at Mentone, loitering by a hedge of prickly pear, its bare, bone-like stems and fleshly leaves spread like distorted hands, its dull-red, warty fruit, grotesquely suggestive of weird spells and horrible enchantments, when round the corner all at once he had come eye to eye with the Countess, solitary, sad and with a new, subdued gentleness in her manner.
He must come in to her apartment, to the balcony looking on the gardens, he heard; she was alone; they must breakfast together; she was sure he had not breakfasted; they would have a bottle of that Clos Vougeot he had liked.
The breakfast had been very cheerful and reviving—dainty cookery, a lively and warm-hearted hostess bent on pleasing, and afterwards an excellent and favourite cigar and a cup of coffee of unimaginable perfection. Such things soften the bitterness of affliction and bring people to contemplate misfortune in gentler mood and through rosier light. And in this cool, sumptuously fitted apartment by the balcony that looked on the gardens, it was pleasant to linger and laugh, forgetful of the thorns of life. And there and then the offer to square the Spider had been pressingly renewed and courteously declined. No man preyed upon women.
But the woman this time was in luck; she could spare whatever was necessary to appease the cormorant; there was no question of preying on her.— But men must stand or fall by themselves. No; he was cruel; he scorned her help; there were tears.
These, of course, had to be dried. There followed assurances of gratitude, friendship, respect; then the counter-assurance of her suddenly inherited wealth. Still her desire to recognize and return old kindnesses was not held to justify preying upon women. He was sincerely grateful, but she must not be hurt by an absolute refusal of her generous offer.
Then came the bolt from the blue, in the shape of an outburst of frenzied passion, fiercely tender, throbbing with life, deep as death.
She loved him. It was the one deep and lasting and genuine passion in a life of many loves, light, fugitive, and easily forgotten; no pale, self-regarding girl's love, but the fervid and passionate self-devotion, the worship, of a matured and full-blooded nature, of one who had drunk deeply of the cup of life, who knew the world and had sounded all the mysteries of passion. She asked nothing in return—nothing but leave to adore, to cherish. They would go to some sunny summerland, where he was not known, wherever he pleased; they might cruise about in their own yacht; they might live on her estate sometimes—anywhere, only together. If he were, as he said, cast broken and friendless upon the world, without a crust, with neither friends, nor hope, nor prospects, why not take refuge in her love? Her wealth was ample. All she had was his without reserve. He might exchange into a regiment on foreign service; he might serve in a foreign army. He might not think it, but she could be a tame, fireside woman for his sake: she would make him a true and devoted wife, married or not. When a woman loved truly she was capable of anything.
Her appeal had the irresistible force of real passion; she was handsome—he had had no idea how handsome till now. Emotion brought back the sweet freshness of youth to her face, called out wonderful tones in her voice and strange brilliance in her eyes. Now she was tender, gentle, sisterly; now she was tragic, fierce, despairing; then suppliant and reproachful, but always with that electric flame of passion kindling and overcharging an atmosphere of mysterious enchantment akin to the magic of the weirdly beautiful gardens and the diablerie of the glittering Casino.
The details of that wild scene he could in no wise recall; nor could he remember exactly how it had come to an end, and he had found himself once more in the free air, thrilled, intoxicated, revolted, bewildered, fascinated, but not bound.
After all, there were worse women than the poor countess. She was a good comrade, and infinitely to be pitied. Was it her fault that she had been torn from her convent in the white innocence of ignorant girlhood and flung without power of protest into the arms of an elderly and unlovable husband, with no pause for reflection, and neither knowledge nor a moment's experience of life? What was there to guide and protect a lovely, lonely, fascinating girl, childless and unloved, and unconscious alike of her power and her weakness, through the rocks and quicksands of a hard and cruel world? Poor child—poor, dear, good-hearted countess! And if her reputation were a trifle damaged, how many, far less tempted and yet of spotless fame in the eyes of a hoodwinked world, were frailer than she! And, after all, who was spotless among women—except Agatha?
To be near Agatha would be calm and safety from that wild and wandering fire. And yet, as he sat listening to the multitudinous murmur of broken seas, with her hand pressed hard to his side, he was powerless to shake off the spell of that passionate hour; the physical attraction, the glowing eyes, the transfigured beauty, the thrilling voice, the pathos, the pity, the deep emotion, were always in his eyes and ears and heart. What could Agatha know of that, or of the intensified power of it all in an hour of desperate need and misery?
"Is it true," he asked, after a long silence, "that my mother is pressed for money, and that you give typewriting to the girls?"
"Ask her yourself. I may say nothing."
"And are youthat man'spaid secretary? Don't say that's true—not that."