He came on more slowly, his eyes following her as she vanished, then turning to me with a rather pitiful apprehension—a look like that I remember to have seen (some hundreds of years ago) on the face of a freshman, glancing up from his book to find his doorway ominously filling with sophomores.
I stepped out to meet him, indignant upon several counts, most of all upon his own. I knew there was no offence in his heart, not the remotest rude intent, but the fact was before me that he had frightened a woman, had given this very lovely guest of my friends good cause to hold him a boor, if she did not, indeed, think him (as she probably thought me) an outright lunatic! I said:
“You spoke to that lady!” And my voice sounded unexpectedly harsh and sharp to my own ears, for I had meant to speak quietly.
“I know—I know. It—it was wrong,” he stammered. “I knew I shouldn’t—and I couldn’t help it.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth; I couldn’t!”
I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had said was only the truth. “I don’t understand; it was all beyond me,” he added huskily.
“What was it you said to her?”
“I spoke her name—‘Madame d’Armand.’”
“You said more than that!”
“I asked her if she would let me see her again.”
“What else?”
“Nothing,” he answered humbly. “And then she—then for a moment it seemed—for a moment she didn’t seem to be able to speak—”
“I should think not!” I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical laughter. He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following the aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting his flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter: this spectacle of a grown man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered confession.
“But she did say something to you, didn’t she?” I asked finally, with the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.
“Yes—after that moment.”
“Well, what was it?”
“She said, ‘Not now!’ That was all.”
“I suppose that was all she had breath for! It was just the inconsequent and meaningless thing a frightened woman WOULD say!”
“Meaningless?” he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.
“Did you take it for an appointment?” I roared, quite out of patience, and losing my temper completely.
“No, no, no! She said only that, and then—”
“Then she turned and ran away from you!”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing painfully.
“That PLEASED you,” I stormed, “to frighten a woman in the woods—to make her feel that she can’t walk here in safety! You ENJOY doing things like that?”
He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.
I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said. This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude until I had finished—and more than finished.
“There—and that’s all!” I said desperately, when the things were strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. “Let’s be off, in heaven’s name!”
At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see that he had grown very pale.
“I wouldn’t have frightened her for the world,” he said, and his voice and his whole body shook with a strange violence. “I wouldn’t have frightened her to please the angels in heaven!”
A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers Keredec’s training had built for his protection, they were down now.
“You think I told a lie!” he cried. “You think I lied when I said I couldn’t help speaking to her!”
“No, no,” I said earnestly. “I didn’t mean—”
“Words!” he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling vehemence. “And what does it matter? You CAN’T understand. When YOU want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I look back—AH!” He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent syllable. “I look back and it’s all—BLIND! All these things you CAN do and CAN’T do—all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows—but I don’t know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don’t know. I haven’t HAD my life. It’s gone! All I have is words that Keredec has said to me, and it’s like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d’Armand? Can life itself teach you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
“I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body,” he went on, with the same wild intensity, “rather than trouble her or frighten her, but I couldn’t help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to see her again—the feeling that I MUST—whatever you say or do, whatever Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do. And I will! It isn’t a thing to choose to do, or not to do. I can’t help it any more than I can help being alive!”
He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain. I made nervous haste to seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly:
“But if it should distress the lady?”
“Yes—then I could keep away. But I must know that.”
“I think you might know it by her running away—and by her look,” I said mildly. “Didn’t you?”
“NO!” And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.
“Well, well,” I said, “let’s be on our way, or the professor will be wondering if he is to dine alone.”
Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward home. He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain control of himself. I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were upon the main road near the Baudry cottage. Then he said in a steadier voice:
“Why should it distress her?”
“Well, you see,” I began, not slackening the pace “there are formalities—”
“Ah, I know,” he interrupted, with an impatient laugh. “Keredec once took me to a marionette show—all the little people strung on wires; they couldn’t move any other way. And so you mustn’t talk to a woman until somebody whose name has been spoken to you speaks yours to her! Do you call that a rule of nature?”
“My dear boy,” I laughed in some desperation, “we must conform to it, ordinarily, no matter whose rule it is.”
“Do you think Madame d’Armand cares for little forms like that?” he asked challengingly.
“She does,” I assured him with perfect confidence. “And, for the hundredth time, you must have seen how you troubled her.”
“No,” he returned, with the same curious obstinacy, “I don’t believe it. There was something, but it wasn’t trouble. We looked straight at each other; I saw her eyes plainly, and it was—” he paused and sighed, a sudden, brilliant smile upon his lips—“it was very—it was very strange!”
There was something so glad and different in his look that—like any other dried-up old blunderer in my place—I felt an instant tendency to laugh. It was that heathenish possession, the old insanity of the risibles, which makes a man think it a humourous thing that his friend should be discovered in love.
But before I spoke, before I quite smiled outright, I was given the grace to see myself in the likeness of a leering stranger trespassing in some cherished inclosure: a garden where the gentlest guests must always be intruders, and only the owner should come. The best of us profane it readily, leaving the coarse prints of our heels upon its paths, mauling and man-handling the fairy blossoms with what pudgy fingers! Comes the poet, ruthlessly leaping the wall and trumpeting indecently his view-halloo of the chase, and, after him, the joker, snickering and hopeful of a kill among the rose-beds; for this has been their hunting-ground since the world began. These two have made us miserably ashamed of the divine infinitive, so that we are afraid to utter the very words “to love,” lest some urchin overhear and pursue us with a sticky forefinger and stickier taunts. It is little to my credit that I checked the silly impulse to giggle at the eternal marvel, and went as gently as I could where I should not have gone at all.
“But if you were wrong,” I said, “if it did distress her, and if it happened that she has already had too much that was distressing in her life—”
“You know something about her!” he exclaimed. “You know—”
“I do not,” I interrupted in turn. “I have only a vague guess; I may be altogether mistaken.”
“What is it that you guess?” he demanded abruptly. “Who made her suffer?”
“I think it was her husband,” I said, with a lack of discretion for which I was instantly sorry, fearing with reason that I had added a final blunder to the long list of the afternoon. “That is,” I added, “if my guess is right.”
He stopped short in the road, detaining me by the arm, the question coming like a whip-crack: sharp, loud, violent.
“Is he alive?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, beginning to move forward; “and this is foolish talk—especially on my part!”
“But I want to know,” he persisted, again detaining me.
“And I DON’T know!” I returned emphatically. “Probably I am entirely mistaken in thinking that I know anything of her whatever. I ought not to have spoken, unless I knew what I was talking about, and I’d rather not say any more until I do know.”
“Very well,” he said quickly. “Will you tell me then?”
“Yes—if you will let it go at that.”
“Thank you,” he said, and with an impulse which was but too plainly one of gratitude, offered me his hand. I took it, and my soul was disquieted within me, for it was no purpose of mine to set inquiries on foot in regard to the affairs of “Madame d’Armand.”
It was early dusk, that hour, a little silvered but still clear, when the edges of things are beginning to grow indefinite, and usually our sleepy countryside knew no tranquiller time of day; but to-night, as we approached the inn, there were strange shapes in the roadway and other tokens that events were stirring there.
From the courtyard came the sounds of laughter and chattering voices. Before the entrance stood a couple of open touring-cars; the chauffeurs engaged in cooling the rear tires with buckets of water brought by a personage ordinarily known as Glouglou, whose look and manner, as he performed this office for the leathern dignitaries, so awed me that I wondered I had ever dared address him with any presumption of intimacy. The cars were great and opulent, of impressive wheel-base, and fore-and-aft they were laden intricately with baggage: concave trunks fitting behind the tonneaus, thin trunks fastened upon the footboards, green, circular trunks adjusted to the spare tires, all deeply coated with dust. Here were fineries from Paris, doubtless on their way to flutter over the gay sands of Trouville, and now wandering but temporarily from the road; for such splendours were never designed to dazzle us of Madame Brossard’s.
We were crossing before the machines when one of the drivers saw fit to crank his engine (if that is the knowing phrase) and the thing shook out the usual vibrating uproar. It had a devastating effect upon my companion. He uttered a wild exclamation and sprang sideways into me, almost upsetting us both.
“What on earth is the matter?” I asked. “Did you think the car was starting?”
He turned toward me a face upon which was imprinted the sheer, blank terror of a child. It passed in an instant however, and he laughed.
“I really didn’t know. Everything has been so quiet always, out here in the country—and that horrible racket coming so suddenly—”
Laughing with him, I took his arm and we turned to enter the archway. As we did so we almost ran into a tall man who was coming out, evidently intending to speak to one of the drivers.
The stranger stepped back with a word of apology, and I took note of him for a fellow-countryman, and a worldly buck of fashion indeed, almost as cap-a-pie the automobilist as my mysterious spiller of cider had been the pedestrian. But this was no game-chicken; on the contrary (so far as a glance in the dusk of the archway revealed him), much the picture for framing in a club window of a Sunday morning; a seasoned, hard-surfaced, knowing creature for whom many a head waiter must have swept previous claimants from desired tables. He looked forty years so cannily that I guessed him to be about fifty.
We were passing him when he uttered an ejaculation of surprise and stepped forward again, holding out his hand to my companion, and exclaiming:
“Where did YOU come from? I’d hardly have known you.”
Oliver seemed unconscious of the proffered hand; he stiffened visibly and said:
“I think there must be some mistake.”
“So there is,” said the other promptly. “I have been misled by a resemblance. I beg your pardon.”
He lifted his cap slightly, going on, and we entered the courtyard to find a cheerful party of nine or ten men and women seated about a couple of tables. Like the person we had just encountered, they all exhibited a picturesque elaboration of the costume permitted by their mode of travel; making effective groupings in their ample draperies of buff and green and white, with glimpses of a flushed and pretty face or two among the loosened veilings. Upon the tables were pots of tea, plates of sandwiches, Madame Brossard’s three best silver dishes heaped with fruit, and some bottles of dry champagne from the cellars of Rheims. The partakers were making very merry, having with them (as is inevitable in all such parties, it seems) a fat young man inclined to humour, who was now upon his feet for the proposal of some prankish toast. He interrupted himself long enough to glance our way as we crossed the garden; and it struck me that several pairs of brighter eyes followed my young companion with interest. He was well worth it, perhaps all the more because he was so genuinely unconscious of it; and he ran up the gallery steps and disappeared into his own rooms without sending even a glance from the corner of his eye in return.
I went almost as quickly to my pavilion, and, without lighting my lamp, set about my preparations for dinner.
The party outside, breaking up presently, could be heard moving toward the archway with increased noise and laughter, inspired by some exquisite antic on the part of the fat young man, when a girl’s voice (a very attractive voice) called, “Oh, Cressie, aren’t you coming?” and a man’s replied, from near my veranda: “Only stopping to light a cigar.”
A flutter of skirts and a patter of feet betokened that the girl came running back to join the smoker. “Cressie,” I heard her say in an eager, lowered tone, “who WAS he?”
“Who was who?”
“That DEVASTATING creature in white flannels!”
The man chuckled. “Matinee sort of devastator—what? Monte Cristo hair, noble profile—”
“You’d better tell me,” she interrupted earnestly—“if you don’t want me to ask the WAITER.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“I saw you speak to him.”
“I thought it was a man I met three years ago out in San Francisco, but I was mistaken. There was a slight resemblance. This fellow might have been a rather decent younger brother of the man I knew. HE was the—”
My strong impression was that if the speaker had not been interrupted at this point he would have said something very unfavourable to the character of the man he had met in San Francisco; but there came a series of blasts from the automobile horns and loud calls from others of the party, who were evidently waiting for these two.
“Coming!” shouted the man.
“Wait!” said his companion hurriedly, “Who was the other man, the older one with the painting things and SUCH a coat?”
“Never saw him before in my life.”
I caught a last word from the girl as the pair moved away.
“I’ll come back here with a BAND to-morrow night, and serenade the beautiful one.
“Perhaps he’d drop me his card out of the window!”
The horns sounded again; there was a final chorus of laughter, suddenly ceasing to be heard as the cars swept away, and Les Trois Pigeons was left to its accustomed quiet.
“Monsieur is served,” said Amedee, looking in at my door, five minutes later.
“You have passed a great hour just now, Amedee.”
“It was like the old days, truly!”
“They are off for Trouville, I suppose.”
“No, monsieur, they are on their way to visit the chateau, and stopped here only because the run from Paris had made the tires too hot.”
“To visit Quesnay, you mean?”
“Truly. But monsieur need give himself no uneasiness; I did not mention to any one that monsieur is here. His name was not spoken. Mademoiselle Ward returned to the chateau to-day,” he added. “She has been in England.”
“Quesnay will be gay,” I said, coming out to the table. Oliver Saffren was helping the professor down the steps, and Keredec, bent with suffering, but indomitable, gave me a hearty greeting, and began a ruthless dissection of Plato with the soup. Oliver, usually, very quiet, as I have said, seemed a little restless under the discourse to-night. However, he did not interrupt, sitting patiently until bedtime, though obviously not listening. When he bade me good night he gave me a look so clearly in reference to a secret understanding between us that, meaning to if I had meanly tricked a child.
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