The Quest: A Romance
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Title: The Quest: A Romance
Creator: Justus Miles Forman
Illustrator: William Hatherell
Release date: August 21, 2013 [eBook #43527]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43527
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST: A ROMANCE ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: "He fell on his knees at her feet" (Page 312).]
THE QUEST
A Romance
By
JUSTUS MILES FORMAN
_Author of "The Garden of Lies," "Tommy Carteret," etc_
_ILLUSTRATED BY W. HATHERELL, R.I._
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO
1909
*CONTENTS*
CHAP.
I Ste. Marie Hears of a Mystery and Meets a Dark Lady
II The Ladder to the Stars
III Ste. Marie makes a Vow, but a Pair of Eyes haunt Him
IV Old David Stewart
V Ste. Marie sets forth upon the Great Adventure
VI A Brave Gentleman Receives a Hurt, but Volunteers in a Good Cause
VII Captain Stewart makes a Kindly Offer
VIII Ste. Marie Meets with a Misadventure and Dreams a Dream
IX Ste. Marie goes upon a Journey and Richard Hartley Pleads for Him
X Captain Stewart Entertains
XI A Golden Lady Enters--The Eyes again
XII The Name of the Lady with the Eyes--Evidence heaps up Swiftly
XIII The Road to Clamart
XIV In the Garden
XV A Conversation at La Lierre
XVI The Black Cat
XVII A Conversation Overheard
XVIII Those who were Left Behind
XIX The Invalid takes the Air
XX The Stone Bench at the Rond Point
XXI A Mist Dims the Shining Star
XXII A Settlement Refused
XXIII The Last Arrow--and a Promise
XXIV The Joint in the Armour
XXV Coira goes over to the Enemy
XXVI "I won't go!"
XXVII The Night's Work
XXVIII Coira's Little Hour
XXIX The Scales of Injustice
XXX Journey's End
*Illustrations*
"He fell on his knees at her feet" . . . _Frontispiece_ (Page 312)
"It seemed to him that her eyes called him."
"'I fancy I know who the man was.'"
"'You're twenty-two. Have you ever fallen in love?'"
"He turned and went out of the room."
"'Don't refuse a helping hand!' said Captain Stewart, looking up once
more. 'Don't be overproud!'"
"So for an hour or more he stood in the open window staring into the
fragrant night."
"He saw Captain Stewart moving among them."
"Captain Stewart lay huddled and writhing upon the floor."
"There appeared two young people."
"'Michel is busy,' said Coira O'Hara, 'so I have brought your coffee.'"
"'Ste. Marie has disappeared? How very extraordinary!'"
"'What can we do, Richard? What can we do?'"
"'Tell me about him, this Ste. Marie! Do you know anything about him?'"
"Mlle. Coira O'Hara sat alone upon the stone bench."
"His hand went swiftly to his coat pocket."
"She did not move when he came before her."
"The girl fumbled desperately with the clumsy key."
"Walking there in the tender moonlight."
*CHAPTER I*
*STE. MARIE HEARS OF A MYSTERY AND MEETS A DARK LADY*
From Ste. Marie's little flat which overlooked the gardens they drove
down the quiet Rue du Luxembourg, and, at the Place St. Sulpice, turned
to the left. They crossed the Place St. Germain des Pres, where lines
of homebound working people stood waiting for places in the electric
trams, and groups of students from the Beaux Arts or from Julien's sat
under the awnings of the Deux Magots, and so, beyond that busy square,
they came into the long and peaceful stretch of the Boulevard St.
Germain. The warm sweet dusk gathered round them as they went, and the
evening air was fresh and aromatic in their faces. There had been a
little gentle shower in the late afternoon, and roadway and pavement
were still damp with it. It had wet the new-grown leaves of the
chestnuts and acacias that bordered the street. The scent of that
living green blended with the scent of laid dust and the fragrance of
the last late-clinging chestnut blossoms: it caught up a fuller richer
burden from the overflowing front of a florist's shop: it stole from
open windows a savoury whiff of cooking, a salt tang of wood smoke, and
the soft little breeze--the breeze of coming summer--mixed all together
and tossed them and bore them down the long quiet street; and it was the
breath of Paris, and it shall be in your nostrils and mine, a keen agony
of sweetness, so long as we may live and so wide as we may
wander--because we have known it and loved it: and in the end we shall
go back to breathe it when we die.
The strong white horse jogged evenly along over the wooden pavement, its
head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went.
The cocher, a torpid purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pear-like,
sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an
extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-coloured coat
wrong-side-before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large
strange toy and his strident voice said--
"_He!_" to the stout white horse, which paid no attention whatever.
Once the beast stumbled and the pear-like lump of flesh insulted it,
saying--
"_He! veux, tu, cochon!_"
Before the War Office a little black slip of a milliner's girl dodged
under the horse's head, saving herself and the huge box slung to her arm
by a miracle of agility, and the cocher called her the most frightful
names, without turning his head, and in a perfunctory tone quite free
from passion.
Young Hartley laughed and turned to look at his companion, but Ste.
Marie sat still in his place, his hat pulled a little down over his
brows, and his handsome chin buried in the folds of the white silk
muffler with which, for some obscure reason, he had swathed his neck.
"This is the first time in many years," said the Englishman, "that I
have known you to be silent for ten whole minutes. Are you ill or are
you making up little epigrams to say at the dinner party?"
Ste. Marie waved a despondent glove.
"I 'ave," said he, "w'at you call ze blue. _Papillons noirs_--clouds in
my soul." It was a species of jest with Ste. Marie--and he seemed never
to tire of it--to pretend that he spoke English very brokenly. As a
matter of fact he spoke it quite as well as any Englishman and without
the slightest trace of accent. He had discovered a long time before
this--it may have been while the two were at Eton together--that it
annoyed Hartley very much, particularly when it was done in company and
before strangers. In consequence he became at such occasions a sort of
comic-paper caricature of his race, and by dint of much practice, added
to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the
torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered
his best friend. He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere
literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring
Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him "my dear" before other men,
whereas at the equivalent "_mon cher_" the Englishman would doubtless
never, as the phrase goes, have batted an eye.
"Ye--es," he continued sadly, "I 'ave ze blue. I weep. Weez ze tears
full ze eyes. Yes." He descended into English. "I think something's
going to happen to me. There's calamity--or something--in the air.
Perhaps I'm going to die."
"Oh, I know what you are going to do, right enough," said the other man,
"you're going to meet the most beautiful woman--girl--in the world at
dinner, and of course you are going to fall in love with her."
"Ah, the Miss Benham!" said Ste. Marie with a faint show of interest.
"I remember now, you said that she was to be there. I had forgotten.
Yes, I shall be glad to meet her. One hears so much. But why am I of
course going to fall in love with her?"
"Well, in the first place," said Hartley, "you always fall in love with
all pretty women as a matter of habit, and, in the second place,
everybody--well, I suppose you--no one could help falling in love with
her, I should think."
"That's high praise to come from you," said the other, and Hartley said
with a short, not very mirthful laugh--
"Oh, I don't pretend to be immune. We all--everybody who knows her----
You'll understand presently."
Ste. Marie turned his head a little and looked curiously at his friend,
for he considered that he knew the not very expressive intonations of
that young gentleman's voice rather well, and this was something
unusual. He wondered what had been happening during his six months'
absence from Paris.
"I dare say that's what I feel in the air, then," he said after a little
pause. "It's not calamity. It's love.
"Or maybe," he said quaintly, "it's both. _L'un n'empeche pas
l'autre._" And he gave an odd little shiver, as if that something in
the air had suddenly blown chill upon him.
They were passing the corner of the Chamber of Deputies which faces the
Pont de la Concorde. Ste. Marie pulled out his watch and looked at it.
"Eight-fifteen," said he. "What time are we asked for? Eight-thirty?
That means nine. It's an English house and nobody will be in time. It's
out of fashion to be prompt nowadays."
"I should hardly call the Marquis de Saulnes English, you know!"
objected Hartley.
"Well, his wife is," said the other, "and they're altogether English in
manner. Dinner won't be before nine. Shall we get out and walk across
the bridge and up the Champs Elysees? I should like to, I think. I
like to walk at this time of the evening--between the daylight and the
dark."
Hartley nodded a rather reluctant assent, and Ste. Marie prodded the
pear-shaped cocher in the back with his stick. So they got down at the
approach to the bridge. Ste. Marie gave the cocher a piece of two
francs and they turned away on foot. The pear-shaped one looked at the
coin in his fat hand as if it was something unclean and contemptible,
something to be despised. He glanced at the dial of his taximeter,
which had registered one franc twenty-five, and pulled the flag up. He
spat gloomily out into the street and his purple lips moved in words.
He seemed to say something like: "_Sale diable de metier!_" which,
considering the fact that he had just been overpaid, appears
unwarrantably pessimistic in tone. Thereafter he spat again, picked up
his reins and jerked them, saying--
"He, Jean Baptiste! Uip, uip!" The unemotional white horse turned up
the boulevard, trotting evenly at its steady pace, head down, the little
bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went. It occurs to me that
the white horse was probably unique. I doubt that there was another
horse in Paris rejoicing in that extraordinary name.
But the two young men walked slowly on across the Pont de la Concorde.
They went in silence, for Hartley was thinking still of Miss Helen
Benham and Ste. Marie was thinking of Heaven knows what. His gloom was
unaccountable unless he had really meant what he said about feeling
calamity in the air. It was very unlike him to have nothing to say.
Midway of the bridge he stopped and turned to look out over the river,
and the other man halted beside him. The dusk was thickening almost
perceptibly, but it was yet far from dark. The swift river ran leaden
beneath them, and the river boats, mouches and hirondelles, darted
silently under the arches of the bridge, making their last trips for the
day. Away to the west, where their faces were turned, the sky was still
faintly washed with colour, lemon and dusky orange and pale thin green.
A single long strip of cirrus cloud was touched with pink, a lifeless
old rose, such as is popular among decorators for the silk hangings of a
woman's boudoir. And black against this pallid wash of colours the
_Tour Eiffel_ stood high and slender and rather ghostly. By day it is
an ugly thing, a preposterous iron finger upthrust by man's vanity
against God's serene sky, but the haze of evening drapes it in a
merciful semi-obscurity, and it is beautiful.
Ste. Marie leant upon the parapet of the bridge, arms folded before him
and eyes afar. He began to sing, _a demi voix_, a little phrase out of
_Louise_,--an invocation to Paris--and the Englishman stirred uneasily
beside him. It seemed to Hartley that to stand on a bridge, in a top
hat and evening clothes, and sing operatic airs while people passed back
and forth behind you, was one of the things that are not done. He tried
to imagine himself singing in the middle of Westminster Bridge at
half-past eight of an evening, and he felt quite hot all over at the
thought. It was not done at all he said to himself. He looked a little
nervously at the people who were passing, and it seemed to him that they
stared at him and at the unconscious Ste. Marie, though in truth they
did nothing of the sort. He turned back and touched his friend on the
arm, saying--
"I think we'd best be getting along, you know," but Ste. Marie was very
far away and did not hear. So then he fell to watching the man's dark
and handsome face, and to thinking how little the years at Eton and the
year or two at Oxford had set any real stamp upon him. He would never
be anything but Latin in spite of his Irish mother and his public
school. Hartley thought what a pity that was. As Englishmen go he was
not illiberal, but, no more than he could have altered the colour of his
eyes, could he have believed that anything foreign would not be improved
by becoming English. That was born in him, as it is born in most
Englishmen, and it was a perfectly simple and honest belief. He felt a
deeper affection for this handsome and volatile young man, whom all
women loved and who bade fair to spend his life at their successive
feet--for he certainly had never shown the slightest desire to take up
any sterner employment--he felt a deeper affection for Ste. Marie than
for any other man he knew, but he had always wished that Ste. Marie were
an Englishman, and he had always felt a slight sense of shame over his
friend's un-English ways.
After a moment he touched him again on the arm, saying--
"Come along! We shall be late, you know. You can finish your little
concert another time."
"Eh!" cried Ste. Marie. "_Quoi, donc?_" He turned with a start.
"Oh yes!" said he. "Yes, come along! I was mooning. _Allons_!
_Allons_, my old!" He took Hartley's arm and began to shove him along
at a rapid walk.
"I will moon no more," he said. "Instead, you shall tell me about the
wonderful Miss Benham whom everybody is talking of. Isn't there
something odd connected with the family? I vaguely recall something
unusual, some mystery or misfortune or something.
"But first a moment! One small moment, my old. Regard me that!" They
had come to the end of the bridge and the great Place de la Concorde lay
before them.
"In all the world," said Ste. Marie--and he spoke the truth--"there is
not another such square. Regard it, _mon brave_! Bow yourself before
it! It is a miracle."
The great bronze lamps were alight, and they cast reflections upon the
still damp pavement about them. To either side the trees of the
Tuileries gardens and of the Cours la Reine and the Champs Elysees lay
in a solid black mass. In the middle the obelisk rose slender and
straight, its pointed top black against the sky, and beneath the water
of the Nereid fountains splashed and gurgled. Far beyond, the gay
lights of the Rue Royale shone in a yellow cluster and, beyond these
still, the tall columns of the Madeleine ended the long vista.
Pedestrians and cabs crept across that vast space, and seemed curiously
little, like black insects, and round about it all the eight cities of
France sat atop their stone pedestals and looked on. Ste. Marie gave a
little sigh of pleasure, and the two moved forward, bearing to the left,
towards the Champs Elysees.
"And now," said he, "about these Benhams. What is the thing I cannot
quite recall? What has happened to them?"
"I suppose," said the other man, "you mean the disappearance of Miss
Benham's young brother, a month ago, before you returned to Paris. Yes,
that was certainly very odd. That is, it was either very odd or very
commonplace. And in either case the family is terribly cut up about it.
The boy's name was Arthur Benham, and he was rather a young fool but not
downright vicious, I should think. I never knew him at all well, but I
know he spent his time chiefly at the Cafe de Paris and at the Olympia
and at Longchamps and at _Henry's Bar_. Well, he just disappeared, that
is all. He dropped completely out of sight between two days, and though
the family has had a small army of detectives on his trail, they've not
discovered the smallest clue. It's deuced odd altogether. You might
think it easy to disappear like that but it's not."
"No--no," said Ste. Marie thoughtfully. "No, I should fancy not.
"This boy," he said after a pause, "I think I had seen him--had him
pointed out to me--before I went away. I think it was at _Henry's Bar_
where all the young Americans go to drink strange beverages. I am quite
sure I remember his face. A weak face but not quite bad."
And after another little pause he asked--
"Was there any reason why he should have gone away? Any quarrel or that
sort of thing?"
"Well," said the other man, "I rather think there was something of the
sort. The boy's uncle--Captain Stewart, middle-aged, rather prim old
party--you'll have met him, I dare say--he intimated to me one day, that
there had been some trivial row. You see the lad isn't of age yet,
though he is to be in a few months, and so he has had to live on an
allowance doled out by his grandfather, who's the head of the house--the
boy's father is dead. There's a quaint old beggar, if you like!--the
grandfather. He was rather a swell in the diplomatic, in his day it
seems--rather an important swell. Now he's bedridden. He sits all day
in bed and plays cards with his granddaughter or with a very superior
valet, and talks politics with the men who come to see him. Oh yes,
he's a quaint old beggar. He has a great quantity of white hair and an
enormous square white beard, and the fiercest eyes I ever saw, I should
think. Everybody's frightened out of their wits of him. Well, he sits
up there and rules his family in good old patriarchal style, and it
seems he came down a bit hard on the poor boy one day over some folly or
other, and there was a row and the boy went out of the house swearing
he'd be even."
"Ah well, then," said Ste. Marie, "the matter seems simple enough. A
foolish boy's foolish pique. He is staying in hiding somewhere to
frighten his grandfather. When he thinks the time favourable he will
come back and be wept over and forgiven."
The other man walked a little way in silence.
"Ye--es," he said at last. "Yes, possibly. Possibly you are right.
That's what the grandfather thinks. It's the obvious solution.
Unfortunately there is more or less against it. The boy went away
with--so far as can be learned--almost no money, almost none at all.
And he has already been gone a month. Miss Benham--his sister--is sure
that something has happened to him, and I'm a bit inclined to think so
too. It's all very odd. I should think he might have been kidnapped
but that no demand has been made for money."
"He was not," suggested Ste. Marie--"not the sort of young man to do
anything desperate--make away with himself?"
Hartley laughed.
"O Lord, no!" said he. "Not that sort of young man at all. He was a
very normal type of rich and spoilt and somewhat foolish American boy."
"Rich?" inquired the other quickly.
"Oh yes! they're beastly rich. Young Arthur is to come into something
very good at his majority, I believe, from his father's estate, and the
old grandfather is said to be indecently rich--rolling in it! There's
another reason why the young idiot wouldn't be likely to stop away of
his own accord. He wouldn't risk anything like a serious break with the
old gentleman. It would mean a loss of millions to him, I dare say; for
the old beggar is quite capable of cutting him off, if he takes the
notion. Oh, it's a bad business, all through." And after they had gone
on a bit he said it again, shaking his head--
"It's a bad business! That poor girl you know--it's hard on her. She
was fond of the young ass for some reason or other. She's very much
broken up over it."
"Yes," said Ste. Marie, "it is hard for her--for all the family, of
course. A bad business, as you say." He spoke absently, for he was
looking ahead at something which seemed to be a motor accident. They
had, by this time, got well up the Champs Elysees and were crossing the
Rond Point. A motor-car was drawn up alongside the kerb just beyond,
and a little knot of people stood about it and seemed to look at
something on the ground.
"I think some one has been run down," said Ste. Marie. "Shall we have a
look?" They quickened their pace and came to where the group of people
stood in a circle looking upon the ground, and two gendarmes asked many
questions and wrote voluminously in their little books. It appeared
that a delivery boy mounted upon a tricycle cart had turned into the
wrong side of the avenue, and had got himself run into and overturned by
a motor-car going at a moderate rate of speed. For once the sentiment
of those mysterious birds of prey which flock instantaneously from
nowhere round an accident, was against the victim and in favour of the
frightened and gesticulating chauffeur.
Ste. Marie turned an amused face from this voluble being to the other
occupants of the patently hired car, who stood apart adding very little
to the discussion. He saw a tall and bony man with very bright blue
eyes and what is sometimes called a guardsman's moustache--the drooping
walruslike ornament which dates back a good many years now. Beyond this
gentleman he saw a young woman in a long grey silk coat and a motoring
veil. He was aware that the tall man was staring at him rather fixedly
and with a half-puzzled frown, as though he thought that they had met
before and was trying to remember when, but Ste. Marie gave the man but
a swift glance. His eyes were upon the dark face of the young woman
beyond, and it seemed to him that she called aloud to him in an actual
voice that rang in his ears. The young woman's very obvious beauty he
thought had nothing to do with the matter. It seemed to him that her
eyes called him. Just that. Something strange and very potent seemed
to take sudden and almost tangible hold upon him--a charm, a spell, a
magic--something unprecedented, new to his experience. He could not
take his eyes from hers and he stood staring.
[Illustration: "It seemed to him that her eyes called him."]
As before, on the Pont de la Concorde, Hartley touched him on the arm,
and abruptly the chains that had bound him were loosened.
"We must be going on, you know," the Englishman said, and Ste. Marie
said rather hurriedly--
"Yes! yes, to be sure. Come along!" But at a little distance he turned
once more to look back. The chauffeur had mounted to his place, the
delivery boy was upon his feet again, little the worse for his tumble,
and the knot of bystanders had begun to disperse, but it seemed to Ste.
Marie that the young woman in the long silk coat stood quite still where
she had been, and that her face was turned towards him watching.
"Did you notice that girl?" said Hartley as they walked on at a brisker
pace. "Did you see her face? She was rather a tremendous beauty, you
know, in her gipsyish fashion. Yes, by Jove, she was!"
"Did I see her?" repeated Ste. Marie. "Yes. Oh yes. She had very
strange eyes. At least I think it was the eyes. I don't know. I've
never seen any eyes quite like them. Very odd!"
He said something more in French which Hartley did not hear, and the
Englishman saw that he was frowning.
"Oh well, I shouldn't have said there was anything strange about them,"
Hartley said, "but they certainly were beautiful. There's no denying
that. The man with her looked rather Irish I thought."
They came to the Etoile and cut across it towards the Avenue Hoche.
Ste. Marie glanced back once more, but the motor-car and the delivery
boy and the gendarmes were gone.
"What did you say?" he asked idly.
"I said the man looked Irish," repeated his friend. All at once Ste.
Marie gave a loud exclamation--
"Sacred thousand devils! Fool that I am! Dolt! Why didn't I think of
it before?" Hartley stared at him and Ste. Marie stared down the Champs
Elysees like one in a trance.
"I say," said the Englishman, "we really must be getting on, you know,
we're late." And as they went along down the Avenue Hoche, he
demanded--
"Why are you a dolt and whatever else it was? What struck you so
suddenly?"
"I remembered all at once," said Ste. Marie, "where I had seen that man
before, and with whom I last saw him. I'll tell you about it later.
Probably it's of no importance, though."
"You're talking rather like a mild lunatic," said the other. "Here we
are at the house!"
*CHAPTER II*
*THE LADDER TO THE STARS*
Miss Benham was talking wearily to a strange fair youth with an
impediment in his speech, and was wondering why the youth had been asked
to this house, where in general one was sure of meeting only interesting
people, when some one spoke her name, and she turned with a little sigh
of relief. It was Baron de Vries, the Belgian First Secretary of
Legation, an old friend of her grandfather's, a man made gentle and
sweet by infinite sorrow. He bowed civilly to the fair youth and bent
over the girl's hand.
"It is very good," he said, "to see you again in the world. We have
need of you, _nous autres_. Madame your mother is well, I hope--and the
bear?" He called old Mr. Stewart "the bear" in a sort of grave jest,
and that fierce octogenarian rather liked it.
"Oh yes," the girl said, "we're all fairly well. My mother had one of
her headaches to-night and so didn't come here, but she's as well as
usual, and 'the bear'--yes, he's well enough physically, I should think,
but he has not been quite the same since--during the past month. It has
told upon him, you know. He grieves over it much more than he will
admit."
"Yes," said Baron de Vries gravely. "Yes, I know." He turned about
towards the fair young man, but that youth had drifted away and joined
himself to another group. Miss Benham looked after him and gave a
little exclamation of relief.
"That person was rather terrible," she said. "I can't think why he is
here. Marian so seldom has dull people."
"I believe," said the Belgian, "that he is some connexion of de
Saulnes'. That explains his presence." He lowered his voice.
"You have heard no--news? They have found no trace?"
"No," said she. "Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm rather in despair. It's
all so hideously mysterious. I am sure, you know, that something has
happened to him. It's--very very hard. Sometimes I think I can't bear
it. But I go on. We all go on."
Baron de Vries nodded his head strongly.
"That, my dear child, is just what you must do," said he. "You must go
on. That is what needs the real courage and you have courage. I am not
afraid for you. And sooner or later you will hear of him--from him. It
is impossible nowadays to disappear for very long. You will hear from
him." He smiled at her, his slow grave smile that was not of mirth but
of kindness and sympathy and cheer.
"And if I may say so," he said, "you are doing very wisely to come out
once more among your friends. You can accomplish no good by brooding at
home. It is better to live one's normal life--even when it is not easy
to do it. I say so who know."
The girl touched Baron de Vries' arm for an instant with her hand--a
little gesture that seemed to express thankfulness and trust and
affection.
"If all my friends were like you!" she said to him. And after that she
drew a quick breath as if to have done with these sad matters, and she
turned her eyes once more towards the broad room where the other guests
stood in little groups, all talking at once very rapidly and in loud
voices.
"What extraordinarily cosmopolitan affairs these dinner parties in new
Paris are!" she said. "They're like diplomatic parties, only we have a
better time and the men don't wear their orders. How many nationalities
should you say there are in this room now?"
"Without stopping to consider," said Baron de Vries, "I say ten." They
counted, and out of fourteen people there were represented nine races.
"I don't see Richard Hartley," Miss Benham said. "I had an idea he was
to be here. Ah!" she broke off, looking towards the doorway.
"Here he comes now!" she said. "He's rather late. Who is the
Spanish-looking man with him, I wonder? He's rather handsome, isn't
he?"
Baron de Vries moved a little forward to look, and exclaimed in his
turn. He said--
"Ah, I did not know he was returned to Paris. That is Ste. Marie." Miss
Benham's eyes followed the Spanish-looking young man as he made his way
through the joyous greetings of friends towards his hostess.
"So that is Ste. Marie!" she said, still watching him. "The famous Ste.
Marie!" She gave a little laugh.
"Well, I don't wonder at the reputation he bears for--gallantry and that
sort of thing. He looks the part, doesn't he?"
"Ye--es," admitted her friend. "Yes, he is sufficiently _beau garcon_.
But--yes, well, that is not all, by any means. You must not get the
idea that Ste. Marie is nothing but a genial and romantic young
squire-of-dames. He is much more than that. He has very fine
qualities. To be sure he appears to possess no ambition in particular,
but I should be glad if he were my son. He comes of a very old house,
and there is no blot upon the history of that house--nothing but
faithfulness and gallantry and honour. And there is, I think, no blot
upon Ste. Marie himself. He is fine gold."
The girl turned and stared at Baron de Vries with some astonishment.
"You speak very strongly," said she. "I have never heard you speak so
strongly of any one, I think."
The Belgian made a little deprecatory gesture with his two hands, and he
laughed.
"Oh well, I like the boy. And I should hate to have you meet him for
the first time under a misconception. Listen, my child! When a young
man is loved equally by both men and women, by both old and young, that
young man is worthy of friendship and trust. Everybody likes Ste.
Marie. In a sense that is his misfortune. The way is made too easy for
him. His friends stand so thick about him that they shut off his view
of the heights. To waken ambition in his soul he has need of solitude
or misfortune or grief.
"Or," said the elderly Belgian, laughing gently, "or perhaps the other
thing might do it best--the more obvious thing?"
The girl's raised eyebrows questioned him and, when he did not answer,
she said--
"What thing then?"
"Why, love," said Baron de Vries. "Love, to be sure. Love is said to
work miracles, and I believe that to be a perfectly true saying. Ah! he
is coming here."
The Marquise de Saulnes, who was a very pretty little Englishwoman with
a deceptively doll-like look, approached, dragging Ste. Marie in her
wake. She said--
"My dearest dear, I give you of my best. Thank me, and cherish him! I
believe he is to lead you to the place where food is, isn't he?" She
beamed over her shoulder, and departed, and Miss Benham found herself
confronted by the Spanish-looking man.
Her first thought was that he was not as handsome as he had seemed at a
distance but something much better. For a young man she thought his
face was rather oddly weather-beaten, as if he might have been very much
at sea, and it was too dark to be entirely pleasing. But she liked his
eyes, which were not brown or black, as she had expected, but a very
unusual dark grey--a sort of slate colour.
And she liked his mouth too. It was her habit--and it is not an
unreliable habit--to judge people by their eyes and mouth. Ste. Marie's
mouth pleased her because the lips were neither thin nor thick, they
were not drawn into an unpleasant line by unpleasant habits, they did
not pout as so many Latin lips do, and they had at one corner a humorous
expression which she found curiously agreeable.
"You are to cherish me," Ste. Marie said. "Orders from headquarters.
How does one cherish people?" The corner of his very expressive mouth
twitched and he grinned at her. Miss Benham did not approve of young
men who began an acquaintance in this very familiar manner. She thought
that there was a certain preliminary and more formal stage which ought
to be got through with first, but Ste. Marie's grin was irresistible.
In spite of herself she found that she was laughing.
"I don't quite know," she said. "It sounds rather appalling, doesn't
it? Marian has such an extraordinary fashion of hurling people at each
other's heads. She takes my breath away at times."
"Ah well," said Ste. Marie, "perhaps we can settle upon something when
I've led you to the place where food is. And, by the way, what are we
waiting for? Are we not all here? There's an even number." He broke
off with a sudden exclamation of pleasure, and, when Miss Benham turned
to look, she found Baron de Vries, who had been talking to some friends,
had once more come up to where she stood. She watched the greeting
between the two men, and its quiet affection impressed her very much.
She knew Baron de Vries well, and she knew that it was not his habit to
show or to feel a strong liking for young and idle men. This young man
must be very worth while to have won the regard of that wise old
Belgian.
Just then Hartley, who had been barricaded behind a cordon of friends,
came up to her in an abominable temper over his ill luck, and, a few
moments later, the dinner procession was formed and they went in.
At table Miss Benham found herself between Ste. Marie and the same
strange fair youth who had afflicted her in the drawing-room. She
looked upon him now with a sort of dismayed terror, but it developed
that there was nothing to fear from the fair youth. He had no attention
to waste upon social amenities. He fell upon his food with a wolfish
passion extraordinary to see and also, alas! to hear. Miss Benham
turned from him to meet Ste. Marie's delighted eye.
"Tell him for me," begged that gentleman, "that soup should be seen--not
heard." But Miss Benham gave a little shiver of disgust.
"I shall tell him nothing whatever," she said. "He's quite too dreadful
really. People shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. It's not
only the noises. Plenty of very charming and estimable Germans, for
example, make strange noises at table. But he behaves like a famished
dog over a bone. I refuse to have anything to do with him. You must
make up the loss to me, M. Ste. Marie. You must be as amusing as two
people." She smiled across at him in her gravely questioning fashion.
"I'm wondering," she said, "if I dare ask you a very personal question.
I hesitate because I don't like people who presume too much upon a short
acquaintance--and our acquaintance has been very very short, hasn't it?
even though we may have heard a great deal about each other beforehand.
I wonder."
"Oh, I should ask it, if I were you!" said Ste. Marie at once. "I'm an
extremely good-natured person. And besides I quite naturally feel
flattered at your taking interest enough to ask anything about me."
"Well," said she, "it's this. Why does everybody call you just 'Ste.
Marie'? Most people are spoken of as Monsieur this or that--if there
isn't a more august title--but they all call you Ste. Marie without any
Monsieur. It seems rather odd."
Ste. Marie looked puzzled.
"Why," he said, "I don't believe I know, just. I'd never thought of
that. It's quite true, of course. They never do use a Monsieur or
anything, do they? How cheeky of them! I wonder why it is. I'll ask
Hartley."
He did ask Hartley later on and Hartley didn't know either. Miss Benham
asked some other people, who were vague about it, and in the end she
became convinced that it was an odd and quite inexplicable form of
something like endearment. But nobody seemed to have formulated it to
himself.
"The name is really 'de Ste. Marie'," he went on, "and there's a title
that I don't use, and a string of Christian names that one employs. My
people were Bearnais, and there's a heap of ruins on top of a hill in
the Pyrenees where they lived. It used to be Ste. Marie de
Mont-les-Roses, but afterwards, after the Revolution, they called it
Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu. My great-grandfather was killed there, but
some old servants smuggled his little son away and saved him."
He seemed to Miss Benham to say that in exactly the right manner, not in
the cheap and scoffing fashion which some young men affect in speaking
of ancestral fortunes or misfortunes, nor with too much solemnity. And
when she allowed a little silence to occur at the end he did not go on
with his family history, but turned at once to another subject. It
pleased her curiously.
The fair youth at her other side continued to crouch over his food,
making fierce and animal-like noises. He never spoke or seemed to wish
to be spoken to, and Miss Benham found it easy to ignore him altogether.
It occurred to her once or twice that Ste. Marie's other neighbour might
desire an occasional word from him, but after all, she said to herself,
that was his affair and beyond her control. So these two talked together
through the entire dinner period, and the girl was aware that she was
being much more deeply affected by the simple magnetic charm of a man
than ever before in her life. It made her a little angry, because she
was unfamiliar with this sort of thing and distrusted it. She was a
rather perfect type of that phenomenon before which the British and
Continental world stands in mingled delight and exasperation--the
American unmarried young woman, the creature of extraordinary beauty and
still more extraordinary poise, the virgin with the bearing and _savoir
faire_ of a woman of the world, the fresh-cheeked girl with the calm
mind of a _savant_ and the cool judgment, in regard to men and things,
of an ambassador. The European world says she is cold, and that may be
true; but it is well enough known that she can love very deeply. It
says that, like most queens, and for precisely the same set of reasons,
she later on makes a bad mother; but it is easy to point to queens who
are the best of mothers. In short, she remains an enigma, and like all
other enigmas forever fascinating.
Miss Benham reflected that she knew almost nothing about Ste. Marie,
save for his reputation as a carpet knight, and Baron de Vries' good
opinion, which could not be despised. And that made her the more
displeased when she realised how promptly she was surrendering to his
charm. In a moment of silence she gave a sudden little laugh which
seemed to express a half-angry astonishment.
"What was that for?" Ste. Marie demanded. The girl looked at him for an
instant and shook her head.
"I can't tell you," said she. "That's rude, isn't it, and I'm sorry.
Perhaps I will tell you one day when we know each other better."
But inwardly she was saying: "Why, I suppose this is how they all begin:
all these regiments of women who make fools of themselves about him! I
suppose this is exactly what he does to them all!"
It made her angry and she tried quite unfairly to shift the anger, as it
were, to Ste. Marie--to put him somehow in the wrong. But she was by
nature very just and she could not quite do that, particularly as it was
evident that the man was using no cheap tricks. He did not try to flirt
with her and he did not attempt to pay her veiled compliments--though
she was often aware that when her attention was diverted for a few
moments his eyes were always upon her, and that is a compliment that few
women can find it in their hearts to resent.
"You say," said Ste. Marie, "'when we know each other better.' May one
twist that into a permission to come and see you--I mean, really see
you, not just leave a card at your door to-morrow by way of observing
the formalities?"
"Yes," she said. "Oh yes, one may twist it into something like that
without straining it unduly, I think. My mother and I shall be very
glad to see you. I'm sorry she is not here to-night to say it herself."
Then the hostess began to gather together her flock, and so the two had
no more speech. But when the women had gone and the men were left about
the dismantled table, Hartley moved up beside Ste. Marie and shook a sad
head at him. He said--
"You're a very lucky being. I was quietly hoping, on the way here, that
I should be the fortunate man, but you always have all the luck. I hope
you're decently grateful."
"_Mon vieux_," said Ste. Marie, "my feet are upon the stars."
"No!" He shook his head as if the figure displeased him. "No, my feet
are upon the ladder to the stars. Grateful? What does a foolish word
like grateful mean? Don't talk to me. You are not worthy to trample
among my magnificent thoughts. I am a god upon Olympus."
"You said just now," objected the other man practically, "that your feet
were on a ladder. There are no ladders from Olympus to the stars."
"Ho!" said Ste. Marie. "Ho! aren't there, though? There shall be
ladders all over Olympus if I like. What do you know about gods and
stars? I shall be a god climbing to the heavens, and I shall be an
angel of light, and I shall be a miserable worm grovelling in the night
here below, and I shall be a poet, and I shall be anything else I happen
to think of, all of them at once, if I choose. And you, you shall be the
tongue-tied son of perfidious Albion that you are, gaping at my
splendours from a fog bank--a November fog bank in May. Who is the
dessicated gentleman bearing down upon us?"
*CHAPTER III*
*STE. MARIE MAKES A VOW, BUT A PAIR OF EYES HAUNT HIM*
Hartley looked over his shoulder and gave a little exclamation of
distaste.
"It's Captain Stewart, Miss Benham's uncle," he said, lowering his
voice. "I'm off. I shall abandon you to him. He's a good old soul but
he bores me." Hartley nodded to the man who was approaching, and then
made his way to the end of the table where their host sat discussing
Aero-Club matters with a group of the other men.
Captain Stewart dropped into the vacant chair, saying--
"May I recall myself to you, M. Ste. Marie? We met, I believe, once or
twice, a couple of years ago. My name's Stewart."
Captain Stewart--the title was vaguely believed to have been won some
years before in the American service, but no one appeared to know much
about it--was not an old man. He could not have been, at this time,
much more than fifty, but English-speaking acquaintances often called
him "old Stewart" and others "_ce vieux_ Stewart." Indeed, at a first
glance, he might have passed for anything up to sixty, for his face was
a good deal more lined and wrinkled than it should have been at his age.
Ste. Marie's adjective had been rather apt. The man had a dessicated
appearance. Upon examination, however, one saw that the blood was still
red in his cheeks and lips, and, although his neck was thin and withered
like an old man's, his brown eyes still held their fire. The hair was
almost gone from the top of his large round head, but it remained at the
sides, stiff colourless hair with a hint of red in it. And there were
red streaks in his grey moustache, which was trained outwards in two
loose tufts like shaving brushes. The moustache and the shallow chin
under it gave him an odd cat-like appearance. Hartley, who rather
disliked the man, used to insist that he had heard him mew.
Ste. Marie said something politely non-committal, though he did not at
all remember the alleged meeting two years before, and he looked at
Captain Stewart with a real curiosity and interest, in his character as
Miss Benham's uncle. He thought it very civil of the elder man to make
these friendly advances when it was in no way incumbent upon him to do
so.
"I noticed," said Captain Stewart, "that you were placed next my niece,
Helen Benham, at dinner. This must be the first time you two have met,
is it not? I remember speaking of you to her some months ago, and I am
quite sure she said that she had not met you. Ah! yes, of course, you
have been away from Paris a great deal since she and her mother--her
mother is my sister, that is to say, my half-sister--have come here to
live with my father." He gave a little gentle laugh.
"I take an elderly uncle's privilege," he said, "of being rather proud
of Helen. She is called very pretty and she certainly has great poise."
Ste. Marie drew a quick breath and his eyes began to flash as they had
done a few moments before when he told Hartley that his feet were upon
the ladder to the stars.
"Miss Benham," he cried. "Miss Benham is----" He hung poised so for a
moment, searching, as it were, for words of sufficient splendour, but in
the end he shook his head, and the gleam faded from his eyes. He sank
back in his chair sighing.
"Miss Benham," said he, "is extremely beautiful." And again her uncle
emitted his little gentle laugh which may have deceived Hartley into
believing that he had heard the man mew. The sound was as much like
mewing as it was like anything else.
"I am very glad," Captain Stewart said, "to see her come out once more
into the world. She needs distraction. We--you may possibly have heard
that the family is in great distress of mind over the disappearance of
my young nephew. Helen has suffered particularly because she is
convinced that the boy has met with foul play. I myself think it very
unlikely, very unlikely indeed. The lack of motive, for one thing, and
for another---- Ah well, a score of reasons! But Helen refuses to be
comforted. It seems to me much more like a boy's prank--his idea of
revenge for what he considered unjust treatment at his grandfather's
hands. He was always a headstrong youngster, and he has been a bit
spoilt. Still, of course, the uncertainty is very trying for us
all--very wearing."
"Of course," said Ste. Marie gravely. "It is most unfortunate. Ah, by
the way!" He looked up with a sudden interest. "A rather odd thing
happened," he said, "as Hartley and I were coming here this evening. We
walked up the Champs Elysees from the Concorde, and on the way Hartley
had been telling me of your nephew's disappearance. Near the Rond Point
we came upon a motor-car which was drawn up at the side of the
street--there had been an accident of no consequence, a boy tumbled over
but not hurt. Well, one of the two occupants of the motor-car was a man
whom I used to see about Maxim's and the Cafe de Paris and the
Montmartre places too, some time ago--a rather shady character whose
name I've forgotten. The odd part of it all was that at the last
occasion or two on which I saw your nephew he was with this man. I
think it was in _Henry's Bar_. Of course it means nothing at all. Your
nephew doubtless knew scores of people, and this man is no more likely
to have information about his present whereabouts than any of the
others. Still, I should have liked to ask him. I didn't remember who
he was till he had gone."
Captain Stewart shook his head sadly, frowning down upon the cigarette
from which he had knocked the ash.
"I am afraid poor Arthur did not always choose his friends with the best
of judgment," said he. "I am not squeamish, and I would not have boys
kept in a glass case, but---- Yes, I'm afraid Arthur was not always too
careful." He replaced the cigarette neatly between his lips.
"This man now, this man whom you saw to-night, what sort of looking man
will he have been?"
"Oh, a tall lean man," said Ste. Marie. "A tall man with blue eyes and
a heavy old-fashioned moustache. I just can't remember the name."
The smoke stood still for an instant over Captain Stewart's cigarette,
and it seemed to Ste. Marie that a little contortion of anger fled over
the man's face and was gone again. He stirred slightly in his chair.
After a moment he said--
"I fancy--from your description I fancy I know who the man was. If it
is the man I am thinking of, the name is--Powers. He is, as you have
said, a rather shady character, and I more than once warned my nephew
against him. Such people are not good companions for a boy. Yes, I
warned him."
[Illustration: "'I fancy I know who the man was.'"]
"Powers," said Ste. Marie, "doesn't sound right to me, you know. I
can't say the fellow's name myself, but I'm sure--that is, I think--it's
not Powers."
"Oh yes," said Captain Stewart with an elderly man's half-querulous
certainty. "Yes, the name is Powers. I remember it well. And I
remember---- Yes, it was odd, was it not, your meeting him like that
just as you were talking of Arthur. You--oh, you didn't speak to him,
you say? No! no, to be sure. You didn't recognise him at once. Yes, it
was odd. Of course, the man could have had nothing to do with poor
Arthur's disappearance. His only interest in the boy at any time would
have been for what money Arthur might have, and he carried none, or
almost none, away with him when he vanished. Eh, poor lad! Where can
he be to-night, I wonder? It's a sad business, M. Ste. Marie. A sad
business."
Captain Stewart fell into a sort of brooding silence, frowning down at
the table before him and twisting with his thin fingers the little
liqueur glass and the coffee cup which were there. Once or twice, Ste.
Marie thought, the frown deepened and twisted into a sort of scowl, and
the man's fingers twitched on the cloth of the table, but when at last
the group at the other end of the board rose and began to move towards
the door, Captain Stewart rose also and followed them.
At the door he seemed to think of something, and touched Ste. Marie upon
the arm.
"This, ah, Powers," he said in a low tone, "this man whom you saw
to-night. You said he was one of two occupants of a motor-car. Yes?
Did you by any chance recognise the other?"
"Oh, the other was a young woman," said Ste. Marie. "No, I never saw
her before. She was very handsome."
Captain Stewart said something under his breath and turned abruptly
away. But an instant later he faced about once more, smiling. He said,
in a man-of-the-world manner which sat rather oddly upon him--
"Ah well, we all have our little love affairs. I dare say this shady
fellow has his." And for some obscure reason Ste. Marie found the
speech peculiarly offensive.
In the drawing-room he had opportunity for no more than a word with Miss
Benham, for Hartley, enraged over his previous ill success, cut in ahead
of him and manoeuvred that young lady into a corner, where he sat before
her turning a square and determined back to the world. Ste. Marie
listlessly played bridge for a time, but his attention was not upon it,
and he was glad when the others at the table settled their accounts and
departed to look in at a dance somewhere. After that he talked for a
little with Marian de Saulnes, whom he liked and who made no secret of
adoring him. She complained loudly that he was in a vile temper, which
was not true: he was only restless and distrait and wanted to be alone;
and so, at last, he took his leave without waiting for Hartley.
Outside in the street he stood for a moment hesitating, and an expectant
fiacre drew up before the house, the cocher raising an interrogative
whip. In the end Ste. Marie shook his head and turned away on foot. It
was a still sweet night of soft airs and a moonless starlit sky, and the
man was very fond of walking in the dark. From the Etoile he walked
down the Champs Elysees, but presently turned towards the river. His
eyes were upon the mellow stars, his feet upon the ladder thereunto. He
found himself crossing the Pont des Invalides, and halted midway to rest
and look. He laid his arms upon the bridge's parapet and turned his
face outwards. Against it bore a little gentle breeze that smelt of the
purifying water below and of the night and of green things growing.
Beneath him the river ran black as flowing ink, and across its troubled
surface the coloured lights of the many bridges glittered very
beautifully--swirling arabesques of gold and crimson. The noises of the
city--beat of hoofs upon wooden pavements, horn of tram or motor-car,
jingle of bell upon cab horse--came here faintly and as if from a great
distance. Above the dark trees of the Cours la Reine the sky glowed
softly golden, reflecting the million lights of Paris.
Ste. Marie closed his eyes and, against darkness, he saw the beautiful
head of Helen Benham, the clear-cut exquisite modelling of feature and
contour, the perfection of form and colour. Her eyes met his eyes, and
they were very serene and calm and confident. She smiled at him, and
the new contours into which her face fell with the smile were more
perfect than before. He watched the turn of her head, and the grace of
the movement was the uttermost effortless grace one dreams that a queen
should have. The heart of Ste. Marie quickened in him and he would have
gone down upon his knees.
He was well aware that with the coming of this girl something
unprecedented, wholly new to his experience had befallen him--an
awakening to a new life. He had been in love a very great many times.
He was usually in love. And each time his heart had gone through the
same sweet and bitter anguish, the same sleepless nights had come and
gone upon him, the eternal and ever-new miracle had wakened spring in
his soul, had passed its summer solstice, had faded through autumnal
regrets to winter's death; but through it all something within him had
waited asleep.
He found himself wondering dully what it was, wherein lay the great
difference, and he could not answer the question he asked. He knew only
that whereas before he had loved, he now went down upon prayerful knees
to worship. In a sudden poignant thrill the knightly fervour of his
forefathers came upon him, and he saw a sweet and golden lady set far
above him upon a throne. Her clear eyes gazed afar, serene and
untroubled. She sat wrapped in a sort of virginal austerity, unaware of
the base passions of men. The other women whom Ste. Marie had, as he
was pleased to term it, loved, had certainly come at least halfway to
meet him, and some of them had come a good deal farther than that. He
could not, by the wildest flight of imagination, conceive this girl
doing anything of that sort. She was to be won by trial and high
endeavour, by prayer and self-purification, not captured by a warm eye
glance, a whispered word, a laughing kiss. In fancy he looked from the
crowding cohorts of these others to that still sweet figure set on high,
wrapt in virginal pride, calm in her serene perfection, and his soul
abased itself before her. He knelt in an awed and worshipful adoration.
So, before quest or tournament or battle, must those elder Ste.
Maries--Ste. Maries of Mont-les-Roses--have knelt, each knight at the
feet of his lady, each knightly soul aglow with the chaste ardour of
chivalry.
The man's hands tightened upon the parapet of the bridge, he lifted his
face again to the shining stars whereamong, as his fancy had it, she sat
enthroned. Exultingly he felt under his feet the rungs of the ladder,
and in the darkness he swore a great oath to have done for ever with
blindness and grovelling, to climb and climb, forever to climb, until at
last he should stand where she was--cleansed and made worthy by long
endeavour--at last meet her eyes and touch her hand.
It was a fine and chivalric frenzy, and Ste. Marie was passionately in
earnest about it, but his guardian angel, indeed Fate herself, must have
laughed a little in the dark, knowing what manner of man he was in less
exalted hours.
It was an odd freak of memory that at last recalled him to earth. Every
man knows that when a strong and, for the moment, unavailing effort has
been made to recall something lost to mind, the memory, in some
mysterious fashion, goes on working long after the attention has been
elsewhere diverted, and sometimes hours afterwards, or even days,
produces quite suddenly and inappropriately the lost article. Ste.
Marie had turned with a little sigh to take up once more his walk across
the Pont des Invalides, when seemingly from nowhere, and certainly by no
conscious effort, a name flashed into his mind. He said it aloud----
"O'Hara! O'Hara. That tall thin chap's name was O'Hara, by Jove! It
wasn't Powers at all." He laughed a little as he remembered how very
positive Captain Stewart had been. And then he frowned, thinking that
the mistake was an odd one since Stewart had evidently known a good deal
about this adventurer. Captain Stewart though, Ste. Marie reflected,
was exactly the sort to be very sure he was right about things. He had
just the neat and precise and semi-scholarly personality of the man who
always knows. So Ste. Marie dismissed the matter with another brief
laugh, but a cognate matter was less easy to dismiss. The name brought
with it a face, a dark and splendid face with tragic eyes that called.
He walked a long way thinking about them, and wondering. The eyes
haunted him. It will have been reasonably evident that Ste. Marie was a
fanciful and imaginative soul. He needed but a chance word, the sight
of a face in a crowd, the glance of an eye, to begin story building, and
he would go on for hours about it and work himself up to quite a passion
with his imaginings. He should have been a writer of fiction.
He began forthwith to construct romances about this lady of the
motor-car. He wondered why she should have been with the shady
Irishman--if Irishman he was--O'Hara, and with some anxiety he wondered
what the two were to each other. Captain Stewart's little cynical jest
came to his mind, and he was conscious of a sudden desire to kick Miss
Benham's middle-aged uncle.
The eyes haunted him. What was it they suffered? Out of what misery
did they call?--and for what? He walked all the long way home to his
little flat overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, haunted by those eyes.
As he climbed his stair it suddenly occurred to him that they had quite
driven out of his mind the image of his beautiful lady who sat amongst
the stars, and the realisation came to him with a shock.
*CHAPTER IV*
*OLD DAVID STEWART*
It was Miss Benham's custom upon returning home at night from dinner
parties or other entertainments to look in for a few minutes on her
grandfather before going to bed. The old gentleman, like most elderly
people, slept lightly, and often sat up in bed very late into the night
reading or playing piquet with his valet. He suffered hideously at
times from the malady which was killing him by degrees, but when he was
free from pain the enormous recuperative power, which he had preserved
to his eighty-six years, left him almost as vigorous and clear-minded as
if he had never been ill at all. Hartley's description of him had not
been altogether a bad one--"a quaint old beggar ... a great quantity of
white hair and an enormous square white beard and the fiercest eyes I
ever saw----" He was a rather "quaint old beggar" indeed! He had let
his thick white hair grow long, and it hung down over his brows in
unparted locks as the ancient Greeks wore their hair. He had very
shaggy eyebrows, and the deep-set eyes under them gleamed from the
shadow with a fierceness which was rather deceptive but none the less
intimidating. He had a great beak of a nose, but the mouth below could
not be seen. It was hidden by the moustache and the enormous square
beard. His face was colourless, almost as white as hair and beard:
there seemed to be no shadow or tint anywhere except the cavernous
recesses from which the man's eyes gleamed and sparkled. Altogether he
was certainly "a quaint old beggar."
He had, during the day and evening, a good many visitors, for the old
gentleman's mind was as alert as it ever had been, and important men
thought him worth consulting. The names which the admirable valet,
Peters, announced from time to time were names which meant a great deal
in the official and diplomatic world of the day. But if old David felt
flattered over the unusual fashion in which the great of the earth
continued to come to him he never betrayed it. Indeed it is quite
probable that this view of the situation never once occurred to him. He
had been thrown with the great of the earth for more than half a
century, and he had learnt to take it as a matter of course.
On her return from the Marquise de Saulnes' dinner party Miss Benham
went at once to her grandfather's wing of the house, which had its own
street entrance, and knocked lightly at his door. She asked the
admirable Peters, who opened to her--
"Is he awake?" And being assured that he was, went into the vast
chamber, dropping her cloak on a chair as she entered. David Stewart
was sitting up in his monumental bed behind a sort of invalid's table
which stretched across his knees without touching them. He wore over
his night-clothes a Chinese Mandarin's jacket of old red satin, wadded
with down, and very gorgeously embroidered with the cloud and bat
designs and with large round panels of the Imperial five-clawed dragon
in gold. He had a number of these jackets, they seemed to be his one
vanity in things external, and they were so made that they could be
slipped about him without disturbing him in his bed, since they hung
down only to the waist or thereabouts. They kept the upper part of his
body, which was not covered by the bedclothes, warm, and they certainly
made him a very impressive figure.
He said--
"Ah, Helen! Come in! Come in! Sit down on the bed there and tell me
what you have been doing!" He pushed aside the pack of cards which was
spread out on the invalid's table before him, and with great care
counted a sum of money in francs and half-francs and nickel twenty-five
centime pieces.
"I've won seven francs fifty from Peters to-night," he said, chuckling
gently. "That is a very good evening indeed. Very good. Where have
you been, and who were there?"
"A dinner party at the de Saulnes'," said Miss Benham, making herself
comfortable on the side of the great bed. "It's a very pleasant place.
Marian is, of course, a dear, and they're quite English and
unceremonious. You can talk to your neighbour at dinner instead of
addressing the house from a platform, as it were. French dinner parties
make me nervous."
Old David gave a little growling laugh.
"French dinner parties at least keep people up to the mark in the art of
conversation," said he. "But that is a lost art anyhow, nowadays, so I
suppose one might as well be quite informal and have done with it. Who
were there?"
"Oh, well--" she considered, "no one, I should think, who would interest
you. Rather an indifferent set. Pleasant people but not inspiring.
The Marquis had some young relative or connexion who was quite odious
and made the most surprising noises over his food. I met a new man whom
I think I am going to like very much indeed. He wouldn't interest you
because he doesn't mean anything in particular--and, of course, he
oughtn't to interest me for the same reason. He's just an idle pleasant
young man, but--he has great charm. Very great charm. His name is Ste.
Marie. Baron de Vries seems very fond of him, which surprised me
rather."
"Ste. Marie!" exclaimed the old gentleman in obvious astonishment.
"Ste. Marie de Mont Perdu?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, that is the name, I believe. You know him then?
I wonder he didn't mention it."
"I knew his father," said old David. "And his grandfather, for that
matter. They're Gascon, I think, or Bearnais, but this boy's mother
will have been Irish, unless his father married again.
"So you've been meeting a Ste. Marie, have you? And finding that he has
great charm?" The old gentleman broke into one of his growling laughs,
and reached for a long black cigar which he lighted, eyeing his
granddaughter the while over the flaring match.
"Well," he said, when the cigar was drawing, "they all have had charm.
I should think there has never been a Ste. Marie without it. They're a
sort of embodiment of romance, that family. This boy's great-grandfather
lost his life defending a castle against a horde of peasants in 1799.
His grandfather was killed in the French campaign in Mexico in '39--at
Vera Cruz, it was, I think; and his father died in a filibustering
expedition ten years ago. I wonder what will become of the last Ste.
Marie?" Old David's eyes suddenly sharpened.
"You're not going to fall in love with Ste. Marie and marry him, are
you?" he demanded.
Miss Benham gave a little angry laugh, but her grandfather saw the
colour rise in her cheeks for all that.
"Certainly not!" she said with great decision. "What an absurd idea!
Because I meet a man at a dinner party and say I like him, must I marry
him to-morrow? I meet a great many men at dinners and things, and a few
of them I like. Heavens!"
"'Methinks the lady doth protest too much,'" muttered old David into his
huge beard.
"I beg your pardon?" asked Miss Benham politely. But he shook his head,
still growling inarticulately, and began to draw enormous clouds of
smoke from the long black cigar. After a time he took the cigar once
more from his lips and looked thoughtfully at his granddaughter where
she sat on the edge of the vast bed, upright and beautiful, perfect in
the most meticulous detail. Most women when they return from a long
evening out, look more or less the worse for it. Deadened eyes, pale
cheeks, loosened coiffure tell their inevitable tale. Miss Benham
looked as if she had just come from the hands of a very excellent maid.
She looked as freshly _soignee_ as she might have looked at eight that
evening instead of at one. Not a wave of her perfectly undulated hair
was loosened or displaced, not a fold of the lace at her breast had
departed from its perfect arrangement.
"It is odd," said old David Stewart, "you taking a fancy to young Ste.
Marie. Of course it's natural too in a way, because you are complete
opposites, I should think--that is, if this lad is like the rest of his
race. What I mean is, that merely attractive young men don't as a rule
attract you."
"Well, no," she admitted, "they don't usually. Men with brains attract
me most, I think--men who are making civilisation, men who are ruling
the world or at least doing important things for it. That's your fault,
you know. You taught me that."
The old gentleman laughed.
"Possibly," said he. "Possibly. Anyhow that is the sort of men you
like and they like you. You're by no means a fool, Helen. In fact,
you're a woman with brains. You could wield great influence married to
the proper sort of man."
"But not to M. Ste. Marie," she suggested, smiling across at him.
"Well, no," he said. "No, not to Ste. Marie. It would be a mistake to
marry Ste. Marie--if he is what the rest of his house have been. The
Ste. Maries live a life compounded of romance and imagination and
emotion. You're not emotional."
"No," said Miss Benham slowly and thoughtfully. It was as if the idea
were new to her. "No, I'm not, I suppose. No. Certainly not."
"As a matter of fact," said old David, "you're by nature rather cold.
I'm not sure it isn't a good thing. Emotional people, I observe, are
usually in hot water of some sort. When you marry you're very likely to
choose with a great deal of care and some wisdom. And you're also
likely to have what is called a career. I repeat that you could wield
great influence in the proper environment."
The girl frowned across at her grandfather reflectively.
"Do you mean by that," she asked after a little silence, "do you mean
that you think I am likely to be moved by sheer ambition and nothing
else in arranging my life? I've never thought of myself as a very
ambitious person."
"Let us substitute for ambition, common sense," said old David. "I
think you have a great deal of common sense for a woman--and so young a
woman. How old are you, by the way? Twenty-two? Yes, to be sure. I
think you have great common sense and appreciation of values. And I
think you're singularly free of the emotionalism that so often plays hob
with them all. People with common sense fall in love in the right
places."
"I don't quite like the sound of it," said Miss Benham. "Perhaps I am
rather ambitious--I don't know. Yes, perhaps. I should like to play
some part in the world. I don't deny that. But--am I as cold as you
say? I doubt it very much. I doubt that."
"You're twenty-two," said her grandfather. "And you have seen a good
deal of society in several capitals. Have you ever fallen in love?"
[Illustration: "'You're twenty-two. Have you ever fallen in love?'"]
Oddly, the face of Ste. Marie came before Miss Benham's eyes as if she
had summoned it there. But she frowned a little and shook her head,
saying--
"No, I can't say that I have. But that means nothing. There's plenty
of time for that.
"And you know," she said after a pause, "you know I'm rather sure I
could fall in love--pretty hard. I'm sure of that. Perhaps I have been
waiting. Who knows?"
"Ay, who knows?" said David. He seemed all at once to lose interest in
the subject, as old people often do without apparent reason, for he
remained silent for a long time, puffing at the long black cigar or
rolling it absently between his fingers. After awhile he laid it down in
a metal dish which stood at his elbow and folded his lean hands before
him over the invalid's table. He was still so long that at last his
granddaughter thought he had fallen asleep, and she began to rise from
her seat, taking care to make no noise, but at that the old man stirred,
and put out his hand once more for the cigar.
"Was young Richard Hartley at your dinner party?" he asked. And she
said--
"Yes. Oh, yes, he was there. He and M. Ste. Marie came together, I
believe. They are very close friends."
"Another idler," growled old David. "The fellow's a man of parts--and a
man of family. What's he idling about here for? Why isn't he in
Parliament where he belongs?"
"Well," said the girl, "I should think it is because he is too much a
man of family--as you put it. You see, he'll succeed his cousin, Lord
Risdale, before very long, and then all his work would have been for
nothing, because he'll have to take his seat in the Lords. Lord Risdale
is unmarried, you know, and a hopeless invalid. He may die any day. I
think I sympathise with poor Mr. Hartley. It would be a pity to build up
a career for one's self in the lower House and then suddenly in the
midst of it have to give it all up. The situation is rather paralysing
to endeavour, isn't it?"
"Yes, I dare say," said old David absently. He looked up sharply.
"Young Hartley doesn't come here as much as he used to do."
"No," said Miss Benham, "he doesn't." She gave a little laugh.
"To avoid cross-examination," she said, "I may as well admit that he
asked me to marry him and I had to refuse. I'm sorry, because I like
him very much indeed."
Old David made an inarticulate sound which may have been meant to
express surprise--or almost anything else. He had not a great range of
expression.
"I don't want," said he, "to seem to have gone daft on the subject of
marriage, and I see no reason why you should be in any haste about
it--certainly, I should hate to lose you, my child, but--Hartley, as the
next Lord Risdale, is undoubtedly a good match. And you say you like
him." The girl looked up with a sort of defiance, and her face was a
little flushed.
"I don't love him," she said. "I like him immensely but I don't love
him, and after all--well, you say I'm cold and I admit I'm more or less
ambitious, but, after all--well, I just don't quite love him. I want to
love the man I marry."
Old David Stewart held up his black cigar and gazed thoughtfully at the
smoke which streamed thin and blue and veil-like from its lighted end.
"Love!" he said in a reflective tone. "Love." He repeated the word two
or three times slowly, and he stirred a little in his bed.
"I have forgotten what it is," said he. "I expect I must be very old.
I have forgotten what love--that sort of love--is like. It seems very
far away to me and rather unimportant. But I remember that I thought it
important enough once, a century or two ago. Do you know, it strikes me
as rather odd that I have forgotten what love is like. It strikes me as
rather pathetic." He gave a sort of uncouth grimace and stuck the black
cigar once more into his mouth.
"Egad!" said he, mumbling indistinctly over the cigar, "how foolish love
seems when you look back at it across fifty or sixty years!"
Miss Benham rose to her feet smiling, and she came and stood near where
the old man lay propped up against his pillows. She touched his cheek
with her cool hand, and old David put up one of his own hands and patted
it.
"I'm going to bed now," said she. "I've sat here talking too long. You
ought to be asleep and so ought I."
"Perhaps! Perhaps!" the old man said. "I don't feel sleepy, though. I
dare say I shall read a little." He held her hand in his and looked up
at her.
"I've been talking a great deal of nonsense about marriage," said he.
"Put it out of your head! It's all nonsense. I don't want you to marry
for a long time. I don't want to lose you." His face twisted a little
quite suddenly.
"You're precious near all I have left, now," he said.
The girl did not answer at once, for it seemed to her that there was
nothing to say. She knew that her grandfather was thinking of the lost
boy, and she knew what a bitter blow the thing had been to him. She
often thought that it would kill him before his old malady could run its
course.
But after a moment she said very gently--
"We won't give up hope. We'll never give up hope. Think! he might come
home to morrow. Who knows?"
"If he has stayed away of his own accord," cried out old David Stewart
in a loud voice, "I'll never forgive him--not if he comes to me
to-morrow on his knees! Not even if he comes to me on his knees!"
The girl bent over her grandfather, saying: "Hush! hush! You mustn't
excite yourself." But old David's grey face was working and his eyes
gleamed from their cavernous shadows with a savage fire.
"If the boy is staying away out of spite," he repeated, "he need never
come back to me. I won't forgive him." He beat his unemployed hand
upon the table before him, and the things which lay there jumped and
danced.
"And if he waits until I'm dead and then comes back," said he, "he'll
find he has made a mistake--a great mistake. He'll find a surprise in
store for him. I can tell you that. I won't tell you what I have done,
but it will be a disagreeable surprise for Master Arthur. You may be
sure."
The old gentleman fell to frowning and muttering in his choleric
fashion, but the fierce glitter began to go out of his eyes, and his
hands ceased to tremble and clutch at the things before him. The girl
was silent because again there seemed to her to be nothing that she
could say. She longed very much to plead her brother's cause, but she
was sure that would only excite her grandfather, and he was growing
quieter after his burst of anger. She bent down over him and kissed his
cheek.
"Try to go to sleep!" she said. "And don't torture yourself with
thinking about all this. I'm as sure that poor Arthur is not staying
away out of spite as if he were myself. He's foolish and headstrong,
but he's not spiteful, dear. Try to believe that! And now I'm really
going. Good-night!"
She kissed him again and slipped out of the room. And as she closed the
door she heard her grandfather pull the bell-cord which hung beside him
and summon the excellent Peters from the room beyond.
*CHAPTER V*
*STE. MARIE SETS FORTH UPON THE GREAT ADVENTURE*
Miss Benham stood at one of the long drawing-room windows of the house
in the Rue de l'Universite and looked out between the curtains upon the
rather grimy little garden, where a few not very prosperous cypresses
and chestnuts stood guard over the rows of lilac shrubs and the
box-bordered flower-beds and the usual moss-stained fountain. She was
thinking of the events of the past month, the month which had elapsed
since the evening of the de Saulnes' dinner party. They were not at all
startling events; in a practical sense there were no events at all, only
a quiet sequence of affairs which was about as inevitable as the night
upon the day--the day upon the night again. In a word this girl, who
had considered herself very strong and very much the mistress of her
feelings, found, for the first time in her life, that her strength was
as nothing at all against the potent charm and magnetism of a man who
had almost none of the qualities she chiefly admired in men. During the
month's time she had passed from a phase of angry self-scorn through a
period of bewilderment not unmixed with fear, and from that she had come
into an unknown world, a land very strange to her, where old standards
and judgments seemed to be valueless--a place seemingly ruled altogether
by new emotions, sweet and thrilling or full of vague terrors as her
mood veered here or there.
That sublimated form of guesswork which is called "woman's intuition"
told her that Ste. Marie would come to her on this afternoon, and that
something in the nature of a crisis would have to be faced. It can be
proved even by poor masculine mathematics that guesswork, like other
gambling ventures, is bound to succeed about half the time, and it
succeeded on this occasion. Even as Miss Benham stood at the window
looking out through the curtains Monsieur Ste. Marie was announced from
the doorway.
She turned to meet him with a little frown of determination, for in his
absence she was often very strong indeed, and sometimes she made up and
rehearsed little speeches of great dignity and decision, in which she
told him that he was attempting a quite hopeless thing, and, as a
well-wishing friend, advised him to go away and attempt it no longer.
But as Ste. Marie came quickly across the room towards her the little
frown wavered and at last fled from her face, and another look came
there. It was always so. The man's bodily presence exerted an absolute
spell over her.
"I have been sitting with your grandfather for half an hour," Ste. Marie
said, and she said--
"Oh, I'm glad! I'm very glad. You always cheer him up. He hasn't been
too cheerful, or too well of late." She unnecessarily twisted a chair
about and after a moment sat down in it. And she gave a little laugh.
"This friendship which has grown up between my grandfather and you,"
said she, "I don't understand it at all. Of course, he knew your father
and all that, but you two seem such very different types, I shouldn't
think you would amuse each other at all. There's Mr. Hartley, for
example, I should expect my grandfather to like him very much better
than you, but he doesn't--though I fancy he approves of him much more."
She laughed again, but a different laugh, and when he heard it Ste.
Marie's eyes gleamed a little and his hands moved beside him.
"I expect," said she, "I expect, you know, that he just likes you,
without stopping to think why--as everybody else does. I fancy it's
just that. What do you think?"
"Oh, I?" said the man. "I--how should I know? I know it's a great
privilege to be allowed to see him--such a man as that. And I know we
get on wonderfully well. He doesn't condescend as most old men do who
have led important lives. We just talk as two men in a club might talk.
And I tell him stories and make him laugh. Oh yes, we get on
wonderfully well."
"Oh!" said she. "I've often wondered what you talk about. What did you
talk about to-day?"
Ste. Marie turned abruptly away from her and went across to one of the
windows--the window where she had stood earlier looking out upon the
dingy garden. She saw him stand there, with his back turned, the head a
little bent, the hands twisting together behind him, and a sudden fit of
nervous shivering wrung her. Every woman knows when a certain thing is
going to be said to her, and usually she is prepared for it, though
usually also she says she is not. Miss Benham knew what was coming now,
and she was frightened--not of Ste. Marie, but of herself. It meant so
very much to her, more than to most women at such a time. It meant, if
she said yes to him, the surrender of almost all the things she had
cared for and hoped for. It meant the giving up of that career which
old David Stewart had dwelt upon a month ago.
Ste. Marie turned back into the room. He came a little way towards
where the girl sat and halted, and she could see that he was very pale.
A sort of critical second self noticed that he was pale, and was
surprised, because, although men's faces often turn red, they seldom
turn noticeably pale except in very great nervous crises--or in works of
fiction; while women on the contrary may turn red and white twenty times
a day, and no harm done. He raised his hands a little way from his
sides in the beginning of a gesture, but they dropped again as if there
were no strength in them.
"I--told him," said Ste. Marie in a flat voice, "I told your grandfather
that I--loved you more than anything in this world or in the next. I
told him that my love for you had made another being of me--a new being.
I told him that I wanted to come to you and to kneel at your feet and to
ask you if you could give me just a little, little hope--something to
live for--a light to climb towards. That is what we talked about, your
grandfather and I."
"Ste. Marie! Ste. Marie!" said the girl in a half whisper.
"What did my grandfather say to you?" she asked after a silence.
Ste. Marie looked away.
"I cannot tell you," he said. "He--was not quite sympathetic."
The girl gave a little cry.
"Tell me what he said!" she demanded. "I must know what he said." The
man's eyes pleaded with her, but she held him with her gaze and in the
end he gave in.
"He said I was a damned fool," said Ste. Marie. And the girl, after an
instant of staring, broke into a little fit of nervous overwrought
laughter, and covered her face with her hands.
He threw himself upon his knees before her, and her laughter died away.
An Englishman or an American cannot do that. Richard Hartley, for
example, would have looked like an idiot upon his knees and he would
have felt it. But it did not seem extravagant with Ste. Marie. It
became him.
"Listen! listen!" he cried to her, but the girl checked him before he
could go on. She dropped her hands from her face and she bent a little
forward over the man as he knelt there. She put out her hands and took
his head for a swift instant between them, looking down into his eyes.
At the touch a sudden wave of tenderness swept her--almost an engulfing
wave--almost it overwhelmed her and bore her away from the land she
knew. And so when she spoke her voice was not quite steady. She said--
"Ah, dear Ste. Marie! I cannot pretend to be cold towards you. You
have laid a spell upon me, Ste. Marie. You enchant us all somehow,
don't you? I suppose I'm not as different from the others as I thought
I was.
"And yet," she said, "he was right, you know. My grandfather was right.
No, let me talk, now! I must talk for a little. I must try to tell you
how it is with me--try somehow to find a way. He was right. He meant
that you and I were utterly unsuited to each other, and so, in calm
moments, I know we are. I know that well enough. When you're not with
me I feel very sure about it. I think of a thousand excellent reasons
why you and I ought to be no more to each other than friends. Do you
know, I think my grandfather is a little uncanny. I think he has
prophetic powers. They say very old people often have. He and I talked
about you when I came home from that dinner party at the de Saulnes' a
month ago--the dinner party where you and I first met. I told him that
I had met a man whom I liked very much--a man with great charm--and,
though I must have said the same sort of thing to him before about other
men, he was quite oddly disturbed, and talked for a long time about it,
about the sort of man I ought to marry and the sort I ought not to
marry. It was unusual for him. He seldom says anything of that kind.
Yes, he is right. You see, I'm ambitious in a particular way. If I
marry at all I ought to marry a man who is working hard in politics or
in something of that kind. I could help him. We could do a great deal
together."
"I could go into politics!" cried Ste. Marie, but she shook her head,
smiling down upon him.
"No, not you, my dear. Politics least of all. You could be a soldier,
if you chose. You could fight as your father and your grandfather and
the others of your house have done. You could lead a forlorn hope in
the field. You could suffer and starve and go on fighting. You could
die splendidly but--politics, no! That wants a tougher shell than you
have.
"And a soldier's wife! Of what use to him is she?"
Ste. Marie's face was very grave. He looked up to her smiling.
"Do you set ambition before love, my queen?" he asked, and she did not
answer him at once. She looked into his eyes, and she was as grave as
he.
"Is love all?" she said at last. "Is love all? Ought one to think of
nothing but love when one is settling one's life for ever?
"I wonder?
"I look about me, Ste. Marie," she said, "and in the lives of my
friends--the people who seem to me to be most worth while--the people
who are making the world's history for good or ill, and it seems to me
that in their lives love has the second place--or the third. I wonder
if one has the right to set it first.
"There is, of course," she said, "the merely domestic type of woman--the
woman who has no thought and no interest beyond her home. I am not that
type of woman. Perhaps I wish I were. Certainly they are the happiest.
But I was brought up among--well, among important people--men of my
grandfather's kind. All my training has been towards that life. Have I
the right, I wonder, to give it all up?"
The man stirred at her feet and she put out her hands to him quickly.
"Do I seem brutal?" she cried. "Oh, I don't want to be! Do I seem very
ungenerous and wrapped up in my own side of the thing? I don't mean to
be that but--I'm not sure. I expect it's that. I'm not sure, and I
think I'm a little frightened." She gave him a brief anxious smile that
was not without its tenderness.
"I'm so sure," she said, "when I'm away from you. But when you're
here--oh, I forget all I've thought of.
"You lay your spell upon me."
Ste. Marie gave a little wordless cry of joy. He caught her two hands
in his and held them against his lips. Again that great wave of
tenderness swept her--almost engulfing. But when it had ebbed she sank
back once more in her chair, and she withdrew her hands from his clasp.
"You make me forget too much," she said. "I think you make me forget
everything that I ought to remember. Oh, Ste. Marie, have I any right
to think of love and happiness while this terrible mystery is upon us?
While we don't know whether poor Arthur is alive or dead? You've seen
what it has brought my grandfather to. It is killing him. He has been
much worse in the last fortnight. And my mother is hardly a ghost of
herself in these days. Ah, it is brutal of me to think of my own
affairs--to dream of happiness at such a time." She smiled across at
him very sadly.
"You see what you have brought me to!" she said.
Ste. Marie rose to his feet. If Miss Benham, absorbed in that warfare
which raged within her, had momentarily forgotten the cloud of sorrow
under which her household lay, so much the more had he, to whom the
sorrow was less intimate, forgotten it. But he was ever swift to
sympathy, Ste. Marie, as quick as a woman and as tender. He could not
thrust his love upon the girl at such a time as this. He turned a
little away from her and so remained for a moment. When he faced about
again the flush had gone from his cheeks and the fire from his eyes.
Only tenderness was left there.
"There has been no news at all this week?" he asked, and the girl shook
her head.
"None! None! Shall we ever have news of him, I wonder? Must we go on
always and never know? It seems to me almost incredible that any one
could disappear so completely. And yet, I dare say, many people have
done it before and have been as carefully sought for. If only I could
believe that he is alive! If only I could believe that!"
"I believe it," said Ste. Marie.
"Ah," she said, "you say that to cheer me. You have no reason to offer."
"Dead bodies very seldom disappear completely," said he. "If your
brother died anywhere there would be a record of the death. If he were
accidentally killed there would be a record of that too, and, of course,
you are having all such records constantly searched?"
"Oh yes," she said. "Yes, of course. At least, I suppose so. My uncle
has been directing the search. Of course he would take an obvious
precaution like that."
"Naturally," said Ste. Marie. "Your uncle, I should say, is an
unusually careful man." He paused a moment to smile.
"He makes his little mistakes, though. I told you about that man O'Hara
and about how sure Captain Stewart was that the name was Powers. Do you
know----" Ste. Marie had been walking up and down the room, but he
halted to face her.
"Do you know, I have a very strong feeling that if one could find this
man O'Hara one would learn something about what became of your brother?
I have no reason for thinking that, but I feel it."
"Oh," said the girl doubtfully, "I hardly think that could be so. What
motive could the man have for harming my brother?"
"None," said Ste. Marie; "but he might have an excellent motive for
hiding him away--kidnapping him. Is that the word? Yes, I know, you're
going to say that no demand has been made for money, and that is where
my argument--if I can call it an argument--is weak. But the fellow may
be biding his time. Anyhow, I should like to have five minutes alone
with him.
"I'll tell you another thing. It's a trifle and it may be of no
consequence, but I add it to my vague and--if you like--foolish feeling
and make something out of it. I happened some days ago to meet at the
Cafe de Paris a man who, I knew, used to know this O'Hara. He was not,
I think, a friend of his at all, but an acquaintance. I asked him what
had become of O'Hara, saying that I hadn't seen him for some weeks.
Well, this man said O'Hara had gone away somewhere a couple of months
ago. He didn't seem at all surprised, for it appears the Irishman--if
he is an Irishman--is decidedly a haphazard sort of person, here to-day,
gone to-morrow. No, the man wasn't surprised, but he was rather angry,
because he said O'Hara owed him some money. I said I thought he must be
mistaken about the fellow's absence, because I'd seen him in the street
within the month--on the evening of our dinner party you remember--but
this man was very sure that I had made a mistake. He said that if
O'Hara had been in town he was sure to have known it.
"Well, the point is here. Your brother disappears at a certain time.
At the same time this Irish adventurer disappears too, _and_ your
brother was known to have frequented the Irishman's company. It may be
only a coincidence, but I can't help feeling that there's something in
it."
Miss Benham was sitting up straight in her chair with a little alert
frown.
"Have you spoken of this to my uncle?" she demanded.
"Well--no," said Ste. Marie. "Not the latter part of it; that is, not
my having heard of O'Hara's disappearance. In the first place, I learnt
of that only three days ago and I have not seen Captain Stewart since--I
rather expected to find him here to-day; and in the second place I was
quite sure that he would only laugh. He has laughed at me two or three
times for suggesting that this Irishman might know something. Captain
Stewart is--not easy to convince, you know."
"I know," she said, looking away. "He's always very certain that he's
right. Well, perhaps he is right. Who knows?"
She gave a little sob.
"Oh!" she cried, "shall we ever have my brother back? Shall we ever see
him again? It is breaking my heart, Ste. Marie, and it is killing my
grandfather and, I think, my mother too! Oh, can nothing be done!"
Ste. Marie was walking up and down the floor before her, his hands
clasped behind his back. When she had finished speaking the girl saw him
halt beside one of the windows, and, after a moment, she saw his head go
up sharply and she heard him give a sudden cry. She thought he had seen
something from the window which had wrung that exclamation from him, and
she asked--
"What is it?" But abruptly the man turned back into the room and came
across to where she sat. It seemed to her that his face had a new look,
a very strange exaltation which she had never before seen there. He
said--
"Listen! I do not know if anything can be done that has not been done
already, but if there is anything I shall do it, you may be sure."
"You, Ste. Marie!" she cried in a sharp voice. "You?"
"And why not I?" he demanded.
"Oh, my friend," said she, "you could do nothing. You wouldn't know
where to turn, how to set to work. Remember that a score of men who are
skilled in this kind of thing have been searching for two months. What
could you do that they haven't done?"
"I do not know, my queen," said Ste. Marie; "but I shall do what I can.
Who knows? Sometimes the fool who rushes in where angels have feared to
tread succeeds where they have failed.
"Oh, let me do this!" he cried out. "Let me do it, for both our sakes,
for yours and for mine. It is for your sake most. I swear that! It is
to set you at peace again, bring back the happiness you have lost. But
it is for my sake too, a little. It will be a test of me, a trial. If I
can succeed here where so many have failed, if I can bring back your
brother to you--or at least, discover what has become of him--I shall be
able to come to you with less shame for my--unworthiness."
He looked down upon her with eager burning eyes, and, after a little,
the girl rose to face him. She was very white and she stared at him
silently.
"When I came to you to-day," he went on, "I knew that I had nothing to
offer you but my faithful love and my life, which has been a life
without value. In exchange for that I asked too much. I knew it and you
knew it too. I know well enough what sort of man you ought to marry,
and what a brilliant career you could make for yourself in the proper
place--what great influence you could wield. But I asked you to give
that all up and I hadn't anything to offer in its place--nothing but
love.
"My queen, give me a chance now to offer you more! If I can bring back
your brother or news of him, I can come to you without shame and ask you
to marry me, because if I can succeed in that you will know that I can
succeed in other things. You will be able to trust me. You'll know that
I can climb. It shall be a sort of symbol. Let me go!"
The girl broke into a sort of sobbing laughter.
"Oh, divine madman!" she cried. "Are you all mad, you Ste. Maries, that
you must be forever leading forlorn hopes? Oh, how you are, after all,
a Ste. Marie! Now at last I know why one cannot but love you. You're
the knight of old. You're chivalry come down to us. You're a ghost out
of the past when men rode in armour with pure hearts seeking the Great
Adventure.
"Oh, my friend," she said, "be wise! Give this up in time. It is a
beautiful thought and I love you for it, but it is madness--yes, yes, a
sweet madness, but mad nevertheless! What possible chance would you
have of success? And think! Think how failure would hurt you--and me!
You must not do it, Ste. Marie."
"Failure will never hurt me, my queen," said he; "because there are no
hurts in the grave, and I shall never give over searching until I
succeed or until I am dead." His face was uplifted, and there was a
sort of splendid fervour upon it. It was as if it shone. The girl
stared at him dumbly. She began to realise that the knightly spirit of
those gallant long-dead gentlemen was indeed descended upon the last of
their house, that he burnt with the same pure fire which had long ago
lighted them through quest and adventure, and she was a little afraid
with an almost superstitious fear.
She put out her hands upon the man's shoulders and she moved a little
closer to him, holding him.
"Oh, madness! madness!" she said, watching his face.
"Let me do it!" said Ste. Marie.
And after a silence that seemed to endure for a long time she sighed,
shaking her head, and said she--
"Oh, my friend, there is no strength in me to stop you. I think we are
both a little mad, and I know that you are very mad, but I cannot say
no. You seem to have come out of another century to take up this quest.
How can I prevent you? But listen to one thing. If I accept this
sacrifice, if I let you give your time and your strength to this almost
hopeless attempt, it must be understood that it is to be within certain
limits. I will not accept any indefinite thing. You may give your
efforts to trying to find trace of my brother for a month if you like,
or for three months or six, or even a year, but not for more than that.
If he is not found in a year's time we shall know that--we shall know
that he is dead, and that--further search is useless. I cannot say how
I---- Oh, Ste. Marie, Ste. Marie, this is a proof of you indeed! And I
have called you idle! I have said hard things of you. It is very
bitter to me to think that I have said those things."
"They were true, my queen," said he, smiling. "They were quite true. It
is for me to prove now that they shall be true no longer." He took the
girl's hand in his rather ceremoniously, and bent his head and kissed
it. As he did so he was aware that she stirred, all at once, uneasily,
and when he had raised his head he looked at her in question.
"I thought some one was coming into the room," she explained, looking
beyond him. "I thought some one started to come in between the
portieres yonder. It must have been a servant."
"Then it is understood," said Ste. Marie. "To bring you back your
happiness and to prove myself in some way worthy of your love, I am to
devote myself with all my effort and all my strength to finding your
brother or some trace of him, and until I succeed I will not see your
face again, my queen."
"Oh, that!" she cried, "that too?"
"I will not see you," said he, "until I bring you news of him, or until
my year is passed and I have failed utterly. I know what risk I run.
If I fail, I lose you. That is understood too. But if I succeed----"
"Then?" she said, breathing quickly. "Then?"
"Then," said he, "I shall come to you and I shall feel no shame in
asking you to marry me, because then you will know that there is in me
some little worthiness, and that in our lives together you need not be
buried in obscurity--lost to the world."
"I cannot find any words to say," said she. "I am feeling just now very
humble and very ashamed. It seems that I haven't known you at all. Oh
yes, I am ashamed." The girl's face, habitually so cool and composed,
was flushed with a beautiful flush, and it had softened and it seemed to
quiver between a smile and a tear. With a swift movement she leant
close to him holding by his shoulder, and for an instant her cheek was
against his. She whispered to him--
"Oh, find him quickly, my dear! Find him quickly, and come back to me!"
Ste. Marie began to tremble, and she stood away from him. Once he
looked up, but the flush was gone from Miss Benham's cheeks, and she was
pale again. She stood with her hands tight clasped over her breast.
So he bowed to her very low, and turned and went out of the room and out
of the house.
[Illustration: "He turned and went out of the room."]
So quickly did he move at this last that a man who had been for some
moments standing just outside the portieres of the doorway had barely
time to step aside into the shadows of the dim hall. As it was, Ste.
Marie in a more normal moment must have seen that the man was there, but
his eyes were blind and he saw nothing. He groped for his hat and stick
as if the place were a place of gloom, and, because the footman who
should have been at the door was in regions unknown, he let himself out
and so went away.
Then the man who stood apart in the shadows crossed the hall to a small
room which was furnished as a library but not often used. He closed the
door behind him and went to one of the windows which gave upon the
street. And he stood there for a long time drawing absurd invisible
pictures upon the glass with one finger, and staring thoughtfully out
into the late June afternoon.
*CHAPTER VI*
*A BRAVE GENTLEMAN RECEIVES A HURT BUT
VOLUNTEERS IN A GOOD CAUSE*
When Ste. Marie had gone Miss Benham sat alone in the drawing-room for
almost an hour. She had been stirred that afternoon more deeply than
she thought she had ever been stirred before, and she needed time to
regain that cool poise, that mental equilibrium which was normal to her
and necessary for coherent thought.
She was still in a sort of fever of bewilderment and exaltation, still
all aglow with the man's own high fervour; but the second self, which so
often sat apart from her and looked on with critical mocking eyes,
whispered that to-morrow, the fervour past, the fever cooled, she must
see the thing in its truer light--a glorious lunacy born of a moment of
enthusiasm. It was finely romantic of him, this mocking second self
whispered to her: picturesque beyond criticism; but, setting aside the
practical folly of it, could even the mood last?
The girl rose to her feet with an angry exclamation. She found herself
intolerable at such times as this.
"If there's a heaven," she cried out, "and by chance I ever go there, I
suppose I shall walk sneering through the streets, and saying to myself:
'Oh yes, it's pretty enough, but how absurd and unpractical!'"
She passed before one of the small narrow mirrors which were let into
the walls of the room in gilt Louis Seize frames with candles beside
them, and she turned and stared at her very beautiful reflection with a
resentful wonder.
"Shall I always drag along so far behind him?" she said. "Shall I never
rise to him, save in the moods of an hour?"
She began suddenly to realise what the man's going away meant--that she
might not see him again for weeks, months, even a year. For was it at
all likely that he could succeed in what he had undertaken?
"Why did I let him go?" she cried. "Oh, fool, fool, to let him go!"
But even as she said it she knew that she could not have held him back.
She began to be afraid, not for him, but of herself. He had taught her
what it might be to love. For the first time love's premonitory
thrill--promise of unspeakable uncomprehended mysteries--had wrung her,
and the echo of that thrill stirred in her yet; but what might not
happen in his long absence? She was afraid of that critical and
analysing power of mind which she had so long trained to attack all that
came to her. What might it not work with the new thing that had come?
To what pitiful shreds might it not be rent while he, who only could
renew it, was away? She looked ahead at the weeks and months to come,
and she was terribly afraid.
She went out of the room and up to her grandfather's chamber and knocked
there. The admirable Peters who opened to her said that his master had
not been very well and was just then asleep, but as they spoke together
in low tones the old gentleman cried testily from within--
"Well? Well? Who's there? Who wants to see me? Who is it?"
Miss Benham went into the dim shaded room, and when old David saw who it
was he sank back upon his pillows with a pacified growl. He certainly
looked ill, and he had grown thinner and whiter within the past month,
and the lines in his waxlike face seemed to be deeper scored.
The girl went up beside the bed and stood there a moment, after she had
bent over and kissed her grandfather's cheek, stroking with her hand the
absurdly gorgeous mandarin's jacket--an imperial yellow one this time.
"Isn't this new?" she asked. "I seem never to have seen this one
before. It's quite wonderful."
The old gentleman looked down at it with the pride of a little girl over
her first party frock. He came as near simpering as a fierce person of
eighty-six, with a square white beard, can come.
"Rather good, that! What?" said he. "Yes, it's new. De Vries sent it
me. It is my best one. Imperial yellow. Did you notice the little
_Show_ medallions with the _swastika_? Young Ste. Marie was here this
afternoon." He introduced the name with no pause or change of
expression, as if Ste. Marie were a part of the decoration of the
mandarin's jacket.
"I told him he was a damned fool."
"Yes," said Miss Benham, "I know. He said you did."
"I suppose," she said, "that in a sort of very informal fashion I am
engaged to him. Well no, perhaps not quite that, but he seems to
consider himself engaged to me, and when he has finished something very
important that he has undertaken to do he is coming to ask me definitely
to marry him. No, I suppose we aren't engaged yet: at least I'm not.
But it's almost the same, because I suppose I shall accept him whether
he fails or succeeds in what he is doing."
"If he fails in it, whatever it may be," said old David, "he won't give
you a chance to accept him. He won't come back. I know him well enough
for that. He's a romantic fool, but he's a thorough-going fool. He
plays the game." The old man looked up to his granddaughter, scowling a
little.
"You two are absurdly unsuited to each other," said he, "and I told Ste.
Marie so. I suppose you think you're in love with him."
"Yes," said the girl, "I suppose I do."
"Idleness and all? You were rather severe on idleness at one time."
"He isn't idle any more," said she. "He has undertaken--of his own
accord--to find Arthur. He has some theory about it. And he is not
going to see me again until he has succeeded--or until a year is past.
If he fails, I fancy he won't come back."
Old David gave a sudden hoarse exclamation, and his withered hands shook
and stirred before him. Afterwards he fell to half-inarticulate
muttering.
"The young romantic fool!--Don Quixote--like all the rest of them--those
Ste. Maries. The fool and the angels. The angels and the fool." The
girl distinguished words from time to time. For the most part he mumbled
under his breath. But when he had been silent a long time he said
suddenly--
"It would be ridiculously like him to succeed."
The girl gave a little sigh.
"I wish I dared hope for it," said she. "I wish I dared hope for it."
She had left a book that she wanted in the drawing-room, and when
presently her grandfather fell asleep in his fitful manner, she went
down after it. In crossing the hall she came upon Captain Stewart, who
was dressed for the street and had his hat and stick in his hands. He
did not live in his father's house, for he had a little flat in the Rue
du Faubourg St. Honore, but he was in and out a good deal. He paused
when he saw his niece and smiled upon her a benignant smile, which she
rather disliked, because she disliked benignant people. The two really
saw very little of each other, though Captain Stewart often sat for
hours together with his sister up in a little boudoir which she had
furnished in the execrable taste which to her meant comfort, while that
timid and colourless lady embroidered strange tea-cloths with stranger
flora, and prattled about the heathen, in whom she had an academic
interest.
He said--
"Ah, my dear! It's you?" Indisputably it was, and there seemed to be
no use of denying it, so Miss Benham said nothing, but waited for the
man to go on if he had more to say.
"I dropped in," he continued, "to see my father, but they told me he was
asleep and so I didn't disturb him. I talked a little while with your
mother instead."
"I have just come from him," said Miss Benham. "He dozed off again as I
left. Still, if you had anything in particular to tell him, he'd be
glad to be wakened, I fancy. There's no news?"
"No," said Captain Stewart sadly, "no, nothing. I do not give up hope,
but I am, I confess, a little discouraged."
"We are all that, I should think," said Miss Benham briefly. She gave
him a little nod, and turned away into the drawing-room. Her uncle's
peculiar dry manner irritated her at times beyond bearing, and she felt
that this was one of the times. She had never had any reason for
doubting that he was a good and kindly soul, but she disliked him
because he bored her. Her mother bored her too--the poor woman bored
everybody--but the sense of filial obligation was strong enough in the
girl to prevent her from acknowledging this even to herself. In regard
to her uncle she had no sense of obligation whatever, except to be as
civil to him as possible, and so she kept out of his way.
She heard the heavy front door close and gave a little sigh of relief.
"If he had come in here and tried to talk to me," she said, "I should
have screamed."
Meanwhile Ste. Marie, a man moving in a dream, uplifted,
cloud-enwrapped, made his way homeward. He walked all the long
distance--that is, looking backward upon it later he thought he must
have walked, but the half-hour was a blank to him, an indeterminate, a
chaotic whirl of things and emotions.
In the little flat in the Rue d'Assas he came upon Richard Hartley, who,
having found the door unlocked and the master of the place absent, had
sat comfortably down with a pipe and a stack of _Courriers Francais_ to
wait. Ste. Marie burst into the doorway of the room where his friend
sat at ease. Hat, gloves and stick fell away from him in a sort of
shower. He extended his arms high in air. His face was, as it were,
luminous. The Englishman regarded him morosely. He said--
"You look as if somebody had died and left you money. What the devil
are you looking like that for?"
"_He!_" cried Ste. Marie in a great voice. "_He_, the world is mine!
Embrace me, my infant! Sacred name of a pig, why do you sit there?
Embrace me!" He began to stride about the room, his head between his
hands. Speech lofty and ridiculous burst from him in a sort of splutter
of fireworks, but the Englishman sat still in his chair, and a grey
bleak look came upon him, for he began to understand. He was more or
less used to these outbursts, and he bore them as patiently as he could;
but though seven times out of the ten they were no more than spasms of
pure joy of living, and meant, "It's a fine spring day," or "I've just
seen two beautiful princesses of milliners in the street," an inner
voice told him that this time it meant another thing. Quite suddenly he
realised that he had been waiting for this, bracing himself against its
onslaught. He had not been altogether blind through the past month.
Ste. Marie seized him and dragged him from his chair.
"Dance, lump of flesh! dance, sacred English _rosbif_ that you are!
Sing, _gros polisson_! Sing!" Abruptly, as usual, the mania departed
from him, but not the glory; his eyes shone bright and triumphant.
"Ah, my old," said he, "I am near the stars at last. My feet are on the
top rungs of the ladder. Tell me that you are glad!" The Englishman
drew a long breath.
"I take it," said he, "that means that you're--that she has accepted
you, eh?" He held out his hand. He was a brave and honest man. Even
in pain he was incapable of jealousy. He said--
"I ought to want to murder you, but I don't. I congratulate you. You're
an undeserving beggar, but so were the rest of us. It was an open
field, and you've won quite honestly. My best wishes!"
Then at last Ste. Marie understood, and in a flash the glory went out of
his face. He cried--
"Ah, _mon cher ami_! Pig that I am to forget. Pig! pig! animal!" The
other man saw that tears had sprung to his eyes, and was horribly
embarrassed to the very bottom of his good British soul.
"Yes! yes!" he said gruffly. "Quite so, quite so! No consequence!" He
dragged his hands away from Ste. Marie's grasp, stuck them in his
pockets, and turned to the window beside which he had been sitting. It
looked out over the sweet green peace of the Luxembourg Gardens with
their winding paths and their clumps of trees and shrubbery, their
flaming flower-beds, their groups of weather-stained sculpture. A youth
in labourer's corduroys and an unclean beret strolled along under the
high palings, one arm was about the ample waist of a woman somewhat the
youth's senior, but, as ever, love was blind. The youth carolled in a
high, clear voice: "_Vous etes si jolie_," a song of abundant sentiment,
and the young woman put up one hand and patted his cheek. So they
strolled on and turned up into the Rue Vavin.
Ste. Marie, across the room, looked at his friend's square back, and
knew that in his silent way the man was suffering. A great sadness, the
recoil from his trembling heights of bliss, came upon him and enveloped
him. Was it true that one man's joy must inevitably be another's pain?
He tried to imagine himself in Hartley's place, Hartley in his; and he
gave a little shiver. He knew that if that _bouleversement_ were
actually to take place he would be as glad for his friend's sake as poor
Hartley was now for his; but he knew also that the smile of
congratulation would be a grimace of almost intolerable pain, and so he
knew what Hartley's black hour must be like.
"You must forgive me," he said. "I had forgotten. I don't know why.
Well, yes, happiness is a very selfish state of mind, I suppose. One
thinks of nothing but one's self--and one other. I--during this past
month I've been in the clouds. You must forgive me."
The Englishman turned back into the room. Ste. Marie saw that his face
was as completely devoid of expression as it usually was, that his hands
when he chose and lighted a cigarette were quite steady, and he
marvelled. That would have been impossible for him under such
circumstances.
"She has accepted you, I take it?" said Hartley again.
"Not quite that," said he. "Sit down and I'll tell you about it." So
he told him about his hour with Miss Benham, and about what had been
agreed upon between them, and about what he had undertaken to do.
"Apart from wishing to do everything in this world that I can do to make
her happy," he said, "--and she will never be at peace again until she
knows the truth about her brother--apart from that, I'm purely selfish
in the thing. I've got to win her respect as well as--the rest. I want
her to respect me, and she has never quite done that. I'm an idler. So
are you, but you have a perfectly good excuse. I have not. I've been
an idler because it suited me, because nothing turned up, and because I
have enough to eat without working for my living. I know how she has
felt about all that. Well, she shall feel it no longer."
"You're taking on a big order," said the other man.
"The bigger the better," said Ste. Marie. "And I shall succeed in it or
never see her again. I've sworn that." The odd look of exaltation that
Miss Benham had seen in his face, the look of knightly fervour, came
there again, and Hartley saw it and knew that the man was stirred by no
transient whim. Oddly enough he thought, as had the girl earlier in the
day, of those elder Ste. Maries who had taken sword and lance and gone
out into a strange world, a place of unknown terrors, afire for the
Great Adventure. And this was one of their blood.
"I'm afraid you don't realise," he went on, "the difficulties you've got
to face. Better men than you have failed over this thing, you know."
"A worse might nevertheless succeed," said Ste. Marie, and the other
said--
"Yes. Oh, yes. And there's always luck to be considered, of course.
You might stumble on some trace." He threw away his cigarette and
lighted another, and he smoked it down almost to the end before he
spoke. At last he said--
"I want to tell you something. The reason why I want to tell it comes a
little later. A few weeks before you returned to Paris I asked Miss
Benham to marry me."
Ste. Marie looked up with a quick sympathy.
"Ah!" said he. "I have sometimes thought--wondered. I have wondered if
it went as far as that. Of course I could see that you had known her
well, though you seldom go there nowadays."
"Yes," said Hartley, "it went as far as that, but no farther.
She--well, she didn't care for me--not in that way. So I stiffened my
back and shut my mouth, and got used to the fact that what I'd hoped for
was impossible.
"And now comes the reason for telling you what I've told. I want you to
let me help you in what you're going to do--if you think you can, that
is. Remember, I--cared for her too. I'd like to do something for her.
It would never have occurred to me to do this until you thought of it,
but I should like very much to lend a hand, do some of the work. D'you
think you could let me in?"
Ste. Marie stared at him in open astonishment, and, for an instant,
something like dismay.
"Yes, yes! I know what you're thinking," said the Englishman. "You'd
hoped to do it all yourself. It's your game, I know. Well, it's your
game even if you let me come in. I'm just a helper. Some one to run
errands, some one perhaps to take counsel with now and then. Look at it
on the practical side! Two heads are certainly better than one.
Certainly I could be of use to you. And besides--well, I want to do
something for her. I--cared too, you see. D'you think you could take me
in?"
It was the man's love that made his appeal irresistible. No one could
appeal to Ste. Marie on that score in vain. It was true that he had
hoped to work alone, to win or lose alone, to stand, in this matter,
quite on his own feet, but he could not deny the man who had loved her
and lost her. Ste. Marie thrust out his hand.
"You love her too!" he said. "That is enough. We work together. I have
a possibly foolish idea that if we can find a certain man we will learn
something about Arthur Benham. I'll tell you about it."
But before he could begin the door-bell jangled.
*CHAPTER VII*
*CAPTAIN STEWART MAKES A KINDLY OFFER*
Ste. Marie scowled.
"A caller would come singularly malapropos, just now," said he. "I've
half a mind not to go to the door. I want to talk this thing over with
you."
"Whoever it is," objected Hartley, "has been told by the concierge that
you're at home. It may not be a caller anyhow. It may be a parcel or
something. You'd best go." So Ste. Marie went out into the little
passage, blaspheming fluently the while.
The Englishman heard him open the outer door of the flat. He heard him
exclaim in great surprise--
"Ah, Captain Stewart! A great pleasure. Come in! Come in!" And he
permitted himself a little blaspheming on his own account, for the
visitor, as Ste. Marie had said, came most malapropos, and besides he
disliked Miss Benham's uncle.
He heard the American say--
"I have been hoping for some weeks to give myself the pleasure of
calling here, and to-day such an excellent pretext presented itself that
I came straight away."
Hartley heard him emit his mewing little laugh, and heard him say with
the elephantine archness affected by certain dry and middle-aged
gentlemen--
"I come with congratulations. My niece has told me all about it. Lucky
young man! Ah!----" He reached the door of the inner room and saw
Richard Hartley standing by the window, and he began to apologise
profusely, saying that he had had no idea that Ste. Marie was not alone.
But Ste. Marie said--
"It doesn't in the least matter. I have no secrets from Hartley.
Indeed, I have just been talking with him about this very thing." But
for all that he looked curiously at the elder man, and it struck him as
very odd that Miss Benham should have gone straight to her uncle and
told him all this. It did not seem in the least like her, especially as
he knew the two were on no terms of intimacy. He decided that she must
have gone up to her grandfather's room to discuss it with that old
gentleman--a reasonable enough hypothesis--and that Captain Stewart must
have come in during the discussion. Quite evidently he had wasted no
time in setting out upon his errand of congratulation.
"Then," said Captain Stewart, "if I am to be good-naturedly forgiven for
my stupidity, let me go on and say, in my capacity as a member of the
family, that the news pleased me very much. I was glad to hear it." He
shook Ste. Marie's hand, looking very benignant indeed, and Ste. Marie
was quite overcome with pleasure and gratitude: it seemed to him such a
very kindly act in the elder man. He produced things to smoke and
drink, and Captain Stewart accepted a cigarette and mixed himself a
rather stiff glass of absinthe--it was between five and six o'clock.
"And now," said he, when he was at ease in the most comfortable of the
low cane chairs, and the glass of opalescent liquor was properly curdled
and set at hand, "now, having congratulated you and--ah, welcomed you,
if I may put it so, as a probable future member of the family, I turn to
the other feature of the affair." He had an odd trick of lowering his
head and gazing benevolently upon an auditor as if over the top of
spectacles. It was one of his elderly ways. He beamed now upon Ste.
Marie in this manner, and, after a moment, turned and beamed upon
Richard Hartley, who gazed stolidly back at him without expression.
"You have determined, I hear," said he, "to join us in our search for
poor Arthur. Good! Good I I welcome you there, also."
Ste. Marie stirred uneasily in his chair.
"Well," said he, "in a sense, yes. That is, I've determined to devote
myself to the search, and Hartley is good enough to offer to go in with
me; but I think, if you don't mind---- Of course, I know it's very
presumptuous and doubtless idiotic of us--but, if you don't mind, I
think we'll work independently. You see--well, I can't quite put it
into words, but it's our idea to succeed or fail quite by our own
efforts. I dare say we shall fail, but it won't be for lack of trying."
Captain Stewart looked disappointed.
"Oh, I think," said he. "Pardon me for saying it! but I think you're
rather foolish to do that." He waved an apologetic hand. "Of course, I
comprehend your excellent motive. Yes, as you say, you want to succeed
quite on your own. But, look at the practical side! You'll have to go
over all the weary weeks of useless labour we have gone over. We could
save you that. We have examined and followed up and at last given over
a hundred clues that on the surface looked quite possible of success.
You'll be doing that all over again. In short, my dear friend, you will
merely be following along a couple of months behind us. It seems to me
a pity. I shan't like to see you wasting your time and efforts." He
dropped his eyes to the glass of Pernod which stood beside him, and he
took it in his hand and turned it slowly, and watched the light gleam in
strange pearl colours upon it. He glanced up again with a little smile
which the two younger men found oddly pathetic.
"I should like to see you succeed," said Captain Stewart. "I like to
see youth and courage and high hope succeed." He said--
"I am past the age of romance, though I am not so very old in years.
Romance has passed me by, but--I love it still. It still stirs me
surprisingly when I see it in other people--young people who are simple
and earnest and who--and who are in love." He laughed gently, still
turning the glass in his hands.
"I am afraid you will call me a sentimentalist," he said, "and an
elderly sentimentalist is, as a rule, a ridiculous person. Ridiculous
or not, though, I have rather set my heart on your success in this
undertaking. Who knows? you may succeed where we others have failed.
Youth has such a way of charging in and carrying all before it by
assault: such a way of overleaping barriers that look unsurmountable to
older eyes! Youth! Youth!
"Eh, my God!" said he, "to be young again just for a little while. To
feel the blood beat strong and eager. Never to be tired. Eh, to be
like one of you youngsters! You, Ste. Marie, or you, Hartley. There's
so little left for people when youth is gone." He bent his head again,
staring down upon the glass before him, and for a while there was a
silence which neither of the younger men cared to break.
"Don't refuse a helping hand!" said Captain Stewart, looking up once
more. "Don't be overproud! I may be able to set you upon the right
path. Not that I have anything definite to work upon. I haven't, alas!
But each day new clues turn up. One day we shall find the real one, and
that may be one that I have turned over to you to follow out. One never
knows."
[Illustration: "'Don't refuse a helping hand!' said Captain Stewart,
looking up once more. 'Don't be overproud!'"]
Ste. Marie looked across at Richard Hartley, but that gentleman was
blowing smoke rings and to all outward appearance giving them his entire
attention. He looked back to Captain Stewart, and Stewart's eyes
regarded him smiling a little wistfully, he thought.
Ste. Marie scowled out of the window at the trees of the Luxembourg
Gardens.
"I hardly know," said he. "Of course I sound a braying ass in
hesitating even a moment, but--in a way, you understand. I'm so anxious
to do this or to fail in it quite on my own! You're--so tremendously
kind about it that I don't know what to say. I must seem very
ungrateful, I know. But I'm not."
"No," said the elder man, "you don't seem ungrateful at all. I
understand exactly how you feel about it, and I applaud your
feeling--but not your judgment. I am afraid that for the sake of a
sentiment you're taking unnecessary risks of failure."
For the first time Richard Hartley spoke.
"I've an idea, you know," said he, "that it's going to be a matter
chiefly of luck. One day somebody will stumble on the right trail--and
that might as well be Ste. Marie or I as your trained detectives. If
you don't mind my saying so, sir--I don't want to seem rude--your
trained detectives do not seem to accomplish much in two months, do
they?"
Captain Stewart looked thoughtfully at the younger man.
"No," he said at last. "I am sorry to say they don't seem to have
accomplished much--except to prove that there are a great many places
poor Arthur has _not_ been to, and a great many people who have _not_
seen him. After all, that is something--the elimination of ground that
need not be worked over again." He set down the glass from which he had
been drinking.
"I cannot agree with your theory," he said. "I cannot agree that such
work as this is best left to an accidental solution. Accidents are too
rare. We have tried to go at it in as scientific a way as could be
managed--by covering large areas of territory, by keeping the police
everywhere on the alert, by watching the boy's old friends and searching
his favourite haunts. Personally I am inclined to think that he managed
to slip away to America very early in the course of events--before we
began to search for him. And of course, I am having a careful watch
kept there as well as here. But no trace has appeared as yet--nothing
at all trustworthy. Meanwhile I continue to hope and to work, but I grow
a little discouraged. In any case, though, we shall hear of him in
three months more if he is alive."
"Why three months?" asked Ste. Marie. "What do you mean by that?"
"In three months," said Captain Stewart, "Arthur will be of age, and he
can demand the money left him by his father. If he is alive he will
turn up for that. I have thought, from the first, that he is merely
hiding somewhere until this time should be past. He--you must know that
he went away very angry, after a quarrel with his grandfather. My
father is not a patient man. He may have been very harsh with the boy."
"Ah yes," said Hartley, "but no boy, however young or angry, would be
foolish enough to risk an absolute break with the man who is going to
leave him a large fortune. Young Benham must know that his grandfather
would never forgive him for staying away all this time if he stayed away
of his own accord. He must know that he'd be taking tremendous risks of
being cut off altogether."
"And besides," added Ste. Marie, "it is quite possible that your father,
sir, may die at any time--any hour. And he's very angry with his
grandson. He may have cut him off already."
Captain Stewart's eyes sharpened suddenly, but he dropped them to the
glass in his hand.
"Have you any reason for thinking that?" he asked.
"No," said Ste. Marie. "I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said it.
That is a matter which concerns your family alone. I forgot myself.
The possibility occurred to me suddenly, for the first time." But the
elder man looked up at him with a smile.
"Pray don't apologise!" said he. "Surely we three can speak frankly
together. And frankly I know nothing of my father's will. But I don't
think he would cut poor Arthur off, though he is, of course, very angry
about the boy's leaving in the manner he did. No! I am sure he
wouldn't cut him off. He was fond of the lad, very fond--as we all
were."
Captain Stewart glanced at his watch and rose with a little sigh.
"I must be off," said he. "I have to dine out this evening, and I must
get home to change. There is a cab-stand near you?" He looked out of
the window. "Ah yes! Just at the corner of the Gardens." He turned
about to Ste. Marie, and held out his hand with a smile. He said--
"You refuse to join forces with us then? Well, I'm sorry. But for all
that, I wish you luck. Go your own way, and I hope you'll succeed. I
honestly hope that, even though your success may show me up for an
incompetent bungler." He gave a little kindly laugh and Ste. Marie
tried to protest.
"Still," said the elder man, "don't throw me over altogether. If I can
help you in any way, little or big, let me know. If I can give you any
hints, any advice, anything at all, I want to do it. And if you happen
upon what seems to be a promising clue, come and talk it over with me.
Oh, don't be afraid! I'll leave it to you to work out. I shan't spoil
your game."
"Ah, now that's very good of you," said Ste. Marie. "Only you make me
seem more than ever an ungrateful fool. Thanks, I will come to you with
my troubles if I may. I have a foolish idea that I want to follow out a
little first, but doubtless I shall be running to you soon for
information."
The elder man's eyes sharpened again with keen interest.
"An idea!" he said quickly. "You have an idea? What--may I ask what
sort of an idea?"
"Oh it's nothing," declared Ste. Marie. "You have already laughed at
it. I just want to find that man O'Hara, that's all. I've a feeling
that I should learn something from him."
"Ah!" said Captain Stewart slowly. "Yes, the man O'Hara. There's
nothing in that, I'm afraid. I've made inquiries about O'Hara. It
seems he left Paris six months ago, saying he was off for America. An
old friend of his told me that. So you must have been mistaken when you
thought you saw him in the Champs Elysees, and he couldn't very well
have had anything to do with poor Arthur. I'm afraid that idea is hardly
worth following up."
"Perhaps not," said Ste. Marie. "I seem to start badly, don't I? Ah
well, I'll have to come to you all the sooner, then."
"You'll be welcome," promised Captain Stewart. "Good-bye to you! Good
day, Hartley. Come and see me both of you. You know where I live."
He took his leave then, and Hartley, standing beside the window, watched
him turn down the street, and at the corner get into one of the fiacres
there and drive away.
Ste. Marie laughed aloud.
"There's the second time," said he, "that I've had him about O'Hara. If
he is as careless as that about everything, I don't wonder he hasn't
found Arthur Benham. O'Hara disappeared from Paris (publicly, that is)
at about the time young Benham disappeared. As a matter of fact he
remains, or at least for a time remained in the city without letting his
friends know, because I made no mistake about seeing him in the Champs
Elysees. All that looks to me suspicious enough to be worth
investigation.
"Of course," he admitted doubtfully--"of course I'm no detective, but
that's how it looks to me."
"I don't believe Stewart is any detective either," said Richard Hartley.
"He's altogether too cock-sure. That sort of man would rather die than
admit he is wrong about anything. He's a good old chap though, isn't
he? I liked him to-day better than ever before. I thought he was
rather pathetic when he went on about his age."
"He has a good heart," said Ste. Marie. "Very few men under the
circumstances would come here and be as decent as he was. Most men
would have thought I was a presumptuous ass and would have behaved
accordingly."
Ste. Marie took a turn about the room and his face began to light up
with its new excitement and exaltation.
"And to-morrow," he cried, "to-morrow we begin! To-morrow we set out
into the world and the Adventure is on foot. God send it success!" He
laughed across at the other man, but it was a laugh of eagerness not of
mirth.
"I feel," said he, "like Jason. I feel as if we were to set sail
to-morrow for Colchis and the Golden Fleece."
"Ye--es," said the other man a little drily. "Yes, perhaps. I don't
want to seem critical, but isn't your figure somewhat ill chosen?"
"'Ill chosen'?" cried Ste. Marie. "What d'you mean? Why ill chosen?"
"I was thinking of Medea," said Richard Hartley.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*STE. MARIE MEETS WITH A MISADVENTURE AND DREAMS A DREAM*
So on the next day these two rode forth upon their quest, and no quest
was ever undertaken with a stouter courage or with a grimmer
determination to succeed. To put it fancifully they burnt their tower
behind them, for to one of them at least--to him who led--there was no
going back.
But after all they set forth under a cloud, and Ste. Marie took a heavy
heart with him. On the evening before an odd and painful incident had
befallen, a singularly unfortunate incident.
It chanced that neither of the two men had a dinner engagement that
evening, and so, after their old habit, they dined together. There was
some wrangling over where they should go, Hartley insisting upon
_Armenonville_ or the _Madrid_ in the Bois, Ste. Marie objecting that
these would be full of tourists so late in June, and urging the claims
of some quiet place in the Quarter, where they could talk instead of
listening perforce to loud music. In the end, for no particular reason,
they compromised on the little Spanish restaurant in the Rue Helder.
They went there about eight o'clock, without dressing; for it is a very
quiet place which the world does not visit, and they had a _sopa de
yerbas_, and some _langostinos_, which are shrimps, and a heavenly
_arroz_ with fowl in it, and many tender succulent strips of red pepper.
They had a salad made out of a little of everything that grows green,
with the true Spanish oil, which has a tang and a bouquet unappreciated
by the philistine; and then they had a strange pastry and some cheese
and green almonds. And to make them glad they drank a bottle of old red
Valdepenas, and afterwards a glass each of a special Manzanilla, upon
which the restaurant very justly prides itself. It was a simple dinner
and a little stodgy for that time of the year, but the two men were
hungry, and sat at table, almost alone in the upper room, for a long
time, saying how good everything was, and from time to time despatching
the saturnine waiter, a Madrileno, for more peppers. When at last they
came out into the narrow street and thence to the thronged Boulevard des
Italiens, it was nearly eleven o'clock. They stood for a little time in
the shelter of a kiosk, looking down the boulevard to where the Place de
l'Opera opened wide, and the lights of the Cafe de la Paix shone garish
in the night, and Ste. Marie said--
"There's a street _fete_ in Montmartre. We might drive home that way."
"An excellent idea," said the other man. "The fact that Montmartre lies
in an opposite direction from home makes the plan all the better. And
after that we might drive home through the Bois. That's much farther in
the wrong direction. Lead on!"
So they sprang into a waiting fiacre, and were dragged up the steep
stone-paved hill to the heights where _La Boheme_ still reigns, though
the glory of Moulin Rouge has departed, and the trail of tourist is over
all. They found Montmartre very much _en fete_. In the Place Blanche
were two of the enormous and brilliantly lighted merry-go-rounds which
only Paris knows--one furnished with stolid cattle, theatrical-looking
horses, and Russian sleighs, the other with the ever-popular galloping
pigs. When these dreadful machines were in rotation mechanical organs
concealed somewhere in their bowels emitted hideous brays and shrieks,
which mingled with the shrieks of the ladies mounted upon the galloping
pigs, and together insulted a peaceful sky.
The square was filled with that extremely heterogeneous throng which the
Parisian street _fete_ gathers together, but it was, for the most part,
a well-dressed throng, largely recruited from the boulevards, and it was
quite determined to have a very good time in the cheerful harmless Latin
fashion. The two men got down from their fiacre and elbowed a way
through the good-natured crowd to a place near the more popular of the
merry-go-rounds. The machine was in rotation. Its garish lights shone
and glittered, its hidden mechanical organ blared a German waltz tune,
the huge pink-varnished pigs galloped gravely up and down as the
platform upon which they were mounted whirled round and round. A little
group of American trippers, sight-seeing, with a guide, stood near by,
and one of the group, a pretty girl with red hair, demanded plaintively
of the friend upon whose arm she hung: "Do you think mamma would be
shocked if we took a ride? Wouldn't I love to!"
Hartley turned laughing from this distressed maiden to Ste. Marie. He
was wondering with mild amusement why anybody should wish to do such a
foolish thing, but Ste. Marie's eyes were fixed upon the galloping pigs
and the eyes shone with a wistful excitement. To tell the truth it was
impossible for him to look on at any form of active amusement without
thirsting to join it. A joyous and care-free lady in a blue hat, who
was mounted astride upon one of the pigs, hurled a paper serpentine at
him, and shrieked with delight when it knocked his hat off.
"That's the second time she has hit me with one of those things," he
said, groping about his feet for the hat. "Here, stop that boy with the
basket!" A vendor of the little rolls of paper ribbon was shouting his
wares through the crowd. Ste. Marie filled his pockets with the things,
and when the lady with the blue hat came round on the next turn, lassoed
her neatly about the neck and held the end of the ribbon till it broke.
Then he caught a fat gentleman, who was holding himself on by his
steed's neck, in the ear, and the red-haired American girl laughed
aloud.
"When the thing stops," said Ste. Marie, "I'm going to take a ride, just
one ride. I haven't ridden a pig for many years." Hartley jeered at
him, calling him an infant, but Ste. Marie bought more serpentines, and
when the platform came to a stop clambered up to it, and mounted the
only unoccupied pig he could find. His friend still scoffed at him and
called him names, but Ste. Marie tucked his long legs round the pig's
neck and smiled back, and presently the machine began again to revolve.
At the end of the first revolution Hartley gave a shout of delight, for
he saw that the lady with the blue hat had left her mount and was making
her way along the platform towards where Ste. Marie sat hurling
serpentines in the face of the world. By the next time round she had
come to where he was, mounted astride behind him, and was holding
herself with one very shapely arm round his neck, while with the other
she rifled his pockets for ammunition. Ste. Marie grinned, and the
public, loud in its acclaims, began to pelt the two with serpentines
until they were hung with many-coloured ribbons like a Christmas-tree.
Even Richard Hartley was so far moved out of the self-consciousness with
which his race is cursed as to buy a handful of the common missiles, and
the lady in the blue hat returned his attention with skill and despatch.
But as the machine began to slacken its pace, and the hideous wail and
blare of the concealed organ died mercifully down, Hartley saw that his
friend's manner had all at once altered, that he sat leaning forward
away from the enthusiastic lady with the blue hat, and that the paper
serpentines had dropped from his hands. Hartley thought that the rapid
motion must have made him a little giddy, but presently, before the
merry-go-round had quite stopped, he saw the man leap down and hurry
towards him through the crowd. Ste. Marie's face was grave and pale. He
caught Hartley's arm in his hand and turned him round, crying in a low
voice--
"Come out of this as quickly as you can! No, in the other direction. I
want to get away at once."
"What's the matter?" Hartley demanded. "Lady in the blue hat too
friendly? Well, if you're going to play this kind of game, you might as
well play it."
"Helen Benham was down there in the crowd," said Ste. Marie. "On the
opposite side from you. She was with a party of people who got out of
two motor-cars, to look on. They were in evening things, so they had
come from dinner somewhere, I suppose. She saw me."
"The devil!" said Hartley under his breath. Then he gave a shout of
laughter, demanding--
"Well, what of it? You weren't committing any crime, were you? There's
no harm in riding a silly pig in a silly merry-go-round. Everybody does
it in these _fete_ things." But even as he spoke he knew how extremely
unfortunate the meeting was, and the laughter went out of his voice.
"I'm afraid," said Ste. Marie, "she won't see the humour of it. Good
God, what a thing to happen! _You_ know well enough what she'll think
of me.
"At five o'clock this afternoon," he said bitterly, "I left her with a
great many fine high-sounding words about the quest I was to give my
days and nights to--for her sake. I went away from her like a--knight
going into battle--consecrated. I tell you, there were tears in her
eyes when I went. And now, now, at midnight, she sees me riding a
galloping pig in a street _fete_ with a girl from the boulevards sitting
on the pig with me and holding me round the neck before a thousand
people. What will she think of me? What but one thing can she possibly
think? Oh, I know well enough! I saw her face before she turned away.
"And," he cried, "I can't even go to her and explain--if there's
anything to explain, and I suppose there is not. I can't even go to
her. I've sworn not to see her."
"Oh, I'll do that," said the other man. "I'll explain it to her, if any
explanation's necessary. I think you'll find that she will laugh at it."
But Ste. Marie shook his head.
"No, she won't," said he. And Hartley could say no more, for he knew
Miss Benham, and he was very much afraid that she would not laugh.
They found a fiacre at the side of the square and drove home at once.
They were almost entirely silent all the long way, for Ste. Marie was
buried in gloom, and the Englishman, after trying once or twice to cheer
him up, realised that he was best left to himself just then, and so held
his tongue. But in the Rue d'Assas as Ste. Marie was getting
down--Hartley kept the fiacre to go on to his rooms in the Avenue de
l'Observatoire--he made a last attempt to lighten the man's depression.
He said--
"Don't you be a silly ass about this! You're making much too much of
it, you know. I'll go to her to-morrow or next day and explain, and
she'll laugh--if she hasn't already done so.
"You know," he said, almost believing it himself, "you are paying her a
dashed poor compliment in thinking she's so dull as to misunderstand a
little thing of this kind. Yes, by Jove, you are!"
Ste. Marie looked up at him, and his face, in the light of the cab-lamp,
showed a first faint gleam of hope.
"Do you think so?" he demanded. "Do you really think that? Maybe I am.
But-- O Lord, who would understand such an idiocy? Sacred imbecile that
I am: why was I ever born? I ask you." He turned abruptly and began to
ring at the door, casting a brief "Good-night," over his shoulder. And,
after a moment, Hartley gave it up and drove away.
Above, in the long shallow front room of his flat, with the three
windows overlooking the Gardens, Ste. Marie made lights, and after much
rummaging unearthed a box of cigarettes of a peculiarly delectable
flavour, which had been sent him by a friend in the Khedivial household.
He allowed himself one or two of them now and then, usually in sorrowful
moments, as an especial treat. And this seemed to him to be the moment
for smoking all there were left. Surely his need had never been
greater. In England he had, of course learnt to smoke a pipe, but pipe
smoking always remained with him a species of accomplishment; it never
brought him the deep and ruminative peace with which it enfolds the
Anglo-Saxon heart. The _vieux Jacob_ of old-fashioned Parisian Bohemia
inspired in him unconcealed horror, of cigars he was suspicious because,
he said, most of the unpleasant people he knew smoked cigars: so he
soothed his soul with cigarettes, and he was usually to be found with
one between his fingers.
He lighted one of the precious Egyptians, and after a first ecstatic
inhalation went across to one of the long windows, which was open, and
stood there with his back to the room, his face to the peaceful fragrant
night. A sudden recollection came to him of that other night a month
before, when he had stood on the Pont des Invalides with his eyes upon
the stars, his feet upon the ladder thereunto. His heart gave a sudden
exultant leap within him when he thought how far and high he had
climbed, but after the leap it shivered and stood still when this
evening's misadventure came before him.
Would she ever understand? He had no fear that Hartley would not do his
best with her. Hartley was as honest and as faithful as ever a friend
was in this world. He would do his best. But even then---- It was the
girl's inflexible nature that made the matter so dangerous. He knew
that she was inflexible, and he took a curious pride in it. He admired
it. So must have been those calm-eyed ancient ladies for whom other
Ste. Maries went out to do battle. It was wellnigh impossible to
imagine them lowering their eyes to silly revelry. They could not stoop
to such as that. It was beneath their high dignity. And it was beneath
hers also. As for himself, he was a thing of patches. Here a patch of
exalted chivalry--a noble patch--there a patch of bourgeois child-like
love of fun; here a patch of melancholic asceticism, there one of
something quite the reverse. A hopeless patchwork he was. Must she not
shrink from him when she knew? He could not quite imagine her
understanding the wholly trivial and meaningless impulse that had
prompted him to ride a galloping pig and cast paper serpentines at the
assembled world.
Apart from her view of the affair he felt no shame in it. The moment of
childish gaiety had been but a passing mood. It had in no way slackened
his tense enthusiasm, dulled the keenness of his spirit, lowered his
high flight. He knew that well enough. But he wondered if she would
understand, and he could not believe it possible. The mood of
exaltation in which they had parted that afternoon came to him, and then
the sight of her shocked face as he had seen it in the laughing crowd in
the Place Blanche.
"What must she think of me?" he cried aloud. "What must she think of
me?"
So for an hour or more he stood in the open window staring into the
fragrant night, or tramped up and down the long room, his hands behind
his back, kicking out of his way the chairs and things which impeded
him--torturing himself with fears and regrets and fancies, until at last
in a calmer moment he realised that he was working himself up into an
absurd state of nerves over something which was done and could not now
be helped. The man had an odd streak of fatalism in his nature--that
will have come of his southern blood--and it came to him now in his
need. For the work upon which he was to enter with the morrow he had
need of clear wits, not scattered ones; a calm judgment, not disordered
nerves. So he took himself in hand, and it would have been amazing to
any one unfamiliar with the abrupt changes of the Latin temperament, to
see how suddenly Ste. Marie became quiet and cool and master of himself.
[Illustration: "So for an hour or more he stood in the open window
staring into the fragrant night."]
"It is done," he said with a little shrug, and if his face was for a
moment bitter it quickly enough became impassive. "It is done, and it
cannot be undone--unless Hartley can undo it. And now, _revenons a nos
moutons_!
"Or at least," said he, looking at his watch--and it was between one and
two--"at least to our beds!"
So he went to bed, and, so well had he recovered from his fit of
excitement, he fell asleep almost at once. But, for all that, the
jangled nerves had their revenge. He who commonly slept like the dead,
without the slightest disturbance, dreamed a strange dream. It seemed
to him that he stood spent and weary in a twilit place, a waste place at
the foot of a high hill. At the top of the hill She sat upon a sort of
throne, golden in a beam of light from heaven--serene, very beautiful,
the end and crown of his weary labours. His feet were set to the ascent
of the height whereon she waited, but he was withheld. From the shadows
at the hill's foot a voice called to him in distress, anguish of
spirit--a voice he knew, but he could not say whose voice. It besought
him out of utter need, and he could not turn away from it.
Then from those shadows eyes looked upon him, very great and dark eyes,
and they besought him too; he did not know what they asked, but they
called to him like the low voice, and he could not turn away.
He looked to the far height, and with all his power he strove to set his
feet towards it--the goal of long labour and desire--but the eyes and
the piteous voice held him motionless, for they needed him.
From this anguish he awoke trembling. And after a long time, when he
was composed, he fell asleep once more, and once more he dreamed the
dream.
So morning found him pallid and unrefreshed. But by daylight he knew
whose eyes had besought him, and he wondered, and was a little afraid.
*CHAPTER IX*
*STE. MARIE GOES UPON A JOURNEY AND
RICHARD HARTLEY PLEADS FOR HIM*
It may as well be admitted at the outset that neither Ste. Marie nor
Richard Hartley proved themselves to be geniuses, hitherto undeveloped,
in the detective science. They entered upon their self-appointed task
with a fine fervour, but, as Miss Benham had suggested, with no other
qualifications in particular. Ste. Marie had a theory that when engaged
in work of this nature you went into questionable parts of the city, ate
and drank cheek by jowl with questionable people; if possible got them
drunk while you remained sober (difficult feat), and sooner or later
they said things which put you on the right road to your goal, or else
confessed to you that they themselves had committed the particular crime
in which you were interested. He argued that this was the way it
happened in books, and that surely people didn't write books about
things of which they were ignorant.
Hartley, on the other hand, preferred the newer or scientific methods.
You sat at home with a pipe and a whisky and water--if possible in a
long dressing-gown with a cord round its middle. You reviewed all the
known facts of the case, and you did mathematics about them with Xs and
Ys and many other symbols, and in the end, by a system of elimination,
you proved that a certain thing must infallibly be true. The chief
difficulty for him in this was, he said, that he had been at Oxford
instead of at Cambridge, and so the mathematics was rather beyond him.
In practice, however, they combined the two methods, which was doubtless
as well as if they hadn't, because for some time they accomplished
nothing whatever, and so neither one was able to sneer at the other's
stupidity.
This is not to say that they found nothing in the way of clues. They
found an embarrassment of them, and for some days went about in a fever
of excitement over these; but the fever cooled when clue after clue
turned out to be misleading. Of course Ste. Marie's first efforts were
directed towards tracing the movements of the Irishman, O'Hara, but the
efforts were altogether unavailing. The man seemed to have disappeared
as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He
was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's
departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained
that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed
person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening
in Maxim's, and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries
about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of
money, whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O'Hara
had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America,
and that he had had a picture postal card, some weeks since, from New
York. The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet by way
of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie was
left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.
He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join
him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said--
"That was a lie. The man lied."
"Name of a dog, why?" demanded Ste. Marie, but the Englishman shrugged
his shoulders.
"I don't know," he said. "But I believe it was a lie. The man came to
you, sought you out to tell his story, didn't he? And all the others
have given a different date? Well, there you are! For some reason this
man or some one behind him--O'Hara himself, probably--wants you to
believe that O'Hara is in America. I dare say he's in Paris all the
while."
"I hope you're right," said the other. "And I mean to make sure, too.
It certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that.
I wonder, by the way, how he knew I'd been making inquiries about
O'Hara. I've questioned only two or three people, and then in the most
casual way. Yes, it's odd."
It was about a week after this--a fruitless week, full of the alternate
brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment--that he met Captain
Stewart, to whom he had been more than once on the point of appealing.
He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the Rue Royale.
Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop,
devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amusement, observed,
to ladies' hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he
looked in an ill humour and older and more yellow than usual. But his
face altered suddenly when he saw the younger man, and he stopped, and
shook Ste. Marie's hand with every evidence of pleasure.
"Well met! well met!" he exclaimed. "If you are not in a hurry, come
and sit down somewhere and tell me about yourself."
They picked their way across the street to the terrace of the _Taverne
Royale_, which was almost deserted at that hour, and sat down at one of
the little tables well back from the pavement, in a corner.
"Is it fair?" queried Captain Stewart, "is it fair as a rival
investigator to ask you what success you have had?" Ste. Marie laughed
rather ruefully and confessed that he had as yet no success at all.
"I've just come," said he, "from pricking one bubble that promised well,
and Hartley is up in Montmartre destroying another, I fancy. Oh well,
we didn't expect it to be child's play."
Captain Stewart raised his little glass of dry vermouth in an
old-fashioned salute, and drank from it.
"You," said he, "you were--ah, full of some idea of connecting this man,
this Irishman, O'Hara, with poor Arthur's disappearance. You've found
that not so promising, as you went on, I take it."
"Well, I've been unable to trace O'Hara," said Ste. Marie. "He seems to
have disappeared as completely as your nephew. I suppose you have no
clues to spare? I confess I'm out of them, at the moment."
"Oh, I have plenty," said the elder man. "A hundred. More than I can
possibly look after." He gave a little chuckling laugh.
"I've been waiting for you to come to me," he said. "It was a little
ungenerous perhaps, but we all love to say, 'I told you so.' Yes, I
have a great quantity of clues, and, of course, they all seem to be of
the greatest and most exciting importance. That's a way clues have." He
took an envelope from an inner pocket of his coat, and sorted several
folded papers which were in it.
"I have here," said he, "memoranda of two chances, shall I call
them?--which seem to me very good, though, as I have already said, every
clue seems good. That is the maddening, the heart-breaking part of such
an investigation. I have made these brief notes from letters received,
one yesterday, one the day before, from an agent of mine who has been
searching the _bains de mer_ of the north coast. This agent writes that
some one very much resembling poor Arthur has been seen at Dinard and
also at Deauville, and he urges me to come there, or to send a man there
at once to look into the matter. You will ask, of course, why this
agent himself does not pursue the clue he has found. Unfortunately he
has been called to London upon some pressing family matter of his own;
he is an Englishman."
"Why haven't you gone yourself?" asked Ste. Marie. But the elder man
shrugged his shoulders and smiled a tired deprecatory smile.
"Oh, my friend," said he, "if I should attempt personally to investigate
one half of these things, I should be compelled to divide myself into
twenty parts. No, I must stay here. There must be, alas! the spider at
the centre of the web. I cannot go, but if you think it worth while I
will gladly turn over the memoranda of these last clues to you. They
may be the true clues, they may not. At any rate, some one must look
into them. Why not you and your partner--or shall I say assistant?"
"Why, thank you!" cried Ste. Marie. "A thousand thanks. Of course I
shall be--we shall be glad to try this chance. On the face of it, it
sounds very reasonable. Your nephew, from what I remember of him, is
much more apt to be in some place that is amusing--some place of
gaiety--than hiding away where it is merely dull, if he has his choice
in the matter, that is--if he is free. And yet----" he turned and
frowned thoughtfully at the elder man.
"What I want to know," said he, "is how the boy is supporting himself
all this time. You say he had no money, or very little, when he went
away. How is he managing to live, if your theory is correct--that he is
staying away of his own accord? It costs a lot of money to live as he
likes to live."
Captain Stewart nodded.
"Oh, that," said he, "that is a question I have often proposed to
myself. Frankly it's beyond me. I can only surmise that poor Arthur,
who had scattered a small fortune about in foolish loans, managed,
before he actually disappeared (mind you, we didn't begin to look for
him until a week had gone by), managed to collect some of this money,
and so went away with something in pocket. That, of course, is only a
guess."
"It is possible," said Ste. Marie doubtfully, "but--I don't know. It is
not very easy to raise money from the sort of people I imagine your
nephew to have lent it to. They borrow but they don't repay."
He glanced up with a half-laughing half-defiant air.
"I can't," said he, "rid myself of a belief that the boy is here in
Paris and he is not free to come or go. It's only a feeling, but it is
very strong in me. Of course I shall follow out these clues you've been
so kind as to give me. I shall go to Dinard and Deauville, and Hartley,
I imagine, will go with me; but I haven't great confidence in them."
Captain Stewart regarded him reflectively for a time, and in the end he
smiled.
"If you will pardon my saying it," he said, "your attitude is just a
little womanlike. You put away reason for something vaguely intuitive.
I always distrust intuition myself." Ste. Marie frowned a little and
looked uncomfortable. He did not relish being called womanlike--few men
do--but he was bound to admit that the elder man's criticism was more or
less just.
"Moreover," pursued Captain Stewart, "you altogether ignore the point of
motive--as I may have suggested to you before. There could be no
possible motive, so far as I am aware, for kidnapping or detaining or in
any way harming my nephew except the desire for money; but, as you know,
he had no large sum of money with him, and no demand has been made upon
us since his disappearance. I'm afraid you can't get round that."
"No," said Ste. Marie, "I'm afraid I can't. Indeed, leaving that aside
(and it can't be left aside), I still have almost nothing with which to
prop up my theory. I told you it was only a feeling."
He took up the memoranda which Captain Stewart had laid upon the
marble-topped table between them, and read the notes through.
"Please," said he, "don't think I am ungrateful for this chance. I am
not. I shall do my best with it, and I hope it may turn out to be
important." He gave a little wry smile.
"I have all sorts of reasons," he said, "for wishing to succeed as soon
as possible. You may be sure that there won't be any delays on my part.
And now I must be going on. I am to meet Hartley for lunch on the other
side of the river, and, if we can manage it, I should like to start
north this afternoon or evening.
"Good!" said Captain Stewart, smiling. "Good! that is what I call true
promptness. You lose no time at all. Go to Dinard and Deauville, by
all means, and look into this thing thoroughly. Don't be discouraged if
you meet with ill success at first. Take Mr. Hartley with you and do
your best." He paid for the two glasses of aperatif, and Ste. Marie
could not help observing that he left on the table a very small tip.
The waiter cursed him audibly as the two walked away.
"If you have returned by a week from to-morrow," he said, as they shook
hands, "I should like to have you keep that evening--Thursday--for me. I
am having a very informal little party in my rooms. There will be two
or three of the opera people there, and they will sing for us, and the
others will be amusing enough. All young. All young. I like young
people about me." He gave his odd little mewing chuckle. "And the
ladies must be beautiful as well as young. Come if you are here! I'll
drop a line to Mr. Hartley also." He shook Ste. Marie's hand and went
away down the street towards the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore, where he
lived.
Ste. Marie met Hartley as he expected to do, at lunch, and they talked
over the possibilities of the Dinard and Deauville expedition. In the
end they decided that Ste. Marie should go alone, but that he was to
telegraph, later on, if the clue looked promising. Hartley had two or
three investigations on foot in Paris, and stayed on to complete these.
Also he wished, as soon as possible, to see Helen Benham and explain
Ste. Marie's ride on the galloping pigs. Ten days had elapsed since
that evening, but Miss Benham had gone into the country the next day to
make a visit at the de Saulnes' chateau on the Oise.
So Ste. Marie packed a portmanteau with clothes and things, and departed
by a mid-afternoon train to Dinard, and, towards five, Richard Hartley
walked down to the Rue de l'Universite. He thought it just possible
that Miss Benham might by now have returned to town, but if not he meant
to have half an hour's chat with old David Stewart, whom he had not seen
for some weeks.
At the door he learnt that Mademoiselle was that very day returned and
was at home. So he went in to the drawing-room, reserving his visit to
old David until later. He found the room divided into two camps. At
one side Mrs. Benham conversed in melancholic monotones with two elderly
French ladies, who were clad in depressing black of a dowdiness
surpassed only in English provincial towns. It was as if the three
mourned together over the remains of some dear one who lay dead amongst
them. Hartley bowed low with an uncontrollable shiver, and turned to
the tea-table, where Miss Benham sat in the seat of authority, flanked
by a young American lady, whom he had met before, and by Baron de Vries,
whom he had not seen since the evening of the de Saulnes' dinner party.
Miss Benham greeted him with evident pleasure, and to his great delight
remembered just how he liked his tea--three pieces of sugar and no milk.
It always flatters a man when his little tastes of this sort are
remembered. The four fell at once into conversation together, and the
young American lady asked Hartley why Ste. Marie was not with him.
"I thought you two always went about together," she said. "Were never
seen apart and all that--a sort of modern Damon and Phidias." Hartley
caught Baron de Vries' eye and looked away again hastily.
"My--ah, Phidias," said he, resisting an irritable desire to correct the
lady, "got mislaid to-day. It shan't happen again, I promise you. He's
a very busy person just now, though. He hasn't time for social
dissipation. I'm the butterfly of the pair." The lady gave a sudden
laugh.
"He was busy enough the last time I saw him," she said, crinkling her
eyelids. She turned to Miss Benham.
"Do you remember that evening we were going home from the _Madrid_, and
motored round by Montmartre to see the _fete_?"
"Yes," said Miss Benham, unsmiling, "I remember."
"Your friend, Ste. Marie," said the American lady to Hartley, "was
distinctly the lion of the _fete_--at the moment we arrived, anyhow. He
was riding a galloping pig and throwing those paper streamer
things--what do you call them?--with both hands, and a genial lady in a
blue hat was riding the same pig and helping him out. It was just like
the _Vie de Boheme_ and the other books. I found it charming."
Baron de Vries emitted an amused chuckle.
"That was very like Ste. Marie," he said. "Ste. Marie is a very
exceptional young man. He can be an angel one moment, a child playing
with toys the next, and--well, a rather commonplace social favourite the
third. It all comes of being romantic--imaginative. Ste. Marie--I know
nothing about this evening of which you speak--but Ste. Marie is quite
capable of stopping on his way to a funeral to ride a galloping pig--or
on his way to his own wedding.
"And the pleasant part of it is," said Baron de Vries, "that the lad
would turn up at either of these two ceremonies not a bit the worse,
outside or in, for his ride."
"Ah, now that's an oddly close shot," said Hartley. He paused a moment,
looking towards Miss Benham, and said--
"I beg pardon! Were you going to speak?"
"No," said Miss Benham, moving the things about on the tea-table before
her, and looking down at them. "No, not at all!"
"You came oddly close to the truth," the man went on, turning back to
Baron de Vries. He was speaking for Helen Benham's ears, and he knew
she would understand that, but he did not wish to seem to be watching
her.
"I was with Ste. Marie on that evening," he said. "No! I wasn't riding
a pig, but I was standing down in the crowd throwing serpentines at the
people who were. And I happen to know that he--that Ste. Marie was on
that day, that evening, more deeply concerned about something, more
absolutely wrapped up in it, devoted to it, than I have ever known him
to be about anything since I first knew him. The galloping pig was an
incident that made, except for the moment, no impression whatever upon
him." Hartley nodded his head.
"Yes," said he, "Ste. Marie can be an angel one moment and a child
playing with toys the next. When he sees toys he always plays with
them, and he plays hard, but when he drops them they go completely out
of his mind."
The American lady laughed.
"Gracious me!" she cried. "You two are emphatic enough about him,
aren't you?"
"We know him," said Baron de Vries. Hartley rose to replace his empty
cup on the tea-table. Miss Benham did not meet his eyes, and as he moved
away again she spoke to her friend about something they were going to do
on the next day, so Hartley went across to where Baron de Vries sat at a
little distance, and took a place beside him on the chaise longue. The
Belgian greeted him with raised eyebrows and the little half-sad
half-humorous smile which was characteristic of him in his gentler
moments.
"You were defending our friend with a purpose," he said in a low voice.
"Good! I am afraid he needs it--here." The younger man hesitated a
moment. Then he said--
"I came on purpose to do that. Ste. Marie knows that she saw him on
that confounded pig. He was half wild with distress over it
because--well, the meeting was singularly unfortunate, just then. I
can't explain----"
"You needn't explain," said the Belgian gravely. "I know. Helen told me
some days since, though she did not mention this encounter. Yes, defend
him with all your power, if you will. Stay after we others have gone
and--have it out with her. The Phidias lady (I must remember that _mot_,
by the way) is preparing to take her leave now, and I will follow her at
once. She shall believe that I am enamoured--that I sigh for her.
"Eh!" said he, shaking his head. And the lines in the kindly old face
seemed to deepen, but in a sort of grave tenderness. "Eh, so love has
come to the dear lad at last! Ah! of course, the hundred other affairs!
Yes, yes. But they were light. No seriousness in them. The ladies may
have loved. He didn't very much. This time, I'm afraid----"
Baron de Vries paused as if he did not mean to finish his sentence, and
Hartley said--
"You say 'afraid'! Why, afraid?"
The Belgian looked up at him reflectively.
"Did I say 'afraid'?" he asked. "Well--perhaps it was the word I
wanted. I wonder if these two are fitted for each other. I am fond of
them both. I think you know that, but--she's not very flexible, this
child. And she hasn't much humour. I love her, but I know those things
are true. I wonder if one ought to marry Ste. Marie without flexibility
and without humour."
"If they love each other," said Richard Hartley, "I expect the other
things don't count. Do they?"
Baron de Vries rose to his feet, for he saw that the Phidias lady was
going.
"Perhaps not," said he; "I hope not. In any case, do your best for him
with Helen. Make her comprehend if you can. I am afraid she is unhappy
over the affair." He made his adieux and went away with the American
lady, to that young person's obvious excitement. And after a moment the
three ladies across the room departed also, Mrs. Benham explaining that
she was taking her two friends up to her own sitting-room to show them
something vaguely related to the heathen. So Hartley was left alone
with Helen Benham.
It was not his way to beat about the bush, and he gave battle at once.
He said, standing to say it more easily--
"You know why I came here to-day. It was the first chance I've had
since that--unfortunate evening. I came on Ste. Marie's account."
Miss Benham said a weak--
"Oh!" And because she was nervous and overwrought and because the thing
meant so much to her, she said cheaply--
"He owes me no apologies. He has a perfect right to act as he pleases,
you know."
The Englishman frowned across at her.
"I didn't come to make apologies," said he. "I came to explain. Well, I
have explained--Baron de Vries and I together. That's just how it
happened, and that's just how Ste. Marie takes things. The point is,
that you've got to understand it. I've got to make you."
The girl smiled up at him dolefully.
"You look," she said, "as if you were going to beat me if necessary.
You look very warlike."
"I feel warlike," the man said, nodding. He said--
"I'm fighting for a friend to whom you are doing, in your mind, an
injustice. I know him better than you do, and I tell you you're doing
him a grave injustice. You're failing altogether to understand him."
"I wonder," the girl said, looking very thoughtfully down at the table
before her.
"I know," said he.
Quite suddenly she gave a little overwrought cry, and she put up her
hands over her face.
"Oh, Richard!" she said, "that day when he was here! He left me----
Oh, I cannot tell you at what a height he left me! It was something new
and beautiful. He swept me to the clouds with him. And I
might--perhaps I might have lived on there. Who knows? But then that
hideous evening! Ah, it was too sickening, the fall back to common
earth again!"
"I know," said the man gently, "I know. And he knew, too. Directly
he'd seen you he knew how you would feel about it. I'm not pretending
that it was of no consequence. It was unfortunate, of course. But--the
point is it did not mean in him any slackening, any stooping, any
letting go. It was a moment's incident. We went to the wretched place
by accident after dinner. Ste. Marie saw those childish lunatics at
play, and for about two minutes he played with them. The lady in the
blue hat made it appear a little more extreme, and that's all."
Miss Benham rose to her feet and moved restlessly back and forth.
"Oh, Richard!" she said, "the golden spell is broken--the enchantment he
laid upon me that day. I'm not like him, you know. Oh, I wish I were!
I wish I were! I can't change from hour to hour. I can't rise to the
clouds again after my fall to earth. It has all--become something
different.
"Don't misunderstand me," she cried; "I don't mean that I've ceased to
care for him. No, far from that! But I was in such an exalted heaven,
and now I'm not there any more. Perhaps he can lift me to it again. Oh
yes, I'm sure he can when I see him once more; but I wanted to go on
living there so happily while he was away! Do you understand at all?"
"I think I do," the man said, but he looked at her very curiously and a
little sadly; for it was the first time he had ever seen her swept from
her superb poise by any emotion, and he hardly recognised her. It was
very bitter to him to realise that he could never have stirred her to
this, never under any conceivable circumstances.
The girl came to him where he stood and touched his arm with her hand.
"He is waiting to hear how I feel about it all, isn't he?" she said.
"He is waiting to know that I understand. Will you tell him a little
lie for me, Richard? No! You needn't tell a lie; I will tell it. Tell
him that I said I understood perfectly. Tell him that I was shocked for
a moment, but that afterwards I understood and thought no more about it.
Will you tell him I said that? It won't be a lie from you, because I
did say it. Oh, I will not grieve him or hamper him now while he is
working in my cause! I'll tell him a lie rather than have him grieve."
"Need it be a lie?" said Richard Hartley. "Can't you truly believe what
you've said?"
She shook her head slowly.
"I'll try," said she, "but--my golden spell is broken, and I can't mend
it alone. I'm sorry."
He turned with a little sigh to leave her, but Miss Benham followed him
towards the door of the drawing-room.
"You're a good friend, Richard," she said, when she had come near.
"You're a good friend to him."
"He deserves good friends," said the man stoutly. "And besides," said
he, "we're brothers in arms nowadays. We've enlisted together to fight
for the same cause."
The girl fell back with a little cry. "Do you mean," she said, after a
moment, "do you mean that you are working with him--to find Arthur?"
Hartley nodded.
"But," said she stammering, "but, Richard----"
The man checked her. "Oh, I know what I'm doing," said he. "My eyes
are open. I know that I'm not--well, in the running. I work for no
reward except a desire to help you and Ste. Marie. That's all. It
pleases me to be useful."
He went away with that, not waiting for an answer; and the girl stood
where he had left her, staring after him.
*CHAPTER X*
*CAPTAIN STEWART ENTERTAINS*
Ste. Marie returned, after three days, from Dinard in a depressed and
somewhat puzzled frame of mind. He had found no trace whatever of
Arthur Benham either at Dinard or at Deauville, and, what was more, he
was unable to discover that any one even remotely resembling that youth
had been seen at either place. The matter of identification, it seemed
to him, should be a rather simple one. In the first place, the boy's
appearance was not at all French, nor for that matter English: it was
very American. Also he spoke French--so Ste. Marie had been told--very
badly, having for the language that scornful contempt peculiar to
Anglo-Saxons of a certain type. His speech, it seemed, was, like his
appearance, ultra-American, full of strange idioms and oddly pronounced.
In short, such a youth would be rather sure to be remembered by any
hotel management and staff with which he might have come in contact.
At first Ste. Marie pursued his investigations quietly and, as it were,
casually, but, after his initial failure, he went to the managements of
the various hotels and lodging-houses and to the cafes and bathing
establishments, and told them with all frankness a part of the
truth--that he was searching for a young man whose disappearance had
caused great distress to his family. He was not long in discovering
that no such young man could have been either in Dinard or Deauville.
The thing which puzzled him was that, apart from finding no trace of the
missing boy, he also found no trace of Captain Stewart's agent--the man
who had been first on the ground. No one seemed able to recollect that
such a person had been making inquiries, and Ste. Marie began to suspect
that his friend was being imposed upon. He determined to warn Stewart
that his agents were earning their fees too easily.
So he returned to Paris more than a little dejected and sore over this
waste of time and effort. He arrived by a noon tram, and drove across
the city in a fiacre to the Rue d'Assas. But as he was in the midst of
unpacking his portmanteau, for he kept no servant (a woman came in once
a day to "do" the rooms), the door-bell rang. It was Baron de Vries,
and Ste. Marie admitted him with an exclamation of surprise and
pleasure.
"You passed me in the street just now," explained the Belgian, "and, as
I was a few minutes early for a lunch engagement, I followed you up."
He pointed with his stick at the open bag.
"Ah, you have been on a journey! Detective work?"
Ste. Marie pushed his guest into a chair, gave him cigarettes, and told
him about the fruitless expedition to Dinard. He spoke also of his
belief that Captain Stewart's agent had never really found a clue at
all, and at that Baron de Vries nodded his grey head and said, "Ah!" in
a tone of some significance. Afterwards he smoked a little while in
silence, but presently he said, as if with some hesitation--
"May I be permitted to offer a word of advice?"
"But surely!" cried Ste. Marie, kicking away the half-empty portmanteau.
"Why not?"
"Do whatever you are going to do in this matter according to your own
judgment," said the elder man. "Or according to Mr. Hartley's and your
combined judgments. Make your investigations without reference to our
friend Captain Stewart." He halted there as if that were all he had
meant to say, but when he saw Ste. Marie's raised eyebrows, he frowned
and went on slowly as if picking his words with some care.
"I should be sorry," he said, "to have Captain Stewart at the head of
any investigation of this nature in which I was deeply interested--just
now, at any rate. I am afraid--It is difficult to say. I do not wish
to say too much--I am afraid he is not quite the man for the position."
Ste. Marie nodded his head with great emphasis.
"Ah!" he cried, "that's just what I have felt, you know, all along. And
it's what Hartley felt too, I'm sure. No, Stewart is not the sort for a
detective. He's too cock-sure. He won't admit that he might possibly
be wrong now and then. He's too----"
"He is too much occupied with other matters," said Baron de Vries. Ste.
Marie sat down on the edge of a chair.
"Other matters?" he demanded. "That sounds mysterious. What other
matters?"
"Oh, there is nothing very mysterious about it," said the elder man. He
frowned down at his cigarette and brushed some fallen ash neatly from
his knees.
"Captain Stewart," said he, "is badly worried, and has been for the past
year or so--badly worried over money matters and other things. He has
lost enormous sums at play, as I happen to know; and he has lost still
more enormous sums at Auteuil and at Longchamps. Also the ladies are
not without their demands."
Ste. Marie gave a shout of laughter.
"_Comment donc!_" he cried. "_Ce vieillard?_"
"Ah well," deprecated the other man, "_Vieillard_ is putting it rather
high. He can't be more than fifty, I should think. To be sure he looks
older, but then, in his day, he lived a great deal in a short time. Do
you happen to remember Olga Nilssen?"
"I do," said Ste. Marie. "I remember her very well indeed; I was a sort
of go-between in settling up that affair with Morrison. Morrison's
people asked me to do what I could. Yes, I remember her well, and with
some pleasure. I felt sorry for her, you know. People didn't quite
know the truth of that affair. Morrison behaved very badly to her."
"Yes," said Baron de Vries, "and Captain Stewart has behaved very badly
to her also. She is furious with rage or jealousy or both. She goes
about, I am told, threatening to kill him, and it would be rather like
her to do it one day. Well, I have dragged in all this scandal by way
of showing you that Stewart has his hands full of his own affairs just
now, and so cannot give the attention he ought to give to hunting out
his nephew. As you suggest, his agents may be deceiving him. I don't
know, I suppose they could do it easily enough. If I were you I would
set to work quite independently of him."
"Yes," said Ste. Marie in an absent tone. "Oh yes, I shall do that, you
may be sure." He gave a sudden smile.
"He's a queer type, this Captain Stewart," said Ste. Marie. "He begins
to interest me very much. I had never suspected this side of him
(though I remember now that I once saw him coming out of a milliner's
shop). He looks rather an ascetic, rather donnish, don't you think? I
remember that he talked to me one day quite pathetically about feeling
his age and about liking young people round him. He's an odd character.
Fancy him mixed up in an affair with Olga Nilssen! or, rather, fancy her
involved in an affair with him! What can she have seen in him? She's
not mercenary, you know. At least she used not to be."
"Ah! there," said Baron de Vries, "you enter upon a _terra incognita_.
No one can say what a woman sees in this man or in that. It's beyond
our ken." He rose to take his leave, and Ste. Marie went with him to
the door.
"I've been asked to a sort of party at Stewart's rooms this week," Ste.
Marie said. "I don't know whether I shall go or not. Probably not. I
suppose I shouldn't find Olga Nilssen there?"
"Well, no," said the Belgian, laughing. "No, I hardly think so.
Good-bye! Think over what I've told you. Good-bye!" He went away down
the stair, and Ste. Marie returned to his unpacking.
Nothing more of consequence occurred in the next few days. Hartley had
unearthed a somewhat shabby adventurer, who swore to having seen the
Irishman, O'Hara, in Paris within a month, but it was by no means
certain that this being did not merely affirm what he believed to be
desired of him, and in any case the information was of no especial
value, since it was O'Hara's present whereabouts that was the point at
issue. So it came to Thursday evening. Ste. Marie received a note from
Captain Stewart during the day, reminding him that he was to come to the
Rue du Faubourg St. Honore that evening, and asking him to come early,
at ten or thereabouts, so that the two could have a comfortable chat
before any one else turned up. Ste. Marie had about decided not to go at
all, but the courtesy of this special invitation from Miss Benham's
uncle made it rather impossible for him to stay away. He tried to
persuade Hartley to follow him later on in the evening, but that
gentleman flatly refused, and went away to dine with some English
friends at Armenonville.
So Ste. Marie, in a vile temper, dined quite alone at Lavenue's, beside
the Gare Montparnasse, and towards ten o'clock drove across the river to
the Rue du Faubourg. Captain Stewart's flat was up five stories, at the
top of the building in which it was located, and so well above the
noises of the street. Ste. Marie went up in the automatic lift, and at
the door above his host met him in person, saying that the one servant
he kept was busy making preparations in the kitchen beyond. They
entered a large room, long but comparatively shallow, in shape not
unlike the sitting-room in the Rue d'Assas but very much bigger, and
Ste. Marie uttered an exclamation of surprise and pleasure, for he had
never before seen an interior anything like this. The room was decorated
and furnished entirely in Chinese and Japanese articles of great age and
remarkable beauty. Ste. Marie knew little of the hieratic art of these
two countries, but he fancied that the place must be an endless delight
to the expert.
The general tone of the room was gold, dulled and softened by great age
until it had ceased to glitter, and relieved by the dusty Chinese blue,
and by old red faded to rose, and by warm ivory tints. The great expanse
of the walls was covered by a brownish-yellow cloth, coarse, like
burlap, and against it round the room hung sixteen large panels
representing the sixteen _Rakan_. They were early copies--fifteenth
century, Captain Stewart said--of those famous originals by the Chinese
_Sung_ master Ririomin, which have been for six hundred years or more
the treasures of Japan. They were mounted upon Japanese brocade of blue
and dull gold, framed in keyaki wood, and, out of their brown
time-stained shadows, the great _Rakan_ scowled or grinned or placidly
gazed, grotesquely graceful masterpieces of a perished art.
At the far end of the room, under a gilded canopy of intricate
wood-carving, stood upon his pedestal of many-petalled lotus a great
statue of Amida Buddha in the yogi attitude of contemplation, and at
intervals against the other walls other smaller images stood or sat;
Buddha in many incarnations; Kwannon, Goddess of Mercy; Jizo Bosatzu;
Hotei, pot-bellied, God of Contentment; Jingo-Kano, God of War. In the
centre of the place was a Buddhist temple table; and priests' chairs,
lacquered and inlaid, stood about the room. The floor was covered by
Chinese rugs, dull yellow with blue flowers; and over a doorway which
led into another room was fixed a huge rama of Chinese pierced carving,
gilded, in which there were trees and rocks and little grouped figures
of the hundred immortals.
It was indeed an extraordinary room. Ste. Marie looked about its mellow
glow with a half-comprehending wonder, and he looked at the man beside
him curiously, for here was another side to this many-sided character.
Captain Stewart smiled.
"You like my museum?" he asked. "Few people care much for it except, of
course, those who go in for the Oriental arts. Most of my friends think
it bizarre--too grotesque and unusual. I have tried to satisfy them by
including those comfortable low divan couches (they refuse altogether to
sit in the priests' chairs), but still they are unhappy." He called his
servant, who came to take Ste. Marie's hat and coat, and returned with
smoking things.
"It seems entirely wonderful to me," said the younger man. "I'm not an
expert at all--I don't know who the gentlemen in those sixteen panels
are, for example; but it is very beautiful. I have never seen anything
like it at all." He gave a little laugh.
"Will it sound very impertinent in me, I wonder, if I express
surprise--not surprise at finding this magnificent room, but at
discovering that this sort of thing is a taste and, very evidently, a
serious study of yours? You--I remember your saying once with some
feeling that it was youth and beauty and--well, freshness that you liked
best to be surrounded by. This," said Ste. Marie, waving an inclusive
hand, "was young so many centuries ago! It fairly breathes antiquity and
death."
"Yes," said Captain Stewart thoughtfully. "Yes, that is quite true."
The two had seated themselves upon one of the broad low benches which
had been built into the place to satisfy the philistine.
"I find it hard to explain," he said, "because both things are passions
of mine. Youth--I could not exist without it. Since I have it no
longer in my own body, I wish to see it about me. It gives me life. It
keeps my heart beating. I must have it near. And then this--antiquity
and death, beautiful things made by hands dead centuries ago in an alien
country! I love this too. I didn't speak too strongly, it is a sort of
passion with me--something quite beyond the collector's mania, quite
beyond that. Sometimes, do you know, I stay at home in the evening, and
I sit here quite alone with the lights half on and, for hours together,
I smoke and watch these things--the quiet, sure, patient smile of that
Buddha for example. Think how long he has been smiling like that, and
waiting! Waiting for what? There is something mysterious beyond all
words in that smile of his, that fixed, crudely carved wooden smile.
No, I'll be hanged if it's crude! It is beyond our modern art. The
dead men carved better than we do. We couldn't manage that with such
simple means. We can only reproduce what is before us. We can't carve
questions--mysteries--everlasting riddles."
Through the pale blue wreathing smoke of his cigarette Captain Stewart
gazed down the room to where Eternal Buddha stood and smiled eternally.
And from there the man's eyes moved with slow enjoyment along the
opposite wall over those who sat or stood there, over the panels of the
ancient Rakan, over carved lotus and gilt contorted dragon for ever in
pursuit of the holy pearl. He drew a short breath which seemed to
bespeak extreme contentment, the keenest height of pleasure, and he
stirred a little where he sat and settled himself among the cushions.
Ste. Marie watched him, and the expression of the man's face began to be
oddly revolting. It was the face of a voluptuary in the presence of his
desire. He was uncomfortable and wished to say something to break the
silence, but, as often occurs at such a time, he could think of nothing
to say. So there was a brief silence between them. But presently
Captain Stewart roused himself with an obvious effort.
"Here! this won't do," said he, in a tone of whimsical apology. "This
won't do, you know. I'm floating off on my hobby (and there's a mixed
metaphor that would do credit to your own Milesian blood!) I'm boring
you to extinction, and I don't want to do that, for I'm anxious that you
should come here again--and often. I should like to have you form the
habit.
"What was it I had in mind to ask you about? Ah yes! The journey to
Dinard and Deauville. I am afraid it turned out to be fruitless or you
would have let me know."
"Entirely fruitless," said Ste. Marie. He went on to tell the elder man
of his investigation, and of his certainty that no one resembling Arthur
Benham had been at either of the two places.
"It's no affair of mine, to be sure," he said; "but I rather suspect
that your agent was deceiving you--pretending to have accomplished
something by way of making you think he was busy." Ste. Marie was so
sure the other would immediately disclaim this that he waited for the
word, and gave a little smothered laugh when Captain Stewart said
promptly--
"Oh no! No! That is impossible. I have every confidence in that man.
He is one of my best. No, you are mistaken there. I am more
disappointed than you could possibly be over the failure of your
efforts, but I am quite sure my man thought he had something worth
working upon.
"By the way, I have received another rather curious communication--from
Ostend this time. I will show you the letter, and you may try your luck
there if you would care to." He felt in his pockets and then rose.
"I've left the thing in another coat," said he; "if you will allow me,
I'll fetch it." But before he had turned away the doorbell rang, and he
paused.
"Ah well," he said, "another time. Here are some of my guests. They
have come earlier than I had expected."
The new arrivals were three very perfectly dressed ladies, one of them
an operatic light who chanced not to be singing that evening, and whom
Ste. Marie had met before. The two others were rather difficult of
classification, but probably, he thought, ornaments of that mysterious
borderland between the two worlds which seems to give shelter to so many
people against whose characters nothing definite is known, but whose
antecedents and connexions are not made topics of conversation. The
three ladies seemed to be on very friendly terms with Captain Stewart,
and greeted him with much noisy delight. One of the unclassified two,
when her host, with a glance towards Ste. Marie, addressed her formally,
seemed inordinately amused, and laughed for a long time.
Within the next hour ten or a dozen other guests had arrived, and they
all seemed to know each other very well, and proceeded to make
themselves quite at home. Ste. Marie regarded them with a reflective
and not over-enthusiastic eye, and he wondered a good deal why he had
been asked here to meet them. He was as far from a prig or a snob as
any man could very well be, and he often went to very Bohemian parties
which were given by his painter or musician friends, but these people
seemed to him quite different. The men, with the exception of two
eminent opera singers, who quite obviously had been asked because of
their voices, were the sort of men who abound at such places as Ostend
and Monte Carlo, and Baden Baden in the race week. That is not to say
that they were ordinary racing touts or the cheaper kind of adventurers:
there was a count among them, and a marquis who had recently been
divorced by his American wife; but adventurers of a sort they
undoubtedly were. There was not one of them, so far as Ste. Marie was
aware, who was received anywhere in good society, and he resented very
much being compelled to meet them.
Naturally enough he felt much less concern on the score of the ladies.
It is an undoubted and wellnigh universal truth that men who would
refuse outright to meet certain classes of their own sex show no
reluctance whatever over meeting the women of a corresponding
circle--that is, if the women are attractive. It is a depressing fact,
and inclines one to sighs and head-shakes and some moral indignation,
until the reverse truth is brought to light: namely, that women have
identically the same point of view; that while they cast looks of
loathing and horror upon certain of their sisters, they will meet with
pleasure any presentable man whatever his crimes or vices.
Ste. Marie was very much puzzled over all this. It seemed to him so
unnecessary that a man who really had some footing in the newer society
of Paris should choose to surround himself with people of this type;
but, as he looked on and wondered, he became aware of a curious and, in
the light of a past conversation, significant fact. All of the people
in the room were young, all of them in their varying fashions and
degrees very attractive to look upon, all full to overflowing of life
and spirits and the determination to have a good time. He saw Captain
Stewart moving among them, playing very gracefully his role of host, and
the man seemed to have dropped twenty years from his shoulders. A
miracle of rejuvenation seemed to have come upon him; his eyes were
bright and eager, the colour was high in his cheeks, and the dry
pedantic tone had gone from his voice. Ste. Marie watched him, and at
last he thought he understood. It was half revolting, half pathetic, he
thought, but it certainly was interesting to see.
[Illustration: "He saw Captain Stewart moving among them."]
Duval, the great basso of the Opera, accompanied at the piano by one of
the unclassified ladies, was just finishing _Mefistofele's_ drinking
song out of _Faust_ when the door-bell rang.
*CHAPTER XI*
*A GOLDEN LADY ENTERS: THE EYES AGAIN*
The music of voice and piano was very loud just then, so that the little
soft whirring sound of the electric bell reached only one or two pairs
of ears in the big room. It did not reach the host certainly, and
neither he nor most of the others observed the servant make his way
among the groups of seated or standing people and go to the outer door,
which opened upon a tiny hallway. The song came to an end, and
everybody was cheering and applauding and crying _bravo_ or _bis_, or
one of the other things that people shout at such times, when, as if in
unexpected answer to the outburst, a lady appeared between the yellow
portieres, and came forward a little way
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