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The Guest of Quesnay

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #5756 · 360,799 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Guest of Quesnay

Author: Booth Tarkington


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5756]
                Most recently updated: June 4, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE GUEST OF QUESNAY

BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK 1915

TO OVID BUTLER JAMESON




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Several pairs of brighter eyes followed my companion ...... Frontispiece

"I haven't had my life. It's gone!"

"You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren't you?"

"Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried




CHAPTER I


There are old Parisians who will tell you pompously that the
boulevards, like the political cafes, have ceased to exist, but this
means only that the boulevards no longer gossip of Louis Napoleon, the
Return of the Bourbons, or of General Boulanger, for these highways are
always too busily stirring with present movements not to be forgetful
of their yesterdays. In the shade of the buildings and awnings, the
loungers, the lookers-on in Paris, the audience of the boulevard, sit
at little tables, sipping coffee from long glasses, drinking absinthe
or bright-coloured sirops, and gazing over the heads of throngs afoot
at others borne along through the sunshine of the street in carriages,
in cabs, in glittering automobiles, or high on the tops of omnibuses.

From all the continents the multitudes come to join in that procession:
Americans, tagged with race-cards and intending hilarious disturbances;
puzzled Americans, worn with guide-book plodding; Chinese princes in
silk; queer Antillean dandies of swarthy origin and fortune; ruddy
English, thinking of nothing; pallid English, with upper teeth bared
and eyes hungrily searching for sign-boards of tea-rooms;
over-Europeanised Japanese, unpleasantly immaculate; burnoosed sheiks
from the desert, and red-fezzed Semitic peddlers; Italian nobles in
English tweeds; Soudanese negroes swaggering in frock coats; slim
Spaniards, squat Turks, travellers, idlers, exiles, fugitives,
sportsmen--all the tribes and kinds of men are tributary here to the
Parisian stream which, on a fair day in spring, already overflows the
banks with its own much-mingled waters. Soberly clad burgesses,
bearded, amiable, and in no fatal hurry; well-kept men of the world
swirling by in miraculous limousines; legless cripples flopping on
hands and leather pads; thin-whiskered students in velveteen;
walrus-moustached veterans in broadcloth; keen-faced old prelates;
shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass; workingmen
turned horse and harnessed to carts; sidewalk jesters, itinerant
vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to resemble
gold-showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy musicians,
blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple-faced, glazed-hatted,
scarlet-waistcoated, cigarette-smoking cabmen, calling one another
"onions," "camels," and names even more terrible. Women prevalent over
all the concourse; fair women, dark women, pretty women, gilded women,
haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry women. Fine
women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor women in fine
clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric
landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of
flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils
of white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women
draped, coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened
poet-milliners and the hasheesh dreams of ladies' tailors.

About the procession, as it moves interminably along the boulevard, a
blue haze of fine dust and burnt gasoline rises into the sunshine like
the haze over the passages to an amphitheatre toward which a crowd is
trampling; and through this the multitudes seem to go as actors passing
to their cues. Your place at one of the little tables upon the sidewalk
is that of a wayside spectator: and as the performers go by, in some
measure acting or looking their parts already, as if in preparation,
you guess the roles they play, and name them comedians, tragedians,
buffoons, saints, beauties, sots, knaves, gladiators, acrobats,
dancers; for all of these are there, and you distinguish the principles
from the unnumbered supernumeraries pressing forward to the entrances.
So, if you sit at the little tables often enough--that is, if you
become an amateur boulevardier--you begin to recognise the transient
stars of the pageant, those to whom the boulevard allows a dubious and
fugitive role of celebrity, and whom it greets with a slight flutter:
the turning of heads, a murmur of comment, and the incredulous
boulevard smile, which seems to say: "You see? Madame and monsieur
passing there--evidently they think we still believe in them!"

This flutter heralded and followed the passing of a white touring-car
with the procession one afternoon, just before the Grand Prix, though
it needed no boulevard celebrity to make the man who lolled in the
tonneau conspicuous. Simply for THAT, notoriety was superfluous; so
were the remarkable size and power of his car; so was the elaborate
touring-costume of flannels and pongee he wore; so was even the
enamelled presence of the dancer who sat beside him. His face would
have done it without accessories.

My old friend, George Ward, and I had met for our aperitif at the
Terrace Larue, by the Madeleine, when the white automobile came snaking
its way craftily through the traffic. Turning in to pass a victoria on
the wrong side, it was forced down to a snail's pace near the curb and
not far from our table, where it paused, checked by a blockade at the
next corner. I heard Ward utter a half-suppressed guttural of what I
took to be amazement, and I did not wonder.

The face of the man in the tonneau detached him to the spectator's gaze
and singled him out of the concourse with an effect almost ludicrous in
its incongruity. The hair was dark, lustrous and thick, the forehead
broad and finely modelled, and certain other ruinous vestiges of youth
and good looks remained; but whatever the features might once have
shown of honour, worth, or kindly semblance had disappeared beyond all
tracing in a blurred distortion. The lids of one eye were discoloured
and swollen almost together; other traces of a recent battering were
not lacking, nor was cosmetic evidence of a heroic struggle, on the
part of some valet of infinite pains, to efface them. The nose lost
outline in the discolorations of the puffed cheeks; the chin, tufted
with a small imperial, trembled beneath a sagging, gray lip. And that
this bruised and dissipated mask should suffer the final grotesque
touch, it was decorated with the moustache of a coquettish marquis, the
ends waxed and exquisitely elevated.

The figure was fat, but loose and sprawling, seemingly without the will
to hold itself together; in truth the man appeared to be almost in a
semi-stupor, and, contrasted with this powdered Silenus, even the woman
beside him gained something of human dignity. At least, she was
thoroughly alive, bold, predatory, and in spite of the gross
embon-point that threatened her, still savagely graceful. A purple
veil, dotted with gold, floated about her hat, from which green-dyed
ostrich plumes cascaded down across a cheek enamelled dead white. Her
hair was plastered in blue-black waves, parted low on the forehead; her
lips were splashed a startling carmine, the eyelids painted blue; and,
from between lashes gummed into little spikes of blacking, she favoured
her companion with a glance of carelessly simulated tenderness,--a look
all too vividly suggesting the ghastly calculations of a cook wheedling
a chicken nearer the kitchen door. But I felt no great pity for the
victim.

"Who is it?" I asked, staring at the man in the automobile and not
turning toward Ward.

"That is Mariana--'la bella Mariana la Mursiana,'" George answered;
"--one of those women who come to Paris from the tropics to form
themselves on the legend of the one great famous and infamous Spanish
dancer who died a long while ago. Mariana did very well for a time.
I've heard that the revolutionary societies intend striking medals in
her honour: she's done worse things to royalty than all the anarchists
in Europe! But her great days are over: she's getting old; that type
goes to pieces quickly, once it begins to slump, and it won't be long
before she'll be horribly fat, though she's still a graceful dancer.
She danced at the Folie Rouge last week."

"Thank you, George," I said gratefully. "I hope you'll point out the
Louvre and the Eiffel Tower to me some day. I didn't mean Mariana."

"What did you mean?"

What I had meant was so obvious that I turned to my friend in surprise.
He was nervously tapping his chin with the handle of his cane and
staring at the white automobile with very grim interest.

"I meant the man with her," I said.

"Oh!" He laughed sourly. "That carrion?"

"You seem to be an acquaintance."

"Everybody on the boulevard knows who he is," said Ward curtly, paused,
and laughed again with very little mirth. "So do you," he continued;
"and as for my acquaintance with him--yes, I had once the distinction
of being his rival in a small way, a way so small, in fact, that it
ended in his becoming a connection of mine by marriage. He's Larrabee
Harman."

That was a name somewhat familiar to readers of American newspapers
even before its bearer was fairly out of college. The publicity it then
attained (partly due to young Harman's conspicuous wealth) attached to
some youthful exploits not without a certain wild humour. But frolic
degenerated into brawl and debauch: what had been scrapes for the boy
became scandals for the man; and he gathered a more and more unsavoury
reputation until its like was not to be found outside a penitentiary.
The crux of his career in his own country was reached during a midnight
quarrel in Chicago when he shot a negro gambler. After that, the negro
having recovered and the matter being somehow arranged so that the
prosecution was dropped, Harman's wife left him, and the papers
recorded her application for a divorce. She was George Ward's second
cousin, the daughter of a Baltimore clergyman; a belle in a season and
town of belles, and a delightful, headstrong creature, from all
accounts. She had made a runaway match of it with Harman three years
before, their affair having been earnestly opposed by all her
relatives--especially by poor George, who came over to Paris just after
the wedding in a miserable frame of mind.

The Chicago exploit was by no means the end of Harman's notoriety.
Evading an effort (on the part of an aunt, I believe) to get him locked
up safely in a "sanitarium," he began a trip round the world with an
orgy which continued from San Francisco to Bangkok, where, in the
company of some congenial fellow travellers, he interfered in a native
ceremonial with the result that one of his companions was drowned.
Proceeding, he was reported to be in serious trouble at Constantinople,
the result of an inquisitiveness little appreciated by Orientals. The
State Department, bestirring itself, saved him from a very real peril,
and he continued his journey. In Rome he was rescued with difficulty
from a street mob that unreasonably refused to accept intoxication as
an excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later,
during the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of
his disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette.

Every event, no matter how trifling, in this man's pitiful career had
been recorded in the American newspapers with an elaboration which, for
my part, I found infuriatingly tiresome. I have lived in Paris so long
that I am afraid to go home: I have too little to show for my years of
pottering with paint and canvas, and I have grown timid about all the
changes that have crept in at home. I do not know the "new men," I do
not know how they would use me, and fear they might make no place for
me; and so I fit myself more closely into the little grooves I have
worn for myself, and resign myself to stay. But I am no "expatriate." I
know there is a feeling at home against us who remain over here to do
our work, but in most instances it is a prejudice which springs from a
misunderstanding. I think the quality of patriotism in those of us who
"didn't go home in time" is almost pathetically deep and real, and,
like many another oldish fellow in my position, I try to keep as close
to things at home as I can. All of my old friends gradually ceased to
write to me, but I still take three home newspapers, trying to follow
the people I knew and the things that happen; and the ubiquity of so
worthless a creature as Larrabee Harman in the columns I dredged for
real news had long been a point of irritation to this present exile.
Not only that: he had usurped space in the Continental papers, and of
late my favourite Parisian journal had served him to me with my morning
coffee, only hinting his name, but offering him with that gracious
satire characteristic of the Gallic journalist writing of anything
American. And so this grotesque wreck of a man was well known to the
boulevard--one of its sights. That was to be perceived by the flutter
he caused, by the turning of heads in his direction, and the low
laughter of the people at the little tables. Three or four in the rear
ranks had risen to their feet to get a better look at him and his
companion.

Some one behind us chuckled aloud. "They say Mariana beats him."

"Evidently!"

The dancer was aware of the flutter, and called Harman's attention to
it with a touch upon his arm and a laugh and a nod of her violent
plumage.

At that he seemed to rouse himself somewhat: his head rolled heavily
over upon his shoulder, the lids lifted a little from the red-shot
eyes, showing a strange pride when his gaze fell upon the many staring
faces.

Then, as the procession moved again and the white automobile with it,
the sottish mouth widened in a smile of dull and cynical contempt: the
look of a half-poisoned Augustan borne down through the crowds from the
Palatine after supping with Caligula.

Ward pulled my sleeve.

"Come," he said, "let us go over to the Luxembourg gardens where the
air is cleaner."




CHAPTER II


Ward is a portrait-painter, and in the matter of vogue there seem to be
no pinnacles left for him to surmount. I think he has painted most of
the very rich women of fashion who have come to Paris of late years,
and he has become so prosperous, has such a polite celebrity, and his
opinions upon art are so conclusively quoted, that the friendship of
some of us who started with him has been dangerously strained.

He lives a well-ordered life; he has always led that kind of life. Even
in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an
occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would
have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a
prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him
one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured
into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in
appearance and manner. He has always been well tended and cared for by
women; in his student days his mother lived with him; his sister, Miss
Elizabeth, looks after him now. She came with him when he returned to
Paris after his disappointment in the unfortunate Harman affair, and
she took charge of all his business--as well as his
social--arrangements (she has been accused of a theory that the two
things may be happily combined), making him lease a house in an
expensively modish quarter near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Miss
Elizabeth is an instinctively fashionable woman, practical withal, and
to her mind success should be not only respectable but "smart." She
does not speak of the "right bank" and the "left bank" of the Seine;
she calls them the "right bank" and the "wrong bank." And yet, though
she removed George (her word is "rescued") from many of his old
associations with Montparnasse, she warmly encouraged my friendship
with him--yea, in spite of my living so deep in the wrong bank that the
first time he brought her to my studio, she declared she hadn't seen
anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the-old-hag's-cellar-at-midnight
since her childhood. She is a handsome woman, large, and of a fine,
high colour; her manner is gaily dictatorial, and she and I got along
very well together.

Probably she appreciated my going to some pains with the clothes I wore
when I went to their house. My visits there were infrequent, not
because I had any fear of wearing out a welcome, but on account of Miss
Elizabeth's "day," when I could see nothing of George for the crowd of
lionising women and time-wasters about him. Her "day" was a dread of
mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had
a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it--to my
misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in
youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door
as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood's, manhood's prayer has
been: From all such days, Good Lord, deliver me!

It was George's habit to come much oftener to see me. He always really
liked the sort of society his sister had brought about him; but now and
then there were intervals when it wore on him a little, I think.
Sometimes he came for me in his automobile and we would make a mild
excursion to breakfast in the country; and that is what happened one
morning about three weeks after the day when we had sought pure air in
the Luxembourg gardens.

We drove out through the Bois and by Suresnes, striking into a
roundabout road to Versailles beyond St. Cloud. It was June, a dustless
and balmy noon, the air thinly gilded by a faint haze, and I know few
things pleasanter than that road on a fair day of the early summer and
no sweeter way to course it than in an open car; though I must not be
giving myself out for a "motorist"--I have not even the right cap. I am
usually nervous in big machines, too; but Ward has never caught the
speed mania and holds a strange power over his chauffeur; so we rolled
along peacefully, not madly, and smoked (like the car) in hasteless
content.

"After all," said George, with a placid wave of the hand, "I sometimes
wish that the landscape had called me. You outdoor men have all the
health and pleasure of living in the open, and as for the work--oh! you
fellows think you work, but you don't know what it means."

"No?" I said, and smiled as I always meanly do when George "talks art."
He was silent for a few moments and then said irritably,

"Well, at least you can't deny that the academic crowd can DRAW!"

Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way
perhaps a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he
returned to his theme: "Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight;
two up, two down, cross and repeat. Take that ahead of us. Could
anything be simpler to paint?"

He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a
curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert. Beyond,
stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches. An
old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet
handkerchief knotted about her head.

"You think it's easy?" I asked.

"Easy! Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done--at least,
the way you fellows do it!" He clenched his fingers as if upon the
handle of a house-painter's brush. "Slap, dash--there's your road." He
paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of
a barn. "Swish, swash--there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit!
Speck! And there's your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your
dealer will probably call 'the human interest,' all complete. Squirt
the edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over
the whole, and there's your haze. Call it 'The Golden Road,' or 'The
Bath of Sunlight,' or 'Quiet Noon.' Then you'll probably get a
criticism beginning, 'Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon
canvas so poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist,
who in Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of
evening on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the
homeward ploughman--'"

He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a
siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white
touring-car swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to
see, and, snorting thunder, passed us "as if we had been standing
still."

It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in
its swirling tail of dust.

"Seventy miles an hour!" gasped George, swabbing at his eyes. "Those
are the fellows that get into the pa--Oh, Lord! THERE they go!"

Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in upon the reverse curve to
clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car;
and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the
road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to
get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her
perhaps, for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the
shriek of the machine drowned the human scream as the automobile struck.

The shock of contact was muffled. But the mass of machinery hoisted
itself in the air as if it had a life of its own and had been stung
into sudden madness. It was horrible to see, and so grotesque that a
long-forgotten memory of my boyhood leaped instantaneously into my
mind, a recollection of the evolutions performed by a Newfoundland dog
that rooted under a board walk and found a hive of wild bees.

The great machine left the road for the fields on the right, reared,
fell, leaped against the stone side of the culvert, apparently trying
to climb it, stood straight on end, whirled backward in a
half-somersault, crashed over on its side, flashed with flame and
explosion, and lay hidden under a cloud of dust and smoke.

Ward's driver slammed down his accelerator, sent us spinning round the
curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply at
the culvert.

The fabric of the road was so torn and distorted one might have thought
a steam dredge had begun work there, but the fragments of wreckage were
oddly isolated and inconspicuous. The peasant's cart, tossed into a
clump of weeds, rested on its side, the spokes of a rimless wheel
slowly revolving on the hub uppermost. Some tools were strewn in a
semi-circular trail in the dust; a pair of smashed goggles crunched
beneath my foot as I sprang out of Ward's car, and a big brass lamp had
fallen in the middle of the road, crumpled like waste paper. Beside it
lay a gold rouge box.

The old woman had somehow saved herself--or perhaps her saint had
helped her--for she was sitting in the grass by the roadside, wailing
hysterically and quite unhurt. The body of a man lay in a heap beneath
the stone archway, and from his clothes I guessed that he had been the
driver of the white car. I say "had been" because there were reasons
for needing no second glance to comprehend that the man was dead.
Nevertheless, I knelt beside him and placed my hand upon his breast to
see if his heart still beat. Afterward I concluded that I did this
because I had seen it done upon the stage, or had read of it in
stories; and even at the time I realised that it was a silly thing for
me to be doing.

Ward, meanwhile, proved more practical. He was dragging a woman out of
the suffocating smoke and dust that shrouded the wreck, and after a
moment I went to help him carry her into the fresh air, where George
put his coat under her head. Her hat had been forced forward over her
face and held there by the twisting of a system of veils she wore; and
we had some difficulty in unravelling this; but she was very much
alive, as a series of muffled imprecations testified, leading us to
conclude that her sufferings were more profoundly of rage than of pain.
Finally she pushed our hands angrily aside and completed the
untanglement herself, revealing the scratched and smeared face of
Mariana, the dancer.

"Cornichon! Chameau! Fond du bain!" she gasped, tears of anger starting
from her eyes. She tried to rise before we could help her, but dropped
back with a scream.

"Oh, the pain!" she cried. "That imbecile! If he has let me break my
leg! A pretty dancer I should be! I hope he is killed."

One of the singularities of motoring on the main-travelled roads near
Paris is the prevalence of cars containing physicians and surgeons.
Whether it be testimony to the opportunism, to the sporting
proclivities, or to the prosperity of gentlemen of those professions, I
do not know, but it is a fact that I have never heard of an accident
(and in the season there is an accident every day) on one of these
roads when a doctor in an automobile was not almost immediately a
chance arrival, and fortunately our case offered no exception to this
rule. Another automobile had already come up and the occupants were
hastily alighting. Ward shouted to the foremost to go for a doctor.

"I am a doctor," the man answered, advancing and kneeling quickly by
the dancer. "And you--you may be of help yonder."

We turned toward the ruined car where Ward's driver was shouting for us.

"What is it?" called Ward as we ran toward him.

"Monsieur," he replied, "there is some one under the tonneau here!"

The smoke had cleared a little, though a rivulet of burning gasoline
ran from the wreck to a pool of flame it was feeding in the road. The
front cushions and woodwork had caught fire and a couple of labourers,
panting with the run across the fields, were vainly belabouring the
flames with brushwood. From beneath the overturned tonneau projected
the lower part of a man's leg, clad in a brown puttee and a russet
shoe. Ward's driver had brought his tools; had jacked up the car as
high as possible; but was still unable to release the imprisoned body.

"I have seized that foot and pulled with all my strength," he said,
"and I cannot make him move one centimetre. It is necessary that as
many people as possible lay hold of the car on the side away from the
fire and all lift together. Yes," he added, "and very soon!"

Some carters had come from the road and one of them lay full length on
the ground peering beneath the wreck. "It is the head of monsieur,"
explained this one; "it is the head of monsieur which is fastened under
there."

"Eh, but you are wiser than Clemenceau!" said the chauffeur. "Get up,
my ancient, and you there, with the brushwood, let the fire go for a
moment and help, when I say the word. And you, monsieur," he turned to
Ward, "if you please, will you pull with me upon the ankle here at the
right moment?"

The carters, the labourers, the men from the other automobile, and I
laid hold of the car together.

"Now, then, messieurs, LIFT!"

Stifled with the gasoline smoke, we obeyed. One or two hands were
scorched and our eyes smarted blindingly, but we gave a mighty heave,
and felt the car rising.

"Well done!" cried the chauffeur. "Well done! But a little more! The
smallest fraction--HA! It is finished, messieurs!"

We staggered back, coughing and wiping our eyes. For a minute or two I
could not see at all, and was busy with a handkerchief.

Ward laid his hand on my shoulder.

"Do you know who it is?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," I answered.

When I could see again, I found that I was looking almost straight down
into the upturned face of Larrabee Harman, and I cannot better express
what this man had come to be, and what the degradation of his life had
written upon him, than by saying that the dreadful thing I looked upon
now was no more horrible a sight than the face I had seen, fresh from
the valet and smiling in ugly pride at the starers, as he passed the
terrace of Larue on the day before the Grand Prix.

We helped to carry him to the doctor's car, and to lift the dancer into
Ward's, and to get both of them out again at the hospital at
Versailles, where they were taken. Then, with no need to ask each other
if we should abandon our plan to breakfast in the country, we turned
toward Paris, and rolled along almost to the barriers in silence.

"Did it seem to you," said George finally, "that a man so frightfully
injured could have any chance of getting well?"

"No," I answered. "I thought he was dying as we carried him into the
hospital."

"So did I. The top of his head seemed all crushed in--Whew!" He broke
off, shivering, and wiped his brow. After a pause he added
thoughtfully, "It will be a great thing for Louise."

Louise was the name of his second cousin, the girl who had done battle
with all her family and then run away from them to be Larrabee Harman's
wife. Remembering the stir that her application for divorce had made, I
did not understand how Harman's death could benefit her, unless George
had some reason to believe that he had made a will in her favour.
However, the remark had been made more to himself than to me and I did
not respond.

The morning papers flared once more with the name of Larrabee Harman,
and we read that there was "no hope of his surviving." Ironic phrase!
There was not a soul on earth that day who could have hoped for his
recovery, or who--for his sake--cared two straws whether he lived or
died. And the dancer had been right; one of her legs was badly broken:
she would never dance again.

Evening papers reported that Harman was "lingering." He was lingering
the next day. He was lingering the next week, and the end of a month
saw him still "lingering." Then I went down to Capri, where--for he had
been after all the merest episode to me--I was pleased to forget all
about him.




CHAPTER III


A great many people keep their friends in mind by writing to them, but
more do not; and Ward and I belong to the majority. After my departure
from Paris I had but one missive from him, a short note, written at the
request of his sister, asking me to be on the lookout for Italian
earrings, to add to her collection of old jewels. So, from time to
time, I sent her what I could find about Capri or in Naples, and she
responded with neat little letters of acknowledgment.

Two years I stayed on Capri, eating the lotus which grows on that happy
island, and painting very little--only enough, indeed, to be remembered
at the Salon and not so much as knowing how kindly or unkindly they
hung my pictures there. But even on Capri, people sometimes hear the
call of Paris and wish to be in that unending movement: to hear the
multitudinous rumble, to watch the procession from a cafe terrace and
to dine at Foyot's. So there came at last a fine day when I, knowing
that the horse-chestnuts were in bloom along the Champs Elysees, threw
my rope-soled shoes to a beggar, packed a rusty trunk, and was off for
the banks of the Seine.

My arrival--just the drive from the Gare de Lyon to my studio--was like
the shock of surf on a bather's breast.

The stir and life, the cheerful energy of the streets, put stir and
life and cheerful energy into me. I felt the itch to work again, to be
at it, at it in earnest--to lose no hour of daylight, and to paint
better than I had painted!

Paris having given me this impetus, I dared not tempt her further, nor
allow the edge of my eagerness time to blunt; therefore, at the end of
a fortnight, I went over into Normandy and deposited that rusty trunk
of mine in a corner of the summer pavilion in the courtyard of Madame
Brossard's inn, Les Trois Pigeons, in a woodland neighborhood that is
there. Here I had painted through a prolific summer of my youth, and I
was glad to find--as I had hoped--nothing changed; for the place was
dear to me. Madame Brossard (dark, thin, demure as of yore, a
fine-looking woman with a fine manner and much the flavour of old
Norman portraits) gave me a pleasant welcome, remembering me readily
but without surprise, while Amedee, the antique servitor, cackled over
me and was as proud of my advent as if I had been a new egg and he had
laid me. The simile is grotesque; but Amedee is the most henlike waiter
in France.

He is a white-haired, fat old fellow, always well-shaved; as neat as a
billiard-ball. In the daytime, when he is partly porter, he wears a
black tie, a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet, and, from
waist to feet, a white apron like a skirt, and so competently
encircling that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real
necessity; but after six o'clock (becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel)
he is clad as any other formal gentleman. At all times he wears a fresh
table-cloth over his arm, keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at
hand on a ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard, so that
he may never be shamed by getting caught without one.

His conception of life is that all worthy persons were created as
receptacles for food and drink; and five minutes after my arrival he
had me seated (in spite of some meek protests) in a wicker chair with a
pitcher of the right Three Pigeons cider on the table before me, while
he subtly dictated what manner of dinner I should eat. For this
interval Amedee's exuberance was sobered and his badinage dismissed as
being mere garniture, the questions now before us concerning grave and
inward matters. His suggestions were deferential but insistent; his
manner was that of a prime minister who goes through the form of
convincing the sovereign. He greeted each of his own decisions with a
very loud "Bien!" as if startled by the brilliancy of my selections,
and, the menu being concluded, exploded a whole volley of "Biens" and
set off violently to instruct old Gaston, the cook.

That is Amedee's way; he always starts violently for anywhere he means
to go. He is a little lame and his progress more or less sidelong, but
if you call him, or new guests arrive at the inn, or he receives an
order from Madame Brossard, he gives the effect of running by a sudden
movement of the whole body like that of a man ABOUT to run, and moves
off using the gestures of a man who IS running; after which he proceeds
to his destination at an exquisite leisure. Remembering this old habit
of his, it was with joy that I noted his headlong departure. Some ten
feet of his progress accomplished, he halted (for no purpose but to
scratch his head the more luxuriously); next, strayed from the path to
contemplate a rose-bush, and, selecting a leaf with careful
deliberation, placed it in his mouth and continued meditatively upon
his way to the kitchen.

I chuckled within me; it was good to be back at Madame Brossard's.

The courtyard was more a garden; bright with rows of flowers in formal
little beds and blossoming up from big green tubs, from red jars, and
also from two brightly painted wheel-barrows. A long arbour offered a
shelter of vines for those who might choose to dine, breakfast, or
lounge beneath, and, here and there among the shrubberies, you might
come upon a latticed bower, thatched with straw. My own pavilion (half
bedroom, half studio) was set in the midst of all and had a small porch
of its own with a rich curtain of climbing honeysuckle for a screen
from the rest of the courtyard.

The inn itself is gray with age, the roof sagging pleasantly here and
there; and an old wooden gallery runs the length of each wing, the
guest-chambers of the upper story opening upon it like the deck-rooms
of a steamer, with boxes of tulips and hyacinths along the gallery
railings and window ledges for the gayest of border-lines.

Beyond the great open archway, which gives entrance to the courtyard,
lies the quiet country road; passing this, my eyes followed the wide
sweep of poppy-sprinkled fields to a line of low green hills; and there
was the edge of the forest sheltering those woodland interiors which I
had long ago tried to paint, and where I should be at work to-morrow.

In the course of time, and well within the bright twilight, Amedee
spread the crisp white cloth and served me at a table on my pavilion
porch. He feigned anxiety lest I should find certain dishes (those
which he knew were most delectable) not to my taste, but was obviously
so distended with fatuous pride over the whole meal that it became a
temptation to denounce at least some trifling sauce or garnishment;
nevertheless, so much mendacity proved beyond me and I spared him and
my own conscience. This puffed-uppedness of his was to be observed only
in his expression of manner, for during the consumption of food it was
his worthy custom to practise a ceremonious, nay, a reverential, hush,
and he never offered (or approved) conversation until he had prepared
the salad. That accomplished, however, and the water bubbling in the
coffee machine, he readily favoured me with a discourse on the decline
in glory of Les Trois Pigeons.

"Monsieur, it is the automobiles; they have done it. Formerly, as when
monsieur was here, the painters came from Paris. They would come in the
spring and would stay until the autumn rains. What busy times and what
drolleries! Ah, it was gay in those days! Monsieur remembers well. Ha,
Ha! But now, I think, the automobiles have frightened away the
painters; at least they do not come any more. And the automobiles
themselves; they come sometimes for lunch, a few, but they love better
the seashore, and we are just close enough to be too far away. Those
automobiles, they love the big new hotels and the casinos with
roulette. They eat hastily, gulp down a liqueur, and pouf! off they
rush for Trouville, for Houlgate--for heaven knows where! And even the
automobiles do not come so frequently as they did. Our road used to be
the best from Lisieux to Beuzeval, but now the maps recommend another.
They pass us by, and yet yonder--only a few kilometres--is the coast
with its thousands. We are near the world but out of it, monsieur."

He poured my coffee; dropped a lump of sugar from the tongs with a
benevolent gesture--"One lump: always the same. Monsieur sees that I
remember well, ha?"--and the twilight having fallen, he lit two
orange-shaded candles and my cigar with the same match. The night was
so quiet that the candle-lights burned as steadily as flames in a
globe, yet the air was spiced with a cool fragrance, and through the
honeysuckle leaves above me I saw, as I leaned back in my wicker chair,
a glimmer of kindly stars.

"Very comfortably out of the world, Amedee," I said. "It seems to me I
have it all to myself."

"Unhappily, yes!" he exclaimed; then excused himself, chuckling. "I
should have said that we should be happier if we had many like
monsieur. But it is early in the season to despair. Then, too, our best
suite is already engaged."

"By whom?"

"Two men of science who arrive next week. One is a great man. Madame
Brossard is pleased that he is coming to Les Trois Pigeons, but I tell
her it is only natural. He comes now for the first time because he
likes the quiet, but he will come again, like monsieur, because he has
been here before. That is what I always say: 'Any one who has been here
must come again.' The problem is only to get them to come the first
time. Truly!"

"Who is the great man, Amedee?"

"Ah! A distinguished professor of science. Truly."

"What science?"

"I do not know. But he is a member of the Institute. Monsieur must have
heard of that great Professor Keredec?"

"The name is known. Who is the other?"

"A friend of his. I do not know. All the upper floor of the east wing
they have taken--the Grande Suite--those two and their
valet-de-chambre. That is truly the way in modern times--the
philosophers are rich men."

"Yes," I sighed. "Only the painters are poor nowadays."

"Ha, ha, monsieur!" Amedee laughed cunningly.

"It was always easy to see that monsieur only amuses himself with his
painting."

"Thank you, Amedee," I responded. "I have amused other people with it
too, I fear."

"Oh, without doubt!" he agreed graciously, as he folded the cloth. I
have always tried to believe that it was not so much my pictures as the
fact that I paid my bills the day they were presented which convinced
everybody about Les Trois Pigeons that I was an amateur. But I never
became happily enough settled in this opinion to risk pressing an
investigation; and it was a relief that Amedee changed the subject.

"Monsieur remembers the Chateau de Quesnay--at the crest of the hill on
the road north of Dives?"

"I remember."

"It is occupied this season by some rich Americans."

"How do you know they are rich?"

"Dieu de Dieu!" The old fellow appealed to heaven. "But they are
Americans!"

"And therefore millionaires. Perfectly, Amedee."

"Perfectly, monsieur. Perhaps monsieur knows them."

"Yes, I know them."

"Truly!" He affected dejection. "And poor Madame Brossard thought
monsieur had returned to our old hotel because he liked it, and
remembered our wine of Beaune and the good beds and old Gaston's
cooking!"

"Do not weep, Amedee," I said. "I have come to paint; not because I
know the people who have taken Quesnay." And I added: "I may not see
them at all."

In truth I thought that very probable. Miss Elizabeth had mentioned in
one of her notes that Ward had leased Quesnay, but I had not sought
quarters at Les Trois Pigeons because it stood within walking distance
of the chateau. In my industrious frame of mind that circumstance
seemed almost a drawback. Miss Elizabeth, ever hospitable to those whom
she noticed at all, would be doubly so in the country, as people always
are; and I wanted all my time to myself--no very selfish wish since my
time was not conceivably of value to any one else. I thought it wise to
leave any encounter with the lady to chance, and as the by-paths of the
country-side were many and intricate, I intended, without ungallantry,
to render the chance remote. George himself had just sailed on a
business trip to America, as I knew from her last missive; and until
his return, I should put in all my time at painting and nothing else,
though I liked his sister, as I have said, and thought of her--often.

Amedee doubted my sincerity, however, for he laughed incredulously.

"Eh, well, monsieur enjoys saying it!"

"Certainly. It is a pleasure to say what one means."

"But monsieur could not mean it. Monsieur will call at the chateau in
the morning"--the complacent varlet prophesied--"as early as it will be
polite. I am sure of that. Monsieur is not at all an old man; no, not
yet! Even if he were, aha! no one could possess the friendship of that
wonderful Madame d'Armand and remain away from the chateau."

"Madame d'Armand?" I said. "That is not the name. You mean Mademoiselle
Ward."

"No, no!" He shook his head and his fat cheeks bulged with a smile
which I believe he intended to express a respectful roguishness.
"Mademoiselle Ward" (he pronounced it "Ware") "is magnificent; every
one must fly to obey when she opens her mouth. If she did not like the
ocean there below the chateau, the ocean would have to move! It needs
only a glance to perceive that Mademoiselle Ward is a great lady--but
MADAME D'ARMAND! AHA!" He rolled his round eyes to an effect of
unspeakable admiration, and with a gesture indicated that he would have
kissed his hand to the stars, had that been properly reverential to
Madame d'Armand. "But monsieur knows very well for himself!"

"Monsieur knows that you are very confusing--even for a maitre d'hotel.
We were speaking of the present chatelaine of Quesnay, Mademoiselle
Ward. I have never heard of Madame d'Armand."

"Monsieur is serious?"

"Truly!" I answered, making bold to quote his shibboleth.

"Then monsieur has truly much to live for. Truly!" he chuckled openly,
convinced that he had obtained a marked advantage in a conflict of
wits, shaking his big head from side to side with an exasperating air
of knowingness. "Ah, truly! When that lady drives by, some day, in the
carriage from the chateau--eh? Then monsieur will see how much he has
to live for. Truly, truly, truly!"

He had cleared the table, and now, with a final explosion of the word
which gave him such immoderate satisfaction, he lifted the tray and
made one of his precipitate departures.

"Amedee," I said, as he slackened down to his sidelong leisure.

"Monsieur?"

"Who is Madame d'Armand?"

"A guest of Mademoiselle Ward at Quesnay. In fact, she is in charge of
the chateau, since Mademoiselle Ward is, for the time, away."

"Is she a Frenchwoman?"

"It seems not. In fact, she is an American, though she dresses with so
much of taste. Ah, Madame Brossard admits it, and Madame Brossard knows
the art of dressing, for she spends a week of every winter in
Rouen--and besides there is Trouville itself only some kilometres
distant. Madame Brossard says that Mademoiselle Ward dresses with
richness and splendour and Madame d'Armand with economy, but beauty.
Those were the words used by Madame Brossard. Truly."

"Madame d'Armand's name is French," I observed.

"Yes, that is true," said Amedee thoughtfully. "No one can deny it; it
is a French name." He rested the tray upon a stump near by and
scratched his head. "I do not understand how that can be," he continued
slowly. "Jean Ferret, who is chief gardener at the chateau, is an
acquaintance of mine. We sometimes have a cup of cider at Pere
Baudry's, a kilometre down the road from here; and Jean Ferret has told
me that she is an American. And yet, as you say, monsieur, the name is
French. Perhaps she is French after all."

"I believe," said I, "that if I struggled a few days over this puzzle,
I might come to the conclusion that Madame d'Armand is an American lady
who has married a Frenchman."

The old man uttered an exclamation of triumph.

"Ha! without doubt! Truly she must be an American lady who has married
a Frenchman. Monsieur has already solved the puzzle. Truly, truly!" And
he trulied himself across the darkness, to emerge in the light of the
open door of the kitchen with the word still rumbling in his throat.

Now for a time there came the clinking of dishes, sounds as of pans and
kettles being scoured, the rolling gutturals of old Gaston, the cook,
and the treble pipings of young "Glouglou," his grandchild and
scullion. After a while the oblong of light from the kitchen door
disappeared; the voices departed; the stillness of the dark descended,
and with it that unreasonable sense of pathos which night in the
country brings to the heart of a wanderer. Then, out of the lonely
silence, there issued a strange, incongruous sound as an execrable
voice essayed to produce the semblance of an air odiously familiar
about the streets of Paris some three years past, and I became aware of
a smell of some dreadful thing burning. Beneath the arbour I perceived
a glowing spark which seemed to bear a certain relation to an oval
whitish patch suggesting the front of a shirt. It was Amedee, at ease,
smoking his cigarette after the day's work and convinced that he was
singing.

  "Pour qu'j'finisse
  Mon service
  Au Tonkin je suis parti--
  Ah! quel beau pays, mesdames!
  C'est l'paradis des p'tites femmes!"

I rose from the chair on my little porch, to go to bed; but I was
reminded of something, and called to him.

"Monsieur?" his voice came briskly.

"How often do you see your friend, Jean Ferret, the gardener of
Quesnay?"

"Frequently, monsieur. To-morrow morning I could easily carry a message
if--"

"That is precisely what I do not wish. And you may as well not mention
me at all when you meet him."

"It is understood. Perfectly."

"If it is well understood, there will be a beautiful present for a good
maitre d'hotel some day."

"Thank you, monsieur."

"Good night, Amedee."

"Good night, monsieur."

Falling to sleep has always been an intricate matter with me: I liken
it to a nightly adventure in an enchanted palace. Weary-limbed and with
burning eyelids, after long waiting in the outer court of wakefulness,
I enter a dim, cool antechamber where the heavy garment of the body is
left behind and where, perhaps, some acquaintance or friend greets me
with a familiar speech or a bit of nonsense--or an unseen orchestra may
play music that I know. From here I go into a spacious apartment where
the air and light are of a fine clarity, for it is the hall of
revelations, and in it the secrets of secrets are told, mysteries are
resolved, perplexities cleared up, and sometimes I learn what to do
about a picture that has bothered me. This is where I would linger, for
beyond it I walk among crowding fantasies, delusions, terrors and
shame, to a curtain of darkness where they take my memory from me, and
I know nothing of my own adventures until I am pushed out of a secret
door into the morning sunlight. Amedee was the acquaintance who met me
in the antechamber to-night. He remarked that Madame d'Armand was the
most beautiful woman in the world, and vanished. And in the hall of
revelations I thought that I found a statue of her--but it was veiled.
I wished to remove the veil, but a passing stranger stopped and told me
laughingly that the veil was all that would ever be revealed of her to
me--of her, or any other woman!




CHAPTER IV


I was up with the birds in the morning; had my breakfast with them--a
very drowsy-eyed Amedee assisting--and made off for the forest to get
the sunrise through the branches, a pack on my back and three
sandwiches for lunch in my pocket. I returned only with the failing
light of evening, cheerfully tired and ready for a fine dinner and an
early bed, both of which the good inn supplied. It was my daily
programme; a healthy life "far from the world," as Amedee said, and I
was sorry when the serpent entered and disturbed it, though he was my
own. He is a pet of mine; has been with me since my childhood. He
leaves me when I live alone, for he loves company, but returns whenever
my kind are about me. There are many names for snakes of his breed,
but, to deal charitably with myself, I call mine
Interest-In-Other-People's-Affairs.

One evening I returned to find a big van from Dives, the nearest
railway station, drawn up in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs
leading to the gallery, and all of the people of the inn, from Madame
Brossard (who directed) to Glouglou (who madly attempted the heaviest
pieces), busily installing trunks, bags, and packing-cases in the suite
engaged for the "great man of science" on the second floor of the east
wing of the building. Neither the great man nor his companion was to be
seen, however, both having retired to their rooms immediately upon
their arrival--so Amedee informed me, as he wiped his brow after
staggering up the steps under a load of books wrapped in sacking.

I made my evening ablutions removing a Joseph's coat of dust and paint;
and came forth from my pavilion, hoping that Professor Keredec and his
friend would not mind eating in the same garden with a man in a
corduroy jacket and knickerbockers; but the gentlemen continued
invisible to the public eye, and mine was the only table set for dinner
in the garden. Up-stairs the curtains were carefully drawn across all
the windows of the east wing; little leaks of orange, here and there,
betraying the lights within. Glouglou, bearing a tray of covered
dishes, was just entering the salon of the "Grande Suite," and the door
closed quickly after him.

"It is to be supposed that Professor Keredec and his friend are
fatigued with their journey from Paris?" I began, a little later.

"Monsieur, they did not seem fatigued," said Amedee.

"But they dine in their own rooms to-night."

"Every night, monsieur. It is the order of Professor Keredec. And with
their own valet-de-chambre to serve them. Eh?" He poured my coffee
solemnly. "That is mysterious, to say the least, isn't it?"

"To say the very least," I agreed.

"Monsieur the professor is a man of secrets, it appears," continued
Amedee. "When he wrote to Madame Brossard engaging his rooms, he
instructed her to be careful that none of us should mention even his
name; and to-day when he came, he spoke of his anxiety on that point."

"But you did mention it."

"To whom, monsieur?" asked the old fellow blankly.

"To me."

"But I told him I had not," said Amedee placidly. "It is the same
thing."

"I wonder," I began, struck by a sudden thought, "if it will prove
quite the same thing in my own case. I suppose you have not mentioned
the circumstance of my being here to your friend, Jean Ferret of
Quesnay?"

He looked at me reproachfully. "Has monsieur been troubled by the
people of the chateau?"

"'Troubled' by them?"

"Have they come to seek out monsieur and disturb him? Have they done
anything whatever to show that they have heard monsieur is here?"

"No, certainly they haven't," I was obliged to retract at once. "I beg
your pardon, Amedee."

"Ah, monsieur!" He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still
deeper in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with
a forgiving hand. "All the same," he pursued, "it seems very
mysterious--this Keredec affair!"

"To comprehend a great man, Amedee," I said, "is the next thing to
sharing his greatness."

He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel,
then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle.

"But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this
fine weather?"

I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon
of Madame Brossard's "Grande Suite" must be, while the garden was
fragrant in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle
tonic. Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the
salon.

When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is
inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention.
The smaller the community the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to
find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough
English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some
scandal about the goat. Thus, though I treated the "Keredec affair"
with a seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal
out, and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the
mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, virtually, I was
receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day's
doings of Professor Keredec and his companion.

The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as
Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in
their rooms. Professor Keredec's voice could often be heard in every
part of the inn; at times holding forth with such protracted vehemence
that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering
a lecture to his companion.

"Say then!" exclaimed Amedee--"what king of madness is that? To make
orations for only one auditor!"

He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer
to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The
relation between the two men, he contended, was more like that between
teacher and pupil. "But a pupil with gray hair!" he finished, raising
his fat hands to heaven. "For that other monsieur has hair as gray as
mine."

"That other monsieur" was farther described as a thin man, handsome,
but with a "singular air," nor could my colleague more satisfactorily
define this air, though he made a racking struggle to do so.

"In what does the peculiarity of his manner lie?" I asked.

"But it is not so much that his manner is peculiar, monsieur; it is an
air about him that is singular. Truly!"

"But how is it singular?"

"Monsieur, it is very, very singular."

"You do not understand," I insisted. "What kind of singularity has the
air of 'that other monsieur'?"

"It has," replied Amedee, with a powerful effort, "a very singular
singularity."

This was as near as he could come, and, fearful of injuring him, I
abandoned that phase of our subject.

The valet-de-chambre whom my fellow-lodgers had brought with them from
Paris contributed nothing to the inn's knowledge of his masters, I
learned. This struck me not only as odd, but unique, for French
servants tell one another everything, and more--very much more. "But
this is a silent man," said Amedee impressively. "Oh! very silent! He
shakes his head wisely, yet he will not open his mouth. However, that
may be because"--and now the explanation came--"because he was engaged
only last week and knows nothing. Also, he is but temporary; he returns
to Paris soon and Glouglou is to serve them."

I ascertained that although "that other monsieur" had gray hair, he was
by no means a person of great age; indeed, Glouglou, who had seen him
oftener than any other of the staff, maintained that he was quite
young. Amedee's own opportunities for observation had been limited.
Every afternoon the two gentlemen went for a walk; but they always came
down from the gallery so quickly, he declared, and, leaving the inn by
a rear entrance, plunged so hastily into the nearest by-path leading to
the forest, that he caught little more than glimpses of them. They
returned after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same appearance
of haste to be out of sight, the professor always talking, "with the
manner of an orator, but in English." Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it
was certain that Professor Keredec's friend was neither an American nor
an Englishman. "Why is it certain?" I asked.

"Monsieur, he drinks nothing but water, he does not smoke, and Glouglou
says he speaks very pure French."

"Glouglou is an authority who resolves the difficulty. 'That other
monsieur' is a Frenchman."

"But, monsieur, he is smooth-shaven."

"Perhaps he has been a maitre d'hotel."

"Eh! I wish one that _I_ know could hope to dress as well when he
retires! Besides, Glouglou says that other monsieur eats his soup
silently."

"I can find no flaw in the deduction," I said, rising to go to bed. "We
must leave it there for to-night."

The next evening Amedee allowed me to perceive that he was concealing
something under his arm as he stoked the coffee-machine, and upon my
asking what it was, he glanced round the courtyard with histrionic
slyness, placed the object on the table beside my cap, and stepped back
to watch the impression, his manner that of one who declaims: "At last
the missing papers are before you!"

"What is that?" I said.

"It is a book."

"I am persuaded by your candour, Amedee, as well as by the general
appearance of this article," I returned as I picked it up, "that you
are speaking the truth. But why do you bring it to me?"

"Monsieur," he replied, in the tones of an old conspirator, "this
afternoon the professor and that other monsieur went as usual to walk
in the forest." He bent over me, pretending to be busy with the
coffee-machine, and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. "When they
returned, this book fell from the pocket of that other monsieur's coat
as he ascended the stair, and he did not notice. Later I shall return
it by Glouglou, but I thought it wise that monsieur should see it for
himself."

The book was Wentworth's Algebra--elementary principles. Painful
recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as
I let the leaves turn under my fingers. "What do you make of it?" I
asked.

His tone became even more confidential. "Part of it, monsieur, is in
English; that is plain. I have found an English word in it that I
know--the word 'O.' But much of the printing is also in Arabic."

"Arabic!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, monsieur, look there." He laid a fat forefinger on "(a + b)2 = a2
+ 2ab + b2." "That is Arabic. Old Gaston has been to Algeria, and he
says that he knows Arabic as well as he does French. He looked at the
book and told me it was Arabic. Truly! Truly!"

"Did he translate any of it for you?"

"No, monsieur; his eyes pained him this afternoon. He says he will read
it to-morrow."

"But you must return the book to-night."

"That is true. Eh! It leaves the mystery deeper than ever, unless
monsieur can find some clue in those parts of the book that are
English."

I shed no light upon him. The book had been Greek to me in my tender
years; it was a pleasure now to leave a fellow-being under the
impression that it was Arabic.

But the volume took its little revenge upon me, for it increased my
curiosity about Professor Keredec and "that other monsieur." Why were
two grown men--one an eminent psychologist and the other a gray-haired
youth with a singular air--carrying about on their walks a text-book
for the instruction of boys of thirteen or fourteen?

The next day that curiosity of mine was piqued in earnest. It rained
and I did not leave the inn, but sat under the great archway and took
notes in colour of the shining road, bright drenched fields, and
dripping sky. My back was toward the courtyard, that is,
"three-quarters" to it, and about noon I became distracted from my work
by a strong self-consciousness which came upon me without any visible
or audible cause. Obeying an impulse, I swung round on my camp-stool
and looked up directly at the gallery window of the salon of the
"Grande Suite."

A man with a great white beard was standing at the window, half hidden
by the curtain, watching me intently.

He perceived that I saw him and dropped the curtain immediately, a
speck of colour in his buttonhole catching my eye as it fell.

The spy was Professor Keredec.

But why should he study me so slyly and yet so obviously? I had no
intention of intruding upon him. Nor was I a psychological "specimen,"
though I began to suspect that "that other monsieur" WAS.




CHAPTER V


I had been painting in various parts of the forest, studying the early
morning along the eastern fringe and moving deeper in as the day
advanced. For the stillness and warmth of noon I went to the very
woodland heart, and in the late afternoon moved westward to a glade--a
chance arena open to the sky, the scene of my most audacious
endeavours, for here I was trying to paint foliage luminous under those
long shafts of sunshine which grow thinner but ruddier toward sunset. A
path closely bordered by underbrush wound its way to the glade, crossed
it, then wandered away into shady dingles again; and with my easel
pitched in the mouth of this path, I sat at work, one late afternoon,
wonderful for its still loveliness.

The path debouched abruptly on the glade and was so narrow that when I
leaned back my elbows were in the bushes, and it needed care to keep my
palette from being smirched by the leaves; though there was more room
for my canvas and easel, as I had placed them at arm's length before
me, fairly in the open. I had the ambition to paint a picture here--to
do the whole thing in the woods from day to day, instead of taking
notes for the studio--and was at work upon a very foolish experiment: I
had thought to render the light--broken by the branches and
foliage--with broken brush-work, a short stroke of the kind that stung
an elder painter to swear that its practitioners painted in shaking
fear of the concierge appearing for the studio rent. The attempt was
alluring, but when I rose from my camp-stool and stepped back into the
path to get more distance for my canvas, I saw what a mess I was making
of it. At the same time, my hand, falling into the capacious pocket of
my jacket, encountered a package, my lunch, which I had forgotten to
eat, whereupon, becoming suddenly aware that I was very hungry, I began
to eat Amedee's good sandwiches without moving from where I stood.

Absorbed, gazing with abysmal disgust at my canvas, I was eating
absent-mindedly--and with all the restraint and dignity of a Georgia
darky attacking a watermelon--when a pleasant voice spoke from just
behind me.

"Pardon, monsieur; permit me to pass, if you please."

That was all it said, very quietly and in French, but a gunshot might
have startled me less.

I turned in confusion to behold a dark-eyed lady, charmingly dressed in
lilac and white, waiting for me to make way so that she could pass.

Nay, let me leave no detail of my mortification unrecorded: I have just
said that I "turned in confusion"; the truth is that I jumped like a
kangaroo, but with infinitely less grace. And in my nervous haste to
clear her way, meaning only to push the camp-stool out of the path with
my foot, I put too much valour into the push, and with horror saw the
camp-stool rise in the air and drop to the ground again nearly a third
of the distance across the glade.

Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and
my cheeks burning.

There are women who will meet or pass a strange man in the woods or
fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if
he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took
place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind.
Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being;
and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy
only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first
sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool
twenty feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with
sandwich that I dared not speak.

"Thank you," she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so
graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings.

I stood looking after her as she crossed the clearing and entered the
cool winding of the path on the other side.

I stared and wished--wished that I could have painted her into my
picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that
I had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer
hat, which was the last bit of her to disappear, had vanished. Then,
discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich
in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and,
recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again.

I did not immediately begin.

The passing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no
moment to a man, and the passing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is
an episode--even to a middle-aged landscape painter.

"An episode?" quoth I. I should be ashamed to withhold the truth out of
my fear to be taken for a sentimentalist: this woman who had passed was
of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there
in the woods--and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face
burned again.

With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to
peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a
swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not
approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the
underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds.

He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white
flannels, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of
underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there
were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful
sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his
approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him.

At sight of me he stopped short.

"Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her
hat?" he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick
eagerness which caused me no wonder--for I had seen the lady.

What did surprise me, however, was the instantaneous certainty with
which I recognised the speaker from Amedee's description; certainty
founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old
fellow's powers.

My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so
clear and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might
have passed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I
guessed his years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome
young fellows with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though
out of the world we were near it. It was the new-comer's "singular air"
which established his identity. Amedee's vagueness had irked me, but
the thing itself--the "singular air"--was not at all vague. Instantly
perceptible, it was an investiture; marked, definite--and intangible.
My interrogator was "that other monsieur."

In response to his question I asked him another:

"Were the roses real or artificial?"

"I don't know," he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical
assumption of gravity. "It wouldn't matter, would it? Have you seen
her?"

He stooped to brush the brambles from his trousers, sending me a
sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and
inquiring, like a boy's. At the same time it struck me that whatever
the nature of the singularity investing him it partook of nothing
repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his
attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction
which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this
singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart
from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to
think him odd enough.

"Isn't your description," I said gravely, thinking to suit my humour to
his own, "somewhat too general? Over yonder a few miles lies Houlgate.
Trouville itself is not so far, and this is the season. A great many
white hats trimmed with roses might come for a stroll in these woods.
If you would complete the items--" and I waved my hand as if inviting
him to continue.

"I have seen her only once before," he responded promptly, with a
seriousness apparently quite genuine. "That was from my window at an
inn, three days ago. She drove by in an open carriage without looking
up, but I could see that she was very handsome. No--" he broke off
abruptly, but as quickly resumed--"handsome isn't just what I mean.
Lovely, I should say. That is more like her and a better thing to be,
shouldn't you think so?"

"Probably--yes--I think so," I stammered, in considerable amazement.

"She went by quickly," he said, as if he were talking in the most
natural and ordinary way in the world, "but I noticed that while she
was in the shade of the inn her hair appeared to be dark, though when
the carriage got into the sunlight again it looked fair."

I had noticed the same thing when the lady who had passed emerged from
the shadows of the path into the sunshine of the glade, but I did not
speak of it now; partly because he gave me no opportunity, partly
because I was almost too astonished to speak at all, for I was no
longer under the delusion that he had any humourous or whimsical
intention.

"A little while ago," he went on, "I was up in the branches of a tree
over yonder, and I caught a glimpse of a lady in a light dress and a
white hat and I thought it might be the same. She wore a dress like
that and a white hat with roses when she drove by the inn. I am very
anxious to see her again."

"You seem to be!"

"And haven't you seen her? Hasn't she passed this way?"

He urged the question with the same strange eagerness which had marked
his manner from the first, a manner which confounded me by its absurd
resemblance to that of a boy who had not mixed with other boys and had
never been teased. And yet his expression was intelligent and alert;
nor was there anything abnormal or "queer" in his good-humoured gaze.

"I think that I may have seen her," I began slowly; "but if you do not
know her I should not advise--"

I was interrupted by a shout and the sound of a large body plunging in
the thicket. At this the face of "that other monsieur" flushed
slightly; he smiled, but seemed troubled.

"That is a friend of mine," he said. "I am afraid he will want me to go
back with him." And he raised an answering shout.

Professor Keredec floundered out through the last row of saplings and
bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and
perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder,
monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in
the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small
pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he
carried a hat which evidently belonged to "that other monsieur," for
his own was on his head.

One glance of scrutiny and recognition he shot at me from his
silver-rimmed spectacles; and seized the young man by the arm.

"Ha, my friend!" he exclaimed in a bass voice of astounding power and
depth, "that is one way to study botany: to jump out of the middle of a
high tree and to run like a crazy man!" He spoke with a strong accent
and a thunderous rolling of the "r." "What was I to think?" he
demanded. "What has arrived to you?"

"I saw a lady I wished to follow," the other answered promptly.

"A lady! What lady?"

"The lady who passed the inn three days ago. I spoke of her then, you
remember."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" Keredec slapped his thigh with the sudden violence
of a man who remembers that he has forgotten something, and as a final
addition to my amazement, his voice rang more of remorse than of
reproach. "Have I never told you that to follow strange ladies is one
of the things you cannot do?"

"That other monsieur" shook his head. "No, you have never told me that.
I do not understand it," he said, adding irrelevantly, "I believe this
gentleman knows her. He says he thinks he has seen her."

"If you please, we must not trouble this gentleman about it," said the
professor hastily. "Put on your hat, in the name of a thousand saints,
and let us go!"

"But I wish to ask him her name," urged the other, with something
curiously like the obstinacy of a child. "I wish--"

"No, no!" Keredec took him by the arm. "We must go. We shall be late
for our dinner."

"But why?" persisted the young man.

"Not now!" The professor removed his broad felt hat and hurriedly wiped
his vast and steaming brow--a magnificent structure, corniced, at this
moment, with anxiety. "It is better if we do not discuss it now."

"But I might not meet him again."

Professor Keredec turned toward me with a half-desperate,
half-apologetic laugh which was like the rumbling of heavy wagons over
a block pavement; and in his flustered face I thought I read a signal
of genuine distress.

"I do not know the lady," I said with some sharpness. "I have never
seen her until this afternoon."

Upon this "that other monsieur" astonished me in good earnest.
Searching my eyes eagerly with his clear, inquisitive gaze, he took a
step toward me and said:

"You are sure you are telling the truth?"

The professor uttered an exclamation of horror, sprang forward, and
clutched his friend's arm again. "Malheureux!" he cried, and then to
me: "Sir, you will give him pardon if you can? He has no meaning to be
rude."

"Rude?" The young man's voice showed both astonishment and pain. "Was
that rude? I didn't know. I didn't mean to be rude, God knows! Ah," he
said sadly, "I do nothing but make mistakes. I hope you will forgive
me."

He lifted his hand as if in appeal, and let it drop to his side; and in
the action, as well as in the tone of his voice and his attitude of
contrition, there was something that reached me suddenly, with the
touch of pathos.

"Never mind," I said. "I am only sorry that it was the truth."

"Thank you," he said, and turned humbly to Keredec.

"Ha, that is better!" shouted the great man, apparently relieved of a
vast weight. "We shall go home now and eat a good dinner. But first--"
his silver-rimmed spectacles twinkled upon me, and he bent his
Brobdingnagian back in a bow which against my will reminded me of the
curtseys performed by Orloff's dancing bears--"first let me speak some
words for myself. My dear sir"--he addressed himself to me with grave
formality--"do not suppose I have no realization that other excuses
should be made to you. Believe me, they shall be. It is now that I see
it is fortunate for us that you are our fellow-innsman at Les Trois
Pigeons."

I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable
surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query:

"Why, how did you know that?"

Professor Keredec's laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder
till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed
back at him.

"Ho, ho, ho!" he shouted. "But you shall not take me for a
window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you!
Ho, ho!"

Then, followed submissively by "that other monsieur," he strode into
the path and went thundering forth through the forest.




CHAPTER VI


No doubt the most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of
Professor Keredec and his singular friend would have been to settle
myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting--and that
is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some
of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting.

I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the
phrase, "seated in a brown study," I pictured my hero in a brown chair,
beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being
enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses
of ordinary correspondence allowed the occasion for it to remain
unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild
it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at
its mildest, a profound purple.

The confession has been made of my curiosity concerning my
fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively
a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly
and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine,
I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying
over and over aloud, "What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?"

This was the sillier inasmuch as the word "wrong" (bearing any
significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to
"that other monsieur." There had been neither darkness nor dullness;
his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness;
rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence--the more amazing
that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know.
Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his
nationality; his face was of the lean, right, American structure; but
they had hit the relation between the two men: Keredec was the master
and "that other monsieur" the scholar--a pupil studying boys' textbooks
and receiving instruction in matters and manners that children are
taught. And yet I could not believe him to be a simple case of arrested
development. For the matter of that, I did not like to think of him as
a "case" at all. There had been something about his bright
youthfulness--perhaps it was his quick contrition for his rudeness,
perhaps it was a certain wistful quality he had, perhaps it was his
very "singularity"--which appealed as directly to my liking as it did
urgently to my sympathy.

I came out of my vari-coloured study with a start, caused by the
discovery that I had absent-mindedly squeezed upon my palette the
entire contents of an expensive tube of cobalt violet, for which I had
no present use; and sighing (for, of necessity, I am an economical
man), I postponed both of my problems till another day, determined to
efface the one with a palette knife and a rag soaked in turpentine, and
to defer the other until I should know more of my fellow-lodgers at
Madame Brossard's.

The turpentine rag at least proved effective; I scoured away the last
tokens of my failure with it, wishing that life were like the canvas
and that men had knowledge of the right celestial turpentine. After
that I cleaned my brushes, packed and shouldered my kit, and, with a
final imprecation upon all sausage-sandwiches, took up my way once more
to Les Trois Pigeons.

Presently I came upon an intersecting path where, on my previous
excursions, I had always borne to the right; but this evening, thinking
to discover a shorter cut, I went straight ahead. Striding along at a
good gait and chanting sonorously, "On Linden when the sun was low," I
left the rougher boscages of the forest behind me and emerged, just at
sunset, upon an orderly fringe of woodland where the ground was neat
and unencumbered, and the trimmed trees stood at polite distances,
bowing slightly to one another with small, well-bred rustlings.

The light was somewhere between gold and pink when I came into this
lady's boudoir of a grove. "Isar flowing rapidly" ceased its tumult
abruptly, and Linden saw no sterner sight that evening: my voice and my
feet stopped simultaneously--for I stood upon Quesnay ground.

Before me stretched a short broad avenue of turf, leading to the
chateau gates. These stood open, a gravelled driveway climbing thence
by easy stages between kempt shrubberies to the crest of the hill,
where the gray roof and red chimney-pots of the chateau were glimpsed
among the tree-tops. The slope was terraced with strips of
flower-gardens and intervals of sward; and against the green of a
rising lawn I marked the figure of a woman, pausing to bend over some
flowering bush. The figure was too slender to be mistaken for that of
the present chatelaine of Quesnay: in Miss Elizabeth's regal amplitude
there was never any hint of fragility. The lady upon the slope, then, I
concluded, must be Madame d'Armand, the inspiration of Amedee's
"Monsieur has much to live for!"

Once more this day I indorsed that worthy man's opinion, for, though I
was too far distant to see clearly, I knew that roses trimmed Madame
d'Armand's white hat, and that she had passed me, no long time since,
in the forest.

I took off my cap.

"I have the honour to salute you," I said aloud. "I make my apologies
for misbehaving with sandwiches and camp-stools in your presence,
Madame d'Armand."

Something in my own pronunciation of her name struck me as reminiscent:
save for the prefix, it had sounded like "Harman," as a Frenchman might
pronounce it.

Foreign names involve the French in terrible difficulties. Hughes, an
English friend of mine, has lived in France some five-and-thirty years
without reconciling himself to being known as "Monsieur Ig."

"Armand" might easily be Jean Ferret's translation of "Harman." Had he
and Amedee in their admiration conferred the prefix because they
considered it a plausible accompaniment to the lady's gentle bearing?
It was not impossible; it was, I concluded, very probable.

I had come far out of my way, so I retraced my steps to the
intersection of the paths, and thence made for the inn by my accustomed
route. The light failed under the roofing of foliage long before I was
free of the woods, and I emerged upon the road to Les Trois Pigeons
when twilight had turned to dusk.

Not far along the road from where I came into it, stood an old, brown,
deep-thatched cottage--a branch of brushwood over the door prettily
beckoning travellers to the knowledge that cider was here for the
thirsty; and as I drew near I perceived that one availed himself of the
invitation. A group stood about the open door, the lamp-light from
within disclosing the head of the house filling a cup for the wayfarer;
while honest Mere Baudry and two generations of younger Baudrys
clustered to miss no word of the interchange of courtesies between Pere
Baudry and his chance patron.

It afforded me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most
mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly
made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap,
white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under
his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that
a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at
some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently,
though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect
of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleasant delusion that he
employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share
of the conversation in a slow patois. As both men spoke at the same
time and neither understood two consecutive words the other said, it
struck me that the dialogue might prove unproductive of any highly
important results this side of Michaelmas; therefore, discovering that
the very pedestrian gentleman was making some sort of inquiry
concerning Les Trois Pigeons, I came to a halt and proffered aid.

"Are you looking for Madame Brossard's?" I asked in English.

The traveller uttered an exclamation and faced about with a jump,
birdlike for quickness. He did not reply to my question with the same
promptness; however, his deliberation denoted scrutiny, not sloth. He
stood peering at me sharply until I repeated it. Even then he
protracted his examination of me, a favour I was unable to return with
any interest, owing to the circumstance of his back being toward the
light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert,
well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of
shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his
whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether
unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected
(more or less directly) with what is known to the people of France as
"le Sport."

"Say," he responded in a voice of unpleasant nasality, finally deciding
upon speech, "you're 'Nummeric'n, ain't you?"

"Yes," I returned. "I thought I heard you inquiring for--"

"Well, m' friend, you can sting me!" he interrupted with condescending
jocularity. "My style French does f'r them camels up in Paris all
right. ME at Nice, Monte Carlo, Chantilly--bow to the p'fess'r; he's
RIGHT! But down here I don't seem to be GUD enough f'r these
sheep-dogs; anyway they bark different. I'm lukkin' fer a hotel called
Les Trois Pigeons."

"I am going there," I said; "I will show you the way."

"Whur is't?" he asked, not moving.

I pointed to the lights of the inn, flickering across the fields.
"Yonder--beyond the second turn of the road," I said, and, as he showed
no signs of accompanying me, I added, "I am rather late."

"Oh, I ain't goin' there t'night. It's too dark t' see anything now,"
he remarked, to my astonishment. "Dives and the choo-choo back t'
little ole Trouville f'r mine! I on'y wanted to take a LUK at this
pigeon-house joint."

"Do you mind my inquiring," I said, "what you expected to see at Les
Trois Pigeons?"

"Why!" he exclaimed, as if astonished at the question, "I'm a tourist.
Makin' a pedestrun trip t' all the reg'ler sights." And, inspired to
eloquence, he added, as an afterthought: "As it were."

"A tourist?" I echoed, with perfect incredulity.

"That's whut I am, m' friend," he returned firmly. "You don't have to
have a red dope-book in one hand and a thoid-class choo-choo ticket in
the other to be a tourist, do you?"

"But if you will pardon me," I said, "where did you get the notion that
Les Trois Pigeons is one of the regular sights?"

"Ain't it in all the books?"

"I don't think that it is mentioned in any of the guide-books."

"NO! I didn't say it WAS, m' friend," he retorted with contemptuous
pity. "I mean them history-books. It's in all o' THEM!"

"This is strange news," said I. "I should be very much interested to
read them!"

"Lookahere," he said, taking a step nearer me; "in oinest now, on your
woid: Didn' more'n half them Jeanne d'Arc tamales live at that hotel
wunst?"

"Nobody of historical importance--or any other kind of importance, so
far as I know--ever lived there," I informed him. "The older portions
of the inn once belonged to an ancient farm-house, that is all."

"On the level," he demanded, "didn't that William the Conker nor NONE
o' them ancient gilt-edges live there?"

"No."

"Stung again!" He broke into a sudden loud cackle of laughter. "Why!
the feller tole me 'at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when
it come t' history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button
cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy
MUS-tache," pursued the pedestrian, apparently fearing his narrative
might lack colour. "I met him right comin' out o' the Casino at
Trouville, yes'day aft'noon; c'udn' a' b'en more'n four o'clock--hol'
on though, yes 'twas, 'twas nearer five, about twunty minutes t' five,
say--an' this feller tells me--" He cackled with laughter as palpably
disingenuous as the corroborative details he thought necessary to
muster, then he became serious, as if marvelling at his own wondrous
verdancy. "M' friend, that feller soitn'y found me easy. But he can't
say I ain't game; he passes me the limes, but I'm jest man enough to
drink his health fer it in this sweet, sound ole-fashioned cider 'at
ain't got a headache in a barrel of it. He played me GUD, and here's TO
him!"

Despite the heartiness of the sentiment, my honest tourist's enthusiasm
seemed largely histrionic, and his quaffing of the beaker too
reminiscent of drain-the-wine-cup-free in the second row of the chorus,
for he absently allowed it to dangle from his hand before raising it to
his lips. However, not all of its contents was spilled, and he
swallowed a mouthful of the sweet, sound, old-fashioned cider--but by
mistake, I was led to suppose, from the expression of displeasure which
became so deeply marked upon his countenance as to be noticeable, even
in the feeble lamplight.

I tarried no longer, but bidding this good youth and the generations of
Baudry good-night, hastened on to my belated dinner.

"Amedee," I said, when my cigar was lighted and the usual hour of
consultation had arrived; "isn't that old lock on the chest where
Madame Brossard keeps her silver getting rather rusty?"

"Monsieur, we have no thieves here. We are out of the world."

"Yes, but Trouville is not so far away."

"Truly."

"Many strange people go to Trouville: grand-dukes, millionaires, opera
singers, princes, jockeys, gamblers--"

"Truly, truly!"

"And tourists," I finished.

"That is well known," assented Amedee, nodding.

"It follows," I continued with the impressiveness of all logicians,
"that many strange people may come from Trouville. In their excursions
to the surrounding points of interest--"

"Eh, monsieur, but that is true!" he interrupted, laying his right
forefinger across the bridge of his nose, which was his gesture when he
remembered anything suddenly. "There was a strange monsieur from
Trouville here this very day."

"What kind of person was he?"

"A foreigner, but I could not tell from what country."

"What time of day was he here?" I asked, with growing interest.

"Toward the middle of the afternoon. I was alone, except for Glouglou,
when he came. He wished to see the whole house and I showed him what I
could, except of course monsieur's pavilion, and the Grande Suite.
Monsieur the Professor and that other monsieur had gone to the forest,
but I did not feel at liberty to exhibit their rooms without Madame
Brossard's permission, and she was spending the day at Dives. Besides,"
added the good man, languidly snapping a napkin at a moth near one of
the candles, "the doors were locked."

"This person was a tourist?" I asked, after a pause during which Amedee
seemed peacefully unaware of the rather concentrated gaze I had fixed
upon him. "Of a kind. In speaking he employed many peculiar
expressions, more like a thief of a Parisian cabman than of the polite
world."

"The devil he did!" said I. "Did he tell you why he wished to see the
whole house? Did he contemplate taking rooms here?"

"No, monsieur, it appears that his interest was historical. At first I
should not have taken him for a man of learning, yet he gave me a great
piece of information; a thing quite new to me, though I have lived here
so many years. We are distinguished in history, it seems, and at one
time both William the Conqueror and that brave Jeanne d'Arc--"

I interrupted sharply, dropping my cigar and leaning across the table:

"How was this person dressed?"

"Monsieur, he was very much the pedestrian."

And so, for that evening, we had something to talk about besides "that
other monsieur"; indeed, we found our subject so absorbing that I
forgot to ask Amedee whether it was he or Jean Ferret who had prefixed
the "de" to "Armand."




CHAPTER VII


The cat that fell from the top of the Washington monument, and
scampered off unhurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a
certain painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been
seen to depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated
Norman stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone
wall of good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered
pebble, some ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected
over the wall, snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned
aforetime; it was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the
painter-man.

I could count on little less than a week of idleness within the
confines of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker
long-chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot
noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable
enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were strutting
on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into
the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and
fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot
sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest
from the ample figure of our maitre d'hotel reposing in a rustic chair
which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when
first occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee's
upper eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a
hazy gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon
his left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant
jerk, without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou,
rolling and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac,
watched with button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost
of some convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter.

A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a
deep inquiring rumble--the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was
I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to
expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in
the direction of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply
for a moment to make sure I had heard aright.

The name was repeated.

"Here I am," I called, "in the pavilion, if you wish to see me."

"Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir." With that the
professor's great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside.
"I have come to condole with you, if you allow it."

"To smoke with me, too, I hope," I said, not a little pleased.

"That I will do," he returned, and came in slowly, walking with
perceptible lameness. "The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only
from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi" he continued, seating
himself with a cavernous groan. "I am your confrere in illness, my dear
sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back."

"I hope it is not painful."

"Ha, it is so-so," he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his
eyes, dazzled by the sun. "There is more of me than of most men--more
to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this
big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war."

"You'll take a cigarette?"

"I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe."

He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened,
disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and,
fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister
tobacco from a pouch. "Always my pipe for me," he said, and applied a
match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of
cigarettes. "Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is
good for the soul." And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on
Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, "It is my first pipe since
yesterday."

"That is being a good smoker," I ventured sententiously; "to whet
indulgence with abstinence."

"My dear sir," he protested, "I am a man without even enough virtue to
be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary
repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am
temperate now."

"He has never smoked, your young friend?" I asked, glancing at my
visitor rather curiously, I fear.

"Mr. Saffren has no vices." Professor Keredec replaced his
silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene
benevolence. "He is in good condition, all pure, like little
children--and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the
eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is
his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window
than at his book. He looks very much from the window"--there was a
muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate
in the professor's torso, and took to be his expression of a
chuckle--"yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady some
days ago."

"You say your young friend's name is Saffren?"

"Oliver Saffren." The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a
shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd
notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec
was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace
syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the
seeming shadow upon my visitor's forehead became a reality, deepening
to a look of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: "It is
about him that I have come to talk to you."

"I shall be very glad," I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality
aside with a gesture of remonstrance.

"Ha, my dear sir," he cried; "but you are a man of feeling! We are both
old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth!
It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman's excuses when
he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject;
it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very
suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!"

"No, no," I protested hastily. "The name of Professor Keredec--"

"The name of NO man," he thundered, interrupting, "can protect his
reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I
know what you think. You think, 'He is a nice fine man, that old
professor, oh, very nice--only he hides behind the curtains sometimes!
Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.' Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you
have been thinking, my dear sir!"

"Not at all," I laughed; "I thought you might fear that _I_ was a spy."

"Eh?" He became sharply serious upon the instant. "What made you think
that?"

"I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps
writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and
that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter."

"So! And THAT is all," he returned, with evident relief. "No, my dear
sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I
confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what
kind of a man you are. And so," he concluded with an opening of the
hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for
concealment, "and so I have watched you."

"Why?" I asked.

"The explanation is so simple: it was necessary."

"Because of--of Mr. Saffren?" I said slowly, and with some trepidation.

"Precisely." The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Because I am
sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am--how should it be
said?--perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian."

"I see."

"Forgive me," he rejoined quickly, "but I am afraid you do not see. I
am not his guardian by the law."

"I had not supposed that you were," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case--his
case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane."

"Ha, my dear sir, you are right!" exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me,
much pleased. "You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as
yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now
much MORE sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with
the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like
the little children's mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little
learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more--ha, at
the greatest, a year from now--and he will not be different any longer;
he will be like the rest of us. Only"--the professor leaned forward and
his big fist came down on the arm of his chair--"he shall be better
than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now," he
continued, leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential
tone, "it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so
many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he
is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily,
those same people might meet him again after a while. 'Ha,' they would
say, 'there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!' And
so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those
clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and
I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this
quiet place where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any
foolish people. But, my dear sir"--he leaned forward again, and spoke
emphatically--"it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in
the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine
together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening but every
evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone.
It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the
world, but--a thousand saints!--let us be civilised to one another!"

"With all my heart," I said.

"Ha! I wish you to know my young man," Keredec went on. "You will like
him--no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him--and he is
your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make
friends, for he needs them."

"I think he has a host of them," said I, "in Professor Keredec."

My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and
sighed. "That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor
Keredec. And yet," he went on sadly, "it is all the friends that poor
boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?"

Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: "You will join me at the table on my
veranda, won't you? I can hobble that far but not much farther."

Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things
outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front
of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden
and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took
note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most
closely screened by the vines and said:

"May the table be placed yonder?"

"Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone."

"Ha, that is good," he exclaimed. "It is not human for a Frenchman to
eat in the house in good weather."

"It is a pity," I said, "that I should have been such a bugbear."

This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt
that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as
complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the
young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions
were altogether due to my presence at the inn.

And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance
repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their
nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever
they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased
Professor Keredec's mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was
sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen
of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.

"The reproach is deserved," he returned, after a pause. "It is to be
wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if
we had the courage, or the slyness"--he laughed--"to investigate."

I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his
back as he rose.

"Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I
must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor
fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in
summer!"

He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should
not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making
slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.

We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse. He crossed our vision
and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a
lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a
quick picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the
lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she
was not in white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was
certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in
recognising her. At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of
foot-steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled
pigeons fluttered up from the garden-path, betaking themselves to
flight, and "that other monsieur" came leaping across the courtyard,
through the archway and into the road.

"Glouglou! Look quickly!" he called loudly, in French, as he came; "Who
is that lady?"

Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth.
Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway,
carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which
for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.

"That lady, monsieur?" he gasped, checking himself at the young man's
side and gazing after the trap, "that is Madame d'Armand."

"Madame d'Armand," Saffren repeated the name slowly. "Her name is
Madame d'Armand."

"Yes, monsieur," said Amedee complacently; "it is an American lady who
has married a French nobleman."




CHAPTER VIII


Like most painters, I have supposed the tools of my craft harder to
manipulate than those of others. The use of words, particularly, seemed
readier, handier for the contrivance of effects than pigments. I
thought the language of words less elusive than that of colour, leaving
smaller margin for unintended effects; and, believing in complacent
good faith that words conveyed exact meanings exactly, it was my
innocent conception that almost anything might be so described in words
that all who read must inevitably perceive that thing precisely. If
this were true, there would be little work for the lawyers, who produce
such tortured pages in the struggle to be definite, who swing riches
from one family to another, save men from violent death or send them to
it, and earn fortunes for themselves through the dangerous inadequacies
of words. I have learned how great was my mistake, and now I am wishing
I could shift paper for canvas, that I might paint the young man who
came to interest me so deeply. I wish I might present him here in
colour instead of trusting to this unstable business of words, so wily
and undependable, with their shimmering values, that you cannot turn
your back upon them for two minutes but they will be shouting a hundred
things which they were not meant to tell.

To make the best of necessity: what I have written of him--my first
impressions--must be taken as the picture, although it be but a
gossamer sketch in the air, instead of definite work with well-ground
pigments to show forth a portrait, to make you see flesh and blood. It
must take the place of something contrived with my own tools to reveal
what the following days revealed him to me, and what it was about him
(evasive of description) which made me so soon, as Keredec wished, his
friend.

Life among our kin and kind is made pleasanter by our daily platitudes.
Who is more tedious than the man incessantly struggling to avoid the
banal? Nature rules that such a one will produce nothing better than
epigram and paradox, saying old, old things in a new way, or merely
shifting object for subject--and his wife's face, when he shines for a
circle, is worth a glance. With no further apology, I declare that I am
a person who has felt few positive likes or dislikes for people in this
life, and I did deeply like my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons.
Liking for both men increased with acquaintance, and for the younger I
came to feel, in addition, a kind of championship, doubtless in some
measure due to what Keredec had told me of him, but more to that
half-humourous sense of protectiveness that we always have for those
young people whose untempered and innocent outlook makes us feel, as we
say, "a thousand years old."

The afternoon following our first dinner together, the two, in
returning from their walk, came into the pavilion with cheerful
greetings, instead of going to their rooms as usual, and Keredec,
declaring that the open air had "dispersed" his rheumatism, asked if he
might overhaul some of my little canvases and boards. I explained that
they consisted mainly of "notes" for future use, but consented
willingly; whereupon he arranged a number of them as for exhibition and
delivered himself impromptu of the most vehemently instructive lecture
on art I had ever heard. Beginning with the family, the tribe, and the
totem-pole, he was able to demonstrate a theory that art was not only
useful to society but its primary necessity; a curious thought,
probably more attributable to the fact that he was a Frenchman than to
that of his being a scientist.

"And here," he said in the course of his demonstration, pointing to a
sketch which I had made one morning just after sunrise--"here you can
see real sunshine. One certain day there came those few certain moment'
at the sunrise when the light was like this. Those few moment', where
are they? They have disappeared, gone for eternally. They went"--he
snapped his fingers--"like that. Yet here they are--ha!--forever!"

"But it doesn't look like sunshine," said Oliver Saffren hesitatingly,
stating a disconcerting but incontrovertible truth; "it only seems to
look like it because--isn't it because it's so much brighter than the
rest of the picture? I doubt if paint CAN look like sunshine." He
turned from the sketch, caught Keredec's gathering frown, and his face
flushed painfully. "Ah!" he cried, "I shouldn't have said it?"

I interposed to reassure him, exclaiming that it were a godsend indeed,
did all our critics merely speak the plain truth as they see it for
themselves. The professor would not have it so, and cut me off.

"No, no, no, my dear sir!" he shouted. "You speak with kindness, but
you put some wrong ideas in his head!"

Saffren's look of trouble deepened. "I don't understand," he murmured.
"I thought you said always to speak the truth just as I see it." "I
have telled you," Keredec declared vehemently, "nothing of the kind!"

"But only yesterday--"

"Never!"

"I understood--"

"Then you understood only one-half! I say, 'Speak the truth as you see
it, when you speak.' I did not tell you to speak! How much time have
you give' to study sunshine and paint? What do you know about them?"

"Nothing," answered the other humbly.

A profound rumbling was heard, and the frown disappeared from Professor
Keredec's brow like the vanishing of the shadow of a little cloud from
the dome of some great benevolent and scientific institute. He dropped
a weighty hand on his young friend's shoulder, and, in high
good-humour, thundered:

"Then you are a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it
warms you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about
them to a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the
night and the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the
ocean. You will tell that to the astronomer? Ha! The truth is what the
masters see. When you know what they see, you may speak."

At dinner the night before, it had struck me that Saffren was a rather
silent young man by habit, and now I thought I began to understand the
reason. I hinted as much, saying, "That would make a quiet world of it."

"All the better, my dear sir!" The professor turned beamingly upon me
and continued, dropping into a Whistlerian mannerism that he had
sometimes: "You must not blame that great wind of a Keredec for
preaching at other people to listen. It gives the poor man more room
for himself to talk!"

I found his talk worth hearing.

I would show you, if I could, our pleasant evenings of lingering, after
coffee, behind the tremulous screen of honeysuckle, with the night very
dark and quiet beyond the warm nimbus of our candle-light, the faces of
my two companions clear-obscure in a mellow shadow like the middle
tones of a Rembrandt, and the professor, good man, talking wonderfully
of everything under the stars and over them,--while Oliver Saffren and
I sat under the spell of the big, kind voice, the young man listening
with the same eagerness which marked him when he spoke. It was an
eagerness to understand, not to interrupt.

These were our evenings. In the afternoons the two went for their walk
as usual, though now they did not plunge out of sight of the main road
with the noticeable haste which Amedee had described. As time pressed,
I perceived the caution of Keredec visibly slackening. Whatever he had
feared, the obscurity and continued quiet of LES TROIS PIGEONS
reassured him; he felt more and more secure in this sheltered retreat,
"far out of the world," and obviously thought no danger imminent. So
the days went by, uneventful for my new friends,--days of warm idleness
for me. Let them go unnarrated; we pass to the event.

My ankle had taken its wonted time to recover. I was on my feet again
and into the woods--not traversing, on the way, a certain
poppy-sprinkled field whence a fine Norman stallion snorted ridicule
over a wall. But the fortune of Keredec was to sink as I rose. His
summer rheumatism returned, came to grips with him, laid him low. We
hobbled together for a day or so, then I threw away my stick and he
exchanged his for an improvised crutch. By the time I was fit to run,
he was able to do little better than to creep--might well have taken to
his bed. But as he insisted that his pupil should not forego the daily
long walks and the health of the forest, it came to pass that Saffren
often made me the objective of his rambles. At dinner he usually asked
in what portion of the forest I should be painting late the next
afternoon, and I got in the habit of expecting him to join me toward
sunset. We located each other through a code of yodeling that we
arranged; his part of these vocal gymnastics being very pleasant to
hear, for he had a flexible, rich voice. I shudder to recall how
largely my own performances partook of the grotesque. But in the forest
where were no musical persons (I supposed) to take hurt from whatever
noise I made, I would let go with all the lungs I had; he followed the
horrid sounds to their origin, and we would return to the inn together.

On these homeward walks I found him a good companion, and that is
something not to be under-valued by a selfish man who lives for himself
and his own little ways and his own little thoughts, and for very
little else,--which is the kind of man (as I have already confessed)
that I was--deserving the pity of all happily or unhappily married
persons.

Responsive in kind to either a talkative mood or a silent one, always
gentle in manner, and always unobtrusively melancholy, Saffren never
took the initiative, though now and then he asked a question about some
rather simple matter which might be puzzling him. Whatever the answer,
he usually received it in silence, apparently turning the thing over
and over and inside out in his mind. He was almost tremulously
sensitive, yet not vain, for he was neither afraid nor ashamed to
expose his ignorance, his amazing lack of experience. He had a greater
trouble, one that I had not fathomed. Sometimes there came over his
face a look of importunate wistfulness and distressed perplexity, and
he seemed on the point of breaking out with something that he wished to
tell me--or to ask me, for it might have been a question--but he always
kept it back. Keredec's training seldom lost its hold upon him.

I had gone back to my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came
a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I
sat in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding
harlequin for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm
in the woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July
stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects
within hearing they must have been asleep; the quivering flight of a
butterfly in that languid air seemed, by contrast, quite a commotion; a
humming-bird would have made a riot.

I heard the light snapping of a twig and a swish of branches from the
direction in which I faced; evidently some one was approaching the
glade, though concealed from me for the moment by the winding of the
path. Taking it for Saffren, as a matter of course (for we had arranged
to meet at that time and place), I raised my voice in what I intended
for a merry yodel of greeting.

I yodeled loud, I yodeled long. Knowing my own deficiencies in this
art, I had adopted the cunning sinner's policy toward sin and made a
joke of it: thus, since my best performance was not unsuggestive of
calamity in the poultry yard, I made it worse. And then and there, when
my mouth was at its widest in the production of these shocking
ulla-hootings, the person approaching came round a turn in the path,
and within full sight of me. To my ultimate, utmost horror, it was
Madame d'Armand.

I grew so furiously red that it burned me. I had not the courage to
run, though I could have prayed that she might take me for what I
seemed--plainly a lunatic, whooping the lonely peace of the woods into
pandemonium--and turn back. But she kept straight on, must inevitably
reach the glade and cross it, and I calculated wretchedly that at the
rate she was walking, unhurried but not lagging, it would be about
thirty seconds before she passed me. Then suddenly, while I waited in
sizzling shame, a clear voice rang out from a distance in an answering
yodel to mine, and I thanked heaven for its mercies; at least she would
see that my antics had some reason.

She stopped short, in a half-step, as if a little startled, one arm
raised to push away a thin green branch that crossed the path at
shoulder-height; and her attitude was so charming as she paused,
detained to listen by this other voice with its musical youthfulness,
that for a second I thought crossly of all the young men in the world.

There was a final call, clear and loud as a bugle, and she turned to
the direction whence it came, so that her back was toward me. Then
Oliver Saffren came running lightly round the turn of the path, near
her and facing her.

He stopped as short as she had.

Her hand dropped from the slender branch, and pressed against her side.

He lifted his hat and spoke to her, and I thought she made some quick
reply in a low voice, though I could not be sure.

She held that startled attitude a moment longer, then turned and
crossed the glade so hurriedly that it was almost as if she ran away
from him. I had moved aside with my easel and camp-stool, but she
passed close to me as she entered the path again on my side of the
glade. She did not seem to see me, her dark eyes stared widely straight
ahead, her lips were parted, and she looked white and frightened.

She disappeared very quickly in the windings of the path.




CHAPTER IX


He came on more slowly, his eyes following her as she vanished, then
turning to me with a rather pitiful apprehension--a look like that I
remember to have seen (some hundreds of years ago) on the face of a
freshman, glancing up from his book to find his doorway ominously
filling with sophomores.

I stepped out to meet him, indignant upon several counts, most of all
upon his own. I knew there was no offence in his heart, not the
remotest rude intent, but the fact was before me that he had frightened
a woman, had given this very lovely guest of my friends good cause to
hold him a boor, if she did not, indeed, think him (as she probably
thought me) an outright lunatic! I said:

"You spoke to that lady!" And my voice sounded unexpectedly harsh and
sharp to my own ears, for I had meant to speak quietly.

"I know--I know. It--it was wrong," he stammered. "I knew I
shouldn't--and I couldn't help it."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"It's the truth; I couldn't!"

I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had
said was only the truth. "I don't understand; it was all beyond me," he
added huskily.

"What was it you said to her?"

"I spoke her name--'Madame d'Armand.'"

"You said more than that!"

"I asked her if she would let me see her again."

"What else?"

"Nothing," he answered humbly. "And then she--then for a moment it
seemed--for a moment she didn't seem to be able to speak--"

"I should think not!" I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical
laughter. He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following
the aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting
his flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to
tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter: this spectacle of a grown
man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered
confession.

"But she did say something to you, didn't she?" I asked finally, with
the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.

"Yes--after that moment."

"Well, what was it?"

"She said, 'Not now!' That was all."

"I suppose that was all she had breath for! It was just the
inconsequent and meaningless thing a frightened woman WOULD say!"

"Meaningless?" he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.

"Did you take it for an appointment?" I roared, quite out of patience,
and losing my temper completely.

"No, no, no! She said only that, and then--"

"Then she turned and ran away from you!"

"Yes," he said, swallowing painfully.

"That PLEASED you," I stormed, "to frighten a woman in the woods--to
make her feel that she can't walk here in safety! You ENJOY doing
things like that?"

He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and,
without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm
against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.

I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last
mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken
out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And
yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my
heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches
gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me
the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said.
This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he
did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude
until I had finished--and more than finished.

"There--and that's all!" I said desperately, when the things were
strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. "Let's be off, in
heaven's name!"

At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to
see that he had grown very pale.

"I wouldn't have frightened her for the world," he said, and his voice
and his whole body shook with a strange violence. "I wouldn't have
frightened her to please the angels in heaven!"

A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I
stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control
the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers
Keredec's training had built for his protection, they were down now.

"You think I told a lie!" he cried. "You think I lied when I said I
couldn't help speaking to her!"

"No, no," I said earnestly. "I didn't mean--"

"Words!" he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling
vehemence. "And what does it matter? You CAN'T understand. When YOU
want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you;
and I look back--AH!" He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent
syllable. "I look back and it's all--BLIND! All these things you CAN do
and CAN'T do--all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec
knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows--but
_I_ don't know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don't
know. I haven't HAD my life. It's gone! All I have is words that
Keredec has said to me, and it's like a man with no eyes, out in the
sunshine hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to
resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d'Armand? Can life
itself teach you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?"

"I don't know," I answered honestly.

"I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body," he went on,
with the same wild intensity, "rather than trouble her or frighten her,
but I couldn't help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to
see her again--the feeling that I MUST--whatever you say or do,
whatever Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do.
And I will! It isn't a thing to choose to do, or not to do. I can't
help it any more than I can help being alive!"

He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like
that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain. I made nervous haste to
seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly:

"But if it should distress the lady?"

"Yes--then I could keep away. But I must know that."

"I think you might know it by her running away--and by her look," I
said mildly. "Didn't you?"

"NO!" And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.

"Well, well," I said, "let's be on our way, or the professor will be
wondering if he is to dine alone."

Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward
home. He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so
long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply
as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain
control of himself. I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and
neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were
upon the main road near the Baudry cottage. Then he said in a steadier
voice:

"Why should it distress her?"

"Well, you see," I began, not slackening the pace "there are
formalities--"

"Ah, I know," he interrupted, with an impatient laugh. "Keredec once
took me to a marionette show--all the little people strung on wires;
they couldn't move any other way. And so you mustn't talk to a woman
until somebody whose name has been spoken to you speaks yours to her!
Do you call that a rule of nature?"

"My dear boy," I laughed in some desperation, "we must conform to it,
ordinarily, no matter whose rule it is."

"Do you think Madame d'Armand cares for little forms like that?" he
asked challengingly.

"She does," I assured him with perfect confidence. "And, for the
hundredth time, you must have seen how you troubled her."

"No," he returned, with the same curious obstinacy, "I don't believe
it. There was something, but it wasn't trouble. We looked straight at
each other; I saw her eyes plainly, and it was--" he paused and sighed,
a sudden, brilliant smile upon his lips--"it was very--it was very
strange!"

There was something so glad and different in his look that--like any
other dried-up old blunderer in my place--I felt an instant tendency to
laugh. It was that heathenish possession, the old insanity of the
risibles, which makes a man think it a humourous thing that his friend
should be discovered in love.

But before I spoke, before I quite smiled outright, I was given the
grace to see myself in the likeness of a leering stranger trespassing
in some cherished inclosure: a garden where the gentlest guests must
always be intruders, and only the owner should come. The best of us
profane it readily, leaving the coarse prints of our heels upon its
paths, mauling and man-handling the fairy blossoms with what pudgy
fingers! Comes the poet, ruthlessly leaping the wall and trumpeting
indecently his view-halloo of the chase, and, after him, the joker,
snickering and hopeful of a kill among the rose-beds; for this has been
their hunting-ground since the world began. These two have made us
miserably ashamed of the divine infinitive, so that we are afraid to
utter the very words "to love," lest some urchin overhear and pursue us
with a sticky forefinger and stickier taunts. It is little to my credit
that I checked the silly impulse to giggle at the eternal marvel, and
went as gently as I could where I should not have gone at all.

"But if you were wrong," I said, "if it did distress her, and if it
happened that she has already had too much that was distressing in her
life--"

"You know something about her!" he exclaimed. "You know--"

"I do not," I interrupted in turn. "I have only a vague guess; I may be
altogether mistaken."

"What is it that you guess?" he demanded abruptly. "Who made her
suffer?"

"I think it was her husband," I said, with a lack of discretion for
which I was instantly sorry, fearing with reason that I had added a
final blunder to the long list of the afternoon. "That is," I added,
"if my guess is right."

He stopped short in the road, detaining me by the arm, the question
coming like a whip-crack: sharp, loud, violent.

"Is he alive?"

"I don't know," I answered, beginning to move forward; "and this is
foolish talk--especially on my part!"

"But I want to know," he persisted, again detaining me.

"And I DON'T know!" I returned emphatically. "Probably I am entirely
mistaken in thinking that I know anything of her whatever. I ought not
to have spoken, unless I knew what I was talking about, and I'd rather
not say any more until I do know."

"Very well," he said quickly. "Will you tell me then?"

"Yes--if you will let it go at that."

"Thank you," he said, and with an impulse which was but too plainly one
of gratitude, offered me his hand. I took it, and my soul was
disquieted within me, for it was no purpose of mine to set inquiries on
foot in regard to the affairs of "Madame d'Armand."

It was early dusk, that hour, a little silvered but still clear, when
the edges of things are beginning to grow indefinite, and usually our
sleepy countryside knew no tranquiller time of day; but to-night, as we
approached the inn, there were strange shapes in the roadway and other
tokens that events were stirring there.

From the courtyard came the sounds of laughter and chattering voices.
Before the entrance stood a couple of open touring-cars; the chauffeurs
engaged in cooling the rear tires with buckets of water brought by a
personage ordinarily known as Glouglou, whose look and manner, as he
performed this office for the leathern dignitaries, so awed me that I
wondered I had ever dared address him with any presumption of intimacy.
The cars were great and opulent, of impressive wheel-base, and
fore-and-aft they were laden intricately with baggage: concave trunks
fitting behind the tonneaus, thin trunks fastened upon the footboards,
green, circular trunks adjusted to the spare tires, all deeply coated
with dust. Here were fineries from Paris, doubtless on their way to
flutter over the gay sands of Trouville, and now wandering but
temporarily from the road; for such splendours were never designed to
dazzle us of Madame Brossard's.

We were crossing before the machines when one of the drivers saw fit to
crank his engine (if that is the knowing phrase) and the thing shook
out the usual vibrating uproar. It had a devastating effect upon my
companion. He uttered a wild exclamation and sprang sideways into me,
almost upsetting us both.

"What on earth is the matter?" I asked. "Did you think the car was
starting?"

He turned toward me a face upon which was imprinted the sheer, blank
terror of a child. It passed in an instant however, and he laughed.

"I really didn't know. Everything has been so quiet always, out here in
the country--and that horrible racket coming so suddenly--"

Laughing with him, I took his arm and we turned to enter the archway.
As we did so we almost ran into a tall man who was coming out,
evidently intending to speak to one of the drivers.

The stranger stepped back with a word of apology, and I took note of
him for a fellow-countryman, and a worldly buck of fashion indeed,
almost as cap-a-pie the automobilist as my mysterious spiller of cider
had been the pedestrian. But this was no game-chicken; on the contrary
(so far as a glance in the dusk of the archway revealed him), much the
picture for framing in a club window of a Sunday morning; a seasoned,
hard-surfaced, knowing creature for whom many a head waiter must have
swept previous claimants from desired tables. He looked forty years so
cannily that I guessed him to be about fifty.

We were passing him when he uttered an ejaculation of surprise and
stepped forward again, holding out his hand to my companion, and
exclaiming:

"Where did YOU come from? I'd hardly have known you."

Oliver seemed unconscious of the proffered hand; he stiffened visibly
and said:

"I think there must be some mistake."

"So there is," said the other promptly. "I have been misled by a
resemblance. I beg your pardon."

He lifted his cap slightly, going on, and we entered the courtyard to
find a cheerful party of nine or ten men and women seated about a
couple of tables. Like the person we had just encountered, they all
exhibited a picturesque elaboration of the costume permitted by their
mode of travel; making effective groupings in their ample draperies of
buff and green and white, with glimpses of a flushed and pretty face or
two among the loosened veilings. Upon the tables were pots of tea,
plates of sandwiches, Madame Brossard's three best silver dishes heaped
with fruit, and some bottles of dry champagne from the cellars of
Rheims. The partakers were making very merry, having with them (as is
inevitable in all such parties, it seems) a fat young man inclined to
humour, who was now upon his feet for the proposal of some prankish
toast. He interrupted himself long enough to glance our way as we
crossed the garden; and it struck me that several pairs of brighter
eyes followed my young companion with interest. He was well worth it,
perhaps all the more because he was so genuinely unconscious of it; and
he ran up the gallery steps and disappeared into his own rooms without
sending even a glance from the corner of his eye in return.

I went almost as quickly to my pavilion, and, without lighting my lamp,
set about my preparations for dinner.

The party outside, breaking up presently, could be heard moving toward
the archway with increased noise and laughter, inspired by some
exquisite antic on the part of the fat young man, when a girl's voice
(a very attractive voice) called, "Oh, Cressie, aren't you coming?" and
a man's replied, from near my veranda: "Only stopping to light a cigar."

A flutter of skirts and a patter of feet betokened that the girl came
running back to join the smoker. "Cressie," I heard her say in an
eager, lowered tone, "who WAS he?"

"Who was who?"

"That DEVASTATING creature in white flannels!"

The man chuckled. "Matinee sort of devastator--what? Monte Cristo hair,
noble profile--"

"You'd better tell me," she interrupted earnestly--"if you don't want
me to ask the WAITER."

"But I don't know him."

"I saw you speak to him."

"I thought it was a man I met three years ago out in San Francisco, but
I was mistaken. There was a slight resemblance. This fellow might have
been a rather decent younger brother of the man I knew. HE was the--"

My strong impression was that if the speaker had not been interrupted
at this point he would have said something very unfavourable to the
character of the man he had met in San Francisco; but there came a
series of blasts from the automobile horns and loud calls from others
of the party, who were evidently waiting for these two.

"Coming!" shouted the man.

"Wait!" said his companion hurriedly, "Who was the other man, the older
one with the painting things and SUCH a coat?"

"Never saw him before in my life."

I caught a last word from the girl as the pair moved away.

"I'll come back here with a BAND to-morrow night, and serenade the
beautiful one.

"Perhaps he'd drop me his card out of the window!"

The horns sounded again; there was a final chorus of laughter, suddenly
ceasing to be heard as the cars swept away, and Les Trois Pigeons was
left to its accustomed quiet.

"Monsieur is served," said Amedee, looking in at my door, five minutes
later.

"You have passed a great hour just now, Amedee."

"It was like the old days, truly!"

"They are off for Trouville, I suppose."

"No, monsieur, they are on their way to visit the chateau, and stopped
here only because the run from Paris had made the tires too hot."

"To visit Quesnay, you mean?"

"Truly. But monsieur need give himself no uneasiness; I did not mention
to any one that monsieur is here. His name was not spoken. Mademoiselle
Ward returned to the chateau to-day," he added. "She has been in
England."

"Quesnay will be gay," I said, coming out to the table. Oliver Saffren
was helping the professor down the steps, and Keredec, bent with
suffering, but indomitable, gave me a hearty greeting, and began a
ruthless dissection of Plato with the soup. Oliver, usually, very
quiet, as I have said, seemed a little restless under the discourse
to-night. However, he did not interrupt, sitting patiently until
bedtime, though obviously not listening. When he bade me good night he
gave me a look so clearly in reference to a secret understanding
between us that, meaning to keep only the letter of my promise to him,
I felt about as comfortable as if I had meanly tricked a child.




CHAPTER X


I had finished dressing, next morning, and was strapping my things
together for the day's campaign, when I heard a shuffling step upon the
porch, and the door opened gently, without any previous ceremony of
knocking. To my angle of vision what at first appeared to have opened
it was a tray of coffee, rolls, eggs, and a packet of sandwiches, but,
after hesitating somewhat, this apparition advanced farther into the
room, disclosing a pair of supporting hands, followed in due time by
the whole person of a nervously smiling and visibly apprehensive
Amedee. He closed the door behind him by the simple action of backing
against it, took the cloth from his arm, and with a single gesture
spread it neatly upon a small table, then, turning to me, laid the
forefinger of his right hand warningly upon his lips and bowed me a
deferential invitation to occupy the chair beside the table.

"Well," I said, glaring at him, "what ails you?"

"I thought monsieur might prefer his breakfast indoors, this morning,"
he returned in a low voice.

"Why should I?"

The miserable old man said something I did not understand--an
incoherent syllable or two--suddenly covered his mouth with both hands,
and turned away. I heard a catch in his throat; suffocated sounds
issued from his bosom; however, it was nothing more than a momentary
seizure, and, recovering command of himself by a powerful effort, he
faced me with hypocritical servility.

"Why do you laugh?" I asked indignantly.

"But I did not laugh," he replied in a husky whisper. "Not at all."

"You did," I asserted, raising my voice. "It almost killed you!"

"Monsieur," he begged hoarsely, "HUSH!"

"What is the matter?" I demanded loudly. "What do you mean by these
abominable croakings? Speak out!"

"Monsieur--" he gesticulated in a panic, toward the courtyard.
"Mademoiselle Ward is out there."

"WHAT!" But I did not shout the word.

"There is always a little window in the rear wall," he breathed in my
ear as I dropped into the chair by the table. "She would not see you
if--"

I interrupted with all the French rough-and-ready expressions of
dislike at my command, daring to hope that they might give him some
shadowy, far-away idea of what I thought of both himself and his
suggestions, and, notwithstanding the difficulty of expressing strong
feeling in whispers, it seemed to me that, in a measure, I succeeded.
"I am not in the habit of crawling out of ventilators," I added,
subduing a tendency to vehemence. "And probably Mademoiselle Ward has
only come to talk with Madame Brossard."

"I fear some of those people may have told her you were here," he
ventured insinuatingly.

"What people?" I asked, drinking my coffee calmly, yet, it must be
confessed, without quite the deliberation I could have wished.

"Those who stopped yesterday evening on the way to the chateau. They
might have recognised--"

"Impossible. I knew none of them."

"But Mademoiselle Ward knows that you are here. Without doubt."

"Why do you say so?"

"Because she has inquired for you."

"So!" I rose at once and went toward the door. "Why didn't you tell me
at once?"

"But surely," he remonstrated, ignoring my question, "monsieur will
make some change of attire?"

"Change of attire?" I echoed.

"Eh, the poor old coat all hunched at the shoulders and spotted with
paint!"

"Why shouldn't it be?" I hissed, thoroughly irritated. "Do you take me
for a racing marquis?"

"But monsieur has a coat much more as a coat ought to be. And Jean
Ferret says--"

"Ha, now we're getting at it!" said I. "What does Jean Ferret say?"

"Perhaps it would be better if I did not repeat--"

"Out with it! What does Jean Ferret say?"

"Well, then, Mademoiselle Ward's maid from Paris has told Jean Ferret
that monsieur and Mademoiselle Ward have corresponded for years, and
that--and that--"

"Go on," I bade him ominously.

"That monsieur has sent Mademoiselle Ward many expensive jewels, and--"

"Aha!" said I, at which he paused abruptly, and stood staring at me.
The idea of explaining Miss Elizabeth's collection to him, of getting
anything whatever through that complacent head of his, was so hopeless
that I did not even consider it. There was only one thing to do, and
perhaps I should have done it--I do not know, for he saw the menace
coiling in my eye, and hurriedly retreated.

"Monsieur!" he gasped, backing away from me, and as his hand, fumbling
behind him, found the latch of the door, he opened it, and scrambled
out by a sort of spiral movement round the casing. When I followed, a
moment later--with my traps on my shoulder and the packet of sandwiches
in my pocket--he was out of sight.

Miss Elizabeth sat beneath the arbour at the other end of the
courtyard, and beside her stood the trim and glossy bay saddle-horse
that she had ridden from Quesnay, his head outstretched above his
mistress to paddle at the vine leaves with a tremulous upper lip. She
checked his desire with a slight movement of her hand upon the
bridle-rein; and he arched his neck prettily, pawing the gravel with a
neat forefoot. Miss Elizabeth is one of the few large women I have
known to whom a riding-habit is entirely becoming, and this group of
two--a handsome woman and her handsome horse--has had a charm for all
men ever since horses were tamed and women began to be beautiful. I
thought of my work, of the canvases I meant to cover, but I felt the
charm--and I felt it stirringly. It was a fine, fresh morning, and the
sun just risen.

An expression in the lady's attitude, and air which I instinctively
construed as histrionic, seemed intended to convey that she had been
kept waiting, yet had waited without reproach; and although she must
have heard me coming, she did not look toward me until I was quite near
and spoke her name. At that she sprang up quickly enough, and stretched
out her hand to me.

"Run to earth!" she cried, advancing a step to meet me.

"A pretty poor trophy of the chase," said I, "but proud that you are
its killer."

To my surprise and mystification, her cheeks and brow flushed rosily;
she was obviously conscious of it, and laughed.

"Don't be embarrassed," she said.

"I!"

"Yes, you, poor man! I suppose I couldn't have more thoroughly
compromised you. Madame Brossard will never believe in your
respectability again."

"Oh, yes, she will," said I.

"What? A lodger who has ladies calling upon him at five o'clock in the
morning? But your bundle's on your shoulder," she rattled on, laughing,
"though there's many could be bolder, and perhaps you'll let me walk a
bit of the way with you, if you're for the road."

"Perhaps I will," said I. She caught up her riding-skirt, fastening it
by a clasp at her side, and we passed out through the archway and went
slowly along the road bordering the forest, her horse following
obediently at half-rein's length.

"When did you hear that I was at Madame Brossard's?" I asked.

"Ten minutes after I returned to Quesnay, late yesterday afternoon."

"Who told you?"

"Louise."

I repeated the name questioningly. "You mean Mrs. Larrabee Harman?"

"Louise Harman," she corrected. "Didn't you know she was staying at
Quesnay?"

"I guessed it, though Amedee got the name confused."

"Yes, she's been kind enough to look after the place for us while we
were away. George won't be back for another ten days, and I've been
overseeing an exhibition for him in London. Afterward I did a round of
visits--tiresome enough, but among people it's well to keep in touch
with on George's account."

"I see," I said, with a grimness which probably escaped her. "But how
did Mrs. Harman know that I was at Les Trois Pigeons?"

"She met you once in the forest--"

"Twice," I interrupted.

"She mentioned only once. Of course she'd often heard both George and
me speak of you."

"But how did she know it was I and where I was staying?"

"Oh, that?" Her smile changed to a laugh. "Your maitre d'hotel told
Ferret, a gardener at Quesnay, that you were at the inn."

"He did!"

"Oh, but you mustn't be angry with him; he made it quite all right."

"How did he do that?" I asked, trying to speak calmly, though there was
that in my mind which might have blanched the parchment cheek of a
grand inquisitor.

"He told Ferret that you were very anxious not to have it known--"

"You call that making it all right?"

"For himself, I mean. He asked Ferret not to mention who it was that
told him."

"The rascal!" I cried. "The treacherous, brazen--"

"Unfortunate man," said Miss Elizabeth, "don't you see how clear you're
making it that you really meant to hide from us?"

There seemed to be something in that, and my tirade broke up in
confusion. "Oh, no," I said lamely, "I hoped--I hoped--"

"Be careful!"

"No; I hoped to work down here," I blurted. "And I thought if I saw too
much of you--I might not."

She looked at me with widening eyes. "And I can take my choice," she
cried, "of all the different things you may mean by that! It's either
the most outrageous speech I ever heard--or the most flattering."

"But I meant simply--"

"No." She lifted her hand and stopped me. "I'd rather believe that I
have at least the choice--and let it go at that." And as I began to
laugh, she turned to me with a gravity apparently so genuine that for
the moment I was fatuous enough to believe that she had said it
seriously. Ensued a pause of some duration, which, for my part, I found
disturbing. She broke it with a change of subject.

"You think Louise very lovely to look at, don't you?"

"Exquisite," I answered.

"Every one does."

"I suppose she told you--" and now I felt myself growing red--"that I
behaved like a drunken acrobat when she came upon me in the path."

"No. Did you?" cried Miss Elizabeth, with a ready credulity which I
thought by no means pretty; indeed, she seemed amused and, to my
surprise (for she is not an unkind woman), rather heartlessly pleased.
"Louise only said she knew it must be you, and that she wished she
could have had a better look at what you were painting."

"Heaven bless her!" I exclaimed. "Her reticence was angelic."

"Yes, she has reticence," said my companion, with enough of the same
quality to make me look at her quickly. A thin line had been drawn
across her forehead.

"You mean she's still reticent with George?" I ventured.

"Yes," she answered sadly. "Poor George always hopes, of course, in the
silent way of his kind when they suffer from such unfortunate
passions--and he waits."

"I suppose that former husband of hers recovered?"

"I believe he's still alive somewhere. Locked up, I hope!" she finished
crisply.

"She retained his name," I observed.

"Harman? Yes, she retained it," said my companion rather shortly.

"At all events, she's rid of him, isn't she?"

"Oh, she's RID of him!" Her tone implied an enigmatic reservation of
some kind.

"It's hard," I reflected aloud, "hard to understand her making that
mistake, young as she was. Even in the glimpses of her I've had, it was
easy to see something of what she's like: a fine, rare, high type--"

"But you didn't know HIM, did you?" Miss Elizabeth asked with some
dryness.

"No," I answered. "I saw him twice; once at the time of his
accident--that was only a nightmare, his face covered with--" I
shivered. "But I had caught a glimpse of him on the boulevard, and of
all the dreadful--"

"Oh, but he wasn't always dreadful," she interposed quickly. "He was a
fascinating sort of person, quite charming and good-looking, when she
ran away with him, though he was horribly dissipated even then. He
always had been THAT. Of course she thought she'd be able to straighten
him out--poor girl! She tried, for three years--three years it hurts
one to think of! You see it must have been something very like a 'grand
passion' to hold her through a pain three years long."

"Or tremendous pride," said I. "Women make an odd world of it for the
rest of us. There was good old George, as true and straight a man as
ever lived--"

"And she took the other! Yes." George's sister laughed sorrowfully.

"But George and she have both survived the mistake," I went on with
confidence. "Her tragedy must have taught her some important
differences. Haven't you a notion she'll be tremendously glad to see
him when he comes back from America?"

"Ah, I do hope so!" she cried. "You see, I'm fearing that he hopes so
too--to the degree of counting on it."

"You don't count on it yourself?"

She shook her head. "With any other woman I should."

"Why not with Mrs. Harman?"

"Cousin Louise has her ways," said Miss Elizabeth slowly, and, whether
she could not further explain her doubts, or whether she would not,
that was all I got out of her on the subject at the time. I asked one
or two more questions, but my companion merely shook her head again,
alluding vaguely to her cousin's "ways." Then she brightened suddenly,
and inquired when I would have my things sent up to the chateau from
the inn.

At the risk of a misunderstanding which I felt I could ill afford, I
resisted her kind hospitality, and the outcome of it was that there
should be a kind of armistice, to begin with my dining at the chateau
that evening. Thereupon she mounted to the saddle, a bit of gymnastics
for which she declined my assistance, and looked down upon me from a
great height.

"Did anybody ever tell you," was her surprising inquiry, "that you are
the queerest man of these times?"

"No," I answered. "Don't you think you're a queerer woman?"

"FOOTLE!" she cried scornfully. "Be off to your woods and your
woodscaping!"

The bay horse departed at a smart gait, not, I was glad to see, a
parkish trot--Miss Elizabeth wisely set limits to her sacrifices to
Mode--and she was far down the road before I had passed the outer
fringe of trees.

My work was accomplished after a fashion more or less desultory that
day; I had many absent moments, was restless, and walked more than I
painted. Oliver Saffron did not join me in the late afternoon; nor did
the echo of distant yodelling bespeak any effort on his part to find
me. So I gave him up, and returned to the inn earlier than usual.

While dressing I sent word to Professor Keredec that I should not be
able to join him at dinner that evening; and it is to be recorded that
Glouglou carried the message for me. Amedee did not appear, from which
it may be inferred that our maitre d'hotel was subject to lucid
intervals. Certainly his present shyness indicated an intelligence of
no low order.




CHAPTER XI


The dining-room at Quesnay is a pretty work of the second of those
three Louises who made so much furniture. It was never a proper setting
for a rusty, out-of-doors painter-man, nor has such a fellow ever found
himself complacently at ease there since the day its first banquet was
spread for a score or so of fine-feathered epigram jinglers, fiddling
Versailles gossip out of a rouge-and-lace Quesnay marquise newly sent
into half-earnest banishment for too much king-hunting. For my part,
however, I should have preferred a chance at making a place for myself
among the wigs and brocades to the Crusoe's Isle of my chair at Miss
Elizabeth's table.

I learned at an early age to look my vanities in the face; I outfaced
them and they quailed, but persisted, surviving for my discomfort to
this day. Here is the confession: It was not until my arrival at the
chateau that I realised what temerity it involved to dine there in
evening clothes purchased, some four or five or six years previously,
in the economical neighbourhood of the Boulevard St. Michel. Yet the
things fitted me well enough; were clean and not shiny, having been
worn no more than a dozen times, I think; though they might have been
better pressed.

Looking over the men of the Quesnay party--or perhaps I should signify
a reversal of that and say a glance of theirs at me--revealed the
importance of a particular length of coat-tail, of a certain rich
effect obtained by widely separating the lower points of the waistcoat,
of the display of some imagination in the buttons upon the same
garment, of a doubled-back arrangement of cuffs, and of a specific
design and dimension of tie. Marked uniformity in these matters denoted
their necessity; and clothes differing from the essential so vitally as
did mine must have seemed immodest, little better than no clothes at
all. I doubt if I could have argued in extenuation my lack of
advantages for study, such an excuse being itself the damning
circumstance. Of course eccentricity is permitted, but (as in the Arts)
only to the established. And I recall a painful change of colour which
befell the countenance of a shining young man I met at Ward's house in
Paris: he had used his handkerchief and was absently putting it in his
pocket when he providentially noticed what he was doing and restored it
to his sleeve.

Miss Elizabeth had the courage to take me under her wing, placing me
upon her left at dinner; but sprightlier calls than mine demanded and
occupied her attention. At my other side sat a magnificently
upholstered lady, who offered a fine shoulder and the rear wall of a
collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she
leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table.
This was a prince, ending in "ski": he permitted himself the slight
vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance
drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I
should not have known her.

Fragments reaching me in my seclusion indicated that the various
conversations up and down the long table were animated; and at times
some topic proved of such high interest as to engage the comment of the
whole company. This was the case when the age of one of the English
king's grandchildren came in question, but a subject which called for
even longer (if less spirited) discourse concerned the shameful lack of
standard on the part of citizens of the United States, or, as it was
put, with no little exasperation, "What is the trouble with America?"
Hereupon brightly gleamed the fat young man whom I had marked for a wit
at Les Trois Pigeons; he pictured with inimitable mimicry a western
senator lately in France. This outcast, it appeared, had worn a slouch
hat at a garden party and had otherwise betrayed his country to the
ridicule of the intelligent. "But really," said the fat young man,
turning plaintiff in conclusion, "imagine what such things make the
English and the French think of US!" And it finally went by consent
that the trouble with America was the vulgarity of our tourists.

"A dreadful lot!" Miss Elizabeth cheerfully summed up for them all.
"The miseries I undergo with that class of 'prominent Amurricans' who
bring letters to my brother! I remember one awful creature who said,
when I came into the room, 'Well, ma'am, I guess you're the lady of the
house, aren't you?'"

Miss Elizabeth sparkled through the chorus of laughter, but I
remembered the "awful creature," a genial and wise old man of affairs,
whose daughter's portrait George painted. Miss Elizabeth had missed his
point: the canvasser's phrase had been intended with humour, and even
had it lacked that, it was not without a pretty quaintness. So I
thought, being "left to my own reflections," which may have partaken of
my own special kind of snobbery; at least I regretted the Elizabeth of
the morning garden and the early walk along the fringe of the woods.
For she at my side to-night was another lady.

The banquet was drawing to a close when she leaned toward me and spoke
in an undertone. As this was the first sign, in so protracted a period,
that I might ever again establish relations with the world of men, it
came upon me like a Friday's footprint, and in the moment of shock I
did not catch what she said.

"Anne Elliott, yonder, is asking you a question," she repeated, nodding
at a very pretty gal down and across the table from me. Miss Anne
Elliott's attractive voice had previously enabled me to recognise her
as the young woman who had threatened to serenade Les Trois Pigeons.

"I beg your pardon," I said, addressing her, and at the sound my
obscurity was illuminated, about half of the company turning to look at
me with wide-eyed surprise. (I spoke in an ordinary tone, it may need
to be explained, and there is nothing remarkable about my voice).

"I hear you're at Les Trois Pigeons," said Miss Elliott.

"Yes?"

"WOULD you mind telling us something of the MYSTERIOUS Narcissus?"

"If you'll be more definite," I returned, in the tone of a question.

"There couldn't be more than one like THAT," said Miss Elliott, "at
least, not in one neighbourhood, could there? I mean a RECKLESSLY
charming vision with a WHITE tie and WHITE hair and WHITE flannels."

"Oh," said I, "HE'S not mysterious."

"But he IS," she returned; "I insist on his being MYSTERIOUS! Rarely,
grandly, STRANGELY mysterious! You WILL let me think so?" This young
lady had a whimsical manner of emphasising words unexpectedly, with a
breathless intensity that approached violence, a habit dangerously
contagious among nervous persons, so that I answered slowly, out of a
fear that I might echo it.

"It would need a great deal of imagination. He's a young American, very
attractive, very simple--"

"But he's MAD!" she interrupted.

"Oh, no!" I said hastily.

"But he IS! A person told me so in a garden this VERY afternoon," she
went on eagerly; "a person with a rake and EVER so many moles on his
chin. This person told me all about him. His name is Oliver Saffren,
and he's in the charge of a VERY large doctor and quite, QUITE mad!"

"Jean Ferret, the gardener." I said deliberately, and with venom, "is
fast acquiring notoriety in these parts as an idiot of purest ray, and
he had his information from another whose continuance unhanged is every
hour more miraculous."

"How RUTHLESS of you," cried Miss Elliott, with exaggerated reproach,
"when I have had such a thrilling happiness all day in believing that
RIOTOUSLY beautiful creature mad! You are wholly positive he isn't?"

Our dialogue was now all that delayed a general departure from the
table. This, combined with the naive surprise I have mentioned, served
to make us temporarily the centre of attention, and, among the faces
turned toward me, my glance fell unexpectedly upon one I had not seen
since entering the dining-room. Mrs. Harman had been placed at some
distance from me and on the same side of the table, but now she leaned
far back in her chair to look at me, so that I saw her behind the
shoulders of the people between us. She was watching me with an
expression unmistakably of repressed anxiety and excitement, and as our
eyes met, hers shone with a certain agitation, as of some odd
consciousness shared with me. It was so strangely, suddenly a reminder
of the look of secret understanding given me with good night,
twenty-four hours earlier, by the man whose sanity was Miss Elliott's
topic, that, puzzled and almost disconcerted for the moment, I did not
at once reply to the lively young lady's question.

"You're hesitating!" she cried, clasping her hands. "I believe there's
a DARLING little chance of it, after all! And if it weren't so, why
would he need to be watched over, day AND night, by an ENORMOUS doctor?"

"This IS romance!" I retorted. "The doctor is Professor Keredec,
illustriously known in this country, but not as a physician, and they
are following some form of scientific research together, I believe.
But, assuming to speak as Mr. Saffren's friend," I added, rising with
the others upon Miss Ward's example, "I'm sure if he could come to know
of your interest, he would much rather play Hamlet for you than let you
find him disappointing."

"If he could come to know of my interest!" she echoed, glancing down at
herself with mock demureness. "Don't you think he could come to know
something more of me than that?"

The windows had been thrown open, allowing passage to a veranda. Miss
Elizabeth led the way outdoors with the prince, the rest of us
following at hazard, and in the mild confusion of this withdrawal I
caught a final glimpse of Mrs. Harman, which revealed that she was
still looking at me with the same tensity; but with the movement of
intervening groups I lost her. Miss Elliott pointedly waited for me
until I came round the table, attached me definitely by taking my arm,
accompanying her action with a dazzling smile. "Oh, DO you think you
can manage it?" she whispered rapturously, to which I replied--as
vaguely as I could--that the demands of scientific research upon the
time of its followers were apt to be exorbitant.

Tables and coffee were waiting on the broad terrace below, with a big
moon rising in the sky. I descended the steps in charge of this pretty
cavalier, allowed her to seat me at the most remote of the tables, and
accepted without unwillingness other gallantries of hers in the matter
of coffee and cigarettes. "And now," she said, "now that I've done so
much for your DEAREST hopes and comfort, look up at the milky moon, and
tell me ALL!"

"If you can bear it?"

She leaned an elbow on the marble railing that protected the terrace,
and, shielding her eyes from the moonlight with her hand, affected to
gaze at me dramatically. "Have no distrust," she bade me. "Who and WHAT
is the glorious stranger?"

Resisting an impulse to chime in with her humour, I gave her so dry and
commonplace an account of my young friend at the inn that I presently
found myself abandoned to solitude again.

"I don't know where to go," she complained as she rose. "These other
people are MOST painful to a girl of my intelligence, but I cannot
linger by your side; untruth long ago lost its interest for me, and I
prefer to believe Mr. Jean Ferret--if that is the gentleman's name. I'd
join Miss Ward and Cressie Ingle yonder, but Cressie WOULD be
indignant! I shall soothe my hurt with SWEETEST airs. Adieu."

With that she made me a solemn courtesy and departed, a pretty little
figure, not little in attractiveness, the strong moonlight, tinged with
blue, shimmering over her blond hair and splashing brightly among the
ripples of her silks and laces. She swept across the terrace languidly,
offering an effect of comedy not unfairylike, and, ascending the steps
of the veranda, disappeared into the orange candle-light of a salon. A
moment later some chords were sounded firmly upon a piano in that room,
and a bitter song swam out to me over the laughter and talk of the
people at the other tables. It was to be observed that Miss Anne
Elliott sang very well, though I thought she over-emphasised one line
of the stanza:

"This world is a world of lies!"

Perhaps she had poisoned another little arrow for me, too. Impelled by
the fine night, the groups upon the terrace were tending toward a wider
dispersal, drifting over the sloping lawns by threes and couples, and I
was able to identify two figures threading the paths of the garden,
together, some distance below. Judging by the pace they kept, I should
have concluded that Miss Ward and Mr. Cresson Ingle sought the
healthful effects of exercise. However, I could see no good reason for
wishing their conversation less obviously absorbing, though Miss
Elliott's insinuation that Mr. Ingle might deplore intrusion upon the
interview had struck me as too definite to be altogether pleasing.
Still, such matters could not discontent me with my solitude. Eastward,
over the moonlit roof of the forest, I could see the quiet ocean, its
unending lines of foam moving slowly to the long beaches, too far away
to be heard. The reproachful voice of the singer came no more from the
house, but the piano ran on into "La Vie de Boheme," and out of that
into something else, I did not know what, but it seemed to be music; at
least it was musical enough to bring before me some memory of the faces
of pretty girls I had danced with long ago in my dancing days, so that,
what with the music, and the distant sea, and the soft air, so
sparklingly full of moonshine, and the little dancing memories, I was
floated off into a reverie that was like a prelude for the person who
broke it. She came so quietly that I did not hear her until she was
almost beside me and spoke to me. It was the second time that had
happened.




CHAPTER XII


"Mrs. Harman," I said, as she took the chair vacated by the elfin young
lady, "you see I can manage it! But perhaps I control myself better
when there's no camp-stool to inspire me. You remember my woodland
didoes--I fear?"

She smiled in a pleasant, comprehending way, but neither directly
replied nor made any return speech whatever; instead, she let her
forearms rest on the broad railing of the marble balustrade, and,
leaning forward, gazed out over the shining and mysterious slopes
below. Somehow it seemed to me that her not answering, and her quiet
action, as well as the thoughtful attitude in which it culminated,
would have been thought "very like her" by any one who knew her well.
"Cousin Louise has her ways," Miss Elizabeth had told me; this was
probably one of them, and I found it singularly attractive. For that
matter, from the day of my first sight of her in the woods I had needed
no prophet to tell me I should like Mrs. Harman's ways.

"After the quiet you have had here, all this must seem," I said,
looking down upon the strollers, "a usurpation."

"Oh, they!" She disposed of Quesnay's guests with a slight movement of
her left hand. "You're an old friend of my cousins--of both of them;
but even without that, I know you understand. Elizabeth does it all for
her brother, of course."

"But she likes it," I said.

"And Mr. Ward likes it, too," she added slowly. "You'll see, when he
comes home."

Night's effect upon me being always to make me venturesome, I took a
chance, and ventured perhaps too far. "I hope we'll see many happy
things when he comes home."

"It's her doing things of this sort," she said, giving no sign of
having heard my remark, "that has helped so much to make him the
success that he is."

"It's what has been death to his art!" I exclaimed, too quickly--and
would have been glad to recall the speech.

She met it with a murmur of low laughter that sounded pitying. "Wasn't
it always a dubious relation--between him and art?" And without
awaiting an answer, she went on, "So it's all the better that he can
have his success!"

To this I had nothing whatever to say. So far as I remembered, I had
never before heard a woman put so much comprehension of a large subject
into so few words, but in my capacity as George's friend, hopeful for
his happiness, it made me a little uneasy. During the ensuing pause
this feeling, at first uppermost, gave way to another not at all in
sequence, but irresponsible and intuitive, that she had something in
particular to say to me, had joined me for that purpose, and was
awaiting the opportunity. As I have made open confession, my curiosity
never needed the spur; and there is no denying that this impression set
it off on the gallop; but evidently the moment had not come for her to
speak. She seemed content to gaze out over the valley in silence.

"Mr. Cresson Ingle," I hazarded; "is he an old, new friend of your
cousins? I think he was not above the horizon when I went to Capri, two
years ago?"

"He wants Elizabeth," she returned, adding quietly, "as you've seen."
And when I had verified this assumption with a monosyllable, she
continued, "He's an 'available,' but I should hate to have it happen.
He's hard."

"He doesn't seem very hard toward her," I murmured, looking down into
the garden where Mr. Ingle just then happened to be adjusting a scarf
about his hostess's shoulders.

"He's led a detestable life," said Mrs. Harman, "among detestable
people!"

She spoke with sudden, remarkable vigour, and as if she knew. The
full-throated emphasis she put upon "detestable" gave the word the
sting of a flagellation; it rang with a rightful indignation that
brought vividly to my mind the thought of those three years in Mrs.
Harman's life which Elizabeth said "hurt one to think of." For this was
the lady who had rejected good George Ward to run away with a man much
deeper in all that was detestable than Mr. Cresson Ingle could ever be!

"He seems to me much of a type with these others," I said.

"Oh, they keep their surfaces about the same."

"It made me wish _I_ had a little more surface to-night," I laughed.
"I'd have fitted better. Miss Ward is different at different times.
When we are alone together she always has the air of excusing, or at
least explaining, these people to me, but this evening I've had the
disquieting thought that perhaps she also explained me to them."

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Harman, turning to me quickly. "Didn't you see? She
was making up to Mr. Ingle for this morning. It came out that she'd
ridden over at daylight to see you; Anne Elliott discovered it in some
way and told him."

This presented an aspect of things so overwhelmingly novel that out of
a confusion of ideas I was able to fasten on only one with which to
continue the conversation, and I said irrelevantly that Miss Elliott
was a remarkable young woman. At this my companion, who had renewed her
observation of the valley, gave me a full, clear look of earnest
scrutiny, which set me on the alert, for I thought that now what she
desired to say was coming. But I was disappointed, for she spoke
lightly, with a ripple of amusement.

"I suppose she finished her investigations? You told her all you could?"

"Almost."

"I suppose you wouldn't trust ME with the reservation?" she asked,
smiling.

"I would trust you with anything," I answered seriously.

"You didn't gratify that child?" she said, half laughing. Then, to my
surprise, her tone changed suddenly, and she began again in a hurried
low voice: "You didn't tell her--" and stopped there, breathless and
troubled, letting me see that I had been right after all: this was what
she wanted to talk about.

"I didn't tell her that young Saffren is mad, no; if that is what you
mean."

"I'm glad you didn't," she said slowly, sinking back in her chair so
that her face was in the shadow of the awning which sheltered the
little table between us.

"In the first place, I wouldn't have told her even if it were true," I
returned, "and in the second, it isn't true--though YOU have some
reason to think it is," I added.

"_I_?" she said. "Why?"

"His speaking to you as he did; a thing on the face of it inexcusable--"

"Why did he call me 'Madame d'Armand'?" she interposed.

I explained something of the mental processes of Amedee, and she
listened till I had finished; then bade me continue.

"That's all," I said blankly, but, with a second thought, caught her
meaning. "Oh, about young Saffren, you mean?"

"Yes."

"I know him pretty well," I said, "without really knowing anything
about him; but what is stranger, I believe he doesn't really know a
great deal about himself. Of course I have a theory about him, though
it's vague. My idea is that probably through some great illness he
lost--not his faculty of memory, but his memories, or, at least, most
of them. In regard to what he does remember, Professor Keredec has
anxiously impressed upon him some very poignant necessity for
reticence. What the necessity may be, or the nature of the professor's
anxieties, I do not know, but I think Keredec's reasons must be good
ones. That's all, except that there's something about the young man
that draws one to him: I couldn't tell you how much I like him, nor how
sorry I am that he offended you."

"He didn't offend me," she murmured--almost whispered.

"He didn't mean to," I said warmly. "You understood that?"

"Yes, I understood."

"I am glad. I'd been waiting the chance to try to explain--to ask you
to pardon him--"

"But there wasn't any need."

"You mean because you understood--"

"No," she interrupted gently, "not only that. I mean because he has
done it himself."

"Asked your pardon?" I said, in complete surprise.

"Yes."

"He's written you?" I cried.

"No. I saw him to-day," she answered. "This afternoon when I went for
my walk, he was waiting where the paths intersect--"

Some hasty ejaculation, I do not know what, came from me, but she
lifted her hand.

"Wait," she said quietly. "As soon as he saw me he came straight toward
me--"

"Oh, but this won't do at all," I broke out. "It's too bad--"

"Wait." She leaned forward slightly, lifting her hand again. "He called
me 'Madame d'Armand,' and said he must know if he had offended me."

"You told him--"

"I told him 'No!'" And it seemed to me that her voice, which up to this
point had been low but very steady, shook upon the monosyllable. "He
walked with me a little way--perhaps It was longer--"

"Trust me that it sha'n't happen again!" I exclaimed. "I'll see that
Keredec knows of this at once. He will--"

"No, no," she interrupted quickly, "that is just what I want you not to
do. Will you promise me?"

"I'll promise anything you ask me. But didn't he frighten you? Didn't
he talk wildly? Didn't he--"

"He didn't frighten me--not as you mean. He was very quiet and--" She
broke off unexpectedly, with a little pitying cry, and turned to me,
lifting both hands appealingly--"And oh, doesn't he make one SORRY for
him!"

That was just it. She had gone straight to the heart of his mystery:
his strangeness was the strange PATHOS that invested him; the
"singularity" of "that other monsieur" was solved for me at last.

When she had spoken she rose, advanced a step, and stood looking out
over the valley again, her skirts pressing the balustrade. One of the
moments in my life when I have wished to be a figure painter came then,
as she raised her arms, the sleeves, of some filmy texture, falling
back from them with the gesture, and clasped her hands lightly behind
her neck, the graceful angle of her chin uplifted to the full rain of
moonshine. Little Miss Elliott, in the glamour of these same blue
showerings, had borrowed gauzy weavings of the fay and the sprite, but
Mrs. Harman--tall, straight, delicate to fragility, yet not to
thinness--was transfigured with a deeper meaning, wearing the sadder,
richer colours of the tragedy that her cruel young romance had put upon
her. She might have posed as she stood against the marble railing--and
especially in that gesture of lifting her arms--for a bearer of the
gift at some foredestined luckless ceremony of votive offerings. So it
seemed, at least, to the eyes of a moon-dazed old painter-man.

She stood in profile to me; there were some jasmine flowers at her
breast; I could see them rise and fall with more than deep breathing;
and I wondered what the man who had talked of her so wildly, only
yesterday, would feel if he could know that already the thought of him
had moved her.

"I haven't HAD my life. It's gone!" It was almost as if I heard his
voice, close at hand, with all the passion of regret and protest that
rang in the words when they broke from him in the forest. And by some
miraculous conjecture, within the moment I seemed not only to hear his
voice but actually to see him, a figure dressed in white, far below us
and small with the distance, standing out in the moonlight in the
middle of the tree-bordered avenue leading to the chateau gates.

I rose and leaned over the railing. There was no doubt about the
reality of the figure in white, though it was too far away to be
identified with certainty; and as I rubbed my eyes for clearer sight,
it turned and disappeared into the shadows of the orderly grove where I
had stood, one day, to watch Louise Harman ascend the slopes of
Quesnay. But I told myself, sensibly, that more than one man on the
coast of Normandy might be wearing white flannels that evening, and,
turning to my companion, found that she had moved some steps away from
me and was gazing eastward to the sea. I concluded that she had not
seen the figure.

"I have a request to make of you," she said, as I turned. "Will you do
it for me--setting it down just as a whim, if you like, and letting it
go at that?"

"Yes, I will," I answered promptly. "I'll do anything you ask."

She stepped closer, looked at me intently for a second, bit her lip in
indecision, then said, all in a breath:

"Don't tell Mr. Saffren my name!"

"But I hadn't meant to," I protested.

"Don't speak of me to him at all," she said, with the same hurried
eagerness. "Will you let me have my way?"

"Could there be any question of that?" I replied, and to my
astonishment found that we had somehow impulsively taken each other's
hands, as upon a serious bargain struck between us.




CHAPTER XIII


The round moon was white and at its smallest, high overhead, when I
stepped out of the phaeton in which Miss Elizabeth sent me back to
Madame Brossard's; midnight was twanging from a rusty old clock indoors
as I crossed the fragrant courtyard to my pavilion; but a lamp still
burned in the salon of the "Grande Suite," a light to my mind more
suggestive of the patient watcher than of the scholar at his tome.

When my own lamp was extinguished, I set my door ajar, moved my bed out
from the wall to catch whatever breeze might stir, "composed myself for
the night," as it used to be written, and lay looking out upon the
quiet garden where a thin white haze was rising. If, in taking this
coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught
against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for
just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath
some immoderate weight, and the noble form of Keredec emerged upon my
field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed
him to be either barefooted or in his stockings. His visible costume
consisted of a sleeping jacket tucked into a pair of trousers, while
his tousled hair and beard and generally tossed and rumpled look were
those of a man who had been lying down temporarily.

I heard him sigh--like one sighing for sleep--as he went noiselessly
across the garden and out through the archway to the road. At that I
sat straight up in bed to stare--and well I might, for here was a
miracle! He had lifted his arms above his head to stretch himself
comfortably, and he walked upright and at ease, whereas when I had last
seen him, the night before, he had been able to do little more than
crawl, bent far over and leaning painfully upon his friend. Never man
beheld a more astonishing recovery from a bad case of rheumatism!

After a long look down the road, he retraced his steps; and the
moonlight, striking across his great forehead as he came, revealed the
furrows ploughed there by an anxiety of which I guessed the cause. The
creaking of the wooden stairs and gallery and the whine of an old door
announced that he had returned to his vigil.

I had, perhaps, a quarter of an hour to consider this performance, when
it was repeated; now, however, he only glanced out into the road,
retreating hastily, and I saw that he was smiling, while the speed he
maintained in returning to his quarters was remarkable for one so newly
convalescent.

The next moment Saffron came through the archway, ascended the steps in
turn--but slowly and carefully, as if fearful of waking his
guardian--and I heard his door closing, very gently. Long before his
arrival, however, I had been certain of his identity with the figure I
had seen gazing up at the terraces of Quesnay from the borders of the
grove. Other questions remained to bother me: Why had Keredec not
prevented this night-roving, and why, since he did permit it, should he
conceal his knowledge of it from Oliver? And what, oh, what wondrous
specific had the mighty man found for his disease?

Morning failed to clarify these mysteries; it brought, however,
something rare and rich and strange. I allude to the manner of Amedee's
approach. The aged gossip-demoniac had to recognise the fact that he
could not keep out of my way for ever; there was nothing for it but to
put as good a face as possible upon a bad business, and get it
over--and the face he selected was a marvel; not less, and in no hasty
sense of the word.

It appeared at my door to announce that breakfast waited outside.

Primarily it displayed an expression of serenity, masterly in its
assumption that not the least, remotest, dreamiest shadow of danger
could possibly be conceived, by the most immoderately pessimistic and
sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest,
you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the
first-born--that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous,
diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles,
beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be
looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my
repast with an unconcealed fondness at once maternal and reverential.

I did not attempt to speak. I came out silently, uncannily fascinated,
my eyes fixed upon him, while he moved gently backward, cooing pleasant
words about the coffee, but just perceptibly keeping himself out of
arm's reach until I had taken my seat. When I had done that, he leaned
over the table and began to set useless things nearer my plate with
frankly affectionate care. It chanced that in "making a long arm" to
reach something I did want, my hand (of which the fingers happened to
be closed) passed rather impatiently beneath his nose. The madonna
expression changed instantly to one of horror, he uttered a startled
croak, and took a surprisingly long skip backward, landing in the
screen of honeysuckle vines, which, he seemed to imagine, were some new
form of hostility attacking him treacherously from the rear. They
sagged, but did not break from their fastenings, and his behaviour, as
he lay thus entangled, would have contrasted unfavourably in dignity
with the actions of a panic-stricken hen in a hammock.

"And so conscience DOES make cowards of us all," I said, with no hope
of being understood.

Recovering some measure of mental equilibrium at the same time that he
managed to find his feet, he burst into shrill laughter, to which he
tried in vain to impart a ring of debonair carelessness.

"Eh, I stumble!" he cried with hollow merriment. "I fall about and
faint with fatigue! Pah! But it is nothing: truly!"

"Fatigue!" I turned a bitter sneer upon him. "Fatigue! And you just out
of bed!"

His fat hands went up palm outward; his heroic laughter was checked as
with a sob; an expression of tragic incredulity shone from his eyes.
Patently he doubted the evidence of his own ears; could not believe
that such black ingratitude existed in the world. "Absalom, O my son
Absalom!" was his unuttered cry. His hands fell to his sides; his chin
sank wretchedly into its own folds; his shirt-bosom heaved and
crinkled; arrows of unspeakable injustice had entered the defenceless
breast.

"Just out of bed!" he repeated, with a pathos that would have brought
the judge of any court in France down from the bench to kiss him--"And
I had risen long, long before the dawn, in the cold and darkness of the
night, to prepare the sandwiches of monsieur!"

It was too much for me, or rather, he was. I stalked off to the woods
in a state of helpless indignation; mentally swearing that his day of
punishment at my hands was only deferred, not abandoned, yet secretly
fearing that this very oath might live for no purpose but to convict me
of perjury. His talents were lost in the country; he should have sought
his fortune in the metropolis. And his manner, as he summoned me that
evening to dinner, and indeed throughout the courses, partook of the
subtle condescension and careless assurance of one who has but faintly
enjoyed some too easy triumph.

I found this so irksome that I might have been goaded into an outbreak
of impotent fury, had my attention not been distracted by the curious
turn of the professor's malady, which had renewed its painful assault
upon him. He came hobbling to table, leaning upon Saffren's shoulder,
and made no reference to his singular improvement of the night
before--nor did I. His rheumatism was his own; he might do what he
pleased with it! There was no reason why he should confide the cause of
its vagaries to me.

Table-talk ran its normal course; a great Pole's philosophy receiving
flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. ("If he could
understand," exclaimed Keredec, "that the individual must be immortal
before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some
intelligence!") On the surface everything was as usual with our trio,
with nothing to show any turbulence of under-currents, unless it was a
certain alertness in Oliver's manner, a restrained excitement, and the
questioning restlessness of his eyes as they sought mine from time to
time. Whatever he wished to ask me, he was given no opportunity, for
the professor carried him off to work when our coffee was finished. As
they departed, the young man glanced back at me over his shoulder, with
that same earnest look of interrogation, but it went unanswered by any
token or gesture: for though I guessed that he wished to know if Mrs.
Harman had spoken of him to me, it seemed part of my bargain with her
to give him no sign that I understood.

A note lay beside my plate next morning, addressed in a writing strange
to me, one of dashing and vigorous character.

"In the pursuit of thrillingly scientific research," it read, "what
with the tumult which possessed me, I forgot to mention the bond that
links us; I, too, am a painter, though as yet unhonoured and unhung. It
must be only because I lack a gentle hand to guide me. If I might sit
beside you as you paint! The hours pass on leaden wings at Quesnay--I
could shriek! Do not refuse me a few words of instruction, either in
the wildwood, whither I could support your shrinking steps, or, from
time to time, as you work in your studio, which (I glean from the
instructive Mr. Ferret) is at Les Trois Pigeons. At any hour, at any
moment, I will speed to you. I am, sir,

"Yours, if you will but breathe a 'yes,'

"ANNE ELLIOTT."

To this I returned a reply, as much in her own key as I could write it,
putting my refusal on the ground that I was not at present painting in
the studio. I added that I hoped her suit might prosper, regretting
that I could not be of greater assistance to that end, and concluded
with the suggestion that Madame Brossard might entertain an offer for
lessons in cooking.

The result of my attempt to echo her vivacity was discomfiting, and I
was allowed to perceive that epistolary jocularity was not thought to
be my line. It was Miss Elizabeth who gave me this instruction three
days later, on the way to Quesnay for "second breakfast." Exercising
fairly shame-faced diplomacy, I had avoided dining at the chateau
again, but, by arrangement, she had driven over for me this morning in
the phaeton.

"Why are you writing silly notes to that child?" she demanded, as soon
as we were away from the inn.

"Was it silly?"

"You should know. Do you think that style of humour suitable for a
young girl?"

This bewildered me a little. "But there wasn't anything offensive--"

"No?" Miss Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows to a height of bland inquiry.
"She mightn't think it rather--well, rough? Your suggesting that she
should take cooking lessons?"

"But SHE suggested she might take PAINTING lessons," was my feeble
protest. "I only meant to show her I understood that she wanted to get
to the inn."

"And why should she care to 'get to the inn'?"

"She seemed interested in a young man who is staying there.
'Interested' is the mildest word for it I can think of."

"Pooh!" Such was Miss Ward's enigmatic retort, and though I begged an
explanation I got none. Instead, she quickened the horse's gait and
changed the subject.

At the chateau, having a mind to offer some sort of apology, I looked
anxiously about for the subject of our rather disquieting conversation,
but she was not to be seen until the party assembled at the table, set
under an awning on the terrace. Then, to my disappointment, I found no
opportunity to speak to her, for her seat was so placed as to make it
impossible, and she escaped into the house immediately upon the
conclusion of the repast, hurrying away too pointedly for any attempt
to detain her--though, as she passed, she sent me one glance of meek
reproach which she was at pains to make elaborately distinct.

Again taking me for her neighbour at the table, Miss Elizabeth talked
to me at intervals, apparently having nothing, just then, to make up to
Mr. Cresson Ingle, but not long after we rose she accompanied him upon
some excursion of an indefinite nature, which led her from my sight.
Thus, the others making off to cards indoors and what not, I was left
to the perusal of the eighteenth century facade of the chateau, one of
the most competent restorations in that part of France, and of the
liveliest interest to the student or practitioner of architecture.

Mrs. Harman had not appeared at all, having gone to call upon some one
at Dives, I was told, and a servant informing me (on inquiry) that Miss
Elliott had retired to her room, I was thrust upon my own devices
indeed, a condition already closely associated in my mind with this
picturesque spot. The likeliest of my devices--or, at least, the one I
hit upon--was in the nature of an unostentatious retreat.

I went home.

However, as the day was spoiled for work, I chose a roundabout way, in
fact the longest, and took the high-road to Dives, but neither the road
nor the town itself (when I passed through it) rewarded my vague hope
that I might meet Mrs. Harman, and I strode the long miles in
considerable disgruntlement, for it was largely in that hope that I had
gone to Quesnay. It put me in no merrier mood to find Miss Elizabeth's
phaeton standing outside the inn in charge of a groom, for my vanity
encouraged the supposition that she had come out of a fear that my
unceremonious departure from Quesnay might have indicated that I was
"hurt," or considered myself neglected; and I dreaded having to make
explanations.

My apprehensions were unfounded; it was not Miss Elizabeth who had come
in the phaeton, though a lady from Quesnay did prove to be the
occupant--the sole occupant--of the courtyard. At sight of her I halted
stock-still under the archway.

There she sat, a sketch-book on a green table beside her and a board in
her lap, brazenly painting--and a more blushless piece of assurance
than Miss Anne Elliott thus engaged these eyes have never beheld.

She was not so hardened that she did not affect a little timidity at
sight of me, looking away even more quickly than she looked up, while I
walked slowly over to her and took the garden chair beside her. That
gave me a view of her sketch, which was a violent little "lay-in" of
shrubbery, trees, and the sky-line of the inn. To my prodigious
surprise (and, naturally enough, with a degree of pleasure) I perceived
that it was not very bad, not bad at all, indeed. It displayed a sense
of values, of placing, and even, in a young and frantic way, of colour.
Here was a young woman of more than "accomplishments!"

"You see," she said, squeezing one of the tiny tubes almost dry, and
continuing to paint with a fine effect of absorption, "I HAD to show
you that I was in the most ABYSMAL earnest. Will you take me painting
with, you?"

"I appreciate your seriousness," I rejoined. "Has it been rewarded?"

"How can I say? You haven't told me whether or no I may follow you to
the wildwood."

"I mean, have you caught another glimpse of Mr. Saffren?"

At that she showed a prettier colour in her cheeks than any in her
sketch-box, but gave no other sign of shame, nor even of being
flustered, cheerfully replying:

"That is far from the point. Do you grant my burning plea?"

"I understood I had offended you."

"You did," she said. "VICIOUSLY!"

"I am sorry," I continued. "I wanted to ask you to forgive me--"

I spoke seriously, and that seemed to strike her as odd or needing
explanation, for she levelled her blue eyes at me, and interrupted,
with something more like seriousness in her own voice than I had yet
heard from her:

"What made you think I was offended?"

"Your look of reproach when you left the table--"

"Nothing else?" she asked quickly.

"Yes; Miss Ward told me you were."

"Yes; she drove over with you. That's it!" she exclaimed with vigour,
and nodded her head as if some suspicion of hers had been confirmed. "I
thought so!"

"You thought she had told me?"

"No," said Miss Elliott decidedly. "Thought that Elizabeth wanted to
have her cake and eat it too."

"I don't understand."

"Then you'll get no help from me," she returned slowly, a frown marking
her pretty forehead. "But I was only playing offended, and she knew it.
I thought your note was THAT fetching!"

She continued to look thoughtful for a moment longer, then with a
resumption of her former manner--the pretence of an earnestness much
deeper than the real--"Will you take me painting with you?" she said.
"If it will convince you that I mean it, I'll give up my hopes of
seeing that SUMPTUOUS Mr. Saffren and go back to Quesnay now, before he
comes home. He's been out for a walk--a long one, since it's lasted
ever since early this morning, so the waiter told me. May I go with
you? You CAN'T know how enervating it is up there at the chateau--all
except Mrs. Harman, and even she--"

"What about Mrs. Harman?" I asked, as she paused.

"I think she must be in love."

"What!"

"I do think so," said the girl. "She's LIKE it, at least."

"But with whom?"

She laughed gaily. "I'm afraid she's my rival!"

"Not with--" I began.

"Yes, with your beautiful and mad young friend."

"But--oh, it's preposterous!" I cried, profoundly disturbed. "She
couldn't be! If you knew a great deal about her--"

"I may know more than you think. My simplicity of appearance is
deceptive," she mocked, beginning to set her sketch-box in order. "You
don't realise that Mrs. Harman and I are quite HURLED upon each other
at Quesnay, being two ravishingly intelligent women entirely surrounded
by large bodies of elementals. She has told me a great deal of herself
since that first evening, and I know--well, I know why she did not come
back from Dives this afternoon, for instance."

"WHY?" I fairly shouted.

She slid her sketch into a groove in the box, which she closed, and
rose to her feet before answering. Then she set her hat a little
straighter with a touch, looking so fixedly and with such grave
interest over my shoulder that I turned to follow her glance and
encountered our reflections in a window of the inn. Her own shed a
light upon THAT mystery, at all events.

"I might tell you some day," she said indifferently, "if I gained
enough confidence in you through association in daily pursuits."

"My dear young lady," I cried with real exasperation, "I am a working
man, and this is a working summer for me!"

"Do you think I'd spoil it?" she urged gently.

"But I get up with the first daylight to paint," I protested, "and I
paint all day--"

She moved a step nearer me and laid her hand warningly upon my sleeve,
checking the outburst.

I turned to see what she meant.

Oliver Saffren had come in from the road and was crossing to the
gallery steps. He lifted his hat and gave me a quick word of greeting
as he passed, and at the sight of his flushed and happy face my riddle
was solved for me. Amazing as the thing was, I had no doubt of the
revelation.

"Ah," I said to Miss Elliott when he had gone, "I won't have to take
pupils to get the answer to my question, now!"




CHAPTER XIV


"Ha, these philosophers," said the professor, expanding in discourse a
little later--"these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell
you that spirit is abstract!" He waved his great hand in a sweeping
semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled
it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of
honeysuckle. "Ha, the folly!"

"What do YOU say it is?" I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar
should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden.

"I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are
only a question of names, and when I use the word 'spirit' I mean
i

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