The _concierge_ appeared, angry and shivery, and bade him either come in
or go out. He was in the act of doing the latter when he remembered
Driscoll. He turned back and faced the angry woman.
"Go up to Madame Burne," he said, giving the woman a franc, "and tell
her--wait!" He searched his pockets, and finally drew the envelope off
Mrs. Gano's birthday letter, and wrote on the back:
"Driscoll unable to sleep without some word from you. Please send
down a message for him."
"Give her that and bring me the answer."
The woman shuffled up-stairs. He stood there in the dingy passage,
waiting, cogitating. Suppose Mary were to send word that after all she
would come when that infernal club broke up, what should he do? He would
certainly have to protect poor old Driscoll against her pitiless
fanaticism. That much was clear. It took her a long time to scribble a
line. He paced back and forth from the foot of the mud-tracked stair to
the open door, where the rain fell ceaselessly. With a sudden elation he
thought of the change in his fortunes, and how soon he should have
turned his back upon all this squalor. A millionaire! Yes, it had a good
ring. It took the sound of Mary Burne's voice out of his tortured ears.
Suddenly he paused, hearing with relief the shambling footsteps of the
returning _concierge_, a relief rudely dashed with fear of the message
she might be bringing.
A quicker figure slipped before the square, slow-moving woman; it was
Mary Burne, running down the stairs, dressed to go out.
"I am sorry to have kept you," she said. If she noticed Gano's changed
manner, she put it down to anxiety for his friend. "Come, I've brought
an umbrella," she said, almost sharply, as Gano stood an instant looking
out for a _fiacre_; "it's nearly as quick to walk, and I--I--"
He took the umbrella from her silently, and they hurried on side by side
in the rain. Gano, with growing agitation, searched for some way of
letting her know that he was in possession of the situation, and meant
to remain in possession.
As they turned into the Rue de Provence she stopped, breathless.
"Are you quite sure he wants to see me only for a minute?"
"So he says."
"He understands that just at present I can't sit up with him any more?"
"He doesn't expect you to stay to-night, at any rate," Gano answered, in
a determined voice. He began to walk on.
"Mr. Gano." She laid an arresting hand on his arm. He looked down coldly
at the white face. "You've shown too plainly in these last weeks to what
lengths your friendship for Dick can go. I don't pretend to apologize
for asking if you can spare the time to take him away for a few weeks as
soon as he gets a little better."
The man hesitated. She misunderstood.
"I've just got some money from the _Semaine_," she went on, "and I can
anticipate my next payment. I've told you how I owe it to Mr. Driscoll
that I have the money at all. It's his in a sense, anyhow."
"You want to get him out of Paris?"
"Yes, _anywhere_ for a change."
"I might do that if he can be moved."
"Oh, thank you, thank you. Dick can't say he hasn't got friends. You
_are_ good about it." They splashed on a few steps in the downpour, and
she slackened her pace again. "But since you are going away alone with
him--and, anyhow, I ought to tell you. He's developing a kind of
monomania. He doesn't want to live--wants--" Her voice choked.
"I know," said Gano.
"You know! He's ventured to say it to you?"
"Yes."
"Then, you see, it's serious." She was clinging to him again. Gano
nodded. Before he could help himself he was trying her.
"You see, he'll never get well."
"How can you say that? and say it so--so--"
Indignant tears stood in her upturned eyes, and she took her hands off
his arm.
"Surely you know it's true."
"I only know that he's still alive, and that I love him."
They walked on--they were nearly at the door.
"You know how he suffers," began Gano.
"Everybody suffers," she interrupted. "He knows nothing about the worst
pain. And he has his art; he has you to care about him, and--he has me.
Oh, Mr. Gano"--she turned on him suddenly--"help me to take care of
him--help me, for God's sake--help me to keep him in the world!"
"Yes, yes; I give you my word."
A great weight was lifted off them both. They went up-stairs together,
but Gano left Mary at Driscoll's door. He wrote some letters in his own
room, then he went softly up-stairs, heard the low, pleasant sound of
voices, and came down without interrupting them. He went to bed, and
slept soundly till the morning.
"I shall cable Bostwick & Allen first thing after breakfast," he said to
himself.
When he was dressed, he went up-stairs as usual to Driscoll, knocked
lightly, and, without waiting, went in. Mary Burne was still there,
kneeling by the bedside. It flashed over Gano that it had been something
like this very picture that had first set him thinking about Mary
Burne. But the spell had lost its potency; something had happened; some
chord of sympathy had snapped. He could think of his friend
whole-heartedly now, without a woman's thrusting her face between them.
Driscoll was asleep this morning, just as he had been that other time
when Gano had found Mary Burne worn out with watching by the bedside;
but his face was hidden. Mary stirred and turned round. Gano started. No
sleep weighed down her eyelids; her eyes were wide and quick-glancing,
but seemed unseeing; the agonized face was pinched and gray-white, like
chalk.
"What is it? What--"
Gano sprang forward to the bed. Driscoll's face was no longer in the
shadow now.
"He's gone," said Mary.
"Not dead?"
"Yes, dead."
She got up slowly, staggering a little. Her cloak was round her. She
went unsteadily to the opposite side of the room and picked up her hat.
She seemed to forget to put it on, and stood with it aimlessly in her
hands, those strained, bright-glancing eyes moving uncannily in the
drawn white mask of a face. Gano had flung himself down by the bed. He
laid his hand over Driscoll's. It was cold.
"When did it happen?" Gano asked; and as the word "happen" left his
lips, he started up and stared at the woman.
"About four o'clock," she said, going in that blind way to the table.
He had the impulse to rush forward and seize her by the shoulders. He
would force those restless eyes to meet his steadily for once, and give
up their secret; but she was counting some gold pieces out of her purse,
doing it by the instinct of touch, while her roving, animal-like glance
seemed to dash itself against window, wall, and door, seeking an escape.
"How did it come?" Gano demanded.
"Quite quietly; no pain--no pain at the last."
Her muffled voice seemed to reach him from far off.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"No good," she said, tonelessly; "and besides, he held fast to my hand.
I am leaving some money here." She motioned to the little pile of ten
and twenty franc pieces on the table, and moved towards the door.
"You'll see to what's necessary." And, without waiting for his
assurance, "I've enough to pay for everything," she said, and went out.
Gano found his first impressions weakened by Mary Burne's clear and
convincing official account of the death. The doctor accepted it without
misgiving. Why should a layman have a doubt?
Driscoll was buried, and his few effects were bought in by Mary Burne at
the sale. When Gano went to say good-bye to her the next day he was told
she had given up her old lodging, and left no address behind.
Gano's original reluctance to return home had not been so very serious.
Had his grandfather been a little forbearing, he could have had the
young man back in Boston in six months; but now, too much had been
sacrificed on the altar of an impetuous resolve for Gano to consider
kindly going to America at once. There was plenty of time for that. He
had sent instructions to Messrs. Bostwick & Allen, and he allowed the
"great political organ" to remain in the experienced hands that had done
so well by it in Aaron Tallmadge's declining years.
He went to Nice, and brought the De Poincys back with him to Paris,
where he had taken a house. Henri de Poincy, even when little by little
he learned something of those years of struggle, could not see that his
friend was essentially changed by their rough lessoning. Ethan had
never, even in the ignorant and care-free days, been either very
outgoing or very light of heart. De Poincy, as the elder, had long ago
recognized his friend as one of those unexpected, but not uncommon,
products of luxurious modern life--a young man whose vivid perception
of the underlying tragedy of the common lot had seemed out of all
proportion to his possible experience. If any difference appeared in him
now, it was that his old easy faith in concrete human nature, as opposed
to his deep mistrust of life in the abstract, had been somewhat
corrected--and that was well, Henri de Poincy thought. The young
diplomat did not discover that, of all the faith-destroying spectacles
his friend had looked upon, not the least, to just his cast of mind, was
the hot haste made, in that same city where he had walked wanting bread,
to court and fête the new millionaire. But Gano had left this phase of
life so far behind him, he had got so out of touch with it, that he was
obliged to learn over and over again that inevitable lesson taught
affluent young America by the sage Old World--that money-bags are less
easily and quickly filled in Europe, and the man who carries one that
overflows will lack little that the craftier civilization can lay at his
feet. Gano's particular kind of self-love revolted at some of his
experiences at the hands of certain elegant and well-born adventurers,
male and female, who, the American had fancied, liked him and sought him
for himself. He was very young in many ways, for all his hardships and
his twenty-six years. Still, he was not so much of a fool but that in
time he learned his lesson. His fault lay in taking it too seriously. So
it was that, despite his renewed literary activities and successes, and
the need impressed on him of studying _les moeurs_, he yielded more and
more to his fondness for camping out, for fishing, and for cruising
about the Mediterranean with Henri de Poincy.
"I never knew a fellow," that amiable young Frenchman would say--"never
knew a fellow so much at his ease in the world, who seemed so anxious to
be rid of people as you are."
"I'm not at my ease in the world."
"Ah, I should have said in drawing-rooms."
"Another matter. The drawing-room is the best place I know to avoid
knowing people. I should like to spend all my days that aren't spent
with a rod on a river-bank, or lying in a boat with you, in
drawing-rooms. I'd like"--he stared up into the high-piled clouds
sailing across the intense blue--"I'd like the big Engine-driver up
yonder to look down through the white steam-puffs, and say: 'My boy, I
give you my word of honor that I'll never run you into any closer
quarters with life than you are in now.'"
"I see," laughed De Poincy, "lovely woman has pursued you till you fight
shy. But don't lay it all to your looks and your winning ways, my
friend; you're known to have dollars."
"Yes." His dark face flushed under some quick wave of feeling. "The most
surprising thing I've found in Europe is the dominance of the money
motive, that quality that they had told me distinguished the American."
He laughed a little bitterly.
"Well," said De Poincy, "you know you do hear more in America about
money than you do anywhere."
"Exactly. Money's talked about with childlike and damnable iteration;
but, by all the gods! if decent people with us want it, they work for
it; they don't cringe and angle for it; they offer labor in exchange,
not _themselves_. They don't, as a nation, make it the basis of
friendship, of marriage."
"If you don't, it's because American women are too self-willed to hear
prudence."
"Yes, thank God! And yet we have the intelligent foreigner saying the
climate makes our women sexless." He stopped and laughed. "I admit les
Américaines don't so universally look on love and marriage as a
profession, their only means of settlement in life. But I'll tell you
what it is, my friend: the American, with all his outward frankness and
_naïveté_, cares more, like men of other nations, for the thing he
doesn't talk about than for things he's always flinging in your face.
With people on this side, it's money which is too sacred to be mentioned
except on solemn occasions"--he made the slightest possible
grimace--"but which is the supreme consideration. With us, the thing we
don't talk about, and yet care for the more, is the relation between the
sexes, the ideal of a chivalry that the elder world has lost, or, more
truly, never had, I think."
"The truth is, you've been long enough away from America to begin to
idealize it. By the way, I thought you were of the _élite_ asked to the
Château d'Avranchéville this autumn."
"This is better than Normandy," he said, shortly.
"Ah, but think of the dear creatures gathered there?"
"I'd rather think about 'em."
"Mademoiselle Lucie this time, _hein_?"
"Oh no--only that I don't love my kind."
De Poincy shook his head.
"That you don't love _that_ kind shows you're getting _blasé_."
Gano sat up, and fixed his dark eyes on his friend's face.
"You know you're talking nonsense. You'll allow I met her under peculiar
circumstances."
"After helping you to fish her out of an Italian lake, I will allow the
circumstances were romantic."
"I thought she--"
"Of course, love at first sight. Just the thing to fetch you."
"I thought she liked me as a girl at home might have liked me, who
hadn't heard that my grandfather--"
He thumped out an oath as he thrust his hands deep down in his
yachtman's jacket.
De Poincy smiled.
"She's so young," Gano went on--"probably less sophisticated, I thought,
than our American girls."
"To be sure, a ravishing _ingénue_."
"And here she was, ready to throw over poor Parthenay like that"--he
tossed his cigarette overboard--"caring for him all the time, as
Parthenay showed me. Then this _ingénue_, after turning the Tallmadge
dollars into francs in her pretty baby head, was calmly arranging to
help me to spend them here in France. How the devil they knew on such
short acquaintance--before the settlement question came up--"
"Oh, her brother asked me that first day."
"What?"
De Poincy nodded.
"And when I thought they didn't so much as know that I was American!" He
laughed with that excessive bitterness of youth perturbed, and pretended
to speak apologetically. "You see, I've plumed myself on my French since
I was seven, and my name tells nothing."
"Your French is all right, but you don't imagine people like that would
put themselves out for the _premier venu_ as they did for you from the
start."
Gano shrugged.
"My mistake was that, even without my banker's reference, I didn't look
upon myself as the _premier venu_."
"I must say I admired the charming way they conveyed the idea to you
that Mademoiselle Lucie--"
"Shut up."
"My dear fellow, you would never have dreamed of Mademoiselle Lucie,
enchanting as she is, if it hadn't been for their tact in pointing out
that--"
"And you looked on!"
"To be sure, and envied you your damned good luck. She's an adorable
creature, and would spend your money with distinction."
"Thanks. I needn't have come so far to find a woman who could manage
that."
"I'm in the enemy's camp," De Poincy went on. "I want you to settle in
France."
"And I--I want--"
Gano looked out over the dancing waves, face to face on a sudden with
something so new and unexpected as to be almost incredible.
"What do you want?" asked De Poincy.
"I want to go back to America by the first boat."
"You're joking."
"I'm in dead earnest. It sounds sudden, but it isn't. Something's been
the matter with me for a deuce of a long time. I haven't known what it
was. I do now. I'm homesick."
"Doesn't it strike you you've postponed it a bit?"
"Dare say. We're offered every inducement to postpone it. We Americans
are as pleased with Europe as children at a fair. We run up and down
your marts with our purses out, delighted, astonished at your wares, at
your ways; we want a souvenir from every booth, we want a peep at every
side-show, we think it impossible ever to tire of the merry-go-round."
His voice dropped. "When the night comes we're ready to go home."
"Night? _Niaiserie!_"
Gano jumped up and paced the deck.
"I say, Henri, do you mind going back to Marseilles? If you do, mind, I
must--"
"Of course I don't mind. It'll give you time to recover on the way."
He laughed good-naturedly.
His companion paced silently up and down in the fading light.
"I've known other fellows," De Poincy went on, after a long
silence--"plenty of others, get rather feverish about the U. S. A., but
I didn't expect it of you."
"Oh, I'm just like the rest."
"Hadn't observed the likeness before."
"I've found the Old World life a good enough game to play at; _I've_ got
no reason to complain."
"Thanks, I'm sure, in the name of France, not to mention England and
Italy."
"Oh, you understand me well enough. It's wonderfully attractive, this
charming Old World, but from our point of view it isn't life."
"Pretty good imitation."
"That's just it," he laughed. "It's pretty and it's good, but it's
_imitation_. It copies, with Chinese fidelity, old originals that were
once, long ago, alive and quick; but to-day--"
"You're taking a leaf out of your old governor's book," said De Poincy,
with smiling malice. "I hear cousin Aaron now." And he caricatured him
mercilessly. "'To an American, sir, Europe is either a museum or a scene
out of a comic opera.' Now, if one said anything like that of America
you'd declare war by return of post. But we"--he lit his cigarette and
threw away the match with a flourish--"we are amused; we give you
exactly the license you demand--that of the child at a fair."
"Well, look here, old man"--Gano laid his hand on De Poincy's
shoulder--"this child wants to catch the first boat home."