I Ste. Marie Hears of a Mystery and Meets a Dark Lady
II The Ladder to the Stars
III Ste. Marie makes a Vow, but a Pair of Eyes haunt Him
IV Old David Stewart
V Ste. Marie sets forth upon the Great Adventure
VI A Brave Gentleman Receives a Hurt, but Volunteers in a Good Cause
VII Captain Stewart makes a Kindly Offer
VIII Ste. Marie Meets with a Misadventure and Dreams a Dream
IX Ste. Marie goes upon a Journey and Richard Hartley Pleads for Him
X Captain Stewart Entertains
XI A Golden Lady Enters--The Eyes again
XII The Name of the Lady with the Eyes--Evidence heaps up Swiftly
XIII The Road to Clamart
XIV In the Garden
XV A Conversation at La Lierre
XVI The Black Cat
XVII A Conversation Overheard
XVIII Those who were Left Behind
XIX The Invalid takes the Air
XX The Stone Bench at the Rond Point
XXI A Mist Dims the Shining Star
XXII A Settlement Refused
XXIII The Last Arrow--and a Promise
XXIV The Joint in the Armour
XXV Coira goes over to the Enemy
XXVI "I won't go!"
XXVII The Night's Work
XXVIII Coira's Little Hour
XXIX The Scales of Injustice
XXX Journey's End
*Illustrations*
"He fell on his knees at her feet" . . . _Frontispiece_ (Page 312)
"It seemed to him that her eyes called him."
"'I fancy I know who the man was.'"
"'You're twenty-two. Have you ever fallen in love?'"
"He turned and went out of the room."
"'Don't refuse a helping hand!' said Captain Stewart, looking up once
more. 'Don't be overproud!'"
"So for an hour or more he stood in the open window staring into the
fragrant night."
"He saw Captain Stewart moving among them."
"Captain Stewart lay huddled and writhing upon the floor."
"There appeared two young people."
"'Michel is busy,' said Coira O'Hara, 'so I have brought your coffee.'"
"'Ste. Marie has disappeared? How very extraordinary!'"
"'What can we do, Richard? What can we do?'"
"'Tell me about him, this Ste. Marie! Do you know anything about him?'"
"Mlle. Coira O'Hara sat alone upon the stone bench."
"His hand went swiftly to his coat pocket."
"She did not move when he came before her."
"The girl fumbled desperately with the clumsy key."
"Walking there in the tender moonlight."
*CHAPTER I*
*STE. MARIE HEARS OF A MYSTERY AND MEETS A DARK LADY*
From Ste. Marie's little flat which overlooked the gardens they drove
down the quiet Rue du Luxembourg, and, at the Place St. Sulpice, turned
to the left. They crossed the Place St. Germain des Pres, where lines
of homebound working people stood waiting for places in the electric
trams, and groups of students from the Beaux Arts or from Julien's sat
under the awnings of the Deux Magots, and so, beyond that busy square,
they came into the long and peaceful stretch of the Boulevard St.
Germain. The warm sweet dusk gathered round them as they went, and the
evening air was fresh and aromatic in their faces. There had been a
little gentle shower in the late afternoon, and roadway and pavement
were still damp with it. It had wet the new-grown leaves of the
chestnuts and acacias that bordered the street. The scent of that
living green blended with the scent of laid dust and the fragrance of
the last late-clinging chestnut blossoms: it caught up a fuller richer
burden from the overflowing front of a florist's shop: it stole from
open windows a savoury whiff of cooking, a salt tang of wood smoke, and
the soft little breeze--the breeze of coming summer--mixed all together
and tossed them and bore them down the long quiet street; and it was the
breath of Paris, and it shall be in your nostrils and mine, a keen agony
of sweetness, so long as we may live and so wide as we may
wander--because we have known it and loved it: and in the end we shall
go back to breathe it when we die.
The strong white horse jogged evenly along over the wooden pavement, its
head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went.
The cocher, a torpid purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pear-like,
sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an
extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-coloured coat
wrong-side-before. At intervals he jerked the reins like a large
strange toy and his strident voice said--
"_He!_" to the stout white horse, which paid no attention whatever.
Once the beast stumbled and the pear-like lump of flesh insulted it,
saying--
"_He! veux, tu, cochon!_"
Before the War Office a little black slip of a milliner's girl dodged
under the horse's head, saving herself and the huge box slung to her arm
by a miracle of agility, and the cocher called her the most frightful
names, without turning his head, and in a perfunctory tone quite free
from passion.
Young Hartley laughed and turned to look at his companion, but Ste.
Marie sat still in his place, his hat pulled a little down over his
brows, and his handsome chin buried in the folds of the white silk
muffler with which, for some obscure reason, he had swathed his neck.
"This is the first time in many years," said the Englishman, "that I
have known you to be silent for ten whole minutes. Are you ill or are
you making up little epigrams to say at the dinner party?"
Ste. Marie waved a despondent glove.
"I 'ave," said he, "w'at you call ze blue. _Papillons noirs_--clouds in
my soul." It was a species of jest with Ste. Marie--and he seemed never
to tire of it--to pretend that he spoke English very brokenly. As a
matter of fact he spoke it quite as well as any Englishman and without
the slightest trace of accent. He had discovered a long time before
this--it may have been while the two were at Eton together--that it
annoyed Hartley very much, particularly when it was done in company and
before strangers. In consequence he became at such occasions a sort of
comic-paper caricature of his race, and by dint of much practice, added
to a naturally alert mind, he became astonishingly ingenious in the
torture of that honest but unimaginative gentleman whom he considered
his best friend. He achieved the most surprising expressions by the mere
literal translation of French idiom, and he could at any time bring
Hartley to a crimson agony by calling him "my dear" before other men,
whereas at the equivalent "_mon cher_" the Englishman would doubtless
never, as the phrase goes, have batted an eye.
"Ye--es," he continued sadly, "I 'ave ze blue. I weep. Weez ze tears
full ze eyes. Yes." He descended into English. "I think something's
going to happen to me. There's calamity--or something--in the air.
Perhaps I'm going to die."
"Oh, I know what you are going to do, right enough," said the other man,
"you're going to meet the most beautiful woman--girl--in the world at
dinner, and of course you are going to fall in love with her."
"Ah, the Miss Benham!" said Ste. Marie with a faint show of interest.
"I remember now, you said that she was to be there. I had forgotten.
Yes, I shall be glad to meet her. One hears so much. But why am I of
course going to fall in love with her?"
"Well, in the first place," said Hartley, "you always fall in love with
all pretty women as a matter of habit, and, in the second place,
everybody--well, I suppose you--no one could help falling in love with
her, I should think."
"That's high praise to come from you," said the other, and Hartley said
with a short, not very mirthful laugh--
"Oh, I don't pretend to be immune. We all--everybody who knows her----
You'll understand presently."
Ste. Marie turned his head a little and looked curiously at his friend,
for he considered that he knew the not very expressive intonations of
that young gentleman's voice rather well, and this was something
unusual. He wondered what had been happening during his six months'
absence from Paris.
"I dare say that's what I feel in the air, then," he said after a little
pause. "It's not calamity. It's love.
"Or maybe," he said quaintly, "it's both. _L'un n'empeche pas
l'autre._" And he gave an odd little shiver, as if that something in
the air had suddenly blown chill upon him.
They were passing the corner of the Chamber of Deputies which faces the
Pont de la Concorde. Ste. Marie pulled out his watch and looked at it.
"Eight-fifteen," said he. "What time are we asked for? Eight-thirty?
That means nine. It's an English house and nobody will be in time. It's
out of fashion to be prompt nowadays."
"I should hardly call the Marquis de Saulnes English, you know!"
objected Hartley.
"Well, his wife is," said the other, "and they're altogether English in
manner. Dinner won't be before nine. Shall we get out and walk across
the bridge and up the Champs Elysees? I should like to, I think. I
like to walk at this time of the evening--between the daylight and the
dark."
Hartley nodded a rather reluctant assent, and Ste. Marie prodded the
pear-shaped cocher in the back with his stick. So they got down at the
approach to the bridge. Ste. Marie gave the cocher a piece of two
francs and they turned away on foot. The pear-shaped one looked at the
coin in his fat hand as if it was something unclean and contemptible,
something to be despised. He glanced at the dial of his taximeter,
which had registered one franc twenty-five, and pulled the flag up. He
spat gloomily out into the street and his purple lips moved in words.
He seemed to say something like: "_Sale diable de metier!_" which,
considering the fact that he had just been overpaid, appears
unwarrantably pessimistic in tone. Thereafter he spat again, picked up
his reins and jerked them, saying--
"He, Jean Baptiste! Uip, uip!" The unemotional white horse turned up
the boulevard, trotting evenly at its steady pace, head down, the little
bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went. It occurs to me that
the white horse was probably unique. I doubt that there was another
horse in Paris rejoicing in that extraordinary name.
But the two young men walked slowly on across the Pont de la Concorde.
They went in silence, for Hartley was thinking still of Miss Helen
Benham and Ste. Marie was thinking of Heaven knows what. His gloom was
unaccountable unless he had really meant what he said about feeling
calamity in the air. It was very unlike him to have nothing to say.
Midway of the bridge he stopped and turned to look out over the river,
and the other man halted beside him. The dusk was thickening almost
perceptibly, but it was yet far from dark. The swift river ran leaden
beneath them, and the river boats, mouches and hirondelles, darted
silently under the arches of the bridge, making their last trips for the
day. Away to the west, where their faces were turned, the sky was still
faintly washed with colour, lemon and dusky orange and pale thin green.
A single long strip of cirrus cloud was touched with pink, a lifeless
old rose, such as is popular among decorators for the silk hangings of a
woman's boudoir. And black against this pallid wash of colours the
_Tour Eiffel_ stood high and slender and rather ghostly. By day it is
an ugly thing, a preposterous iron finger upthrust by man's vanity
against God's serene sky, but the haze of evening drapes it in a
merciful semi-obscurity, and it is beautiful.
Ste. Marie leant upon the parapet of the bridge, arms folded before him
and eyes afar. He began to sing, _a demi voix_, a little phrase out of
_Louise_,--an invocation to Paris--and the Englishman stirred uneasily
beside him. It seemed to Hartley that to stand on a bridge, in a top
hat and evening clothes, and sing operatic airs while people passed back
and forth behind you, was one of the things that are not done. He tried
to imagine himself singing in the middle of Westminster Bridge at
half-past eight of an evening, and he felt quite hot all over at the
thought. It was not done at all he said to himself. He looked a little
nervously at the people who were passing, and it seemed to him that they
stared at him and at the unconscious Ste. Marie, though in truth they
did nothing of the sort. He turned back and touched his friend on the
arm, saying--
"I think we'd best be getting along, you know," but Ste. Marie was very
far away and did not hear. So then he fell to watching the man's dark
and handsome face, and to thinking how little the years at Eton and the
year or two at Oxford had set any real stamp upon him. He would never
be anything but Latin in spite of his Irish mother and his public
school. Hartley thought what a pity that was. As Englishmen go he was
not illiberal, but, no more than he could have altered the colour of his
eyes, could he have believed that anything foreign would not be improved
by becoming English. That was born in him, as it is born in most
Englishmen, and it was a perfectly simple and honest belief. He felt a
deeper affection for this handsome and volatile young man, whom all
women loved and who bade fair to spend his life at their successive
feet--for he certainly had never shown the slightest desire to take up
any sterner employment--he felt a deeper affection for Ste. Marie than
for any other man he knew, but he had always wished that Ste. Marie were
an Englishman, and he had always felt a slight sense of shame over his
friend's un-English ways.