"I don't quite see what--Ah, yes, to be sure! Yes, I see. Well, I
should count upon eight weeks, if I were you. In eight weeks the boy
will be independent of them all, and we shall go to England for the
wedding."
"The wedding?" cried Ste. Marie. "What wedding?--Ah!"
"Arthur Benham and my daughter are to be married," said O'Hara, "so soon
as he reaches his majority. I thought you knew that."
In a very vague fashion he realised that he had expected it. And still
the definite words came to him with a shock which was like a physical
blow, and he turned his back with a man's natural instinct to hide his
feeling. Certainly that was the logical conclusion to be drawn from
known premises. That was to be the O'Haras' reward for their labour.
To Stewart the great fortune, to the O'Haras a good marriage for the
girl and an assured future. That was reward enough surely for a few
weeks of angling and decoying and luring and lying. That was what she
had meant, on the day before, by saying that she could see all the
to-morrows. He realised that he must have been expecting something like
this, but the thought turned him sick nevertheless. He could not forget
the girl as he had come to know her during the past week. He could not
face with any calmness the thought of her as the adventuress who had
lured poor Arthur Benham on to destruction. It was an impossible
thought. He could have laughed at it in scornful anger, and yet--What
else was she?
He began to realise that his action in turning his back upon the other
man in the middle of a conversation must look very odd, and he faced
round again trying to drive from his expression the pain and distress
which he knew must be there plain to see. But he need not have troubled
himself, for the other man was standing before the sext window and
looking out into the morning sunlight, and his hard bony face had so
altered that Ste. Marie stared at him with open amazement. He thought
O'Hara must be ill.
"I want to see her married!" cried the Irishman suddenly. And it was a
new voice, a voice Ste. Marie did not know. It shook a little with an
emotion that sat uncouthly upon this grim stern man.
"I want to see her married and safe!" he said. "I want her to be rid of
this damnable, roving, cheap existence. I want her to be rid of me and
my rotten friends and my rotten life." He chafed his hands together
before him, and his tired eyes fixed themselves upon something that he
seemed to see out of the window, and glared at it fiercely.
"I should like," said he, "to die on the day after her wedding, and so
be out of her way for ever. I don't want her to have any shadows cast
over her from the past. I don't want her to open closet doors and find
skeletons there. I want her to be free--free to live the sort of life
she was born to and has a right to."
He turned sharply upon the younger man.
"You've seen her!" he cried. "You've talked to her, you know her!
Think of that girl dragged about Europe with me ever since she was a
little child! Think of the people she's had to know, the things she's
had to see! Do you wonder that I want to have her free of it all,
married and safe and comfortable and in peace? Do you? I tell you it
has driven me as nearly mad as a man can be. But I couldn't go mad
because I had to take care of her. I couldn't even die because she'd
have been left alone, without any one to look out for her.
"She wouldn't leave me! I could have settled her somewhere in some
quiet place where she'd have been quit at least of shady rotten people,
but she wouldn't have it. She's stuck to me always through good times
and bad. She's kept my heart up when I'd have been ready to cut my
throat if I'd been alone. She's been the--bravest and
faithfullest--Well I--And look at her! Look at her now! Think of what
she's had to see and know--the people she's had to live with--and look
at her! Has any of it stuck to her? Has it cheapened her in any
littlest way? No, by God! She has come through it all like a--like a
Sister of Charity through a city slum--like an angel through the dark!"
The Irishman broke off speaking, for his voice was beyond control, but
after a moment he went on again more calmly--
"This boy, this young Benham, is a fool, but he's not a mean fool.
She'll make a man of him. And, married to him, she'll have the comforts
that she ought to have and the care and--freedom. She'll have a chance
to live the life that she had a right to, among the sort of people she
has a right to know. I'm not afraid for her. She'll do her part and
more. She'll hold up her head among duchesses, that girl. I'm not
afraid for her."
He said this last sentence over several times, standing before the
window and staring out at the sun upon the treetops. "I'm not afraid
for her.... I'm not afraid for her." He seemed to have forgotten that
the younger man was in the room, for he did not look towards him again
or pay him any attention for a long while. He only gazed out of the
window into the fresh morning sunlight, and his face worked and quivered
and his lean hands chafed restlessly together before him.
But at last he seemed to realise where he was, for he turned with a
sudden start, and he stared at Ste. Marie frowning as if the younger man
were some one he had never seen before. He said--
"Ah, yes, yes! You were wanting to go out into the garden. Yes, quite
so! I--I was thinking of something else. I seem to be absent-minded of
late. Don't let me keep you here!" He seemed a little embarrassed and
ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said--
"Oh, thanks! There's no hurry. However, I'll go, I think. It's after
eleven. I understand that I'm on my honour not to climb over the wall
or burrow under it or batter it down. That's understood. I----"
He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O'Hara's
long speech about his daughter; but he could think of nothing to say,
and besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his
strange outburst. So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the
room without further ceremony.
He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and
unlooked-for breakdown of the other man's impregnable reserve, and dimly
he realised that it must have come out of some very extraordinary
nervous strain; but he himself had been in no state to give the
Irishman's words the attention and thought that he would have given them
at another time. His mind, his whole field of mental vision had been
full of one great fact--_the girl was to be married to young Arthur
Benham_. The thing loomed gigantic before him, and, in some strange way,
terrifying. He could neither see nor think beyond it. O'Hara's burst
of confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great
distance--poignant but only half comprehended words, to be reflected
upon later in their own time.
He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes,
and he said one sentence over and over aloud--as the Irishman standing
beside the window had said another.
"She is going to be married! She is going to be married!"
It would seem that he must have forgotten his previous half knowledge of
the fact. It would seem to have remained, as at the first hearing, a
great and appalling shock--thunderous out of a blue sky.
Below in the open his feet led him mechanically straight down under the
trees, through the tangle of shrubbery beyond, and so to the wall under
the cedar. Arrived there he awoke all at once to his task, and with a
sort of frowning anger shook off the dream which enveloped him. His
eyes sharpened and grew keen and eager. He said--
"The last arrow! God send it reached home!" And so went in under the
lilac shrubs.
He was there longer than usual: unhampered now he may have made a larger
search, but when at last he emerged Ste. Marie's hands were over his
face, and his feet dragged slowly like an old man's feet.
Without knowing that he had stirred he found himself some distance away,
standing still beside a chestnut tree. A great wave of depression and
fear and hopelessness swept him, and he shivered under it. He had an
instant's wild panic, and mad, desperate thoughts surged upon him. He
saw utter failure confronting him. He saw himself as helpless as a
little child, his feeble efforts already spent for naught, and, like a
little child, he was afraid. He would have rushed at that grim
encircling wall and fought his way up and over it, but even as the
impulse raced to his feet the momentary madness left him and he turned
away. He could not do a dishonourable thing even for all he held
dearest.
He walked on in the direction which lay before him, but he took no heed
of where he went; and Mlle. Coira O'Hara spoke to him twice before he
heard or saw her.
*CHAPTER XXV*
*COIRA GOES OVER TO THE ENEMY*
They were near the east end of the _rond point_, in a space where fir
trees stood and the ground underfoot was covered with dry needles.
"I was just on my way to--our bench beyond the fountain," said she, and
Ste. Marie nodded, looking upon her sombrely. It seemed to him that he
looked with new eyes, and after a little time when he did not speak but
only gazed in that strange manner the girl said--
"What is it? Something has happened. Please tell me what it is!"
Something like the pale foreshadow of fear came over her beautiful face,
and shrouded her golden voice as if it had been a veil.
"Your father," said Ste. Marie heavily, "has just been telling me--that
you are to marry young Arthur Benham. He has been telling me."