THE BRASS BELL
Hermia, waiting for him! What did Mrs. Hammond mean? Was the woman
mad? Hermia had fled from New York, her proud little head bent before
this cruel story which, of course, had gathered impetus in the telling
and now indicted her of sins unwritten in the fair page of her
experience. Poor child! She had suffered--and he, fool that he was,
had sat in his studio, the victim of his false pride, wrapped in his
own ego while this vile plot was brewing. He might have done something
if he had had his wits about him, instead of hiding his head like an
ostrich and imagining himself unseen. Olga--he did not dare to think
of Olga Tcherny or of De Folligny. He had given his word to Mrs.
Hammond to leave the entire matter in her hands. Even while she had
given him her word not to speak she had been planning this refined
vengeance, probably knew that Pierre de Folligny had already made a
good story of their adventure for some of his new intimates at the
Club. He would have a reckoning with her--some day--and with De
Folligny! His fingers tightened on his stick, and an angry tide warmed
his face and temples. Had he met them, there upon the Avenue at that
moment, all his promises to Mrs. Hammond must have been forgotten--and
he would have made short work of that unspeakable gentleman. Of Olga
Tcherny he thought with hardly less rancor. At one time--a year ago
now--Olga had loomed large upon his horizon. Now in the light of his
present knowledge of her he wondered how he could have ever thought of
her friendship seriously.
She belonged in an atmosphere too sophisticated for his simple rustic
soul. She had always lied to him; her friendship was a lie; her love,
too--a lie. That declaration--Good God!--and he had been actually at
the point of being sorry for her. He had nothing to regret now with
regard to Olga Tcherny. She had wiped the slate clean, and made a new
account at poor Hermia's expense.
Hermia in exile--and suffering! Her innocence could not make her heart
pangs any the less real. Like a child she had followed the line of
least resistance, and seeking freedom from the trammels of convention
had obeyed her impulses blindly. It was such a trivial transgression
to find so crushing a retribution. And he, Markham, walked the streets
of New York the envied hero of an "armourette." This was the law,
which says that women may sin if they are not found out and that men
may sin when they please.
Poor little penitent, atoning for sins uncommitted! All his heart went
out to her, and his memory, passing the forbidding vision of her last
appearance, now pictured the real Hermia that he knew, a brave, buoyant
Hermia, who knew nothing of discouragements and greeted the sunrise
with a smile, her head now bowed and, like _Niobe_, "all tears."
Was she waiting for him? If so, why had she not written? A line, and
he would have sped to her. She knew that. She must have known it when
she had fled. Where was she now? At Westport, perhaps? In the South
somewhere, alone with her maid, avoiding the newspapers, seeking the
company of strangers that her ears might not hear or her eyes see the
record of her transgression? Had she gone abroad again? Who would
know? He might inquire of Phyllis Van Vorst or Caroline Anstell over
the telephone. But when he reached his rooms and had taken up the
receiver he saw that even this information was denied to him. Any
manifest interest or anxiety on his part with regard to Hermia would be
regarded with suspicion. Nor was he any more positive than before that
his quest would meet with the approval of its object. He was
powerless. There was nothing for him but to wait.
The thought of going to his club to dine was repellant to him. The
story that Mrs. Hammond had let him read was not common property and,
though none of his acquaintances would have had the bad taste to
mention his connection with it, his appearance among them must revive
its disagreeable details, at Hermia's expense. So for some days he
dined alone at an obscure restaurant, glooming over the evening paper
and wondering what could be done. Night after night he walked the
street until, at last, wearied and no nearer the solution of his
problem, he went home and to bed, to toss restlessly most of the night
and plan impossibilities. Through his thoughts, the friendship of Mrs.
Berkeley Hammond hovered comfortingly. She was not a woman to promise
idly. She had been interested in his story and felt herself morally
bound to make some sort of restitution to Hermia for her own unwilling
responsibility in the attention that had been drawn to it. He did not
doubt that she would use all her influence to minimize the effect of
Olga's machinations, and he felt sure with such a friend at court that
Hermia need have little fear from the opinions of Mrs. Hammond's
friends and her own, and these after all were the only opinions that
mattered to her.
An early morning, a few days after the interview with Mrs. Hammond,
found Markham at his studio, somber and dark eyed, regarding his latest
work with a savage eye of disapproval. He didn't feel like working,
and by a piece of good fortune his time was free for him to do what he
chose. He would have liked above all things to have employed it in a
visit to the house of Olga Tcherny and thence with dispatch to the
hotel of Monsieur de Folligny, where what remained of his wrath could
be honestly expended in a manner befitting the occasion. This
occupation being denied him, there was nothing left but to take what
pleasure he could from the mental picture that he made of it.
At last he rose and groped for his tobacco. A precious lot of good
that would do him! It would have been a pity, too, because murder,
even such justifiable murder, had not yet received the sanction of
society as represented in the New York Department of Police. He paced
the floor restlessly and brought up before his desk, where the janitor
of the building had a few moments ago laid the morning mail. He took
it up idly--and glanced over it--a note or two in the fashionable
feminine scrawl about sittings, a letter from a framemaker, one from
his Paris agent, and the usual litter of circulars. He took them up
one by one, opened them, put some of them aside and consigned others to
the paper basket. A small package lay at the bottom of the pile, an
unobtrusive package neatly tied with string--evidently an advertisement
of some sort--of a paint or of a canvas. He was about to drop it with
the others when he was made aware that as he turned the small parcel
over it emitted a tinkle as of two metal objects striking together. He
turned it again and examined the address and stamp. His name was
printed in ink as though with a bad pen and the stamp was French. Now
really curious as to its contents and aware of its individuality, he
cut the string and opened it. There was an inner wrapping of tissue
paper containing a small white pasteboard box which bore the name of a
fashionable New York jeweler, and inside the box the origin of the
tinkle was revealed in a small brass bell.
He took the object out, his wonder growing, and held it suspended
between his thumb and forefinger. A brass bell no larger than his
thumbnail, a tarnished little trinket, no longer new, which tinkled
merrily under his astonished gaze. He examined the thing more
carefully, his bewilderment increasing, noting the curious
construction, which was unlike that of the toy bells which had adorned
the necks of the wooly beasts abroad at Christmas-time. It was heavy
for its size, and when he moved it had a decisive and very mellow note.
Who would send him a thing like this and why? There must have been a
mistake. He took up the paper wrapper from the waste basket and
examined it with renewed interest.
John Markham, Esquire,
--West--th Street,
New York City.
With a stamp of the French Republic and a postmark of--What were the
postmarks? Paris. Of course. And the other? VAL-E--? Valence?
Valence was in the South of France on the Rhone. He had never been
there. No. That wouldn't do. VAL-L-E--Vallécy!
A brass bell from Vallécy! Still he did not understand. He took the
object up again and scrutinized it, its meaning dawning slowly.
Vallécy! That was the village where he and Hermia had stayed with
Mère Guégou. There was the garden of the golden roses where--The
bell! It was from Hermia's head-dress--the belled cap of the _Femme
Orchestre_! He knew it now. It was a token. Hermia had sent it--from
Vallécy. A token.
In high excitement he examined the obscure postmark again. The accent
on the E, a little smudged, but quite legible. Hermia had sent the
bell as a token from Vagabondia which meant that she was there in Père
Guégou's garden, whither she had fled when her own world had renounced
her. She was waiting for him. She needed him, and took this means of
showing him that all things that had happened to them both since they
had parted in the forest at Sées were to be forgotten--that they were
both to take life up--from Vallécy. He stood a moment in joyous
uncertainty, his glance on the clock, then, quickly wrapping the
memento in its tissue paper, thrust it into his coat pocket and in a
moment was striding like a madman down the street. At his apartment he
rang for a taxicab, thrust a few things into a suitcase, wrote a note
or two and in half an hour was on his way to the bank and then to the
steamship wharf.
He had no definite plans except that he must take the first steamer
which left New York for Europe. A brief glance at his morning paper
advised him of two sailings this morning, one for Havre and the other
for Cherbourg, and he had made up his mind to take one steamer or the
other. The taxicab crawled, it seemed, and on the way downtown was
caught in a block of traffic which delayed him for ten minutes, during
which he fumed silently. But he reached the dock with scarcely a
quarter of an hour to spare, and after a difficulty which was cleared
away, found himself upon the deck of the _Kaiserin Augusta_, a somewhat
flustered individual, with many loose ends dangling in retrospect, with
no cabin as yet assigned to him, sober of face but inexpressibly happy.
It was really not until his ship was well out at sea and the voyage
fairly begun that Markham had the opportunity to settle down
comfortably and mediate upon the surprising events of the morning. He
found a steamer chair in a quiet place and then gave himself up to his
thoughts. He took the tiny object from his breast pocket and turned
it over in his fingers. Of course it was Hermia's. The wonder was
that he had not recognized it at first glance. This bell and its
other small companions had tinkled their way into his heart at each
step she had taken down the long road from Evreux to
Alençon--tinkled merrily at Passy, joyously at Vallécy,
disdainfully at Verneuil, and contentedly at La Mesle. Alençon
had made them tragic so they had been packed in Hermia's bundle which
went with her to Sées and were heard no more, except in a faint
tinkle of protest as she was put aboard the train for Paris.
Wonderful bells they were, tiny chimes that had rung in the season of
their joy and lingered in their memory never to be forgotten.
Tokens--Hermia had realized it--symbols of her greatest happiness and
his, with life reduced to the simplest elements, in which there had
been no place for the extravagant commonplaces of the other life which
they both had lived and endured. Hermia had fled to Vallécy to
the motherly breast of Mère Guégou, and there perhaps
was weeping out her troubles. He took out the square of paper (he had
clipped it with his penknife) which bore the address and examined it
again. This and the bell were all he had had to start him off on his
fateful pilgrimage. But they were enough. She could not have written
him after her treatment of him in New York. She had thrown herself
upon his mercy, given her message ambiguity that he might ignore it if
he chose, or read, as she had hoped he would, the message of her
heart, across the distances. It was the message of a vagabond like
himself, as definite a message as the gypsy _patteran_ which shows the
way from one camp to another. His _patteran_ pointed to
Vallécy, that lovely village by the Arth where he had first
told Hermia that he loved her. Beyond Vallécy had come
misunderstanding, bitterness, misfortune. She had chosen that spot as
though by instinct. She wanted him to remember her there where love
had first been spoken. Alone and waiting for him among the roses of
Père Guégou--
He started up from his chair in bewilderment, staring blankly at the
sunlit sea, suddenly mindful of the fact that in the hurry of getting
away he had not cabled her. He threw his rugs aside and made his way
hastily to the office, to find unluckily that the wireless had gotten
out of order, and that it might be several hours before it was
repaired. He strolled on deck again, thoughtful, suddenly impressed
with the potency of the charm that had called him. The thought of
replying to her message had not until this moment entered his head.
All that he had been able to think of was that he must get to her at
once, follow the _patteran_ at top speed. He had done so and now
unhappily remembered a dozen neglected people who must wonder at his
extraordinary disappearance. But he only smiled joyously. He had
another engagement.
He took up his walk along the promenade deck, careless of the enemies
he had made, careless of the friendships he might lose, all his
thoughts of the small vagabond at Vallécy. His inability to
communicate with her by wireless set him thinking. Wasn't that, too, a
symbol? If he got a message over what would be its effect? Would she
still wait for him, looking forward to the precious hour of their
meeting? Or would her mind change at the last moment and send her
flying from him again? This was more like Hermia, the real Hermia that
he knew. He feared her moods still. And if he refused to cable her
would her patience last until he got to France? He cast is memory over
the months that had passed in New York. He guessed how much she had
suffered. He had followed her social career through the newspapers and
he knew now that she had gone gaily that she might hide her terror.
She was tired--poor child--tired in body and spirit, and that was why
she had not stayed in Paris among the fashionable people she knew
there; that was why she had fled to Vallécy, where at least she might
be at peace, unreminded by those of her own social sphere of the
villainous story which pursued her. There at Vallécy she sat remote,
with her own innocence for company, convalescent--amid these primitive
surroundings--from the sickness that her world had given her. She
would wait for him _if she wasn't sure that he would come_. He smiled.
He would not send the wireless. Nor would he wire her from Cherbourg.
A search of the postmark of his much-beloved package revealed the date
"_Av. 22_." She had sent her token on the twenty-second of April and
it was now only the second of May. Ten days only had passed, and he
was already well on his way to her. In less than a week more he would
be in Vallécy. She would wait for him. Markham, as will be observed,
was learning something about women--about one woman at least, the only
woman in the world who mattered.
The voyage seemed interminable, through the ship was a fast one, and
the day's run (on paper) highly satisfactory. He knew no one aboard
but some of the officers, with whom he had crossed before, and he was
thankful that he was therefore left alone with his thoughts, which were
infinitely more pleasing to him than the chatter of the salon or
smoking-room. He read novels, or tried to, but his own story was so
much more interesting, so much more real than those he could find that
he gave them up after a trial or two and lived again his own romance.
The time to take it up again where he had left it off came slowly, but
at last the _Lizard_ hove into sight and the passengers for France
prepared for debarkation. Morning of the next day found Markham in the
express to Paris. Evreux was his station, and from there to Verneuil
was a little over an hour, most of it along the road he and Hermia had
so blithely traveled. The road from Verneuil to Vallécy--he would
cover it afoot if there were no vehicles to be begged, borrowed or
stolen.