For a while they were content to remain silent; and afterward the man
said, "I've been needing you, Marcia."
The fingers that he held tightened a little on his own. Now she thought
he would tell her that he had given his problem the test of bold
reflection and could come to her with his mind made up--and the decision
was that he needed her. In the hope her loneliness saw an opening vista
of happiness, but his next words were not of that.
"You have read the papers?" he questioned. "You know what has happened?"
Of course she knew and her heart had been full of grief for him in these
days of distress. Had she not written him--and torn up unmailed--a score
of letters in which she had told him tenderly and unreservedly all she
felt? But when she had seen him tonight she had forgotten that,
remembering only that he had searched for her and found her and come to
her.
Now that he spoke of misfortune to himself and his family she wanted to
give him only sympathy and comfort and love--yet coming like a sudden,
chilling draught, a conviction struck in upon her heart and left it
shuddering--with all its tender new hopes shattered.
For as he spoke she realized with the finality of revelation that the
Paul Burton of whom she thought in her dreams had not come at all; only
the Paul Burton who, too weak to bear his own sorrows, came to share
them with her. He had not come offering her strength and companionship
in loneliness--but asking them for himself. He had not come to offer
marriage. She had, in the face of the old warnings, dreamed
again--falsely idealized once more--and his mission was to waken in her
anew the dreary reality of her life. Yet that same maternal instinct
which made her love a thing more of giving than of asking endowed him
with a greater dearness, as she realized the truth.
"Yes, dear," she said in a low voice, "I know--and I've been thinking of
you all the while."
Then for a quarter of an hour he recited his griefs and forgot hers. She
was there near him; his arms were about her and she was comforting him.
That, for him, was all that was necessary. But at the end of it all she
rose and turned half from him and her face was pale.
"If there was a single thing I could do," she said from her heart, "I
would do it at any cost--" Her voice questioned him tensely. "You know
that, don't you, dear? You believe it."
"You are doing something now," he declared. "You are giving me your own
strength."
To herself she said bitterly that to make a mistake once is an accident
with which life may ambush the most wary, but to walk twice into the
same snare stamps the victim as a fool. She was paying the price now of
that folly. She was indeed giving him, as he enthusiastically declared,
her own strength for his adversities, and he was accepting it, using it,
burning it up with no thought of how little of that particular capital
she had to squander in the sharing.
Even at that moment with his self-pitying voice in her ears, reciting
his Iliad of reflected troubles, her mind found a whimsical parallel for
his self-absorption. He was like some unheroic wanderer in desert
places who had stumbled upon another equally unfortunate, but more
stalwart of heart. He had greedily fallen upon the depleted
water-supply, drinking deep and never pausing to consider that the
tongue of the wayfarer who offered him a flask was more parched than his
own. He was a minstrel and a troubadour who held himself immune from the
need of meeting stress with combat. His mission in life was to sing and
accept, and now it pleased him to sing sadly of himself.
Yet the one way she could not go on helping him was the particular way
he elected to be helped. He chose to let himself drift and vacillate,
and the aid that he asked of her was that she should drift near enough
for him to have her companionship. He was like a wakeful child who
required that she, too, should be sleepless that he might escape
loneliness.
"And so," she said, forcing a smile, which concealed all that was in her
heart, "you were lonely, and you came to me."
"Yes, dear." His voice was eager. "I had to see you. To stay in exile
any longer was unendurable. I was thinking of you always, wanting you
always, and so I came. You forgive me, don't you?"
Marcia laughed. "It's very nice to be wanted," she answered, "but sit
over there across the hearth and light your cigar. It's gone out."
Paul looked down resentfully at the cigar and lifted his hand to toss it
away, but the girl laid her fingers on his wrist and laughed.
"No," she commanded. "Smoke it. Tobacco is soothing and I like the
fragrance. It's a Romney panatella, isn't it?"
"How do you manage to remember details like that?" Paul inquired with
boyish pleasure. "Other women don't carry in mind the brand of tobacco
that a man prefers."
"I'm not other women," she reminded him lightly. "I have a genius for
minute and trivial things. The others flatter you by burning incense to
your music--and I remember that you take two lumps of sugar in your
coffee and one slice of lemon in your tea and that you must have your
Martini extra dry."
To herself she was saying, with a lump in her throat which waged war on
the bright smile in her eyes, "I hoped that he might have come
differently. I hoped that he might have made an end of vacillation. Now
it's all going to be harder. I must send him away again--"
One hand which fell over the arm of her chair and which he could not see
clutched its fingers convulsively, squeezing the handkerchief it held
into a small wad of linen.
"You are wonderful, Marcia," he told her softly as he comfortably
exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, and his delicate lips fell into a smile
of contentment. His troubles were for the moment being assuaged in the
effortless indolence of the lotus-eaters. He looked at her through
half-closed lids, studying the face that smiled at him. Yes, she was
giving him her strength. He would go back tomorrow appeased and soothed.
Then he suggested with the suddenness of a newly discovered thought:
"But we've been talking about my troubles all the while. Tell me
something about yourself. It must be proving a hard trip, isn't it? A
bit of a trial at times?"
A hard trip! A bit of a trial at times! For an instant the smile died
and the lips stiffened. She wanted to answer him with a stormy burst of
words. She wanted to say that it had been sheer hell.
In the face of such callous complacency an indignant anger stirred deep
in her breast. He had fled to her with his troubles, which after all
were only the shadows of deeper troubles, of which other members of his
household were bearing, unaided, the more direct brunt. He was asking
her, whose life had known chapters of tragedy, to give him such sympathy
as a woman has the right to give in exchange for a man's whole love. Had
he no sense of fairness, even the fairness of good sportsmanship? But
close on the heels of that realization came another which banished the
wrath. God had chosen to paint him in soft and tender colors. God had
given to his soul-pattern a certain beauty, and if there had gone into
the design no bold strokes, he himself was no more to blame than he
would have been for the failure to see, had he been born blind. His
weakness doubtless carried its own penalty of suffering. Perhaps had the
guidance been there, the wanted qualities might have been trained into
him. Hamilton had seen that, but Hamilton's hand had not had the light
touch for the delicacy of the task's beginnings.
Her mind flashed back to her girlhood. She was standing at the paddock
fence of her grandfather's stock-farm in Kentucky.
Even in her childish heart there had been a mighty pride for the old
gold and blue that were the colors of her grandfather's stables. They
were silks that raced true to tradition, for no mere gambler's
venturing, but for the gentleman's pride in his horse-flesh and his
inherent love of sport. Much of the stamina that had kept her heart from
breaking had been instilled in those lessons of the gallantry of the
long struggle and the endurance of the home-stretch.
She remembered a certain chestnut colt whose name had gone down in turf
history. She had known that colt from a weanling and to her he had not
been an animal, but a personality.
Yet that splendid-hearted creature which could out-game his fields in a
smothering drive when his heart was near bursting had been a
disappointment in two-year-old form because he had seemed to sulk and
falter and lack courage. Under the whip his speed died and his petulance
cropped out. It had only been when a jockey was found whose soft touch
of the reins nursed the head and held it up and encouraged, that the
horse had come in to his own and made his name great. Might it not be so
with a man as well as with a horse?
"Yes," she said, "it has been a bit of a trial, but it has been funny,
too," and straightway she launched into a flow of anecdote that touched
up with whimsical and delightful humor every bit of poor comedy that had
tinged the days of the tour. And as she talked the man laughed with
sheer delight and amusement.
But it was growing late, and Marcia was exhausted with the outflow of
spirits. He might be comforted, but tomorrow she must again take up the
dull thread of her routine. It would not be easier for tonight's
disappointment; for the coming of the rescuing knight who upon arrival
had only clamored mournfully for assistance.
After all she could only stand so much, and just now she felt that the
margin of endurance was narrow. Yet there was to be said the most
important thing of all, and the most trying.
"Paul," she began slowly, but in a voice of finality, "when you go back
tomorrow, you mustn't come to see me again. At least not for a long
while."
His face became a mask of tragic disappointment, and his voice was
pleading.
"You are not going to reinstate your sentence of banishment, Marcia? You
can't know what this evening has meant to me. A man must have in his
life that comfort that only a woman like you can give. Surely you will
give it."
"But, Paul," she said as gently as she would have argued with a child,
"you must remember. There is a woman: a woman to whom you regard
yourself pledged. Are you being very loyal to her? Are you being very
loyal to either of us?"
To herself she added: "A woman whom I have never seen and whose battles
I am called upon to fight."
"She's in Europe." Paul spoke rather sullenly, and though he said no
more his voice intimated that so far as he was concerned she might
remain there.
Marcia nodded her bend. "She is there to get a divorce--so that she can
marry you. No, Paul, you know why I sent you away in the first place.
Since then nothing has changed--unless it is that I see more clearly the
fatality of drifting. I can't do it."
"And you--" he spoke somewhat brokenly--"doesn't it mean anything to
you?"
Suddenly and momentarily her self-restraint broke.
"Mean anything to me!" she exclaimed passionately as her eyes widened
and her whole attitude relaxed into a posture of collapse in her chair.
"Mean anything--!" Then suddenly she straightened up and passed a hand
across her brow as though to brush away a cloud that rested there. In a
composed voice she added: "It means so much that you must do as I say,
not merely until you feel like disobeying again, but always." After a
long silence she rose. "I must get up early," she said, remembering that
tomorrow brought its program of a train journey, a matinée and an
evening performance.
"Paul," said Marcia as they walked back, "I have to leave a call for
seven and catch a train at eight-thirty. There's no use in your getting
up. No, please don't, and please don't hunt me out again." At the door
of the hotel she said enigmatically, "What a wonderful balance Nature
might have struck between your brother's strength and your--winning
personality. Good-night."
* * * * *
The Duke de Metuan's failure to rehabilitate his impaired fortunes with
Burton gold had left a more durable scar upon his optimism than any of
the similar scars of the past. Mary Burton had been such a splendid
combination of charm and opulence that a marriage with her would have
made a pleasure of necessity. The Duke in his earlier stages of
disappointment had felt first the pangs of a lover, and only in
secondary degree the chagrin of a depleted exchequer. Several months had
found him inconsolable, and when desperation had closed upon him he had
wedded an estimable lady whose wealth was less dazzling than Mary's, but
ample none the less. Her personal paucity of allurement was a handicap
which his philosophy ignored as much as possible. In private he
sometimes made a fastidious grimace, and accepted the inevitable.
Yet the duke had long been an epicure in life's pleasures, and though he
must yield to the demands of his creditors, much as a young prince must
yield to the edicts of his chancellery in making a required marriage, he
did so with mental reservations. He had no intention of permitting that
necessity to cast a perpetual cloud over his days and nights.
He had found it possible to leave his estate in Andalusia, where his
duchess elected to remain with an imaginary malady from which she
derived much melancholy pleasure, and in Nice he had been overjoyed to
meet a charming acquaintance in the person of Loraine Haswell.
Loraine, too, was willing to have these hours which hung heavy
alleviated with companionship, and Nice is a place where hours lend
themselves to the process of being lightened.
There was a waiter at one of the esplanade cafés where the tables look
out over the whiteness of the sea-front and the sapphire of the bay, who
regarded his grace and madame as his regular clients. He knew without
telling what _hors d'oeuvres_ and vintages the dark gentleman affected
and at what pastries the beautiful lady preferred to nibble. She nibbled
decoratively between peals of soft laughter and snatches of small talk.
The garçon in question noted--and officially ignored--that the lady, who
had at first worn a preoccupied, almost troubled, expression about her
dark eyes, now smiled more often, and that into the black pupils of
Carlos de Metuan there came frequently a glow which was akin to ardor.
In the same way he noticed that occasionally their hands met and
lingered, as the lady formed the habit of losing her handkerchief and
the gentleman habituated himself to its retrieving. A legal separation
cannot be established in a day, and if one must remain away from one's
friends at home, one may surely console oneself with friends abroad.
The duke was lavish in his entertainment. His wife's fortune permitted
that, as well as his wife's ignorance of the disbursements, and of late
Loraine's supply of money from America had arrived on a scale of
diminuendo. Entertainment was welcome.
Half-jokingly and veiled in phrases which she was at liberty to construe
as she wished, there had of late been an insidious vein of suggestion in
the duke's conversation.
"Were I not married and were you not married and were I able to convince
you with an eloquence which I lack, I think I might be happy," he
informed her one night as he studied his cigarette end in the dark. Then
he laughed and his hand sought hers as he added: "Yet, thank God a
thousand times, we live in a day when friendship need not go shackled by
dark-age absurdities." That had been the beginning.
"Friendship," she replied demurely, "has never had to be shackled, has
it?"
He leaned forward and she caught the glint of his eyes and a flash of
white teeth, as he answered:
"When friendship between man and woman is a feeble little fellow, he
goes free, but when he grows very strong, then his lot was not so easy
in other days. You understand me?"
"I'm sure I don't, but what matter?" she laughed. Carlos shrugged his
shoulders.
"Yes, what matter?" he murmured. "As long as we can be together, why
should we seek names for our companionship? It is--what it is."
Yet Loraine, still sure of her future, spelling a congenial and
luxurious life with Paul, understood what she pretended not to
understand. The Duke de Metuan was not a riddle to her; not even a
figure tinged with mystery. His wife was an unlovely invalid. Her sole
value was monetary, and the duke's hints and thoughts had all to do with
an arrangement wherein life should yield him the compensating delights
which his family denied.
Loraine's fastidiousness rather shuddered at this idea, yet perhaps a
certain sort of character disintegration had set in, with her first
cutting loose the moorings of preconceived standards. Possibly it was
working a more rapid atrophy than she knew. She told herself that, in
her exile, Carlos made a rather diverting companion, and that since she
understood his purpose she could with ease control the situation. He
should amuse and no more. If his hints became less ambiguous than she
found agreeable, she would send him packing, but meanwhile she would
permit his luncheons and his motors to serve her. The food and roads
about Nice are excellent--and expensive.