THE COST OF WINGS
AND OTHER STORIES
THE
COST OF WINGS
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
RICHARD DEHAN
AUTHOR OF
“ONE BRAVER THING,” “BETWEEN TWO THIEVES,” ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1914, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE COST OF WINGS 1
A FADED ROMANCE 11
AN INDIAN BABY 41
YVONNE 52
THE DELUSION OF MRS. DONOHOE 70
PONSONBY AND THE PANTHERESS 92
A FAT GIRL’S LOVE STORY 104
IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION 116
THE GEWGAW 122
THE NIGHT OF POWER 134
THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN 145
OBSESSED 155
A VANISHED HAND 164
AN ORDEAL BY FIRE 179
HOW THE MISTRESS CAME HOME 198
THE MOTOR-BURGLAR 212
THE LOST ROOM 219
FATHER TO THE MAN 226
THE FLY AND THE SPIDER 235
FOR VALOR! 243
MELLICENT 248
THE COLLAPSE OF THE IDEAL 263
THE HAND THAT FAILED 272
HIS SILHOUETTE 280
A NOCTURNE 292
THE LAST EXPEDITION 298
THE COST OF WINGS
Sheldrick, returning, refreshed and exhilarated, from a spin with a
friend who had brought down a racing car of forty horse-power and an
enthusiasm to match, found his wife sitting in the same chair, in the
same attitude, as it seemed to him, in which he had left her, in the
bare, dull sitting-room of their quarters at the Pavilion Hotel, on
the edge of Greymouth Links, from which starting point Sheldrick, in
fulfillment of his recent engagement with the Aero Club of France, had
arranged to take wing for Cherbourg, wind and weather permitting, on
the morrow.
It would be difficult exceedingly to imagine Caruso as an engineer or a
bank manager, or in any capacity other than that of operatic star. It
would be equally difficult to picture Shackleton as a side-splitting
antic and quip-monger, or Pélissier in the rôle of the dauntless
explorer. Sheldrick, the most recent idol of the flying world, was the
type-ideal of the aviator.
Mathematician, engineer, meteorologist, and athlete, his tall, lightly
built but muscular frame carried the head of an eagle. The wide
forehead, sloping to the temples, the piercing prominently set eyes,
the salient nose, and the wide, firm, deep-cut mouth characterizing
the long-winged birds of powerful flight, were Sheldrick’s. His, too,
the long, supple neck, the curiously deceptive shoulder slope that
disguises depth of chest while his long arms looked as though, were
they clothed with feathers, they might cleave the air; and his feet
gripped the ground through the thin, soft boots he always wore, as the
eagle’s talons grip the rock.
Perhaps he was not unaware of the suggested resemblance. He had
certainly christened his recently completed monoplane “Aquila,” and
had piloted her to victory in two minor events at the Moncaster Spring
Flying Meeting in April of that year, and at the Nismes Concours
des Aviateurs of three weeks before had carried off the Grand Prix
of 25,000 francs for the longest flight under favorable weather
conditions. And at the Club dinner following the presentation of the
prizes, Sheldrick, flushed with conquest and congratulations, had given
that pledge whereby the soul of the woman who yet loved him was wrung
to torture anew.
“After all that I have borne,” Mrs. Sheldrick had said to herself,
sitting in her hideous red moreen-covered chair by the green
Venetian-blinded window of the staring hotel sitting-room--“after three
years of agony, silently, patiently endured--after all his promises, I
am still upon the rack.”
She looked rather like it as she sat by the window, the center one of
three that gave a view across the gray-green links, and the gray-brown
beach of smooth, sliding pebbles that gave place to the gray-white,
throbbing water of the English Channel. And the white, drawn face that
masked her frenzy of anguish, and the dark-gray, haunted eyes through
which her suffering spirit looked, greeted her husband as he burst into
the room, fresh from his banquet of speed and clean, salt, buoyant air,
and sympathetic, enthusiastic companionship, like an unexpected douche
of ice water.
“Haven’t you been out?”
Sheldrick uttered the words recorded, upon a pause implying the
swallowing of others less neutrally amiable. And his face, which
had already clouded, darkened sullenly as his wife replied: “I have
traveled some distance since you left here with your friend.”
“Where have you been?” asked Sheldrick unwillingly, as a man who
suspects that the question may open some unwelcome topic.
Mrs. Sheldrick looked at her husband full; and, though it had seemed
to him that he had read the book of her beauty from preface to finis,
there was something new to him in her regard as she answered:
“I have gone over in memory every week of the last three years that we
have spent together, Edgar; and the road has been a rough and stony
one, without one green patch of grass to rest on by the wayside, or one
refreshing spring at which to drink. But I was patient while I plodded
after you, because I saw an end to what I was enduring. Now it seems
that I am mistaken. It is only my endurance that is at an end.”
“Why do you talk in allegory, Ella?” Sheldrick broke out impatiently.
He threw down his leather motoring cap with the talc eye shields upon
the sofa, and pitched his heavy overcoat upon a chair in a corner of
the ugly room, and let his long, lithe body down into a hideous Early
Victorian plush armchair beside the empty fireplace, where nothing
crackled but some fantastically bordered strips of red and green
gelatine paper, shuddering under the influence of a powerful chimney
draught. “I’m not an imaginative man,” he went on. “Even if my mind
were not occupied with a dozen affairs of supreme urgency I should
still boggle at interpreting your cryptic utterances. If you want them
understood, make them to some minor poet at a garden party or an At
Home. You’ve stacks of invitations from the nicest people to all sorts
of functions ever since I pulled off those two events at Moncaster and
the Grand Prix at Nismes. And now that it’s May, and the season in full
swing, you might be having no end of a capital time at home in London
instead of----” She interrupted him with a passionate gesture.
“I have no home!”
“No?” said Sheldrick coolly, leaning back his head against the knobby
back of the Early Victorian armchair.
“No!” said Mrs. Sheldrick, and her passion seemed to dash itself
against and break upon the man’s composure as a wave beats and breaks
upon a rock. “It was a home, once, when you were working partner in the
firm of Mallard, Mallard and Sheldrick, Manufacturers of Automobiles;
and the life you led was a normal, ordinary, everyday life, and the
risks you ran were everyday, ordinary risks, such as a woman who
loved you--note that I say _who loved you_--might bear without going
mad or dying of terror. But it is a prison now. I cannot breathe in
it. Even when you are there with me--and when every postman’s knock,
or telegraph boy’s ring, or telephone message has for the moment
ceased to be fraught with hideous, often-dreamed-of, never-forgotten
possibilities ... when each newsboy’s voice, yelling in the streets,
has temporarily ceased to be the voice of Fate for me--it is no longer
home! It is a caravanserai, from which Hope and Content and Peace of
Mind may go out before the next day’s dawning, leaving the door open
that Death and Despair may the more freely enter in!”
“Ella!” exclaimed Sheldrick, looking at her open-eyed. She had always
been such a quiet, calm, self-possessed woman, that now, as she rose
up out of her chair suddenly, as though she had been prodded with a
bayonet, she was strange and new, and rather awe-inspiring. As she
stood before him, her passion-breathing face an ivory cameo between the
drooping folds of her rich blue-black hair, her gray eyes glittering
fiercely between the narrowed lids under the straight black brows, her
lips two bitterly straightened lines of scarlet showing the gleaming
teeth, her firm chin implacable in its set upon the dainty cravat of
muslin and black silk ribbon, her slight bosom panting fiercely under
her bodice folds, her slender limbs rigid beneath the sheath-fitting
gown of silken chestnut-colored cloth, the man, her husband, looked at
her more attentively than he had looked for years.
“Ella, what is the matter? What has upset you like this? If there is
anything I can do to put things right, why not tell me, and--and----”
Sheldrick’s voice faltered, and his eyes looked away from his wife’s
as he saw the reviving hope leap desperately into her face. It died
instantly, leaving her gray eyes more somber, and the lines of her
scarlet, parted lips more bitter than before.
“Ah, yes!” she said. “Why not tell you what you know already, and be
coaxed and patted into compliance and meek, patient submission for the
hundredth time! You will kiss me good-bye to-morrow morning, if the
weather permits of your starting, and make this flight. It is to be the
last, the very last, like the others that have gone before it; it is
only so much more daring, only so much more risky, only so much more
dangerous than the things that other aviators have dared and risked and
braved. If it blows from the north you will not dream of making the
venture--the jagged rocks and shoals, and the towering, greedy seas of
the Channel Islands threaten things too grim. You will wait, and I with
you--oh, my God!--for a favorable wind. Your successes at Brookfields
and at Nismes have made the ‘Aquila’ patent worth a moderate fortune;
they are turning out replicas of her at your workshops as rapidly as
they can make them--your manager took on twenty more skilled hands only
last week. You have done what you set out to do; we are freed from
poverty for the rest of our lives--we might live happily, peacefully
together somewhere, if this unnatural love of peril had not bitten you
to the bone. ‘One more contest,’ you will keep on saying; ‘one more
revenge I am bound to give this and that or the other man whom I have
beaten, or who has challenged me.’” Her bosom heaved, and the ivory
paleness of her face was darkened with a rush of blood. “Honor is
involved. You are bound in honor to keep your word to others, but free
to deceive, to defraud, to cheat and lie to--your wife!”
“Take care what you’re saying!”
Sheldrick leaped out of his chair, fiery red and glaring angrily. Mrs.
Sheldrick looked at him out of her glittering, narrowed eyes, and
laughed, and her laugh was ugly to hear.
“Your wife! Did you ever realize what it meant to me to be your wife?
When we were married, and for eighteen months after that! Heaven upon
earth! Have you ever dreamed what sort of life began for me when
you were first bitten by this craze of flying, three years ago?
Hell--sheer, unmitigated hell! To the public I am a woman in an ulster,
or in a dust cloak and a silk motor veil, thick to hide the ghastly
terror in my face!--a woman who kisses you before the start, and keeps
pace with your aeroplane in an automobile through the long-distance
flights, with what the English newspaper men describe as ‘unswerving
devotion,’ and the French press correspondents term ‘a tenderness of
the most touching.’ They are wrong! I am not conscious of any special
devotion. The springs of tenderness have frozen in me. I am like every
other spectator on the course, possessed, body and soul, by the secret,
poignant, momentary expectation of seeing a man hurled to a horrible
death. Only the man is--my husband! _Now_ I remember this, Edgar, but
a day will dawn--an hour will come to me--is coming as surely as there
is a God in heaven--when he will be no more than the flying man who may
possibly be killed!”
There was silence in the room, and the hoarse, dry sound that broke it
was not a sob. It came from Sheldrick, a single utterance, like the
sound of something breaking.
“I--understand!”
There was no response, for the woman, having unsealed and poured out
the last drop of her vials of bitterness and wrath, was dumb. Sheldrick
added, after a long pause:
“What do you ask? That I should give up the attempt to fly to
Cherbourg? That I should break the engagement with the Aero
Club--withdraw the challenge given to M. Ledru? Is that what you
demand?”
She said with a hopeless gesture:
“I ask nothing! I demand nothing!”
Sheldrick muttered an oath. But in his soul he was yielding. “Aquila
No. 1,” “Aquila No. 2,” and “Aquila No. 3” were dear to his soul. But
he had awakened to the fact that his dearest possession was the love
of his wife. And he had been killing it by inches. He met her eyes
now--the stern gray eyes that had learned to see him as he was and look
on the bare realities of life, shorn of its love glamour, and muttered:
“It is true. I have promised over and over.... And I owe it to you to
take no more risks, even more than if we had a living child to....
Where are those cable-forms?”
He strode to the ink-splashed writing table between the windows, and
routed the bundle of greenish papers out of the frowsy blotting book,
and dipped the blunt pen into the thick, dirty ink, and wrote:
“_To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France._
“Unavoidably compelled break engagement----”
He was struck by a sudden idea, ceased writing, and left the room,
going into the adjoining bedroom. His wife, standing dumb and frozen
on the gaudy hearthrug near the empty grate, heard him rummaging
for something. He came back in a few minutes with a heavy brow and
preoccupied look, and took a leather strap from the pocket of the heavy
overcoat he had thrown upon the sofa. With this he went back into the
bedroom. The door handle rattled as though something were being hitched
about it, the stout door groaned and creaked under a violent pull from
the other side, there was a horrible, suggestive crack, and a stifled
oath from Sheldrick. Next moment he was back in the room, dipping the
blunt pen into the bad ink, and finishing the cablegram:
“Left wrist badly sprained--SHELDRICK, _Pavilion Hotel, Links,
Greymouth, England_.”
Having finished writing, he brought the filled form to his wife. She
read, and looked at him in eloquent silence. And, in answer to the
question in her eyes, he held out his left hand, already swollen and
purple, and with a swelling of the dimensions of a cricket ball,
indicating the dislocated joint. A cry broke from her:
“Oh! how could you....”
“It was the easiest way,” said Sheldrick, flushed and scowling. “Call
me a coward, if you like. I deserve it--as well as the other names!” He
rang the bell, and fished with the sound hand for silver in a trouser
pocket.
“We’ll send the cable now,” he said.
She bit her lips, that were no longer scarlet, and went to the
blotted blotter, dipped the worn pen into the blobby ink, and made an
alteration in the cablegram. Then she showed it to him, and the message
ran:
“_To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France._
“Unavoidably compelled postpone engagement. Left wrist badly
sprained.--SHELDRICK, _Pavilion Hotel, Links, Greymouth, England_.”
As Sheldrick looked at Mrs. Sheldrick, in intent amazement, the bell
was answered by a German waiter. Mrs. Sheldrick took the silver out
of Sheldrick’s sound hand, dismissed the attendant to dispatch the
message, closed and locked the door of the sitting-room against
intruders, and then went quickly to her husband and fell upon his
breast. He clasped her with his sound arm as she broke into passionate
weeping, and only whispered when at last she lifted her face to his:
“Why ‘postponed’?”
“Because,” whispered Ella Sheldrick, with her cheek against her
husband’s, “because you are not chained to your rock, my darling, with
iron bars between you and the free fields of space, forged by the wife
you love. You are free to give and take as many challenges as you
desire. When you have finished ‘Aquila No. 4,’ that shall be built with
a seat for a passenger beside you, run what risks you choose, brave as
many dangers as seem good to you; I will not say one word, provided
that I share the risk and brave the danger too.”
This is why the successful aviator Sheldrick never flies without a
passenger. And the story has a moral--of a kind.
A FADED ROMANCE
IN TWO PARTS
I
The ladies of the household at Charny les Bois usually sat in the
library on sunny mornings. At the southern end of the long room,
paneled in black walnut, and possessing a hooded stone fireplace of
the fifteenth century, there was a bay, with wide glass doors opening
upon a _perron_ of wrought iron and copper work, which led down into
the lovely garden--a piece of land originally reclaimed from the heart
of the ancient beech forest, whose splendid somberness set off the
dazzling whiteness of the _château_ and made the parterres glow and
sparkle like jewels--rubies, turquoises, emeralds, sapphires--poured
out upon the green velvet lap of princess or courtesan.
The Marquis de Courvaux, lord of the soil and owner of the historic
mansion, was absent. One must picture him leading the hunt through
the forest alleys, attired in a maroon and yellow uniform of the
most exquisite correctness, three-cocked hat, and immense spurred
jack-boots, and accompanied by a field of fifty or sixty, of which
every individual had turned out in a different costume: green corduroy
knickerbockers with gold braid accompanying cut-away coats and jockey
caps, and bowlers of English make, sported in combination with pink
and leathers, adding much to the kaleidoscopic effect. Half a dozen
_cuirassiers_ from the neighboring garrison town were upon their London
coach, driving a scratch four-in-hand and attired in full uniform;
various vehicles, of types ranging from the capacious _char-à-banc_ to
the landaulette, were laden with ardent votaries of the _chasse_.
The distant fanfare of the horns sounding the _ragot_ reached the
ears of the ladies sewing in the library at the _château_. One of
these ladies, detained by urgent nursery reasons from joining in the
morning’s sport, was the young and pretty wife of the Marquis; the
other, old as a high-bred French lady alone knows how to be, and still
beautiful, was his mother. Over the high-arched cover of the great
carved fireplace was her portrait by Varolan, painted at sixteen, in
the full ball costume of 1870. One saw, regarding that portrait, that
it was possible to be beautiful in those days even with a chignon
and waterfall, even with panniers or bustle, and absurd trimmings of
the ham-frill type. Perhaps some such reflection passed through the
calm mind behind the broad, white, unwrinkled forehead of Madame de
Courvaux, as she removed her gold spectacles and lifted her eyes,
darkly blue and brilliant still, to the exquisite childish flower face
of the portrait. The autumn breeze coming in little puffs between the
open _battants_ of the glass doors, savoring of crushed thyme, late
violets, moss, bruised beech leaves, and other pleasant things, stirred
the thick, waving, gold-gray tresses under the rich lace, a profusion
of which, with the charming coquetry of a venerable beauty, the
grandmamma of the chubby young gentleman upstairs in the nursery, the
thirteen-year-old schoolboy on his hunting pony, and the budding belle
but newly emancipated from her convent, was fond of wearing--sometimes
tied under her still lovely chin, sometimes floating loosely over her
shoulders.
“There again!” The younger Madame de Courvaux arched her mobile
eyebrows and showed her pretty teeth as she bit off a thread of
embroidery cotton. “The third time you have looked at that portrait
within ten minutes! Tell me, do you think it is getting stained with
smoke? In north winds this chimney does not always behave itself, and
Frédéric’s cigars and pipes----” The speaker shrugged her charming
shoulders. “But he is incorrigible, as thou knowest, _Maman_.”
“I was not thinking of Frédéric or the chimney.” The elder lady smiled,
still looking upward at the girlish face overhead. “It occurred to
me that forty years have passed since I gave Carlo Varolan the first
sitting for that portrait. His studio in the Rue Vernet was a perfect
museum of lovely things.... I was never tired of examining them.... My
_gouvernante_ fell asleep in a great tapestry chair.... Varolan drew a
caricature of her--so laughable!--with a dozen strokes of the charcoal
on the canvas, and then rubbed it all out with a grave expression that
made me laugh more. I was only just sixteen, and going to be married
in a fortnight.... And I could laugh like that!” The antique brooch of
black pearls and pigeons’ blood rubies that fastened the costly laces
upon the bosom of Madame la Marquise rose and fell at the bidding of a
sigh.
“I cried for days and days before my marriage with Frédéric,” the
little Marquise remarked complacently.
“And I should cry at the bare idea of not being married at all!” said
a fresh young voice, belonging to Mademoiselle Lucie, who came up
the steps from the garden with the skirt of her cambric morning frock
full of autumn roses, her cheeks flushed to the hue of the pinkest La
France. She dropped her pretty reverence to her grandmother, kissed her
upon the hand, and her mother on the forehead, and turned her lapful of
flowers out upon the table, where vases and bowls of Sèvres and China
ware stood to receive them, ready filled with water. “You know I would,
Grandmamma!”
“It is a mistake either to laugh or to weep; one should smile only, or
merely sigh,” said Grandmamma, with the charming air of philosophy that
so became her. “One should neither take life too much to heart, nor
make a jest of it, my little Lucie.”
“Please go on with the story. Your _gouvernante_ was asleep in the
chair; Monsieur Varolan caricatured her. You were laughing at the
drawing and at his droll face, as he rubbed it out, and then----”
“Then a gentleman arrived, and I did not laugh any more.” Grandmamma
took up her work, a delicate, spidery web of tatting, and the corners
of her delicately chiseled lips, pink yet as faded azalea blossoms,
quivered a little. “He was staying at the British Embassy with his
brother-in-law, who was Military Attaché, and whose name I have
forgotten. He came to see his sister’s portrait; it stood framed upon
the easel--oh! but most beautiful and stately, with the calm, cold
gaze, the strange poetic glamour of the North. He, too, was fair, very
tall, with aquiline features, and light hazel eyes, very piercing in
their regard, and yet capable of expressing great tenderness. For
Englishmen I have never cared, but Scotch gentlemen of high breeding
have always appeared to me quite unapproachable in _ton_, much like
the Bretons of old blood, with whom their type, indeed, has much in
common. But I am prosing quite intolerably, it seems to me!” said
Grandmamma, with a heightened tint upon her lovely old cheeks and an
embarrassed laugh.
Both Lucie and the little Marquise cried out in protestation. Lucie,
snipping dead leaves from her roses, wanted to know whether Monsieur
Varolan had presented the strange Scotch gentleman to Grandmamma.
“He did. At first he seemed to hesitate, glancing toward Mademoiselle
Binet. But she slept soundly, and, indeed, with cause, having
over-eaten herself that day at the twelve o’clock breakfast upon duck
stewed with olives, pastry, and corn salad. An excellent creature,
poor Binet, but with the failings of _ces gens-là_, and you may be
assured that I did not grudge her her repose while I conversed with
Monsieur Angus Dunbar, who spoke French almost to perfection. How it
was that I, who had been brought up by my mother with such absolute
strictness, yielded to the entreaties of Monsieur Varolan, who was
quite suddenly inspired with the idea of what afterward proved to be
one of his greatest pictures, I cannot imagine,” said Grandmamma;
“but it is certain that we posed together as the Lord of Nann and the
Korrigan standing in the forest by the enchanted well. It would have
been a terrible story to travel home to the Faubourg St. Germain,
I knew, but Mademoiselle still slept sweetly, and out of girlish
recklessness and _gaieté de cœur_ I consented, and down came my
long ropes of yellow hair, which had only been released from their
schoolroom plait, and dressed in grown young-lady fashion six months
before. Monsieur Varolan cried out, and clasped his hands in his
impulsive southern way. Monsieur Dunbar said nothing--then; but by
his eyes one could tell, child as one was, that he was pleased. But
when Varolan’s sketch was dashed in, and the painter cried to us to
descend from the model’s platform, Monsieur Dunbar leaned toward me
and whispered, as he offered me his hand, ‘If the fairy had been as
beautiful as you, Mademoiselle’--for Varolan had told him the story,
and he had pronounced it to be the parallel of an antique Highland
legend--‘had the fairy been as beautiful as you, the Lord of Nann would
have forgotten the lady in the tower by the sea.’ He, as I have told
you, my children, spoke French with great ease and remarkable purity;
and something in the earnestness of his manner and the expression of
his eyes--those light hazel, gleaming eyes”--Grandmamma’s delicate
dove-colored silks rustled as she shuddered slightly--“caused me a
thrill, but a thrill----”
“Young girls are so absurdly impressionable,” began the little
Marquise, with a glance at Lucie. “I remember when our dancing master,
hideous old M. Mouton, praised me for executing my steps with elegance,
I would be in the seventh heaven.”
“But this man was neither hideous, old, nor a dancing master, my dear,”
said Grandmamma, a little annoyed. She took up her tatting, which had
dropped upon her silver-gray lap, as though the story were ended, and
Lucie’s face fell.
“And is that all--absolutely all?” she cried.
“Mademoiselle Binet woke up, and we went home to the Faubourg St.
Germain to five o’clock tea--then the latest novelty imported from
London; and she overate herself again--upon hot honey cake buttered
to excess--and spoiled her appetite for supper,” said Grandmamma
provokingly.
“And you never saw Monsieur Varolan or Monsieur D ...--I cannot
pronounce his name--again?”
“Monsieur Varolan I saw again, several times in fact, for the portrait
required it; and Monsieur Dunbar, quite by accident, called at the
studio on several of these occasions.”
“And Mademoiselle Binet? Did she always fall asleep in the tapestry
chair?” asked the little Marquise, with arching eyebrows.
Grandmamma laughed, and her laugh was so clear, so sweet, and so
mirthful that the almost living lips of the exquisite child portrayed
upon the canvas bearing the signature of the dead Varolan seemed to
smile in sympathy.
“No, but she was occupied for all that. Monsieur Varolan had found out
her weakness for confectionery, and there was always a large dish of
chocolate _pralines_ and cream puffs for her to nibble at after that
first sitting. Poor, good creature, she conceived an immense admiration
for Varolan; and Monsieur Dunbar treated her with a grave courtesy
which delighted her. She had always imagined Scotchmen as savages,
painted blue and feeding upon raw rabbits, she explained, until she had
the happiness of meeting him.”
“And he--what brought him from his bogs and mountains?” asked the
little Marquise. “Was he qualifying for the diplomatic service, or
studying art?”
Grandmamma turned her brilliant eyes calmly upon the less aristocratic
countenance of her daughter-in-law. “He was doing neither. He was
staying in Paris in attendance upon his _fiancée_, who had come over to
buy her _trousseau_. I forget her name--she was the only daughter of a
baronet of Leicestershire, and an heiress. The match had been made by
her family. Monsieur Dunbar, though poor, being the cadet of a great
family and heir to an ancient title--his brother, Lord Hailhope, having
in early youth sustained an accident in the gymnasium which rendered
him a cripple for life.”
“So a wife with a ‘dot’ was urgently required!” commented the little
Marquise. “Let us hope she was not without _esprit_ and a certain
amount of good looks, in the interests of Monsieur Dunbar.”
“I saw her on the night of my first ball,” said Grandmamma, laying down
her tatting and folding her delicate, ivory-tinted hands, adorned with
a few rings of price, upon her dove-colored silk lap. “She had sandy
hair, much drawn back from the forehead, and pale eyes of china-blue,
with the projecting teeth which the caricatures of ‘Cham’ gave to all
Englishwomen. Also, her waist was rather flat, and her satin boots
would have fitted a _sapeur_; but she had an agreeable expression, and
I afterward heard her married life with Monsieur Dunbar was fairly
happy.”
“And Monsieur himself--was he as happy with her as--as he might have
been, supposing he had never visited Paris--never called at the studio
of Varolan?” asked the little Marquise, with a peculiar intonation.
Grandmamma’s rosary was of beautiful pearls. She let the shining things
slide through her fingers meditatively as she replied:
“My daughter, I cannot say. We met at that ball--the last ball given
at the Tuileries before the terrible events of the fifteenth of
July. I presented Monsieur Dunbar to my mother. We danced together,
conversed lightly of our prospects; I felt a _serrement de cœur_, and
he, Monsieur Dunbar, was very pale, with a peculiar expression about
the eyes and mouth which denoted violent emotion strongly repressed. I
had noticed it when Monsieur de Courvaux came to claim my hand for the
second State quadrille. He wore his uniform as Minister of Commerce
and all his Orders.... His thick nose, white whiskers, dull eyes, and
bent figure contrasted strangely with the fine features and splendid
physique of Monsieur Dunbar. Ah, Heaven! how I shivered as he smiled
at me with his false teeth, and pressed my hand within his arm....
He filled me with fear. And yet at heart I knew him to be good and
disinterested and noble, even while I could have cried out to Angus
to save me.... But I was whirled away. Everyone was very kind. The
Empress, looking tall as a goddess, despotically magnificent in the
plenitude of her charms, noticed me kindly. I danced with the Prince
Imperial, a fresh-faced, gentle boy. Monsieur de Courvaux was much
felicitated upon his choice, and _Maman_ was pleased--that goes without
saying. Thus I came back to Monsieur Dunbar. We were standing together
in an alcove adorned with palms, admiring the porphyry vase, once the
property of Catherine the Great, and given by the Emperor Alexander to
the First Napoleon, when for the first time he took my hand. If I could
paint in words the emotion that suddenly overwhelmed me!... It seemed
as though the great personages, the distinguished crowds, the jeweled
ladies, the uniformed men, vanished, and the lustres and girandoles
went out, and Angus and I were standing in pale moonlight on the shores
of a lake encircled by mountains, looking in each other’s eyes. It
matters little what we said, but the history of our first meeting
might have prompted the sonnet of Arvers.... You recall it:
“Mon cœur a son secret, mon âme a son mystère,
Un amour éternel dans un instant conçu:
Le mal est sans remède.”
“_Sans remède_ for either of us. Honor was engaged on either side. So
we parted,” said Grandmamma. “My bouquet of white tea-roses and ferns
had lost a few buds when I put it in water upon reaching home.”
“And----”
“In three days I married Monsieur de Courvaux. As for Monsieur
Dunbar----”
“Lucie,” said the little Marquise, “run down to the bottom of the
garden and listen for the horns!”
“Monsieur Dunbar I never saw again,” said Grandmamma, with a smile,
“and there is no need for Lucie to run into the garden. Listen! One can
hear the horns quite plainly; the boar has taken to the open--they are
sounding the _débuché_. What do you want, Lebas?”
The middle-aged, country-faced house-steward was the medium of a humble
entreaty on the part of one Auguste Pichon, a forest keeper, that
Madame the Marquise would deign to hear him on behalf of the young
woman, his sister, of whom Monsieur le Curé had already spoken. This
time, upon the exchange of a silent intelligence between the two elder
ladies, Mademoiselle Lucie was really dismissed to the garden, and
Pichon and his sister were shown in by Lebas.
Pichon was a thick-set, blue-bearded, vigorous fellow of twenty-seven,
wearing a leather gun pad strapped over his blouse, and cloth gaiters.
He held his cap in both hands against his breast as he bowed to his
master’s mother and his master’s wife. His sister, a pale, sickly,
large-eyed little creature, scarcely ventured to raise her abashed
glance from the Turkey carpet as Pichon plucked at her cotton sleeve.
“We have heard the story from Monsieur le Curé,” cried the younger
lady, “and both Madame la Marquise and myself are much shocked and
grieved. Is it not so, Madame?”
Grandmamma surveyed the bending, tempest-beaten figure before her with
a sternness of the most august, yet with pity and interest too.
“We did not anticipate when we had the pleasure of contributing
a little sum to your sister’s dower, upon her marriage with the
under-gardener, Pierre Michaud, that the union would be attended with
anything but happiness.”
“Alas! Nor did I, Madame.... I picked out Michaud myself from half a
dozen others. ‘Here’s a sound, hale man of sixty,’ thinks I, ‘will make
the girl a good husband, and leave her a warm widow when he dies’; for
he has a bit put by, as is well known. And she was willing when he
asked her to go before the Maire and Monsieur le Curé and sign herself
Michaud instead of Pichon. Weren’t you, girl?”
No answer from the culprit but a sob.
“So, as she was willing and Michaud was eager, the wedding came off.
At the dance, for it’s a poor foot that doesn’t hop at a wedding,
what happens? Latrace, Monsieur le Marquis’s new groom, drops in. He
dances with the bride, drops a few sweet speeches in her ear. Crac!
’Tis like sowing mustard and cress.... Latrace scrapes acquaintance
with Michaud--more fool he, with respect to the ladies’ presence,
for when one has a drop of honey one doesn’t care to share with the
wasp! Latrace takes to hanging about the cottage. Ninette, the silly
thing, begins to gape at the moon, and when what might be expected to
happen happens, Michaud turns her out of house and home. What’s more,
keeps her dowry, to pay for his honor, says he. ‘Honor! leave honor
to gentlemen; wipe out scores with a stick!’ says I, ‘and eat one’s
cabbage soup in peace.’ But he’ll bolt the door and stick to the dowry,
and Ninette may beg, or worse, for all he cares. And my wife flies
out on the poor thing; and what to do with her may the good God teach
me.... Madame will understand that who provides for her keeps two! And
she so young, Madame, only seventeen!”
The little Marquise uttered a pitying exclamation, and over the face
of the elder lady passed a swift change. The exquisite faded lips
quivered, the brilliant eyes under the worn eyelids shone through a
liquid veil of tears. Rustling in her rich neutral-tinted silks, Madame
rose, went to the shrinking figure, and stooping from her stately
height, kissed Ninette impulsively upon both cheeks.
“Poor child! Poor little one!” whispered Grandmamma; and at the caress
and the whisper, the girl dropped upon her knees with a wild, sobbing
cry, and hid her face in the folds of what seemed to her an angel’s
robe. “Leave Ninette to us, my good Pichon,” said Grandmamma. “For
the present the Sisters of the Convent at Charny will take her, all
expenses being guaranteed by me, and when she is stronger we will talk
of what is to be done.” She raised the crying girl, passing a gentle
hand over the bowed head and the convulsed shoulders. “Life is not all
ended because one has made one mistake!” said Grandmamma. “Tell Madame
Pichon that, from me!”
Pichon, crushing his cap, bowed and stammered gratitude, and backed
out, leading the girl, who turned upon the threshold to send one
passionate glance of gratitude from her great, melancholy, black
eyes at the beautiful stately figure with the gold-gray hair, clad
in shining silks and costly lace. As the door closed upon the homely
figures, the little Marquise heaved a sigh of relief.
“Ouf! Pitiable as it all is, one can hardly expect anything better. The
standard of morality is elevated in proportion to the standard of rank,
the caliber of intellect, the level of refinement. Do you not agree
with me?”
Grandmamma smiled. “Are we of the upper world so extremely moral?”
The little Marquise pouted.
“_Noblesse oblige_ is an admirable apothegm, but does it keep members
of our order from the Courts of Divorce? My dear Augustine, reflect,
and you will come to the conclusion that there is really very little
difference in human beings. The texture of the skin, the shape of the
fingernails, cleanliness, correct grammar, and graceful manners do
not argue superior virtue, or greater probity of mind, or increased
power to resist temptation, but very often the reverse. This poor girl
married an uninteresting, elderly man at the very moment when her heart
awakened at the sight and the voice of one whom she was destined to
love.... Circumstances, environments, opportunities contributed to her
defeat; but I will answer for it she has known moments of abnegation as
lofty, struggles as desperate, triumphs of conscience over instinct
as noble, as delicate, and as touching as those experienced by any
Lucretia of the Rue Tronchet or the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She has been
beaten, that is all, worsted in the conflict; and it is for us, who are
women like herself, to help her to rise. But I prose,” said Grandmamma;
“I sound to myself like a dull tract or an indifferent sermon. And
Lucie must be getting tired of the garden!”
Grandmamma moved toward the open _battants_ of the glass doors to call
Mademoiselle, but arrested her steps to answer the interrogation which
rose in the eyes, but never reached the lips, of the little Marquise.
“I have said, my dear, that we never met again. Whether Monsieur Angus
Dunbar was nobler and stronger than other men--whether I was braver and
purer than others of my sex--this was a question which never came to
the test. Fate kept us apart, and something in which Monsieur le Curé,
and perhaps ourselves, would recognize the hand of Heaven!”
Grandmamma went out through the glass doors and stood upon the
_perron_, breathing the delicious air. The sun was drowning in a sea of
molten gold, the sweet clamor of the horns came from an island in the
shallow river. “Gone to the water! Gone to the water!” they played....
And then the death of the boar was sounded in the _hallali_. But a
nobler passion than that of the hunter, who follows and slays for the
mere momentary lust of possession, shone in the exquisite old face that
lifted to the sunset the yearning of a deathless love.
II
The boar, a _ragot_, had met his end at the point of the Marquis’s
hunting knife, an ancestral _couteau de chasse_ with a blade about
three feet long. The field had dispersed, one or two of the _valets
de chien_ gone after the missing hounds, leading the decoy dogs on
leashes. Afternoon tea at the _château_ was a very lively affair,
the clatter of tongues, cups, and teaspoons almost deafening. A
_cuirassier_, whose polished boot had suffered abrasion from the
tusk of the wounded animal, recounted his adventure to a circle of
sympathetic ladies. A fire of beech logs blazed on the wide hearth,
the leaping flames playing a color symphony, from peacock green to
sapphire, from ruby to orange, dying into palest lemon-yellow, leaping
up in lilac, deepening to violet, and so _da capo_.... The silver
andirons had sphinx heads adorned with full-bottomed periwigs of the
period of Louis le Grand.... The exquisite Watteaus and Bouchers, set
in the paneling--painted white because the little Marquise had found
oak so _triste_--shone with a subdued splendor. The perfume of fine
tobacco, green tea, and many roses, loaded the atmosphere, producing a
mild intoxication in the brain of the tall, fair, well-dressed young
fellow, unmistakably British, whom a servant had announced as Monsieur
Brown....
“Monsieur Brown?” Monsieur de Courvaux read the card passed over to him
by his wife. “Who under the sun is Monsieur Brown?”
“Fie, Frédéric!” rebuked the little Marquise. “It is the English tutor!”
Then they rose together and welcomed the newcomer with hospitable
warmth. Charny les Bois was hideously difficult of access; the railway
from the junction at which one had to change was a single line, and a
perfect disgrace. Monsieur de Courvaux had long intended to bring the
question--a burning one--before the proper authorities. Both Monsieur
and Madame were horrified to realize that Monsieur Brown had walked
from the station, where cabs were conspicuous by their absence. A
conveyance had been ordered to be sent, but at the last moment it was
wanted for the hunt. Monsieur Brown had hunted in England, of course?
Mr. Brown admitted that he had followed the hounds in several counties.
Looking at the new tutor’s square shoulders, sinewy frame, long,
well-made limbs, and firmly knit, supple hands, tanned like his face
and throat by outdoor exercise, Monsieur de Courvaux did not doubt it.
Brown came of good race, that was clear at the first glance. Harrow
and Oxford had added the _cachet_ of the high public school and the
university. He had recommendations from the Duke of Atholblair, who
mentioned him as the son of a dear old friend. And Atholblair was
of the old _régime_, a great nobleman who chose his friends with
discretion. Clearly Brown would do. His French was singularly pure; his
English was the English of the upper classes. Absolutely, Brown was the
thing. He was, he said, a Scotchman. The late Queen of England, to whom
the little Marquise had the honor of being god-daughter’s daughter, had
had a valuable attendant--also a Scotchman--of the name of Brown! Did
Monsieur Brown happen to be any relation?
“Unhappily no, Madame!” said Mr. Brown, who seemed rather tickled by
the notion. He took the next opportunity to laugh, and did it heartily.
He was standing on the bear-skin before the fireplace, measuring an
equal six feet of height with Monsieur de Courvaux, when he laughed,
and several people, grouped about a central figure--that of the elder
Madame de Courvaux, who sat upon a gilt _fauteuil_ with her back to
the great windows, beyond which the fires of the sunset were burning
rapidly away--the people glanced round.
“What a handsome Englishman!” a lady whispered, a tiny brunette, with
eyes of jet and ebony hair, who consequently adored the hazel-eyed, the
tawny-haired, the tall of the opposite sex. Madame de Courvaux, superb
in her laces and dove-colored silks, sat like a figure of marble. Under
her broad white brow, crowned by its waves of gray-gold hair, her eyes,
blue and brilliant still, fixed with an intensity of regard almost
devouring upon the face of the new tutor, whom the Marquis, stepping
forward, presented to his mother with due ceremony, and to whom,
offering her white, jeweled hand, she said:
“Welcome once more to France, Monsieur Dunbar!”
“But, Mamma,” put in Monsieur de Courvaux, as young Mr. Brown started
and crimsoned to the roots of his tawny hair, “the name of Monsieur is
Brown, and he has never before visited our country.”
“Monsieur Brown will pardon me!” Madame de Courvaux rose to her full
height and swept the astonished young fellow a wonderful curtsy. “The
old are apt to make mistakes. And--there sounds the dressing gong!”
Indeed, the metallic _tintamarre_ of the instrument named began at that
instant, and the great room emptied as the chatterers and tea drinkers
scurried away. A rosy, civil footman in plain black livery showed Mr.
Brown to his room, which was not unreasonably high up, and boasted a
dressing cabinet and a bath. As Brown hurriedly removed the smuts of
the railway with oceans of soap and water, and got into his evening
clothes--much too new and well cut for a tutor--he pondered. As he
shook some attar of violets--much too expensive a perfume for a tutor,
who, at the most, should content himself with Eau de Cologne of the
ninepenny brand--upon his handkerchief, he shook his head.
“I’ll be shot if she didn’t, and plainly too! It wasn’t the
confusion of the beastly all-night train journey from Paris. It
wasn’t the clatter of French talk, or the delusion of a guilty
conscience--decidedly not! The thing is as certain as it is
inexplicable! I arrive under the name of Brown at a country house in
a country I don’t know, belonging to people I have never met, and the
second lady I am introduced to addresses me as Mr. Dunbar. There’s the
second gong! I wonder whether there is a governess for me to take in,
or whether I trot behind my superiors, who aren’t paid a hundred and
fifty pounds a year to teach English?”
And Mr. Brown went down to dinner. Somewhat to his surprise, he was
placed impartially, served without prejudice, and conversed with as an
equal. The De Courvaux were charming people, their tutor thought--equal
to the best-bred Britons he had ever met. His pupils--the freckled boy
with hair cropped _à la brosse_, and the pretty, frank-mannered girl
of sixteen--interested him. He was uncommonly obliged to the kind old
Duke for his recommendation; the bread of servitude eaten under this
hospitable roof would have no bitter herbs mingled with it, that was
plain. He helped himself to an _entrée_ of calves’ tongues stewed with
mushrooms, as he thought this, and noted the violet bouquet of the
old Bordeaux with which one of the ripe-faced, black-liveried footmen
filled his glass. And perhaps he thought of another table, at the
bottom of which his place had been always laid, and of the grim, gaunt
dining-room in which it stood, with the targets and breast-pieces,
the chain and plate mail of his--Brown’s--forebears winking against
the deep lusterless black of the antique paneling; and, opposite,
lost in deep reflection, the master of the house, moody, haggard,
gray-moustached and gray-haired, but eminently handsome still, leaning
his head upon his hand, and staring at the gold and ruby reflections
of the wine decanters in the polished surface of the ancient oak, or
staring straight before him at the portrait, so oddly out of keeping
with the Lord Neils and Lord Ronalds in tartans and powdered wigs,
the Lady Agnes and the Lady Jean in hoops and stomachers, with their
hair dressed over cushions, and shepherds’ crooks in their narrow,
yellowish hands.... That portrait, of an exquisite girl--a lily-faced,
gold-haired, blue-eyed child in the ball costume of 1870--had been the
object of Mr. Brown’s boyish adoration. Varolan painted it, Mr. Brown’s
uncle--whose name was no more Brown than his nephew’s--had often said.
And on one occasion, years previously, he had expanded sufficiently to
tell his nephew and expectant heir that the original of the portrait
was the daughter of a ducal family of France, a star moving in the
social orbit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, married to a Minister of
the Imperial Government a few weeks previous to that Government’s
collapse and fall.
“I believe the dear old boy must have been in love with her before
Uncle Ronald died, and he came in for the family honors,” mused Mr.
Brown, and then began to wonder whether he had treated the dear old
boy badly or _vice versa_. For between this uncle and nephew, who,
despite a certain chilly stiffness and rigor of mental bearing, often
mutually exhibited by relations, were sincerely attached to each other,
a breach had opened, an estrangement had occurred. Hot words and bitter
reproaches had suddenly, unexpectedly been exchanged, old wrongs
flaming up at a kindling word, forgotten grudges coming to light in the
blaze of the conflagration....
And so it had come to pass that the son of Lord Hailhope’s younger
brother, named Angus after his uncle, had not been thrown, had hurled
himself upon his own resources. And the Duke of Atholblair had found
him the place of English tutor in the family of Madame de Courvaux.
“It is the only thing that presents itself,” the aged peer had
explained, “and therefore, my dear boy, you had better take it until
something better turns up.”