I saw temptation struggling with Speed's caution; I, too, was almost
willing to drop a hint that might change her amusement to speculation,
if not to alarm.
So this was the woman for whose caprice Kelly Eyre had wrecked his
prospects! Clever--oh, certainly clever. But she had made the
inevitable slip that such clever people always make sooner or later.
And in a bantering message to her victim she had completed the chain
against herself--a chain of which I might have been left in absolute
ignorance. Impulse probably did it--reasonless and perhaps malicious
caprice--the instinct of a pretty woman to stir up memory in a
discarded and long-forgotten victim--just to note the effect--just to
see if there still remains one nerve, one pulse-beat to respond.
"Will the pensive gentleman with nine lives have a little more
nourishment to sustain him?" she asked.
Looking up from my empty plate, I declined politely; and we followed
her signal to rise.
"There is a Mr. Kelly Eyre," she said to Speed, "connected with your
circus. Has he gone with the others?"
"Yes, mademoiselle."
"Really?" she mused, amiably. "I knew him as a student in Paris,
when he was very young--and I was younger. I should have liked to have
seen him--once more."
"Did you not see him?" I asked, abruptly.
Her back was toward me; very deliberately she turned her pretty head
and looked at me over her shoulder, studying my face a moment.
"Yes, I saw him. I should have liked to have seen him--once more,"
she said, as though she had first calculated the effect on me of a
different reply.
She led the way into that small room overlooking the garden where I
had been twice received by Madame de Vassart. Here she took leave of
us, abandoning us to our own designs. Mine was to find a large
arm-chair and sit down in it, and give Speed a few instructions.
Speed's was to prowl around Paradise for information, and, if
possible, telegraph to Lorient for troops to catch Buckhurst
red-handed.
He left me turning over the leaves of the "Chanson de Roland," saying
that he would return in a little while with any news he might pick up,
and that he would do his best to catch Buckhurst in the foolish trap
which that gentleman had set for others.
Tiring of the poem, I turned my eyes toward the garden, where, in the
sunshine, heaps of crisped leaves lay drifted along the base of the
wall or scattered between the rows of herbs which were still ripely
green. The apricots had lost their leaves, so had the grapevines and
the fig-trees; but the peach-trees were in foliage; pansies and
perpetual roses bloomed amid sere and seedy thickets of larkspurs,
phlox, and dead delphinium.
On the wall a cat sat, sunning her sleek flanks. Something about the
animal seemed familiar to me, and after a while I made up my mind that
this was Ange Pitou, Jacqueline's pet, abandoned by her mistress and
now a feline derelict. Speed must have been mistaken when he told me
that Jacqueline had taken her cat; or possibly the home-haunting
instinct had brought the creature back, abandoning her mistress to her
fortunes.
If I had been in my own house I should have offered Ange Pitou
hospitality; as it was, I walked out into the sunny garden and made
courteous advances which were ignored. I watched the cat for a few
moments, then sat down on the bench. The inertia which follows
recovery from a shock, however light, left me with the lazy
acquiescence of a convalescent, willing to let the world drift for an
hour or two, contented to relax, apathetic, comfortable.
Seaward the gulls sailed like white feathers floating; the rocky
ramparts of Groix rose clear-cut against a horizon where no haze
curtained the sea; the breakers had receded from the coast on a heavy
ebb-tide, and I saw them in frothy outline, noiselessly churning the
shallows beyond the outer bar.
And then my reverie ended abruptly; a step on the gravel walk brought
me to my feet.... There she stood, lovely in a fresh morning-gown
deeply belted with turquoise-shells, her ruddy hair glistening, coiled
low on a neck of snow.
For the first time she showed embarrassment in her greeting, scarcely
touching my hand, speaking with a new constraint in a voice which grew
colder as she hesitated.
"We were frightened; we are so glad that you were not badly hurt. I
thought you might find it comfortable here--of course I could not know
that you were not seriously injured."
"That is fortunate for me," I said, pleasantly, "for I am afraid you
would not have offered this shelter if you had known how little
injured I really was."
"Yes, I should have offered it--had I reason to believe you would
have accepted. I have felt that perhaps you might think what I have
done was unwarranted."
"I think you did the most graciously unselfish thing a woman could
do," I said, quickly. "You offered your best; and the man who took it
cannot--dare not--express his gratitude."
The emotion in my voice warned me to cease; the faintest color tinted
her cheeks, and she looked at me with beautiful, grave eyes that
slowly grew inscrutable, leaving me standing diffident and silent
before her.
The breeze shifted, bringing with it the hollow sea-thunder. She
turned her head and glanced out across the ocean, hands behind her,
fingers linked.
"I have come here into your garden uninvited," I said.
"Shall we sit here--a moment?" she suggested, without turning.
Presently she seated herself in one corner of the bench; her gaze
wandered over the partly blighted garden, then once more centred on
the seaward skyline.
The color of her hands, her neck, fascinated me. That flesh texture of
snow and roses, firmly and delicately modelled, which sometimes is
seen with red hair, I had seen once before in a picture by a Spanish
master, but never, until now, in real life.
And she was life incarnate in her wholesome beauty--a beauty of which
I had perceived only the sad shadow at La Trappe--a sweet, healthy,
exquisite woman, moulded, fashioned, colored by a greater Master than
the Spanish painter dreaming of perfection centuries ago.
In the sun a fragrance grew--the subtle incense from her gown--perhaps
from her hair.
"Autumn is already gone; we are close to winter," she said, under her
breath. "See, there is nothing left--scarcely a blossom--a rose or
two; but the first frost will scatter the petals. Look at the pinks;
look at the dead leaves. Ah, tristesse, tristesse! The life of summer
is too short; the life of flowers is too short; so are our lives,
Monsieur Scarlett. Do you believe it?"
"Yes--now."
She was very still for a while, her head bent toward the sea. Then,
without turning: "Have you not always believed it?"
"No, madame."
"Then ... why do you believe it ... now?"
"Because, since we have become friends, life seems pitiably short for
such a friendship."
She smiled without moving.
"That is a ... very beautiful ... compliment, monsieur."
"It owes its beauty to its truth, madame."
"And that reply is illogical," she said, turning to look at me with
brilliant eyes and a gay smile which emphasized the sensitive mouth's
faint droop. "Illogical, because truth is not always beautiful. As
example: you were very near to death yesterday. That is the truth, but
it is not beautiful at all."
"Ah, madame, it is you who are illogical," I said, laughing.
"I?" she cried. "Prove it!"
But I would not, spite of her challenge and bright mockery.
In that flash all of our comradeship returned, bringing with it
something new, which I dared not think was intimacy.
Yet constraint fell away like a curtain between us, and though she
dominated, and I was afraid lest I overstep limits which I myself had
set, the charm of her careless confidence, her pretty, undissembled
caprices, her pleasure in a delicately intimate badinage, gave me
something of a self-reliance, a freedom that I had not known in a
woman's presence for many years.
"We brought you here because we thought it was good for you," she
said, reverting maliciously to the theme that had at first embarrassed
her. "We were perfectly certain that you have always been unfit to
take care of yourself. Now we have the proofs."
"Mademoiselle Elven said that you harbored us only because you were
afraid of those bandits who have arrived in Paradise," I observed.
"Afraid!" she said, scornfully. "Oh, you are making fun of me now.
Indeed, when Mr. Buckhurst came last night I had my men conduct him to
the outer gate!"
"Did he come last night?" I asked, troubled.
"Yes." She shrugged her pretty shoulders.
"Alone?"
"That unspeakable creature, Mornac, was with him. I had no idea he
was here; had you?"
I was silent. Did Mornac mean trouble for me? Yet how could he, shorn
now of all authority?
The thought seemed to occur to her, too, and she looked up quickly,
asking if I had anything to fear.
"Only for you," I said.
"For me? Why? I am not afraid of such men. I have servants on whom I
can call to disembarrass me of such people." She hesitated; the memory
of her deception, of what she had suffered at Buckhurst's hands,
brought a glint of anger into her beautiful eyes.
"My innocence shames me," she said. "I merited what I received in
such company. It was you who saved me from myself."
"A noble mind thinks nobly," I said. "Theirs is the shame, not
yours, that you could not understand treachery--that you never can
understand it. As for me, I was an accident, which warned you in time
that all the world was not as good and true as you desired to believe
it."
She sat looking at me curiously. "I wonder," she said, "why it is
that you do not know your own value?"
"My value--to whom?"
"To ... everybody--to the world--to people."
"Am I of any value to you, madame?"
The pulsing moments passed and she did not answer, and I bit my lip
and waited. At last she said, coolly: "A man must appraise himself.
If he chooses, he is valuable. But values are comparative, and depend
on individual taste.... Yes, you are of some value to me,... or I
should not be here with you,... or I should not find it my pleasure to
be here--or I should not trust you, come to you with my petty
troubles, ask your experience to help me, perhaps protect me."
She bent her head with adorable diffidence. "Monsieur Scarlett, I
have never before had a friend who thought first of me and last of
himself."
I leaned on the back of the bench, resting my bandaged forehead on my
hand.
She looked up after a moment, and her face grew serious.
"Are you suffering?" she asked. "Your face is white as my sleeve."
"I feel curiously tired," I said, smiling.
"Then you must have some tea, and I will brew it myself. You shall
not object! No--it is useless, because I am determined. And you shall
lie down in the little tea-room, where I found you that day when you
first came to Trécourt."
"I shall be very happy to do anything--if you are there."
"Even drink tea when you abhor it? Then I certainly ought to reward
you with my presence at the rite.... Are you dizzy? You are terribly
pale.... Would you lean on my arm?"
I was not dizzy, but I did so; and if such deceit is not pardonable,
there is no justice in this world or in the next.
The tea was hot and harmless; I lay thinking while she sat in the
sunny window-corner, nibbling biscuit and marmalade, and watching me
gravely.
"My appetite is dreadful in these days," she said; "age increases
it; I have just had my chocolate, yet here am I, eating like a
school-girl.... I have a strange idea that I am exceedingly young,...
that I am just beginning to live. That tired, thin, shabby girl you
saw at La Trappe was certainly not I.... And long before that, before
I knew you, there was another impersonal, half--awakened creature, who
watched the world surging and receding around her, who grew tired even
of violets and bonbons, tired of the companionship of the indifferent,
hurt by the intimacy of the unfriendly; and I cannot believe that she
was I.... Can you?"
"I can believe it; I once saw you then," I said.