It is impossible to say what Mariana would have done had there been no
interference, for she had worked herself into one of those furies which
women of her type can attain when they feel the occasion demands it, a
paroxysm none the less dangerous because its foundation is histrionic.
But Rameau threw his arms about her; Mr. Percy came hastily to his
assistance, and Ward and I sprang in between her and the too-fearless
lady she strove to reach. Even at that, the finger-nails of Mariana's
right hand touched the pretty white hat--but only touched it and no
more.
Rameau and the little spy managed to get their vociferating burden
across the courtyard and into her own door, where she suddenly
subsided, disappearing within the passage to her apartment in
unexpected silence--indubitably a disappointment to the interested
Amedee, to Glouglou, Francois, and the whole personnel of the inn, who
hastened to group themselves about the door in attentive attitudes.
"In heaven's name," gasped Miss Elizabeth, seizing her cousin by the
arm, "come into the pavilion. Here's the whole world looking at us!"
"Professor Keredec--" Mrs. Harman began, resisting, and turning to the
professor appealingly.
"Oh, let him come too!" said Miss Elizabeth desperately. "Nothing could
be worse than this!"
She led the way back to the pavilion, and, refusing to consider a
proposal on the part of Mr. Ingle and myself to remain outside, entered
the room last, herself, producing an effect of "shooing" the rest of us
in; closed the door with surprising force, relapsed in a chair, and
burst into tears.
"Not a soul at Quesnay," sobbed the mortified chatelaine--"not one but
will know this before dinner! They'll hear the whole thing within two
hours."
"Isn't there any way of stopping that, at least?" Ward said to me.
"None on earth, unless you go home at once and turn your visitors and
THEIR servants out of the house," I answered.
"There is nothing they shouldn't know," said Mrs. Harman.
George turned to her with a smile so bravely managed that I was proud
of him. "Oh, yes, there is," he said. "We're going to get you out of
all this."
"All this?" she repeated.
"All this MIRE!" he answered. "We're going to get you out of it and
keep you out of it, now, for good. I don't know whether your revelation
to the Spanish woman will make that easier or harder, but I do know
that it makes the mire deeper."
"For whom?"
"For Harman. But you sha'n't share it!"
Her anxious eyes grew wider. "How have I made it deeper for him? Wasn't
it necessary that the poor woman should be told the truth?"
"Professor Keredec seemed to think it important that she shouldn't."
She turned to Keredec with a frightened gesture and an unintelligible
word of appeal, as if entreating him to deny what George had said. The
professor's beard was trembling; he looked haggard; an almost pitiable
apprehension hung upon his eyelids; but he came forward manfully.
"Madame," he said, "you could never in your life do anything that would
make harm. You were right to speak, and I had short sight to fear,
since it was the truth."
"But why did you fear it?"
"It was because--" he began, and hesitated.
"I must know the reason," she urged. "I must know just what I've done."
"It was because," he repeated, running a nervous hand through his
beard, "because the knowledge would put us so utterly in this people's
power. Already they demand more than we could give them; now they can--"
"They can do what?" she asked tremulously.
His eyes rested gently on her blanched and stricken face. "Nothing, my
dear lady," he answered, swallowing painfully. "Nothing that will last.
I am an old man. I have seen and I have--I have thought. And I tell you
that only the real survives; evil actions are some phantoms that
disappear. They must not trouble us."
"That is a high plane," George intervened, and he spoke without
sarcasm. "To put it roughly, these people have been asking more than
the Harman estate is worth; that was on the strength of the woman's
claim as a wife; but now they know she is not one, her position is
immensely strengthened, for she has only to go before the nearest
Commissaire de Police--"
"Oh, no!" Mrs. Harman cried passionately. "I haven't done THAT! You
mustn't tell me I have. You MUSTN'T!"
"Never!" he answered. "There could not be a greater lie than to say you
have done it. The responsibility is with the wretched and vicious boy
who brought the catastrophe upon himself. But don't you see that you've
got to keep out of it, that we've got to take you out of it?"
"You can't! I'm part of it; better or worse, it's as much mine as his."
"No, no!" cried Miss Elizabeth. "YOU mustn't tell us THAT!" Still
weeping, she sprang up and threw her arms about her brother. "It's too
horrible of you--"
"It is what I must tell you," Mrs. Harman said. "My separation from my
husband is over. I shall be with him now for--"
"I won't listen to you!" Miss Elizabeth lifted her wet face from
George's shoulder, and there was a note of deep anger in her voice.
"You don't know what you're talking about; you haven't the faintest
idea of what a hideous situation that creature has made for himself.
Don't you know that that awful woman was right, and there are laws in
France? When she finds she can't get out of him all she wants, do you
think she's going to let him off? I suppose she struck you as being
quite the sort who'd prove nobly magnanimous! Are you so blind you
don't see exactly what's going to happen? She'll ask twice as much now
as she did before; and the moment it's clear that she isn't going to
get it, she'll call in an agent of police. She'll get her money in a
separate suit and send him to prison to do it. The case against him is
positive; there isn't a shadow of hope for him. You talk of being with
him; don't you see how preposterous that is? Do you imagine they
encourage family housekeeping in French prisons?"
"Oh, come, this won't do!" The speaker was Cresson Ingle, who stepped
forward, to my surprise; for he had been hovering in the background
wearing an expression of thorough discomfort.
"You're going much too far," he said, touching his betrothed upon the
arm. "My dear Elizabeth, there is no use exaggerating; the case is
unpleasant enough just as it is."
"In what have I exaggerated?" she demanded.
"Why, I KNEW Larrabee Harman," he returned. "I knew him fairly well. I
went as far as Honolulu with him, when he and some of his heelers
started round the world; and I remember that papers were served on him
in San Francisco. Mrs. Harman had made her application; it was just
before he sailed. About a year and a half or two years later I met him
again, in Paris. He was in pretty bad shape; seemed hypnotised by this
Mariana and afraid as death of her; she could go into a tantrum that
would frighten him into anything. It was a joke--down along the line of
the all-night dancers and cafes--that she was going to marry him; and
some one told me afterward that she claimed to have brought it about. I
suppose it's true; but there is no question of his having married her
in good faith. He believed that the divorce had been granted; he'd
offered no opposition to it whatever. He was travelling continually,
and I don't think he knew much of what was going on, even right around
him, most of the time. He began with cognac and absinthe in the
morning, you know. For myself, I always supposed the suit had been
carried through; so did people generally, I think. He'll probably have
to stand trial, and of course he's technically guilty, but I don't
believe he'd be convicted--though I must say it would have been a most
devilish good thing for him if he could have been got out of France
before la Mursiana heard the truth. Then he could have made terms with
her safely at a distance--she'd have been powerless to injure him and
would have precious soon come to time and been glad to take whatever
he'd give her. NOW, I suppose, that's impossible, and they'll arrest
him if he tries to budge. But this talk of prison and all that is
nonsense, my dear Elizabeth!"
"You admit there is a chance of it!" she retorted.
"I've said all I had to say," returned Mr. Ingle with a dubious laugh.
"And if you don't mind, I believe I'll wait for you outside, in the
machine. I want to look at the gear-box."
He paused, as if in deference to possible opposition, and, none being
manifested, went hastily from the room with a sigh of relief, giving
me, as he carefully closed the door, a glance of profound commiseration
over his shoulder.
Miss Elizabeth had taken her brother's hand, not with the effect of
clinging for sympathy; nor had her throwing her arms about him produced
that effect; one could as easily have imagined Brunhilda hiding her
face in a man's coat-lapels. George's sister wept, not weakly: she was
on the defensive, but not for herself.
"Does the fact that he may possibly escape going to prison"--she
addressed her cousin--"make his position less scandalous, or can it
make the man himself less detestable?"
Mrs. Harman looked at her steadily. There was a long and sorrowful
pause.
"Nothing is changed," she said finally; her eyes still fixed gravely on
Miss Elizabeth's.
At that, the other's face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked
exclamation. "Oh," she cried--"you've fallen in love with playing the
martyr; it's SELF-love! You SEE yourself in the role! No one on earth
could make me believe you're in LOVE with this degraded imbecile--all
that's left of the wreck of a vicious life! It isn't that! It's because
you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on
your knees and wash off the vileness from this befouled creature; you
want--"
"Madame!" Keredec interrupted tremendously, "you speak out of no
knowledge!" He leaned toward her across the table, which shook under
the weight of his arms. "There is no vileness; no one who is clean
remains befouled because of the things that are gone."
"They do not?" She laughed hysterically, and for my part, I sighed in
despair--for there was no stopping him.
"They do not, indeed! Do you know the relation of TIME to this little
life of ours? We have only the present moment; your consciousness of
that is your existence. Your knowledge of each present moment as it
passes--and it passes so swiftly that each word I speak now overlaps
it--yet it is all we have. For all the rest, for what has gone by and
what is yet coming--THAT has no real existence; it is all a dream. It
is not ALIVE. It IS not! It IS--nothing! So the soul that stands clean
and pure to-day IS clean and pure--and that is all there is to say
about that soul!"
"But a soul with evil tendencies," Ward began impatiently, "if one must
meet you on your own ground--"
"Ha! my dear sir, those evil tendencies would be in the soiling
memories, and my boy is free from them."
"He went toward all that was soiling before. Surely you can't pretend
he may not take that direction again?"
"That," returned the professor quickly, "is his to choose. If this lady
can be with him now, he will choose right."
"So!" cried Miss Elizabeth, "you offer her the role of a guide, do you?
First she is to be his companion through a trial for bigamy in a French
court, and, if he is acquitted, his nurse, teacher, and moral
preceptor?" She turned swiftly to her cousin. "That's YOUR conception
of a woman's mission?"
"I haven't any mission," Mrs. Harman answered quietly. "I've never
thought about missions; I only know I belong to him; that's all I EVER
thought about it. I don't pretend to explain it, or make it seem
reasonable. And when I met him again, here, it was--it was--it was
proved to me."
"Proved?" echoed Miss Elizabeth incredulously.
"Yes; proved as certainly as the sun shining proves that it's day."
"Will you tell us?"
It was I who asked the question: I spoke involuntarily, but she did not
seem to think it strange that I should ask.
"Oh, when I first met him," she said tremulously, "I was frightened;
but it was not he who frightened me--it was the rush of my own feeling.
I did not know what I felt, but I thought I might die, and he was so
like himself as I had first known him--but so changed, too; there was
something so wonderful about him, something that must make any stranger
feel sorry for him, and yet it is beautiful--" She stopped for a moment
and wiped her eyes, then went on bravely: "And the next day he came,
and waited for me--I should have come here for him if he hadn't--and I
fell in with the mistake he had made about my name. You see, he'd heard
I was called 'Madame d'Armand,' and I wanted him to keep on thinking
that, for I thought if he knew I was Mrs. Harman he might find out--"
She paused, her lip beginning to tremble. "Oh, don't you see why I
didn't want him to know? I didn't want him to suffer as he would--as he
does now, poor child!--but most of all I wanted--I wanted to see if he
would fall in love with me again! I kept him from knowing, because, if
he thought I was a stranger, and the same thing happened again--his
caring for me, I mean--" She had begun to weep now, freely and openly,
but not from grief. "Oh!" she cried, "don't you SEE how it's all proven
to me?"
"I see how it has deluded you!" said Miss Elizabeth vehemently. "I see
what a rose-light it has thrown about this creature; but it won't last,
thank God! any more than it did the other time. The thing is for you to
come to your senses before--"
"Ah, my dear, I have come to them at last and for ever!" The words rang
full and strong, though she was white and shaking, and heavy tears
filled her eyes. "I know what I am doing now, if I never knew before!"
"You never did know--" Miss Ward began, but George stopped her.
"Elizabeth!" he said quickly. "We mustn't go on like this; it's more
than any of us can bear. Come, let's get out into the air; let's get
back to Quesnay. We'll have Ingle drive us around the longer way, by
the sea." He turned to his cousin. "Louise, you'll come now? If not,
we'll have to stay here with you."
"I'll come," she answered, trying bravely to stop the tears that kept
rising in spite of her; "if you'll wait till"--and suddenly she flashed
through them a smile so charming that my heart ached the harder for
George--"till I can stop crying!"