"COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS"
"A thousand times welcome, my dear Savage!" Anastasia Beauchamp cried,
taking Adrian's hand in both hers and looking up at him affectionately
from beneath a broad-brimmed brown hat crowned by a positive vineyard
of purple and white glass grapes and autumn foliage, the whole
inwrapped cloudily in a streaming blue gauze veil. "You have played
the good Samaritan quite long enough in my opinion, and it's high time
you bestowed some attention upon the rest of us, though we are neither
insane nor conspicuously immoral. And here we all are, that's to say,
all of us who matter, in this really quite tidy, comfortable hotel,
plus the amiable family Bernard, my devoted, despised little Byewater
and his compatriot Lenty B. Stacpole--note the inevitable transatlantic
initial, I beseech you! Clever, excellent fellows both of them, though
a trifle slight temperamentally. And here, to complete our circle, you
arrive as the God in the Car."
Anastasia's smile bore effective testimony to her appreciation of
Adrian's handsome looks and gallant bearing.
"Yes, very much the God in the Car, my dear boy," she repeated. "You
are the picture of health. Playing the good Samaritan, it must be
conceded, hasn't damaged you.--And I honestly believe, though I won't
swear to it for fear of committing an indiscretion, that every one,
every one, mind you--save possibly our excellent Americans, to whom
your near neighborhood may reveal their own temperamental
deficiencies--will be as genuinely happy to see you as I am myself."
"Kindest and most sympathetic of friends," Adrian returned, touched
both by her words and warmth of manner, "how inexpressibly good you are
to me!"
"I only pay an old debt. Your mother was good to me once--well--" She
caught at an end of her streaming veil and brought it to anchor under
her chin. "Well--when I stood in need of a wise and sweet counselor
very badly. And I never forget. Gratitude can be--mind, I don't say
it always is, but it can be--a very delightful sentiment to
entertain.--But now you are expiring for a detailed account of a
certain dear lady. At this moment she is down on the beach with the
rest of our company. They will be back shortly for tea. So come here
with me on to the piazza, while we wait for them, and I'll give you all
the news I can."
Adrian, the brave song of the engines still in his ears, his eyes still
dazzled by the seventy-mile rush along the white roads of the rich and
pleasant Norman country, followed Miss Beauchamp and her somewhat
Bacchanalian headgear from the large, light-colored hotel saloon into
the arcade, found her a comfortable seat, and stationed himself beside
her.
From thence he commanded a comprehensive view of the opposite side of
the shallow valley, dotted with modest green-shuttered villas and
rustic chalets set in ledges of roughly terraced garden. Of the rutted
road, bordered by elms and sycamores, leading down from the fertile
uplands through the straggling gray village of Ste. Marie to the shore.
Of the high chalk cliffs forming the headland, which closed the view
westward, and the quarter-mile-wide sweep of grass running up the back
of it, stunted, bronzed oak and thorn thickets filling in the rounded
hollows. Of the curving beach, its rows of gaily painted wooden
bathing-cabins, and chairs arranged in friendly groups along the
fore-shore occupied by women in airy summer costumes,--their docile
men-kind, assisted in some cases by white-capped nurses, dealing
meanwhile with a slightly turbulent infant population upon the near
shingle and the dark mussel and seaweed covered reef of rocks just
below.
Upon that same friendly grouping of chairs Adrian's glance directed
itself eagerly, seeking a feminine presence acutely interesting to him,
but without result. Open parasols and hats of brobdingnagian
proportions rendered their charming owners practically invisible.
Wistfully he relinquished the search. Then, looking at the scene as a
whole, his poetic sense was fired by the spaciousness and freedom of
the expanse of gleaming sands for which Ste. Marie is celebrated.
Furrowed in places and edged by rare traceries of blue shadow,
traversed by sparkling blue-green waterways, interspersed with broad,
smooth lagoons--where the rather overdefined forms of pink-armed,
pink-legged bathers, clad in abbreviated garments, swam, splashed, and
floated--the sands ranged out under a translucent clearness of early
afternoon sunshine to the first glinting ripples of the gently
inflowing tide. Farther still, along the horizon, the solid blue of
the intervening belt of deep sea melted, by imperceptible gradations,
into low-lying tracts of furrowed, semi-transparent opaline cloud.
Those gold and silver shimmering levels, washed by and rimmed with
heavenly blue, commanded Adrian's imagination. He found the strong air
sweet to breathe, the keen scent of the brine pleasant to his nostrils.
Disease, age, death, and kindred ugly concomitants of human experience
lost their vraisemblance and meaning. Only glad and gracious things
were credible. These in multitude innumerable; and along with them,
making audible the note of pathos without which even perfect beauty
still lacks perfection, the haunting solicitation of the Beyond and of
the Unattained, forever beckoning the feet of man onward with the
promise of stranger and more noble joys hidden from him as yet within
the womb of the coming years.
Whereupon Anastasia Beauchamp, divining in some sort the trend of her
companion's meditations, proceeded to pat him genially upon the arm.
"My dear young god, 'come down off that roof right away,' as little
Byewater would put it, and listen to my recital of sordid domestic woes
recently suffered by our _belle Gabrielle_."
Adrian became practical, his nose at once pugnacious and furiously
busy, on the instant.
"Great heavens!" he exclaimed, "who has dared to offer her annoyance?"
"Mice, my dear Savage, beetles, and, to be quite plain with you,
drains. Yes, you may well make a grimace. That mild-looking little
chalet yonder across the valley--the one with the parterre of
marigolds--which she had rented without preliminary inspection, proved
a veritable pest-house. When I arrived in July--mainly with a view to
safeguarding your interests, since frankly I hold most seaside places
in abhorrence--"
"How can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you!" the young man
murmured fervently.
"I have no child--and--perhaps, at my age, even the ghost, even the
fiction, of motherhood is better than nothing.--But this is a
digression--sentimental or scientific, which? To return. I found
Madame Vernois nervous and debilitated, little Bette with a temperature
and sore throat, the indispensable maid Henriette drowned in tears and
sulks, and our poor, beautiful Gabrielle in a most admired distraction."
Harrowed by which description, her hearer gave way to smothered
imprecations.
"Exactly. At the time I too made little remarks. Then I sniffed
once--twice. Twice was quite sufficient. Better sacrifice a month's
rent than be poisoned. Without ceremony I bundled them over here, bag
and baggage, since when, dear creatures, they flourish. The Bernards,
who had taken the villa next door to the pest-house, also had cause for
dissatisfaction. They joined us. This addition to our party I could
have dispensed with. I entertain the highest respect for M. Bernard's
acquirements, only I could wish he had learned early in life that
imparting information and making conversation are by no means
synonymous. Never am I alone with him for over five minutes but he
positively lapidates me with the remains of the architectural past.
Conversation should be interchange of opinions, ideas, experiences, not
a bombardment with facts which one is perfectly competent to read up
for oneself if one's a mind to. Should you ever be tempted to start a
hobby--we none of us know what we may come to!--avoid archæology, my
dear Savage, I implore you, out of retrospective tenderness for my
sufferings during the last few weeks! Yes--and then I must record one
truly alarming episode. The great Zélie and a horde of her nauseating
adherents threatened a descent upon Madame St. Leger. Promptly I
engaged all the vacant rooms in the hotel--fortunately they weren't
very numerous--until the peril was over-past."
"You are not only the kindest and the most superb of friends, but you
are a great general. You should command armies," Adrian declared.
"Forever shall archæology be anathema to me!"
"Saving the proposed raid of the objectionable Zélie, our history has
been of the simplest," Anastasia continued. "People, pleasant and
unpleasant, have come and gone; we remain--and there's the sum total of
it. Now tell me about yourself. How long do we keep you?"
"Alas, only until this evening. I must go back to Rouen, where my
letters await me. We have been moving daily from place to place, as
inclination suggested. To-morrow I must rejoin René Dax--for a few
days, a week probably, to observe how the new treatment prospers. It
is decided that he shall remain in the country-house, near Caen, of an
intelligent young doctor who has been in attendance upon him during our
touring. His man-servant, of course, is with him. And there he can
also have his pet animals."
"Will he recover?"
Adrian raised his shoulders and spread out his hands.
"God knows!" he answered. "He is quite gentle, quite tractable. At
moments he is irresistibly entertaining. On his good days he composes
little poems of an exquisite fancifulness and fragility--iridescent
flowers as of spun glass. But whether he will ever draw or paint again
is an open question."
"It is pathetic," Miss Beauchamp put in musingly. "What a sequel to
his extravagant popularity!"
And both lapsed into silence, looking out across the immense expanse of
gleaming sands. Adrian was the first to speak. He did so with
uncertain hesitation.
"You said it was high time I came, _tres chère Mademoiselle_. Does
that imply that I have stayed away too long? I feared to be
precipitate, lest I might appear to take unfair advantage of the--"
"The studio escapade--precisely."
"And employ it to further my own interests. On that account I have
resolutely effaced myself. To do so has constituted a severe penance;
but to do otherwise would, in my opinion, have shown an odious lack of
imagination and of delicacy."
"I venture to doubt whether in affairs of the heart delicacy has not
more miscarriages of happiness to answer for than precipitancy! The
word too much, as between man and woman, is more easily forgiven than
the word too little."
"It is inconceivable," Adrian broke out hotly, all of a fume and a
fluster, "that Madame St. Leger should mistake my motives."
"Take it from me, my dear Savage," Anastasia replied, with a finely
humorous smile, "that exactly in proportion as a woman is indifferent
is she just and clear-sighted. Let her care for one of you tiresome
male creatures ever, yes, ever so little, and those praiseworthy
qualities suffer instant suspension. Reason and probability pick up
their petticoats and scuttle. She develops a positively inordinate
ingenuity in misconstruction and mistake."
Adrian turned an eagerly inquiring countenance upon the speaker, his
whole soul in his eyes.
"But, dearest, most deeply valued friend, tell me, tell me, may I
believe that she does then care?"
And asking it he bared his head, instinctively doing homage to that
most lovely idea. Miss Beauchamp's smile changed in character,
softening to a sweetness which held something of relinquishment and
farewell.
"Ah! the good years, the good years," she said, "when love and all the
world is young!--May you believe that she cares, my dear boy? Well,
without its being the least unnatural, she very well might care, I
fancy. But you really must find that out for yourself. Listen--the
chirruping of the children. Here they all come."
She rose and went forward; and Adrian, an odd tingling sensation in his
blood, went forward too and stood beside her under the central arch of
the arcade watching the little procession winding its way by the rough
path up the broken grass slope from the beach.
First, slender-legged, short-kilted, fresh as flowers, frisking
lambkin-like and chattering in high-pitched, clear little voices, came
Bette and her two little friends. Next M. Bernard, dignified, serious,
robust, wearing light-brown tweeds, Panama in hand, decidedly warm,
expounding, recounting, archæologically dilating to Madame
Vernois--refined, fragile, dressed in black--who leaned upon his arm.
At a little distance Madame Bernard, small, fair-haired, neat-featured,
pretty, inclining to stoutness, her person rigorously controlled by the
last word in corsets and clothed in the last word of mauve linen
costumes and mauve and white hats. She was not an ardent pedestrian,
and mounted laboriously with the help of a long-handled parasol,
uttering reproachful little ejaculations and complaints the while for
the benefit of the two young Americans, who, good-naturedly loaded up
with the ladies' folding chairs, rugs and cushions, followed close
behind.
And there, apparently, was an end of the procession. Whereupon Adrian
turned to Anastasia with a deeply injured countenance and a quite
lamentably orphaned look in his handsome eyes.
"Madame St. Leger is not with them? What can have occurred? Where
then can she be?" he demanded, in tones of child-like disappointment
and distress.
"There--there!" Anastasia returned, merrily. "See, no ill-chance has
befallen your goddess, my dear distracted young god. Look--look--near
the cliff edge, to the right."
Then noting the change which came over Adrian's expression and bearing
as his eyes followed her pointing hand, Miss Beauchamp's broadly amused
smile faded. She shook her head, sighed, turned away, while the witty,
large-featured face grew gray, aged, sibylline beneath the shadow of
her broad-brimmed, vine-crowned, slightly rampageous hat.
"Like to like," she murmured. "However, others before now have gone
through that enchanted and perilous gate! Only may the Almighty permit
these two not to cram their romance into one flimsy, purple-patched,
paper-bound yellow-back, but print it openly and honestly in three
good, stout volumes, of which all save the first twenty or thirty pages
deal with the married state."