CONCERNING A CURSE, AND THE MANNER OF ITS GOING
HOME TO ROOST
The room, furnished in dark walnut, was upholstered in red Utrecht
velvet, the walls hung with a striped fawn-and-red paper. A mirror, in
a florid gilt frame, was fixed above the low mantel-shelf. The
atmosphere held odors reminiscent of cigarettes, patchouli, and food in
process of cooking. The dinner-table had, by Adrian's orders, been
placed near the central window, the two casements of which stood open
to the ground. After so many hours spent in the open air, dining in
present company he felt the necessity of such freshness as he could by
any means get. In the center of the long flagged courtyard the big
palmate leaves of a row of pollarded chestnuts caught the light coming
from the offices on the left. White-coated, white-capped _chefs_ and
scullions passed to and fro. An old liver-colored bitch, basset as to
her legs and pointer as to her body, waddled after them, her nose in
the air, sniffing, permanently hopeful of scraps. On the flags, just
outside the salon window, three tabby kittens played--stalking one
another round pots of fuchsia and musk, bouncing out, leaping in the
air, spitting, galloping sideways, highly diabolic with teapot-handle
tails. Farther along the courtyard, hidden by the lower branches of
the intervening trees, a stable-helper sang and whistled as he washed
down the hotel omnibus. The servants talked, laughed, scolded over
their work. Almost incessantly from the _rue Jeanne d'Arc_ came the
long-drawn rattle and swish of the electric trams. And opposite to
Adrian at table, clad in a complete outfit of his, Adrian's clothes--a
white flannel suit with a faint four-thread black stripe on it, a soft,
pale blue shirt, an immaculate collar and narrow black tie--sat William
Smyrthwaite, outwardly, at all events, surprisingly transformed.
Adrian had hesitated to propose him as an inmate; but an up-to-date
motor-car, a ruffling chauffeur, a well-built suit-case and kit-bag
bearing an English name, a very good Paris address, are calculated to
promote not only faith, but charity. The hotel proprietor, a short,
fat, bland little man with a dancing step and a shrewd, rapacious
Norman eye, was sympathy itself.
"That Monsieur should remove his effects and seek another, an inferior,
hotel would desolate him, was not to be thought of! He would arrange
the affair on the instant. Such lamentable lapses will occur at
times--are there not, alas, members of the most respectable, the most
distinguished, families who turn badly? Let Monsieur, then, rest
assured he was infinitely touched by the confidence Monsieur reposed in
him. And, see"--tapping his forehead with a fat forefinger--"the
little suite at the back on the ground floor, giving upon the
courtyard, became precisely this morning vacant. True, these were not
the rooms he should have selected for Monsieur's occupation; but, under
the circumstances, it was conceivable they would serve. They were
comfortable though modest. They were retired--two bed-chambers
connected by a salon. There Monsieur and his guest could dine in
private, secure from the intrusive observation of strangers. But,
indeed, no--Monsieur was too amiable! He himself was undeserving of
thanks, since did it not become evident that Monsieur was engaged in a
work of the highest benevolence--the attempted reclamation of an
unhappy fellow-creature?--With which work to be associated, even in the
humblest capacity, could not but be esteemed by any person of feeling
as a privilege."
Then with a rapid change of manner, becoming autocratic, Napoleonic:
"Gustave," he cried, over his shoulder, "_portez les bagages de ces
messieurs aux numeros sept et huit._"--And waving Adrian to follow, he
bounced lightly away down the corridor; his eyebrows drawn together as
he inwardly debated how many francs extra he dared charge for the
Utrecht-velvet upholstered suite without seeming too flagrantly
extortionate.
After that first outbreak of unseemly rejoicing at the announcement of
his father's death, young Smyrthwaite subsided into a state of
acquiescent apathy. He did as he was bid, but with what mental
reservations, what underlying thoughts or emotions, Adrian failed to
discover. Somewhere, in this weak, slipshod creature, he suspected a
bed-rock of obstinacy. He also suspected predatory instincts. Or, was
it only that the instinct of self-preservation had taken--as under the
stress of poverty it almost must take--a predatory form?
At the beginning of dinner Smyrthwaite spoke little, but sat, his
elbows upon the table, his head bent low over his plate, putting away
food with the sullen haste of an animal suspicious of its
fellow-animal's intentions and appetite. And when Adrian, to whom this
exhibition of gluttony proved anything but agreeable, hinted civilly
there was no cause for hurry, he looked across the nicely ordered table
with a half-sneering yet oddly boyish smile.
"Oh! it's all very well for you," he said. "You're safe enough to have
your solid three meals to-morrow, and all the other blooming to-morrows
as long as you live. But, I tell you, I mean to make jolly sure of
this meal while I can get it. I've learned not to put much trust in
to-morrows. I want to be on the safe side, so that if the wind
changes, as far as this meal goes, anyhow, I shall have nothing to
repent of."
"But, my good fellow, the wind will not change. That is exactly what I
have been trying to assure you," Adrian interposed, pity and repulsion
playing see-saw within him to a bewildering extent. "For the future
you can be just as secure of three meals a day as I myself am if you
choose."
"Bully!" Smyrthwaite said. "I wonder! The old man cut up well?" he
added, his face again bent down over the table.
"Your father left a large fortune," Adrian replied, repulsion now very
much on the top.
"To me? Not likely!"
"To your sisters. And Joanna"--Adrian hesitated, conscious of a
singular distaste to using the Christian name--"at once devoted a
considerable sum of money to be employed, in the event of your return,
for your maintenance."
With his coarse, thick-jointed fingers Smyrthwaite rubbed a bit of
bread round his plate, sopping up the remains of the gravy.
"That's no more than right," he said, "if you come to think of it. Why
should the girls have all the stuff?"
His hand went out furtively across the table to a dish of braised beef
and richly cooked vegetables which he proceeded to transfer to his own
plate.
"All the same, it's nice of Nannie. We were rather chummy in the old
days--the blasted old days which I've nearly forgot. But I didn't
suppose she cared still. Poor old Nannie! What a beastly hash my
father made of our lives! Nannie ought to have married Merriman. Then
I should have had a home. Andrew's a bit peachy, but he's a rare good
sort."
He slushed in the food silently for a while; and Adrian, anxious to
avoid observation of the details of that process, watched the kittens
sporting round the flower-pots on the flags just outside.
He had searched for Bibby, spending time, money, even risking personal
safety, in that search. He had found Bibby. He had brought him here
to civilized quarters. He had clothed him from head to foot.--Adrian
felt a pang, for they were such nice clothes! He was rather fond of
that particular flannel suit. Really it cost him not a little to part
with it; and, he could almost fancy, hanging now upon Bibby's angular,
narrow-chested frame, that it bore the plaintive air of a thing
unkindly treated, consciously humiliated and disgraced. He apologized
to it half sentimentally, half humorously, in spirit.--And then because
the small things of life whip one's sense of the great ones into higher
activity, the trivial matter of the ill-used flannel suit brought home
to Adrian with disquieting clearness the difficulties of this whole
third _affaire_ Smyrthwaite in which he had, as it now occurred to him,
rather recklessly embarked.
As if the two first _affaires_, those of father and daughter, hadn't
been enough, he must needs go and add that of the degenerate son and
brother! And who, after all, would thank him? Wasn't he very much a
fool, then, for his pains? Psychologically and in the abstract, as an
example of lapse and degradation, Smyrthwaite presented an interesting
and instructive study. But in the concrete, as a guest, a companion,
as a young man, a relation, moreover, to be reclaimed from evil courses
and socially reinstated, the situation took on quite other color.
Looking across the table now as, his plate again empty, Bibby sank back
in his chair, slouched together, his hands in his trousers pockets, his
blue eyes turned upon the door, anxiously awaiting the advent of the
_garçon_ with the next course, Adrian was tempted to deplore his own
philanthropic impulse. All hope of pulling the boy up to any
permanently decent level of living seemed so unspeakably remote.
And, as though some silent transmission of thought had taken place
between them, Bibby's next speech went to confirm Adrian's fears.
"You say if I choose," he began; "but the question is, can I choose?
You see I'm so beastly out of the habit of all that.--Now I'm getting
full I seem to understand things, so I'd best talk at once."
"I ask nothing better than that you should talk," Adrian put in,
good-temperedly. For Heaven's sake, let him at least gain whatever
scientific knowledge of and from Bibby he could!
"Presently I shall turn sleepy," the other continued, with a curiously
unblushing directness of statement. "I always do when I'm first filled
up after going short. You see, I've never set eyes on you before, and
you come along and tell me some blooming fairy story about poor old
Nannie and her money. It may be true or it may be false, but anyhow I
don't seem to tumble to it. I fancy these clothes and I fancy this
feed, but I don't feel to go much beyond that.--Chicken?--Yes, rather.
Leave me the breast. Golly! I do like white meat! Two or three years
ago it would have set me on fire. I should have felt like bucking up
and making play with it--repentant prodigal, don't you know, and all
that kind of rot. But now I don't seem to be able to bother much. If
it was winter I suppose I should be more ready to fix on to it, because
I'm afraid of the cold. When you're empty half the time cold makes you
so beastly sick; and then I get chilblains and my skin chaps. But in
the summer I'd just as soon lie out.--Say, can I have the rest of the
fowl?"
"By all means," Adrian replied, handing him the dish.
"You see, it's like this," he went on, picking up the bones and ripping
off the meat with his teeth, "I've knocked about so long it's grown
second nature. I have to move on. I can't stick to one job or stop in
one place. I suppose that's left over from the old days, when my
father was always down on me with some infernal row or other. He hated
me like poison. It's a trick Englishmen have with their sons. They've
not got the knack of paternity like you French. I got into the habit
of feeling I'd best run because he was sure to be after me; and that's
a sort of feeling you can't be quit of. It keeps you always looking
over your shoulder to see what's coming next. People haven't been half
nasty to me on the whole, and I mightn't have done so badly if I could
have stuck. A little mincing devil of an artist, with a head like the
dome of St. Paul's--draws for the comic papers--you may know him--René
Dax--"
"Yes, I know him," Adrian said.
"He picked me up this winter when I was just pitching myself into the
river. It was cold, you see, and I'd been drinking. It's silly to
drink when you're empty. It gives you the hump. He took me home with
him, and drew funny pictures of me. They were pretty low down some of
them, but they made me laugh. He did me very well as to food and all
that, but two or three days of it was enough. I couldn't stand the
confinement. I pinched what I could and left."
Adrian raised his eyebrows and passed his hand down over his black
beard meditatively. A sweet youth, a really sweet and promising youth
this!--René had never mentioned the thieving incident to him, and it
explained much. It also showed René's conception of the duty entailed
by hospitality in an admirable light. Even active exercise of the
predatory instinct must be passed over in silence in the case of a
guest.
"What he paid me, with what I took, kept me going quite a good while,"
Smyrthwaite said, stretching and yawning audibly. "But I'm turning
thundering sleepy. I told you I should. I'll be shot if I can sit up
on end jawing any more like this," he added querulously. "You might
let a fellow have ten minutes' nap."
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, all the minutes of the unnumbered ages
spent by Bibby in slumber would, Adrian just then felt, supply a more
than grateful respite! He lit a cigarette and stepped out of the open
window on to the flags, thereby startling the tabby kittens, who, with
arched backs and frenzied spittings, vanished behind the flower-pots.
An arc lamp was fixed to the wall just over the kitchen entrance. One
of the white-clad _chefs_ brought out a chair, and sat there reading a
flimsy, little two-page evening paper. The heavy foliage of the
chestnuts hung motionless. In the distance a bugle sounded to
quarters. And Adrian thought of Gabrielle St. Leger, standing on the
grass-grown monticle looking across the gleaming sands of Ste. Marie
into the beckoning future. When next they met he would speak, she
would answer--and Adrian's eyes grew at once very gay and very gentle.
He pushed up the ends of his mustache and smoothed the tip of his
pointed beard. Then he remembered on a sudden that in the houroosh
over the finding of Bibby he had forgotten all about his letters.
So he took them out of his pocket and looked at them. It wasn't
necessary to read dear Anastasia's letter now, since he knew pretty
well what it must contain, having seen her so lately. But here was
Joanna's black-edged envelope. He shrugged his shoulders.--Oh! this
interminable _famille_ Smyrthwaite! Why, the dickens, had his
great-aunt committed the maddening error of marrying into it? With an
expressive grimace, followed by an expression of saintly resignation,
Adrian tore the envelope open. The letter was a long one, worse luck!
He read a few lines, and moved forward to where the arc lamp gave a
fuller light. "_Par exemple!_" he said, once or twice; also, very
softly, "_Sapristi!_" drawing in his breath. Then all lurking sense of
comedy deserted him. He straightened himself up, his face bleaching
beneath its brown coating of sunburn and his eyes growing hot. The old
dog waddled across from the offices and planted herself in front of
him, wagging a disgracefully illegitimate tail, looking up in his face,
sniffing and feebly grinning. He paid no heed to her feminine
cajoleries; paid no heed to the fact that his cigarette had gone out,
or to the antics of the again emergent kittens, or to the intermittent
sounds from the courtyard and city, or to the all-pervasive stable and
kitchen smells.
"Dear Cousin Adrian," Joanna's letter ran, "I find it difficult and
even painful to write to you, yet I can no longer refrain from writing.
In refraining I might be guilty of an injustice toward you. This
nerves me to write. I have suffered very greatly in the past week. I
know suffering may purify, but I am not purified by this suffering. On
the contrary, the tendencies of my nature which I least approve are
brought into prominence by it. I owe it to whatever is best in me; I
owe it to you--yes, above all to you--to take steps to check this
dreadful florescence of evil in myself.
"But before explaining the principal cause of my suffering, I must tell
you this. You may have heard from Margaret. In that case forgive my
repeating what you already know. She has engaged herself to Mr.
Challoner. The news came to me as a great shock. From every point of
view such a marriage is displeasing to me. I have regretted Mr.
Challoner's influence over Margaret. Already I cannot but see she is
deteriorating, and adopting a view of life dreadfully wanting in
elevation of feeling and thought. I know you will sympathize with me
in this, and that you will also deplore Margaret's choice. Indeed, the
thought of the effect that this news must have upon your mind has
caused me much sorrow. You may so reasonably object to Mr. Challoner
entering our family. I have never considered that he appreciated your
great superiority to himself both in position and in attainments, or
treated you with the deference due to you. Mr. Challoner is not a
gentleman, and I am humiliated by the prospect of his becoming nearly
connected with you by marriage. You are too just to visit this upon
me; but it must color your thought of me and of all our future relation.
"I speak of our future relation; and there the agony of suspense in
which I have lately lived overcomes me. I can hardly write. Believe
me, Adrian, I do not doubt you; I know you are incapable of an
inconsiderate, still more of a cruel, action. My trust in you is as
deep as my affection. It is myself whom I distrust. Knowing my
absence of talent and beauty, knowing my own faults of character from
the first, the wonder of your love for me has been almost overpowering,
almost incredible."
Adrian folded the thin sheets together and walked back and forth over
the flags, looking up at the fair night sky above the big-leaved
chestnuts.
"My God! Poor thing! poor Joanna! What can one do? Poor thing!" he
said.
Then he stood still again in the lamplight and re-opened the letter.
"And hence, when gossiping reports reach me, however contrary to my
knowledge of you and however unworthy of credence they may be, aware as
I am of my many shortcomings, they torture me. I cannot control my
mind. It places dreadful ideas before me. I realize my utter
dependence upon you for all that makes life desirable--I could almost
say for all that makes its continuance possible. Before you came to
us, at the time of papa's death this winter, I was unhappy, but
passively unhappy, as one born blind might be yearning for a sense
denied and unknown to him. Now, when fears regarding our relation to
each other assail me I am like one who, having enjoyed the rapture and
glory of sight, is struck blind, or who learns that sightlessness,
absolute and incurable, awaits him. A horror of great darkness is upon
me. Only you can relieve me of that horror; therefore I write to you.
"Col. Rentoul Haig tells Margaret he heard from acquaintances of yours
in Paris this summer that you have long been attached to a lady there
who would in every respect be a suitable wife for you. I know that
this cannot be true. Indeed, I know it. But I implore you to tell me
_yourself_ that it is not true. Set my mind at rest. The limits of my
endurance are reached. Misery is undermining my health, as well as all
the nobler elements of my character. I am a prey to insomnia, and to
obtain sleep I am obliged to have recourse to drugs. I grow afraid of
my own impulses. Dear Adrian, write to me. Forgive me. Comfort me.
Reassure me. Yours,
"JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE."
Adrian folded up the letter slowly, returned it to his pocket, and
stood thinking.
Thanks to his strong dramatic sense, at first the thing in itself, the
isolating intensity of Joanna's passion, filled his imagination. Every
word was sincere, dragged live and bleeding out of her heart. Baldness
of statement only made it the more telling. This was what she actually
believed regarding herself, what she really felt and meant.--"The
limits of my endurance are reached, I suffer too much, I grow afraid of
my own impulses." This was not a way of talking, rhetoric, a pose; it
was reasoned and accurate fact. And, if he understood Joanna aright,
her capacity of suffering was enormous. If the limit of endurance had
now been reached, about all which lay short of that limit it was
terrible to think! She had been tortured, and only in the extremity of
torture did she cry for help.
But here Adrian's dramatic sense gave before the common instinct of
humanity. The most callous of men might very well be moved by Joanna's
letter; and Adrian was among the least callous of men, especially where
a woman was concerned. Therefore, for him, practically, what followed?
This question struck him as quite the ugliest he had ever been called
upon to answer in the whole course of his life. To use poor Joanna's
favorite catch-word, a "dreadful" question--a very dreadful question,
as he saw it just now, taking the warmth out of the sunshine and the
color out of life. He recalled those extremely disagreeable ten
minutes, spent among the sweet-scented allspice bushes, in the garden
of the Tower House. He had argued out the question, or the equivalent
of the question, then--and, as he had believed, answered it fully and
finally, once and for all. But apparently he hadn't answered it
finally, since on its recurring now the consequences of either
alternative presented themselves to him with such merciless
distinctness.--The fact that his conscience was clear in respect of
Joanna, that she was the victim of self-invented delusion--in as far as
reciprocal affection on his part went--made little appreciable
difference to the situation. Indeed, to prove his own innocence was
merely to cap the climax of her humiliation with conviction of
presumptuous folly.
Indescribably perplexed and pained, shocked by the position in which he
found himself, Adrian passed absently back from the courtyard into the
salon. He had forgotten the third _affaire_ Smyrthwaite in the storm
and stress of the second. Here, the third _affaire_ presented itself
to him under a guise far from encouraging.
Bibby, the whiteness of the flannel suit bringing out his limp,
slatternly yet boyish figure into high relief as against the red
Utrecht velvet, lay crumpled sideways in the largest of the chairs.
His legs dangled over one arm of it, his head nodded forward, sunk
between his pointed shoulders, his chin rested on his breast. An
ill-conditioned, hopeless, irreclaimable fellow! Yet still the family
likeness to Joanna remained--to the degraded Joanna of the "funny
pictures" upon René Dax's studio wall--a Joanna wearing his, Adrian's,
clothes, moreover, whose mouth hung open as he breathed stertorously in
almost bestial after-dinner sleep.
Adrian looked once, picked up his hat, and fled.
For the ensuing three or four hours he walked aimlessly up and down the
streets of Rouen, along the pleasant tree-planted boulevards and the
quays beside the broad, silent-flowing Seine. He was aware of lights,
of blottings of black shadow, of venerable buildings rich in beautiful
detail, of the brightly lighted interiors of wine-shops and cafes open
to the pavement, of people loud-voiced and insistent, and of
vehicles--these in lessening number as it drew toward midnight--passing
by. But all his impressions were indefinite, his vision strangely
blurred. He walked, as a living man might walk through a phantom city
peopled by chaffering ghosts, for all that his surroundings meant to
him, his thoughts concentrated upon the overwhelming personal drama,
and personal question, raised by Joanna's letter.
Must he, taking his courage rather brutally in both hands, disillusion
her and risk the results of such disillusionment? Chivalry, pity,
humanity, the very honor of his manhood, protested as against some
dastardly and unpardonable act of physical cruelty. How he wished she
hadn't employed that illustration of blindness and sight! The thought
of her pale eyes fixed on him, doting, imploring, worshiping, hungry
with unsatisfied passion, starving for his love, pursued him, making
itself almost visible to his outward sense. How was it possible to
sear those poor eyes, extinguishing light in them forever by
application of the white-hot iron of truth? Before God, he could not
do it! It was too horrible.
And yet, the alternative--to lie to her, to lie to love, to be false to
himself, to be false to the hope and purpose of years, didn't his
manhood, every mental, and moral, and--very keenly--every physical
fiber of him protest equally against that? He saw Gabrielle as he had
seen her only this afternoon, in her fresh, grave beauty, the promise
of hidden delights, of enchanting discoveries in her mysterious smile.
Saw, as he so happily believed, a certain awakening of her heart and
sense toward the joys which man has with woman and woman with man. How
could he consent to cut himself from all this and take Joanna's meager
and unlovely body in his arms? It wasn't to be done. He turned faint
with loathing and unspeakable distress, staggered as though drunk,
nearly fell.
Bibby Smyrthwaite and Joseph Challoner for brothers, Margaret
Smyrthwaite for sister, Joanna for bride--this, all which went along
with it and which of necessity it implied, was more than he could face.
He would rather be dead, rather ten thousand times. He said so in
perfect honesty, knowing that were the final choice offered him now and
here, notwithstanding his immense value of life and joy in living he
would choose to die.
But in point of fact no such choice was offered him, since in his
opinion it is the act of a most contemptible poltroon to avoid the
issue by means of self-inflicted death. No, he must take the
consequences of his own actions, and poor Joanna must take the
consequences of her own actions--in obedience to the fundamental
natural and moral law which none escape. And among those consequences,
both of her and of his own past actions, was the cruel suffering which
he found himself constrained to inflict. He shrank, he sickened, for
to be cruel was hateful to him, a violation of his nature. In a sort
of despair he went back upon the whole question, arguing it through
once more, wearily, painfully, point by point.
Adrian's aimless wanderings had, now, conducted him to a small public
garden laid out with flower borders, shrubberies, and carefully tended
islands of turf, beneath the shadow of a chaste yet florid
fifteenth-century church. Clerestory windows glinted high above,
touched by the lamplight, and flying buttresses, thick with fantastic
carven flowers and little lurking demons, formed a lace-work of stone
against the sky. He sat down on one of the garden benches, laying his
hat beside him on the seat. He doubled himself together, his elbows
upon his knees, pressing his hands against either side of his head.
He was very tired. He was also desperately sad. Never before had he
felt the chill breath of a trouble from which there seemed no issue
save by the creation of further, deeper trouble. Never before had
he--so it now appeared to him--gauged the possibilities of tragedy in
human life. And the present situation had grown out of such wholly
accidental happenings--well-meant kindnesses and courtesies, an
overstrained delicacy in admitting the reality of poor Joanna's
infatuation and making her understand that his affections were engaged
elsewhere. In his fear of assuming too much and appearing fatuous, he
had let things drift. He had been guilty of saying that fatal word
"too little" against which dear Anastasia Beauchamp to-day fulminated.
There he was to blame. There was his real error, his real mistake. It
gnawed mercilessly at his conscience and his sensibility. It would
continue so to gnaw, whatever the upshot of this disastrous business,
as long as he lived. In the restrained and conventional intercourse of
modern, civilized life, the difficulty of avoiding that fatal word "too
little" is so constant and so great. His mind, spent with thought and
emotion, dwelt with languid persistence upon this point. In this
particular he had shirked his duty both to Joanna and to himself, with
the terrible result that he was doomed to inflict a cruel injury upon
her or to wreck his own life.
And at that moment, dully, without any quickening of interest, amiable
or the reverse, he perceived that a young woman sat at the farther end
of the bench. When he came to think of it, he believed she had
followed him through the streets for some little time. Now she coughed
slightly and moved rather nearer to him, fidgeted, pushing about the
loose, shingly gravel, which made small rattling noises, with her foot.
Adrian still sat doubled together pressing his hands against either
side of his head. Presently she began to speak, making overtures to
him, praising his handsome looks, his youth his dress, his bearing, his
walk, flattering and wheedling him after the manner of her sorry kind.
While expressing admiration and offering endearing phrases, her voice
remained toneless and monotonous. And this peculiarity rather than
what she said aroused Adrian's attention. He looked round and received
a definite impression, notwithstanding the dimness of the light. Her
reddish hair was turned loosely back from her forehead. Her face was
gaunt and worn under its layer of fard. Her mouth was large, and the
painted lips, though coarse, were sensitive--her soul had not yet been
killed by her infamous trade. Her eyes were pale, desperate with shame
and with entreaty. And these were the eyes which, if he would save all
which made life noble and dear to him, Adrian must strike blind!
During some few seconds he looked straight at her. Then, feeling among
the loose coins in his pocket, he found a gold twenty-franc piece and
put it into her hand.
"It is no use," he said gravely and very sadly--speaking whether to her
or to Joanna Smyrthwaite he could not tell. "I do not want you. My
poor woman, I do not want you. It is not possible that I ever should
want you. I am bitterly grieved for you, but you waste your time."
And he rose and moved away, having suddenly regained full possession of
himself. He had ceased to doubt in respect of Joanna. That passing of
money was to him symbolic, setting him free. He understood that to
marry Joanna would be a crime against God-given instinct, against
God-given love, against the God-given beauty of all wholesome and
natural things. The sour, pedantic, man-imagined deity of some
Protestant sect might demand such hideous, almost blasphemous sacrifice
from its votaries; but never that supreme artist, Almighty God the
Creator, maker of man's flesh as well as of his spirit, _le bon Dieu_
of the divinely reasonable and divinely human Catholic Church. To
marry Joanna would, in the end, constitute a blacker cruelty than to
tell her the whole truth. For he couldn't live up to that lie and keep
it going. He would hate her, and sooner or later show that he hated
her; he would inevitably be unfaithful to her and leave her, thereby
ruining her life as well as his own.
He went back to the hotel. The little red Utrecht-velvet upholstered
_salon_ still smelled of cooking, patchouli, and cigarettes, plus the
dregs of a tumbler of brandy and soda and a something human and
insufficiently washed. Smyrthwaite's door was shut, and no sound
proceeded from behind it, for which Adrian returned thanks and betook
himself to bed. He was dog-tired. He slept till broad day. On making
a morning reconnaissance he found Smyrthwaite's door still locked, nor
did knocking elicit any response. Somewhat anxious, he went out into
the courtyard. The window was ajar, the room vacant, the bed
undisturbed. Then he remembered to have seen a tall, slight, loosely
made figure, wearing whitish garments, flitting hastily away down a dim
side-street as he turned into the _rue Jeanne d'Arc_ on his way home.
Later Adrian discovered that a pair of diamond and enamel sleeve-links,
a set of pearl studs, some loose gold and a hundred-franc note were
missing from his suit-case, of which the fastening had been forced.
True to his predatory and roving instincts, Bibby had "pinched" what he
could and left.