Now that Gordon was gone, at any rate, gone for good, and not to return,
he felt a sudden and singular sense of freedom. It was a feeling of
unbounded expansion, quite out of proportion, as he said to himself, to
any assignable cause. Everything suddenly appeared to have become very
optional; but he was quite at a loss what to do with his liberty. It
seemed a harmless use to make of it, in the afternoon, to go and pay
another visit to the ladies who lived at the confectioner’s. Here,
however, he met a reception which introduced a fresh element of
perplexity into the situation that Gordon had left behind him. The door
was opened to him by Mrs. Vivian’s maid-servant, a sturdy daughter
of the Schwartzwald, who informed him that the ladies--with much
regret--were unable to receive any one.
“They are very busy--and they are ill,” said the young woman, by way of
explanation.
Bernard was disappointed, and he felt like arguing the case.
“Surely,” he said, “they are not both ill and busy! When you make
excuses, you should make them agree with each other.”
The Teutonic soubrette fixed her round blue eyes a minute upon the patch
of blue sky revealed to her by her open door.
“I say what I can, lieber Herr. It ‘s not my fault if I ‘m not so clever
as a French mamsell. One of the ladies is busy, the other is ill. There
you have it.”
“Not quite,” said Bernard. “You must remember that there are three of
them.”
“Oh, the little one--the little one weeps.”
“Miss Evers weeps!” exclaimed Bernard, to whom the vision of this young
lady in tears had never presented itself.
“That happens to young ladies when they are unhappy,” said the girl; and
with an artless yet significant smile she carried a big red hand to the
left side of a broad bosom.
“I am sorry she is unhappy; but which of the other ladies is ill?”
“The mother is very busy.”
“And the daughter is ill?”
The young woman looked at him an instant, smiling again, and the light
in her little blue eyes indicated confusion, but not perversity.
“No, the mamma is ill,” she exclaimed, “and the daughter is very busy.
They are preparing to leave Baden.”
“To leave Baden? When do they go?”
“I don’t quite know, lieber Herr; but very soon.”
With this information Bernard turned away. He was rather surprised, but
he reflected that Mrs. Vivian had not proposed to spend her life on the
banks of the Oos, and that people were leaving Baden every day in the
year. In the evening, at the Kursaal, he met Captain Lovelock, who was
wandering about with an air of explosive sadness.
“Damn it, they ‘re going--yes, they ‘re going,” said the Captain, after
the two young men had exchanged a few allusions to current events.
“Fancy their leaving us in that heartless manner! It ‘s not the time to
run away--it ‘s the time to keep your rooms, if you ‘re so lucky as to
have any. The races begin next week and there ‘ll be a tremendous crowd.
All the grand-ducal people are coming. Miss Evers wanted awfully to see
the Grand Duke, and I promised her an introduction. I can’t make out
what Mrs. Vivian is up to. I bet you a ten-pound note she ‘s giving
chase. Our friend Wright has come back and gone off again, and Mrs.
Vivian means to strike camp and follow. She ‘ll pot him yet; you see if
she does n’t!”
“She is running away from you, dangerous man!” said Bernard.
“Do you mean on account of Miss Evers? Well, I admire Miss Evers--I
don’t mind admitting that; but I ain’t dangerous,” said Captain
Lovelock, with a lustreless eye. “How can a fellow be dangerous when he
has n’t ten shillings in his pocket? Desperation, do you call it? But
Miss Evers has n’t money, so far as I have heard. I don’t ask you,”
Lovelock continued--“I don’t care a damn whether she has or not. She ‘s
a devilish charming girl, and I don’t mind telling you I ‘m hit. I stand
no chance--I know I stand no chance. Mrs. Vivian ‘s down on me, and, by
Jove, Mrs. Vivian ‘s right. I ‘m not the husband to pick out for a young
woman of expensive habits and no expectations. Gordon Wright’s the sort
of young man that ‘s wanted, and, hang me, if Mrs. Vivian did n’t want
him so much for her own daughter, I believe she ‘d try and bag him for
the little one. Gad, I believe that to keep me off she would like to
cut him in two and give half to each of them! I ‘m afraid of that little
woman. She has got a little voice like a screw-driver. But for all that,
if I could get away from this cursed place, I would keep the girl in
sight--hang me if I would n’t! I ‘d cut the races--dash me if I would
n’t! But I ‘m in pawn, if you know what that means. I owe a beastly lot
of money at the inn, and that impudent little beggar of a landlord won’t
let me out of his sight. The luck ‘s dead against me at those filthy
tables; I have n’t won a farthing in three weeks. I wrote to my brother
the other day, and this morning I got an answer from him--a cursed,
canting letter of good advice, remarking that he had already paid my
debts seven times. It does n’t happen to be seven; it ‘s only six, or
six and a half! Does he expect me to spend the rest of my life at the
Hotel de Hollande? Perhaps he would like me to engage as a waiter there
and pay it off by serving at the table d’hote. It would be convenient
for him the next time he comes abroad with his seven daughters and two
governesses. I hate the smell of their beastly table d’hote! You ‘re
sorry I ‘m hard up? I ‘m sure I ‘m much obliged to you. Can you be of
any service? My dear fellow, if you are bent on throwing your money
about the place I ‘m not the man to stop you.” Bernard’s winnings of the
previous night were burning a hole, as the phrase is, in his pocket. Ten
thousand francs had never before seemed to him so heavy a load to carry,
and to lighten the weight of his good luck by lending fifty pounds to
a less fortunate fellow-player was an operation that not only gratified
his good-nature but strongly commended itself to his conscience.
His conscience, however, made its conditions. “My dear Longueville,”
Lovelock went on, “I have always gone in for family feeling, early
associations, and all that sort of thing. That ‘s what made me confide
my difficulties to Dovedale. But, upon my honor, you remind me of the
good Samaritan, or that sort of person; you are fonder of me than my own
brother! I ‘ll take fifty pounds with pleasure, thank you, and you
shall have them again--at the earliest opportunity. My earliest
convenience--will that do? Damn it, it is a convenience, is n’t it? You
make your conditions. My dear fellow, I accept them in advance. That
I ‘m not to follow up Miss Evers--is that what you mean? Have you been
commissioned by the family to buy me off? It ‘s devilish cruel to take
advantage of my poverty! Though I ‘m poor, I ‘m honest. But I am honest,
my dear Longueville; that ‘s the point. I ‘ll give you my word, and I
‘ll keep it. I won’t go near that girl again--I won’t think of her till
I ‘ve got rid of your fifty pounds. It ‘s a dreadful encouragement to
extravagance, but that ‘s your lookout. I ‘ll stop for their beastly
races and the young lady shall be sacred.”
Longueville called the next morning at Mrs. Vivian’s, and learned that
the three ladies had left Baden by the early train, a couple of hours
before. This fact produced in his mind a variety of emotions--surprise,
annoyance, embarrassment. In spite of his effort to think it natural
they should go, he found something precipitate and inexplicable in the
manner of their going, and he declared to himself that one of the party,
at least, had been unkind and ungracious in not giving him a chance
to say good-bye. He took refuge by anticipation, as it were, in this
reflection, whenever, for the next three or four days, he foresaw
himself stopping short, as he had done before, and asking himself
whether he had done an injury to Angela Vivian. This was an idle and
unpractical question, inasmuch as the answer was not forthcoming;
whereas it was quite simple and conclusive to say, without the note
of interrogation, that she was, in spite of many attractive points,
an abrupt and capricious young woman. During the three or four days in
question, Bernard lingered on at Baden, uncertain what to do or where
to go, feeling as if he had received a sudden check--a sort of spiritual
snub--which arrested the accumulation of motive. Lovelock, also, whom
Bernard saw every day, appeared to think that destiny had given him
a slap in the face, for he had not enjoyed the satisfaction of a last
interview with Miss Evers.
“I thought she might have written me a note,” said the Captain; “but it
appears she does n’t write. Some girls don’t write, you know.”
Bernard remarked that it was possible Lovelock would still have news of
Miss Blanche; and before he left Baden he learned that she had addressed
her forsaken swain a charming little note from Lausanne, where the three
ladies had paused in their flight from Baden, and where Mrs. Vivian had
decreed that for the present they should remain.
“I ‘m devilish glad she writes,” said Captain Lovelock; “some girls do
write, you know.”
Blanche found Lausanne most horrid after Baden, for whose delights she
languished. The delights of Baden, however, were not obvious just now to
her correspondent, who had taken Bernard’s fifty pounds into the Kursaal
and left them there. Bernard, on learning his misfortune, lent him
another fifty, with which he performed a second series of unsuccessful
experiments; and our hero was not at his ease until he had passed over
to his luckless friend the whole amount of his own winnings, every penny
of which found its way through Captain Lovelock’s fingers back into the
bank. When this operation was completed, Bernard left Baden, the Captain
gloomily accompanying him to the station.
I have said that there had come over Bernard a singular sense of
freedom. One of the uses he made of his freedom was to undertake a long
journey. He went to the East and remained absent from Europe for upward
of two years--a period of his life of which it is not proposed to
offer a complete history. The East is a wonderful region, and Bernard,
investigating the mysteries of Asia, saw a great many curious and
beautiful things. He had moments of keen enjoyment; he laid up a great
store of impressions and even a considerable sum of knowledge. But,
nevertheless, he was not destined to look back upon this episode with
any particular complacency. It was less delightful than it was supposed
to be; it was less successful than it might have been. By what unnatural
element the cup of pleasure was adulterated, he would have been very
much at a loss to say; but it was an incontestable fact that at times he
sipped it as a medicine, rather than quaffed it as a nectar. When people
congratulated him on his opportunity of seeing the world, and said they
envied him the privilege of seeing it so well, he felt even more than
the usual degree of irritation produced by an insinuation that fortune
thinks so poorly of us as to give us easy terms. Misplaced sympathy is
the least available of superfluities, and Bernard at this time found
himself thinking that there was a good deal of impertinence in the
world. He would, however, readily have confessed that, in so far as he
failed to enjoy his Oriental wanderings, the fault was his own; though
he would have made mentally the gratifying reflection that never was
a fault less deliberate. If, during the period of which I speak, his
natural gayety had sunk to a minor key, a partial explanation may
be found in the fact that he was deprived of the society of his late
companion. It was an odd circumstance that the two young men had not met
since Gordon’s abrupt departure from Baden. Gordon went to Berlin, and
shortly afterward to America, so that they were on opposite sides of the
globe. Before he returned to his own country, Bernard made by letter two
or three offers to join him in Europe, anywhere that was agreeable to
him. Gordon answered that his movements were very uncertain, and that he
should be sorry to trouble Bernard to follow him about. He had put him
to this inconvenience in making him travel from Venice to Baden, and
one such favor at a time was enough to ask, even of the most obliging of
men. Bernard was, of course, afraid that what he had told Gordon about
Angela Vivian was really the cause of a state of things which, as
between two such good friends, wore a perceptible resemblance to
alienation. Gordon had given her up; but he bore Bernard a grudge for
speaking ill of her, and so long as this disagreeable impression should
last, he preferred not to see him. Bernard was frank enough to charge
the poor fellow with a lingering rancor, of which he made, indeed, no
great crime. But Gordon denied the allegation, and assured him that,
to his own perception, there was no decline in their intimacy. He only
requested, as a favor and as a tribute to “just susceptibilities,”
that Bernard would allude no more either to Miss Vivian or to what had
happened at Baden. This request was easy to comply with, and Bernard, in
writing, strictly conformed to it; but it seemed to him that the act of
doing so was in itself a cooling-off. What would be a better proof of
what is called a “tension” than an agreement to avoid a natural topic?
Bernard moralized a little over Gordon’s “just susceptibilities,” and
felt that the existence of a perverse resentment in so honest a nature
was a fact gained to his acquaintance with psychological science. It
cannot be said, however, that he suffered this fact to occupy at all
times the foreground of his consciousness. Bernard was like some great
painters; his foregrounds were very happily arranged. He heard nothing
of Mrs. Vivian and her daughter, beyond a rumor that they had gone to
Italy; and he learned, on apparently good authority, that Blanche Evers
had returned to New York with her mother. He wondered whether Captain
Lovelock was still in pawn at the Hotel de Hollande. If he did not allow
himself to wonder too curiously whether he had done a harm to Gordon,
it may be affirmed that he was haunted by the recurrence of that other
question, of which mention has already been made. Had he done a harm to
Angela Vivian, and did she know that he had done it? This inquiry by no
means made him miserable, and it was far from awaiting him regularly
on his pillow. But it visited him at intervals, and sometimes in the
strangest places--suddenly, abruptly, in the stillness of an Indian
temple, or amid the shrillness of an Oriental crowd. He became familiar
with it at last; he called it his Jack-in-the-box. Some invisible touch
of circumstance would press the spring, and the little image would
pop up, staring him in the face and grinning an interrogation. Bernard
always clapped down the lid, for he regarded this phenomenon as
strikingly inane. But if it was more frequent than any pang of
conscience connected with the remembrance of Gordon himself, this last
sentiment was certainly lively enough to make it a great relief to hear
at last a rumor that the excellent fellow was about to be married. The
rumor reached him at Athens; it was vague and indirect, and it omitted
the name of his betrothed. But Bernard made the most of it, and took
comfort in the thought that his friend had recovered his spirits and his
appetite for matrimony.