had myself looked over carefully by one of the most eminent physicians
in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition,
that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact----"
Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.
"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your _biceps
flexor_. How many years are you alive?"
"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand----"
"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"
"On the contrary."
"And your age?"
Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.
"Fifty," he belligerently declared.
Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.
"_Vous voila!_"
"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand----"
"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is
it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl
of eighteen----"
"But I have lived a careful life!"
"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are
moderate drinkers."
"I drink no more than you."
"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."
"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.
"La-la-la!"
"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely
abstemious."
It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant
effort to speak as if he did not.
"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."
Stainton rose.
"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.
Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled
the more knowingly.
"Yet you are here," said he.
Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to
leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he
showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.
"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as
restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl----"
"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come
to consult me."
"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression--all my life
of--of----"
Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk and, with a touch of
genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.
"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he
comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!'
The old roue, he comes to me and says--the same thing. We all some day
curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of
merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on
one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it
with regard to no man."
"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."
"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"
"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.
The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.
"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but
even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make
him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt,
I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her
young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself
with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts--you try to live
downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not
possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is
not cruel. It is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the
beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps
time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember
your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now--Poof!
It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to
quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her
respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us.
Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this
prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more.
You must yourself rest."
He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and
handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same
strain, as before.
"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been
easier."
"In a little while?"
"There will be a child."
Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.
"What?" he said. "And you--you----Thousand thunders, these Americans
here!"
At this Stainton himself grew angry.
"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."
"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is
far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the
great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '_Avis Important_'
he there has posted on the door."
It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain
and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had
been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried
by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame
Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had
been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more
exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of
maturity.
"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little
week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for
we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it
not, _hein_? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly.
Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know
not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men,
they I think no more wise."
Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit
street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He
walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. He did
this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of
Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.
His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that
she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.
"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."
She did not open her eyes.
"Yes," she said.
"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter
of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good
lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."
"Yes."
"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I
don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely
in Lyons, and I shall be busy--very busy. Now, I know you don't like
Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man
in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she
will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."
Muriel was silent.
"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare
de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."
"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.
"Yes, dear."
"And he----"
"He said the--the change was what I needed."
He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and
bent over her.
"Good-bye," he said.
She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust
himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask
any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he
knew was that she kissed him.
Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and
shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her
stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.
In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet
nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class,
who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.
She hailed a passing cab.
"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.
The driver nodded.
Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.
Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chatham and left it with a
suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at the _bureau_
that her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for
five days.
"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with
monsieur."
XIV
RUNAWAYS
Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better
spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly
his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that
Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to
be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from
congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he
announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before
received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her
normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below
the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.
Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the
day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to
meet him, and he embraced her warmly.
"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to
have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's
good to be with you again!"
"What wire?" asked Muriel.
"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come
here."
"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."
"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to
have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back
here."
"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me
before those strangers."
"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our
two selves--just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now,"
he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his
knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my
reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is
gone--going, going, gone--and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri
Duperre Boussingault et Cie., for----I told you the figure, didn't
I--_our_ figure? Isn't it splendid?"
"I am glad," said Muriel.
"You don't really object?" he asked.
"Why should I? Of course I am glad."
"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell
it."
"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember--but you showed me how foolish that was."
He laughed happily.
"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could only have heard me
converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel--and mostly
through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and
you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."
"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."
"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little
brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"
"Yes, Jim."
"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On
Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and
there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on
a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked
that?"
"I should----" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.
"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were
the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind?
Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you
wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you
didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the
Boussingaults."
Muriel sat upon his knee.
"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.
"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.
"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.
"But, dearest, how--What?--Where were you? You mean to say that you
stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"
She nodded.
Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and
sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.
"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did
you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"
Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.
"I don't know," she said. "I--Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"
"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then
you never got my letters?"
She shook her head.
"Muriel! And you pretended--Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She
said she would call the afternoon that I left."
"I suppose she did."
"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see
her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"
"I didn't see her. I left word at the _bureau_ that I was out. I left
word that I had gone to Lyons with you."
"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking
right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would
know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that
you weren't with me."
She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.
Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.
"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and
were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a
fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand,
dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel----"
"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.
"I was. Yes, I was."
"You are the best man in the world, only--only----"
"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt,
dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"
"I had to."
"Out of consideration for me."
"No."
"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and
so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for
anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave,
lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in
your condition!"
She drew from him.
"Jim----" she said.
"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.
"But, Jim----"
"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults.
Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell
him."
"Don't tell him, Jim."
"We'll see; we'll see."
"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him
again."
"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."
"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am--I dare say I am
as bad----"
"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not.
Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in
the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or
interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and
soon"--he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child--"in
a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."
"Don't!" said Muriel.
But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.
"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am
going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear
of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly
always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make
a tour of the shops."
She lifted her face with a troubled smile.
"I have everything I want," she said.
"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared
to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."
"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."
"All?" smiled her husband.
"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already
that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them.
You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."
"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad
you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get
some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those--some little
things--some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival
of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know
I am."
Muriel's voice faltered.
"So soon----" she said.
"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city
where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come
along."
She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after
shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes.
She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she
endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed
her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which
he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as
he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop
clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as
this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the
approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last
broke down and fainted in their _taxi-metre_.
The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.
"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept
long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"
"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."
"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."
They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains
and stood looking out upon a grey day.
"I don't want to think it over," she said.
"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."
"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I
want to go to-day."
"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed
it.
"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been
like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."
He softened.
"Aren't you well?"
"No."
"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.
"Don't call me that," she said.
"Why not, Muriel?"
"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim----" She put her
hand in his--"I'm horrid, I know----"
"You're never that!"
"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired
of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can
pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."
Again Muriel took refuge at the window.
"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."
"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"
"I don't think so."
"It'll be cold, dear."
"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm
weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."
She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make
arrangements. In an hour he was back.
"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of
mail sent on as far as Neuchatel. We can get a train in forty-five
minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a
ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English--and here are the tickets.
Can you be ready?"
She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly
distracting journey.
The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their
train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard,
then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over
fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white
strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without
deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel
and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old
red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel
would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church
would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the
tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier
and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward
and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds
about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchatel with the white Sentis to
the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.
But a day at Neuchatel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted
to move on. She made enquiries.
"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor
was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.
"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly
protested.
"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done
almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no
business and nothing else to do."
So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne,
through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg,
past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of
Koenigsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary
had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by
John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden
and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to
Zurich.
They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of
their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on
their way to the Gross-Muenster, Muriel said:
"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here.
Let's go on to-morrow."
It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.
"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back
to the hotel this minute and lie down."
She would not hear of that.
"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe
Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you
know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"
Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon
the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her
unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than
he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.
"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down to sleep, eight hours
later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few
real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."
Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to
loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.
"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."
"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"
"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"
"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."
"We've seen it, haven't we?"
"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to
Innsbruck."
Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the
door.
"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to
know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed
and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.
"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am
about done up."
Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan
to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that
Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded
Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins of Graephang and, on the
great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.
Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of
their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring
moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer,
saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had
the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last
there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a
sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.
"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte
and Twain and Do-_nel_li."
"Our what?" asked Jim.
"Please?"
"I didn't catch that last name."
"Donelli--Ignatius Donelli."
"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly--yes."
"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know
of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"
The Austrian left the train just before they reached the
six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight
after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:
"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"