than twice between them since they had left the _Friedrich Barbarossa_.
"Why, no," she answered.
"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."
"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."
Stainton reflected.
"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed
rather to neglect us in Paris."
"_My_ Austrian? Why mine?"
"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"
"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."
He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to
quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all
Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.
Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the
Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then
across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by
way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale
spring sunshine and where, in roles of gallants to the fashionable
ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of
light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel
said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she
scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the
copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediaeval
roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene
Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the
Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb
of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."
Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton
was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf.
So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure
these things--and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.
Muriel was again in tears.
"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."
"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear.
Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."
"But I'm tired of looking and waiting--we've been doing that ever since
we went away. Let's go back to Paris."
Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she
had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them
both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions--and now
she wanted to go back to Paris!
"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.
"I know; but now it will be spring there--real spring--and everyone says
that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."
"Yet the climate----"
"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."
"Do you think"--Stainton put his hand upon hers--"do you think that you
can rest there: really rest?"
"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak
a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful.
I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German,
either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been
hurrying--hurrying--hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"
"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked
sixty years old.
"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that
pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know _what's_ the matter with me;
but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back
home."
This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more
quartered at the Chatham.
XV
"NOT AT HOME"
"A gentleman to see madame."
The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the
barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four
hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up"
at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris,
there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's
nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of
Captain von Klausen.
"I am not at home," said Muriel.
"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added:
"This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that
madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and
it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed
disappointed."
"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.
This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself
out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat
wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the
sitting-room again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen
downstairs and had brought him along.
In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and
his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it.
Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an
air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed
utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had
Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have
protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young
fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a
schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented
Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.
Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen
in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was
out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a
man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she
was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.
Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to
observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that
politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and
von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, at least appeared
to see no more. He remained to tea.
"Why on earth did you bring _him_ here?" asked Muriel as soon as the
door had closed on the Austrian.
"Why, did you mind?"
"I told you that I didn't like him."
"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."
"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have
remembered that I said I didn't like him."
"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I
brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was
so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the
lobby."
"How did he know that we were here?"
"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."
"But we have been and gone and returned since then."
"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did:
in the hotel news of the _Daily Mail_."
"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told
the servant when his card was sent up."
"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did
think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew
you would be lonely up here without me."
Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.
"You know I don't like him," she repeated.
"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good
fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you
have for your prejudice?"
"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she
hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's
generally good ground for it."
"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a
mere boy."
"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than
I am."
"Are you so very aged, my dear?"
"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."
Stainton kissed her.
"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten
that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any
more about von Klausen."
Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the
next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that
his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He took them to
the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to
dine.
It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging
his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he
and Muriel that evening left the hotel.
"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all.
They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."
He turned to Muriel.
"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel,
and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"
Muriel smiled.
"I'll try," she said.
"You won't be bored?"
"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."
"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs.
Stainton."
"Your services?" asked Muriel.
"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think
of you as wholly deserted--is it not, sir?"
The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick
glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain;
Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to read his letter
before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.
"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"
"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."
"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.
"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his
wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."
"An imposition--Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure
you, sir."
"But your duties at the Embassy?"
"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it
fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The
spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather.
If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the
Bois----"
"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."
Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.
He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in
their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.
"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.
"For what?"
"For getting you into that confounded engagement with young von
Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into
it."
"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."
"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and
so I hope you'll pardon----"
"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn
out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."
XVI
IN THE BOIS
That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely
begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and
so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Foret de Rouvray and the
Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets
and the Champs Elysees, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic
commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman
seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and
turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence
fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the
horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.
"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.
Muriel hesitated.
"Why?" she enquired.
"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the
most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality
of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you
have been good enough to visit."
His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to
contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inferieur, with its shaded
banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in
imitation of a Swiss _chalet_. She was resolved to prefer this to his
Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the
Austrian Tyrol as his own.
"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.
"Better? But--why?"
"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and
inviting."
"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen,
smiling.
He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself
fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain
turned to the driver.
"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.
There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the
undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.
"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."
Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."
"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after
your return from your visit to my country."
"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said
this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her
companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have
not been thinking much about you one way or the other."
"I am sorry," said von Klausen.
"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."
"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."
"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.
"Yes."
She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at
his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.
"How dared you?" she gasped.
"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a
reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."
"Well, you shan't know."
"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to
plead in his own defence?"
"You are not accused--and you aren't judged."
"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how
is that possible?"
"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"
"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none.
Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To
accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in
another of them."
Muriel bit her red under-lip.
"Let us go back," she said.
"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."
They walked a few steps forward.
"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.
"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are
presumptuous."
"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."
"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."
"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."
"What nonsense!"
"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret,
madame."
Muriel's eyes flashed.
"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident
that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."
Von Klausen bowed.
"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to
the reference."
"I did not."
"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close
acquaintanceship."
"I required nothing--and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was
the merest trifle."
Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.
"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to
your husband."
She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky
cheeks were aflame.
"How low of you!" she cried.
But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.
"To mention the truth?" he murmured.
"To bring up such a trifle--to trade on such a confidence--to make of an
impulsive action and of the consequences of that action--you know--I
told you at the time, and you must know--that I didn't mention the
circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been
to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you
would not want your terror known."
"Ah--so you did think of me, then?"
"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."
They were now half-way along the Lac Inferieur. Under the arching trees
in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring
morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the
Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling
companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his
blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.
"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched
my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always--think of me deeply. I
cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must
listen. I tell you now, once and forever--I tell you----"
Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise
understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there
was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly
unloosed--the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite
of all the hampering harness of convention--and she was undeniably
curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain
sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory
knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this
soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage
and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been
goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion
against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent
opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something
else--something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the
young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of
ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of
elaborately conceived convention.
Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the
last, it will have its word.
"Stop!" said Muriel.
Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.
"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do
not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only
a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and
slowly; now----"
Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically
Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the
Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence
for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.
Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was
evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her
soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful
consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the
moment before.
She raised a trembling hand.
"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as
ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe
he would kill you."
Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but
the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands
fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.
"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some
phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no
man that lives."
"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered:
"afraid and ashamed."
"Not afraid."
"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the
splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way.
Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."
It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result.
Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so
deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley
in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he
did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and
the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was
somehow inexplicably true.
Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him.
His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he
was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.
Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could
not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was
doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the
result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty
had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak
began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth
which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard
his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.
"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself
murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry--very sorry. We will never
speak of it again--not to ourselves--and not to anybody else."
"But we shall be friends?" he asked.
"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was
before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his
manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had
previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will
never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a
herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.
When one is young such promises are lightly made.
"Never," he vowed.
"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this
affair to me?"
"Never again, dear lady."
"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in--in that
way."
He pressed her hand ever so slightly.
"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."
"But the thoughts are wrong."
"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I
cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only
master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The
good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he
has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions.
I shall remember always his words."
She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and
their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them
to fall, upon trivial things.
"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the
subject of her fevered trip with Jim.
"We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to
Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris."
"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"
"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we
crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had
driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came
right back here."
"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it.
It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world
goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit
at a table before one of the cafes, of an evening in summer or of a
Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebiere or the rue
Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime--you and
your husband."
"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and
I."
"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and
more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons
seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."
She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.