small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it
to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at
once.
They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their
rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of
fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of
business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for
the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for
Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because
she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to
banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to
which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own
reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It
annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her
shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put
roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders
and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for
excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she
was heartily sorry for Jim.
It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to
press once more the question of their return to New York. They were
sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their
villa, and were looking over the blue bay.
"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"
His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have
thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to
see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.
"Perhaps," she granted.
On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out
the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill
on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern
monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open
elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed
the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which
stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.
The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a
quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of
storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of
the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other
ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at
the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers
answered or to the making of other prayers.
"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping
before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused,
"that these people wanted."
Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.
"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."
His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.
"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."
"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in
here."
"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze
out there."
"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."
Muriel's lips tightened.
"Very well," she said.
She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled
to the side overlooking the bay.
Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a
panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping
in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed
houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from
the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cite Chabas
and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point,
where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in
terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From
dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas
on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue;
the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the
waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of
land where towers the Chateau d'If.
She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The
breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen
below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a
landscape of which she had only heard:
"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away;
the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the
distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and
was saved."
"Muriel!"
It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and
had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner
serious.
"How did you come here?"
The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her
weapons of defence.
"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning
after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or
not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and
they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your
hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on
the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come
here."
His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her
poise.
"How dared you come?" she asked.
"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.
"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."
"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."
"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"
"You must." He came nearer to her.
"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she
demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."
"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that
you have told him nothing."
She eyed him menacingly.
"Are you so sure of that?"
"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told
him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."
"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider
me?--But of course you don't!"
"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have
come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear
that I should cause you annoyance----"
"You annoy me now."
"But if you have not told him----Well, what I have to say is my excuse.
If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste
in saying it."
He moved still nearer.
"I have told him," she said.
"No."
"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes,
her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.
"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said
von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to
tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied.
I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I
have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was
in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I
know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence
from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do
not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that
word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now--now, _ach_, I know I
love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred
as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in
your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my
punishment--for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and
I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still
be hopeless."
She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it
rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the
cold.
"Hopeless?" she repeated.
"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes
of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."
She remembered her teaching in the convent school.
"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.
"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact,
you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."
She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning
the corner of the promenade.
"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything.
Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone
with you before--before----"
"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our
lives."
The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.
"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see
you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive
glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.
Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to
the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience
with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so
the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The
Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself
altogether at the best.
"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been
homesick for a long time without knowing."
"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little
dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"
"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have
one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we
are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that
both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."
"Then you are returning soon?"
"Three weeks from to-day."
Muriel looked at Jim.
"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.
"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed,
didn't we, dear?"
She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She
could only nod.
"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not
mention it to me when we met to-day."
"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled
pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."
She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a
departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in
three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious
manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there
were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her
were not the sense of her deception of him.
"I forgot," she said.
"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing,
my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the
Captain for a few minutes with his _dubonais_. We have an outside
stateroom on the upper deck of the _Prinzess Wilhelmina_, and we sail
from Genoa."
He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the
southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced
another surprise.
"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains
to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here
until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."
This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.
"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."
"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's
not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you
had to to run right off to dress, you know."
"Why must you go?"
"Those French purchasers again."
"I thought you were through with them."
"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they
have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I
wrote to them and fixed a price on that."
"You don't mean that you tricked them?"
"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of
doing business."
"You didn't say you had written them."
"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to
von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But
perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening
and see that she is not too much depressed."
Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately
shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he
was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone
there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and
she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house.
Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and
the Austrian left without naming his hotel.
When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing,
although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company.
She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:
"Why are you going away to-morrow?"
Jim was surprised.
"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"
"Then I think you might have told me when _he_ wasn't here."
"My dear, you gave me no chance."
"And you booked passage back, Jim?"
"Passage home, yes."
Muriel's mouth drooped.
"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.
He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked
searchingly into hers.
"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"
"I know, Jim, but I never promised----"
"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."
He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how
to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that,
within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in
France or America.
"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want
to leave early. We had better go to bed."
She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to
Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet
she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule
never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded
that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent,
and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and
watched him climb aboard his train.
She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried
to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none.
As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When
nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew
afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed
him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown
into her drawing-room.
"You shouldn't," she said--"you shouldn't have come!"
Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young
and handsome.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because of Jim."
"He invited me."
"Yes, I know, but----" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted
her fingers.
"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."
"He was queer. His manner--I don't know. Only I had not promised to go
home in three weeks."
"No?"
"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"
Von Klausen smiled.
"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"
"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons
and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."
"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of
business. I know that; surely you should know it better."
"That business wasn't like him."
"It was very--shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself.
Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married
man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife
in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once
more!'"
She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this
was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa,
the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare
shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.
The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the
walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half
hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say
good-bye forever.
Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la
Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love
for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had
asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the
characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love
for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether.
This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not
have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at
all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and
of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he
had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more
than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one
might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon
a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.
They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet
Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.
"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now
think of as so right might end by being very wrong."
"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be
right."
"Not the ruin of our lives?"
"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your
husband's----"
"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't
honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is
good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know
why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did
love him."
"Nevertheless, you are married to him."
"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----"
"A divorce is always wrong."
"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the
marriage a real one?"
"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of
any faith is binding."
"But marriage is a contract."
"Marriage is a sacrament."
They would get so far--always darting down this byway and that of
casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against
the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom--and then she would come back
to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her
great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from
taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile,
and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one
in a passion of abnegation.
But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it
must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued
proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung,
with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding
interview.
In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.
Muriel started.
"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling
bell.
"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.
They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in
that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of
man.
Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind
rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the
Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.
"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"
With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He
told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they
occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as
passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to
chastity.
To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past
seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded
it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force
balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim
had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had
once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving
how much stronger was her hold on him.
"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her
hand.
They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment
more and they would go on, forever, apart.
He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with
pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan
Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer,
fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her
wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high,
curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were
damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars.
He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled
her in his arms.
It was then that Stainton entered the room.
XIX
HUSBAND AND WIFE
They sprang apart. They could not be certain that he had seen them. Each
was sure that their arms had loosed the moment when the handle of the
door had rattled. Each communicated this certainty to the other in one
glance. Each turned toward the husband.
Stainton smiled heartily.
"Didn't expect me so soon?" he asked. He went to his wife and kissed
her. "Hello, Captain," he said, shaking the Austrian's cold hand. "I see
you have been good enough to come and cheer up Muriel as I asked you.
But, by Jove, you are rather a late stayer, aren't you? A custom of your
country, perhaps? Oh, no offence. I'm glad you are here."
"When----" began Muriel.
"I got as far as Montelimart when they caught me with one of their blue
telegrams, calmly postponing the meeting until next week. They will have
to pay for that postponement, Captain. Lucky thing I wired them what
train I was coming by, or I should have gone the last ninety-odd miles
and landed at Lyons before I heard that--I wasn't wanted."
Von Klausen had keyed himself for heroics; Muriel had been on the verge
of fainting; but Stainton's tone reassured them both. The Austrian,
nevertheless, made for the door: to face disaster was one thing; to
court it quite another.
"I have indeed remained late," he said. "I hope that I have not bored
your good wife."
"Oh," answered Stainton, patting Muriel's pale cheek, "I am sure that my
good wife has been entertained. Haven't you, dear?"
Muriel opened her lips. She stammered, but she managed at last
distinctly to say:
"Captain von Klausen has been very kind."
"I thank you," said von Klausen, with his Continental bow.
"What's your hurry?" persisted Jim.
"You have said, sir, that it is late."
"Not so late that you can't stop a few minutes more."
The Captain thought otherwise. He really must go.
Stainton saw him to the front door, and then returned to the
drawing-room, where his wife stood just on the spot where he had left
her.
"Now," said the husband, quietly. "I think that it is time we had an
explanation."
She swayed a little, and he came forward to catch her; but at his
approach she flew into a storm of hot anger.
"Don't touch me!" she cried.
She had found herself at last. What she had been she looked at squarely,
what she was she would be entire. Stainton, in his habitual role of fond
protector, was a figure that she could feel gently towards, could even
pity; but Stainton as an accusing husband she now realised that she
could not but hate. She looked at him with a scorn that was not lessened
by the fact that, goading it from a deep recess in her heart, there
cringed an imp of fear. She knew that she hated him.
Jim stopped short.
"Don't touch me!" she repeated. "You believe I've deceived you. Well,
you never meant to go to Lyons. You have tricked me. You have lied to
me!"