IN WHICH MR. ERWIN SEEK PARIS
As she glanced around the sitting-room of her apartment in Paris one
September morning she found it difficult, in some respects, to realize
that she had lived in it for more than five years. After Chiltern's death
she had sought a refuge, and she had found it here: a refuge in which she
meant--if her intention may be so definitely stated--to pass the
remainder of her days.
As a refuge it had become dear to her. When first she had entered it she
had looked about her numbly, thankful for walls and roof, thankful for
its remoteness from the haunts of the prying: as a shipwrecked castaway
regards, at the first light, the cave into which he has stumbled into the
darkness-gratefully. And gradually, castaway that she felt herself to be,
she had adorned it lovingly, as one above whose horizon the sails of hope
were not to rise; filled it with friends not chosen in a day, whose
faithful ministrations were not to cease. Her books, but only those
worthy to be bound and read again; the pictures she had bought when she
had grown to know what pictures were; the music she had come to love for
its eternal qualities--these were her companions.
The apartment was in the old quarter across the Seine, and she had found
it by chance. The ancient family of which this hotel had once been the
home would scarce have recognized, if they had returned the part of it
Honora occupied. The room in which she mostly lived was above the corner
of the quiet street, and might have been more aptly called a sitting-room
than a salon. Its panels were the most delicate of blue-gray,
fantastically designed and outlined by ribbings of blue. Some of them
contained her pictures. The chairs, the sofas, the little tabourets, were
upholstered in yellow, their wood matching the panels. Above the carved
mantel of yellowing marble was a quaintly shaped mirror extending to the
high ceiling, and flanked on either side by sconces. The carpet was a
golden brown, the hangings in the tall windows yellow. And in the morning
the sun came in, not boisterously, but as a well-bred and cheerful guest.
An amiable proprietor had permitted her also to add a wrought-iron
balcony as an adjunct to this room, and sometimes she sat there on the
warmer days reading under the seclusion of an awning, or gazing at the
mysterious facades of the houses opposite, or at infrequent cabs or
pedestrians below.
An archway led out of the sitting-room into a smaller room, once the
boudoir of a marquise, now Honora's library. This was in blue and gold,
and she had so far modified the design of the decorator as to replace the
mirrors of the cases with glass; she liked to see her books. Beyond the
library was a dining room in grey, with dark red hangings; it overlooked
the forgotten garden of the hotel.
One item alone of news from the outer world, vital to her, had drifted to
her retreat. Newspapers filled her with dread, but it was from a
newspaper, during the first year of her retirement, that she had learned
of the death of Howard Spence. A complication of maladies was mentioned,
but the true underlying cause was implied in the article, and this had
shocked but not surprised her. A ferment was in progress in her own
country, the affairs of the Orange Trust Company being investigated, and
its president under indictment at the hour of his demise. Her feelings at
the time, and for months after, were complex. She had been moved to deep
pity, for in spite of what he had told her of his business transactions,
it was impossible for her to think of him as a criminal. That he had been
the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a question in her mind how
clearly he had perceived the immorality of his course, and of theirs. He
had not been given to casuistry, and he had been brought up in a school
the motto of which he had once succinctly stated: the survival of the
fittest. He had not been, alas, one of those to survive.
Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their
relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did
not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had
done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another
man, she acknowledged freely. Wrong as she knew this to have been,
severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring herself
to an adequate penitence. She tried to remember him as he had been at
Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not as he had
afterwards become. There was no question in her mind, now that it was
given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried harder,
much harder, to make their marriage a success. He might, indeed, have
done more to protect and cherish her. It was a man's part to guard a
woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded. On the other
hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape it,
that she had had the more light of the two: and that, though the task
were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and infuse
him with it.
That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point. Many of
her hours were spent in retrospection. She was, in a sense, as one dead,
yet retaining her faculties; and these became infinitely keen now that
she was deprived of the power to use them as guides through life. She
felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old. And
she contemplated the Honora of other days--of the flesh, as though she
were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly
regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it had
been animated and led to destruction.
Even Hugh Chiltern had left her no illusions. She thought of him at tunes
with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she could not
say. She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense feeling had
been burned out of her. And she found that she could permit her mind to
rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a sense of horror;
there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from haunting terror,
no day that had not added its mite to the gathering evidence of an
ultimate retribution. And it was like a nightmare to summon again this
spectacle of the man going to pieces under her eyes. The whole incident
in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect bizarre, incredible, as the
follies of a night of madness appear in the saner light of morning. Her
great love had bereft her of her senses, for had the least grain of
sanity remained to her she might have known that the thing they attempted
was impossible of accomplishment.
Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief. To
employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she of
all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and thrown
up on an island. What had she done above the others to deserve
preservation? It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to
herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the
vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his
telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests. Her escape had
indeed been miraculous!
Although they had passed through a ceremony, the conviction had never
taken root in her that she had been married to Chiltern. The tie that had
united her to him had not been sacred, though it had been no less
binding; more so, in fact. That tie would have become a shackle. Her
perception of this, after his death, had led her to instruct her attorney
to send back to his relatives all but a small income from his estate,
enough for her to live on during her lifetime. There had been some
trouble about this matter; Mrs. Grainger, in particular, had surprised
her in making objections, and had finally written a letter which Honora
received with a feeling akin to gratitude. Whether her own action had
softened this lady's feelings, she never understood; she had cherished
the letter for its unexpectedly charitable expressions. Chiltern's family
had at last agreed to accept the estate on the condition that the income
mentioned should be tripled. And to this Honora had consented. Money had
less value than ever in her eyes.
She lived here in Paris in what may be called a certain peace, made no
demands upon the world, and had no expectations from it. She was now in
half mourning, and intended to remain so. Her isolation was of her own
choice, if a stronger expression be not used. She was by no means an
enforced outcast. And she was even aware that a certain sympathy for her
had grown up amongst her former friends which had spread to the colony of
her compatriots in Paris; in whose numbers there were some, by no means
unrecognized, who had defied the conventions more than she. Hugh
Chiltern's reputation, and the general knowledge of his career, had no
doubt aided to increase this sympathy, but the dignity of her conduct
since his death was at the foundation of it. Sometimes, on her walks and
drives, she saw people bowing to her, and recognized friends or
acquaintances of what seemed to her like a former existence.
Such had been her life in Paris until a certain day in early September, a
month before this chapter opens. It was afternoon, and she was sitting in
the balcony cutting a volume of memoirs when she heard the rattle of a
cab on the cobbles below, and peered curiously over the edge of the
railing. Although still half a block away, the national characteristics
of the passenger were sufficiently apparent. He was an American--of that
she was sure. And many Americans did not stray into that quarter. The
length of his legs, for one thing, betrayed him: he found the seat of the
fiacre too low, and had crossed one knee over the other. Other and less
easily definable attributes he did not lack. And as he leaned against the
faded blue cushions regarding with interest the buildings he passed, he
seemed, like an ambassador, to convert the cab in which he rode into
United States territory. Then she saw that it was Peter Erwin.
She drew back her head from the balcony rail, and tried to sit still and
to think, but she was trembling as one stricken with a chill. The cab
stopped; and presently, after an interval, his card was handed her. She
rose, and stood for a moment with her hand against the wall before she
went into the salon. None of the questions she had asked herself were
answered. Was she glad to see him? and what would be his attitude towards
her? When she beheld him standing before her she had strength only to
pronounce his name.
He came forward quickly and took her hand and looked down into her face.
She regarded him tremulously, instinctively guessing the vital importance
of this moment for him; and she knew then that he had been looking
forward to it in mingled hope and dread, as one who gazes seaward after a
night of tempest for the ship he has seen at dusk in the offing. What had
the tempest done to her? Such was his question. And her heart leaped as
she saw the light growing in his eyes, for it meant much to her that he
should see that she was not utterly dismantled. She fell; his own hand
tremble as he relinquished hers. He was greatly moved; his voice, too,
betrayed it.
"You see I have found you," he said.
"Yes," she answered; "--why did you come?"
"Why have I always come to you, when it was possible?" he asked.
"No one ever had such a friend, Peter. Of that I am sure:'
"I wanted to see Paris," he said, "before I grew too decrepit to enjoy
it."
She smiled, and turned away.
"Have you seen much of it?"
"Enough to wish to see more."
"When did you arrive?"
"Some time in the night," he said, "from Cherbourg. And I'm staying at a
very grand hotel, which might be anywhere. A man I crossed with on the
steamer took me there. I think I'd move to one of the quieter ones, the
French ones, if I were a little surer of my pronunciation and the
subjunctive mood."
"You don't mean to say you've been studying French!"
He coloured a little, and laughed.
"You think it ridiculous at my time of life? I suppose you're right. You
should have seen me trying to understand the cabmen. The way these people
talk reminds me more of a Gatling gun than anything I can think of. It
certainly isn't human."
"Perhaps you have come over as ambassador," she suggested. "When I saw
you in the cab, even before I recognized you, I thought of a bit of our
soil broken off and drifted over here."
Her voice did not quite sustain the lighter note--the emotion his visit
was causing her was too great. He brought with him into her retreat not
so much a flood of memories as of sensations. He was a man whose image
time with difficulty obliterates, whose presence was a shining thing: so
she had grown to value it in proportion as she had had less of it. She
did inevitably recall the last time she had seen him, in the little
Western city, and how he had overwhelmed her, invaded her with doubts and
aroused the spirit which had possessed her to fight fiercely for its
foothold. And to-day his coming might be likened to the entrance of a
great physician into the room of a distant and lonely patient whom amidst
wide ministrations he has not forgotten. She saw now that he had been
right. She had always seen it, clearly indeed when he had been beside
her, but the spirit within her had been too strong, until now. Now, when
it had plundered her soul of treasures--once so little valued--it had
fled. Such were her thoughts.
The great of heart undoubtedly possess this highest quality of the
physician,--if the statement may thus be put backhandedly,--and Peter
Erwin instinctively understood the essential of what was going on within
her. He appeared to take a delight in the fancy she had suggested; that
he had brought a portion of the newer world to France.
"Not a piece of the Atlantic coast, certainly," he replied. "One of the
muddy islands, perhaps, of the Mississippi."
"All the more representative," she said. "You seem to have taken
possession of Paris, Peter--not Paris of you. You have annexed the seat
of the Capets, and brought democracy at last into the Faubourg."
"Without a Reign of Terror," he added quizzically.
"If you are not ambassador, what are you?" she asked. "I have expected at
any moment to read in the Figaro that you were President of the United
States."
"I am the American tourist," he declared, "with Baedeker for my Bible,
who desires to be shown everything. And I have already discovered that
the legend of the fabulous wealth of the Indies is still in force here.
There are many who are willing to believe that in spite of my modest
appearance--maybe because of it--I have sailed over in a galleon filled
with gold. Already I have been approached from every side by confidential
gentlemen who announced that they spoke English--one of them said
'American'--who have offered to show me many things, and who have
betrayed enough interest in me to inquire whether I were married or
single."
Honora laughed. They were seated in the balcony by this time, and he had
the volume of memoirs on his knee, fingering it idly.
"What did you say to them?" she asked.
"I told them I was the proud father of ten children," he replied. "That
seemed to stagger them, but only for a moment. They offered to take us
all to the Louvre."
"Peter, you are ridiculous! But, in spite of your nationality, you don't
look exactly gullible."
"That is a relief," he said. "I had begun to think I ought to leave my
address and my watch with the Consul General . . . ."
Of such a nature was the first insidious rupture of that routine she had
grown to look upon as changeless for the years to come, of the life she
had chosen for its very immutable quality. Even its pangs of loneliness
had acquired a certain sweet taste. Partly from a fear of a world that
had hurt her, partly from fear of herself, she had made her burrow deep,
that heat and cold, the changing seasons, and love and hate might be
things far removed. She had sought to remove comparisons, too, from the
limits of her vision; to cherish and keep alive, indeed, such regrets as
she had, but to make no new ones.
Often had she thought of Peter Erwin, and it is not too much to say that
he had insensibly grown into an ideal. He had come to represent to her
the great thing she had missed in life, missed by feverish searching in
the wrong places, digging for gold where the ground had glittered. And,
if the choice had been given her, she would have preferred his spiritual
to his bodily companionship--for a while, at least. Some day, when she
should feel sure that desire had ceased to throb, when she should have
acquired an unshakable and absolute resignation, she would see him. It is
not too much to say, if her feeling be not misconstrued and stretched far
beyond her own conception of it, that he was her one remaining interest
in the world. She had scanned the letters of her aunt and uncle for
knowledge of his doings, and had felt her curiosity justified by a
certain proprietorship that she did not define, faith in humankind, or
the lack of it, usually makes itself felt through one's comparative
contemporaries. That her uncle was a good man, for instance, had no such
effect upon Honora, as the fact that Peter was a good man. And that he
had held a true course had gradually become a very vital thing to her,
perhaps the most vital thing; and she could have imagined no greater
personal calamity now than to have seen him inconsistent. For there are
such men, and most people have known them. They are the men who,
unconsciously, keep life sweet.
Yet she was sorry he had invaded her hiding-place. She had not yet
achieved peace, and much of the weary task would have to be done over
after he was gone.
In the meantime she drifted with astounding ease into another existence.
For it was she, and not the confidential gentlemen, who showed Peter
Paris: not the careless, pleasure-loving Paris of the restaurants, but of
the Cluny and the Carnavalet. The Louvre even was not neglected, and as
they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter his
reply to the proffered services of the guide. Indeed, there was much
laughter in their excursions: his native humour sprang from the same well
that held his seriousness. She was amazed at his ability to strip a sham
and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which she had
never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had given her. Some
of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him the greatest
amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European
"personalities," combinations of assumed indifference and effrontery, and
an accent the like of which was never heard before. But he was neither
bitter nor crude in his criticisms. He made her laugh, but he never made
her ashamed. His chief faculty seemed to be to give her the power to
behold, with astonishing clearness, objects and truths which had lain
before her eyes, and yet hidden. And she had not thought to acquire any
more truths.
The depth of his pleasure in the things he saw was likewise a revelation
to her. She was by no means a bad guide to the Louvre and the Luxembourg,
but the light in her which had come slowly flooded him with radiance at
the sight of a statue or a picture. He would stop with an exclamation and
stand gazing, self-forgetful, for incredible periods, and she would watch
him, filled with a curious sense of the limitations of an appreciation
she had thought complete. Where during his busy life had he got this
thing which others had sought in many voyages in vain?
Other excursions they made, and sometimes these absorbed a day. It was a
wonderful month, that Parisian September, which Honora, when she allowed
herself to think, felt that she had no right to. A month filled to the
brim with colour: the stone facades of the houses, which in certain
lights were what the French so aptly call bleuatre; the dense green
foliage of the horse-chestnut trees, the fantastic iron grills, the Arc
de Triomphe in the centre of its circle at sunset, the wide shaded
avenues radiating from it, the bewildering Champs Elysees, the blue
waters of the Seine and the graceful bridges spanning it, Notre Dame
against the sky. Their walks took them, too, into quainter, forgotten
regions where history was grim and half-effaced, and they speculated on
the France of other days.
They went farther afield; and it was given them to walk together down
green vistas cut for kings, to linger on terraces with the river far
below them, and the roofs of Paris in the hazy distance; that Paris,
sullen so long, the mutterings of which the kings who had sat there must
have heard with dread; that Paris which had finally risen in its wrath
and taken the pleasure-houses and the parks for itself.
Once they went out to Chantilly, the cameo-like chateau that stands
mirrored in its waters, and wandered through the alleys there. Honora had
left her parasol on the parapet, and as they returned Peter went to get
it, while she awaited him at a little distance. A group was chatting
gayly on the lawn, and one of them, a middle-aged, well-dressed man
hailed him with an air of fellowship, and Peter stopped for a moment's
talk.
"We were speaking of ambassadors the other day," he said when he joined
her; "that was our own, Minturn."
"We were speaking of them nearly a month ago," she said.
"A month ago! I can't believe it!" he exclaimed.
"What did he say to you?" Honora inquired presently.
"He was abusing me for not letting him know I was in Paris."
"Peter, you ought to have let him know!"
"I didn't come over here to see the ambassador," answered Peter, gayly.
She talked less than usual on their drive homeward, but he did not seem
to notice the fact. Dusk was already lurking in the courtyards and byways
of the quiet quarter when the porter let them in, and the stone stairway
of the old hotel was almost in darkness. The sitting-room, with its
yellow, hangings snugly drawn and its pervading but soft light, was a
grateful change. And while she was gone to--remove her veil and hat,
Peter looked around it.
It was redolent of her. A high vase of remarkable beauty, filled with
white roses, stood on the gueridon. He went forward and touched it, and
closed his eyes as though in pain. When he opened them he saw her
standing in the archway.
She had taken off her coat, and was in a simple white muslin gown, with a
black belt--a costume that had become habitual. Her age was thirty. The
tragedy and the gravity of her life during these later years had touched
her with something that before was lacking. In the street, in the
galleries, people had turned to look at her; not with impudent stares.
She caught attention, aroused imagination. Once, the year before, she had
had a strange experience with a well-known painter, who, in an impulsive
note, had admitted following her home and bribing the concierge. He
craved a few sittings. Her expression now, as she looked at Peter, was
graver than usual.
"You must not come to-morrow," she said.
"I thought we were going to Versailles again," he replied in surprise. "I
have made the arrangements."
"I have changed my mind. I'm not going."
"You want to postpone it?" he asked.
She took a chair beside the little blaze in the fireplace.
"Sit down, Peter. I wish to say something to you. I have been wishing to
do so for some time."
"Do you object if I stand a moment?" he said. "I feel so much more
comfortable standing, especially when I am going to be scolded."
"Yes," she admitted, "I am going to scold you. Your conscience has warned
you."
"On the contrary," he declared, "it has never been quieter. If I have
offended; it is through ignorance."
"It is through charity, as usual," she said in a low voice. "If your
conscience be quiet, mine is not. It is in myself that I am
disappointed--I have been very selfish. I have usurped you. I have known
it all along, and I have done very wrong in not relinquishing you
before."
"Who would have shown me Paris?" he exclaimed.
"No," she continued, "you would not have been alone. If I had needed
proof of that fact, I had it to-day--"
"Oh, Minturn," he interrupted; "think of me hanging about an Embassy and
trying not to spill tea!" And he smiled at the image that presented.
Her own smile was fleeting.
"You would never do that, I know," she said gravely.
"You are still too modest, Peter, but the time has gone by when I can be
easily deceived. You have a great reputation among men of affairs, an
unique one. In spite of the fact that you are distinctly American, you
have a wide interest in what is going on in the world. And you have an
opportunity here to meet people of note, people really worth while from
every point of view. You have no right to neglect it."
He was silent a moment, looking down at her. She was leaning forward, her
eyes fixed on the fire, her hands clasped between her knees.
"Do you think I care for that?" he asked.
"You ought to care," she said, without looking up. "And it is my duty to
try to make you care."
"Honora, why do you think I came over here?" he said.
"To see Paris," she answered. "I have your own word for it. To--to
continue your education. It never seems to stop."
"Did you really believe that?"
"Of course I believed it. What could be more natural? And you have never
had a holiday like this."
"No," he agreed. "I admit that."
"I don't know how much longer you are going to stay," she said. "You have
not been abroad before, and there are other places you ought to go."
"I'll get you to make out an itinerary."
"Peter, can't you see that I'm serious? I have decided to take matters in
my own hands. The rest of the time you are here, you may come to see me
twice a week. I shall instruct the concierge."
He turned and grasped the mantel shelf with both hands, and touched the
log with the toe of his boot.
"What I told you about seeing Paris may be called polite fiction," he
said. "I came over here to see you. I have been afraid to say it until
to-day, and I am afraid to say it now."
She sat very still. The log flared up again, and he turned slowly and
looked at the shadows in her face.
"You-you have always been good to me," she answered. "I have never
deserved it--I have never understood it. If it is any satisfaction for
you to know that what I have saved of myself I owe to you, I tell you so
freely."
"That," he said, "is something for which God forbid that I should take
credit. What you are is due to the development of a germ within you, a
development in which I have always had faith. I came here to see you, I
came here because I love you, because I have always loved you, Honora."
"Oh, no, not that!" she cried; "not that!"
"Why not?" he asked. "It is something I cannot help, something beyond my
power to prevent if I would. But I would not. I am proud of it, and I
should be lost without it. I have had it always. I have come over to beg
you to marry me."
"It's impossible! Can't you see it's impossible?"
"You don't love me?" he said. Into those few words was thrown all the
suffering of his silent years.
"I don't know what I feel for you," she answered in an agonized voice,
her fingers tightening over the backs of her white hands. "If reverence
be love--if trust be love, infinite and absolute trust--if gratitude be
love--if emptiness after you are gone be a sign of it--yes, I love you.
If the power to see clearly only through you, to interpret myself only by
your aid be love, I acknowledge it. I tell you so freely, as of your
right to know. And the germ of which you spoke is you. You have grown
until you have taken possession of--of what is left of me. If I had only
been able to see clearly from the first, Peter, I should be another woman
to-day, a whole woman, a wise woman. Oh, I have thought of it much. The
secret of life was there at my side from the time I was able to pronounce
your name, and I couldn't see it. You had it. You stayed. You took duty
where you found it, and it has made you great. Oh, I don't mean to speak
in a worldly sense. When I say that, it is to express the highest human
quality of which I can think and feel. But I can't marry you. You must
see it."
"I cannot see it," he replied, when he had somewhat gained control of
himself.
"Because I should be wronging you."
"How?" he asked.
"In the first place, I should be ruining your career."
"If I had a career," he said, smiling gently, "you couldn't ruin it. You
both overestimate and underestimate the world's opinion, Honora. As my
wife, it will not treat you cruelly. And as for my career, as you call
it, it has merely consisted in doing as best I could the work that has
come to me. I have tried to serve well those who have employed me, and if
my services be of value to them, and to those who may need me in the
future, they are not going to reject me. If I have any worth in the
world, you will but add to it. Without you I am incomplete."
She looked up at him wonderingly.
"Yes, you are great," she said. "You pity me, you think of my
loneliness."
"It is true I cannot bear to picture you here," he exclaimed. "The
thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to take
and shield you. I am not a man to marry a woman without love. It seems to
me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora. There
never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be. I have
given you proof of it, God knows."
"I am not what I was," she said, "I am not what I was. I have been
dragged down."
He bent and lifted her hand from her knee, and raised it to his lips, a
homage from him that gave her an exquisite pain.
"If you had been dragged down," he answered simply, "my love would have
been killed. I know something of the horrors you have been through, as
though I had suffered them myself. They might have dragged down another
woman, Honora. But they have strangely ennobled you."
She drew her hand away.
"No," she said, "I do not deserve happiness. It cannot be my destiny."
"Destiny," he repeated. "Destiny is a thing not understandable by finite
minds. It is not necessarily continued tragedy and waste, of that I am
certain. Only a little thought is required, it seems to me, to assure us
that we cannot be the judges of our own punishment on this earth. And of
another world we know nothing. It cannot be any one's destiny to throw
away a life while still something may be made of it. You would be
throwing your life away here. That no other woman is possible, or ever
can be possible, for me should be a consideration with you, Honora. What
I ask of you is a sacrifice--will you make me happy?"
Her eyes filled with tears.
"Oh, Peter, do you care so much as that? If--if I could be sure that I
were doing it for you! If in spite--of all that has happened to me, I
could be doing something for you--!"
He stooped and kissed her.
"You can if you will," he said.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 8, by Winston Churchill