"Madame dort toujours!" The dark-eyed, cherry cheeked, white-capped
chamber-maid of the Hôtel du Chalet made the statement to the manager,
who occupied a glass case in the hall. "She must have been very tired
yesterday, pauvre petite!"
The manager answered phlegmatically in French with a German accent:
"So much the better if she sleeps. She does not eat. When the gentleman
went out he wanted sanveeches to put in his pocket. One does not want
sanveeches when one sleeps."
"All the same, I wish she would wake up. It's so odd to see her sleeping
like that," returned the cherry-cheeked one; and passed about her
duties.
The _déjeuner_ was over, and those guests who had not already gone out
for the day, were tramping about the bare, wooden passages and
staircase, putting on knitted gloves and shouting for their companions
and toboggans. But it was not till all had gone out and their voices had
died away on the clear, cold air, that the sleeper in No. 19 awoke. For
a while she lay with open eyes as still as though she were yet sleeping.
But suddenly she started up in bed and looked around her with frowning,
startled attention. She was in a rather large, bare bedroom with
varnished green wood-work and furniture and a green pottery stove. There
was an odd, thick paper on the wall, of no particular color, and a
painted geometrical pattern in the centre of the ceiling. It was a neat
room, on the whole, but on the bed beside her own a man's waistcoat had
been thrown, and in the middle of the floor a pair of long, shabby
slippers lay a yard apart from each other and upside down. There were
other little signs of masculine occupation. A startled movement brought
her sitting up on the bedside.
"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"
A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins,
anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the
power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some
unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts
flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that
strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr.
Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not
allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew
nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not
been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had
not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an
audible cry she sprang to her feet.
"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"
The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she
plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she
might have been heard in the corridor.
"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly
capable of it."
Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands,
thinking.
"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I
am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money
somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"--she was
thinking of Milly--"How I should like to strangle her!"
She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs,
propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
with a veil of fine lace.
"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"
But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey.
Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
Archibald Toovey.
Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old--disappointed,
that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
returned to him in one delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
received no apology.
Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
anxiety about his safety and indulging another on the subject of his wet
feet. A smile of tender amusement visited his lips as he took hold of
the door-handle. Exactly as he touched it, the key on the other side
turned. The lock had been stiff, but it had shot out in the nick of
time, and he found himself brought up short in his impulsive career and
hurtling against a solid barrier. He knocked, but no one answered. He
could have fancied he heard panting breaths on the other side of the
ill-fitting door.
"Mayn't I come in, darling?" he asked, gently, but with a shade of
reproach in his voice.
"No, you can't," returned Milly's voice; hers, but with an accent of
coldness and decision in it which struck strangely on his ear. He
paused, bewildered. Then he remembered how often he had read that women
were capricious, unaccountable creatures. Milly had made him forget
that. Her attitude towards him had been one of unvarying gentleness and
devotion. Vaguely he felt that there was a kind of feminine charm in
this sudden burst of coldness, almost indifference.
"Is anything the matter, dear?" he asked. "Aren't you well?"
"Quite well, thank you," came the curt voice through the door. Then
after a minute's hesitation: "What do you want?"
Ian smiled to himself as he answered:
"My feet are wet. I want to change."
He was a delicate man, and if he had a foible which Milly could be said
to execrate, it was that of "sitting in wet feet." He expected the door
to fly open; but it did nothing of the kind. There was not a trace of
anxiety in the grudging voice which replied, after a pause:
"I suppose you want dry shoes and stockings. I'll give them to you if
you'll wait."
He stood bewildered, a little pained, not noticing the noisy opening and
shutting of several ill-fitting drawers in the room. Yet Milly always
put away his things for him and should have known where to find them.
The door opened a chink and the shoes and stockings came flying through
on to the passage floor. He had a natural impulse to use his masculine
strength, to push the door open before she could lock it again, but
fortunately he restrained it. He went down-stairs slowly, shoes and
stockings in hand; threw them down behind the big green stove in the
smoking-room and lighted a meditative pipe. It was evidently a fact that
women were difficult to understand; even Milly was. He had been
uniformly kind and tender to her, and so far she had seemed more than
content with him as a husband. But beneath this apparent happiness of
hers had some instinct, incomprehensible to him, been whispering to her
that he did not love her as many men, perhaps most, loved their young
wives? That he had felt for her no ardor, no worship? If so, then the
crisis had come at the right moment; at the moment when, by one of those
tricks of nature which make us half acquiesce in the belief that our
personality is an illusion, that we are but cosmic automata, the power
of love had been granted to him again. Yet for all that--very
fortunately, seeing that the crisis was more acute than he was aware--he
did not fancy that his way lay plain before him. He began to perceive
that the cementing of a close union between a man and woman, two beings
with so abundant a capacity for misunderstanding each other, is a
complex and delicate affair. That to marry is to be a kind of Odysseus
advancing into the palace of a Circe, nobler and more humane than the
enchantress of old, yet capable also of working strange and terrible
transformations. That many go in there carrying in their hands blossoms
which they believe to be moly; but the true moly is not easy to
distinguish. And he hoped that he and Milly, in their different ways,
had found and were both wearing the milk-white flower. Yet he knew that
this was a matter which must be left to the arbitrament of time.