six weeks ago. It was at the table d'hote. Two ladies came in and took
places opposite me--a middle-aged lady and a young one. I did not
notice them until they were seated; it was the voice of the younger
lady that attracted me; I looked up,--and there was the Queen of Sheba.
The same eyes, the same hair, the same face, though not so pale, and
fuller; the same form, only the contours filled out. I put down my
knife and fork and stared at her. She flushed, for I fancy I stared at
her rather rudely, and a faint mark, like a star, came into her cheek
and faded. I saw it as distinctly as I saw it the day she passed me on
the country road, swinging the flower in her hand."
"By Jove! it's a regular romance--strawberry mark and all."
"If you don't take this seriously," said Lynde, frowning, "I am done."
"Go on."
"I shall never know how I got through the endless courses of that
dinner; it was an empty pantomime on my part. As soon as it was over I
rushed to the hotel register. The only entry among the new arrivals
which pointed to the two ladies was that of Mrs. William Denham and
Niece, United States. You can understand, Flemming, how I was seized
with a desire to know those two women. I had come to Geneva for a day
or so; but I resolved to stay here a month if they stayed, or to leave
the next hour if they left. In short, I meant to follow them
discreetly; it was an occupation for me. They remained. In the course
of a week I knew the Denhams to speak to them when we met of a morning
in the English Garden. A fortnight later it seemed to me that I had
known them half my life. They had come across the previous November,
they had wintered in Italy, and were going to Chamouni some time in
July, where Mr. Denham was to join them; then they were to make an
extended tour of Switzerland, accompanied by an old friend of the
family, a professor, or a doctor, or something, who was in the south of
France for his health. Miss Denham--her name is Ruth--is an orphan, and
was educated mostly over here. When the Denhams are at home they live
somewhere in the neighborhood of Orange, New Jersey. There are all the
simple, exasperating facts. I can add nothing to them. If I were to
tell you how this girl has perplexed and distressed me, by seeming to
be and seeming not to be that other person--how my doubts and hopes
have risen and fallen from day to day, even from hour to hour--it would
be as uninteresting to you as a barometrical record. But this is
certain: when Miss Denham and I part at Chamouni, as I suppose we
shall, this world will have come to an end so far as I am concerned."
"The world doesn't come to an end that way--when one is twenty-six.
Does she like you, Ned?"
"How can I say? She does not dislike me. We have seen very much of each
other. We have been together some portion of each day for more than a
month. But I've never had her a moment alone; the aunt is always
present. We are like old friends--with a difference."
"I see; the aunt makes the difference! No flirting allowed on the
premises."
"Miss Denham is not a girl to flirt with; she is very self-possessed,
with just a suspicion of haughtiness; personally, tall, slight, a sort
of dusky Eastern beauty, with the clear warm colors of a New England
September twilight--not like the brunettes on this side, who are apt to
have thick complexions, saving their presence. I say she is not a girl
to flirt with, and yet, with that sensitive-cut mouth and those deep
eyes, she could do awful things in the way of tenderness if she had a
mind to. She's a puzzle, with her dove's innocence and her serpent's
wisdom. All women are problems. I suppose every married man of us goes
down to his grave with his particular problem not quite solved."
Flemming gave a loud laugh. The "every married man of us" tickled him.
"Yes," said he; "they are all daughters of the Sphinx, and past finding
out. Is Miss Denham an invalid?" he asked, after a pause.
"No; she is not strong--delicate, rather; of the pure type of American
young-womanhood--more spirit than physique; but not an
invalid--unless"--
"You have let a morbid fancy run away with you, Ned. This lady and the
other one are two different persons."
"If I could only believe it!" said Lynde. "I do believe it at times;
then some gesture, some fleeting expression, a turn of the head, the
timbre of her voice--and there she is again! The next moment I am ready
to laugh at myself."
"Couldn't you question the aunt?"
"How could I?"
"You couldn't!"
"I have thought of that doctor at the asylum--what in the devil was his
name? I might write to him; but I shrink from doing it. I have been
brutal enough in other ways. I am ashamed to confess to what
unforgivable expedients I have resorted to solve my uncertainty. Once
we were speaking of Genoa, where the Denhams had spent a week; I turned
the conversation on the church of St. Lorenzo and the relic in the
treasury there--the Sacra Catino, a supposed gift to Solomon from the
Queen of Sheba. Miss Denham listened with the calmest interest; she had
not seen it the day she visited the church; she was sorry to have
missed that. Then the aunt changed the subject, but whether by accident
or design I was unable for the soul of me to conjecture. Good God,
Flemming! could this girl have had some terrible, swift malady which
touched her and passed, and still hangs over her--an hereditary doom?"
"Then she's the most artful actress that ever lived, I should say. The
leading lady of the Theatre Francais might go and take lessons of her.
But if that were so, Ned?"
"If that were so," said Lynde slowly, "a great pity would be added to
my love."
"You would not marry her!"
Lynde made no reply.
The night had settled down upon Geneva while the friends were talking.
The room was so dark they could not distinguish each other; but
Flemming was conscious of a pale, set face turned towards him in the
obscurity, in the same way that he was conscious of the forlorn
whiteness of Mont Blanc looming up out yonder, unseen. It was dark in
the chamber, but the streets were gay now with the life of a midsummer
night. Interminable lines of lamps twinkled on the bridges and along
the quays; the windows of the cafes on the opposite bank of the Rhone
were brilliant with gas jets; boats, bearing merry cargoes to and from
the lake, passed up and down the river; the street running under the
hotel balcony was crowded with loungers, and a band was playing in the
English Garden. From time to time a strain of music floated up to the
window where the two men were sitting. Neither had spoken for some
minutes, when Lynde asked his friend where he was staying.
"At the Schweizerhof," replied Flemming. "I always take the hotel
nearest the station. Few Americans go there, I fancy. It is wonderfully
and fearfully Swiss. I was strolling in here to look through the
register for some American autographs when I ran against you."
"You had better bring your traps over here."
"It would not be worth while. I am booked for Paris to-morrow night.
Ned--come with me!"
"I can't, Flemming; I have agreed to go to Chamouni with the Denhams."
"Don't!"
"That is like advising a famishing man not to eat his last morsel of
food. I have a presentiment it will all end there. I never had a
presentiment before."
"I had a presentiment once," said Flemming impressively. "I had a
presentiment that a certain number--it was number twenty-seven--would
draw the prize in a certain lottery. I went to the office, and number
twenty-seven was one of the two numbers unsold! I bought it as quick as
lightning, I dreamed of number twenty-seven three successive nights,
and the next day it drew a blank."
"That has the ring of the old Flemming!" cried Lynde, with an unforced
laugh. "I am glad that I have not succeeded in turning all your joyous
gold into lead. I'm not always such dull company as I have been
to-night, with my moods and my presentiments. I owe them partly,
perhaps, to not seeing Miss Denham to-day, the aunt having a headache."
"You were not in a rollicking humor when I picked you up."
"I had been cruising about town all the morning alone, making assaults
on the Musee Fol, the Botanic Garden, and the Jewish Synagogue. In the
afternoon I had wrecked myself on Rousseau's Island, where I sat on a
bench staring at Pradier's poor statue of Jean Jacques until I fancied
that the ugly bronze cannibal was making mouths at me. When the aunt
has a headache, _I_ suffer. Flemming, you must see Miss Denham, if only
for a moment."
"Of course I should like to see her, Ned."
"You do not leave until evening," Lynde said, reflecting. "I think I
can manage a little dinner for to-morrow. Now let us take a breath of
fresh air. I know the queerest old nook, in the Rue de Chantpoulet,
where the Bavarian beer is excellent and all the company smoke the most
enormous porcelain pipes. Haven't I hit one of your weaknesses?"
"You have hit a brace!"
VII
THE DENHAMS
When Edward Lynde returned to the hotel that night, after parting with
Flemming at the head of a crooked, gable-hung street leading to the
Schweizerhof, the young man regretted that he had said anything on the
subject of the Denhams, or rather, that he had spoken of the painful
likeness which had haunted him so persistently. The friends had spent
the gayest of evenings together at a small green-topped table in one
corner of the smoky cafe. Over their beer and cheese they had chatted
of old days at boarding-school and college, and this contact with the
large, healthy nature of Flemming, which threw off depression as
sunshine dissipates mist, had sent Lynde's vapors flying. Nothing was
changed in the circumstances that had distressed him, yet some way a
load had removed itself from his bosom. He was sorry he had mentioned
that dark business at all. As he threaded the deserted streets--it was
long after midnight--he planned a dinner to be given in his rooms the
next day, and formulated a note of invitation to the ladies, which he
would write when he got back to the hotel, and have in readiness for
early delivery in the morning.
Lynde was in one of those lightsome moods which, in that varying month,
had not unfrequently followed a day of doubt and restless despondency.
As he turned into the Quai des Bergues he actually hummed a bar or two
of opera. He had not done that before in six weeks. They had been weeks
of inconceivable torment and pleasure to Lynde.
He had left home while still afflicted by David Lynde's death. Since
the uncle's ill-advised marriage the intercourse between them, as the
reader knows, had all but ceased; they had met only once, and then as
if to bid each other farewell; but the ties had been very close, after
all. In the weeks immediately following his guardian's death, the young
man, occupied with settling the estate, of which he was one of the
executors, scarcely realized his loss; but when he returned to
Rivermouth a heavy sense of loneliness came over him. The crowded,
happy firesides to which he was free seemed to reproach him for his
lack of kinship; he stood alone in the world; there was no more reason
why he should stay in one place than in another. His connection with
the bank, unnecessary now from a money point of view, grew irksome; the
quietude of the town oppressed him; he determined to cut adrift from
all and go abroad. An educated American with no deeper sorrow than
Lynde's cannot travel through Europe, for the first time at least, with
indifference. Three months in Germany and France began in Lynde a cure
which was completed by a winter in Southern Italy. He had regained his
former elasticity of spirits and was taking life with a relish, when he
went to Geneva; there he fell in with the Denhams in the manner he
described to Flemming. An habitual shyness, and perhaps a doubt of
Flemming's sympathetic capacity, had prevented Lynde from giving his
friend more than an outline of the situation. In his statement Lynde
had omitted several matters which may properly be set down here.
That first day at the table d'hote and the next day, when he was able
more deliberately to study the young woman, Edward Lynde had made no
question to himself as to her being the same person he had seen in so
different and so pathetic surroundings. It was unmistakably the same.
He had even had a vague apprehension she might recognize him, and had
been greatly relieved to observe that there was no glimmer of
recognition in the well-bred, careless glance which swept him once or
twice. No, he had passed out of her memory--with the other shapes and
shadows! How strange they should meet again, thousands of miles from
New England; how strange that he alone, of all the crowded city, should
know there had been a dark episode in this girl's history! What words
she had spoken to him and forgotten, she who now sat there robed in the
beauty of her reason!
It was a natural interest, and a deep interest, certainly, that
impelled Lynde to seek the acquaintance of the two ladies. On the third
day a chance service rendered the elder--she had left a glove or a
handkerchief beside her plate at table, and Lynde had followed her with
it from the dining-room--placed him upon speaking terms. They were his
country-women, he was a gentleman, and the surface ice was easily
broken. Three days afterwards Lynde found himself oddly doubting his
first conviction. This was not that girl! The likeness was undeniable:
the same purple-black hair, the same long eyelashes, a very distinctive
feature. In voice and carriage, too, Miss Denham curiously recalled the
other; and that mark on Miss Denham's cheek--a birth-mark--was singular
enough. But there the analogies ended. Miss Denham was a young woman
who obviously had seen much of the world; she possessed accomplishments
which could have been acquired only by uninterrupted application; she
spoke French, German, and Italian with unusual purity. That intellect,
as strong and clear as crystal, could never have suffered even a
temporary blur. He was beginning to be amazed at the blunder he had
committed, when suddenly, one evening, a peculiar note in her voice,
accompanied by a certain lifting of the eyelashes--a movement he had
noticed for the first time, but which was familiar to him--threw Lynde
into great perplexity. It WAS that other girl! How useless for him to
try to blind himself to the truth! Besides, why should he wish to, and
why should the fact of the identity trouble him to such a degree? The
next day he was staggered by Miss Denham alluding incidentally to the
circumstance that she and her aunt had passed a part of the spring of
1872 in Florida. That was the date of Lynde's adventure, the spring of
1872. Here was almost positive proof that Miss Denham could not have
been in New England at the time. Lynde did not know what to think. Of
course he was mistaken; he must be mistaken--and yet! There were
moments when he could not look at Miss Denham without half expecting to
see the man Blaisdell flitting somewhere in the background. Then there
were days when it was impossible for Lynde to picture her as anything
different from what she now was. But whatever conclusion he came to, a
doubt directly insinuated itself.
While he was drifting from one uncertainty to another, a fortnight
elapsed in which his intimacy with the Denhams had daily increased.
They were in Geneva for an indefinite time, awaiting directions from
Mr. Denham. The few sights in the city had been exhausted; the places
of interest in the environs could not be visited by ladies without
escort; so it fell out that Lynde accompanied the Denhams on several
short excursions--to Petit and Grand Sacconnex, to the Villa Tronchin,
to Pregny and Mornex. These were days which Lynde marked with a red
letter. At the end of the month, however, he was in the same state of
distressing indecision relative to Miss Denham. On one point he
required no light--he was deeply interested in her, so deeply, indeed,
that it had become a question affecting all his future, whether or not
she was the person he had encountered on his horseback journey three
years before. If she was--
But Edward Lynde had put the question out of his thought that night as
he walked home from the cafe. His two bars of opera music lasted him to
the hotel steps. Though it was late--a great bell somewhere, striking
two, sent its rich reverberation across the lake while he was unlocking
his chamber door--Lynde seated himself at a table and wrote his note to
the Denhams.
Flemming had promised to come and take coffee with him early the next
morning, that is to say at nine o'clock. Before Flemming arrived,
Lynde's invitation had been despatched and accepted. He was re-reading
Miss Denham's few lines of acceptance when he heard his friend, at the
other end of the hall, approaching with great strides.
"The thousandth part of a minute late!" cried Flemming, throwing open
the door. "There's no excuse for me. When a man lives in a city where
they manufacture a hundred thousand watches a year--that's one watch
and a quarter every five minutes day and night--it's a moral duty to be
punctual. Ned, you look like a prize pink this morning."
"I have had such a sleep! Besides, I've just gone through the
excitement of laying out the menu for our dinner. Good heavens, I
forgot the flowers! We'll go and get them after breakfast. There's your
coffee. Cream, old man? I am in a tremor over this dinner, you know. It
is a maiden effort. By the way, Flemming, I wish you'd forget what I
said about Miss Denham, last evening. I was all wrong."
"I told you so; what has happened?"
"Nothing. Only I have reconsidered the matter, and I see I was wrong to
let it upset me."
"I saw that from the first."
"Some persons," said Lynde gayly, "always see everything from the
first. You belong to the I-told-you-so family, only you belong to the
cheerful branch."
"Thank the Lord for that! A wide-spreading, hopeful disposition is your
only true umbrella in this vale of tears."
"I shall have to borrow yours, then, if it rains heavily, for I've none
of my own."
"Take it, my boy; my name's on the handle!"
On finishing their coffee the young men lighted cigars and sallied
forth for a stroll along the bank of the river, which they followed to
the confluence of the Rhone with the Arve, stopping on the way to leave
an order at a florist's. Returning to the hotel some time after
mid-day, they found the flowers awaiting them in Lynde's parlor, where
a servant was already laying the cloth. There were bouquets for the
ladies' plates, an imposing centre-piece in the shape of a pyramid, and
a profusion of loose flowers.
"What shall we do with these?" asked Lynde, pointing to the latter.
"Set 'em around somewhere," said Flemming, with cheerful vagueness.
Lynde disposed the flowers around the room to the best of his judgment;
he hung some among the glass pendants of the chandelier, gave a nosegay
to each of the two gilt statuettes in the corners, and piled the
remainder about the base of a monumental clock on the mantelpiece.
"That's rather a pretty idea, isn't it?--wreathing Time in flowers,"
remarked Flemming, with honest envy of his friend's profounder depth of
poetic sentiment.
"I thought it rather neat," said Lynde, who had not thought of it at
all.
In the course of that dinner if two or three unexplained demure smiles
flitted over Miss Denham's face, they might, perhaps, have been
indirectly traced to these floral decorations, though they pleased her
more than if a woman's hand had been visible in them.
"Flemming," said Lynde, with a severe aesthetic air, "I don't think
that arrangement in the fireplace is quite up to the rest of the room."
"Nor I either," said Flemming, who had been silently admiring it for
the last ten minutes.
The fireplace in question was stuffed with a quantity of long,
delicately spiral shavings, sprinkled with silver spangles or flakes of
isinglass, and covered by a piece of pale blue illusion. This
device--peculiarly Genevese--was supposed to represent a waterfall.
"Take a match and touch it off," suggested Flemming.
"If we had some more flowers, now"--"Exactly. I am going to the hotel
to get myself up like a head-waiter, and I'll bring some when I come
back."
In an hour afterwards Flemming reappeared, followed by a youth bearing
an immense basket. Lynde removed the Alpine waterfall to an adjoining
chamber, and built up a huge fire of flame-colored flowers in the
grate. The two friends were standing in the middle of the room, gravely
contemplating the effect, when a servant opened the door and announced
Mrs. and Miss Denham. A rustle of drapery at the threshold was followed
by the entrance of the two ladies in ceremonious dinner toilets.
Lynde had never seen Miss Denham in any but a dark travelling-dress, or
in such unobtrusive costume as a modest girl may wear at a hotel table.
He stood motionless an instant, seeing her in a trailing robe of some
fleecy, maize-colored material, with a cluster of moss-roses at her
corsage and a cross of diamonds at her throat. She was without other
ornament. The shade of her dress made her hair and eyes and complexion
wonderful. Lynde was proud to have her look like that for Flemming,
though he was himself affected by a queer impression that this queenly
young person was not the simple, lovely girl he had known all along. He
was embarrassed by her unexpected elegance, but he covered his
embarrassment and his pleasure by presenting his friend to the ladies,
and ordering the servant to serve the dinner immediately.
Lynde's constraint was only momentary, and the others had experienced
none. Flemming, indeed, had a fleeting surprise at finding in the aunt
a woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight, in the Indian summer of her
beauty. Lynde had given him the idea of an elderly person with
spectacles. As to Miss Denham, she had not fallen short of the mental
picture Flemming had drawn of her--which ought to have surprised him.
No charms or graces in a woman, however, could much surprise Flemming;
he accepted them as matters of course; to him all women were charming
in various degrees. He had that general susceptibility which preserves
us the breed of bachelors. The constant victim of a series of minor
emotions, he was safe from any major passion. There was a certain
chivalrous air of camaraderie in his manner to women which made them
like him sooner or later; the Denhams liked him instantly. Even before
the potage was removed, Lynde saw that his dinner was a success. "The
cook may drop dead now, if he wants to," said Lynde to himself; "he
can't spoil anything."
"You are not entirely a stranger to us, Mr. Flemming," said Mrs.
Denham, looking at him from behind the floral pyramid, which had the
happy effect of isolating two guests who sat opposite each other.
"There is a person who goes about foreign lands with no other
ostensible mission than to sound your praise."
"You must set down a great deal to filial gratitude," returned
Flemming. "I have been almost a father to our young friend."
"He tells me that your being here is quite accidental."
"It was one of those fortunate things, madam, which sometimes befall
undeserving persons, as if to refute the theory of a special
providence."
"On the contrary, Mr. Flemming"--it was Miss Ruth who spoke--"it was
evidently arranged with the clearest foresight; for if you had been a
day later, perhaps you would not have found your friend in Geneva--that
is, if Mr. Lynde goes with us to Chamouni."
"You have heard from Mr. Denham, then?" said Lynde, turning to the aunt.
"We had letters this morning. Mr. Denham is in Paris, where he will
remain a week or ten days, to show the sights to an old American friend
of ours who is to join our party. I think I told you, Mr. Lynde?
Supposing us to be weary of Geneva by this time, Mr. Denham suggests
that we go on to Chamouni and wait there. I have left the matter to
Ruth, and she decides in favor of leaving to-morrow, if the weather is
fine."
"We are not tired of Geneva," said Miss Denham; "it would be
ingratitude to Mr. Lynde to admit that; but we are longing for a nearer
view of the Mont Blanc groups. One ought to know them pretty well after
six weeks' constant looking at them; but the changes in the atmosphere
make any certain intimacy impossible at this distance. New ranges loom
up and disappear, the lines alter almost every hour. Were you ever at
the Isles of Shoals, Mr. Flemming?"