O viva morte, e dilettoso male!
PETRARCH.
I.
The following morning, towards twelve o'clock, a note from Madeleine
was handed to Maurice. In it, she begged him to account to Schwarz for
her absence from the rehearsal of a trio, which was to have taken place
at two.
GO AND EXPLAIN THAT IT IS QUITE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO COME, she wrote.
LOUISE IS VERY ILL; THE DOCTOR IS AFRAID OF BRAIN FEVER. I AM RUSHING,
OFF THIS MOMENT TO SEE ABOUT A NURSE--AND SHALL STAY TILL ONE COMES.
He read the words mechanically, without taking in their meaning. From
the paper, his eyes roved round the room; he saw the tumbled, unopened
bed, from which he had just risen, the traces of his boots on the
coverings. He could not remember how he had come there; his last
recollection was of being turned out of Krafft's room, in what seemed
to be still the middle of the night. Since getting home, he must have
slept a dead sleep.
"Ill? Brain fever?" he repeated to himself, and his mind strove to
pierce the significance of the words. What had happened? Why should she
be ill? A racking uneasiness seized him and would not let him rest. His
inclination was to lay his aching head on the pillow again; but this
was out of the question; and so, though he seldom braved Frau Krause,
he now boldly went to her with a request to warm up his coffee.
When he had drunk it, and bathed his head, he felt considerably better.
But he still could not call to mind what had occurred. The previous
evening was blurred in its details; he only had a sense of oppression
when he thought of it, as of something that had threatened, and still
did. He was glad to have a definite task before him, and went out at
once, in order to catch Schwarz before he left the Conservatorium; but
it was too late; the master's door was locked. It was a bright, cold
day with strong sunlight; Maurice's eyes ached, and he shrank from the
wind at every corner. Instead of going home, he went to Madeleine's
room and sat down to wait for her. She had evidently been away since
early morning; the piano was dusty and unopened; the blind at the head
of it had not been drawn up. It was a pleasant dusk; he put his arms on
the table, his head on his arms, and, in spite of his anxiety, fell
into a sound sleep.
He was wakened by Madeleine's entrance. It was three o'clock. She came
bustling in, took off her hat, laid it on the piano, and at once drew
up the blind. She was not surprised to find him there, but exclaimed at
his appearance.
"Good gracious, Maurice, how dreadful you look! Are you ill?"
He hastened to reassure her, and she was a little put out at her wasted
sympathy.
"Well, no wonder, I'm sure, after the doings there were last night. A
pretty way to behave! And that you should have mixed yourself up in it
as you did!--I wouldn't have believed it of you. How I know? My dear
boy, it's the talk of the place."
Her words called up to him a more lucid remembrance of the past evening
than he had yet been capable of. In his eagerness to recollect
everything, he changed colour and looked away. Madeleine put his
confusion down to another cause.
"Never mind, it's over now, and we won't say any more about it. Sit
still, and I'll make you some tea. That will do your head good--for you
have a splitting headache, haven't you? I shall be glad of some myself,
too, after all the running about I've had this morning. I'm quite worn
out."
When she heard that he had had no dinner, she sent for bread and
sausage, and was so busy and unsettled that only when she sat down,
with her cup before her, did he get a chance to say: "What is it,
Madeleine? Is she very ill?"
Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. "Yes, she is ill enough. It's not
easy to say what the matter is, though. The doctor is to see her again
this evening. And I found a nurse."
"Then she is not going away?" He did not mean to say the words aloud;
they escaped him against his will.
His companion raised her eyebrows, filling her forehead with wrinkles.
"Going away?" she echoed. "I should say not. My dear Maurice, what is
more, it turns out she hadn't an idea he was going either. What do you
say to that?" She flushed with sincere indignation. "Not an idea--until
yesterday. My lord had the intention of sneaking off without a word,
and of leaving her to find it out for herself. Oh, it's an abominable
affair altogether!--and has been from beginning to end. There's much
about Louise, as you know, that I don't approve of, and I think she has
behaved weakly--not to call it by a harder name--all through. But now,
she has my entire sympathy. The poor girl is in a pitiable state."
"Is she ... dangerously ill?"
"Well, I don't think she'll die of it, exactly--though it might be
better for her if she did. NA!... let me fill up your cup. And eat
something more. Oh, he is ... no words are bad enough for him; though
honestly speaking, I think we might have been prepared for something of
this kind, all along. It seems he made his arrangements for going on
the quiet. Frau Schaefele advanced him the money; for of course he has
nothing of his own. But what condition do you think the old wretch
made? That he should break with Louise. Furst has told me all about it.
I went to him at once this morning. She was always jealous of
Louise--though to him she only talked of the holiness of art and the
artist's calling, and the danger of letting domestic ties entangle you,
and rubbish of that kind. I believe she was at the bottom of it that he
didn't marry Louise long ago. Well, however that may be, he now let
himself be persuaded easily enough. He was hearing on all sides that he
had been here too long; and candidly, I think he was beginning to feel
Louise a drag on him. I know of late they were not getting on well
together. But to be such a coward and a weakling! To slink off in this
fashion! Of course, when it came to the last, he was simply afraid of
her, and of the scene she would make him. Bravery has as little room in
his soul as honesty or manliness. He would always prefer a back-door
exit. Such things excite a man, don't you know?--and ruffle the
necessary artistic composure." She laughed scornfully. "However, I'm
glad to say, he didn't escape scot-free after all. Everything went well
till yesterday afternoon, when Louise, who was as unsuspecting as a
child, heard of it from some one--they say it was Krafft. Without
thinking twice--you know her ... or rather you don't--she went straight
to Schilsky and confronted him. I can't tell you what took place
between them, but I can imagine something of it, for when Louise lets
herself go, she knows no bounds, and this was a matter of life and
death to her."
Madeleine rose, blew out the flame of the spirit-lamp, and refilled the
teapot.
"Fraulein Grunhut, her landlady, heard her go out yesterday afternoon,
but didn't hear her come in, so it must have been late in the evening.
Louise hates to be pried on, and the old woman is lazy, so she didn't
go to her room till about half-past eight this morning, when she took
in the hot water. Then she found Louise stretched on the floor, just as
she had come in last night, her hat lying beside her. She was
conscious, and her eyes were open, but she was stiff and cold, and
wouldn't speak or move. Grunhut couldn't do anything with her, and was
mortally afraid. She sent for me; and between us we got her to bed, and
I went for a doctor. That was at nine, and I have been on my feet ever
since."
"It's awfully good of you."
"No, she won't die," continued Madeleine meditatively, stirring her
tea. "She's too robust a nature for that. But I shouldn't wonder if it
affected her mind. As I say, she knows no bounds, and has never learnt
self-restraint. It has always been all or nothing with her. And this I
must say: however foolish and wrong the whole thing was, she was
devoted to Schilsky, and sacrificed everything--work, money and
friends--to her infatuation. She lived only for him, and this is a
moral judgment on her. Excess of any kind brings its own punishment
with it."
She rose and smoothed her hair before the mirror.
"And now I really must get to work, and make up for the lost morning. I
haven't touched a note to-day. As for you, Maurice, if you take my
advice, you'll go home and go to bed. A good sleep is what you're
needing. Come to-morrow, if you like, for further news. I shall go back
after supper, and hear what the doctor says. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, Madeleine. You're a brick."
Having returned to his room, he lay face downwards on the sofa. He was
sick at heart. Viewed in the light of the story he had heard from
Madeleine, life seemed too unjust to be endured. It propounded riddles
no one could answer; the vast output of energy that composed it, was
misdirected; on every side was cruelty and suffering. Only the
heartless and selfish--those who deserved to suffer--went free.
He pressed the back of his hand to his tired eyes; and, despite her
good deeds, he felt a sudden antipathy to Madeleine, who, on a day like
this, could take up her ordinary occupation.
In the morning, on awakening from a heavy sleep, he was seized by a
fear lest Louise should have died in the night. Through brooding on it,
the fear became a certainty, and he went early to Madeleine, making a
detour through the BRUDERSTRASSE, where his suspicions were confirmed
by the lowered blinds. He had almost two hours to wait; it was eleven
o'clock before Madeleine returned. Her face was so grave that his heart
seemed to stop beating. But there was no change in the sick girl's
condition; the doctor was perplexed, and spoke of a consultation.
Madeleine was returning at two o'clock to relieve the nurse.
"You are foolishly letting it upset you altogether," she reproved
Maurice. "And it won't mend matters in the least. Go home and settle
down to work, like a sensible fellow."
He tried to follow Madeleine's advice. But it was of no use; when he
had struggled on for half an hour, he sprang up, realising how
monstrous it was that he should be sitting there, drilling his fingers,
getting the right notes of a turn, the specific shade of a crescendo,
when, not very far away, Louise perhaps lay dying. Again he felt keenly
the contrariness of life; and all the labour which those around him
were expending on the cult of hand and voice and car, seemed of a
ludicrous vanity compared with the grim little tragedy that touched him
so nearly; and in this mood he remained, throughout the days of
suspense that now ensued.
He went regularly every afternoon to Madeleine, and, if she were not at
home, waited till she returned, an hour, two hours, as the case might
be. This was the vital moment of the day--when he read her tidings from
her face.
At first they were always the same: there was no change. Fever did not
set in, but, day and night, Louise lay with wide, strained eyes; she
refused nourishment, and the strongest sleeping-draught had no effect.
Then, early one morning, for some trifling cause which, afterwards, no
one could recall, she broke into a convulsive fit of weeping, went on
till she was exhausted, and subsequently fell asleep.
On the day Maurice learnt that she was out of danger, he walked deep
into the woods. The news had lifted such a load from his mind that he
felt almost happy. But before he reached home again, his brain had
begun to work at matters which, during the period of anxiety, it had
left untouched. At first, in desperation, he had been selfless enough
to hope that Schilsky would return, on learning what had happened. Now,
however, that he had not done so, and Louise had passed safely through
the ordeal, Maurice was ready to tremble lest anything should occur to
soil the robe of saintly suffering, in which he draped her.
He began to take up the steady routine of his life again. Furst
received him with open arms, and no allusion was made to the night in
the BRUHL. With the cessation of his anxiety, a feeling of benevolence
towards other people awakened in him, and when, one afternoon, Schwarz
asked the assembled class if no one knew what had become of Krafft,
whether he was ill, or anything of the kind, it was Maurice who
volunteered to find out. He remembered now that he had not seen Krafft
at the Conservatorium for a week or more.
Frau Schulz looked astonished to see him, and, holding the door in her
hand, made no mien to let him enter. Herr Krafft was away, she said
gruffly, had been gone for about a week, she did not know where or why.
He had left suddenly one morning, without her knowledge, and the
following day a postcard had come from him, stating that all his things
were to lie untouched till his return.
"He was so queer lately that I'd be just as pleased if he stayed away
altogether," she said. "That's all I can tell you. Maybe you'd get
something more out of her. She knows more than she says, anyhow," and
she pointed with her thumb at the door of the adjoining PENSION.
Maurice rang there, and a dirty maid-servant showed him Avery's room.
At his knock, she opened the door herself, and first looked surprised,
then alarmed at seeing him.
"What's the matter? Has anything happened?" she stammered, like one on
the look-out for bad news.
"Then what do you want?" she asked in her short, unpleasant way, when
he had reassured her.
"I came up to see Heinz. And they tell me he is not here; and Frau
Schulz sent me to you. Schwarz was asking for him. Is it true that he
has gone away?"
"Yes, it's true."
"Where to? Will he be away long?"
"How should I know?" she cried rudely. "Am I his keeper? Find out for
yourself, if you must know," and the door slammed to in his face.
He mentioned the incident to Madeleine that evening. She looked
strangely at him, he thought, and abruptly changed the subject. A day
or two later, on the strength of a rumour that reached his ears, he
tackled Furst, and the latter, who, up to this time, had been of a
praiseworthy reticence, let fall a hint which made Maurice look blank
with amazement. Nevertheless, he could not now avoid seeing certain
incidents in his friendship with Krafft, under a different aspect.
About a fortnight had elapsed since the beginning of Louise's illness;
she was still obliged to keep her bed. More than once, of late,
Madeleine had returned from her daily visit, decidedly out of temper.
"Louise rubs me up the wrong way," she complained to Maurice. "And she
isn't in the least grateful for all I've done for her. I really think
she prefers having the nurse about her to me."
"Sick people often have such fancies," he consoled her.
"Louise shows hers a little too plainly. Besides, we have never got on
well for long together."
But one afternoon, on coming in, she unpinned her hat and threw it on
the piano, with a decisive haste that was characteristic of her in
anger.
"That's the end; I don't go back again. I'm not paid for my services,
and am under no obligation to listen to such things as Louise said to
me to-day. Enough is enough. She is well on the mend, and must get on
now as best she can. I wash my hands of the whole affair."
"But you're surely not going to take what a sick person says
seriously?" Maurice exclaimed in dismay. "How can she possibly get on
with only those strangers about her?"
"She's not so ill now. She'll be all right," answered Madeleine; she
had opened a letter that was on the table, and did not look up as she
spoke. "There's a limit to everything--even to my patience with her
rudeness."
And on returning the following day, he found, sure enough, that, true
to her word, Madeleine had not gone back. She maintained an obstinate
silence about what had happened, and requested that he would now let
the matter drop.
The truth was that Madeleine's conscience was by no means easy.
She had gone to see Louise on that particular afternoon, with even more
inconvenience to herself than usual. On admitting her, Fraulein Grunhut
had endeavoured to detain her in the passage, mumbling and
gesticulating in the mystery-mongering way with which Madeleine had no
patience. It incited her to answer the old woman in a loud, clear
voice; then, brusquely putting her aside, she opened the door of the
sick girl's room.
As she did so, she uttered an exclamation of surprise. Louise, in a
flannel dressing-gown, was standing at the high tiled stove behind the
door. Both her arms were upraised and held to it, and she leant her
forehead against the tiles.
"Good Heavens, what are you doing out of bed?" cried Madeleine; and, as
she looked round the room: "And where is Sister Martha?"
Louise moved her head, so that another spot of forehead came in contact
with the tiles, and looked up at Madeleine from under her heavy lids,
without replying.
Madeleine laid one by one on the table some small purchases she had
made on the way there.
"Well, are you not going to speak to me to-day?" she said in a pleasant
voice, as she unbuttoned her jacket. "Or tell me what I ask about the
Sister?" There was not a shade of umbrage in her tone.
Louise moved her head again, and looked away from Madeleine to the wall
of the room. "I have got up," she answered, in such a low voice that
Madeleine had to pause in what she was doing, to hear her; "because I
could not bear to lie in bed any longer. And I've sent the Sister
away--because ... oh, because I couldn't endure having her about me."
"You have sent Sister Martha away?" echoed Madeleine. "On your own
responsibility? Louise!--how absurd! Well, I suppose I must put on my
hat again and fetch her back. How can you get on alone, I should like
to know? Really, I have no time to come oftener than I do."
"I'm quite well now. I don't need anyone."
"Come, get back into bed, like a good girl, and I will make you some
tea," said Madeleine, in the gently superior tone that one uses to a
sick person, to a young child, to anyone with whom it is not fitting to
dispute.
Instead, Louise left the stove, and sat down in a low American
rocking-chair, where she crouched despondently.
"I wish I had died," she said in a toneless voice.
Madeleine smiled with exaggerated cheerfulness, and rattled the
tea-cups. "Nonsense! You mustn't talk about dying--now that you are
nearly well again. Besides, you know, such things are easily said. One
doesn't mean them."
"I wish I had died. Why didn't you let me die?" repeated Louise in the
same apathetic way.
Madeleine did not reply; she was cogitating whether it would be more
convenient to go after the nurse at once, and what she ought to do if
she could not get her to come back. For Louise would certainly have
despatched her in tragedy-fashion.
Meanwhile the latter had laid her arms along the low arms of the chair,
and now sat gazing from one to the other of her hands. In their way,
these hands of hers had acquired a kind of fame, which she had once
been vain of. They had been photographed; a sculptor had modelled them
for a statue of Antigone--long, slim and strong, with closely knit
fingers, and pale, deep-set nails: hands like those of an adoring
Virgin; hands which had an eloquent language all their own, but little
or no agility, and which were out of place on the keys of a piano.
Louise sat looking at them, and her face was so changed--the hollow
setting of the eyes reminded perpetually of the bones beneath; the
lines were hammered black below the eyes; nostrils and lips were
pinched and thinned--that Madeleine, secretly observing her, remarked
to herself that Louise looked at least ten years older than before. Her
youth, and, with it, such freshness as she had once had, were gone from
her.
"Here is your tea."
The girl drank it slowly, as if swallowing were an effort, while
Madeleine went round the room, touching and ordering, and opening a
window. This done, she looked at her watch.
"I will go now," she said, "and see if I can persuade Sister Martha to
come back. If you haven't mortally offended her, that is."
Louise started up from her chair, and put her cup, only half emptied,
on the table.
"Madeleine!--please--please, don't! I can't have her back again. I am
quite well now. There was nothing more she could do for me. I shall
sleep a thousand times better at night if she is not here. Oh, don't
bring her back again! Her voice cut like a knife, and her hands were so
hard."
She trembled with excitement, and was on the brink of tears.
"Hush!--don't excite yourself like that," said Madeleine, and tried to
soothe her. "There's no need for it. If you are really determined not
to have her, then she shall not come and that's the end of it. Not but
what I think it foolish of you all the same," she could not refrain
from adding. "You are still weak. However, if you prefer it, I'll do my
best to run up this evening to see that you have everything for the
night."
"I don't want you either."
Madeleine shrugged her shoulders, and her pity became tinged with
impatience.
"The doctor says you must go away somewhere, for a change," she said as
she beat up the pillows and smoothed out the crumpled sheets,
preparatory to coaxing her patient back to bed.
Louise shook her head, but did not speak.
"A few weeks' change of air is what you need to set you up again."
"I cannot go away."
"Nonsense! Of course you can. You don't want to be ill all the winter?"
"I don't want to be well."
Madeleine sniffed audibly. "There's no reasoning with you. When you
hear on all sides that it's for your own good----"
"Oh, stop tormenting me!" cried Louise, raising a drawn face with
disordered hair. "I won't go away! Nothing will make me. I shall stay
here--though I never get well again."
"But why? Give me one sensible reason for not going.--You can't!"
"Yes ... if ... if Eugen should come back."
The words could only just be caught. Madeleine stood, holding a sheet
with both hands, as though she could not believe her ears.
"Louise!" she said at last, in a tone which meant many things.
Louise began to cry, and was shaken by hard, dry sobs. Madeleine did
not look at her again, but went severely on with her bedmaking. When
she had finished, she crossed to the washstand, and poured out a glass
of water.
Louise took it, humbled and submissive, and gradually her sobs abated.
But now Madeleine, in place of getting ready to leave, as she had
intended, sat down at the centre table, and revolved what she felt it
to be her duty to say. When all sound of crying had ceased, she began
to speak, persuasively, in a quiet voice.
"You have brought the matter up yourself, Louise," she said, "and, now
the ice is broken, there are one or two things I should like to say to
you. First then, you have been very ill, far worse than you know--the
immediate danger is over now, so I can speak of it. But who can tell
what may happen if you persist in remaining on here by yourself, in the
state you are in?"
Louise did not stir; her face was hidden.
"The reason you give for staying is not a serious one, I hope,"
Madeleine proceeded cautiously choosing her words. "After all the ...
the precautions that were taken to ensure the ... break, it is not all
likely ... he would think of returning. And Louise," she added with
warmth, "even though he did--suppose he did--after the way he has
behaved, and his disgraceful treatment of you----"
Louise looked up for an instant. "That is not true," she said.
"Not true?" echoed Madeleine. "Well, if you are able to admire his
behaviour--if you don't consider it disgraceful--no, more than
that--infamous----" She stopped, not being able to find a stronger
epithet.
"It is not true," said Louise in the same expressionless voice. But now
she lifted her head, and pressed the palms of her hands together.
Madeleine pushed back her chair, as if she were about to rise. "Then I
have nothing more to say," she said; and went on: "If you are ready to
defend a man who has acted towards you as he has--in a way that makes a
respectable person's blood boil--there is indeed nothing more to be
said." She reddened with indignation. "As if it were not bad enough for
him to go, after all you have done for him, but that he must do it in
such a mean, underhand way--it's enough to make one sick. The only
thing to compare with it is his conduct on the night before he left. Do
you know, pray, that on the last evening, at a KNEIPE in the GOLDENE
HIRSCH, he boasted of what you had done for him--boasted about
everything that had happened between you--to a rowdy, tipsy crew? More
than that, he gave shameless details, about you going to his room that
afternoon----"
"It's not true, it's not true," repeated Louise, as if she had got
these few words by heart. She rose from her chair, and leaned on it,
half turning her back to Madeleine, and holding her handkerchief to her
lips.
Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. "Do you think I should say it, if it
weren't?" she asked. "I don't invent scandal. And you are bound to hear
it when you go out again. He did this, and worse than I choose to tell
you, and if you felt as you ought to about it, you would never give him
another thought. He's not worth it. He's not worth any respectable
person's----"
"Respectable!" burst in Louise, and raised two blazing eyes to her
companion's face. "That's the second time. Why do you come here,
Madeleine, and talk like that to me? He did what he was obliged
to--that's all: for I should never have let him go. Can't you see how
preposterous it is to think that by talking of respectability, and
unworthiness, you can make me leave off caring for him?--when for
months I have lived for nothing else? Do you think one can change one's
feelings so easily? Don't you understand that to love a person once is
to love him always and altogether?--his faults as well--everything he
does, good or bad, no matter what other people think of it? Oh, you
have never really cared for anyone yourself, or you would know it."
"It's not preposterous at all," retorted Madeleine. "Yes--if he had
deserved all the affection you wasted on him, or if unhappy
circumstances had separated you. But that's not the case. He has
behaved scandalously, without the least attempt at shielding you. He
has made you the talk of the place. And you may consider me narrow and
prejudiced, but this I must say--I am boundlessly astonished at you.
When he has shown you as plainly as he can that he's tired of you, that
you should still be ready to defend him, and have so little proper
pride that you even say you would take him back!----"
Louise turned on her. "You would never do that, Madeleine, would
you?--never so far forget yourself as to crawl to a man's feet and
ask--ask?--no, implore forgiveness, for faults you were not conscious
of having committed. You would never beg him to go on loving you, after
he had ceased to care, or think nothing on earth worth having if he
would not--or could not. As I would; as I have done." But chancing to
look at Madeleine, she grew quieter. "You would never do that, would
you?" she repeated. "And do you know why?" Her words came quickly
again; her voice shook with excitement. "Because you will never care
for anyone more than yourself--it isn't in you to do it. You will go
through life, tight on to the end, without knowing what it is to care
for some one--oh, but I mean absolutely, unthinkingly----"
She broke down, and hid her face again. Madeleine had carried the cups
and saucers to a side-table, and now put on her hat.
"And I hope I never shall," she said, forcing herself to speak calmly.
"If I thought it likely, I should never look at a man again."
But Louise had not finished. Coming round to the front of the
rocking-chair, and leaning on the table, she gazed at Madeleine with
wild eyes, while her pale lips poured forth a kind of revenge for the
suffering, real and imaginary, that she had undergone at the hands of
this cooler nature.
"And I'll tell you why. You are doubly safe; for you will never be able
to make a man care so much that--that you are forced to love him like
this in return. It isn't in you to do it. I don't mean because you're
plain. There are plenty of plainer women than you, who can make men
follow them. No, it's your nature--your cold, narrow, egotistic
nature--which only lets you care for things outside yourself in a cold,
narrow way. You will never know what it is to be taken out of yourself,
taken and shaken, till everything you are familiar with falls away."
She laughed; but tears were near at hand. Madeleine had turned her back
on her, and stood buttoning her jacket, with a red, exasperated face.
"I shall not answer you," she said. "You have worked yourself into such
a state that you don't know what you're saying. All the same, I think
you might try to curb your tongue. I have done nothing to you--but be
kind to you."
"Kind to me? Do you call it kind to come here and try to set me against
the man I love best in the world? And who loves me best, too. Yes; he
does. He would never have gone, if he hadn't been forced to--if I
hadn't been a hindrance to him--a drag on him."
"It makes me ashamed of my sex to hear you say such things. That a
woman can so far lose her pride as to----"
"Oh, other women do it in other ways. Do you think I haven't seen how
you have been trying to make some one here like you?--doing your
utmost, without any thoughts of pride or self-respect.--And how you
have failed? Yes, failed. And if you don't believe me, ask him
yourself--ask him who it is that could bring him to her, just by
raising her finger. It's to me he would come, not to you--to me who
have never given him look or thought."
Madeleine paled, then went scarlet. "That's a direct untruth. You!--and
not to egg a man on, if you see he admires you! You know every time a
passer-by looks at you in the street. You feed on such looks--yes, and
return them, too. I have seen you, my lady, looking and being looked
at, by a stranger, in a way no decent woman allows.--For the rest, I'll
trouble you to mind your own business. Whatever I do or don't do, trust
me, I shall at least take care not to make myself the laughing-stock of
the place. Yes, you have only succeeded in making yourself ridiculous.
For while you were cringing before him, and aspiring to die for his
sake, he was making love behind your back to another girl. For the last
six months. Every one knew it, it seems, but you."
She had spoken with unconcealed anger, and now turned to leave the
room. But Louise was at the door before her, and spread herself across
it.
"That's a lie, Madeleine! Of your own making. You shall prove it to me
before you go out of this room. How dare you say such a thing!--how
dare you!"
Madeleine looked at her with cold aversion, and drew back to avoid
touching her.
"Prove it?" she echoed. "Are his own words not proof enough! He told
the whole story that night, just as he had first told all about you. It
had been going on for months. Sometimes, you were hardly out of his
room, before the other was in. And if you don't believe me, ask the
person you're so proud of having attracted, without raising your
finger."
Louise moved away from the door, and went back to the table, on which
she leaned heavily. All the blood had left her face and the dark rings
below her eyes stood out with alarming distinctness. Madeleine felt a
sudden compunction at what she had done.
"It's entirely your own fault that I told you anything whatever about
it," she said, heartily annoyed with herself. "You had no right to
provoke me by saying what you did. I declare, Louise, to be with you
makes one just like you. If it's any consolation to you to know it, he
was drunk at the time, and there's a possibility it may not be true."
"Go away--go out of my room!" cried Louise. And Madeleine went, without
delay, having almost a physical sensation about her throat of the
slender hands stretched so threateningly towards her.--And this
unpleasant feeling remained with her until she turned the corner of the
street.
II.
On the afternoon when Maurice found that Madeleine had kept her word he
went home and paced his room in perplexity. He pictured Louise lying
helpless, too weak to raise her hand. His brain went stupidly over the
few people to whom he might turn for aid. Avery Hill?--Johanna Cayhill?
But Avery was occupied with her own troubles; and Johanna's
relationship to Ephie put her out of the question. He was thinking
fantastic thoughts of somehow offering his own services, or of even
throwing himself on the goodness of a person like Miss Jensen, whose
motherly form must surely imply a corresponding motherliness of heart,
when Frau. Krause entered the room, bearing a letter which she said had
been left for him an hour or two previously. She carried a lamp in her
hand, and eyed her restless lodger with suspicion.
"Why, in the name of goodness, didn't you bring this in when it came?"
he demanded. He held the unopened letter at arm's length, as if he were
afraid of it.
Frau Krause bridled instantly. Did he think she had nothing else to do
than to carry things in and out of his room? The letter had lain on the
chest of drawers in the passage; he could have seen it for himself, had
he troubled to look.
Maurice waved her away. He was staring at the envelope; he believed he
knew the handwriting. His heart beat with precise hammerings. He laid
the letter on the table, and took a few turns in the room before he
picked it up again. On examining it anew, it seemed to him that the
lightly gummed envelope had been tampered with, and he made a
threatening movement towards the door, then checked himself,
remembering that if the letter were what he believed, it would be
written in English. He tore it open, destroying the envelope in his
nervousness. There was no heading, and it was only a few lines long.
I MUST SPEAK TO YOU. WILL YOU COME TO ME THIS EVENING? LOUISE DUFRAYER.
His heart was thumping now. He was to go to her, she said so herself;
to go this moment, for it was evening already. As it was, she was
perhaps waiting for him, wondering why he did not come. He had not
shaved that day, and his first impulse was to call for hot water. In
the same breath he gave up the idea: it was out of the question by the
poor light of the lamp, and the extraordinary position of the
looking-glass. He made, however, a hasty toilet in his best, only to
colour at himself when finished. Was there ever such a fool as he? His
act contained the germ of an insult: and he rapidly changed back to his
workaday wear.
All this took time, and it was eight o'clock before he rang the
door-bell in the BRUDERSTRASSE. Now, the landlady did not mistake him
for a possible thief. But she looked at him in an unfriendly way, and
said grumblingly that Fraulein had been expecting him for an hour or
more. Then she pointed to the door of the room, and left him to make
his way in alone.
He knocked gently, but no one answered. The old woman, who stood
watching his movements, signed to him to enter, and he turned the
handle. The large room was dark, except for the light shed by a small
lamp, which stood on the table before the sofa. From somewhere out of
the dusk that lay beyond, a white figure rose and came towards him.
Louise was in a crumpled dressing-gown, and her hair was loosened from
its coil on her neck. Maurice saw so much, before she was close beside
him, her eyes searching his face.
"Oh, you have come," she said with a sigh, as if a load had been lifted
from her mind. "I thought you were not coming."
"I only got your note a few minutes ago. I ... I came at once," he
said, and stammered, as he saw how greatly illness had changed her.
"I knew you would."
She did not give him her hand, but stood gazing at him; and her look
was so helpless and forlorn that he grew uncomfortable.
"You have been ill?" he said, to render the pause that followed less
embarrassing.
"Yes; but I'm better now." She supported herself on the table; her
indecision seemed to increase, and several seconds passed before she
said: "Won't you sit down?"
He took one of the stuffed arm-chairs she indicated; and she went back
to the sofa. Again there was silence. With her elbows on her knees, her
chin on her two hands, Louise stared hard at the pattern of the
tablecloth. Maurice sat stiff and erect, waiting for her to tell him
why she had summoned him.
"You will think it strange that I should send for you like this ...
when I know you so slightly," she began at length. "But ...since I saw
you last ... I have been in trouble,"--her voice broke, but her eyes
remained fixed on the cloth. "And I am quite alone. I have no one to
help me. Then I thought of you; you were kind to me once; you offered
to help me." She paused, and wound her handkerchief to a ball.
"Anything!--anything that lies in my power," said Maurice fervently. He
fidgeted his hands round the brim of his hat, which he was holding to
him.
"Won't you tell me what it is?" he asked, after another long break. "I
should be so glad, and grateful--yes, indeed, grateful--if there were
anything I could do for you."
She met his eyes, and tried to say something, but no sound came over
her lips. She was trying to fasten her thoughts on what she had to say,
but, in spite of her efforts, they eluded her. For more than
twenty-four hours she had brooded over one idea; the strain had been
too great; and, now that the moment had come, her strength deserted
her. She would have liked to lay her head on her arms and sleep; it
almost seemed to her now, in the indifference of sheer fatigue, that it
did not matter whether she spoke or not. But as she looked at the young
man, she became conscious of an expression in his face, which made her
own grow hard.
"I won't be pitied."
Maurice turned very red. His heart had gone out to her in her distress;
and his feelings were painted on his face. His discomfiture at her
discovery was so palpable that it gave her courage to go on.
"You were one of those, were you not, who were present at a certain
cafe in the BRUHL, one evening, three weeks ago." It was more of a
statement than a question. Her eyes held him fast. His retreating
colour rose again; he had a presentiment of what was coming.
"Then you must have heard----" she began quickly, but left the sentence
unended.
His suspicions took shape, and he made a large, vague gesture of
dissent. "You heard all that was said," she continued, without paying
any heed to him. "You heard how ... how some one--no, how the man I
loved and trusted ... how he boasted about my caring for him; and not
only that, but how, before that drunken crowd, he told how I had been
to him ... to his room ... that afternoon----" She could not finish,
and pressed her knotted handkerchief to her lips.
Maurice looked round him for assistance. "You are mistaken," he
declared. "I heard nothing of the kind. Remember, I, too, was among
those ... in the state you mention," he added as an afterthought,
lowering his voice.
"That is not it." Leaning forward, she opened her eyes so wide that he
saw a rim of white round the brown of the pupils. "You must also have
heard ... how, all this time, behind my back, there was some one else
... someone he cared for ... when I thought it was only me."
The young man coloured, with her and for her. "It is not true; you have
been misled," he said with vehemence. And, again, a flash of intuition
suggested an afterthought to him. "Can you really believe it? Don't you
think better of him than that?"
For the first time since she had known him, Louise gave him a personal
look, a look that belonged to him alone, and held a warm ray of
gratitude. Then, however, she went on unsparingly: "I want you to tell
me who it was."
He laid his hat on a chair, and used his hands. "But if I assure you it
is not true? If I give you my word that you have been misinformed?"
"Who was it? What is her name?"
He rose, and went away from the table.
"I knew him better than you," she said slowly, as he did not speak:
"you or anyone else--a hundred thousand times better--and I KNOW it is
true."
Still he did not answer. "Then you won't tell me?"
"Tell you? How can I? There's nothing to tell."
"I was wrong then. You have no pity for me?"
"Pity!--I no pity?" he cried, forgetting how, a minute ago, she had
resented his feeling it. "But all the same I can't tell you what you
ask me. You don't realise what it means: putting a slur on a young
girl's name ... which has never been touched."
Directly he had said this, he was aware of his foolishness; but she let
the admission contained in the words pass unnoticed.
"Then she is not with him?" she cried, springing to her feet, and there
was a jubilation in her voice, which she did not attempt to suppress.
Maurice made no answer, but in his face was such a mixture of surprise
and disconcertion that it was answer enough.
She remained standing, with her head bowed; and Maurice, who, in his
nervousness, had gripped the back of his chair, held it so tightly that
it left a furrow in his hand. He was looking into the lamp, and did not
at first see that Louise had raised her head again and was
contemplating him. When she had succeeded in making him look at her,
she sat down on the sofa and drew the folds of her dressing-gown to her.
"Come and sit here. I want to speak to you."
But Maurice only shot a quick glance at her, and did not move.
She leaned forward, in her old position. She had pushed the heavy wings
of hair up from her forehead, and this, together with her extreme
pallor, gave her face a look of febrile intensity.
"Maurice Guest," she said slowly, "do you remember a night last summer,
when, by chance, you happened to walk with me, coming home from the
theatre?--Or have you perhaps forgotten?"
He shook his head.
"Then do you remember, too, what you said to me? How, since the first
time you had seen me--you even knew where that was, I believe--you had
thought about me ... thought too much, or words to that effect. Do you
remember?"
"Do you think when a man says a thing like that he forgets it?" asked
Maurice in a gruff voice. He turned, as he spoke, and looked down on
her with a kind of pitying wisdom. "If you knew how often I have
reproached myself for it!" he added.
"There was no need for that," she answered, and even smiled a little.
"We women never resent having such things said to us--never--though it
is supposed we do, and though we must pretend to. But I remember, too,
I was in a bad mood that night, and was angry with you, after all.
Everything seemed to have gone against me. In the theatre--in ... Oh,
no, no!" she cried, as she remembrance of that past night, with its
alternations of pain and pleasure, broke over her. "My God!"
Maurice hardly breathed, for fear he should remind her of his presence.
When the paroxysm had passed, she crossed to the window; the blinds had
not been drawn, and leaning her forehead on the glass, she looked out
into the darkness. In spite of his trouble of mind, the young man could
not but comment on the ironic fashion in which fate was treating him:
not once, in all the hours he had spent on the pavement below, had
Louise come, like this, to the window; now that she did so, he was in
the room beside her, wishing himself away.
Then, with a swift movement, she came back to him, and stood at his
side.
"Then it was not true?--what you said that night."
"True?" echoed Maurice. He instinctively moved a step away from her,
and threw a quick glance at the pale face so near his own. "If I were
to tell you how much more than that is true, you wouldn't have anything
more to do with me."
For the second time, she seemed to see him and consider him. But he
kept his head turned stubbornly away.
"You feel like that," she began in slow surprise, to continue
hurriedly: "You care for me like that, and yet, when I ask the first
and only thing I shall ever ask of you, you won't do it? It is a lesson
to me, I suppose, not to come to you for help again.--Oh, I can't
understand you men! You are all--all alike."
"I would do anything in the world for you. Anything but this."
She repeated his last words after him. "But I want nothing else."
"This I can't tell you."
"Then you don't really care. You only think you do. If you can't do
this one small thing for me! Oh, there is no one else I can turn to, or
I would. Oh, please tell me!--you who make-believe to care for me. You
won't? When it comes to the point, a man will do nothing--nothing at
all."
"I would cut off my hands for you. But you are asking me to do
something I think wrong."
"Wrong! What is wrong?--and what is right? They are only words. Is it
right that I should be left like this?--thrown away like a broken
plate? Oh, I shall not rest till I know who it was that took him from
me. And you are the only person who can help me. Are you not a little
sorry for me? Is there nothing I can do to make you sorry?"
"You won't realise what you are asking me to do."
He spoke in a constrained voice, for he felt the impossibility of
standing out much longer against her. Louise caught the note of
yielding, and taking his hand in hers, laid it against her forehead.
"Feel that! Feel how it throbs and burns! And so it has gone on for
hours now, for days. I can't think or feel--with that fever in me. I
must know who it was, or I shall go mad. Don't torture me then--you,
too! You are good. Be kind to me now. Be my friend, Maurice Guest."
Maurice was vanquished; in a low voice he told her what she wished to
hear. She read the syllables from his lips, repeated the name slowly
after him, then shook her head; she did not know it. Letting his hand
drop, she went back to the sofa.
"Tell me everything you know about her," she said imperiously. "What is
she like?--what is she like? What is the colour of her hair?"
Maurice was a poor hand at description. Questioned thus, he was not
even sure whether to call Ephie pretty or not; he knew that she was
small, and very young, but of her hair he could say little, except that
it was not black.
Louise caught at the detail. "Not black, no, not black!" she cried. "He
had black enough here," and she ran her hands through her own unruly
hair.
There was nothing she did not want to know, did not try to force from
his lips; and a relentless impatience seized her at his powerlessness.
"I must see her for myself," she said at length, when he had stammered
into silence. "You must bring her to me."
"No, that you really can't ask me to do."
She came over to him again, and took his hands. "You will bring her
here to-morrow--to-morrow afternoon. Do you think I shall hurt her? Is
she any better than I am? Oh, don't be afraid! We are not so easily
soiled."
Maurice demurred no more.
"For until I see her, I shall not know--I shall not know," she said to
herself, when he had pledged his word.
The tense expression of her face relaxed; her mouth drooped; she lay
back in the sofa-corner and shut her eyes. For what seemed a long time,
there was no sound in the room. Maurice thought she had fallen asleep.
But at his first light movement she opened her eyes.
"Now go," she said. "Please, go!" And he obeyed.
The night was cold, but, as he stood irresolute in the street, he wiped
the perspiration from his forehead. He felt very perplexed. Only one
thing was clear to him: he had promised to bring Ephie to see her the
next day, and, however wrong it might be, the promise was given and
must be kept. But what he now asked himself was: did not the bringing
of the child, under these circumstances, imply a tacit acknowledgment
that she was seriously involved?--a fact which, all along, he had
striven against admitting. For, after his one encounter with Ephie and
Schilsky, in the woods that summer, and the first firing of his
suspicions, he had seen nothing else to render him uneasy; a few weeks
later, Ephie had gone to Switzerland, and, on her return in September,
or almost directly afterwards--three or four days at most--Schilsky had
taken his departure. There had been, of course, his drunken boasts to
take into account, but firstly, Maurice had only retained a hazy idea
of their nature, and, in the next place, the events which had followed
that evening had been of so much greater importance to him that he had
had no thoughts to spare for Ephie--more especially as he then knew
that Schilsky was out of the way. But now the whole affair rose vividly
before his mind again, and in his heart he knew that he had always
believed--just as Louise believed--in Ephie's guilt. No: guilt was too
strong a word. Yet however harmless the flirtation might have been in
itself, it had been carried on in secret, in an underhand way: there
had been nothing straightforward or above-board about it; and this
alone was enough to compromise a young girl.
The Cayhills had been in Leipzig again for three weeks, but so occupied
had Maurice been during this time, that he had only paid them one hasty
call. Now he felt that he must see Ephie at once, not only to secure
her word that she would come out with him, the following day, but also
to read from her frank eyes and childish lips the assurance of her
innocence, or, at least, the impossibility of her guilt.
But as he walked to the LESSINGSTRASSE, he remembered, without being
able to help it, all the trifles which, at one time or another, had
disturbed his relations with Ephie. He recalled each of the thin,
superficial untruths, by means of which she had defended herself, the
day he had met her with Schilsky: it seemed incredible to him now that
he had not seen through them instantly. He called up her pretty,
insincere behaviour with the circle of young men that gathered round
her; the language of signs by which she had conversed with Schilsky in
the theatre. He remembered the astounding ease with which he had made
her acquaintance in the first case, or rather, with which she had made
his. Even the innocent kiss she had once openly incited him to, and on
the score of which she had been so exaggeratedly angry--this, too, was
summoned to bear witness against her. Each of these incidents now
seemed to point to a fatal frivolity, to a levity of character which,
put to a real test, would offer no resistance.
Supper was over in the PENSION, but only Mrs. Cayhill sat in her
accustomed corner. Ephie was with the rest of the boarders in the
general sitting-room, where Johanna conducted Maurice. Boehmer was
paying an evening visit, as well as a very young American, who laughed:
"Heh, heh!" at everything that was said, thereby displaying two
prominently gold teeth. Mrs. Tully sat on a small sofa, with her arm
round Ephie's waist: they were the centre of the group, and it did not
appear likely that Maurice would get an opportunity of speaking to
Ephie in private. She was in high spirits, and had only a saucy
greeting for him. He sat down beside Johanna, and waited, ill at ease.
Soon his patience was exhausted; rising, he went over to the sofa, and
asked Ephie if he might come to take her for a walk, the next
afternoon. But she would not give him an express promise; she pouted:
after all these weeks, it suddenly occurred to him to come and see
them, and then, the first thing he did, was to ask a favour of her. Did
he really expect her to grant it?
"Don't, Ephie, love, don't!" cried Mrs. Tully in her sprightly way.
"Men are really shocking creatures, and it is our duty, love, to keep
them in their place. If we don't, they grow presumptuous," and she shot
an arch look at Boehmer, who returned it, fingered his beard, and
murmured: "Cruel--cruel!"
"And even if I wanted to go when the time came, how do you expect me to
know so long beforehand? Ever so many things may happen before
to-morrow," said Ephie brilliantly; at which Mrs. Tully laughed very
much indeed, and still more at Boehmer's remark that it was an ancient
privilege of the ladies, never to be obliged to know their own minds.
"It's a libel--take that, you naughty boy!" she cried, and slapped him
playfully on the hand. "Ephie, love, how shall we punish him?"
"He is not to come again for a week," answered Ephie slily; and at
Boehmer's protestations of penitence and despair, both she and Mrs.
Tully laughed till the tears stood in their eyes, Ephie all the more
extravagantly because Maurice stood unsmiling before her.
"I ask this as a direct favour, Ephie. There's something I want to say
to you--something important," he added in a low voice, so that only she
could hear it.
Ephie changed colour at once, and tried to read his face.
"Then I may come at five? You will be ready? Good night."
Johanna followed him into the passage, and stood by while he put on his
coat. They had used up all their small talk in the sitting-room, and
had nothing more to say to each other. When however they shook hands,
she observed impulsively: "Sometimes I wish we were safe back home
again." But Maurice only said: "Indeed?" and displayed no curiosity to
know the reason why.
After he had gone, Ephie was livelier than before, as long as she was
being teased about her pale, importunate admirer. Then, suddenly, she
pleaded a headache, and went to her own room.
Johanna, listening outside the door, concluded from the stillness that
her sister was asleep. But Ephie heard Johanna come and go. She could
not sleep, nor could she get Maurice's words out of her mind. He had
something important to say to her. What could it be? There was only one
important subject in the world for her now; and she longed for the hour
of his visit--longed, hoped, and was more than half afraid.
III.
Since her return to Leipzig, Ephie's spirits had gone up and down like
a barometer in spring. In this short time, she passed through more
changes of mood than in all her previous life. She learned what
uncertainty meant, and suspense, and helplessness; she caught at any
straw of hope, and, for a day on end, would be almost comforted; she
invented numberless excuses for Schilsky, and rejected them, one and
all. For she was quite in the dark about his movements; she had not
seen him since her return, and could hear nothing of him. Only the
first of the letters she had written to him from Switzerland had
elicited a reply, and he had left all the notes she had sent him, since
getting back, unanswered.
Her fellow-boarder, Mrs. Tully, was her only confidant; and that, only
in so far as this lady, knowing that what she called "a little romance"
was going on, had undertaken to enclose any letters that might arrive
during Ephie's absence. Johanna had no suspicions, or rather she had
hitherto had none. In the course of the past week, however, it had
become plain even to her blind, sisterly eyes that something was the
matter with Ephie. She could still be lively when she liked, almost
unnaturally lively, and especially in the company of Mrs. Tully and her
circle; but with these high spirits alternated fits of depression, and
once Johanna had come upon her in tears. Driven into a corner, Ephie
declared that Herr Becker had scolded her at her lesson; but Johanna
was not satisfied with this explanation; for formerly, the master's
blame or praise had left no impression on her little sister's mind.
Even worse than this, Ephie could now, on slight provocation, be
thoroughly peevish--a thing so new in her that it worried Johanna most
of all. The long walks of the summer had been given up; but Ephie had
adopted a way of going in and out of the house, just as it pleased her,
without a word to her sister. Johanna scrutinised her keenly, and the
result was so disturbing that she resolved to broach the subject to her
mother.
On the morning after Maurice's visit, therefore, she appeared in the
sitting-room, with a heap of undarned stockings in one hand, her
work-basket in the other, and with a very determined expression on her
face. But the moment was not a happy one: Mrs. Cayhill was deep in WHY
PAUL FERROL KILLED HIS WIFE; and would be lost to her surroundings
until the end of the book was reached. Had Johanna been of an observant
turn of mind, she would have waited a little; for, finding the
intermediate portion of the novel dry reading, Mrs. Cayhill was getting
over the pages at the rate of three or four a minute, and would soon
have been finished.
But Johanna sat down at the table and opened fire.
"I wish to speak to you, mother," she said firmly.
Mrs. Cayhill did not even blink. Johanna drew several threads across a
hole she was darning, before she repeated, in the same decided tone:
"Do you hear me, mother? There is something I wish to speak to you
about."
"Hm," said Mrs. Cayhill, without raising her eyes from the page. She
heard Johanna, and was even vaguely distracted by her from the web of
circumstance that was enveloping her hero; but she believed, from
experience, that if she took no notice of her, Johanna would not
persist. What the latter had to say would only be a reminder that it
was mail-day, and no letters were ready; or that if she did not put on
her bonnet and go out for a walk, she would be obliged to take another
of her nerve-powders that night: and Mrs. Cayhill hated moral
persuasion with all her heart.
"Put down your book, mother, please, and listen to me," continued
Johanna, without any outward sign of impatience, and as she spoke, she
drew another stocking over her hand.
"What IS the matter, Joan? I wish you would let me be," answered Mrs.
Cayhill querulously, still without looking up.
"It's about Ephie, mother. But you can't hear me if you go on reading."
"I can hear well enough," said Mrs. Cayhill, and turning a page, she
lost herself, to all appearance, in the next one. Johanna did not
reply, and for some minutes there was silence, broken only by the
turning of the leaves. Then, compelled by something that was stronger
than herself, Mrs. Cayhill laid her book on her knee, gave a loud sigh,
and glanced at Johanna's grave face.
"You are a nuisance, Joan. Well, make haste now--what is it?"
"It's Ephie, mother. I am not easy about her lately. I don't think she
can be well. She is so unlike herself."
"Really, Joan," said Mrs. Cayhill, laughing with an exaggerated
carelessness. "I think I should be the first to notice if she were
sick. But you like to make yourself important, that's what it is, and
to have a finger in every pie. There is nothing whatever the matter
with the child."
"She's not well, I'm sure," persisted Johanna, without haste. "I have
noticed it for some time now. I think the air here is not agreeing with
her. I constantly hear it said that this is an enervating place. I
believe it would be better for her if we went somewhere else for the
winter--even if we returned home. Nothing binds us, and health is the
first and chief----"
"Go home?" cried Mrs. Cayhill, and turned her book over on its face.
"Really, Joan, you are absurd! Because Ephie finds it hard to settle
down again, after such a long vacation--and that's all it is--you want
to rush off to a fresh place, when ... when we are just so comfortably
fixed here for the winter, and where we have at last gotten us a few
friends. As for going home, why, every one would suppose we'd gone
crazy. We haven't been away six months yet--and when Mr. Cayhill is
coming over to fetch us back--and ... and everything."
She spoke with heat; for she knew from experience that what her elder
daughter resolved on, was likely to be carried through.
"That is all very well, mother," continued Johanna unmoved. "But I
don't think your arguments are sound if we find that Ephie is really
sick, and needs a change."
"Arguments not sound! What big words you love to use, Joan! You let
Ephie be. She grows prettier every day, and she's a favourite wherever
she goes."
"That's another thing. Her head is being turned, and she will soon be
quite spoilt. She begins to like the fuss and attention so well
that----"
"You had your chances too, Joan. You needn't be jealous."
Johanna had heard this remark too often to be sensitive to it.
"When it comes to serious 'chances,' as you call them, no one will be
more pleased for Ephie or more interested than I. But this is something
different. You see that yourself, mother, I am sure. These young men
who come about the house are so foolish, and immature, and they have
such different ideas of things from ourselves. They think so...
so"--Johanna hesitated for a word--"so laxly on earnest subjects. And
it is telling on Ephie--Look, for instance, at Mr. Dove! I don't want
to say anything against him, in particular. He is really more serious
than the rest. But for some time now, he has been making himself
ridiculous,"--Johanna had blushed for Dove on the occasion of his last
visit. "No one could be more in earnest than he is; but Ephie only
makes fun of him, in a heartless way. She won't see what a grave matter
it is to him."
Mrs. Cayhill laughed, not at all displeased. "Young people will be
young people. You can't put old heads on young shoulders, Joan, or shut
them up in separate houses. Ephie is an extremely pretty girl, and it
will be the same wherever we go.--As for young Dove, he knows well
enough that nothing can come of it, and if he chooses to continue his
attentions, why, he must take the consequences--that's all. Absurd!--a
boy and girl flirtation, and to make so much of it! A mountain of a
molehill, as usual. And half the time, you only imagine things, and
don't see what is going on under your very nose. Anyone but you, I'm
sure, would find more to object to in the way young Guest behaves than
Dove."
"Maurice Guest?" said Johanna, and laid her hands with stocking and
needle on the table.
"Yes, Maurice Guest," repeated Mrs. Cayhill, with complacent mockery.
"Do you think no one has eyes but yourself?--No, Joan, you're not sharp
enough. Just look at the way he went on last night! Every one but you
could see what was the matter with him. Mrs. Tully told me about it
afterwards. Why, he never took his eyes off her."
"Oh, I'm sure you are mistaken," said Johanna earnestly, and was silent
from sheer surprise. "He has been here so seldom of late," she added
after a pause, thinking aloud.
"Just for that very reason," replied Mrs. Cayhill, with the same air of
wisdom. "A nice-minded young man stays away, if he sees that his
feelings are not returned, or if he has no position to offer.--And
another thing I'll tell you, Joan, though you do think yourself so
clever. You don't need to worry if Ephie is odd and fidgety sometimes
just now. At her age, it's only to be expected. You know very well what
I mean. All girls go through the same thing. You did yourself."
After this, she took up her book again, having, she knew, successfully
silenced her daughter, who, on matters of this nature, was extremely
sensitive.
Johanna went methodically on with her darning; but the new idea which
her mother had dropped into her mind, took root and grew. Strange that
it had not occurred to her before! Dove's state of mind had been patent
from the first; but she had had no suspicions of Maurice Guest. His
manner with Ephie had hitherto been that of a brother: he had never
behaved like the rest. Yet, when she looked back on his visit of the
previous evening, she could not but be struck by the strangeness of his
demeanour: his distracted silence, his efforts to speak to Ephie alone,
and the expression with which he had watched her. And Ephie?--what of
her? Now that Johanna thought of it, a change had also come over
Ephie's mode of treating Maurice; the gay insouciance of the early days
had given place to the pert flippancy which, only the night before, had
so pained her sister. What had brought about this change? Was it pique?
Was Ephie chafing, in secret, at his prolonged absences, and was she,
girl-like, anxious to conceal it from him?
Johanna gathered up her work to go to her own room and think the matter
out in private. In the passage, she ran into the arms of Mrs. Tully,
whom she disliked; for, ever since coming to the PENSION, this lady had
carried on a kind of cult with Ephie, which was distasteful in the
extreme to Johanna.
"Oh, Miss Cayhill!" she now exclaimed. "I was just groping my way--it
is indeed groping, is it not?--to your sitting-room. WHERE is your
sister? I want SO much to ask her if she will have tea with me this
afternoon. I am expecting a few friends, and should be so glad if she
would join us."
"Ephie is practising, Mrs. Tully," said Johanna in her coolest tone.
"And I cannot have her disturbed."
"She is so very, very diligent," said Mrs. Tully with enthusiasm. "I
always remark to myself on hearing her, how very idle a life like mine
is in comparison. I am able to do SO little; just a mere trifle here
and there, a little atom of good, one might say. I have no
talents.--And you, too, dear Miss Cayhill. So studious, so clever! I
hear of you on every side," and, letting her eyes rest on Johanna's
head, she wondered why the girl wore her hair so unbecomingly.
Johanna did not respond.
"If only you would let your hair grow, it would make such a difference
to your appearance," said Mrs. Tully suddenly, with disconcerting
outspokenness.
Johanna drew herself up.
"Thanks," she said. "I have always worn my hair like this, and at my
age, have no intention of altering it," and leaving Mrs. Tully
protesting vehemently at such false modesty, she went past her, into
her own room, and shut the door.
She sat down by the window to sew. But her hands soon fell to her lap,
and with her eyes on the backs of the neighbouring houses, she
continued her interrupted reflections. First, though, she threw a
quick, sarcastic side-glance on her mother and herself. As so often
before, when she had wanted to pin her mother's attention to a subject,
the centre of interest had shifted in spite of her efforts, and they
had ended far from where they had begun: further, she, Johanna, had a
way, when it came to the point, not of asking advice or of faithfully
discussing a question, but of emphatically giving her opinion, or of
stating what she considered to be the facts of the case.
From an odd mixture of experience and self-distrust, Johanna had,
however, acquired a certain faith in her mother's opinions--these
blind, instinctive hits and guesses, which often proved right where
Johanna's carefully drawn conclusions failed. Here, once more, her
mother's idea had broken in upon her like a flash of light, even though
she could not immediately bring herself to accept it. Maurice and
Ephie! She could not reconcile the one with the other. Yet what if the
child were fretting? What if he did not care? A pang shot through her
at the thought that any outsider should have the power to make Ephie
suffer. Oh, she would make him care!--she would talk to him as he had
never been talked to in his life before.
The sisters' rooms were connected by a door; and, gradually, in spite
of her preoccupation, Johanna could not but become aware how brokenly
Ephie was practising. Coaxing, encouragement, and sometimes even
severity, were all, it is true, necessary to pilot Ephie through the
two hours that were her daily task; but as idle as to-day, she had
never been. What could she be doing? Johanna listened intently, but not
a sound came from the room; and impelled by a curiosity to observe her
sister in a new light, she rose and opened the door.
Ephie was standing with her back to it, staring out of the window, and
supporting herself on the table by her violin, which she held by the
neck. At Johanna's entrance, she started, grew very red, and hastily
raised the instrument to her shoulder.
"What are you doing, Ephie? You are wasting a great deal of time," said
Johanna in the tone of mild reproof that came natural to her, in
speaking to her little sister. "Is anything the matter to-day? If you
don't practice better than this, you won't have the ETUDE ready by
Friday, and Herr Becker will make you take it again--for the third
time."
"He can if he likes. I guess I don't care," said Ephie nonchalantly,
and, seizing the opportunity offered for a break, she sat down, and
laid bow and fiddle on the table.
"Have you remembered everything he pointed out to you at your last
lesson?" asked Johanna, going over to the music-stand, and peering at
the pages with her shortsighted eyes. "Let me see--what was it now?
Something about this double-stopping here, and the fingering in this
position."
Ephie laughed. "Old Joan, what do you know about it?"
"Not much, dear, I admit," said Johanna pleasantly. "But try and master
it, like a good girl. So you can get rid of it, and go on to something
else."
Ephie sat back, clasped her hands behind her head, and gave a long
sigh. "Yes, to the next one," she said. "Oh, if you only knew how sick
I am of them, Joan! The next won't be a bit better than this. They are
all alike--a whole book of them."
Johanna looked down at the little figure with the plump, white arms,
and discontented expression; and she tried to find in the childish face
something she had previously not seen there.
"Are you tired of studying, Ephie?" she asked. "Would you like to leave
off and go away?"
"Go away from Leipzig? Where to?" Ephie did not unclasp her hands, but
her eyes grew vigilant.
"Oh, there are plenty of other places, child. Dresden--or Weimar--or
Stuttgart--where you could take lessons just as well. Or if you are
tired of studying altogether, there is no need for you to go on with
it. We can return home, any day. Sometimes, I think it would be better
if we did. You have not been yourself lately, dear. I don't think you
are very well."
"I not myself?--not well? What rubbish you talk, Joan! I am quite well,
and wish you wouldn't tease me. I guess you want to go away yourself.
You are tired of being here. But nothing shall induce me to go. I love
old Leipzig. And I still have heaps to learn before I leave off
studying.--I don't even know whether I shall be ready by spring. It all
depends. And now, Joan, go away." She took up her violin and put it on
her shoulder. "Now it's you who are wasting time. How can I practise
when you stand there talking?"
Johanna was silent. But after this, she did not venture to mention
Maurice's name; and she had turned to leave the room when she
remembered her meeting with Mrs. Tully.
"I would rather you did not go to tea, Ephie," she ended, and then
regretted having said it.
"That's another of your silly prejudices, Joan. I want to know why you
feel so about Mrs. Tully. I think she's lovely. Not that I'd have gone
anyway. I promised Maurice to go for a walk with him at five. I know
what her 'few friends' means, too--just Boehmer, and she asks me along
so people will think he comes to see me, and not her. He sits there,
and twirls his moustache, and makes eyes at her, and she makes them
back. I'm only for show. No, I shouldn't have gone. I can't bear
Boehmer. He's such a goat."
"You didn't think that as long as he came to see us," expostulated
Johanna.
"No, of course not. But so he only comes to see her, I do.--And
sometimes, Joan, why it's just embarrassing. The last afternoon, why,
he had a headache or something, and she made him lie on the sofa, with
a rug over him, so she could bathe his head with eau-de-cologne. I
guess she's going to marry him. And I'm not the only one. The other day
I heard Frau Walter and Frau von Baerle talking in the dining-room
after dinner, and they said the little English widow was very
HEIRATSLUSTIG."
"Ephie, I don't like to hear you repeat such foolish gossip," said
Johanna in real distress. "And if you can understand and remember a
word like that, you might really take more pains with your German. It
is not impossible for you to learn, you see."
"Joan the preacher, and Joan the teacher, and Joan the wise old bird,"
sang Ephie, and laughed. "I think Mrs. Tully is real kind. She's going
to show me a new way to do my hair. This style is quite out in London,
she says."
"Don't let her touch your hair. It couldn't be better than it is," said
Johanna quickly. But Ephie turned her head this way and that, and
considered herself in the looking-glass.
Now that she knew Maurice was expected that afternoon, Johanna awaited
his arrival with impatience. Meanwhile, she believed she was not wrong
in thinking Ephie unusually excited. At dinner, where, as always, the
elderly boarders made a great fuss over her, her laughter was so loud
as to grate on Johanna's ear; but afterwards, in their own
sitting-room, a trifle sufficed to put her out of temper. A new hat had
been sent home, a hat which Johanna had not yet seen. Now that it had
come, Ephie was not sure whether she liked it or not; and all the cries
of admiration her mother and Mrs. Tully uttered, when she put it on,
were necessary to reassure her. Johanna was silent, and this unspoken
disapproval irritated Ephie.
"Why don't you say something, Joan?" she cried crossly. "I suppose you
think it's homely?"
"Frankly, I don't care for it much, dear. To my mind, it's overtrimmed."
This was so precisely Ephie's own feeling that she was more annoyed
than ever; she taunted Johanna with old-fashioned, countrified tastes;
and, in spite of her mother's comforting assurances, retired in a pet
to her own room.
That afternoon, as they sat together at tea, Mrs. Cayhill, who for some
time had considered Ephie fondly, said: "I can't understand you
thinking she isn't well, Joan. I never saw her look better."
Ephie went crimson. "Now what has Joan been saying about me?" she asked
angrily.
Johanna had left the table, and was reading on the sofa.
"I only said what I repeated to yourself, Ephie. That I didn't think
you were looking well."
"Just fancy," said Mrs. Cayhill, laughing good-humouredly, "she was
saying we ought to leave Leipzig and go to some strange place. Even
back home to America. You don't want to go away, darling, do you?"
"No, really, Joan is too bad," cried Ephie, with a voice in which tears
and exasperation struggled for the mastery. "She always has some new
fad in her head. She can't leave us alone--never! Let her go away, so
she wants to. I won't. I'm happy here. I love being here. Even if you
both go away, I shall stop."
She got up from the table, and went to a window, where she stood biting
her lips, and paying small attention to her mother's elaborate protests
that she, too, had no intention of being moved.
Johanna did not raise her eyes from her book. She could have wept: not
only at the spirit of rebellious dislike, which was beginning to show
more and more clearly in everything Ephie said. But was no one but
herself awake to the change that was taking place in the child, day by
day? She would write to her father, without delay, and make him insist
on their returning to America.
From the moment Maurice entered the room, she did not take her eyes off
him; and, under her scrutiny, the young man soon grew nervous. He sat
and fidgeted, and found nothing to say.
Ephie was wayward: she did not think she wanted to go out; it looked
like rain. Johanna refrained from interfering; but Maurice was most
persistent: he begged Ephie not to disappoint him, and, when this
failed, said angrily that she had no business to bring him there for
such capricious whims. This treatment cowed Ephie; and she went at once
to put on her hat and jacket.
"He wants to speak to her; and she knows it; and is trying to avoid
it," said Johanna to herself; and her heart beat fast for both of them.
But she was alone with Maurice; she must not lose the chance of
sounding him a little.
"Where do you think of going for a walk?" she asked, and her voice had
an odd tone to her ears.
"Where? Oh, to the ROSENTAL--or the SCHEIBENHOLZ--or along the river.
Anywhere. I don't know."
She coughed. "Have you noticed anything strange about Ephie lately? She
is not herself. I'm afraid she is not well."
He had noticed nothing. But he did not face Johanna; and he held the
photograph he was looking at upside down.
She leaned out of the window to watch them walk along the street. At
this moment, she was fully convinced of the correctness of her mother's
assumption; and by the thought of what might take place within the next
hour, she was much disturbed. During the rest of the afternoon, she
found it impossible to settle to anything; and she wandered from one
room to another, unable even to read. But it struck six, seven, eight
o'clock; it was supper-time; and still Ephie had not come home. Mrs.
Cayhill grew anxious, too, and Johanna strained her eyes, watching the
dark street. At nine and at ten, she was pacing the room, and at
eleven, after a messenger had been sent to Maurice's lodging and had
found no one there she buttoned on her rain-cloak, to accompany one of
the servants to the police-station.
"Why did I let her go?--Oh, why did I let her go!"
IV.
Maurice and Ephie walked along the LESSINGSTRASSE without speaking--it
was a dull, mild day, threatening to rain, as it had rained the whole
of the preceding night. But Ephie was not accustomed to be silent; she
found the stillness disconcerting, and before they had gone far, shot a
furtive look at her companion. She did not intend him to see it; but he
did, and turned to her. He cleared his throat, and seemed about to
speak, then changed his mind. Something in his face, as she observed it
more nearly, made Ephie change colour and give an awkward laugh.
"I asked you before how you liked my hat," she said, with another
attempt at the airiness which, to-day, she could not command. "And you
didn't say. I guess you haven't looked at it. You're in such a hurry."
Maurice turned his head; but he did not see the hat. Instead, he
mentally answered a question Louise had put to him the day before, and
which he had then not known how to meet. Yes, Ephie was pretty,
radiantly pretty, with the fresh, unsullied charm of a flower just
blown.
"Joan was so stupid about it," she went on at random; her face still
wore its uncertain smile. "She said it was overtrimmed, and top-heavy,
and didn't become me. As if she ever wore anything that suited her! But
Joan is an old maid. She hasn't a scrap of taste. And as for you,
Maurice, why I just don't believe you know one hat from another. Men
are so stupid."
Again they went forward in silence.
"You are tiresome to-day," she said at length, and looked at him with a
touch of defiance, as a schoolgirl looks at the master with whom she
ventures to remonstrate.
"Yes, I'm a dull companion."
"Knowing it doesn't make it any better."
But she was not really cross; all other feelings were swallowed up by
the uneasiness she felt at his manner of treating her.
"Where are we going?" she suddenly demanded of him, with a little quick
upward note in her voice. "This is not the way to the SCHEIBENHOLZ."
"No." He had been waiting for the question. "Ephie,"--he cleared his
throat anew. "I am taking you to see a friend--of mine."
"Is that what you brought me out for? Then you didn't want to speak to
me, as you said? Then we're not going for a walk?"
"Afterwards, perhaps. It's like this. Some one I know has been very
ill. Now that she is getting better, she needs rousing and cheering up,
and that kind of thing; and I said I would bring you to call on her.
She knows you by sight--and would like to know you personally," he
added, with a lame effort at explanation.
"Is that so?" said Ephie with sudden indifference; and her heart, which
had begun to thump at the mention of a friend, quieted down at once. In
fancy, she saw an elderly lady with shawls and a footstool, who had
been attracted by her fresh young face; the same thing had happened to
her before.
Now, however, that she knew the object of their walk, she was greatly
relieved, as if a near danger had been averted; but she had not taken
many steps forward before she was telling herself that another hope was
gone. The only thing to do was to take the matter into her own hands;
it was now or never; and simply a question of courage.
"Maurice, say, do many people go away from here in the fall?--leave the
Con., I would say?" she asked abruptly. "I mean is this a time more
people leave than in spring?"
Maurice started; he had been lost in his own thoughts, which all
centred round this meeting he had weakly agreed to arrange. Again and
again he had tried to imagine how it would fall out. But he did not
know Louise well enough to foresee how she would act; and the nearer
the time came, the stronger grew his presentiment of trouble. His chief
remaining hope was that there would be no open speaking, that
Schilsky's name would not be mentioned; and plump into the midst of
this hope fell Ephie's question. He turned on her; she coloured
furiously, and walked into a pool of water; and, at this moment,
everything was as clear to Maurice as though she had said: "Where is
be? Why has he gone?"
"Why do you ask?" he queried with unconscious sharpness. "No, Easter is
the general time for leaving. But people who play in the PRUFUNGEN
then, sometimes stay for the summer term. Why do you ask?"
"Gracious, Maurice, how tiresome you are! Must one always say why? I
only wanted to know. I missed people I used to see about, that's all."
"Yes, a number have not come back."
He was so occupied with what they were saying that he, in his turn,
stepped into a puddle, splashing the water up over her shoe. Ephie was
extremely annoyed.
"Look!--look what you've done!" she cried, showing him her spikey
little shoe. "Why don't you look where you're going? How clumsy you
are!" and, in a sudden burst of illhumour: "I don't know why you're
bringing me here. It's a horrid part of the city anyway. I didn't have
any desire to come. I guess I'll turn back and go home."
"We're almost there now."
"I don't care. I don't want to go."
"But you shall, all the same. What's the matter with you to-day that
you don't know your own mind for two minutes together?"
"You didn't inquire if I wanted to come. You're just horrid, Maurice."
"And you're a capricious child."
He quickened his pace, afraid she might still escape him; and Ephie had
hard work to keep up with him. As she trotted along, a few steps
behind, there arose in her a strong feeling of resentment against
Maurice, which was all the stronger because she suspected that she was
on the brink of hearing her worst suspicions confirmed. But she could
not afford to yield to the feeling, when the last chance she had of
getting definite information was passing from her. Knitting both hands
firmly inside her muff, she asked, with an earnestness which, to one
who knew, was fatally tale-telling: "Did anyone you were acquainted
with leave, Maurice?"
"Yes," said the young man at her side, with brusque determination. He
remained untouched by the tone of appeal in which Ephie put the
question; for he himself suffered under her continued hedging. "Yes,"
he said, "some one did, and that was a man called Schilsky--a tall,
red-haired fellow, a violinist. But he has only just gone. He came back
after the vacation to settle his affairs, and say good-bye to his
friends. Is there anything else you want to know?"
He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. After
all, Ephie was such a child. He could not see her face, which was
hidden by the brim of the big hat, but there was something pathetic in
the line of her chin, and the droop of her arms and shoulders. She
seemed to shrink under his words--to grow smaller. As he stood aside to
let her pass before him, through the house-door in the BRUDERSTRASSE,
he had a quick revulsion of feeling. Instead of being rough and cruel
to her, he should have tried to win her confidence with brotherly
kindness. But he had had room in his mind for nothing but the meeting
with Louise, and now there was no more time; they were going up the
stairs. All he could do was to say gently: "I ought to tell you, Ephie,
that the person we are going to see has been very, very ill--and needs
treating with the utmost consideration. I rely on your tact and
good-feeling."
But Ephie did not reply; the colour had left her face, and for once,
the short upper-lip closed firmly on the lower one. For some minutes
amazed anger with Maurice was all she felt. Then, however, came the
knowledge of what his words meant: he knew--Maurice knew; he had seen
through her fictions; he would tell on her; there would be dreadful
scenes with Joan; there would be reproaches and recriminations; she
would be locked up, or taken away. As for what lay beyond, his
assertion that Schilsky had been there--had been and gone, without a
word to her--that was a sickening possibility, which, at present, her
mind could not grasp. She grew dizzy under these blows that rained down
on her, one after the other. And meanwhile, she had to keep up
appearances, to go on as though nothing had happened, when it seemed
impossible even to drag herself to the top of the winding flight of
stairs. She held her head down; there was a peculiar clicking in her
throat, which she could not master; she felt at every step as if she
would have to burst out crying.
At the glass of the door, and at the wizened old face that appeared
behind it, she looked with unseeing eyes; and she followed Maurice
mechanically along the passage to a door at the end.
In his agitation the young man forgot to knock; and as they entered, a
figure sprang up from the sofa-corner, and made a few impulsive steps
towards them.
Maurice went over to Louise and took her hand.
"I've brought her," he said in a low tone, and with a kind of appeal in
voice and eyes, which he was not himself aware of. Louise answered the
look, and went on looking at him, as if she were fearful of letting her
eyes stray. Both turned at an exclamation from Ephie. She was still
standing where Maurice had left her, close beside the door; but her
face was flaming, and her right hand fumbled with the doorhandle.
"Ephie!" said Maurice warningly. He was afraid she would turn the
handle, and, going over to her, took her by the arm.
"Say, Maurice, I'm going home," she said under her breath. "I can't
stop here. Oh, why did you bring me?"
"Ssh!--be a good girl, Ephie," he replied as though speaking to a
child. "Come with me."
An inborn politeness struggled with Ephie's dread. "I can't. I don't
know her name," she whispered. But she let him draw her forward to
where Louise was standing; and she held out her hand.
"Miss--?" she said in a small voice, and waited for the name to be
filled in.
Louise had watched them whispering, with a stony fare, but, at Ephie's
gesture, life came into it. Her eyes opened wide; and drawing back from
the girl's outstretched hand, yet without seeming to see it, she turned
with a hasty movement, and went over to the window, where she stood
with her back to them.
This was the last straw; Ephie dropped on a chair, and hiding her face
in her hands, burst into the tears she had hitherto restrained. Her
previous trouble was increased a hundredfold. For she had recognised
Louise at once; she felt that she was in a trap; and the person who had
entrapped her was Maurice. Holding a tiny lace handkerchief to her
eyes, she sobbed as though her heart would break.
"Don't cry, dear, don't cry," said the young man. "It's all right." But
his thoughts were with Louise. He was apprehensive of what she might do
next.
As if in answer to his fear, she crossed the room.
"Ask her to take her hands down. I want to see her face."
Maurice bent over Ephie, and touched her shoulder.
"Ephie, dear, do you hear? Look up, like a good girl, and speak to Miss
Dufrayer."
But Ephie shook off his hand.
Over her bowed head, their eyes met; and the look Louise gave the young
man was cold and questioning. He shrugged his shoulders: he could do
nothing; and retreating behind the writing-table, he left the two girls
to themselves.
"Stand up, please," said Louise in an unfriendly voice; and as Ephie
did not obey, she made a movement to take her by the wrists.
"No, no!--don't touch me," cried Ephie, and rose in spite of herself.
"What right have you to speak to me like this?"
She could say no more, for, with a quick, unforeseen movement, Louise
took the young girl's face in both hands, and turned it up. And after
her first instinctive effort to draw back, Ephie kept still, like a
fascinated rabbit, her eyes fixed on the dark face that looked down at
her.
Seconds passed into minutes; and the minutes seemed hours. Maurice
watched, on the alert to intervene, if necessary.
At the entrance of her visitors, Louise had been unable to see
distinctly, so stupefied was she by the thought that the person on whom
her thoughts had run, with a kind of madness, for more than forty-eight
hours, was actually in the room beside her--it was just as though a
nightmare phantom had taken bodily form. And then, too, though she had
spent each of these hours in picturing to herself what this girl would
be like, the reality was so opposed to her imagining that, at first,
she could not reconcile the differences.
Now she forced herself to see every line of the face. Nothing escaped
her. She saw how loosened tendrils of hair on neck and forehead became
little curls; saw the finely marked brows, and the dark blue veins at
the temples; the pink and white colouring of the cheeks; the small
nose, modelled as if in wax; the fascinating baby mouth, with its short
upper-lip. Like most dark, sallow women, whose own brief freshness is
past, the elder girl passionately admired such may-blossom beauty, as
something belonging to a different race from herself. And this was not
all: as she continued to look into Ephie's face, she ceased to be
herself; she became the man whose tastes she knew better than her own;
she saw with his eyes, felt with his senses. She pictured Ephie's face,
arch and smiling, lifted to his; and she understood and excused his
weakness. He had not been able to help what had happened: this was the
prettiness that drew him in, the kind he had invariably turned to look
back at, in the street--something fair and round, adorably small and
young, something to be petted and protected, that clung, and was
childishly subordinate. For her dark sallowness, for her wilful
mastery, he had only had a passing fancy. She was not his type, and she
knew it. But to have known it vaguely, when it did not matter, and to
know it at a moment like the present, were two different things.
In a burst of despair she let her arms fall to her sides; but her
insatiable eyes gazed on; and Ephie, though she was now free, did not
stir, but remained standing, with her face raised, in a silly
fascination. And the eyes, having taken in the curves of cheeks and
chin, and the soft white throat, passed to the rounded, drooping
shoulders, to the plumpness of the girlish figure, embracing the whole
body in their devouring gaze. Ephie went hot and cold beneath them; she
felt as if her clothes were being stripped from her, and she left
standing naked. Louise saw the changing colour, and interpreted it in
her own way. His--all his! He was not the mortal--she knew it only too
well--to have this flower within his reach, and not clutch at it,
instinctively, as a child clutches at sunbeams. It would riot have been
in nature for him to do otherwise than take, greedily, without
reflection. At the thought of it, a spasm of jealousy caught her by the
throat; her hanging hands trembled to hurt this infantile prettiness,
to spoil these lips that had been kissed by his.
Maurice was at her side. "Don't hurt her," he said, and did not know
how the words came to his lips.
The spell was broken. The unnatural expression died out of her face;
she was tired and apathetic.
"Hurt her?" she repeated faintly. "No, don't be afraid. I shall not
hurt her. But if I beat her with ropes till all my strength was gone, I
couldn't hurt her as she has hurt me."
"Hush! Don't say such things."
"I? I hurt you?" said Ephie, and began to cry afresh. "How could I? I
don't even know you."
"No, you don't know me; and yet you have done me the cruellest wrong."
"Oh, no, no," sobbed Ephic. "No, indeed!"
"He was all I had--all I cared for. And you plotted, and planned, and
stole him from me--with your silly baby face."
"It's not true," wept Ephie. "How could I? I didn't know anything about
you. He ... he never spoke of you."
Louise laughed. "Oh, I can believe that! And you thought, didn't you,
you poor little fool, that he only cared for you? That was why my name
was never mentioned. He didn't need to scheme, and contrive, and lie,
lie abominably, for fear I should come to hear what he was doing!"
"No, indeed," sobbed Ephie. "Never! And you've no right to say such
things of him."
"I no right?" Louise drew herself up. "No right to say what I like of
him? Are you going to tell me what I shall say and what I shan't of the
man I loved?--yes, and who loved me, too, but in a way you couldn't
understand you who think all you have to do is to smile your silly
smile, and spoil another person's life. You didn't know, no, of course
not!--didn't know this was his room as well as mine. Look, his music is
still lying on the piano; that's the chair he sat in, not many days
ago; here," she took Ephie by the shoulder and drew her behind the
screen, where a small door, papered like the wall, gave, direct from
the stair-head, a second entrance to the room--"here's the door he came
in at.--For he came as he liked, whenever he chose."
"It's not true; it can't be true," said Ephie, and raised her
tear-stained face defiantly. "We are engaged--since the summer. He's
coming back to marry me soon."
"He's coming back to marry you!" echoed Louise in a blank voice. "He's
coming back to marry you!"
She moved a few steps away, and stood by the writing-table, looking
dazed, as if she did not understand. Then she laughed.
Ephie cried with renewed bitterness. "I want to go home."
But Maurice did not pay any attention to her. He was watching Louise,
with a growing dismay. For she continued to laugh, in a breathless way,
with a catch in the throat, which made the laughter sound like sobbing.
On his approaching her, she tried to check herself, but without
success. She wiped her lips, and pressed her handkerchief to them, then
took the handkerchief between her teeth and bit it. She crossed to the
window, and stood with her back to the others; but she could not stop
laughing. She went behind the low, broad screen that divided the room,
and sat down on the edge of the bed; but still she had to laugh on. She
came out again into the other part of the room, and saw Maurice pale
and concerned, and Ephie's tears dried through pure fear; but the sight
of these two made her laugh more violently than before. She held her
face in her hands, and pressed her jaws together as though she would
break them; for they shook with a nervous convulsion. Her whole body
began to shake, with the efforts she made at repression.
Ephie cowered in her seat. "Oh, Maurice, let us go. I'm so afraid," she
implored him.
"Don't be frightened! It's all right." But he was following Louise
about the room, entreating her to regain the mastery of herself. When
he did happen to notice Ephie more closely, he said: "Go downstairs,
and wait for me there. I'll come soon."
Ephie did not need twice telling: she turned and fled. He heard the
hall-door bang behind her.
"Do try to control yourself. Miss Dufrayer--Louise! Every one in the
house will hear you."
But she only laughed the more. And now the merest trifles helped to
increase the paroxysm--the way Maurice worked his hands, Ephie's muff
lying forgotten on a chair, the landlady's inquisitive face peering in
at the door. The laugh continued, though it had become a kind of
cackle--a sound without tone. Maurice could bear it no longer. He went
up to her and tried to take her hands. She repulsed him, but he was too
strong for her. He took both her hands in his, and pressed her down on
a chair. He was not clear himself what to do next; but, the moment he
touched her, the laughter ceased. She gasped for breath; he thought she
would choke, and let her hands go again. She pressed them to her
throat; her breath came more and more quickly; her eyes closed; and
falling forward on her knees, she hid her face in the cushioned seat of
the sofa.