"AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE."
The two men separated at the Porte Maillot, Radwalader strolling away in
the direction of the Metropolitain entrance with a readily fabricated
excuse about a card engagement. He understood to perfection the action
of moral leaven--that, once introduced as an ingredient, it must not be
unduly stirred, but left, with the fair white cloth of unconcern drawn
smoothly over it, to work its will at ease. To a greater extent even
than Mrs. Carnby, he possessed the instinct for not saying too much. He
left Andrew to reflect upon what had passed between them, confident of
its effect.
Andrew paused at the junction of the Avenues de Malakoff and de la
Grande Armee, the confusion and glare of the great thoroughfares smiting
fretfully upon his instant need of reflection, and then returned upon
his tracks, seeking the cool quiet of the Bois. After a short walk past
the brightly lighted Chalet du Touring Club, a by-path tempted him, and
he turned aside. At once the forest closed in upon him, and the scene of
a half-hour before became more than ever like a phase in some fantastic
and uneasy dream. At Armenonville there had been a blaze of light and a
ripple of laughter, which barred out the stars of heaven as if they had
never been: here was a world of stillness and of shadow, broken only by
the distant music of the tziganes, and, through the interstices of
tree-trunks and foliage, the intermittent gleam of bicycle and
automobile lanterns on the Route de la Porte des Sablons. The faintly
pungent odour of moss rose to his nostrils, as in some deep,
undiscovered retreat in a provincial preserve. The small, sweet twitter
of a restless bird pricked the delicious silence like the sound of a rip
in thin linen. The tziganes at Armenonville were playing the "Valse
Bleue." The air, pulsing softly through the gloom, seemed almost to
speak the words:
"_Pourquoi ne pas m'aimer, p'isqu' tu sais que je t'ai--ai--me?_"
"Margery!" said Andrew slowly, to himself. "Margery--Margery!"
In the three weeks just past, he had been building a new world, a world
from which his former ideals had been deliberately banished, and wherein
new standards of conduct had been set. Pride, recklessness, and
resentment had been the triumvirate by which this moral state was
governed, and he had obeyed their dictates blindly, without caring, as
he had told Radwalader, to think. Left to itself, this might have
endured indefinitely, even as the larger world, with all its codes and
creeds, established by the limited experience of the men inhabiting it.
But what would be effected by the abrupt entrance into society of a
messenger from another planet, infinitely wiser, infinitely more
advanced, was brought to pass by Radwalader's words. The _status quod_
reeled on its foundations. The alternative which Andrew had accepted,
and which had dulled, if not actually done away with, the acuteness of
his disappointment, now appeared in its true light as the veriest sham,
a sedative worse than useless--enervating--stupefying--poisonous. The
bare suggestion was enough. Not for a moment did he doubt the
significance of this message which had never reached him. It could mean
but one thing--forgiveness and recall. All there had been to say upon
the other count, had been said in that half-hour in the arbour. Her hand
had been stretched out to stay him from the precipice down which he had
plunged--stretched out too late! The knowledge tore in an instant the
mask from his vanity, and he stood confessed--a coward. What was it she
had said? "A fancy so trivial and so idle that it could not even hold
you back from transgression." And he had resented that, resented it only
to furnish proof, when the actual temptation came, that it was true!
He knew himself now for what he was. How scornful he had been of these
accusations, how certain of himself, how small in that great loyalty of
his which stood for nothing, how ready to believe himself infallible!
The merest profligate of those whose follies he had despised in other
days, was no weaker, in the end, than he. He looked up blindly to where
the stars winked faintly through the lace-like foliage, and cursed the
distant roar of Paris which came dully to his ears. Paris--Circe! and he
no better than the transformed comrades of Ulysses! He was a coward--a
fraud--a sham; he found himself, in this moment of bitter self-reproach,
untrue even to the flimsy conception of duty which, when it put him to
the test, he had debauched. He thought of Mirabelle, and in thinking
hated her! With all her beauty, all her perfect mimicry of breeding, all
the little significant hints of colour and perfume with which she so
skilfully clothed with charm whatever pertained to her, she had never
struck below his ready appreciation of whatever was suggestive of
refinement and eloquent of femininity. It was her novelty which had
principally charmed him, but novelty is the butterfly of the
sensations--the most brilliant, the shortest-lived of these emotional
ephemera. Mrs. Carnby had struck the key-note in her cool analysis of
the _demi-monde_: "These women don't wear. They seem to be only plated
with fascination, and in time the plating wears off, and you come back
to the kind with the hall-mark."
Now the scales fell from Andrew's eyes, and he knew that what she had
said was true. Compared to Margery--the Margery he had loved and lost,
what was this Mirabelle to whom he had yielded her place? Beautiful,
yes! But the perception of beauty, like beauty's self, lies only
skin-deep. Now, with Radwalader's suggestion that the way of retreat lay
open, came the reaction, inevitable in such a nature as Andrew Vane's,
from an emotion purely extrinsic. He was tired of her. The plating had
worn off.
Suddenly he remembered that he had promised to see her that night, and,
with an abrupt perception of the opportunity thus offered, he pulled
himself together, and swung off rapidly toward the Porte Dauphine. As he
walked, inhaling the fragrance of the evening air, a new sanity seemed
to descend on him. He promised himself that this should be the end.
However the effect was to be accomplished, he was determined to break
the relation, kindly but firmly, and at whatever risk to regain, if not
his self-esteem, at least his freedom. As to what should follow, he did
not care--or dare--to ask. The unknown significance of the lost message
soothed him like an irrational caress. Was it too late? Is it _ever_
"too late to mend"? He neither knew nor cared. Given his freedom, he
would chance the rest. Fate was hard. A thought checked him. "Fate is
hard--cash!"
"Whatever I believe," he told himself, "I don't believe that." And then,
in the illogical manner of man, added: "I don't care what it costs
me--this is the end!"
He found Mirabelle in a corner of her great divan, and the room softly
illumined. She wore a bewitchingly dainty lounging-gown of iridescent
silk, in the folds of which peacock-blues and greens played and rippled
into each other in constant com-minglings.
"_Embrasse-moi_," she said, looking up at him.
She glanced at him curiously as he straightened himself again and
dropped upon the cushions at her feet. In a woman, the manner of a kiss
performs the midwife's office to the beginnings of clairvoyance.
"I wonder," said Andrew presently, "if you know that people are talking
about us, _ma chere_?"
Mirabelle commented upon this intelligence with a tilt of her eyebrows.
"Yes," continued Andrew, "it seems that our doings are become public
property, and our reputations are in jeopardy."
"Yours, perhaps," remarked the girl. "As for mine, _mon ami, ca n'existe
pas_."
"_Don't!_" said Andrew suddenly. "Please don't!"
"After all," said Mirabelle, "what difference? They talk, these good
people, whether things are so or not. It's the women, of course. If my
clothes were not _d'un chic_, they would pass me over as unworthy of
consideration."
"This time," said Andrew, "it seems the ground of complaint is not
clothes alone. I'm told that I'm _affiche_."
"So you are, I suppose. You were that from the moment I took your arm at
Auteuil, that first afternoon. Do you object? There are many who would
be glad to say as much."
Andrew bit his lip. It was going to be harder than he had thought. He
had come to say--he could not have told exactly what. His whole relation
with Mirabelle had come so stealthily into being, and had been
distinguished by a novelty, a _gout piquant_ so subtle and alluring,
that he had hardly been conscious of its development into something
definite and established, until the thing was done. His thoughts went
back to that afternoon, in his own apartment, three weeks before, when
first he had kissed her. That had been the turning-point--the crisis
when the whole wide world tipped upside down. His entire point of view
had undergone an instantaneous readjustment as his lips met hers, and
before him had opened the gate of a new world--a garden lavish of
unfamiliar fruits and strange flowers, breathing a heavy, languid,
deadening sweetness. He had entered, as one turns aside from the beaten
road to explore some little vista of unprecedented beauty, with a vague
convincement at the back of his brain, that the divergence was for a
moment only, and that, so soon as his curiosity should be satisfied, he
would turn back to the highway and go forward again, richer by an
experience which it was not necessary to mention, and which would be as
immaterial in its bearing upon the main issues of life, as a flower
plucked and tossed aside in passing, or a tune whistled in a moment of
lightheartedness.
Now--it was singularly hard to cut to the pith of the sensation--the
gate which had opened so invitingly seemed to have closed behind him.
What was still more curious, he found, of a sudden, that these fruits
and flowers which had tempted him by reason of their novelty, were now
as familiar, as seemingly essential, as if they had always been features
of his environment. The garden itself was no longer a place wherein he
walked as a transient visitor, idly inspecting, but one in which he
stood as proprietor. The tendrils had climbed and clung about his feet.
The moment for retreat had come, and lo! he could not move!
As they talked, he grew still more conscious of the fact that this task
of disentanglement which he had planned, was one beset with unexpected
difficulties. Mirabelle had practically disregarded the inclined plane
of suggestion by which he had sought to lead up to the main issue, and,
with a little air of proprietorship, had begun to map out her plans for
the coming week--plans in which Andrew figured as naturally, as much as
a matter of course, as did her carriage or her meals or her gowns. For
the first time, he realized to what an extent she had a claim upon him.
For the first time, the curb replaced the snaffle. For the first time,
the bit made its presence fully felt. Andrew stirred uneasily.
"_M'amie_," he said, "we've been much in each other's company of
late--more, perhaps, than is best for either of us."
"How can that be?" asked Mirabelle, with a little laugh. "We love each
other--_ca suffit_. It's impossible to be too much together."
Her voice was quite even, but that was not to say that she did not scent
the approaching issue.
"But people say--" began Andrew.
"Oh, lala! _People say!_ What _don't_ they say, my poor friend? What
won't they continue to say, however you choose to live, and whatever you
choose to do? That's Paris, and that's the smallest village in Brittany,
and everything in between, into the bargain. Nowadays, one must do as
one sees fit, and have the courage of one's convictions. We've chosen
our way. It's too late to think of what people say. After all, it's
gossip, all this, and gossip is a snake. One kills it if one can; but,
in the long run, it's better to step over it and forget. What does
gossip amount to? If you're seen always with your wife, it's because you
can't trust her alone; if you're never seen with her, it's because
you've interests elsewhere. If you spend your nights in public, you're a
profligate; and if you spend them at home, you're a secret drinker.
'People say'! Let them say, Andrew. It can't make any difference."
"Our--our friendship is the talk of the American Colony," said Andrew,
almost savagely.
Mirabelle looked at him suddenly, with a curious crinkling of her
forehead. The issue now lay clear before her.
"And you are ashamed of _that_?" she asked.
She leaned back wearily, closing her eyes.
"Yes, of course you are," she added. "I wonder why it is that we--_nous
autres_--never seem to realize what it means, all this. A little
laughter, a kiss or two, and the rest, a '_je t'aime_' which means
something less than nothing, and then--They speak of the women whom men
abuse! What is that to being _used_--and flung aside?"
"Mirabelle!"
"Ah, don't speak to me! I know all that you're going to say--I've heard
it all before! I knew it, back there a minute, when you kissed me,
thinking of another woman! It's the old story--a little harder to bear
this time, perhaps, because I've cared very much for you. Somehow, you
seemed different from other men. You were young, you were gentle, you
were respectful, _mon Dieu!_--respectful! I thought that it was for _me_
you cared--_me_, as you saw me here, loving and needing to be loved--not
the Mirabelle Tremonceau who is dressed like a doll by Paquin and
Louise--the Mirabelle Tremonceau of the Acacias, and the Palais de
Glace, and the Cafe de Paris. I said to myself that it had not all been
in vain--the training, the care, the painstaking which have made me what
I am. Long since, I'd come to loathe all these, my surroundings, but,
for the first time, it seemed to me that perhaps they were not a sham
and an imitation and a mockery. You were a gentleman--not a _rasta_,
like the others. I thought your instincts couldn't play you false, and
that I saw that they prompted you to regard me, here in my own home, as
a woman and a friend, not merely as a mistress and a toy. From the
first, you never presumed, you never let the thought of what, at worst,
I might have been to you, come forward to shame the thought of what I
was, at best! I said to myself that you cared for _me_--for my mind--my
heart--and that what was most to others was nothing to you. When you
kissed me first--that afternoon--ah, _mon Dieu_! I thought it was not
the kiss of passion, but the kiss of love! At that moment you knew fully
what I was--if you'd not guessed it before, but you asked for--nothing!
Instead you played, and your soul was in the music. I've never heard
such playing. It was pure--pure--_pure!_ Ah!--"
She opened her eyes slowly, without looking at him.
"And I was happy--happier than I've ever been: because, I said, there
must still be a little something in me of all I thought I'd lost. I'd
not loved you before that day. It was while we were there together that
it came. I would to God you'd let me go then--let me go with the memory
of a look which I'd never seen in a man's eyes before--the look which
said 'Respect.'"
For a moment there was silence, and then Mirabelle laughed shortly.
"That was what I was fool enough to think--all that! _Quelle idiote!
Nous voila, cher ami_, at the end of the chapter. Your glove is worn:
you must replace it. Your flower is wilted: you must have another for
your lapel!"
Now she looked full at him, her lip curling.
"It is like the Moulin," she added. "_Combien est-ce que tu me donnes,
beau brun?_"
Andrew swung himself to a kneeling posture.
"What are you saying?" he demanded hotly. "My God! Does what has been
between us mean nothing to you? Have I ever suggested--have I ever said
a word to justify such a monstrous thing? I--"
"Just now you kissed me, thinking of another woman!" exclaimed
Mirabelle. "Did you suppose I didn't know? Why, I've _loved_ you--that's
how I knew! Do you realize what all this meant? You could have made me
good again. I would have left all this--forgotten it--blotted it out! I
could have gone away quietly into the country, and lived my life out,
without a regret. I could almost have been content never to see you
again--never to hear from you, if I could have remembered--what once was
true--that you respected me! Forgive what I said just now. It was
coarse--unworthy of all that has been. But you don't understand. I wish
I'd not said what I did; and yet, at times, I feel that way--I mean, as
if it were all the same--at the Moulin Rouge or here--they for an hour,
I for a month, but each flung away presently, like the dregs of wine.
I've laughed at the knowledge that that is how it is; always
laughed--until the shadow of the thought fell on you!"
She slid her cool fingers into the hand he started to raise in protest,
and held it close against her cheek.
"Then it maddened me. You see, everything has been different with you
from what it was with the others. I'd never have believed that I could
care for any man as I have for you--and perhaps I shouldn't have cared
for you as I have, if you'd come into my life in any other way. But you
asked to be presented to me, and waited for Radwalader to get my
permission; you talked to me as to a young girl of your own _monde_; and
if at first I didn't understand what that meant, I soon saw that it was
because _you didn't know_! Is it any wonder that I came to love
you?--you who alone of all men yielded me the exquisite homage of
respect? I dreaded the moment when the change must come--when that
deference which intoxicated me like a new wine should be touched with a
growing spirit of license, which from you would have been intolerable!
From day to day I watched you, but even when I knew that you suspected
what I was, my eyes--_mon Dieu_, how keen they were!--could see no
change in you--and that was the greatest surprise of all. And when, in
that moment of madness, I as much as told you, and you were gentle with
me, what had been love for your treatment of me became, all at once,
love for just--_you_!"
With an almost imperceptible pressure she drew him closer to her. As she
went on speaking, her fingers touched his temples and his hair in a
succession of tiny, soft caresses which were like the embryos of spoken
endearments.
"_Mon bien aime!_ Never will you be able to comprehend what you thus
came to mean to me. I have always been vain, lazy, passionately desirous
of all that is softest, sweetest, most palatable in life; and these
things I have had--but at what a price! Then _you_ came, and with you a
flash of hope! I made myself believe, I don't know what! Marriage? Yes,
there was even that in my mind; and there was, as well, the idea of
going away, as I've said, into the country, and letting the four winds
and the sunlight of heaven wash and wash and wash me, through all the
years of my life, until I should go out of this world as white as I came
in! Ah! I don't know what it was, that little flash of hope, except that
it seemed to say that escape was possible, and it was to _your_ hand I
clung, seeking the outlet. But that was only for one night--for just
that one night! With the next day, with all the sights and sounds to
which I am accustomed--the Allee at noon, Armenonville at tea-time,
Paillard's at midnight--I saw what the end must be; and, since then,
I've watched, as only a woman watches, for that first little hint of its
coming which only a woman sees! Ah, _mon cheri_, it has come, it has
come indeed! For a moment I cried out in my agony against the fate which
is separating us. You must forgive me that. Six weeks--a little slice of
spring--and already you are tired of me. _Mon amour--mon amour!_"
Andrew turned, and, with his forehead on her knees and his lips against
her fingers, battled silently against the swelling in his throat and the
hot moisture stinging his inner lids. In the warm, perfume-laden
silence, both the man and the girl went back in thought to their
individual as well as their associated past. For the end of each
successive stage of life has this in common with the concluding moments
of the whole: as with a drowning person, all preceding incidents and
emotions start up in orderly array, intensified and in their proper
light.
So Andrew, reviewing the past three weeks, was prey to a passionate
regret. In this there was censure, not so much of his own weakness, as
of the test which had laid it bare. In youth, reaction carries with a
merciless arraignment of all which has made possible disloyalty to
standard; with age, men learn to blame themselves, their own folly and
frailty. In his heart of hearts, Andrew impugned the girl; and when,
under the impetus of her resentment, she had voiced that scathing sneer,
he had almost welcomed it, as an excuse for the course he was determined
to pursue. For an instant, pity and regret were swallowed up in a
profound sense of indignity. In its essentials, her speech seemed no
better than a touch of the brutal vulgarity which, with deliberation, he
had avoided all his life. It had that very element of the sordid which
had held him aloof from the student excursions from Cambridge into
Boston--excursions so apt to end in brawls, drunken clamour, tears, and
maudlin reconciliations. It was of a piece with a dispute over the
finish of a game of cards, with the recriminations of an aggrieved
supper companion, with the abuse of an exasperated bartender. It cut him
to the quick, and, for the moment, seemed to place Mirabelle on a level
with the women with whom she desperately classed herself. "It is like
the Moulin!" As she said the words, it was as if the wand of a harlequin
had touched the scene. The faint perfume of the Gloire de Dijon roses
which he himself had sent her turned suddenly to the stale smell of the
tobacco smoke which hung densely over the dancers in the Red Mill of
Montmartre; and Mirabelle herself, with her angry eyes, was at one with
the painted, powdered, and bedizened monstrosity whom Radwalader had
snubbed one evening as she paused at the table where he and Andrew were
sampling an atrocious _liqueur_ and watching an unlovely quadrille. But
the impression passed as it had come. She was herself again, supremely
beautiful, and supremely appealing in her avowal of devotion; and the
element of romance which, in his mind, had always characterized their
relation was intensified rather than diminished by this touch of
tragedy.
Mirabelle rose suddenly, looking down upon him.
"I understand," she said; "but there is one thing I would like to ask
you. This other woman--do you love her? Will all this procure you what
you want?"
"I don't know," faltered Andrew. "Perhaps not."
"Then why--"
"Oh, how can I explain to you?" he exclaimed, rising in his turn. "It's
just this--I _must_ make another try, and to do that I _must_ be free!
You have the right to ask--what _haven't_ you the right to ask! I'll
tell you the truth--that's all I can do now. The girl I asked to marry
me flung me off because--because--"
"Because of _me_?"
She bent forward, staring at him, as if she would wring the truth from
his hesitation.
"Yes--because of you."
"And when was this? When _was_ it, I ask you? Was it--_before_?"
"Yes."
"Then she had no grounds for what she said? She was wrong--she misjudged
you--and then you came back to me!"
"Yes."
"Why--_why_?"
"I don't know," said Andrew miserably. "I owed you something. I couldn't
hear you accused like that when there was no reason. You were my
friend."
"And so--you gave up the woman you--loved? Ah, _mon Dieu_!"
She paused, and then her eyes blazed suddenly with such a light as he
had never seen in them, and her hands went to her temples with a
bewildered flutter.
"It was for me," she said, "for me! And to-morrow it is to be _adieu_?"
"To-morrow?"
Briefly they searched each other's eyes.
"I mean to-night, of course," said Mirabelle evenly. "Andrew--there is
one thing I would like to ask of you, before you go. Will you--will you
kiss me once--not as you have ever kissed me?" Her fingers touched her
forehead. "Will you kiss me--here?"
He advanced a step and did as she had asked, then fell back.
"Mirabelle--Mirabelle!"
"Ah, don't think of me, my friend. I don't mean to be cruel--but I
have--other interests. Let us say good-by, and part--friends. I trust
you may be happy."
"Mirabelle!"
Andrew's voice broke suddenly.
"Then it's good-by?"
"Yes," said Mirabelle; and, with a little sob, he bent and kissed her
hand.
When he had gone, she stood irresolutely, her lips parted and her eyes
very bright. Then she wheeled and walked slowly toward the mantel. A
photograph of Thomas Radwalader leaned there against a slender vase. As
it met her eyes, she snatched abruptly at it, tore it into twenty
pieces, and scattered the fragments in the air.