An Act of Justice
No trace of storm remained next morning; it was, on the contrary, a
day of brilliant and cloudless calm, a lotus-eating day, made for
basking in sunshine and rejoicing only to be alive.
But Miss Boundrish was not content with merely being alive, she
wished to be very comfortable as well; and to that end selected the
pleasantest spot in the grounds, outside that same shelter of
rye-straw whence Ermengarde had overheard scraps of conversation
between two strangers on her first day there. Miss Dorris was quite
aware of the acoustic properties of the place, whence she had on many
occasions derived entertainment and information that she was not
unwilling to impart. This little plateau, which was reached by a
flight of marble steps, was not always well supplied with seats; on
the present occasion, besides some iron chairs only fit to do penance
in, there were only two very cosy cushioned wicker arm-chairs with
deep low seats to be had. These the young lady arranged along the
edge of the little platform immediately over the mule-path, and,
sitting in one, put up her feet cosily on the other in such a way
that she appropriated nearly the whole front, commanding the fair and
extensive prospect seaward and across the mountain gorges. Thus
extended at full length, holding up a huge white sunshade, she made
an interesting foreground etched upon the purple bloom of distance,
and considerately blotted out most of the sunshine and nearly all the
view from the shelter. Provided with a novel, a packet of letters, a
box of chocolates and the prospect of revelations of human character
from people passing on the mule-path, she felt herself securely
fortified against attacks of dulness, and surrendered herself with a
gentle sigh to the voluptuous charm of a long morning of _dolce far
niente_.
She had not long enjoyed the amenities of this position, when her
solitude was invaded by the sound of a slow and dragging step
accompanied by faint gasps, and turning with a slight frown on her
velvet brow, she perceived the figure of an elderly invalid emerging
slowly from under the olive-boughs shading the steps. Encumbered
with shawls, cushions, and writing and working materials, this poor
lady made slow and panting progress, and was obliged to rest a minute
on the wooden seat surrounding the olive-trunk; and upon perceiving a
youthful form stretched on chairs along the foreground, of the aerial
prospect before her, she was not without hope that the graceful
figure in full bloom of health would get up and help her. In this
she was disappointed, since the face of the fair damsel in question,
after the first frowning glance, continued to be bent in studious
absorption upon her book, as if undisturbed by or unaware of her
presence. Observing this, the new-comer, in the habit of occupying
one of the chairs now supporting the fairy figure, for whole mornings
together, her infirmities not permitting her to walk or be carried in
the ambulant arm-chairs known to common minds as donkeys, and
supposing her approach to have been both unseen and unheard, rose,
and gathering up her burdens, dragged herself across the platform to
Dorris, with some friendly words.
At this the fair student raised her eyes languidly to the frail and
bent figure standing at her side, and, having favoured her with a
cool and contemptuous stare, observed in a patronizing tone that the
morning was warm, and went back to her work without another word, to
the poor lady's speechless amazement. A passing thought of asking
her young friend if she could spare one of the easy-chairs and take a
plain one for her feet was abandoned in sudden indignation at this
heartless piece of impudence, and, being unable to accommodate
herself to the hard iron bars and high seats of the straight chairs
without actual pain, and seeing no one near to fetch her a less
penitential seat, the invalid was obliged to beat a retreat with as
little loss of dignity as possible, resting once more under the olive
on her way, and then very slowly climbing down the marble steps.
There she met M. Isidore, fury firing his eyes and bristling his
moustache, but gentleness in his voice when he spoke to her,
relieving her of her encumbrances and giving her an arm to a less
desirable shelter in the sun, where he surrounded her with every
available comfort.
"I go now," he said with a very sweet smile, before vanishing, "to
settle the other lady. She will have some fun, that one."
With this he sped across the grounds in all directions and thence
into the house, whispering a word of power into the ears of those he
met, and then sped back to the rear of the rye-straw shelter, where
he had been sorting seeds, while the invalid, lulled by the warmth
and beauty, and occupied with her needle, soon forgot her annoyance,
and commented to a neighbouring lotus-eater on the pleasantness of
that young man's manner, and the great addition he made to the charm
and convenience of the house. "And I don't believe a word of what
they say about him," she added indignantly; "he's just as nice to the
old ladies as to the young ones--and a great deal nicer, too."
Meanwhile, the fair Dorris, munching chocolates, and nestling in her
two easy-chairs, grew drowsy with warmth and comfort; her novel
slipped from her fingers and her eyes closed; her flower-like head
drooped on the slender stalk, her neck; she would soon have been in
the land of dreams but for the sound of a cheery whistle on the
mule-path, at which her blue eyes opened wide, and she started up,
alert and listening, under her huge sunshade. Only a careless
whistling of that catchy tune played at the Carnival. It broke off
in the middle, but soon began again in a cheery tenor, brokenly
still, and she recognized the voice of young Trevor, the Oxonian,
staying in these parts to recover from something, whether from too
much work, or too much play, was not clearly understood.
"No," she heard him say, in intervals of switching a juniper-bush on
the brink with his stick, "I can't say I admire that black-a-vized
style. I like 'em fresh and fair, curds and cream mixed with
roses--like Miss Boundrish--_she's_ a ripper and no mistake."
A sweet smile illumined the curds and cream features of the ripper at
this; she looked pensively at her hands, and wondered at the round
whiteness of her wrists, and thought regretfully of the loveliness of
her present pose, wasted upon empty air, and held her breath to
listen and sniff more incense.
A female voice with an American accent rebuked the youth for levity
in commenting upon feminine beauty in the concrete; he was told that
he should confine his observations to the abstract.
"Well, but you can't say she isn't ripping," he remonstrated, "and
why on earth shouldn't you mention a girl's name among her friends?
You wouldn't discuss her in public, and you couldn't tell it to her
face; but I bet anything she wouldn't mind the way I spoke of her, if
she could only hear it."
Something unintelligible followed in a low voice, that Dorris
recognized as the thin man's, and a light gush of laughter ensued.
"Well, and whose character is being thrown to the lions now? Oh,
don't tell me, I know from the sound of that laugh that scandal's
about. Is it poor me?" cried the cheerful voice of Mrs. Allonby at
this juncture. She was rather breathless, as if she had just climbed
up from somewhere.
"You scented the battle from afar, Mrs. Allonby. Well, you shall
have your share of the spoil," said the Oxonian. "Here's a nice soft
stone for a seat. It's only the beauty of Miss Boundrish that's on
toast. I say she's ripping, and they say I'm rude to say it."
"I think her perfectly lovely. Those coral lips, that velvet
brow----"
"Ah, you're charring now, Mrs. Allonby----"
"No, I really do admire the girl's face immensely if only----"
"Ah!" interjected the thin man piously, "that fatal 'if,' that always
qualifies the admiration of ladies for each other!"
"Well, anyhow I guess it's a pretty big if this time, ain't it, Mrs.
Allonby?" Mrs. Dinwiddie asked.
"Beasts," reflected the fair being above them. "Of course, all the
men are for me and all the women against!"
"I was only about to regret," Ermengarde replied meekly, "that
manners in that quarter scarcely match the beauty of the face."
"Manners?" cried the thin man enigmatically. "Ah, if you want
manners!"
"Oh! manners," echoed the boy, "that's another matter. I was talking
of beauty, and if that girl isn't a clinker----"
"'Manners makyth man,' as I trust all Wykehamists know----"
"Well, now, Mr. Welbourne, if manners makyth woman too," Mrs.
Dinwiddie put in, "I judge that poor Boundrish gell wants making
some. The way she'll take the only comfortable chairs."
"I'll poor-Boundrish-girl her as soon as I get the chance!" reflected
the fair object of the discussion, her eyes winking with wrath.
"My dear lady," expostulated the boy, "we were speaking of beauty.
You, who come from the country _par excellence_ of fair women, can
you, even in comparison with your peerless countrywomen, deny that
Miss Boundrish is a clinker?"
"Ah!" sighed poor Dorris, "I always thought Bertie Trevor as nice as
they make them."
"Land's sake, Mr. Trevor, she clinks fast enough; she goes solid for
beauty, if that's what you mean, and I guess she'd go for me if I
darst deny it. But what, did Solomon say, is a beautiful woman
without discretion?"
"Surely his was a somewhat jaundiced view of the sex, Mrs.
Dinwiddie----"
"Anyhow, 'twas pretty extensive. He'd ought to know 'em if anybody
did. He'd sampled 'em pretty well all round. King Solomon's
reckoned about the most married man in history."
"But _is_ the poor girl wanting in discretion?" asked Ermengarde's
most dulcet tones.
"Not," replied Agatha, who had silently stolen into the circle, "if
it is discreet to shout exaggerated scandal in public places"--in
some occult way Agatha knew of Dorris's misadventure at Turbia--"or
to make mischief between friends and breed dissension in families, by
the most odious misrepresentations and insinuations. Not if it is
discreet to catch up half a misunderstood tale and repeat it with a
twist--
"I say, Miss Somers, hadn't you better hold up. The lady might be
coming round the corner," remonstrated Bertie in an anxious voice.
"She can't. She's gone to Nice to see her aunt. So she told me at
breakfast----"
"Gone to Nice!" came in a chorus of irrepressible ecstasy. "If she
would only _stay_ at Nice."
"Too good to be true!" complained a male voice, that Dorris
conjectured to be that of a certain Major Norris, whom she had more
than once publicly appropriated as lawful spoil of her charms, and
inveigled into winding and solitary walks alone with her.
"Couldn't somebody persuade her that Nice is the only spot on earth
for the complexion?" asked one.
"She'd swallow any rot. That story of the frogs--feeding the
conscripts with frogs to give them courage! Too bad to stuff her
like that," said another.
"Surely you must acknowledge that the presence of our young friend at
least makes for mirth at table," reproved the thin man's plaintive
tones.
"You hypocritical old owl, you!" muttered Dorris, clenching her small
fists and twisting them as if a gentle fancy had involved them in Mr.
Welbourne's hair, which was artistically grown.
"Say," cried Mrs. Dinwiddie with sudden inspiration, "what was M.
Isidore's _mot_ on the Boundrish gell?"
"Ah! M. Isidore's _mot_," echoed Ermengarde, "how did it run?"
"To be sure, M. Isidore's _mot_," went from mouth to mouth, ending in
a general shout of laughter and ejaculations of ecstasy; but what the
_mot_ was poor Dorris never heard, for the simple and sufficient
reason that M. Isidore was entirely innocent of having so much as
imagined one, and was at that moment bending over the rose-covered
rail above the path, with gesticulations expressive of mingled
delight and resentment at the liberty taken with his name, to the
great joy of Bertie Trevor, who made gestures of defiance at him in
return. At this, M. Isidore, shaking his head as if in despair of
the group below, turned his attention to Dorris--whom he could see
through a chink in the rye-straw partition, and whose reception of
public incense he had watched with tender, if spasmodic, interest
from time to time--and was rewarded by perceiving symptoms of severe
internal perturbation in the fair lady's demeanour.
The good-hearted little man had substantial and most bitter cause to
dislike Dorris and all her ways; few things would have given him
greater satisfaction than her instant and final disappearance from
Les Oliviers, from France, from any and every place in which he might
henceforth walk all his life long; but he had a heart and a soft one;
he had also a French tenderness for the smaller woes of women, and
what he saw through the chink smote him with such compunction that he
left his seeds, leapt lightly down from the platform and ran round to
the path, where the group of traducers were loitering, holding out
his hands in appeal.
"Mais, mais, mesdames, messieurs! c'est un peu fort!" he cried; "does
one talk so of ladies?"
"We were only admiring the dear girl's little ways," Ermengarde
explained, "and her beauty."
"I do love her little way of listening to people talking among
themselves, and picking their brains and passing their things off as
her own," Major Norris said. "And that of patronizing her betters
and flatly contradicting people on subjects she hasn't had the chance
of understanding--even if she had the brains."
"The way she explained to me how we run elections in the States,"
added Mrs. Dinwiddie's husband, a humble, unconsidered dependent,
occasionally found handy to fetch and carry for his liege lady.
"She'd just as soon tell the Almighty the way to run the Universe,
you bet----"
"But that charming laugh, Mr. Dinwiddie, surely that atones for
much," murmured Lady Seaton, arriving from the convent to the
Carnival tune that Bertie Trevor was whistling, as he had done at
intervals during the whole interview, to the deep disgust and
irritation of Dorris, who was more impatient than most people of
tiresome tricks like humming and whistling--tricks she arrogated to
herself as the peculiar privilege of one too lovely and attractive
not to be always sure to please whatever she did. Dorris was, of
course, not aware that whenever anyone came down the path or up the
path or from the convent steep, Bertie, standing out on a little jut
of rock, looking idly about, instantly began that Carnival tune,
unless it was a stranger. In that case he whistled the Marseillaise
and the talk paused.
"O Lord, that everlasting gurgle," growled the Major; "it's all over
the place from morning till night. What the dickens does she do it
for?"
Dorris's fists clenched themselves; she remembered bare-faced
admiration of that charming laugh, and other tributes to her
fascination, bold almost to impudence not a week old, from this false
man.
"Well," replied Mrs. Dinwiddie, "I judge the poor gell can't so much
as go to sleep without acting. She's just made up of affectations
right through, top skirt and lining, inside and out. I should be
surprised if her mother _didn't_ get headache and her father the
hump."
"I don't care," Bertie began doggedly, "if she has got the voice of a
screech-owl----"
"Oh, come now, Mr. Trevor, her voice is well enough, poor girl, if
she wouldn't always yell at the top of it."
"Beauty is beauty, however soulless," he continued stolidly. "And if
she does strut like a peacock----"
"Et tu, Bertie!" the poor peacock sighed metaphorically.
"--She's got the peacock's justification. Her hair is perfectly
stunning."
"So is her voice," muttered the Major.
"Assez, assez! cette pauvre demoiselle," M. Isidore remonstrated, as
he had continued to do at intervals.
"And she can't help it," added the chivalrous Bertie.
"Very true," returned Mr. Welbourne, solemnly misunderstanding him.
"Our young friend should not be judged harshly for what is misfortune
rather than fault. What is to be expected of an ignorant and
entirely brainless girl, vain and thoughtless, who has evidently
never been in any decent society? She is too young and too
inexperienced to be aware of her own defects, to which her kind and
indulgent parents are affectionately blind----"
"I've seen her momma squirm at her antics more than once," Mrs.
Dinwiddie put in.
"If some kind and judicious friend could but tell her----"
"But who'll bell the cat? Nobody wants to be clawed."
"--She would doubtless correct herself--she is young."
"Not she; she's a heartless little cat. So spiteful," cried a female
voice.
"If somebody would only lock her up while she's correcting herself,"
sighed Ermengarde, eliciting variously expressed but unanimous
agreement in her suggestion.
In the meantime M. Isidore had stolen one more glance at the victim
on the block, discovering the mournful spectacle of Dorris on her
knees between the two nefariously appropriated chairs, her arms on
the seat of one, her face in her hands, trying to stifle bitter sobs.
Her position was truly unfortunate. A comfortable matron had
appropriated a seat at the foot of the steps, and was tranquilly
perusing a paper through the glasses she held, occasionally looking
up and expressing mild wonder to a daughter a little way off at the
continuous talk and merriment going on outside on the path--this lady
even audibly entertained the idea of going out to see for herself
what was forward--and, besides not being able to leave her now
distasteful eminence without passing her, poor Dorris feared she
would come up to her, little knowing that the good lady was purposely
stationed there to cut off her retreat and ensure her sufficient
castigation.
The sight was more than the kind-hearted little Frenchman could bear.
Once more he sprang down and ran into the midst of the gossipers,
whispering to one after the other, "Mais elle pleure, elle pleure à
chaudes larmes."
"After all," commented the thin man with unconscious cruelty, in the
sudden silence that followed these words: "vulgarity is not vice. It
is involuntary and unconscious."
That was the last, worst stripe of all, that and M. Isidore's
knowledge and compassionate betrayal of her sufferings. "Vulgarity."
The word blistered her ears; she caught up a scarf, threw it over her
face, and fled down the marble steps, past the comfortable matron,
nearly upsetting her, and through the grounds, dashing in her wild
career against some one, she neither knew nor cared whom.
Mr. Welbourne himself felt the vitriol of his ill-considered speech
the moment it was spoken, but knew it to be past mending, and groaned
audibly, while every member of the group, with the exception of Major
Norris, who was a disciplinarian and a thoroughly good hater when
once he began, was more or less visited by compunction.
"After all, it was beastly mean of us," Bertie Trevor said, turning
away with a sullen face, when the flight of the victim was known.
"'Twas the way she acted to the lame lady set up my back," Mrs.
Dinwiddie confessed.
"And quite right too," the Major rejoined; "the girl was a positive
pest to everybody in the house."
"But at least," came in French, in a deep contralto voice from the
spot whence the sufferer had fled, causing every eye to be raised to
that eminence, to perceive the majestic figure of Madame Bontemps, a
large cauliflower tucked under each arm, an apron full of
fresh-gathered lemons and oranges, and a sharp bright knife
threateningly flourished in her hand. "At least, this demoiselle was
not chased from the house for inveigling the fiancé and breaking the
heart of an innocent young girl."
Having thus spoken, Madame turned and receded majestically from
sight, leaving the conspirators petrified with amazement.
"What on earth is she driving at?" asked Ermengarde, looking straight
at M. Isidore, a sudden flood of enlightenment rushing in crimson
over her face and throat even as she spoke, and leaving her
death-pale and trembling.
M. Isidore's face, from which she quickly withdrew her gaze, was
marble in its rigid impenetrability. He made no reply, beyond a
faint shrug of ignorance, but turned and offered some slight service
to the lady standing next him. Then the group, which had been
shifting the whole time, soon melted quietly away, each member with a
feeling of having done an indifferent morning's work in this
long-threatened and carefully planned conspiracy of rough justice.
That morning's _déjeuner_ was singularly devoid of gaiety. The
conspirators looked guiltily at poor Dorris's empty place. Those of
her father and mother were expected to be empty, else the execution
could not have taken place. The lame lady innocently wondered what
had become of Miss Boundrish, and mentioned having seen her in the
grounds that morning. Even Major Norris enjoyed the absence of the
strident voice and gurgling laugh less than he expected, and found
fault with the weather, which was perfect, and the salad, which was
not, characterizing both as rotten. The thin man, openly but
dejectedly, laid a bunch of roses by the woman of mystery's plate,
and observed plaintively to Ermengarde more than once upon the
undesirability of lynch law, and the mistaken estimate by average
Britons of the salutary effect of ragging on immature character.
"It is often unjust," he said, "and always goes too far. Though I
don't know what we should have done at Winchester without it--even
without the injustice and occasional savagery. Yes, Mrs. Allonby,
the savagery. But that, I hear, is now very rare. You need not
shrink from sending your boy to Winchester. It will make a man of
him; though he will be let down very gently to what we were."
It was during this discourse that Ermengarde discovered what she had
been too much preoccupied while assisting at the execution of Miss
Boundrish to think out before, though all the time she had been
conscious of a subtle change in the thin man's appearance--a change
so great that every one who saw him that morning was so much struck
by it as to look twice, even three times at him--his beard was gone.
Now why, she pondered, had Mr. Welbourne's beard taken sudden flight?
Had he foreboded a personal encounter with Miss Boundrish, and
thought it well to give as little hold to her vengeance as possible?
"Ah!" she said, suddenly divining another cause, "I see that you are
no longer afraid of sore throat, Mr. Welbourne. That is good.
First, because it means that your health is restored, secondly,
because it is a portent of spring."
"Sore throat?" he murmured, bewildered. "The Riviera throat only
comes in the first weeks. But----" his hand suddenly went up to the
newly reaped chin, when crimson of the deepest dye suffused and
betrayed him. "Quite so," he added vaguely--"yes; it--it was a
protection--oh!--the _mistral_--ah--invalid ways--indolence----"
"I congratulate you on all counts," she said in a kind voice,
wondering who was the object of Mr. Welbourne's passion, a sudden
paralyzing fear suggesting herself. But no; that would be too
terrible; M. Isidore, the Anarchist and the thin man, in those few,
short weeks--Fate could hardly be so cruel as all that! And at his
age! But he looked horribly young without the beard, and there was a
certain gallant and knightly suggestion in the elegantly trimmed
moustache left. There was no doubt that the thin man--no longer so
thin and not at all so lame--was going forth in that moustache,
conquering and to conquer. He had been heard to condemn the present
clean-shaven mode as womanish. She had perhaps been too filial, too
confiding with him, under the shadow of that venerable beard, and he
had mistaken her. Then her eyes fell on the roses by Agatha's plate;
she remembered that those two had often been elaborately unconscious
of each other's presence lately; she remembered a long succession of
gentle judgments on the woman of mystery's vagaries, and many
delicate allusions to her beauty and charm, and in a flash she knew.
Poor Mr. Welbourne! This was indeed tragedy.
After a sketchy and unsatisfactory _déjeuner_, during which appetite
and peace were alike annihilated by that dread pronouncement of
Madame Bontemps "inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an
innocent young girl," ringing through her brain, Ermengarde,
renouncing her intention of looking for quarters in Mentone, and
thinking that San Remo would now be the nearest place in which she
could venture to hide her diminished head and reflect upon the
spitefulness of perverse fate, fled upstairs to her room to take
counsel of solitude.
But in this she was balked before reaching her sanctuary by the
encounter of Mrs. Boundrish, round-eyed and in very unfinished
toilet, hurrying along the corridor in the greatest perturbation.
"Oh dear, Mrs. Allonby!" she cried in agitated _accellerando_ that
admitted of no stops, "what _shall_ I do? Dorris is in _such_ a
state. I can't make anything of her. She was never taken like this
before and this dreadful spotted fever about nobody knows how it
begins but of course their poor brains and foreign doctors and
chiefly the young and they go off so soon and so infectious and
Boundrish at Nice oh dear! She won't speak."
"But _is_ she spotted?" Ermengarde asked solemnly.
"She won't say; she won't speak," the poor woman sobbed, and Agatha,
arriving then, bore her back to her room, while Ermengarde, hastily
upsetting eau-de-Cologne in every direction, and holding a
handkerchief soaked in it to her face to keep off infection, stole
into the chamber of the unfortunate Dorris, trying to remember when
and where and how the spots characterizing this terrible disease were
to be expected.
Dorris had flung herself face downwards on her bed, and was sobbing
faintly; the room was in great disorder, drawers open and clothing
tossed recklessly about. Some scraps of torn paper, an open
blotting-book, and pens and ink on the table, pointed to the writing
and tearing up of letters.
At the sound of Ermengarde's cautious entrance the poor girl turned
quickly, showing a tear-washed, wild-eyed and miserable, but quite
spotless, face.
"Go away, go away! Oh, why can't I die?" she cried wildly, turning
back to her original posture, while Ermengarde, carefully keeping the
handkerchief to her face, felt her pulse and touched her brow softly,
and asked where the pain was and what was the matter.
"And you can ask?" she moaned, "when you were there, and as bad as
any of them. Somebody might have told me--privately--I didn't know.
They all hate and despise me. I can never--never--nev-nev--never----"
"Dear Miss Boundrish, I _am_ so sorry," cried Ermengarde, suddenly
dropping her handkerchief, her terrors, and her precautions, and
putting a caressing arm round the sobbing figure on the bed. "We
didn't mean it--at least, not more than a quarter of it. It was more
than half in joke. And if you hadn't been rude to poor Mrs.
Lamb--that put us up--and then we were carried away--forgot
ourselves--everybody went one better than everybody else--you know
how it is in a game like that. Think no more about it."
"But you do-do-do-don't--think me quite--such
a--bib-bib-bibby--beast?"
"Certainly not," firmly and decisively.
"A scrik-scrik-screech-owl?" she sobbed; "a bun-bun-bun-bundle of
aff-fec-fec-fectation? So-so-so-soulless----"
"Not in the least, dear child. It was all put on--at least, half
was--just our fun. We knew you were a spoilt child, and wanted to
give you a lesson, that was all. You are very young, my dear."
Then poor Dorris, touched more by the voice than the words, threw
herself into Ermengarde's arms, confessed some of her sins, and
acknowledged herself--after consenting to a cup of tea, made on the
spot and administered by Ermengarde, and much petting, rose-water and
eau-de-Cologne--a sadder, a humbler, and a wiser girl.
But her place at table knew her no more, and the familiar gurgle and
strident voice never again troubled the air of Les Oliviers. A few
days later her parents followed her to Cannes; Dorris, they said,
required younger and gayer society.