“O, Nicanor! let this strange new shadow between us be dispelled, at
once and for ever. I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Nicanor.”
“I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Miguel.”
“Very well. Then I yield her to you.”
“O, pardon me, Miguel! but that is just the point. I wanted to save
you the pain—the sense of self-renunciation; but your blindness
confounds me. More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. Your
infatuation for Mademoiselle Suzanne is very plain to very many. What
is plain only to yourself is that Mademoiselle Suzanne returns your
devotion. You are not, indeed, justified in that belief.”
“Why not?”
“She has confessed her regard, in the first place, for me.”
“But she has also confessed to me that I have won the leading place in
her affections.”
“That is absurd, Miguel. She is the soul of ingenuousness.”
“Perhaps, Nicanor—we are only boys, after all—she is a practised
coquette.”
“You must not say that, Miguel, if you want me to remain your friend.
You, perhaps, attach too much importance to your looks as an
irresistible asset in matters of the heart.”
“Now I shall certainly quarrel with you.”
“You are mistaken, I think. Mind, to women of intellect, is the
compelling lure.”
“It remains to be proved.”
“You are determined to put it to the test, then? Good-bye, Miguel.”
“This is not a real breach between us? O, Nicanor!”
“We must come to a definite understanding. Until we do, further
confidence between us is impossible.”
He strutted away, perking his angry head, and whistling.
But Suzanne had accomplished the amiable débacle for which she had
been intriguing. She had, paradoxically, separated the inseparables.
It was a little triumph, perhaps; a very easy game to one of her
experience—hardly worth the candle, in fact; but it was the best the
boat had to offer. It remained only to solace the tedium of what was
left of the voyage by playing on the broken strings of that
friendship.
It was Nicanor who suffered most under the torture. He had always been
rather accustomed to hear himself applauded for his wit—a funny
little acrid possession which was touched with a precocious knowledge
of the world. Now, to know himself made the butt of a maturer social
irony lowered his little cockerel crest most dismally. As for
good-natured Miguel, it was his way to join, rather than resent, the
laugh against himself; and his persistent moral health under the
infliction only added to the other’s mind-corrosion. In a very little
the two were at daggers-drawn.
The “affair” made a laughable distraction for many of the listless and
mischievous among the passengers. They contributed their little fans
to the flame, and exchanged private bets upon the probable
consequences. But Suzanne, indifferent to all interests but her own,
worked her oracles serenely, and affected a wide-eyed unconsciousness
of the amorous imbroglio which her arts had brought about. First one,
then the other of the rivals would she beguile with her pensive
kindnesses, and, according to her mood or the accident of
circumstances, reassure in hope. And the task grew simpler as it
advanced, inasmuch as the silence which came to fall between Miguel
and Nicanor precluded the wholesome revelations which an interchange
of confidences might have inspired.
At last the decisive moment arrived when Suzanne’s more intimate
worldlings were to be gratified with her solution of the riddle. It
was to end, in fact, in a Palais Royal farce; and they were to be
invited to witness the “curtain.”
A few hours before reaching port she drew Miguel to a private
interview.
“Ah, my friend!” she said, her slender fingers knotted, her large eyes
wistful with tears, “I become distracted in the near necessity for
decision. Pity me in so momentous a pass. What am I to do?”
“Mademoiselle,” said poor Miguel, his chest heaving, “it is resolved
already. We are to journey together to Paris, where the bliss of my
life is to be piously consummated.”
“Yes,” she said; “but the publicity—the scandal! Men are sure to
attribute the worst motives to our comradeship, and that I could not
endure.”
“Then we will make an appointment to meet privately—somewhere whence
we can escape without the knowledge of a soul.”
“It is what had occurred to me. Hush! There is a little accommodating
place—the Café de Paris, on the Boulevard des Dames, near the
harbour. Do you know it? No—I forgot the world is all to open for
you. But it is quite easy to find. Be there at eight o’clock to-morrow
morning. I will await you. In the meantime, not a hint, not a whisper
of our intention to anyone. Now go, go!”
He left her, rapturous but, once without her radiance, struck his
breast and sighed, “Ah, heart, heart! thou traitor to thy brother!”
And at that moment Suzanne was catching sight of the jealous Nicanor,
angrily and ostentatiously ignoring her. She called to him piteously,
timidly, and he came, after a struggle with himself, stepping like a
bantam.
“Is it not my friend that you meant, mademoiselle? I will summon him
back. Your heart melts to him at the last moment.”
“Cruel!” she said. “You saw us together? I would not have had a
witness to the humiliation of that gentle soul—least of all his
brother and happier rival.”
“His——! Ah, mademoiselle, I entreat you, do not torture me!”
“Are you so sensitive? Alas! I have much for which to blame myself!
Perhaps I have coquetted too long with my happiness; but how many
women realize their feelings for the first time in the shock of
imminent loss! We do not know our hearts until they ache, Nicanor.”
“Poor Miguel—poor fellow!”
“You love him best of all, I think. Well, go! I have no more to say.”
“Suzanne!”
“No, do not speak to me. To have so bared my breast to this repulse!
O, I am shamed beyond words!”
“But do you not understand my heartfelt pity for his loss, when
measured by my own ecstatic gain?”
“Well?”
“Suzanne! I cannot believe it true.”
“I feel so bewildered also. What are we to do?”
“You spoke once of a journey to Paris together.”
“You and I? Think of the jests, the comments on the part of our
shipmates! We are not to bear a slurred reputation with us. I should
die of shame.”
“What if we were to meet somewhere, unknown to anybody, by
appointment, and slip away before the world awoke?”
“Yes, that would do; but where?”
“Can’t you suggest?”
“I know of a little Café de Paris. It is on the Boulevard des Dames,
near the harbour. Say we meet there, at eight o’clock to-morrow
morning, in time to catch the early mail?”
“O, yes, yes!”
“Hush! We have been long enough together. Do not forget; be silent as
the grave.”
“Brains triumph!” thought Nicanor, as he went. “Alas, my poor, sweet,
simple-minded comrade!”
De la Vénerie carried betimes quite a select little company with her
to the rendezvous. They were all choking with fun and expectation.
“The dear _ingénus_!” said Captain Robillard. “It will be exquisite
to see the fur fly. But precocity must have its lesson.”
They had their rolls and coffee in a closet adjoining the common room.
There was a window overlooking the street.
“Hist!” whispered the tiny Comte de Bellenglise. “Here they come!”
Nicanor was the first to arrive. He was very spruce and cock-a-hoop.
His big brown eyes were like fever-spots in his little body. He
questioned, airily enough, the proprietor, who had been well prompted
to answer him.
“No, monsieur; there is no lady at this hour. An appointment? Alas!
such is always the least considered of their many engagements.”
As he spoke, Miguel came in. The two eyed one another blankly after
the first shock. At length Nicanor spoke: the door between the closet
and the café opened a little.
“You have discovered, then? Go away, my poor friend. This is, indeed,
the worst occasion for our reconciliation.”
“I did not come to seek you, Nicanor. I came to meet Mademoiselle
Suzanne alone, by appointment.”
“And I, too, Miguel. I fear you must have overheard and misconstrued
her meaning. It was I she invited to this place.”
“No, Nicanor; it was I.”
“She has not come, at least. We must decide, at once and for ever,
before she comes.”
“I know what you mean, Nicanor. This, indeed, is the only end to a
madness. Have you your pistol? I have mine.”
“And I have mine, Miguel. You will kill me, as you are the good shot.
I don’t know why I ever carried one, except to entice you to show your
skill at breaking the floating bottles. But that was before the
trouble.”
“Dear Nicanor!”
“But let it be _à l’outrance_. I want either to kill you or to be
killed.”
“If she were only out of the way, you would love me again.”
“Amen to that, dear Miguel!”
“Yet we are to fight?”
“To the death, my brother, my comrade! Such is the madness of
passion.”
The paralyzed landlord found breath for the first time to intervene.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! for God’s sake! consider my reputation!”
Miguel, starting away, and leaving Nicanor with his back to the
closet, produced and pointed his weapon at the trembling creature.
These South Americans were a strange compound of sweetness and
ferocity.
“If you interfere,” he said, “I will shoot you instead. Now, Nicanor,
we fire at discretion, one shot to each.”
The bang of Nicanor’s pistol shattered the emptiness. Miguel was down
on the floor. Nicanor cast away his reeking weapon, and, running to
his friend, raised his body in his arms. The door of the closet
opened, and Suzanne, radiant and gloating, stood in the entry. “That
was a good shot, Nicanor,” said Miguel, smiling weakly. “You are
better at men than bottles.”
“Miguel! Miguel! you have your pistol undischarged. Faint as you are,
you cannot miss me at this range.”
“Stand away, then, Nicanor.”
Nicanor stood up, tearing his coat apart.
“Here, here! to my heart, dearest!”
Miguel, supporting himself on his left hand, raised his pistol
swiftly, and shot Mademoiselle Suzanne through the breast. Then he
fell back to the floor.
“That is the short way to it, Nicanor. Confess, after all, I am the
better shot. Now we are reunited for ever.”
Suzanne had not a word to say to that compact. She lay in a heap, like
the sweetest of dressmaker’s dummies overturned.
The landlord raised a terrible outcry.
“Messieurs! I am ruined, unless you witness to the truth of this
catastrophe!”
“I, for one, will witness,” said de Bellenglise, very white.
“Mademoiselle, it is plain to the humorist, has only reaped what she
sowed. But I do not envy M. Nicanor his survival.”
Heaven, however, did, it appeared, from the fact of its claiming him
to the most austere of its foundations, La Trappe, in Normandy, where
men whom the law exonerates may suffer, voluntarily, a lifelong penal
servitude.
And, in the meanwhile, Miguel could await his friend wholehearted, for
he had certainly taken the direct way of sending Mademoiselle Suzanne
to a place where her future interference between them was not to be
dreaded.