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Bulstrode, by Marie Van Vorst
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Title: The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode
Author: Marie Van Vorst
Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball
Release Date: October 13, 2010 [EBook #34065]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JIMMY BULSTRODE ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and
madame "_pour les enfants_"]
The Sentimental
Adventures of
Jimmy Bulstrode
BY
MARIE VAN VORST
With Illustrations by
ALONZO KIMBALL
NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1908
TO THE MEMORY
OF
H. E. TESCHEMACHER
CONTENTS
_THE FIRST ADVENTURE_
In which he buys a Christmas tree
_THE SECOND ADVENTURE_
In which he tries to buy a portrait
_THE THIRD ADVENTURE_
In which he finds there are some things which one cannot buy
_THE FOURTH ADVENTURE_
In which he makes three people happy
_THE FIFTH ADVENTURE_
In which he makes nobody happy at all
_THE SIXTH ADVENTURE_
In which he discards a knave and saves a queen
_THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE_
In which he becomes the possessor of a certain piece of property
_THE EIGHTH ADVENTURE_
In which he comes into his own
ILLUSTRATIONS
From drawings by ALONZO KIMBALL
_The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame "pour
les enfants"_ . . . . . . Frontispiece
"_I only like him like a kind, kind friend_"
_In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing_
"_I've had a telegram from my husband_"
THE FIRST ADVENTURE
I
IN WHICH HE BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE
There was never in the world a better fellow than Jimmy Bulstrode. If
he had been poorer his generosities would have ruined him over and over
again. He was always being taken in, was the recipient of hundreds of
begging letters, which he hired another soft-hearted person to read.
He offended charitable organizations by never passing a beggar's
outstretched hand without dropping a coin in it. He was altogether a
distressingly impracticable rich person, surrounded by people who
admired him for what he really was and by those who tried to squeeze
him for what he was worth!
It was a general wonder to people who knew him slightly why Bulstrode
had never married. The gentleman himself knew the answer perfectly,
but it amused him to discuss the question in spite of the pain, as well
as for the pleasure that it caused him to consider--_the reason why_.
Mary Falconer, the woman he loved, was the wife of a man of whom
Bulstrode could only think in pitiful contempt. But, thanks to an
element of chivalry in the character of the hero of this story the
years, as time went on, spread back of both the woman and the man in an
honorable series, of whose history neither one had any reason to be
ashamed.
Nevertheless, it struck them both as rather humorous, after all, that
of the three concerned her husband should be the only renegade and,
notwithstanding, profit by the combined good faith of his wife and the
man who loved her.
Oh, there was nothing easy in the task that Jimmy set for himself! And
it did not facilitate matters that Mary Falconer scarcely ever helped
him in the least! She was a beautiful woman, a tender woman, and there
were times when her friend felt that she cleverly and cruelly taunted
him with Puritanism and with his simple, old-fashioned ideas and
crystal clearness of vision, the _culte_ he had regarding marriage and
the sacred way in which he held bonds and vows. It was no help at all
to think she rebelled and jested at his reserve; that she did her best
to break it--and there were times when it was a brilliant siege. But
down in her heart she respected him, and as she saw around her the
domestic wrecks with which the matrimonial seas are encumbered, and
knew that her own craft promised to go safely through the storm, Mary
Falconer more than once had been grateful to the man.
As far as Bulstrode himself was concerned, each year--there had been
ten of them--he found the situation becoming more difficult and
dangerous. Not only did the future appear to him impossible as things
were, but he began to hate his arid past. He was sometimes led to ask,
what, after all, was he getting out of his colossal sacrifice? The
only reward he wanted was the woman herself, and, unless her husband
died, she would never be his. Bulstrode had not found that he could
solve the problem, and now and then he let it go from sheer weariness
of heart.
In the face of the window of the drawing-room where Bulstrode sat on
this afternoon of an especial winter's day the storm cast wreaths of
snow that clung and froze, or dropped like feathers down against the
sill. The gentleman had his predilections even in New York, and in the
open fireplace the logs crumbled and disintegrated to ashen caves
wherein the palpitating jewels of the heat were held. Except for this
old-fashioned warmth, there was none other in the room, whose white
wainscoting and pillars, low ceilings and quaint chimney-piece,
characterized one of those agreeably proportioned houses still to be
found in lower New York around Washington Square.
Bulstrode had received about half an hour ago a letter whose qualities
and suggestions were something disturbing to him:
"There is such a thing, believe me" (Mary Falconer wrote in the pages
which Bulstrode opened to read for the twentieth time), "as the _gloom_
of Christmas, Jimmy. People won't frankly own to it. They're afraid
of seeming sour and crabbed. But don't you, who are so exquisitely apt
to feelings--to other people's feelings,--at once confess it? It
attacks the spinster in the bustling winter streets as she is elbowed
by some person, exuberantly a mother, and so arrogantly laden with
delicious-looking parcels that she is almost a personal Christmas tree
herself. I'm confident this 'gloom of Christmas' grips the wretched
little beings at toy-shop windows as they stand 'choosin'' their
never-to-be-realized toys. I'm sure it haunts the vagrant and the
homeless in a city fairly redolent of holly and dinners, and where the
array of other people's homes is terrifying. And, my dear friend, it
is so horribly subtle that no doubt it attacks others whose only grudge
is that their hearths are not built for Christmas trees or the hanging
of stockings. But these unfortunates are not saying anything aloud,
therefore we must not pry!
"There's a jolly house-party on at the Van Schoolings'. We're to go
down to-morrow to Tuxedo and pass Christmas night, and you are, of
course, asked and wanted. Knowing your dread of these family
feasts--possibly from just such a ghost of the gloom--I was sure you
would refuse. But it's a wonderful place for a talk or two, and I
shall hope you will go--will come, not even follow, but go down with
me."
There was more of the letter--there always is more of women's letters.
Their minds and pens are so charmingly facile; there is nothing a woman
can do better than talk, except to write.
Bulstrode smoked slowly, the pages between his fingers, his thoughts
travelling like wanderers towards a home from which a ban had kept them
aliens. His eyes drifted to the beginning of the letter. He wasn't
familiar with the homeless vagrant class. His charities to that part
of the population consisted in donations to established societies, and
haphazard giving called forth by a beggar's extended hand.
If anybody may be immune to the melancholy of which his friend Mrs.
Falconer spoke, it should surely be this gentleman, smoking his cigar
before the fire. The unopened letters--there was a pile of them--would
have offered ample reason why. No one of the lot but bore some
testimony to the generous heart which, beneath dinner-jacket and behind
the screw-faced watch with the picture in the back of it, beat so
healthy and so well.
But the bestowal of benefits, whilst it may beautify the giver, does
not always transform itself into the one benefit desired and console
the bestower! Bulstrode had a charming home. He was alone in it. He
had his clubs where bachelors like himself, more or less infected with
Christmas gloom, would be glad to greet him. He had his friends, many
of them, and their home circles were complete. His, by force of
circumstances, began and ended with himself, and as if triumphant to
have found so tempting a victim, the gloom came and possessed Bulstrode
as he sat and mused.
But the decided sadness that stole across his face bore no relation, to
the season, to whose white mystery and holy beauty there was something
in his boyish, kindly heart that always responded.
The sadness Mrs. Falconer's letter awakened would not sleep. What his
Christmas _might_ be...! He had only to order his motor, to call for
her and drive over the ferry; to sit beside her in the train, to drive
with her again across the wintry roads. He had but to see her, watch
her, talk with her, share with her the day and evening, to have his
Christmas as nearly what a feast should be as dreams could ask. The
whole festival was there: joy, good-will--peace? No. Not peace for
him or for her--not that; everything else, but not that. And he had
been travelling for five weary months in order to make himself keep for
her that peace a little longer.
Bulstrode sighed here, lifted the letter where there was more of it to
his lips--held it out toward the fire as if the red jewels were to set
themselves around it, thought differently, and putting it back in its
envelope, thrust it in the pocket of his waistcoat.
"Ruggles," he asked the servant who had come in, "you sent the despatch
to Tuxedo?"
"Yes, sir."
"There'll be later a note to send. I'll ring. Well, what is it?"
"There's a person at the door, sir, who insists on seeing you."
The servant's tone--one particularly jarring to the ears of a man who
had fellowship with more than one class of his kind--made the master
look sharply up. Ruggles was a new addition to the household, and
Bulstrode did not like him.
"A person," Bulstrode repeated, quietly; "what sort of a person?"
"A man, sir."
"Not a gentleman? No," he nodded gently; "I see you do not think him
one. Yet that he is a man is in his favor. There are some gentlemen
who aren't men, you know. Let him in."
In doing so Ruggles seemed to let in the night. Bulstrode had, in the
warmth of his fragrant room, forgotten that outside was the wintry
dark. Ruggles, in letting the man in, had the air of thrusting him in,
and shut the door behind the visitor with a click.
The creature himself let in the cold; he seemed made of it. The snow
clung to his shoulders; his shoes, tied up with strings, were encrusted
with it. His coat, buttoned to his chin, frayed at the cuffs and
edges, was thin and weather-stained. He had a pale face, a royal
growth of beard--this was all Bulstrode had time to remark. He rose.
"My servant says you want to see me. Come near the fire, won't you?"
The visitor did not stir. Bewildered in the warmth of the room, he
stood far back on the edge of the thick rug. To all appearances he was
a bit of driftwood from the streets, one of the usual vagrant class who
haunt the saloons and park and steer from lockup to night-lodging,
until they finally steer themselves entirely off the face of history,
and the potter's field gathers them in. Nothing but his entrance into
this conventional room before this well-balanced member of decent
society was peculiar.
As he still neither moved nor spoke, Bulstrode, approaching him, again
invited: "Come near the fire, won't you? and when you are warm tell me
what I can do for you."
"It's the storm," murmured the man, and a half-human look came across
his face with his words. "I mean to say, it's this hellish storm
that's got in my throat and lungs. I can't speak--it's so warm here.
It will be better in a second. No, not near the fire;
thanks--chilblains." He looked down at his poor feet.
The voice which the storm had beaten and thrashed to painful hoarseness
was entirely out of keeping with the man's appearance, and in
intonation, accent, and language was a shock to the hearer.
"Don't stand back like that--come into the room." Bulstrode wheeled a
chair briskly about. "There; sit down and drink this; it's a mild
blend."
"I'm very wet," said the man. "I'll drip on the rug."
"Hang the rug!"
The tramp drained the glass given him at one swallow merely; it
appeared to clear his throat and release his speech. He gathered his
rags together.
"I beg pardon for forcing myself on you like this, but I fancy I
needn't tell you I'm desperate--desperate!" He held out his hand; it
shook like a pale ghost's. "I look it, I'm sure. I haven't eaten a
meal or slept in a bed for a fortnight. I've begged work and charity.
All day I've been shovelling snow, but I'm too weak to work now."
He was being led to a chair. He sank in it. "Before they sent me to
the Island I decided to try a ruse. I went into a saloon and opened a
directory, and I said, 'The first name I put my finger upon I'll take
as good luck, and I'll go and see the person, man or woman. I opened
to James Thatcher Bulstrode, 9 Washington Square." He half smiled; the
pale, trembling hand was waving like a pitiful flag, a signal of
distress to catch the sight of some bark that might lend aid. "So I
came here. When there seemed actually to be some chance of my getting
in, why, my courage failed me. I don't expect you to believe my story
or to believe anything, except that I am desperate--desperate. It's
below zero to-night out there--infernally cold." He took the pin out
of the collar turned up around his neck and let his coat fall back.
Under it Bulstrode saw he wore a thin flannel shirt. The tramp
repeated to himself, as it were, "It's a bad storm."
He looked up in a dazed fashion at his host as if for acceptance of his
remark. In the easy chair, half swathed in rags, pitiful in thinness,
dripping from shoes and clothes water that the storm had drenched into
him, he was a sorry object in the atmosphere of the well-ordered
conventional room. The heat and whiskey, the famine and exposure, cast
a film across his eyes and brain. He indistinctly saw his host pass
into the next room and shut the door behind him.
"By Jove!" he murmured under his breath in wonder find dumb thanks for
the shelter. "By Jove!" The stimulant filtered agreeably through him;
more charitable than any element with which he had been lately
familiar, the fire's heat began to thaw the ice in his bones. He laid
his dripping hat on his knees, his thin hands folded themselves over
it, his eyes closed. For hours he had shuffled about the streets to
keep from freezing. At the charity organization they gave work he was
too weak to do; he had not eaten a substantial meal in so long that he
had forgotten the taste of food and had ceased to crave it. In the
soft light of lamp and fire he fell into a doze. Bulstrode, if he had
stolen softly in to look at his visitor, would have seen a man not over
thirty years of age, although want and dissipation added ten to his
appearance. He would have been quick to take note of the fine,
delicately cut face under the disfiguring beard, and of the slender,
emaciated body deformed by its rags.
Possibly he did so noiselessly come in and stand by the unconscious
creature, but the sleeping vagabond, dreaming fitful, half-painful
things, was ignorant of the visitor. Finally across his mind's sharp
despair came a sense of warmth and comfort, and in its spell he awoke.
A servant, not the one who had thrust him into the drawing-room, but
another with a friendly face, stood at his side, and in broken English
asked the guest of Bulstrode to follow him; and gathering his scattered
senses together and picking up his rags and what was left of himself,
the creature obeyed a summons which he supposed was to hale him again
into the winter streets.
It was some three hours later that Bulstrode in his dining-room
entertained his singular guest.
"I have asked you to dine with me," he explained, with a certain
graciousness, as if he claimed, not gave, a favor, "as I'm all alone
to-night. It's Christmas eve, you know--or perhaps you've been more or
less glad to forget it?"
The young man who took the chair indicated him was unrecognizable as
the stranger who had staggered into 9 Washington Square three or four
hours before. Turned out in spotless linen and a good suit that fitted
him fairly well, shaven face save for a mustache above his lip, bathed,
brushed, refreshed by nourishment and sleep and repose, he looked like
one who has been in the waters, possibly a long, long time; like one
who has drifted, been bruised, shattered, and beaten, but who has
nevertheless drifted to shore; and in spite of his borrowed clothes,
his scarred, haggard face, he looked like a gentleman, and Bulstrode
from the moment he spoke had recognized him as one.
The food was a feast to the stranger, in spite of nourishment already
given him by Prosper. He restrained the ferocious hunger that woke at
sight and smell of the good things, forced himself not to cry out with
eagerness, not to tear and grasp the eatables off the plate, not to
devour like a beast. Every time he raised his eyes he met those of the
butler Ruggles, and as quickly the stranger looked away. The face of
the servant standing by the sideboard, back of him the white and
gleaming array of the Bulstrode family silver like piles of snow, was
for some reason or other not a pleasant face; the stranger did not
think it so.
Once again seated in the room he had entered in his outcast state, a
cup of coffee at his hand, a cigar between his lips, the agreeable
atmosphere of the old room and its charming objects, the kindly look on
the face of his host, all swam before him. Looking frankly at
Bulstrode, he said, not without grace of manner:
"I give it up. I can't--it's not to be made out or understood..."
"Do you," interrupted the other, "feel equal to talking a little: to
telling me how it happens that you are wandering, as you seem to be?
For from the moment you first spoke----"
The young man nodded. "I'm a gentleman. It's worse somehow--I don't
know why, but it is."
Bulstrode thought out for him: "It's like remembering agreeable places
to which you feel you will never return. Only," he quickly offered,
"in your case you must, you know, go back."
"No," said the young man, quietly.
There was so much entire renunciation in what he said that the other
could not press it.
"Better still, you can then go on?"
The vagrant looked at his companion as if to say: "Since I've known
you--seen you--I have thought that I might." But he said nothing more,
and Bulstrode, reading a diffidence which did not displease him,
finished:
"You shall go on, and I'll help you."
The stranger bowed his head, and the wine sent the color up until his
cheeks took the flush of health. Remaining a little bent over, his
eyes on his feet clad in Bulstrode's shoes, he said:
"I'm an Englishman. My family is everything that's decent and all
_that_, you know, and proud. We've first-rate traditions. I'm a
younger son, and I've always been a thorn in the family's side. I've
been a sort of vagabond from the first, but never as bad as they
thought or believed."
He paused. His recital was painful to him. Bulstrode waited, then
knocking off the ash from his cigar, urged:
"Tell me about it, tell me frankly; it will, you see, be a relief. We
can do better that way--if I know."
The stranger looked up at him quickly, then leaning forward in his
chair, talked as it were to the carpet, and rapidly:
"It's just a year ago. I'd been going it rather hard and got into
trouble more or less--lost at cards and the races, and been running up
a lot of bills. My father was awfully down on me. I'd gone home for
the holidays and had a talk with my father and asked him to pay up for
me just this once more. He refused, and we got very angry, both of us,
and separated in a rage. The house was full of people--a Christmas
ball and a tree. My father had, so it happened, quite a lot of money
in the house. I knew where it was--I had seen him count it and put it
away. That night for some reason the whole thing sickened me, in the
mess I was in, and I left and went up to London without even saying
good-by. In the course of the week my brother came and found me drunk
in my rooms. It seems that the money had been taken from my father's
safe, and they accused me."
"But," interrupted Bulstrode, eagerly, "it was a simple thing to
exculpate yourself."
Ignoring his remark, the other continued: "I have never seen my father
since that night."
No amount of former deception can persuade a man that he is a lame
judge of character. The young Englishman's emaciated face, where eyes
spoiled by dissipation looked out at his companion, was to this
impulsive reader of humanity a good face. Bulstrode, however, saw what
he wanted to see in most people. Given a chance to study them, or
rather further to know them intimately, he might indeed have ended by
finding in some cases a few of the imagined qualities. Here misery was
evident, degradation as well, timidity, and hesitation,--but honesty?
Bulstrode fancied that its characters were not effaced, and he helped
the recital:
"Since you so left your people?"
"The steady go down!" acknowledged the other. "I worked my passage to
the States on a liner--I stoked..."
"Any chap," encouraged the gentleman, "who can do that can pull
himself, I should say, out of a worse hole."
"There's scarcely a bad habit I haven't had down in the hole with me,"
confessed the other, "and they've held me there."
They both remained for a few seconds without speaking, and the host's
eyes wandered to where, over his mantel-shelf, in a great gold frame
was the portrait of a lady done by Baker. A quaint young lady in her
early teens, with bare arms and frilled frock. She had Bulstrode's
eyes. By her side was the black muzzle of a great hound, on whose head
the little hand rested. Under the picture, from a silver bowl of
roses, came a fragrance that filled the room, and, close by stood a
photograph of another lady, very modern, very mocking, and very lovely.
Bulstrode, delicately drawing inferences from the influences in his
life, and, if not consciously grateful, reflecting them charmingly,
broke the silence:
"You must have formed some plan or other in your mind when you came to
my door? What, in the event of your being received, did you intend to
ask me to do?"
The stranger lifted his head and his response was irrelevant: "It seems
a hundred years since I stood there in that storm and your man pulled
me in. I haven't seen a place like this for long, not the inside of
decent houses. When I left the ship I managed to get down with a chap
as far as Florida, where he had an orange-plantation, but the venture
fell through. I fancy the rest is as well forgotten. When I came in
here to-night I intended to ask you for a Christmas gift of money, and
I should have gone out and drunk myself to hell."
"You spoke"--Bulstrode fetched him back--"of your father and your
brother; was there no one else?"
The younger man looked up without reply.
"There has been, then, no more kindly influence in your life--no
sister--no woman?"
Bulstrode brought out the words; in his judgment they meant so very
much. He saw a change cross the other's face.
"I fancy there are not many men who haven't had a woman in their lives
for good or bad," he said, with a short laugh.
"Well," urged the gentleman, gently, "and for what was this woman?"
As if he repelled the insistence, the young fellow stammered:
"I say, this putting a fellow on the rack----"
But Bulstrode leaned forward in his chair and rested his hand on his
companion's knee and pleaded:
"Speak out frankly--frankly--I believe I shall understand; it will free
your heart to speak. This influence which to a man should be the
best--the best--what was it to you?" Bulstrode sat back and waited,
and the other man seemed quite lost in melancholy meditations for some
few seconds. Then Bulstrode put it: "For a young man, no matter how
wild, to leave his home under the misapprehension you claim:--for him
to make no effort to reinstate himself: with no attempt at justice: for
him to become a wanderer--there must be an extraordinary reason, almost
an improbable one----"
"I don't ask you to hear," said the vagrant, quickly.
"I wish to do so. It would have been a simple matter to exculpate
yourself--you had not the funds in your possession, had never had them.
You took no means to clear yourself?"
"None."
Bulstrode looked hard at the face his care had revealed to him: the
deep eyes, the neck, chin, the sensitive mouth--there was a certain
distinction about him in his borrowed clothes.
"Where is the woman now?"
"She married my brother--she is Lady Waring--my name," tardily
introduced the stranger, "is Cecil Waring."
Bulstrode bowed. "Tell me something of her, in a word--in a word."
"Well, she is always clever," said the young man, slowly, "always very
beautiful, and then very poor."
"Yes," nodded Bulstrode.
"She is like the rest of us--one of a fast wild set--a----"
"A gambler?" Bulstrode helped the description.
"She played," acknowledged the young man, "as the rest do--bridge."
"Were you engaged to her, Waring?"
"Yes," he slowly acknowledged, as if each word hurt him.
"And did she believe you guilty?"
"I think," said the other, with an inscrutable expression, "she could
not have done so."
"But she let you go under suspicion?"
"Yes."
"Without a word of good faith, of comfort?"
"Yes."
"Did she know of your embarrassments?"
"Too well."
"You tell me she was poor and--possibly she had embarrassments of her
own?"
"Possibly."
Bulstrode came over to him.
"Was she at the Christmas ball that night?"
The young man rose as well, his eyes on his questioner's; the color had
all left his face--he appeared fascinated--then he shook himself and
unexpectedly laughed.
"No," he said; "oh no."
The older man bowed his head and replied, quite inaptly:
"I understand!"
He took a turn across the room.
The few steps brought him in front of the mantel and the photograph of
the modern lady in her furs and close hat. He stood and met the fire
of her mocking eyes.
"And you _believe_ him, Jimmy!" he could hear her say in her delicious
voice.
"Yes," he mentally told her, "I believe him."
"You think that to save a woman's name and honor he has become an
outcast on the face of the earth ... Jimmy!"
He still gently replied to her:
"Men who love, you know, have but one code--the woman and honor."
Still mocking, but gentle as would have been the touch of the roses in
the bowl near the photograph, her voice told him,
"Then he's worth saving, Jimmy."
Worth saving ... he agreed, and turned to his guest. In doing so he
saw that Ruggles had come into the drawing-room to remove the
coffee-tray.
"Beg pardon, sir, but you mentioned there would be a letter to send
shortly?"
"By Jove! so I did!" exclaimed Bulstrode. "I beg your pardon; will you
excuse me while I write a line at the desk?" The line was an order to
the florist.
For some reason the eyes of the Englishman had not quitted the butler's
face, and Ruggles, with cold insolence, had stared at him in turn.
Waring, albeit in another man's clothes, fed and seated before a
friendly hearth, and once again within the pale of his own class, had
regained something of his natural air and feeling of superiority. He
resented the servant's insolence, and his face was angrily flushed as
Bulstrode gave his orders, and the man left the room.
"I must go away," he said, rather brusquely. "I can never thank you
for what you have done. I feel as if I had been in a dream."
"Sit down." His companion ignored his words. "Sit down."
"It's late."
"For what, my friend?"
"I must find some place to sleep."
"You have found it," gently smiled Bulstrode. "Your room is prepared
for you here." Then he interrupted: "No thanks--no thanks. If what
you tell me is all I think it is, I'm proud to share my roof with you,
Waring."
"Don't think well of me--don't!" blurted out the other. "You don't
know what a ruined vagabond I am. When you send me out to-morrow I
shall begin again; but let me tell you that although I've herded with
tramps and thieves, been in the hospital and lock-up, and worked in the
hell of a furnace in a ship's hold, nothing hurt me any more, not after
I left England--not after those days when I waited in Liverpool for a
word--for a sign--not after that, all you see the marks of now--nothing
hurts now but the memory. I'm immune."
"You will feel differently--you will humanize."
"Never!" exclaimed the tramp.
"To-night," said Bulstrode, simply.
Waring looked at him curiously.
"What a wonderful man!" he half murmured. "I was led to you by fate:
you have forced me to lay my soul bare to you--and now..."
"Let's look things in the face together," suggested the gentleman,
practically. "I have a ranch out West. A good piece of property.
It's in the hands of a clever Englishman and promises well. How would
you like to go out there and start anew? He'll give you a welcome, and
he's a first-rate business man. Will you go?"
Waring had with his old habit thrust his hands in his pockets. He
stood well on his feet. Bulstrode remarked it. He looked meditatively
down between the soles of his shoes.
"You mean to say you give me a chance--to--to----"
"Begin anew, Waring."
"I drink a great deal," said the young man.
"You will swear off."
"I've gambled away all the money I ever had."
"You will be taking care of mine, and it will be a point of honor."
"I'm under a cloud----
"Not in my eyes," said Bulstrode, stoutly.
"--which I can never clear."
Bulstrode made a dismissing gesture.
"I should want the chap out there to know the truth."
"The truth," caught his hearer, and the other as quickly interrupted:
"To know under what circumstances I left my people."
"No, that is unnecessary," said Bulstrode, firmly. "Nobody has any
right to your past. I don't know his. That's the beauty of the
plains--the freshness of them. It's a new start--a clean page."
Still the guest hesitated.
"I don't believe it's worth while. You see, I've batted about now so
much alone, with nobody near me but the lowest sort; I've given in so
long, with no care to do better, that I haven't any confidence in
myself. I don't want you to see me fail, sir,--I don't want to go back
on you."
Bulstrode had heard very understandingly part of the man's word, part
of his excuse for his weakness.
"That's it," he said, musingly. "Butting about alone. It's
that--loneliness--that's responsible for so many things."
Looking up brightly as his friend whose derelict dangerous vessel, so
near to port and repair, was heading for the wide seas again, Bulstrode
wondered: "If such a thing could be that some friend, not too
uncongenial, could be found to go with you and stand as it were by
you--some friend who knew--who comprehended----"
Waring laughed. "I haven't such a one."
"Yes," said the older gentleman, "you have, and he will stand by you.
I'll go West with you myself to-morrow--on Christmas day. I need a
change. I want to get away for a little time."
Waring drew back a step, for Bulstrode had risen. Cold Anglo-Saxon as
he was, the unprecedented miracle this gentleman presented made him
seem almost lunatic. He stared blankly.
"It's simpler than it looks." Bulstrode attempted conventionally to
shear it of a little of its eccentricity. "There's every reason why I
should look after my property out there. I've never seen it at all."
"I'm not worth such a goodness," Waring faltered, earnestly,--"not
worth it."
"You will be."
"Don't hope it."
"I believe it," smiled the gentleman; "and at all events I'll stand by
you till you are--if you'll say the word."
Waring, whose lips were trembling, repeated vaguely, "The _word_?"
"Well," replied Bulstrode, "you might say those--they're as good
any--will you stand by _me_----?"
Making the first hearty spontaneous gesture he had shown, the young man
seized the other's outstretched hand. "Yes," he breathed; "by Heaven!
I will!"
It was past midnight when Bulstrode, pushing open the curtains of his
bedroom, looked out on the frozen world of Washington Square, where of
tree and arch not an outline was visible under the disguising snow; and
above, in the sky swept clear of clouds by the strongest of winds, rode
the round full disk of the Christmas moon.
The adoption of a vagrant, the quixotic decision he had taken to leave
New York on Christmas day, the plain facts of the outrageous folly his
impulsiveness led him to contemplate, had relegated his more worldly
plans to the background. Laying aside his waistcoat, he took out the
letter in whose contents he had been absorbed when Cecil Waring crossed
the threshold of his drawing-room.
Well ... as he re-read at leisure her delightful plan for Christmas
day, he sighed that he could not do for them both better than to go two
thousand miles away! "Waring thinks himself a vagrant--and so, poor
chap, he has been; but there are vagrants of another kind." Jimmy
reflected he felt himself to be one of these others, and was led to
speculate if there were many outcasts like himself, and what
ultimately, if their courage was sufficient to keep them banished to
the end, would be the reward?
"Since," he reflected, "there's only one thing I desire--and it's the
one thing forbidden--I fail sometimes to quite puzzle it out!"
He had finished his preparations for the night and was about to turn
out the light, when, with his hand on the electric button, he paused,
for he distinctly heard from downstairs what sounded like a call--a cry.
Taking his revolver from the top drawer, he went into the hall, to feel
a draft of icy air blow up the staircase, to see over the balusters the
open door of the dining-room and light within it, and to hear more
clearly the sounds that had come to him through closed doors declare
themselves to be scuffling--struggling--the half-cry of a muffled
voice--a fall, then Bulstrode started.
"I'm coming," he declared, and ran down the stairs like a boy.
On the dining-room floor, close to the window wide open to the icy
night, lay a man's form, and over him bent another man cruelly, with
all the animus of a bird of prey.
The under man was Ruggles, Bulstrode's butler, his eyes starting from
their sockets, his mouth open, his color livid; he couldn't have called
out, for the other man had seized his necktie, twisted it tight as a
tourniquet around the man's gullet, and so kneeling with one knee on
his chest, Waring held the big man under.
"I say," panted the young man, "can you lend a hand, sir? I've got
him, but I'm not strong enough to keep him."
Bulstrode thought his servant's eyes rolled appealingly at him. He
cocked his revolver, holding it quietly, and asked coolly:
"What's the matter with him that he needs to be kept?"
"Would you sit on his chest, Mr. Bulstrode?"
"No," said that gentleman. "I'll cover him so. What's the truth?"
"I heard a queer noise," panted the Englishman, "and came out to see
what it was, and this fellow was just getting through the window.
There was another chap outside, but he got away. I caught this one
from the back, otherwise I could never have thrown him."
"You're throttling him."
"He deserves it."
"Let him up."
"Mr. Bulstrode...!"
"Yes," said that gentleman, decidedly, "let him up."
But Ruggles, released from the hand whose knuckles had ground
themselves into his windpipe, could not at once rise. The breath was
out of him, for he had been heavily struck in the stomach by a blow
from the fist of a man whose training in sport had delightfully
returned at need.
Ruggles began to breathe like a porpoise, to grunt and pant and roll
over. He staggered to his feet, and with a string of imprecations
raised his fist at Waring, but as Bulstrode's revolver was entirely
ready to answer at command, he did not venture to leave the spot where
he stood.
"Now," said his master, "when you get your tongue your story will be
just the same as Mr. Waring's. You found him getting away with the
silver. The probabilities are all with you, Ruggles. The police will
be here in just about five minutes. Ten to one the guilty man is known
to the officers. Now there's an overcoat and hat on the hat-rack in
the hall. I give both of you time to get away. There's the front door
and the window--which, by the way, you would better shut, Waring, as
it's a cold morning."
Neither man moved. Without removing his eyes from the butler or
uncovering him, Bulstrode, by means of the messenger-call to the right
of the window, summoned the police. The metallic click of the button
sounded loud in the room.
Ruggles shook his great hand high in air.
"I'd--I'd----"
"Never mind _that_," interrupted the householder. "The man who's
_going_ had better take his chance. There's one minute lost."
During the next half-second the modern philanthropist breathed in
suspense. It was so on the cards that he might be obliged to apologize
to his antipathetic butler and find himself sentimentally sold by
Waring!
But Ruggles it was who with a parting oath stepped to the
door--accelerating his pace as the daze began to pass a little from his
brain, and snatched the hat and coat, unlocked the front door, opened
it, looked quickly up and down the white streets, and then without a
word cut down the steps and across Washington Square, slowly at first,
and then on a run.
Bulstrode turned to his visitor.
"Come," he said, "let's go up to bed."
"But," stammered the young man, "you're never going to let him go like
that?"
"Yes, I am," confessed the unpractical gentleman. "I couldn't send a
man to jail on Christmas day."
"But the police----?"
"I shall tell them out of my window that it was a false alarm."
Bulstrode shut and locked his door, and turning to Waring, laughed
delightedly.
"I must tell you that when he let you in last night Ruggles did not
think you were a gentleman. He must have found out this morning that
you were very much of a man. It's astonishing where you got your
strength, though. He'd make two of you, and you're not fit in any way."
He looked ghastly enough as Bulstrode spoke, and the gentleman put his
arm under the Englishman's. "I'll ring for the servants and have some
coffee made and fetched to your room. Lean on me." He helped the
vagabond upstairs.
The New Yorker, whose sentimental follies were certainly a menace to
public safety and a premium to begging and vagabondage and crime, slept
well and late, and was awakened finally by the keen, bright ringing of
the telephone at his side. As he took up the receiver his whole face
illumined.
"Merry Christmas, Jimmy!"
. . . . . . . .
"What _wonderful_ roses! Thanks a thousand times!"
. . . . . . . .
"But of course I knew! No other man in New York is sentimental enough
to have a woman awakened at eight o'clock by a bunch of flowers!"
. . . . . . . .
"Forgive you!" (It was clear that she did.)
. . . . . . . .
"Jimmy, what a day for Tuxedo, and what a shame I can't go!"
. . . . . . . .
"You weren't going! You mean to say that you had refused?"
. . . . . . . .
"I don't understand--it's the connection--West?"
"Why, ranches look after themselves. They always do. They go right
on. You don't _mean_ it, on Christmas day!"
. . . . . . . .
"I shouldn't care for your reasons. They're sure to be
ridiculous--unpractical--unnecessary--don't tell them to me."
There was a pause, and then the voice, which had undergone a slight
change said:
"Jack's ill again ... that's why I couldn't go to Tuxedo. I shall pass
the day here in town. I called up to tell you this--and to
suggest--but since you're going West..."
Falconer's illnesses! How well Bulstrode knew them, and how well he
could see her alone in the familiar little drawing-room by a hearth not
built for a Christmas tree! He had promised Waring, "I'll stand by
you." It was a kind of vow--a real vow, and the poor tramp had lived
up to his.
"Jimmy." There was a note he had never heard before; if a tone can be
a tear, it was one.
He interrupted her.
. . . . . . . .
"How dear of you!"
. . . . . . . .
"But I haven't any Christmas tree!"
. . . . . . . .
"You'll fetch one? How _dear_ of you! We'll trim it--with your
roses--make it bloom. Come early and help me dress the tree."
Two hours later he opened the door into his breakfast-room with the
guiltiness of a truant boy. He wore culprit shame written all over his
face, and the young man who stood waiting for him in the window might
almost have read his friend's dejection in his embarrassed face.
But Waring came eagerly forward, answered the season's greetings, and
said quickly:
"Are you still in the same mind about the West, Mr. Bulstrode?"
(Poor Bulstrode!)
"I mean to say, sir, if you still feel like giving me this chance, I've
a favor to ask. Would you let me go _alone_?"
Bulstrode gasped.
"Since last night a lot has happened to me, not only since you've
befriended me, but since I tussled with that fellow here. I'd like a
chance to see what I can do alone. If you, as you so generously plan,
go with me, I shall feel watched--protected. It will weaken me more
than anything else. I suppose I shall go all to pieces, but I'd like
to try my strength. If I could suddenly master that chap with my fists
after months of dissipation----"
Bulstrode finished for him:
"You can master the rest."
"Don't give me any extra money," pleaded the tramp, as if he foresaw
his friend's impulse. "Pay my ticket out West, if you will, and write
to the man who is there, and I'll start in."
Bulstrode beamed on him.
"You're a man," he assured him--"a man."
"I may become one."
"You're a fine fellow."
"You'll trust me, then?"
"Implicitly."
"Then let me start to-day. I'm reckless--let me get away. I may get
off at the first station and pawn my clothes and drink and drink to a
lower hell than before--but let me try alone."
"You shall go alone--and go to-day."
Prosper came in with the coffee; he, too, was beaming, and the servants
below-stairs were all agog. Waring was a hero.
"Prosper," said his master, in French, "will you, after you have served
breakfast, go out to the market quarters and see if you can discover
for me a medium-sized, very well-proportioned little Christmas tree?
Fetch it home with you."
Waring smiled faintly.
Bulstrode smiled too, and more comprehendingly, and Prosper smiled and
said:
"Mais certainement, monsieur."
THE SECOND ADVENTURE
II
IN WHICH HE TRIES TO BUY A PORTRAIT
Bulstrode was extremely fond of travel, and every now and then treated
himself to a season in London or Paris, and in the May following his
adventure with Waring he saw, from his apartments in the Hôtel Ritz,
from Boulevard, Bois, and the Champs Elysées, as much of the
maddeningly delicious Parisian springtime "as was good for him at his
age," so he said! It gave the feeling that he was a mere boy, and with
buoyant sensations astir in him, life had begun over again.
Any morning between eleven and twelve Bulstrode might have been seen in
the Bois de Boulogne briskly walking along the Avenue des Acacias, his
well-filled chest thrown out, his step light and assured; cane in hand,
a boutonnière tinging the lapel of his coat; immaculate and fresh as a
rose, he exhaled good-humor, kindliness, and well-being.
From their traps and motors charming women bowed and smiled, the _fine
fleur_ and the _beau monde_ greeted him cordially.
"Regardez moi ce bon Bulstrode qui se promene," if it were a Frenchman,
or, "There's dear old Jimmy Bulstrode!" if he were recognized by a
compatriot.
Bulstrode was rather slight of build, yet with an evident strength of
body that indicated a familiarity with exercise, a healthful habit of
sport and activity. His eyes, clear-sighted and strong, looked through
the medium of no glass happily and naïvely on the world. Many years
before his hair had begun to turn gray, and had not nearly finished the
process; it grew thickly, and was quite dark about his ears and on his
brow. Having gained experience and kept his youth, he was as rare and
delightful as fine wine--as inspiring as spring. It was his heart
(Mrs. Falconer said) that made him so, his good, gentle, generous
heart!--and she should know. His fastidiousness in point of dress, and
his good taste kept him close to elegance of attire.
"You turn yourself out, Jimmy, on every occasion," she had said, "as if
you were on the point of meeting the woman you loved." And Bulstrode
had replied that such consistent hopefulness should certainly be
ultimately rewarded.
He gave the impression of a man who in his youth starts out to take a
long and pleasant journey and finds the route easy, the taverns
agreeable, and the scenes all the guide-book promised. Midway--(he had
turned the page of forty)--midway, pausing to look back, Bulstrode saw
the experiences of his travels in their sunny valleys, full of goodly
memories, and the future, to his sweet hopefulness, promised to be a
pleasant journey to the end.
During the time that he spent in Paris every pet charity in the
American colony took advantage of the philanthropic Mr. Bulstrode's
passing through the city, and came to him to be set upon its feet, and
every pretty woman with an interest, hobby, or scheme came as well to
this generous millionaire, told him about her fad and went away with a
donation.
One ravishing May morning Bulstrode, taking his usual constitutional in
the Bois, paused at the end of the Avenue des Acacias to find it
deserted and attractively quiet; he sat down on a little bench the more
reposefully to enjoy the day and time.
There are, fortunately, certain things which, unlike money, can be
shared only with certain people; and Bulstrode felt that the pleasure
of this spring day, the charm of the opposite wood-glades into which he
meditatively looked, the tranquil as well as the buoyant joy of life,
were among those personal things so delightful when shared--and which,
if too long enjoyed alone, bring (let it be scarcely whispered on this
bewildering May morning) something like sadness!
Before his happier mood changed his attention was attracted by a woman
who came rapidly toward the avenue from a little alley at the side. He
looked up quickly at the feminine creature who so aptly appeared upon
his musings. She was young; her form in its simple dress assured him
this. He could not see her face, for it was covered by her hands.
Abruptly taking the opposite direction, she went over to a farther
seat, where she sat down, and when the young girl put her arms on the
back of the seat, her head upon her arms, and in the remoteness this
part of the avenue offered, cried without restraint, the kind-hearted
Bulstrode felt that it was too cruel to be true.
But soft-hearted though he was, the gentleman was a worldling as well,
and that the outburst was a ruse more than suggested itself to him as
he went over to the lovely Niobe whose abundant fair hair sunned from
under her simple straw hat and from beneath whose frayed skirt showed a
worn little shoe.
He spoke in French.
"Pardon, madame, but you seem in great distress."
The poor thing started violently, and as soon as she displayed her
pretty tearful face the American recognized in her a compatriot. She
waved him emphatically away.
"Oh, please don't notice me--don't speak to me--I didn't see that
anybody was there."
"I am an American, too: can't I do anything for you--won't you let me?"
And he saw at once that she wanted to be left alone. She averted her
head determinedly.
"No, no, please don't notice me. Please go away!"
He had nothing to do but to obey her, and as he reluctantly did so a
smart pony-cart driven by a lady alone came briskly along and drew up,
for the occupant had recognized him.
"Get in!" she rather commanded. "My dear Jimmy, how _nice_ to find you
here, and how nice to drive you at least as far as the entrance!"
As the rebuffed philanthropist accepted he cast a ruthful glance at the
solitary figure on the bench.
"Do you see that poor girl over there? She's an American, and in real
trouble."
"My _dear_ Jimmy!" His companion's tone left him in no doubt as to her
scepticism.
"Oh, I know, I know," he interrupted, "but she's not a fraud. She's
the real thing."
They were already gayly whirling away from the sad little figure.
"Did you make her cry?"
"I? Certainly not."
"Then let the man who did wipe her tears away!"
But Bulstrode had seen the face of the girl, and he was haunted by it
all day until the Bois and its bright atmosphere became only the
setting for an unhappy woman, young and lovely, whom it had been
impossible for him to help.
Somebody had said that Bulstrode should have his portrait done with his
hands in his pockets, and Mrs. Falconer had replied, "Or rather with
_other_ people's hands in his pockets!"
The next afternoon he found himself part of a group of people who, out
of charity and curiosity, patronized the Western Artists' Exhibition in
the Rue Monsieur.
Having made a ridiculously generous donation to the support of this
league at the request of a certain lovely lady, Bulstrode followed his
generosity by a personal effort, and with not much opposition on his
part permitted himself to be taken to the exhibition.
He was not, in the ultra sense of the word, a _connaisseur_, but he
thought he knew a horror when he saw it! So he said, and on this
afternoon his eyes ached and his offended taste cried out before he had
patiently travelled half-way down the line of canvases.
"My dear lady," he confided _sotto voce_ to his friend, "I feel more
inclined to establish a fund for sending all these young women back to
the _prairies_, if that's where they come from, than to aid in this
slaughter of public time and taste. _Why_ don't they stay at home--and
marry?"
"That's a vulgar and limited point of view to take," his friend
reproached him. "Don't you acknowledge that a woman has many careers
instead of one? _You_ seem to be thoroughly enjoying your liberty!
What if I should ask you why _you_ don't stay at home, and marry?"
Bulstrode looked at his guide comprehensively and smiled gently. His
response was irrelevant. "Look at this picture! It's too dreadful for
words."
"Hush, you're not a judge. Here and there there is evidence of great
talent."
They had drawn up before a portrait, and poor Bulstrode caught his
breath with a groan:
"It's too awful! It's crime to encourage it."
Mrs. Falconer tried to lead him on.
"Well, this _is_ an unfortunate place to stop," she confessed. "That
portrait represents more tragedy than you can see."
"It couldn't," murmured Bulstrode.
"The poor girl who did it has struggled on here for two years, living
sometimes on a franc a day. Just fancy! She has been trying to get
orders so that she can stay on and study. Poor thing! The people who
are interested say that she's been near to desperation. She is awfully
proud, and won't take any assistance but orders. You can imagine
_they're_ not besieging her! She has come to her last cent, I believe,
and has to go home to Idaho."
"Let her go, my dear friend." Bulstrode was earnest. "It's the best
thing she could possibly do!"
His companion put her hand on his arm.
"Please be quiet," she implored. "There she is, standing over by the
door. That rather pretty girl with the disorderly blonde hair."
Bulstrode looked up--saw her--looked again, and exclaimed:
"Is _that_ the girl? Do you know her? Present me, will you?"
"Nonsense." She detained him. "How you go from hot to cold! _Why_
should you want to meet her, pray?"
"Oh," he evaded, "it's a curious study. I want to talk to her about
art, and if you don't present me I shall speak to her without an
introduction."
Not many moments later Bulstrode was cornered in a dingy little room,
where tea that tasted like the infusion of a haystack was being served.
He had skilfully disassociated Miss Laura Desprey from her Bohemian
companions and placed her on a little divan, before which, with a
teacup in his hand, he stood.
She wore the same dress, the same hat--and he did not doubt the same
shoes which characterized her miserable toilet when he had surprised
her childlike display of grief on a bench in the Bois. He had done
quite right in speaking to her, and he thanked his stars that she did
not in the least remember him.
He thought with kind humor: "No wonder she cries if she paints like
that!"
But it was not in a spirit of criticism that he bent his friendly eyes
on the Bohemian. He had the pleasure of seeing her plainly this time,
for the window back of her admitted a generous square of light against
which her blonde head framed itself, and her untidy hair was like a
dusty mesh of gold. She regarded the amiable gentleman out of eyes
child-like and purely blue. Under her round chin the edges of a black
bow tied loosely stood out like the wings of a butterfly. Her dress
was careless and poor, but she was grace in it and youth--"and what,"
thought Bulstrode, "has one a right to expect more of any woman?" He
remembered her boots and shuddered. He remembered the one franc a day
and began his campaign.
"I want so much to meet the painter of that portrait over there," he
began.
Her face lightened.
"Oh, did you like it?"
"I think it's wonderful, perfectly wonderful!"
A slow red crept up the thin contour of her cheek. She leaned forward!
"Do you really mean that?"
He said most seriously:
"Yes, I can frankly say I haven't seen a portrait in a long time which
impressed me so much."
His praise was not in Latin Quarter vernacular, and coming from a
Philistine, had only a certain value to the artist. But to a lonely
stranded girl the words were balm. Bulstrode, in his immaculate dress,
his conventional manner, was as foreign a person to the Bohemian
student as if he had been an inhabitant of another planet. Her speech
was brusque and quick, with a generous burr in her "rs" when she
replied.
"I've studied at Julian's two years now. This was my Salon picture,
but it didn't get in."
"If one can judge by those that _did_"--Bulstrode's tact was
delightful--"you should feel honorably refused. I suppose you are at
work on another portrait?"
The face which his interest had brightened clouded.
"No, I'm going home--to Idaho--I'm not painting any more."
All the tragedy to a whole-souled Latin Quarter art student that this
implied was not revealed to Bulstrode, but, as it was, his sensitive
kindness felt so much already that it ached. He hastened toward his
goal with eagerness:
"I'm so awfully sorry! Because, do you know, I was going to ask you if
you couldn't possibly paint my portrait?" It came from him on the spur
of the moment. His frank eyes met hers and might have quailed at his
hypocrisy, but the expression of joy on her face, eclipsing everything
else, dazzled him.
She cried out impulsively:
"Oh--goodness!" so loud that one or two tea-drinkers turned about.
After a second, having gained control and half as though she expected
some motive she did not understand:
"But you never _heard_ of me before to-day! I don't believe you
_really_ liked that portrait over there so very much."
With a candor that impressed her he assured her: "I give you my word of
honor I've never felt quite so about any portrait before."
Here Miss Desprey had a cup of tea handed her by a vague-eyed girl who
stumbled over Bulstrode in her ministrations, much to her confusion.
Laura Desprey drank her tea with avidity, put the cup down on the table
near, and leaning over to her patron, exclaimed:
"I just _can't_ believe I've got an order!"
Bulstrode affirmed smiling: "You have, and if you could arrange to stay
over for it--if it would," he delicately put, "be worth your while----"
She said quietly:
"Yes, it would be worth my while."
A _distrait_ look passed over her face for a second, and Bulstrode saw
he was forgotten in, as he supposed, a painter's vision of an order and
its contingent technicalities.
"I can begin at once." He lost no time. "I'm quite free."
"But--I have no studio."
"There must be studios to rent."
Yes. She knew of one; she could secure it for a month. It would take
that time--she was a slow worker.
"But we haven't discussed the price." Before so much poverty and
struggle--not that it was new to him, but clothed like this in beauty
it was rare and appealed to him--he was embarrassed by his riches.
"Now the price. I want," he meditated, "a full-length portrait, with a
great deal of background, just as handsome and expensive looking as you
can paint it."
He exquisitely sacrificed himself and winced at his own words, and saw
her color with amusement and a little scorn, but he went on bravely:
"Now for a man like me, Miss Desprey--I am sure you will know what I
mean--a man who has never been painted before--this picture will have
to cost me a lot of money. You see otherwise my friends would not
appreciate it."
In the vulgarian he was making himself out to be his friends would not
have recognized the unpretentious Bulstrode.
"Get the place, Miss Desprey, and let me come as soon as you can. All
this change of plans will give you extra expenses--I understand about
that! Every time I change my rooms it costs me a fortune. Now if you
will let me send you over a check for half payment on the picture, for,
let us say"--he made it as large as he dared and a quarter of what he
wanted. They were alone in the tea-room, the motley gathering had
weeded itself out. Miss Desprey turned pale.
"No," she gasped; "I couldn't take anything like half so much for the
whole thing."
Bulstrode said coldly:
"I'm afraid I must insist, Miss Desprey; I couldn't order less than a
fifteen-hundred dollar portrait. It's the sum I have planned to pay
when I'm painted."
"But a celebrated painter would paint it for that."
Bulstrode smiled fatuously.
"Can't a man pay for his fads? I want to be painted by the person who
did that portrait over there, Miss Desprey."
In a tiny studio--the dingy chrysalis of a Bohemian art
student--Bulstrode posed for his portrait.
Each morning saw him set forth from the Ritz alert and debonaire in his
fastidious toilet---saw him cross the Place Vendôme, the bridge, and
lose his worldly figure in the lax nonchalant crowd of the Quarter
Latin. At the end of an alley as narrow and picturesque as a lane in a
colored print he knocked at a green door, and was admitted to the
studio by his protégée. In another second he had assumed his
prescribed position according to the pose, and Miss Desprey before her
easel began the _séance_.
On these May days the glass roof admitted delightful gradations of
glory to the commonplace _atelier_. A few cheap casts, a few yards of
mustard-toned burlaps, some Botticelli and Manet photographs, a mangy
divan, and a couple of chairs were the furnishings. It had been
impossible for Bulstrode to pass indifferently the venders of flowers
in the festive, brilliant streets, and great bunches of _giroflé_,
hyacinths, and narcissi overflowed the earthenware pitchers and vases
with which the studio was plentifully supplied. The soft, sharp
fragrance rose above the shut-in odor of the _atelier_, and, while Miss
Desprey worked, her patron looked at her across waves of spring perfume.
Her painting-dress, a garment of _beige_ linen, half belted in at the
waist and entirely covering her, made her to Bulstrode, from the crown
of her fair hair to the tip of her old tan shoes, seem all of one
color. He had taken tremendous interest in his pose, in the progress
of the work. He would have looked at the portrait every few moments,
but Miss Desprey refused him even a glimpse. He was to wait until all
manner of strange things took place on the canvas, till "schemes and
composition" were determined, "proper values" arrived at, and he
listened to her glib school terms with respect and a sanguine hope that
with the aid of such potent technicalities and his interest she might
be able to achieve this time something short of atrocious.
He posed faithfully for Miss Desprey, and smiled at her with friendly
eyes whenever he caught anything more personal than the squinting
glance with which she professionally regarded him, putting him far away
or fetching him near, according to her art's requirements. They talked
in his rest, and he took pleasure in telling her how he enjoyed his
morning walks from his hôtel, how the outdoor life delighted him, and
how all the suburban gardens seemed to have been brought to Paris to
glow and blossom in the venders' carts or in little baskets on the
backs of women and boys, and how thoroughly well worth living he
thought life in Paris was.
"There is," he finished, "nothing in the world which compares to the
Paris spring-time, I believe, but I have never been West. What is
spring like in Idaho?"
Miss Desprey laughed, touched her ruffled hair with painty fingers,
blushed, and mused.
"Oh, it's all right, I guess. There's a trolley-line in Centreville,
an electric plant and the oil works--no trees, no flowers, and the
people all look alike. So you see"--she had a dazzling way of shaking
her head, when her fine white teeth, her sunny dishevelled hair, her
bright cheeks and eyes seemed all to flash and chime together--"so you
see, spring in Centreville and _Paris_ isn't the same thing at all!
Things are beautiful everywhere," she assured him slowly as she
painted, "if you're happy--and I was very unhappy in Centreville, so I
thought I'd come away and try to have a career." She poured out a long
stream of _garance_ from the tube on to her palette. Bulstrode
watched, fascinated.
"And here in Paris, are you--have you been happy here?"
"Oh, dear no!" she laughed; "perfectly miserable. And it used to seem
as though it was cruel of the city to be so gay and happy when I
couldn't join in--" Bulstrode, remembering the one franc a day and the
very questionable inspiration her poor art could impart, understood;
his face was full of feeling--"until," she went slowly on, "lately."
She stepped behind the canvas and was lost to sight. "I've been
awfully happy in Paris for the first time. I do like beautiful
things--but I like beautiful people better--and you're
beautiful--beautiful."
She finished with a blush and a smile.
Bulstrode grew to think nothing at all about his portrait further than
fervently to hope it would not shock him beyond power to disguise. But
Miss Desprey was frightfully in earnest, and worked until her eyes
glowed with excitement and her cheeks burned. Strong and vigorous and
(Bulstrode over and over again said) "young, so young!" she never
evinced any signs of fatigue, but stood when his limbs trembled under
him and looked up radiant when he was ready to cry "_Grâce!_" In her
enthusiasm she would have given him two sittings a day, but this his
worldly relations would not permit. As she painted, painted, her head
on one side sometimes, sometimes thrown back, her eyes half closed, he
studied her with pleasure and delight.
"What a pity she paints so dreadfully ill! What a pity she paints at
all! What difference, after all, does it make _what_ she does? She's
so pretty and feminine!" She was a clinging, sweet creature, and the
walk and the flower debauch he permitted himself, the long quiet hours
of companionship with this lovely girl in the _atelier_, illumined,
accentuated, and intensified Bulstrode's already fatuous appreciation
of the spring in Paris.
During Bulstrode's artistic mornings there distilled itself into the
studio a magic to which he was not insensitive. Whether or not it came
with the flowers or with the delicate filtering of the sun through the
studio light, who can say, but as he stood in his assumed position of
_nonchalance_ he was more and more charmed by his painter. The spell
he naturally felt should, and for long indeed did, emanate from the
slender figure, lost at times behind her canvas, and at times
completely in his view.
For years Bulstrode had been the victim of hope, or rather in this case
of intent, _to love again_--to love anew! Neither of these statements
is the correct way of putting it. He tried with good faith to prove
himself to be what was so generally claimed for him by his
friends--susceptible; alas, he knew better!
As he meditatively studied the blonde young girl he spun for himself to
its end the idea of picking her up, carrying her off, marrying her,
shutting Idaho away definitely, and opening to her all that his wealth
and position could of life and the world. He grew tender at the
thought of her poor struggle, her insufficient art, her ambition. It
fascinated him to think of playing the good fairy, of touching her
gray, hard life to color and beauty, and as the beauty and the holy
intimacy of home occurred to him, and marriage, his thoughts wandered
as pilgrims whose feet stray back in the worn ways and find their own
old footprints there, ... and after a few moments Miss Desprey was like
to be farther away from his meditations than Centreville is from Paris,
and the personality of the dream-woman was another. Once Miss
Desprey's voice startled him out of such a reverie by bidding him,
"_Please_ take the pose, Mr. Bulstrode!" As he laughed and apologized
he caught her eyes fixed on him with, as he thought, a curious
expression of affection and sympathy--indeed, tears sprang to them.
She reddened and went furiously back to work. She was more personal
that day than she had yet been. She seemed, after having surprised his
absent-mindedness, to feel that she had a right to him--quite ordered
him about, and was almost petulant in her exactions of his positions.
Her work evidently advanced to her satisfaction.
As she stood elated before her easel, her hair in sunny disorder, her
eyes like stars, Bulstrode was conscious there was a change in her--she
was excited and tremulous. In her frayed dress, sagging at the edges,
her paint-smeared apron, her slender thumb through the hole in the
palette, she came over to him at the close of the sitting, started to
speak, faltered, and said:
"You don't know what it means to me--all you have done. And I can't
ever tell you."
"Oh, don't," he pleaded, "pray don't speak of it!"
Miss Desprey, half radiant and half troubled, turned away as if she
were afraid of his eyes.
"No, I won't try to tell you. I couldn't, I don't dare," she
whispered, and impulsively caught his hand and kissed it.
When he had left the studio finally it was with a bewildering sense of
having kissed her hand--no, both of her hands! but one held her palette
and he _couldn't_ have kissed that one without having got paint on his
nose--perhaps he had! He was not at peace.
That same night a telegram brought him news to the effect that Miss
Desprey was ill and would not expect him to pose the following day; and
relieved that it was not required of him to resume immediately the
over-charged relations, he went back to his old habit, rudely broken
into by his artistic escapade, and walked far into the Bois.
He thought with alarming persistency of Miss Desprey. He was
chivalrous with women, old-fashioned and clean-minded and
straight-lived. In the greatest, in the only passion of his life, he
had been a Chevalier Bayard, and he could look back upon no incidents
in which he had played the part which men of the world pride themselves
on playing well. Women were mysterious and wonderful to him. Because
of one he approached them all with a feeling not far from worship; and
he had no intention of doing a dishonorable thing. Puzzled,
self-accusing--although he did not quite know of what he was guilty--he
sat down as he had done several weeks before on the bench in the Avenue
des Acacias. With extraordinary promptness, as if arranged by a
scene-setter, a girl's figure came quickly out of a side alley. She
was young--her figure betrayed it. She went quickly over to a seat and
sat down. She was weeping and covered her face with her hands.
Bulstrode, this time without hesitation, went directly over to her:
"My dear Miss Desprey----"
She sprang up and displayed a face disfigured with weeping.
"_You_!" she exclaimed with something like terror. "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!"
Her words shuddered in sobs.
"Don't stay here! Why did you come? Please go--please."
Bulstrode sat down beside her and took her hands.
"I'm not going away--not until I know what your trouble is. You were
in distress when I first saw you here and you wouldn't let me help you
then. Now you can't refuse me. What is it?"
He found she was clinging to his hands as she found voice enough to say:
"No, I can't tell you. I couldn't ever tell you. It's not the same
trouble, it's a new one and worse. I guess it's the worst thing in the
world."
Bulstrode was pitiless:
"One that has come lately to you?"
"Oh, yes!"
She was weeping more quietly now.
"Please leave me: please go, Mr. Bulstrode."
"A trouble with which I have had anything to do?"
She waited a long time, then faintly breathed:
"Yes."
The hand he firmly held was gloveless and cold--before he could say
anything further she drew it away from him and cried:
"Oh, I ought never to have let you guess! You were so good and kind,
you meant to help me so, but it's been the worst help of all, only you
couldn't know that," she pleaded for him. "Please forgive me if I seem
ungrateful, but if I had known that I was going to suffer like this I
would have wished never to see you in the world."
Bulstrode was trying to speak, but she wouldn't let him:
"I never can see you again. Never! You mustn't come any more."
But here she half caught her breath and sobbed with what seemed naïve
and adorable daring:
"Unless you can help me through, Mr. Bulstrode--it is your fault, after
all."
If this were a virtual throwing of herself into his arms, they were all
but open to her and the generous heart was all but ready "to see her
through." Bulstrode was about to do, and say, the one rash and
irrevocable perfect thing when at this minute fate again at the ring of
the curtain opportuned. The tap, tapping, of a pony's feet was heard
and a gay little cart came brightly along. Bulstrode saw it. He
sprang to his feet. It was close upon them.
"You will let me come to-morrow?" he asked eagerly,
"Oh, yes," she whispered; "yes, I shall count on you. I beg you will
come."
"Jimmy," said the lady severely as he accepted her invitation to get
into the cart, "this is the second wicked rendezvous I have
interrupted. I didn't know you were anything like this, and I've seen
that girl before, but I can't remember where."
"Don't try," said Bulstrode.
"And she was crying. Of course you made her cry."
"Well," said Bulstrode desperately, "if I did, it's the first woman
that has ever cried for me."
As the reason why Bulstrode had never married was again in Paris, he
went up in the late afternoon to see her.
The train of visitors who showed their appreciation of her by thronging
her doors had been turned away, but Bulstrode was admitted. The man
told him, "Mrs. Falconer will see you, sir," by which he had the
agreeably flattered feeling that she would see nobody else.
When he was opposite her the room at once dwindled, contracted, as
invariably did every place in which they found themselves together,
into one small circle containing himself and one woman. Mrs. Falconer
said at once to Bulstrode:
"Jimmy, you're in trouble--in one of your quandaries. What useless
good have you been doing, and who has been sharper than a serpent's
tooth to you?"
Bulstrode's late companionship with youth had imparted to him a boyish
look. His friend narrowly observed him, and her charming face clouded
with one of those almost imperceptible _nuances_ that the faces of
those women wear who feel everything and by habit reveal nothing.
"I'm not a victim." Bulstrode's tone was regretful. "One might say,
on the contrary, this time that I was possibly overpaid."
"Yes?"
"I haven't," he explained and regretted, "seen you for a long time."
"I've been automobiling in Touraine." Mrs. Falconer gave him no
opportunity to be delinquent.
"And I," he confessed, "have been posing for my portrait. Don't," he
pleaded, "laugh at me--it isn't for a miniature or a locket; it's
life-size, horribly life-size. I've had to stand, off and on with the
rests, three hours a day, and I've done so _every day for three weeks_."
Mrs. Falconer regarded him with indulgent amusement.
"It's your fault--you took me to see those awful school-girl paintings
and pointed out that poor young creature to me." And he was
interrupted by her exclamation:
"Oh, how _dear_ of you, Jimmy! how sweet and kind and ridiculous! It
won't be fit to be seen."
"Oh, never mind that," he waved; "no one need see it. I haven't--she
won't let me."
He had accepted a cup of tea from the lady's hand; he drank it off and
sat down, holding the empty cup as if he held his fate.
"Tell me," she urged, "all about it. It was just like you--any other
man would have found means to show charity, but you have shown
unselfish goodness, and that's the rarest thing in the world. Fancy
posing every day! How ghastly and how wonderful of you!"
"No," he said slowly, "it wasn't any of these things. I wanted to do
it. It amused me at first, you see. But now I am a little
annoyed--rather bothered to tell the truth--He met her eyes with almost
an appeal in his. Mrs. Falconer was in kindness bound to help him.
"Bothered? How, pray? With what part of it? You're not chivalrous
about it, are you? You're not by the way of feeling that you have
compromised her by posing?"
"Oh, no, no," he hurried; "but I do feel, and I am frank to
acknowledge, that it was a mistake. Because--do you know--that for
some absurd reason I am afraid she has become fond of me." He blushed
like a boy. Mrs. Falconer said coldly:
"Yes? Well, what of it?"
"This--" Bulstrode's voice was quiet and determined--"if I am right I
shall marry her."
Mrs. Falconer had the advantage over most women of completely
understanding the man with whom she dealt. She knew that to attempt to
turn from its just and generous source any intent of Mr. Bulstrode
would have been as futile as to attempt to turn a river from its parent
fountain.
"You're quixotic, I know, but you're not demented, and you won't
certainly marry this nobody--whose fancies or love-affairs have not the
least importance. You won't ever see her again unless you are in love
with her yourself."
Bulstrode interrupted her hastily:
"Oh, yes, I shall."
He got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs.
Falconer's trim little garden. A couple of iron chairs and a table
stood under the trees. Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds
whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease. Beyond the iron
rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears.
Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:
"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."
"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."
As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have
grown darker and she to sit in the shadow. She leaned toward him,
laughing:
"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we
have so often planned together."
Bulstrode stood looking down on her.
"I feel myself responsible," he said gravely. "She was going home, and
by a mistaken impulse I came in and changed her plans. She is
perfectly alone and perfectly poor, and I am not going to add to her
perplexities. I have no one in the world to care what I do. I have no
ties and no duties."
"No," said Mrs. Falconer; "you are wonderfully free."
He said vehemently:
"I am all of a sudden wonderfully miserable."
He had been in the habit for years of suddenly leaving her without any
warning, and now he put out his hand and bade her good-by, and before
she could detain him had made one of many brusque exits from her
presence.
On the following day--a Sunday, as from his delightful apartments in
the Ritz he set forth for the studio, Bulstrode bade good-by to his
bachelor existence. He knew when he should next see the Place Vendôme
it would be with the eyes of an engaged man. His life hereafter was to
be shared by a "total stranger." So he pathetically put it, and his
sentimental yearning to share everything with a lovely woman had died a
sudden death.
"There's no one in the world to care a rap what I do--really," he
reflected, "and in this case I have run up against it--that's the long
and the short of the matter--and I shall see it through."
As he set out for Miss Desprey's along his favorite track he remarked
that the gala, festive character of Paris had entirely disappeared.
The season had gone back on him by several months, and the melancholy
of autumn and dreary winter cast a gloom over his boyish spirits. A
very slight rain was falling. Bulstrode began to feel a twinge of
rheumatism in his arm and as he irritably opened his umbrella his
spirits dropped beneath it and his brisk, springy walk sagged to
something resembling the gait of a middle-aged gentleman. But he urged
himself into a better mood, however, at the sight of a flower-shop
whose delicate wares huddled appealingly close to the window. He went
in and purchased an enormous bunch of--he hesitated--there were certain
flowers he _could_ not, would _not_ send! The selection his
sentimental reserve imposed therefore consisted of sweet-peas,
_giroflés_, and a big cluster of white roses, all very girlish and
virginal. His bridal offering in his hand, he took a cab and drove to
the other side of the river with lead at his good heart and, he almost
fancied, a lump in his throat. He paid the coachman, whose careless
spirits he envied, and slowly walked down the picturesque alley of
Impasse du Maine.
"There isn't a man I know--not a man in the Somerset Club--who would be
as big a fool as this!"
He had more than a mind to leave the flowers on the doorstep and run.
Bulstrode would have done so now that he was face to face with his
quixotic folly, but his cab had been heard as well as his steps on the
walk, and the door was opened by Miss Desprey herself. The girl's
colorless face, her eyes spoiled with tears, and a pretty, sad dignity,
which became her well, struck her friend with the sincerity and depth
of her grief, and as the good gentleman shook hands with her he
realized that less than ever in the world could he add a featherweight
of grief to the burden of this helpless creature.
"My dearest child!" He lifted her hand to his lips.
"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode, I'm so glad you've come, I was so afraid you
wouldn't--after yesterday!"
His arms were still full of white paper, roses, and sweet-peas.
"Oh, don't give them to me, Mr. Bulstrode! Oh, why, did you bring
them? Oh, dear, what will you think of me?" She had possessed herself
of the flowers and with agitation and distress hastily thrust them, as
if she wanted to hide them, behind the draperies of the couch.
Bulstrode murmured something of whose import he was scarcely conscious.
As she came tearfully back to him she let him take her hands. He felt
that she clung to him. "It would have spoiled my life if you hadn't
come. I would have just gone and jumped in the Seine. I may yet. Oh,
you don't understand! It's been hard to be poor--I've been often
hungry--but this last thing was too much. When you found me yesterday
I didn't want to live any more."
Bulstrode's kind clasp warmed the cold little hands. As tenderly as he
could he looked at her agitated prettiness.
"Don't talk like that"--he tried for her first name and found it.
"Laura, you will let me make it all right, my dear? You will let me,
won't you? You shall never know another care if I can prevent it."
She interrupted with hasty gratitude:
"Nobody else can make it all right but you."
He tried softly:
"Did I, then, make it so very wrong?"
She murmured, too overcome to trust herself to say much:
"Yes!"
She was standing close to him, and lifted her appealing face to his.
Her excitement communicated itself to him; he bent toward her about to
kiss her, when the door of the studio sharply opened, and before
Bulstrode could do more than swiftly draw back and leave Miss Desprey
free an exceedingly tall and able-bodied man entered without ceremony.
The girl gave a cry, ran from Bulstrode, and, so to speak, threw
herself against the arms of the stranger, for there were none open to
receive her.
"Oh, here's Mr. Bulstrode, Dan! I knew he'd come; and he'll tell
you--won't you, Mr. Bulstrode? Tell him, please, that I don't care
anything at all about you and you don't care anything about me....
That you don't want to marry me or anything. Oh, please make him
believe it!"
The poor gentleman's senses and brain whirling together made him giddy.
He felt as though he had just been whisked up from the edge of a
precipice over which he ridiculously dangled. Dan, who represented the
rescuer, was not prepossessing. He was the complete and unspoiled type
of Western youth; the girl herself was an imperfect and exquisite
hybrid.
"I don't know that this gentleman can explain to me"--the young fellow
threw his boyish head back--"or that I care to hear him."
She gave a cry, sharp and wounded. The sound touched the now normal,
thoroughly grateful patron, who had come out of his ordeal with as much
kindly sensibility as he went in.
"Of course, my dear young lady"--he perfectly understood the
situation--"I will tell your friend the facts of our acquaintance.
That's what you want me to do, isn't it?"
She was weeping and hanging on to the unyielding arm of her cross
lover, who glared at the intruding Bulstrode with a youthful jealousy
at which the older man smiled while he envied it. He pursued
impressively:
"Miss Desprey has been painting my portrait for the past few weeks. I
gave her the order at the Art League; other than painter and sitter we
have no possible interest in each other--Mr.----"
"Gregs," snapped the stranger, "Daniel Gregs!"
The slender creature, whose eyes never left the stolid, uncompromising
face, repeated eagerly:
"_No possible interest_--Dan--none! He doesn't care anything about me
at all! You heard what he said, didn't you? I only like him like a
kind, kind friend."
[Illustration: "I only like him like a kind, kind friend"]
Her voice, soft as a flower, caressed and pleaded with the passionate
tenderness of a woman who feels that an inadvertent word may keep for
her or lose for her the man she adores.
"My dear man," exclaimed Bulstrode in great irritation, "you ought to
be ashamed to let her cry like that! Can't you _understand_--don't you
see?"
"No," shortly caught up the other, "I don't! I've come here from South
Africa, where I'm prospecting some mines for a company at Centreville,
and I heard she was poor and unhappy, and I hurried up my things so I
could come to Paris and marry her and take her with me, and here I find
her painting every day alone with a rich man, her place all fixed up
with flowers, and a thousand dollars in the bank"--his cheek
reddened--"I don't like it! And that's all there is to it!" he
finished shortly.
"No, my friend," said the other severely, "there's a great deal more.
If, from what you say, and the way you speak, you wish me to understand
you have a real interest in Miss Desprey, you can follow me when I say
that I came here and found her a lonely, forsaken girl, obliged to
return to Idaho when she didn't want to go, without any money or any
friends. May I ask you why, if there was any one in the world who
cared for her, she should be left so deserted?"
The girl here turned her face from her lover to her champion.
"Don't please blame Dan for that. He was so poor, too. He didn't have
anything when he went to South Africa; it was just a chance if he would
succeed. And he was working for me, so that he could get married."
Gregs interrupted:
"I don't owe this gentleman any explanation!"
"No," accepted the other gently, "perhaps not, but you mustn't, on the
other hand, refuse to hear mine. Be reasonable. Why _shouldn't_ Miss
Desprey have an order for a portrait?"
Gregs, over the golden head against his arm, looked at Bulstrode:
"_She_ can't paint!" His tone was gentler. "Laura can't paint, and
you know it!"
"Dan!" she whispered; "how cruel you are to me!"
And here the desperate Bulstrode broke in:
"He is, indeed, Miss Desprey, cruel and unjust, and I frankly ask leave
to tell him so. You don't deserve the girl, Mr. Gregs, if she's yours,
as she seems to be."
But the girl clung closer, as if she still feared Bulstrode might try
to rescue her.
"That's all right," frowned the miner. "I am no better and no worse
than any man about his girl, and I'm going to know _just where I
stand_!"
The gentleman's reply was caustic. "I should be inclined to say you'd
find it hard to be in a better place."
Laura Desprey had wound her arms around Mr. Gregs. Bulstrode held out
his hand. She couldn't take it, nor could her lover. With arrogant
obstinacy he had folded his arms across his chest.
"Come, can't we be friends?" urged the amiable gentleman. "I seem to
have made trouble when I only wanted to be friendly. Let me set it
right before I go. I am lunching in Versailles, and I have to take the
noon train from the Gare Montparnasse."
But Daniel Gregs did not unbend to the affable proposition. Miss
Desprey said:
"When you saw me yesterday in the park, Mr. Bulstrode, Dan had just
come back the day before. I was putting the flowers you sent me in
fresh water when he came in on me all of a sudden. Oh, it was so
splendid at first! I was _so_ happy--until he asked all about you, and
then he grew so angry and said unless you could explain to him a lot of
things he would go away and never see me again, and when you found me I
was crying because I thought he had left me forever. I hadn't seen him
for two years, and if you hadn't helped me to stay on here I should
have had to go to Idaho, and I wouldn't have seen him at all. You
ought to _thank_ him, Dan."
Bulstrode interrupted:
"Indeed, Mr. Gregs, you should, you know!--you should thank me; come,
be generous."
Dan relaxed his grim humor a little.
"When I get through with this South African business I'm going back to
Centreville, and if I ever get her out of this Paris _she'll_ never see
it again!"
"Dan," she breathed, "I don't want to. Centreville is good enough for
me."
(Centreville! The horrible environment he was to have snatched her
from. Bulstrode smiled softly.)
"But this money," pursued the dogged lover, returning to his grudge.
"You've got to take it back, Mr. Bulstrode. No picture on earth is
worth a thousand dollars, and certainly not Laura's."
"Oh, Dan!" she exclaimed.
But her friend said firmly: "The portrait is mine. Come, don't be
foolish. If Miss Desprey is willing to marry you and go out to Idaho,
take the money and buy her some pretty clothes and things."
Here the girl herself interrupted excitedly:
"No, no! We couldn't take it. I don't want any new clothes. If Dan
doesn't care how shabby I am, I don't. I don't want anything in the
world but just to go with Dan."
At this sweet tenderness Dan's face entirely changed, his arms
unfolded; he put them around her.
"That's all right, little girl." His tone thrilled through Bulstrode
more than the woman's tears had done. He understood why she wanted to
go to him, and how she could be drawn. He had at times in his life
lost money, and sometimes heavily, and he had never felt poor before.
In the same words, but in a vastly different tone, Dan Gregs held out
his hand to Bulstrode.
"That's all right, sir. When a fellow travels thousands and thousands
of miles to get his girl and hasn't much more than his car fare and he
runs up against another fellow who has got the rocks and all and who he
thinks is sweet on his girl, it makes him crazy--just crazy!"
"I see"--Bulstrode sympathetically understood--"and I don't at all
wonder."
They were all three shaking hands together and Bulstrode said:
"Would you believe it, I haven't seen my portrait, Miss Desprey."
Dan Gregs grinned.
"Don't," he said, "don't look at it. It's what made all the trouble.
When I saw it yesterday and Laura told me it had drawn a thousand
dollars--why I said 'there isn't a man living who would give you fifty
cents for it.' That made her mad at first. Then she told me you
thought she was a great portrait-painter, and I knew you must be sweet
on her. I'm fond of her all right, but I decided that you were bound
to have her and didn't care how you dealt your cards, and I thought I'd
clear out."
His face fell and threatened to cloud over, but it cleared again as
with the remembrance of his doubts came the actual sense of the woman
whose face was hidden on his breast, and he lightly touched the dusty
golden hair.
When in a few seconds Bulstrode took leave of them, Miss Desprey, in
her dingy painting-dress, seemed completely swallowed up in the embrace
of the big Dan Gregs. From where he stood by the door Bulstrode could
see the white corner of his _fiançailles_ bouquet sticking out from the
draperies of the couch. The paper was open and in the heat of the warm
little _atelier_ the fresh odor of the pungent flowers came strongly on
the air.
Bulstrode as he said good-by seemed to say it--and to look at the
lovers--through a haze of perfume--a perfume that, like the most
precious things in the world, pervades and affects, suggests and
impresses, while its existence is unseen, unknown to the world.
Once in his train, he had been able to catch it at the Invalides after
all, Jimmy drew a long breath and settled back into himself, for, he
had been, poor dear, during the past three weeks, in another man's
shoes and profiting by another man's identity. It was perfectly
heavenly to feel that he had been liberated by the merciful providence
which takes care to provide the right lover for the right place. He
couldn't be too grateful for the miracle which saved him from a
sacrifice alongside of which Abraham's would have been a jest indeed.
The June morning was warm and through the open car window, as the train
went comfortably along, the perfume of the country came into him where
he sat. Opposite, a pair of lovers frankly and naturally showed their
annoyance at the third person's intrusion, and Bulstrode,
sympathetically turned himself about and became absorbed in Suburban
Paris. His heart beat high at the fact of his deliverance. His
gratitude was sincere--moreover, his thoughts were of an agreeable
trend, and he was able to forget everybody else within twelve miles.
Secure in his impersonality and in the indifference of his broad
unseeing back, the lovers kissed and held hands.
Bulstrode wandered slowly up from the Versailles station to the Hôtel
des Reservoirs, crossed the broad square of the Palace Court, found the
pink and yellow façade more mellow and perfect than ever, and toward
twelve-thirty strolled into the yard of the old hostelry. Breakfast
had been set for twelve-thirty, but his host was not there.
"Ah--mais, bon jour, Monsieur Bulstrode!" The proprietor knew and
appreciated this client greatly.
Monsieur Falconer, it seemed, had been called suddenly to Paris....
Yes--well--there were, now and then, in the course of life, bits of
news that could be borne with fortitude. "And Madame has also been
called to Paris?"
"Mais non!" Madame had a few minutes since gone out in the Park, the
proprietor thought she would not be very far away.
Bulstrode thanked him, and crossed over to the hedge and the gateway
and through it to the Palace Gardens. On all sides the paths stretched
broad and inviting toward the various alleys, and upon the terrace to
his left there shone a thousand flowers in June abundance. The
gentleman chose the first path that opened, and went carelessly down
it, and in a few moments the pretty ring of an embowered circle spread
before him, but, although there was an inviting marble bench under a
big tree at one side, and several eighteenth century marbles on their
pedestals, illuminated by the bland eighteenth century smile, there was
not a living woman in sight to make him, the visitor, welcome! He went
a little further along and found another felicitous, harmonious circle,
where a small fountain threw its jets on the June air. At the sound of
the water Bulstrode remembered that the Grands Eaux were to play on
this afternoon at Versailles.
"Ah, _that_ is why they especially wanted me to come out to-day," he
decided.
On the other side of the fountain, the vivid white of her summer dress
making a flash like moonlight on the obscurity of the woods, a lady was
standing looking across at Mr. Bulstrode.
"Hush!" she said; "come over softly, Jimmy; there is a timid third
party here."
On a branch at her side, where an oriole sat, his head thrown back, his
throat swelling, there was a little stir and flutter of leaves, for
although the lady had put her finger to her lips, her voice broke the
spell, and a bit of yellow flashed through the trees.
"I don't believe _he_ will ever forgive you!" she cried; "you spoiled
his solo, but I'll forgive you. What brought you out to Versailles
to-day?"
"The fountains," Bulstrode told her; "I have never seen them play.
Then, too--there are certain places to which, when I am asked to
luncheon, I always go."
"That's quite true," she accepted; "you _were_ invited!--but, to be
perfectly frank, I did not expect you, so your coming on this occasion
has only the pleasure of a surprise. As a rule, I hate them. My
husband informed me that he would telephone you to meet him in Paris,
but I think he must have forgotten you, Jimmy."
She was taking him in from his fresh panama to his boots, and she
apparently found an air of festivity about him.
"Was it," she asked, "in honor of the fountains' playing that you have
made yourself so beautiful?"
Bulstrode took the boutonnière out of his coat lapel and handed it to
her. "Can't you pin it in somewhere?" Mrs. Falconer laughed and
thrust the carnation into her bodice.
"I dressed to-day, more or less," Mr. Bulstrode confessed, "in order to
attend--well, what shall I call it--a betrothal? That's a good
old-fashioned word."
"Oh!" exclaimed the lady, "a _fiançailles_?"
"Yes."
The two had wandered slowly along, out of the Bosquet towards the
canals.
"They make a great deal of these functions in France," Mrs. Falconer
said.
Her companion agreed. "They made a great deal, rather more than usual,
out of this one." And his tone was so suggestive that his companion
looked up at him quickly.
"Who _are_ your mysterious lovers?" she asked, "are they French? Do I
know them?"
"They are not in the least mysterious," Bulstrode assured her. "I
never saw anything less complex and more simple. They are Americans."
She seemed now to understand that she was to hear of "one of Jimmy's
adventures," as she called his dashes in other people's affairs.
"I hope, Jimmy, in this case, that you have pulled the affair off to
your credit, and that if you have made a match the creatures will be
grateful to you for once! And, by the way," she bethought; "whatever
has happened to the pretty girl whom you were quixotic enough to think
you had to marry?"
"The last time I saw her she appeared to be in the best of
circumstances," Bulstrode answered cheerfully. "In point of fact--it
was, singularly enough, to _her_ engagement party that I went to-day!"
And Mrs. Falconer now showed real interest and feeling. "No! how
delightful. So she is really off your hands, Jimmy. Well, that is too
good to be true. There's one at least whom you don't have to marry,
Jimmy!"
"Oh, they grow beautifully less," he agreed.
Mrs. Falconer smiled softly.
"They are narrowing down every year," Jimmy went on; "when I am about
sixty the number will be reduced, I dare say, to the proper quantity."
"What a goose you are," she said jestingly. "What a tease and a bother
you are, Jimmy Bulstrode; _I'll_ find you a proper wife!"
He accepted warmly. "Do, do! I leave myself quite in your hands."
His companion extended him her hand as she spoke, and after lifting it
to his lips, Bulstrode drew it through his arm. It was clothed in a
glove of pale coffee-color suede. It was a soft, dear hand, and rested
as if it were at home on Bulstrode's gray sleeve. Side by side the two
friends walked slowly out toward the broader avenues leading to the
canals. The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some
drifting cloud, like dashes of foam. The trees about them lifted dark
velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and
flowers.
"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs.
Falconer. "Isn't it _too_ beautiful!"
"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to
say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories
of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because
he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys,
and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of
no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.
THE THIRD ADVENTURE
III
IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY
After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June,
Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not
an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world
wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in
their own country--but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming
rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and
where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made
him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.
On the very first day he went over the Hôtel Montensier from _grenier_
to _caves_, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de
Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the
hôtel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around
him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the
house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that
Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked,
"that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if
cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, _mon
cher_, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not
think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all
afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why,
your coat alone--the cut of it--" Montensier had laughed, "speaks of
Poole with a Boston compromise!
The Duc had been in the United States--moreover, the Frenchman had
plans of his own and he wanted very much to go to Newport and leave his
house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode. Whether the Puritan in him led
Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any
rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love
of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up
and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.
The Falconers were off somewhere _en auto_. He had thought they had
gone through Spain. It was pretty hot to do such a thing, however, and
he did not really know. He wanted very much to be able not to let
himself follow them, and he knew that there was little chance of his
reaching such stoicism unless he began by not finding out where they
were going! So he shut himself up with the books which the library
offered and gave many charming little dinners and parties on his
terraces in the bland summer nights, and tried with all his might and
main to forget the flight of a certain motor over the fair white roads
and, above all, to nerve himself up to refuse an invitation for the
middle of July.
Directly opposite the white façade of the Montensiers' hôtel was a
hostelry for beggars, for domestics without places; for poor
professors; for actors with no stages but the last; for laborers with
no labor; in short, for the riff-raff of the population, for those who
no longer hold the dignity of profession or pay rent for a term.
Sometimes Bulstrode would look out at the tenement, whose windows in
this season were wide open; and the general aspect indicated that
dislocated fortunes flourished. In one window, pirouetting or dancing
in it, calling out of it, leaning perilously over the sill of it, was a
child--as far as Bulstrode could decide, a creature of about six years
of age. She was too small to see much of, but all he saw was activity,
gesticulation, and perpetual motion. When the day was hot she fanned
herself with a bit of paper. She called far out to the wine-merchant's
wife, who sat with her family before the shop while her pretty children
played in the gutter.
In Paris, when the weather climbs to eighty, Parisians count themselves
in the tropics and the people, who lived apparently out of doors
altogether, wore a melted, disheartened air. But the De Montensier
garden, full of roses and heliotrope, watered and refreshed by the
fountains' delightful falling, was a retreat not to be surpassed by
many suburbs. Bulstrode gave little dinners on the terrace; little
suppers after the theatre, when rooms and garden were lighted with
fairy lanterns, and his chef outdid his traditions to please his
American master.
One day as the American sat smoking on the terrace with nothing more
disturbing than the drip of the fountain and the remote murmur of Paris
to break his reverie, Prosper, his confidential man, made a tentative
appearance.
"Would m'sieu, _who is so good_, see a young lady?"
His master smiled as he rose, instinctively at the words "jeune
demoiselle," throwing away his cigar.
"Pardon, m'sieu, I thought it might amuse m'sieu--" and Prosper stepped
back.
Bulstrode had been intently thinking of the caravansary opposite him,
and he now saw that part of the _hôtel meublé_ had come across the
street; he recognized it immediately for the smallest part. Before him
stood the ridiculous and pathetic figure of a dirty little girl in
rags, tatters, and furbelows, her legs clad in red silk stockings
evidently intended for fuller, shapelier limbs; her feet slipped about
in pattens. She had on a woman's bodice, a long flounced skirt pinned
up to keep her from tripping. Her head was adorned by a torn straw
hat, also contrived and created for the coquetry of maturity.
"Monsieur is so good," she began in a flute-like voice. "I have come
to thank monsieur with all my heart."
Bulstrode looked toward Prosper for enlightenment, but that individual
had cleverly disappeared.
"To thank me, my child? But for what?"
"Why, for the eggs and butter and sugar that monsieur was so good as to
send me. I have made the cake. It is beautiful! Monsieur le
cuisinier of this house baked it for me. It is perhaps a little
flat--but that was because I got tired stirring. See--it says--" She
had, so he now saw, a book under her arm; letting fall a fold of her
cumbersome dress with both hands and opening a filthy cook-book, she
laid it on the table, bending over it. "It says stir briskly half an
hour." (Her "rs" rolled in her throat like tiny cannons in a rosy
hollow.) "Quelle idée! It was _too_ stupid! Half an hour! I just
mixed it round once or twice and then--voila! it has white on the top
and shall have a candle."
"So you've made a cake?" he said kindly. "I'm sure it's a good one."
She nodded brightly. "It is for that I came to thank monsieur and to
ask if he would accept a piece of it."
Poor Bulstrode, with dreadful suspicion, looked to see part of the
horror immediately offered for his degustation. "I don't, my dear,
understand. Why should you thank _me_--what had I to do with it?"
Her gesture was delightful. "But for monsieur it would not exist; for
butter, eggs, and flour. Monsieur Prosper, when he gave them, said it
was of the kindness of '_Monsieur Balstro_.'"
(Oh, Prosper! "I have corrupted _him_," his master thought. "He is as
bad as I am!")
"Well, I'm very glad indeed," and he said it heartily. "But what did
you especially want to make it for--with the one candle? That means
one year old. Who's birthday may it then be?"
"It is the birthday of maman." She shut the book, and as she did so
raised her great black eyes, which dirt and neglect could not spoil.
There was in her appearance so little suggestion of maternal care that
Bulstrode nearly incredulously asked, "Your mother? And what, then,
does your mother do?"
"She's a fish," informed the child tranquilly. And Bulstrode, although
startled, could believe it. It too perfectly accounted for the
cold-blooded indifference to this offspring. Not even a mermaid could
have been guilty of so little care for her child. Still, he repeated:
"A fish?"
"Oui, a devil-fish in the aquarium at Bostock's. Oh, que c'est beau!"
she clasped her little hands. "Maman wears a costume of red--quite a
small, thin dress," she described eagerly. "And it is all spangles,
like fire when she dives into the water. I have been; the waiter at
the café downstairs took me. I screamed. I thought maman was drowned.
But no--she comes up always!" The child threw her head back and lifted
her eyes in ecstasy. "C'est magnifique!"
"What is your mother's name?"
"Mademoiselle Lascaze."
"And yours?"
"Simone."
"What do you do all day, Simone?"
"I wash and cook and sew and play--I have much to do--oh, much." She
assumed an important air. "The bad air of the room makes maman ill, so
she's out--'to breathe,' she says--and she locks me safely in. I play
Bostock and dive like maman. And sometimes"--she lowered her voice,
and looking back to see if they were alone--confided, "I cry."
"Ah!" sympathized Bulstrode.
"But, yes," she insisted, "when maman forgets to come home, and the
night is so black; then the seamstress next door knocks on the wall,
and I knock back for company."
"I see," he understood gently, "for company."
He rang for Prosper. "You will conduct mademoiselle home, Prosper, and
give her everything she needs for her kitchen always."
"Yes, monsieur; I knew that monsieur would----"
At sight of Prosper the mite gathered up her voluminous skirts and bade
her new friend a cordial good-by.
From the corrupted Prosper Bulstrode extracted what he wished to know
concerning the child.
"It is of a scandalousness, monsieur! Four nights of the seven the
poor little object is alone. The mother appears to have money enough,
she pays her rent regularly, and there is therefore nothing to do. She
sometimes even fetches her companions home with her, and Simone, when
she is not making sport for them, is tied to a chair to keep her from
falling off in her sleep."
Bulstrode expressed himself strongly, violently for him, went to see a
lawyer and a charitable French countess and found out that so long as
the mother did not actually ill-treat the child she could not be
replaced by any other guardian.
"Mon cher ami," said the spirituelle lady, "leave the fish to her
deviltry, and her child in her care. We are _fin de race_, if you
like, and in direct opposition to your American progressive schemes,
but we have a tradition that the family is sacred, and that, however
bad it may be, a child is better off in its home than elsewhere. You
will find it difficult to replace a mother by a _machine_ or an
_institution_, believe me."
And Bulstrode at the words felt a new sense of failure in
philanthropies, and his benevolence seemed pure dilletantism. What was
he likely to accomplish in the case of this child? Nothing more than
the momentary pleasure a few toys and a few hours of play could secure.
"And yet," as he mused he philosophically put it to himself, "isn't it,
after all, about the sum total any of us get out of destiny?"
In New York he would have quite known how to proceed in order to help
the child, but in the face of French law and strong family prejudice he
came up against a stone wall.
"I'm no sort of a real benefactor," he remorsefully acceded, "and I
don't believe I'm fit to be trusted alone with the poor."
Nevertheless he did not relinquish his idea entirely, and confided
Simone to Prosper's sympathetic care and that of an emotional
maid-servant, with the result that a cleaning woman penetrated by hook
or crook into the room of "the fish" and treated it to more _aqua pura_
than the piscatory individual had cognizance of outside of the aquarium.
The gentleman in this particular charity was surprised to find how
simple it sometimes is to do good. In this case no one had come to him
with a petition or a demand; on the contrary, a note of undeserved
thanks had, with the strange little creature, been presented to him.
It was so pleasantly easy to help a child! There were no _arrières
pensées_--not that they would have troubled him, but there were none;
there were no wire-pullings, no time infringements, no suggestion or
criticism, no--he believed--expectations. Everything he could do was
so annoyingly little! The charwoman cleaned, Simone had a complete
wardrobe, the larder was full, and there remained nothing but toys to
buy. The little thing was so womanly and capable--he had seen it and
marvelled in their interviews at her age and accomplishments--her hands
were so apt and almost creative, that toys seemed inadequate. She took
her benefits charmingly; rushed over at the least provocation to pour
out her gratitude, and Bulstrode, who hated thanks, liked these.
Childhood, if it had been for sale on the Boulevard, even that he would
have bought Simone if he could! As it was, he found himself pausing
before a series of shops other than chemisièrs--florists, and
jewellers'--shops where diminutive objects were displayed--and one
afternoon had been standing ridiculously long in front of a certain
window on the Rue de Rivoli when he was accosted by an agreeable and
familiar voice.
"Jimmy! It isn't possible! don't tell me it has come so cruelly
_soon_?"
The gentleman gave a violent, but an entirely happy start. Well, there
were rewards then for people who didn't follow speeding motors through
France! She was back and in Paris.
"What--has come so soon?" he asked.
Mrs. Falconer, on her way from a hat shop in her automobile, stopped by
his side.
"Why, your second childhood, my dear man. Do you know what shop you
are standing before?"
Bulstrode seemed to be perfectly aware of his dotage and to delight in
it. Behind the big window pane there was a bright and very juvenile
display.
Ships sailed there; dolls hung gaudily and smilingly aloft; giant
parti-colored balls rounded out their harlequin sides; tiny dishes for
pygmy festivals were piled with delicious carrots and artichokes on
little white, blue-rimmed platters.
"Have you a moment to spare?" Bulstrode asked her.
"I have bought all my hats," she replied; "after that a woman's time
hangs heavy on her hands."
"Ah!" he was as radiant as she had the genius for making him. "Come,
then, in with me and help me choose a _doll_."
It was not the first purchase during the course of a long friendship
which Bulstrode had made with this charming woman by his side, but for
some reason he enjoyed it more than former errands. The bachelor and
the childless woman were hard to please and their choice consumed an
unconscionable time. As they lingered, the amiable shopman pressed
various toys on monsieur and madame "_pour les enfants_," and the lady,
finally depositing her friend with his parcels at the door of his
hôtel, realized as she drove away that she knew nothing of the child
for whom the purchases had been made. On her way up the Champs Elysées
she smiled softly. "It's what you _share_," she mused, "what you give
of _yourself--with_ yourself--_that's_ charity! Jimmy gives himself.
I wonder who his new love is?"
Bulstrode, in order to share what should be his "new love's" ecstasy at
first sight of the miraculous toy, sent for Simone. The Rue de Rivoli
doll, on a small chair designed for diminutive ladies of the eighteenth
century or for the king's dwarfs, held out stiff but cordial arms and
was naturally, to a child, the first and sole object of the
drawing-room.
"_Monsieur!_"
"For you, Simone."
"_Monsieur!_"
She said nothing else as she clasped her hands, and the color rushed
into her face, but she felt the doll, touched reverently its feet,
hair, dress, incontinently forgot Bulstrode, and quite suddenly,
passionately, caught the image of life to her heart. Just over its
blonde head, for it was nearly as large as herself, she met the
gentleman's eyes.
"It's my child! I've prayed for it always, always! I've never had a
doll, a _bébé_, m'sieu."
The tea-table with cakes and chocolate called them all too soon and, as
Prosper served, the fountains sang, the heat stole through the garden
and called up agreeable odors of sod and roses, the late afternoon sky
spread its expanse over the terrace of the hôtel, where, perfectly
happy both of them, animated by as gentle and harmless pleasure as any
two in Paris that day, the child of the people and an American
gentleman chatted over their tea.
Bulstrode, being an original, erratic, and reckless giver of alms,
quite by this time knew that, more than often, for him to give was, if
not to regret, to have at least misgivings whether in the hands of some
colder, less poetic person his money would not have accomplished more
good. In the case of Simone he had, as usual, happily gone on with
abandon, relegating any remorse to a future which he hoped would never
arrive.
But the middle of July did come and with it came poor Jimmy's exquisite
temptation. A telephone helped it dreadfully. There was something so
wonderful in the fact that in a couple of hours he could, if he would,
let himself reach the side of the lovely voice which called to him over
the wires. And being nothing but a human man, he threw all his good
resolves to the wind, and went down and stayed three days at
Fontainebleau.
Out under the sky, where the elastic earth sprang softly beneath her
feet and the embowered forests were sifted through with gold, Mary
Falconer finally asked him, "And your doll, Jimmy? Have you broken her
yet?" Bulstrode felt a guilty twinge, for he had not once thought of
the little girl, nor did Mrs. Falconer's mention of her bring the
subject near enough for Bulstrode to tell her the pretty story. He had
other things to say, and many things not to say, and this, as it always
did when he was with his lady, kept him very absorbed and occupied. On
this occasion he forgot all about little Simone.
The night of his return Paris was _en fête_ and in no sense impatient
to reach his lonely house--for it seemed to him this night the
loneliest house in the world--he walked without haste up town along the
quays.
It was hard to forget that not fifty miles away he had left the cool
forests, their tempting roads, their alluring alleys. He had forgotten
that it was the annual celebration and that at this late hour the
_fête_ would be in full swing, and as he strolled meditating along the
Seine the spirit of the gay populace--good-humor, reckless pleasure,
and the _joie de vivre_--poured itself out around him like cordial,
like a generous gift from an over-charged horn of cheer. In his gray
clothes, modish panama, a little white rose plucked by a dear hand from
the trellis at Fontainebleau still in his buttonhole, Bulstrode
scarcely remarked the crowds or heard the music as he passed outdoor
dancing stands and was jostled by a dancing throng.
His own street, as he approached it, welcomed him with a strong odor of
onions and fried potatoes; it had apparently turned itself out of doors
and all of the houses seemed to have emptied themselves into the narrow
alley. A hurdy-gurdy playing before the _hôtel meublê_ tinkled and
jangled in the centre of a crowd of merry-makers, and the metallic
melody and wild ascending octaves were the first sounds Bulstrode
consciously heard since he left Fontainebleau.
In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing like a mad child,
hair, arms, and feet flying; her voice, thin and piercing, every now
and then above the rattle of the hand-organ, cried out the lines of a
popular song whose meaning on her lips was particularly horrifying.
The wine-shop family encircled her, encoring her vociferously. As she
paused for breath the light from over the shop-door shone on her
excited little face.
[Illustration: In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing]
"I tired! Mon Dieu, que non! I could dance till morning. Play again,
monsieur l'organiste. Play again."
Bulstrode, on the crowd's edge, watched her, and for once in his
philanthropic history made no attempt to rescue. As Prosper let his
master in he said:
"It's a shame, isn't it, monsieur? The people over there have let her
run quite crazy. The poor little thing! Heaven knows where the mother
is!"
Of which celestial knowledge Bulstrode had his doubts. It was close to
twelve, and dismissing Prosper for the night, he took his cigar out on
the terrace and to what solitude his garden might extend. Before long
the noise of the music subsided, the people, tired out with hours of
festivity, dispersed, and the alley settled into quiet. From the
distance now and then came the soft, dull explosion of fireworks, the
rumble and roar of Paris was a little accelerated; otherwise the
silence about Bulstrode's garden grew and deepened as the night
advanced.
It was rare for him to allow himself to be the object of his own
personal consideration, or that indeed he at all thought of himself,
and when he did the man he had long ignored had his revenge and made
him pay up old scores.
On the late afternoon of this very day he was to have walked for miles
through the Fontainebleau woods with Mrs. Falconer, and instead he had
fled. Pleading a sudden summons to Paris, he left Fontainebleau.
It was well past four o'clock when he at last threw his cigar away and
rose. He had been musing all night in his chair.
A sudden gust of noise blew down the quiet little street, the sound of
loud singing and the shrill staccato of a woman's laugh. By the time
the revellers had passed his house and the hubbub had died away,
Bulstrode, with an idea at length of going up to his room, walked
across the salon and prepared to extinguish the electricity, but the
sound of some one tapping without caught his ear, and going over to the
window that gave on the street, he looked out. From end to end the
alley was deserted except for the figure of a woman. As he saw in the
ruddy light of early morning she huddled against the threshold of the
_hôtel meublé_--knocking persistently at the door. The tattered gauze
of her dress, whose bold _decolletée_ left her neck and shoulders bare,
a garland of roses on the bandeaux of her black hair, she epitomized
the carnival just come to its end--its exhaustion, its excess, spent at
length, surfeited, knocking for entrance at last to rest. Bulstrode,
as he remarked the sinuous figure that swayed as the woman stood,
exclaimed to himself with illumination: "Why, she's the _fish_, of
course! Simone's mother! And this is the state in which she goes to
the miserable child!"
As, knocking at intervals, the object leaned there a few moments
longer, evidently scarcely able to stand, his pity wakened and he
slowly left the window, shut in its blinds, and crossed his
ante-chamber, where the artificial light of electricity was met by the
full sunshine of the breaking day streaming in through the open window
of his terrace. Not entirely sure of his motive or to what excess of
folly it might lead him, he nevertheless opened wide his front door,
only to see that the woman on the opposite street had gone. She had
been let in. With a glance of relief up and down the street where the
_confetti_ in disks of lilac and yellow and red lay in dirty piles or
swam on the flushing gutters that sparkled in the light, Bulstrode shot
to his door on the Parisian world and after a _nuit blanche_ went
upstairs to his rooms.
And there had intensely come to him during the period of his dressing
the next morning after a tardy wakening the idea of taking the child,
of--he was certain it could be done--buying the mother off. He would,
in short, if he could, legally adopt the Parisian _gamine_ for his own.
It would give him a distinct interest, and life was empty for want of
one; this, in a manner, however short of perfect, would supply the need
of a loving living creature in his environment and would--his thrill at
the idea proved to him how lonely he had been--give him companionship
and a responsibility of a tender, personal sort. He could make a home
at last for a child. Men are more paternal than they are credited with
being, and Bulstrode directly foresaw delightful _causeries_ in the
future with--(he knew many women)--_with one woman_ whose pretty taste,
whose wit and humor, should counsel him in his new rôle. Mrs. Falconer
would dress Simone--her hand should be wonderfully in it all.
Bulstrode had let his fancy linger over the scheme. Certainly, during
the hour in which he spun his fanciful plan, there was not one bar to
its execution. Nor did there come to him any hint of its intrinsic
sterility, or the idea that it was possibly an excuse for the
interweaving of another interest more closely with his life--no idea
that he was simply strengthening an old bond, or by means of this
little tug pushing a mighty vessel nearer port.
He almost happily mused until a nursery grew out of thin air, a child's
little garments lay on a chair, and festivities, whose charm is of the
most mysterious, illuminated his reverie. Bulstrode, even without the
shudder of the climatician, contemplated the rigors of his own country,
for a rosy room grew out of his dream, fire-lit and fragrant with fir
and holly, and in the centre shone The Tree, whose shiny globes and
marvels were reflected till they danced in a child's eyes.
There had been an hour earlier the quick, brusque dash of a French
thunder-storm, and the cooled air came refreshingly from the garden as
Bulstrode stood out on the terrace before going into the noonday
breakfast. Prosper, fetching his master's coffee at nine o'clock, had
been informed that they were leaving Paris that day and received
instructions as to the setting in order of the hôtel before returning
it to its proprietor. Where his wanderings were to take him Bulstrode
had not as yet made up his mind. It, after all, mattered so very
little what a bachelor did with his leisure! It was the height of the
season along the seacoast and a dozen places brilliantly beckoned;
there were tri-weekly boats to the country, where he should most
properly be.
"There is," he with recurrent leeway to his inclinations reflected,
"always plenty of time to decide what one does not want to do!"
As he glanced at the little breakfast spread temptingly there for him
on the terrace he was arrested by the sound of French voices in quick,
agitated discussion, and looked up to see the unceremonious entrance of
quite a little band of people who had in point of fact penetrated his
seclusion. In a second of time a group was before him and he
remembered afterward that certain figures in a twinkling assumed
familiar shapes: the wine-shop keeper, his wife, one or two other
patrons of the hôtel; but in the centre--he was sure of her!--pale and
staring, stood little Simone, her big doll clasped in her arms.
Before the gentleman could ask their errand Madame Branchard, eager to
tell it, pushed forward. Bulstrode afterward, when he thought of the
scene, could always distinctly see her important red face, sleek, oily
hair, and in spite of summer heat the crocheted shawl over her cotton
gown.
"We decided at once to address to monsieur, who is so good"--(he was
growing accustomed to the formula) "to monsieur who has been so like a
father to the poor little thing. Not but that we are ready ourselves
to do all we can for her--she is so sweet, so intelligent!"
"The sweet, intelligent child" appeared, as Bulstrode's pitying gaze,
never leaving her, saw, to have shrunk overnight. In their midst she
stood of a ridiculous smallness, her big doll nearly hiding her and
over its blonde head Simone's eyes peered pathetically into, as it
were, a vague and terrifying world. Bulstrode asked shortly in the
face of the theatrical prelude:
"What is this all about? What have you come to tell me?"
"Ah, monsieur!" Madame Branchard's voice, particularly suited to
retailing the tragedies of the streets, quavered. "There has been a
_malheur_--it is too horrible--the mother!"
"Stop!" Bulstrode put out his hand. "Simone!"
The little thing dragged herself to him with a new timidity, as though
she believed him in league with the world against her.
"Come," he encouraged, "come out here on the terrace, where you have so
often played with your doll, and don't be frightened, _mon enfant_;
everything will be all right."
When he had so settled her in the smallest of chairs he went back to
the other bit of Paris street-life which had seethed in to him.
Madame Branchard, whom his manner had reduced to, for her, marvellous
quiet and ease, approached impressively and lowered her voice as deeply
as it would fall.
"Mademoiselle Lascaze, whom monsieur knows has been my tenant for
months past, is dead--dead, monsieur!"
Bulstrode echoed, "Dead?" and his first thought was: "It was not she,
then, whom I saw striving for entrance this morning. Ah, poor
creature! Drowned?"
"Monsieur then knows?"
Knows--how should he know? He had thought of the aquarium and her
often repeated feat.
"Monsieur is right, she is drowned; but it is not the aquarium--it is
the Seine. It appears," the wine-merchant's wife went on, "that last
night she made _la fête_ in the streets. We over here lock up, well,
at a decent hour, as monsieur will understand. Those who are in stay,
those who are out--well, monsieur will understand----"
Yes, he understood. Would she go on?
"Mademoiselle Lascaze had evidently lost her key of entry--so it
appears. We have this story from her comrades, a bad lot, like
herself. She tried to get in about five o'clock--they left her
knocking at the door. She must then have wandered the streets for an
hour, for it was six when they met her again by chance quite by the
Pont des Arts. They all had something to drink and started across the
river, when the poor thing offered to give an exhibition of her circus
feat and, before anyone could stop her, had dived off the bridge into
the Seine."
He had, then, seen her knocking there in the dawn, and if he had
hastened a little--not held conventionally back----
"It is all _en règle_," assured Madame Branchard. "As my husband will
tell monsieur, he has been to the morgue to identify her."
The wine-merchant now at his cue, nodded impressively. "Mais oui, I
assure monsieur she was quite natural--and she was une belle femme tout
le même----"
His wife glanced at him scornfully. "She was a bad mother, and all the
house will tell you so. Many times, monsieur, I have gone in with my
pass-key and taken the poor little thing downstairs in my arms to give
her all the supper she would have had, and many a time, on cold nights,
when there was not a stick of fire in their room, and the woman
abroad--many a time I have had her sleep in our bed with us--my husband
will tell monsieur."
The wine-merchant nodded assent. "She speaks the truth, monsieur."
Bulstrode found presence of mind to wonder. "I suppose Mademoiselle
Lascaze left debts?"
The husband and wife exchanged glances.
"_En vérité_, monsieur," confessed Madame Branchard, "she has left a
few, but they are small and not significant; a hundred francs will
cover them. It is not for our pockets we are come to monsieur."
Here the sentimentality having been disposed of by the woman, the
husband broke in:
"It is like this, Monsieur Balstro" (Bulstrode saw how intimately the
_hôtel meublé_ knew him): "In a few moments even the authorities will
be here to take charge of the woman's effects and Simone will become
the property of the State. She has no relatives, as Monsieur will
understand. Thinking, therefore, that monsieur, _who is so good_,
might for some reason care to take an interest in the child's
future----"
Branchard coughed and paused. Having given Mr. Bulstrode ample time to
speak, to show some signs of life and of his usual quick benevolence,
and being greeted with nothing other than quiet, meditative silence,
the merchant shrugged and comprehensively relinquished suppositions and
hopes in one large gesture.
"In which case" (evidently that of taking for granted that Bulstrode
was less good than they had supposed), "in that case we shall put in a
plea ourselves for Simone and adopt her."
Madame's voice, now in full and customary volume, expressed frankly
_her_ goodness. "We have five children and our means are modest,
but"--and she put it sublimely--"_one is not a mother for nothing_."
Her tirade, however, was quite lost on Bulstrode, who was occupied with
his own projects of benevolence. Turning to this contingent of the
_hôtel meublé_ a back scarcely more imperturbable than his face had
been, he went out of the room to the terrace, where Simone sat just as
he had left her. She was, on her low chair, so tiny that in order more
nearly than ever before to approach her little point of view, to come
into her little sphere, Bulstrode knelt down on one knee.
"Don't look so frightened, my child. Nothing will harm you--I assure
you of that; don't you"--he called her loyally to answer--"don't you
believe me, Simone?"
The little thing drew in a struggling breath and whispered: "Oui,
m'sieu."
"Good!" He was smiling at her and had taken her ice-cold, dirty,
little hands. "You are fond of me, Simone--you like a little M'sieu
Balstro'?"
"Oh," she caught at her frightened voice and more clearly whispered,
"oh, oui, m'sieu!"
"Bien encore!"
He wanted tactfully to break the ice which shock and terror had formed
around the poor little heart, and yet not to prolong the moment.
"_Voyons_," he said to her lightly, as if he were only to bid her come
and play in his garden, and not ask her to decide her destiny.
"_Voyons_, how would you like to come and live with me? to have toys
and pretty clothes and good things to eat--to be"--the bachelor put it
bravely--"to be _my_ little girl. How, Simone, would you like it?"
If further startled she was humanized by his warmth, which was melting
her; her breast heaved, her lips trembled, and she asked: "Et
puis--maman?"
Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to
curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly
behind the two on the terrace. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she
sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.
Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her,
"What does she then know?"
"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."
Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the
marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe
did not touch her.
"And maman?" she repeated. "Where is she? She did not come home last
night?"
Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but
Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms
around the child.
"Look, ma petite--your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful
country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever
this kind gentleman says. Will you go to be his little girl? He will
give you everything in the world." She closed with this magnificent
promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp. In order
to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the
wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.
Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion,
no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or
surprise. She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting
in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame
Branchard's black shawl.
"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and
play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have. You can be my
little girl, as you will--it is for you to decide--chez moi, or with
this bon monsieur."
Was it fair of them--thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own
destiny?
Simone raised her head; her cheeks had reddened a little at Madame
Branchard's last words. She was unable to grasp the benefits that
Bulstrode's magnificence offered, but she knew Marie and Jeannette--she
knew the hands of Madame Branchard could tuck one in at night, and how
warm and soft was the bosom on which she had already wept her little
griefs. There were many beautiful things in the world, but Simone just
then only wanted one. Madame Branchard was not _her_ mother--but she
was still _a_ mother! Simone whispered so low that only the woman
heard:
"I will go with you."
Prosper having embarked on a sea of indiscretion, went through the day
consistently. With a love of the melodramatic in his Latin temperament
he had admitted the _hôtel meublé sans cérémonie_: and late that
afternoon he gave entrance to another group of quite a different order,
and without formality ushered the lady and her friends to the terrace,
where the solitary inhabitant of another man's house was taking a
farewell beverage before leaving Paris.
"We have caught you in time, Jimmy!" Mrs. Falconer made a virtue of it.
"If you are absconding with the Montensier treasures, then let me show
Molly and the Marquis at least what has been left behind."
His bags and boxes in the hall, his automobile at the door, and
Bulstrode himself in travelling trim, it looked very much like a
flight, indeed. Miss Molly and the Marquis, it transpired, were able
to explore for themselves and to find in the gallery and salons
pictures and objects of interest to excuse a prolonged absence.
"They're engaged," Mrs. Falconer explained to her host. "Isn't it
ridiculous? As you know, she hasn't a cent in the world, and his
family are not in the secret, but Molly and De Presle-Vaulx _are_, and
_I_ am, and I brought them off in pity for a spin to Paris."
The apparition of the lady, whose mocking beauty had a fresh charm
every time he saw her--her worldly wisdom and her keen
reasonableness--made, as he stood talking with her, his past debauch in
philanthropies seem especially grotesque. With a long breath of joy at
the sight of her Bulstrode also realized how wonderfully separated from
her the introduction of another life into his environment would have
made him.
"Your garden is a waste," the lady criticised, "dusty and dull. I
don't wonder you're getting away. Fontainebleau, too, was only a
_faute de mieux_, and I have left it. One should get really far away
at this season. It's the time when only the persons who are actually
bred in its stones can stay in Paris--certainly the birds of passage
may now, if ever, fly."
"We are going to Trouville," she said; "we are all going to motor
through Normandy. Won't you come--won't you come?" He shook his head.
Mrs. Falconer looked across the terrace to where a little chair had
been overturned, and on the floor by its side lay a broken doll.
"Jimmy!" she laughed in triumph at the sight. "You _have_ broken your
doll!"
Bulstrode said: "Yes, beyond repair, and I don't want another." Then
in a few words, briefly, a little impatient, and still smarting under
the child's defection, he gave her the story.
Listening, absorbed, her charming eyes on him or at one moment turned
suspiciously away, the lady heard him to the end, and at the end said
softly:
"Jimmy, my poor Jimmy! What have you nearly done! What _would_ people
have thought? Not that it matters in the least--it's what people _do_
that counts--but oh, I tremble for your next folly!"
"It might"--he spoke with something like bitterness--"be less harmless
and leave me less alone."
She had finished a glass of iced tea, put her goblet down on the tray
and rose, coming over to where Bulstrode stood; she lightly laid her
hand on his arm.
"You are, then, so very lonely? So lonely that you would be capable of
doing this foolish thing? Oh, you would have found, as I have found,
that it is those things which come into our lives, not those which we
by force _take_, which mean all we want them to mean! This wasn't
_your child_!" Mrs. Falconer's face softened as he had never seen it.
"Nor yet is she the child of some woman you love. Believe me, it would
have made you far lonelier if it so happened--if you should ever come
to love--if you ever had loved----"
Bulstrode interrupted her abruptly:
"Yes, in that case I should no doubt be glad that Simone had gone back
on me." He waited silent for a second, and then continued gently, "I
_am_ glad, very glad indeed!"
THE FOURTH ADVENTURE
IV
IN WHICH HE MAKES THREE PEOPLE HAPPY
There were times when Bulstrode decided that he never could see the
woman he loved any more: there were times when he felt he must follow
her to the ends of the world, just in order to assure himself that she
was alive and serene. Such is the gentleman's character and point of
view, that she must always be serene, no matter what his own troubled
emotions might be.
He had the extraordinary idea that he could not himself be happy or
make a woman happy over the dishonor of another man. It was
old-fashioned and unworldly of Bulstrode: still, that was the way he
was constituted.
It was on one of the imperious occasions when he felt as if he must
follow her to the ends of the earth, that he steered his craft toward a
little town on the edge of the Norman coast, to a very fashionable bit
of France--Trouville. As soon as he understood that Mrs. Falconer was
to be in Normandy for the race week, he packed his things and ran down
and put up at the Hôtel de Paris. On this occasion the gentleman
followed so fast that he overleaped his goal, and arrived at the
watering-place before the others appeared. Bulstrode took his own
rooms, and in response to a telegram, engaged the Falconers'
apartments. He liked the way the little salon gave on the heavenly
blue sea, and with a nice fancy to make it something more home-like for
his friend to begin with, he filled it with flowers ... ran what
lengths he dared in putting a few rare vases and several pieces of old
Italian damask here and there.
"Falconer," he consoled himself, "will be too taken up with his horses
to notice the _inside_ of anything but a stable! And I shall tell the
others that the hôtel proprietor is a collector: most of these Norman
innkeepers are collectors." And, as his idea grew, he went to greater
lengths, with the curiosity shops on either side the Rue de Paris to
tempt him. The result was that when Mrs. Falconer came, she found the
hôtel room wonderfully mellow and harmonious, and as a woman who revels
in beauty she responded to its charm. She was delighted, her eyes
sparkled, her cheeks glowed. And Jimmy Bulstrode had a moment of high
happiness as she looked at him and touched with her pretty hands the
flowers he had himself arranged. It was a delightful moment, a moment
that was much to him.
The Falconers arrived with the usual lot of servants and motors and,
moreover, with a racing outfit, for Falconer had decided to enter his
English filly, Bonjour, for the events of August. There was also with
them a Miss Molly Malines and a young sprig of nobility, the Marquis de
Presle-Vaulx, to whom Bulstrode was a trifle paternal.
"He can't, at least, be after Molly's _millions_," he reflected; "he
can't, at any rate, be a _fortune_ hunter, for the girl's face is the
only fortune she has!"
On a bright and beautiful morning, the first of all the days for many
weeks--for Bulstrode reckoned his calendar in broken bits, beginning a
New Year each time he saw his lady again--a bright and beautiful
morning he walked out at the fashionable hour of noon and turned into
the Rue de Paris.
The eyes of many women followed Bulstrode.
Being an early riser, he had already taken a brisk walk over the
cliffs, had swum out beyond the buoys, and now in his flannels, his
panama, a gay rose in the lapel of his coat, amongst the many
debonnaire and pleasing people who filled the little fishing town, his
was a distinguished figure. He trusted very much to instinct to
discover his friend, and after a few moments found her at the extreme
end of the street which the papers of Paris tell you is "the most
worldly and fashionable in any part of the Continent, during race week
at Trouville." Mary Falconer was of course dressed in the very height
of the mode. She looked up and saw Bulstrode before he saw her, but
she could wait until he made his leisurely way down to her side. She
waited for him a great deal. He did not know how much, but then her
point of view and her feelings have never come into the history. It
amused her to make him her many clever little bits of speech, for he
was so appreciative of everything she said, and looking up at him now
as he approached she said: "These people never seem to have anything to
do, do they? Leisure is like money: to enjoy thoroughly either money
or leisure one should only have a little of each. Now for us
good-for-nothings who have no occupation it doesn't make much
difference what we do or where we do it!"
The lady's camp-stool had been set down at the end of the street.
Those who are not promenading opened little _chaises pliantes_ and
watched from their little seats. Mrs. Falconer sat facing the ocean,
or what was visible of it between the bathing tents. Pagodas gay with
children's shovels and bright pails, striped bonbons and the sea of
muslins, ribbons and feathers and sunshades of the midsummer crowd.
All the capitals of Europe had poured themselves into Trouville, and
the resort overflowed with beauty and fashion.
'"It's perfectly bewitching," Bulstrode said to her, "perfectly
bewitching, and it makes one feel as though there were nothing but
pleasure in the world."
She wore a white dress and her hat was bright with flowers. She opened
her rose-lined parasol over her head.
"Jimmy," she said abruptly, and brought his eyes to hers like a flash,
for he had been looking over the scene, "do you know I begin to see
where the innkeeper found his rare treasures; _there are a great many
other things_ that suggest them in this little street!"
Bulstrode replied, "You don't want him to take them away, do you?"
She shook her head. "No," she said slowly, "they have been a great
pleasure, but I don't want to _buy_ them from him, either."
"I don't _think_ he'd sell them," Bulstrode was certain of it, "they're
extremely precious in his eyes."
"I'm a good judge of works of art, however," she said after a moment,
"that is to say, I know a good thing when I see it. There was a little
picture in one of the shops back of me that I would have given a lot to
own."
Her friend exclaimed: "Are you going to buy it! That is to say, will
Falconer buy it for you?"
"My dear soul--with his horse running to-morrow! At any rate, the
bijou is already bought above my head. I went in yesterday to see what
was the least they would take for it, and found the Prince Pollona, the
Englishman who buys for the Wallace Collection, and somebody who, they
tell me, was the Rockefeller of St. Petersburg. Well, my little
picture was what they all wanted, and you can imagine that _I_ retired
from the running...! But I tell you this," she said, "only to show you
how very good my taste is, and so that you may rely on my selections."
Bulstrode smiled in a way that said he thought he might rely on her,
but still he asked rather quizzically, "Well, what are you going to
recommend to me _now_?"
The lady at the moment, not having anything in mind, looked suddenly
up, gave him whimsically:
"Molly and her Marquis."
The two young people with Jack Falconer were coming slowly along the
Rue de Paris toward them. The grace of the girl, her freshness under
her wide hat where flowers and ribbons danced and blended; the radiant
pleasure she exhaled, the swing of her dress, her youth, expressed so
happily the joy of life, recommended themselves easily in a flash....
"Oh, _Molly_--she's perfect!"
"And the Marquis?"
"He is perfectly in _love_," ... Bulstrode allowed him so much.
"My dear friend, remember I know my _objets d'art_."
"Oh, as an _objet d'art_...!"
Bulstrode took the young man in: his white immaculateness, his
boutonnière, his panama--(not less than forty dollars a straw, as Jimmy
knew) his monocle.
"As an _objet d'art_," he further conceded to her, "he's perfect, too!"
"As an _homme de race_," said the American lady eagerly, with the true
Republican appreciation of blood and title, "as an _homme du monde_, as
a..."
"Title?" he finished for her. "Oh, the Presle-Vaulx are all right!
I'll grant him a perfect title, sound as a bell, first Crusade--_Léonce
de Presle-Vaulx main droite, or sur azur--Pour toi seule_. It's a good
old tradition--a good old name."
She scented his lack of sympathy. "Oh, I'll stand for him, Jimmy. I
know the _pâte_, as they say. I know the ring and the tone; and you
must, at my valuation, take him."
"Molly, dear lady, has done the taking." Bulstrode lifted his hat as
the trio came up. "And what, after all, can we--the rest of us do?"
"The rest of them" watched the young couple with mingled emotions: Mary
Falconer with all the romance in her, and in spite of unusual cool
reasonableness she had a feminine share--Jimmy with the sympathy of a
kindly nature, a certain sting of jealousy at the decidedly perfect
completeness of young love, and with a singularly wide-awake practical
common sense for an impulsive gentleman whose pleasure in life is to
pour into people's hands the things they most long for and cannot
without him ever hope to enjoy!
Bulstrode, although owning his share of horse-flesh and a proper number
of automobiles and keeping, for the best part of the time, a yacht out
of commission, was a sport only in a certain sense of the word. The
people who liked him best and who were themselves able to judge, said
he was a "dead game sport," but Jimmy smiled at this and knew that the
human element interested him in life above all, and that he only cared
for amusements as they helped others to enjoy. He was backing
Falconer's horse, although he felt certain the winnings would go to the
Rothschild's gelding. On the afternoon, however, when De Presle-Vaulx
came up to him in the Casino and said: "On what are you going to put
your money, Monsieur?" Bulstrode looked at him thoughtfully. He had
stood by the young man the night before at baccarat and seen him lose
enough to keep a little family of Trouville fisherfolk for a year.
"Are you going to play the races, Marquis?"
"But naturally!" ...
De Presle-Vaulx had an attractive frankness, and his smile
was--Bulstrode understood what a girl would think about it!
"... But of course! One doesn't come to Trouville in _la grande
semaine_ not to play!"
He put his hand cordially on Bulstrode's arm.
"Entre nous," he said, "I don't believe Falconer's horse has a chance
against Rothschild's Grimace. And you?"
"Oh, I shall back Jack Falconer's mare," the older man replied.
The Marquis played with his moustache. "She doesn't stand a show."
Bulstrode was walking slowly down the grand staircase by his
companion's side. "And you will back Grimace?" He ignored the young
man's prognostication.
De Presle-Vaulx said ingenuously: "_I_? Oh, seriously, I'm not
betting. I lost at baccarat last night, and I haven't a sou for the
race."
He looked boyish and regretful. The American put his hand in his
pocket and took out his portefeuille.
"Let me," he suggested pleasantly, "be your banker."
The light dry rustle of French bank-notes came agreeably from between
his fingers.
The young man hesitated, then put out his hand.
"A thousand thanks, Monsieur, you are too good--I _will_ back Grimace,
and after the race----"
Jimmy handed him the notes to choose from.
At the stair foot stood Molly and Mrs. Falconer.
"We went this afternoon to see Jack's horse," Miss Malines said to the
Marquis. Whatever she said, no matter how general, she said to
him--others might gather what they could. "Bon Jour's a beauty--a
dear, and as fit as possible. Oh, she's in great form! Jack's crazy
about her, and so is the jockey. I know Bon Jour will win! I'm going
to put twenty-five francs on her to-morrow."
Mary Falconer smiled radiantly. "And you, Jimmy," she took for
granted, "are of course betting on the favorite?"
"If you mean Grimace--" his tone was indifferent--"no, I shall back
your husband's horse."
"_Jimmy_!" Her tone changed, and her expression as well.
De Presle-Vaulx saw it, and he knew what women's voices can mean. He
was a Frenchman, and he understood what a slow, delicious flush, a
darkening of the eyes, a sharp note in the voice can signify of
feeling--as well as of gratitude, surprise and a little scorn. There
was all this in Mary Falconer's exclamation and her face.
"And Maurice!" Molly said, "of course, you're doing the same?"
The Marquis met his fiancée's clear eyes, her girlish enthusiasm and
her confidence. He bit his lip, shrugged, hesitated, looked at
Bulstrode, at Molly, and laughed. The presence of the others and the
custom of his country made it only a pretty courtesy--he lifted Molly's
hand to his lips.
"Of course--_chère Mademoiselle_, I am backing Bon Jour with all my
heart, _cela va sans dire_!"
Miss Malines regarded her friend with a pretty grimace and a smile.
As they walked along together all four, Bulstrode said to himself:
"He's a sport, a true sport--that's five thousand francs to the bad.
He was game, however, he's a good sport and, better yet, he's a true
lover!"
Whether or not Mary Falconer really had an exalted idea of the merits
of Bon Jour, or whether she thoroughly understood the situation, how
was her friend to know?
Falconer adored the horse, and the lady showed in the matter, as in
everything else, a fine loyalty to her husband, which was undoubtedly
one of the reasons why--but this is going too deeply into the domain of
Bulstrode's feelings, which, since he keeps them honorably sealed, it
is unworthy to surprise even in the interest of psychology.
Bulstrode saw that his friend was pleased: her color, her mounting
spirits at dinner, showed it. She spoke with interest of the races,
and with confidence greater than she had hitherto evinced in the
fortunes of her husband's racer--indeed she talked horse to Molly's
edification, her husband's delight, and Bulstrode's admiration. All
this--the sense that the party was, so to speak, with him--put Jack
Falconer in the best of spirits, and the unruffled course of the
dinner, and, above all, the humor of the elder of the two ladies, quite
repaid Jimmy Bulstrode for the sure loss of his stakes.
"Does she really think that I have faith in the horse?" he
wondered---meeting her charming eyes over the glass of champagne she
was drinking. They did not answer in text his question, but their glow
and the light of content in them answered for him other questions which
were perhaps of greater interest.
She was not unhappy. All his life, since his acquaintance with her, it
had been his aim, in so far as he could aid it, that she should not be
unhappy. His idea of affection was that in all cases it should bring
to the object--joy. In his own life these things which brought him, no
matter how pleasant they might be, the after taste of regret and misery
he strove with all his manliness to tear out: "and surely," he so
argued, "if my presence in her life cause her for one moment anything
but peace, it would be better that we had never looked into each
other's eyes."
There was nothing especially buoyant, in the attitude of the young
Marquis! His inclination to feminine will had cost him--he was so
familiar with the turf and the next day's programme to feel sure--five
thousand francs, which he had not the means to pay.
Later in the evening, very much later, indeed well on to one o'clock,
Bulstrode, wandering through the baccarat rooms--for no other purpose,
it would be said from his indifferent air, than to study types--saw
Maurice de Presle-Vaulx just leaving the Casino.
Bulstrode's air was as friendly and as naïve as though he had not a
pretty clear idea of just how the tide of events was fluctuating toward
misfortune in the case of this young nobleman.
"What do you say," he suggested, "to getting something to drink or eat?
What do you say to a piece of _perdreau_ and some champagne?"
The Frenchman followed the older man, who in contrast to his pallor
looked the picture of health and spirits. Bulstrode cheerily led him
to a small table in the corner of the restaurant, where they sat
opposite one another, and for a little time applied themselves in
silence to the light supper served them.
The Marquis drank more than he ate, and Bulstrode dutifully finished
the game and toast, quite glad, in truth, to break the fast of a long
evening which he had spent in the close rooms: for no other reason than
unseen, to befriend--and unasked, to chaperone Molly's lover. Finally,
when he felt that the right moment to say something had come, he smiled
at the young man, and said frankly:
"Voyons, mon ami, don't you feel that you can talk to me a little more
freely than you could possibly to even so kind and charming a friend as
Mrs. Falconer? We are not of the same race, perhaps, but then under
certain circumstances such distinctions are not important. How do
you"--he handled the words as though in presenting them to the young
man he was afraid they might prick him--"How do _you_ now stand?--I
mean to say, the luck has been rather against you, I'm afraid."
Bulstrode would never be so near forty again, and De Presle-Vaulx was a
spoiled child--at all events, all that could be spoiled in him had been
taken care of by his mother, and in his own way he had spoiled a large
part of what remained. He looked up smartly, for he had been following
the pattern of the table-cloth. If the frankness of the other
threatened to offend him, as he met the kind eyes of the American he
found nothing there that could do otherwise than please him. He
shrugged with his national habit, then threw out his hands without
making any verbal reply, but his smile and his gesture comprehended so
much that Bulstrode intelligently exclaimed:
"Oh, but you don't mean to _say_----?"
"I have not, monsieur, much to lose," the scion of an old house replied
simply. "We have the reputation of being poor; but to-night and last
night have quite 'wiped me out,' as you say in America. Je suis ruiné."
Bulstrode lit his cigar. De Presle-Vaulx took from his pocket one of
his own cigarettes and puffed at it gently. Bulstrode smoked silently,
and thought of the young man without looking at him. He liked him, and
did not understand him at all: not at all! He supposed, that with his
different traditions, his Puritanism, his New World point of view, he
could _never_ understand him, but he would enjoy trying to do so, for
aside from the quality of spoiled boy, there was something of the man
in De Presle-Vaulx to which the New Englander extremely responded.
His next remark was impersonal:
"Bon Jour, then, you think is not likely----?"
"_Mon cher Monsieur_! ... She is not even mentioned for place! Even in
the event of her winning," De Presle-Vaulx was gloomy, "I should be
able to discharge my debt to you and nothing more." Again he looked up
quickly. "I shall, of course, be quite able to discharge _that_; I
only mean to say that _en somme_, I am _roulé completément roulé_."
"What, then, are you going to do?"
De Presle-Vaulx looked at the end of his cigarette as though he took
counsel from it, and said measuredly:
"There is, in my position, but one thing possible for a man to do."
"You mean to say, marry, make a rich marriage?"
The Marquis flashed at him:
"A month ago, yes! that would have been the one way out of my
embarrassment: but I am no longer in the market. It is the other
alternative."
Bulstrode in no case caring to hear put in words a tragically
disagreeable means of solving the problems of debt and love, and having
less faith in this extravagant, explosive alternative than in the
_marriage de convenance_, did not urge the Frenchman further. He
simply brought out--his quiet eyes fixed on the other:
"And the little girl?--Molly--Miss Malines?----"
He gave him three chances to think of the pretty child, and for the
first De Presle-Vaulx's expression changed. He had with a nonchalance
submitted to the discussion of his fortune and his fate, but now he
distinctly showed dignity.
"Don't, I beg of you, _speak_ of Mademoiselle Malines!" and then he
said more gently, "mille pardons, mon cher ami!"
Bulstrode smoked his Garcia meditatively. He had not attempted the
solving of other people's questions, had not played the good fairy for
a long time. He had the hazy feeling--such as he often experienced
just before stepping into the mysterious excitement of doing some good
deed, of undergoing the effects of a narcotic which put to sleep reason
and practical common-sense, and left alive only a desire to befriend.
In this case, determined not again to be the victim of sentimentality,
determined for once to unite common sense and common humanity, he
forcibly dissipated the haze and said:
"Your family! I have, as you know, understood from Mrs. Falconer, the
facts of the case. You must not be formal with me." He smiled
delightfully. "I am an American; you know we have all sorts of
barbarous privileges. We rush in quite where the older races fear to
tread ... and Molly Malines' father is an old friend of mine."
(Mr. Bulstrode did not say what kind of an old friend! or even allow
himself to remember the I.O.U.s and loans that his bankers had made to
the visionary, good-humored, sanguine, unfortunate stockbroker.)
"Your family--how do they take the idea of your marriage to a poor
American?"
De Presle-Vaulx pushed his coffee cup aside, leaned his arms on the
table, bent over, and said with more confidence:
"Oh, they are entirely opposed to it. That's one reason, to be quite
frank with you, why I have been so reckless."
He added: "My mother has refused her consent, and I can never hope to
alter my father's attitude. I have their letters to-day as well as
telegrams from Presle-Vaulxoron--they bid me 'come home immediately,'
and so far as my people are concerned, their refusal puts an end to the
affair!"
There was a mixture of amusement and reproach in Bulstrode's tone--"and
you have found nothing better to do than to throw away at baccarat what
money you had, and have found no other solution for the future than
to...?" he eyed the young man keenly, and a proper severity came into
his expression. "Nonsense," he said, and repeated the word with more
indulgence: "nonsense, _mon ami_!"
His reproof was borne:
"We are an old race, M. Bulstrode----"
Bulstrode had heard this allocution before. It gave lee-way to so
much; permitted so much; excused so much!
"... I don't need to tell you our traditions, or recall our customs.
You of course know them. If I marry without my parents' consent I
shall probably, during my mother's lifetime, never see her again, and I
am her only son. It means that I sever all relations with my people."
Bulstrode knocked the ash off his cigar and said thoughtfully:
"It's too bad! A choice, if there _is_ one, is always too bad. There
should in real things _be_ no choice. As soon as such a contingent
arises, it proves that neither thing is really worth while! When a man
loves a woman there can be no choice. My dear friend, when a
_man_"--he paused--"loves--there is nothing in the world _but the
woman_."
The Marquis looked at the fine face of the elder man. Years had, with
their gentle history, and kindly records, touched Jimmy Bulstrode
lightly. Every experience made him better to look at; "like a good
picture," Mrs. Falconer had said, "painted by a master, and only
growing more splendid." Nothing of the worldliness of the roué marked
his expression. His memories were clear and honorable, and the
Frenchman experienced a sensation of surprise and also one of
enlightenment as he looked at him and responded to his expression. He
had never seen any one quite like this man of the world, could not
think of his prototype in France.
He repeated:
"Nothing but the woman in the world--? Honor--" Bulstrode quickly
added, "and the woman--they are synonymous."
In watching his companion he wondered in how much of a tangle the
Frenchman's mind was, and just how deep his feet were sunk in the
meshes of conventionality and tradition, and decided: "Oh, is it too
much to believe that he could----!"
As if in answer to his thoughts, De Presle-Vaulx spoke in the simplest
manner possible:
"J'aime Molly."
Quite surprised at the simplicity, Bulstrode beamed on him and waited.
Then the other added:
"But I can't ask any woman to share poverty and debts, and I have no
way of making a living; I'm not bred for it."
"You are not an invalid?"
"On the contrary."
"You can work."
De Presle-Vaulx smiled: "I am afraid not! No De Presle-Vaulx has done
a stroke of work in three hundred years."
"It's time, then"--Bulstrode was tart--"that you broke the record. Why
don't you?" He said as though suddenly illumined--"make me your
banker, draw on me for whatever sum you will, and since you have faith
in her and are so well supported by the public opinion--bet on Grimace.
I believe, with you, that he is sure to win. You would recoup much of
your loss here."
De Presle-Vaulx pushed back his chair and exclaimed: "Monsieur!"
"Oh," shrugged Bulstrode, "a woman's caprice, my dear fellow! A
foolish little whim of a girl! You can't be expected to mix sport and
flirtation to the tune of two or three thousand dollars."
He smiled deceptively.
The young man laughed bitterly:
"So that is something of what you think of me? for I see you are not
serious! It's a folly, of course, a sentimental folly," he met
Bulstrode's eyes that silently accused him of a like--"but only a man
in love knows what sentimental follies are worth! There is"--the young
man was suddenly serious, "a sort of prodigality in love only
understood by certain temperaments, certain races: it may be
degenerate: I suppose it is, and to push it quite to the last phase,
is, of course, cowardly, certainly very weak, and men like you,
Monsieur, will deem it so."
"You mean--?" and now Bulstrode's tone urged him to make himself clear.
"I mean," said De Presle-Vaulx firmly, "rather than renounce this woman
I adore I will without doubt--(given the tangle in which the whole
matter is!...") and he could not for the life of him put his intention
into words. He smiled nevertheless unmistakably. Bulstrode leaned
across the table and put his hand on the other's arm.
"Then you don't love her well enough not to break her heart? Or well
enough to live a commonplace life for her?"
"I don't know how to do it."
"Well," said Bulstrode, "I have run upon quite a good many hard
moments, perhaps some, in their way, as difficult as this, and I have
never thought of getting out of the muddle. Perhaps it _is_ a
question, as you say, of temperament and race. I am inclined also to
think, stubbornly, that it is a question of the quality of the love
that one has for the woman. You won't think it impertinent of me, my
dear friend,"--and his tone was such that no one could have thought it
impertinent--"you won't, I am sure, take it amiss if we talk this over
to-morrow, and if I try to show you something that means _life_,
instead of what you plan."
"You know you as good as stood for De Presle-Vaulx."
Bulstrode held Mrs. Falconer's parasol, her fan, as well as a gold bag
purse full of louis, a handkerchief and his own cane and field-glass.
For the lady, standing on a chair the better to see the race-track, was
applauding with enthusiasm the result of the first handicap. She had
placed a bet on a horse called Plum-Branch "from a feeling of
sentiment," as she said, because she had, that day, quite by chance,
selected a hat with a decorative plum-branch amongst other garnitures.
"I am _standing_, certainly, Jimmy," she replied to his remark, "and to
the peril of my high heels!-- _There_, I've won! and won't you, like an
angel, go and cash my bets?--give me the purse, you might have your
hand picked! You can put my winnings in your pocket; they're not so
enormous."
During his absence she watched the scene around her with animation.
The spotless day, if one might so call it, when the sky and the turf
and the whole world looked as though washed clean, and nature, seen in
the warm sunlight, seemed to palpitate and flutter in the wind that
gently stirred ends of ribbon or tips of plumes, and set the fragrance
of the country air astir. Back of the lady the tribune was like a
floral display: here and there a corner red as roses, there a mass of
lily-white dresses enlivened by pink and blue parasols, and the green
_pesage_ stretched between the spectators and the race-track in bands
of emerald, whilst across it promenaded or stood in groups those
interested in the races. Mrs. Falconer acknowledged a friend here and
there, glanced affectionately over to where Molly and the Marquis,
seated near, fixed their attention on the race-course, where the
winner, flying his blue ribbon, cantered triumphantly around the track.
One of a little group Falconer, the worse for many cocktails, stood by
the railing, talking familiarly with his jockey, whilst Bon Jour,
blanketed to the eyes, was being led up and down the outside track
alongside of her rival, Rothschild's Grimace.
Bulstrode returning, gave his friend a handful of gold, which she put
into her purse, and he repeated: "You remember that you stood, as it
were, for De Presle-Vaulx?"
"I do," she said, "if you think the race-course is the place to take me
to account for anything so serious, I do remember, and I do stand.
What is the trouble that he needs me?"
"He needs," Bulstrode was serious, "a good many things, it seems to me,
in order to get firmly on the plane where he should be!"
"And that is----?"
"On his feet, my dear friend."
"Well, he is head over heels in love," she nodded, "but when he finally
lands I think you will find Maurice perfectly perpendicular."
"He won't," returned the other, "at all events, land in the bosom of
his family."
"No?"--she looked away from the race-course and laughed--"you mean to
say, Jimmy, has he heard, then?"
"I mean to say that _they_ are quite clear in their minds about his
marriage! They seem to have all the firmness that the young man lacks.
Tell me," he asked his friend, "just what do you know about the matter?
What happened that you so strongly took up his cause with Molly? You
have not told me yet."
She relinquished the interests of the moment to those of the
sentimental question.
"It seems," she said, lowering her tone, "that they have been secretly
engaged for a year. Nothing that an American girl can do would
surprise me, but you can imagine that I was overwhelmed at his part in
the matter. When Molly joined me in Fontainebleau, De Presle-Vaulx
promptly followed, and I naturally obliged her to tell me everything.
I was dismayed at the lack of _tenue_ he had shown. I had a plain talk
with him. He said that he had first met Molly at some dance or other
in the American colony, I don't know where; that he understood that
American girls disposed of their own lives; that he loved her and
wanted to marry her, and that he was only waiting to gain the consent
of his family before writing to her father. He seemed delighted to
talk with me and perfectly conventional in his feelings. He further
told me that his parents until now knew nothing, that he had not been
able to tear himself away from Molly long enough to go down to the
country where they were and see them. I forced him to write at once;
exacted myself that until he received their answer there should be
nothing between Molly and him but the merest distant acquaintance. I
did not know that he had heard from the Marquise or his father. You
seemed to have suddenly entirely gained his confidence and taken my
place." She looked over at the young couple. "Poor Molly!" she
exclaimed. "He has not, I should say, told her: she looks so happy and
so serene! It's of course only a question of _dot_, otherwise there
could be no possible objection. She is perfectly beautiful, the
sweetest creature in the world; and she is a born Marquise!"
Bulstrode interrupted her impatiently:
"It would be more to the purpose if he were a born bread-winner and she
were a dairy-maid!"
"Jimmy, how vulgar you are!"
"Very--" he was wonderfully sarcastic for him--"money is a very vulgar
thing, my dear friend; it's as vulgar as air and bread and butter. It
is like all other clean, decent vulgarity, it can be abused, but it's
necessary to life."
Mrs. Falconer opened her eyes wide on this new Bulstrode.
"Why, what has happened to you?"
He made a comprehensive gesture: "Oh, I am always supporting a family!"
he said with an amusing attempt at irritability. "I am always
supporting a family that is not mine, that does not sit at my
hearthstone or at my table. I am always marrying other people to some
one else, and dressing other people's children!"
He finished with a laugh: "There, No. 5 is up! Aren't you interested
in this race?"
Mrs. Falconer and Bulstrode had walked a little from where the young
couple chattered indifferent to everything but each other.
"No; I am only interested in what you are saying. What have you
planned to do or thought out for them, Jimmy? What do your rebellious
phrases imply? _Are_ you really going to make a home for----?"
Bulstrode said stubbornly. "No! I am going to show him how to make
one for himself."
He stopped short where he stood: he had resumed the care of her
parasol, her fan, and purse.
Her face, as she took in his exposition of his plan for the
regeneration of a decayed nobility, was inscrutable. Instead of
exclaiming, she stopped to speak a moment to some people who passed,
shook hands with the owner of the favorite, and when they were once
again alone said to her friend:
"Isn't it too delightful! the whole scene? I mean to say, how
perfectly they do it all. How thoroughly gay it is, how debonnair,
graceful, and _bien compris_. Look at the wonderful color of the
_pesage_, and the life of the whole thing! These Latin most thoroughly
understand the art of living. You scarcely ever see a care-worn face
in France. Look at Jack now! Did you ever see such anxiety as he
represents? If Bon Jour is beaten I don't know _what_ will become of
him. What shall I do with him?"
Bulstrode's interest on this subject was tepid.
"Oh, he'll be all right!" he said indifferently. "Take him to the
Dublin Horse Fair."
And then as though she had not capriciously left the other topic, Mrs.
Falconer asked:
"Just what _is_ your plan for Molly and her Marquis? May I not know?"
And Bulstrode who had never in any way thought out a plan or scheduled
a scheme for the wise distribution of the good he intended to do,
educated now, so he fondly hoped, by his failures, wiser, he was proud
to believe, by several sharp lessons--with no little confidence and
something of pride, said to his companion:
"I have a ranch out West, you know; a little property I took for a bad
debt once. It has turned out to be a great and good piece of luck.
That time I was fortunate--" (his tone, was congratulatory and Mrs.
Falconer smiled prettily). "I now need a second overseer again--a man
of brains, good temper, and physical endurance, who can keep accounts.
Experience isn't at all necessary. There's my Englishman there, my
Christmas tramp, you recall; he'll show De Presle-Vaulx his duties.
It's a good enough berth for any determined chap who has his way to
make and an ideal to work for. I purpose to send this Frenchman out on
a salary and to see what stuff he's made of. After a year or two, with
good sense and push, he will be in a position to ask any girl to be his
wife. I'll raise his salary, and if Molly is the girl I take her for,
she will help him there."
"And his family, Jimmy?"
"Damn his family!" risked the aroused Bulstrode.
Mrs. Falconer laughed.
"Really! It is casual of you! but you don't know them and can't! But
they can quite spoil the whole thing as far as Molly is concerned. His
tradition and race, his home and all it means to him--why you can't
roughly run against all the old conventions like that, my dear man!"
"Well," said the ruthless gentleman, "then he can go and feed on their
charity, can take to his flesh-pots and give up the girl. She is far
too good for any foreign fortune-hunter anyway. You spoil a man, all
of you. You'd prefer a disreputable roué to a cowboy with money in his
pocket and a heart."
"Would it then prove to you De Presle-Vaulx's heart if he threw over
his family and went West?"
"Yes," said the other quickly. "It would prove he loves the girl."
"You forget his mother."
Bulstrode fumed.
"I have not the honor to forget her; I don't know the Marquise de
Presle-Vaulx."
"I do," interrupted his friend. "She is a charming, gentle old dear;
narrow, if you call it so, clear-headed and delightful. She adores her
only son, and thinks quite properly that his name, his estates,
beautiful if mortgaged, are a fair exchange for an American _dot_.
Maurice de Presle-Vaulx, after all, does not go poverty-stricken to the
woman he marries. There are not so many ways to live after one is
twenty-five, and to uproot this scion of an old race, to exact such a
sacrifice----"
"It would make a man of him."
"He is one already. There are all kinds, I need not tell you so."
"He is head over heels in debt."
Mrs. Falconer laughed again.
"We make him out an acrobat between us."
"He gambles on borrowed money."
"You mean that you have forced him to borrow from you? He will pay
what he owes, I am sure of him."
Bulstrode wheeled and scrutinized her, and said with the natural
asperity of a man who is bored by a woman's too generous championship
of another man:
"You stand for him warmly."
Mrs. Falconer, reading him, said quickly:
"Oh, I know him thoroughly! He has the faults of his race, but as an
individual he is the right sort."
With their pretty habit, her cheeks had grown red in the course of the
discussion.
"Please give me my parasol; it's awfully hot here."
He opened it for her and she held its rosy lining against the sun.
Mr. Falconer, who from the rail had been observing, through the haze
formed by countless cocktails, the figure of his wife in her white
dress, as well as the figure of her faithful squire, here came
swaggering up to them both. He was never jealous, but Mr. Bulstrode's
uniform courtesy and attention to the woman neglected by her husband
often piqued him to attention. As he drew near, Mrs. Falconer asked
quickly:
"And the Marquis, Jimmy? What do you suppose he will say to your Wild
West scheme?"
Bulstrode smiled.
"Oh, you women understand us even when we are stupid mysteries to
ourselves! Tell me, how will he take this?"
"He will refuse." The lady was quick in her decision. "He cannot in
consistence do otherwise. He will consider your plan provincial and
Yankee, and he will consider, what you ignore, that it will kill his
mother. If he cannot marry Molly with the family consent in proper
French fashion he will naturally give her up. But first of all, my
dear Jimmy, he will put _you_ in your place!"
Bulstrode cast a fatherly glance to where the young people sat talking
together: the Marquis in gray clothes of the latest London make, a
white rose in his button-hole, and monocle in his eye, a figure more
unlike the traditional cowboy one could scarcely conceive.
"Your taste is good, ma chere amie," his voice was delighted. "Your
instinct as a connoisseur is faultless; but you are not quite sure of
your _objet d'art_ this time." He nodded kindly at the Parisian--"He's
all right! he's a true sport, a lover and a man. De Presle-Vaulx knows
my Wild West scheme and has accepted."
Molly had put twenty-five francs on Bon Jour and expected to win it.
The money Bulstrode played would have bought a very handsome present
for his lady, and he felt as if he were making an anonymous gift to the
woman he loved.
At the ringing of the bell Falconer left his post by the railing and
came up and joined the little group of his friends just below the Grand
Stand. He lit a cigar, threw down the match furiously, smoked
furiously, and nerved himself for the strain.
Nodding toward the betting contingent he muttered: "They're sheep.
They're all betting on the favorite naturally. Bon Jour wasn't
mentioned for place even, poor little girl!"
The ignored little racer had ambled around the field, her jockey in
crimson and white, doubled up upon her back after the manner of his
profession. Bon Jour was as golden red as a young chestnut; she had
four white feet that twinkled on the fragrant turf whose odors of
crushed blades and green blades, of earth and the distant smell of the
sea went to her pretty head. She threw it up eagerly as her disputants
filled the field. There were nine horses scheduled, but only five
qualified. The Rothschild gelding, an English gray, and two others
named for probable places.
"She's cool as a rose," murmured Bon Jour's owner, "and just look at
her form, will you!"
It was charming, and already the American's horse was attracting
attention.
Molly, with De Presle-Vaulx's aid, rose on her chair, from which her
excitement threatened at any moment to precipitate her.
"Oh, Maurice--of course she'll win. Isn't she a _dear_? How much
shall I make on twenty-five francs?"
Bulstrode smiled.
"A frightful amount! There are twenty to one up on her, Molly."
The girl mentally calculated, exclaimed with pleasure and, with
sparkling eyes, watched the lining-up of the racers. Neck to neck they
stood, a splendid showing of satin and shine from fetlock to forelock,
equine beauty enough to gladden a sporting man's heart, and all five
were away before Miss Malines was even sure which one was the great
Grimace.
From the first the favorite's nose was to the good. His shapely body
followed, and when the horses came in sight again beyond the right-hand
hedge, he had put four lengths between himself and the others. The
winner of the Grand Prix had all the field with him. But the gray
gelding who strained at Grimace's flanks had no staying powers,
although he was backed as strongly for place as was Grimace to win; as
he fell back Bon Jour began to attract notice.
Bulstrode and De Presle-Vaulx exchanged glances over the absorbed
figure of Jack Falconer. "She may yet win place," murmured the younger
man.
As they came up the wide turf sweep that lay like an emerald sea
crested by the dark waves of the hedges, as the horses rocked like
ships over the obstacle--Bon Jour closely followed the favorite.
At the moment Miss Malines cried: "Oh, a jockey's off! Oh, Jack, it's
Bon Jour! She's _thrown_ her jockey! I see the red and white."
But Falconer biting his cigar fiercely, laughed in scorn. "She's
thrown _them_ all right. She's left them all _behind_ her--see!" he
pointed, "there are only three running." And, indeed, as they came
again in sight, one of the horses was seen to be wandering loose about
the course, and another cantered nonchalantly some hundred yards behind.
"She's not even trying," murmured her enchanted owner. "She's cool as
a rose."
The cries which had named the Rothschild gelding from the start were
now mingled, and Bon Jour, flying around the emerald course, might have
heard her name for the first on the public lips. She was running
gracefully, her head even with the favorite's saddle and the English
gray was a far-off third. Bon Jour was pressing to fame.
At the last hurdle as they appeared flying in full sight of the Grand
Stand it was evident the pretty creature had made her better good. The
horses leapt simultaneously and came down on all fours, with Grimace to
the rear, and amongst the frantic acclamation with which the public is
always ready to greet the surprise of unlooked-for merit, Bon Jour
passed Grimace by half a metre at the goal. Jack Falconer was an
interesting figure on the turf; his horse was worth twenty thousand
pounds.
Several hours later, Bulstrode, early in the salon, walked up and down
waiting the arrival of the ladies. He had paid downstairs a hundred
francs for the privilege of dining in the window of the restaurant,
because Mrs. Falconer chanced to remark that one saw the room better
from that point. And the head waiter even after this monstrous tip
said if "_ces dames_" were late there would be no possibility to keep
this gilt-edged table for them. It was the night of the year at
Trouville: Boldi and his Hungarians played to five hundred people in
the dining-room.
Bulstrode looked at the clock; they had yet ten minutes' grace.
Extremely satisfied with himself, with Bon Jour, above all with the
French Marquis--he felt a glow of affection for the whole French nation.
"How we misjudge them!" he mused; "how we accuse them of clinging to
their families' apron strings, of being bad colonists; call them
hearthstone huggers, degenerates; and declare that they lack nerve and
force to rescue themselves from degeneration! And here without
hesitation this young man----" At this moment the salon door opened,
and one of the ladies he had been expecting came in, the youngest one,
Miss Molly Malines, in a tulle dress, an enormous white hat, a light
scarf over her shoulders, and the remains of recent tears on her face.
"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!" she exclaimed, half putting out her hand and
drawing it back again, as she bit her lips: "I thought I should find
Mary here; I wanted to see her first to _cry_ with! but of course it is
you I _should_ see and not cry with!"
She gave a little gasp and put her handkerchief to her eyes to his
consternation; then to his relief controlled herself.
"Maurice has just told me _everything_," she repeated the word with
much the same desperation that De Presle-Vaulx had put into a gesture
which to Bulstrode had signified ruin.
"He's too wonderful! too _glorious_, Mr. Bulstrode, isn't he? I loved
him before, but I _adore_ him now! He's glorious. I never heard
anything so terrible and so silly!"
Bright tears sprang to brighter eyes, and she dashed them away.
("She's adorable") he was obliged to acknowledge it.
"Why, how could you be so cruel; yes, I will say it, so cruel, so hard,
so brutal?"
"_Brutal_?"--he fairly whispered the word in his surprise.
"Why, fancy Maurice in the West, in the dreadful Western life, in that
climate----!"
"Why, it is the Garden of Eden," murmured Bulstrode.
"Oh, I mean to say with cattle and cowboys."
"Come," interrupted her father's friend, practically, "you don't know
what you are talking about, Molly. You don't talk like an American
girl. They've spoiled De Presle-Vaulx, and this will make a man of
him!"
Miss Malines called out in scorn:
"_A man of him_! What do you think he is? He's the finest man I ever
saw. You don't know him. Just because he has a title and his mother
spoils him, and because he has been a little reckless in debts and
things, you throw him over as you do all the French race without
knowing them!"
Her tears had dried and her cheeks flamed.
"Why, Maurice has served three years as a common soldier in the
Madagascar Army; and _that's_ no cinch! Cuba's a joke to it. He's had
the fever and marched with it. He's slept all night with no covering
but the clothes he had worn for weeks. He's eaten bread and drunk
dirty water. He's been a soldier three years. The way I came to know
him was at Dinard where he swam out into the sea to save a fisherman
who couldn't swim, and all the town was out in the storm to welcome
him! They carried him up the streets in their arms--" she waited a
minute to steady her voice--"He's been two years exploring in Abyssinia
with a native caravan--no white man near him, he's the youngest man
wearing the Legion d'Honneur in France. _And you want to send him out
to make a cowboy of him in the American West to turn him into a man_!"
Mr. Bulstrode had never heard such impressive youthful scorn. Molly
threw back her pretty head and laughed.
"Do you know many cowboys who have been three years a soldier;
travelled through unexplored countries; written a book that was crowned
by an academy? Well, I don't!" she said boldly. "Of course I like his
title, of course I am proud of his traditions. They're fine! And it
is no dishonor to love his château and his Paris hôtel, and I'd love
his mother, too--if she'd let me. But I adore Maurice _as he is_, and
he's man enough for me!"
The floor seemed to quiver under poor Bulstrode, who could scarcely see
distinctly the lovely excited face as he ventured timidly:
"I didn't know all these things, Molly."
She was still unpitying.
"Of course not! Americans never do know. They only _judge_. You
didn't think Maurice would tell you all his good points! He doesn't
think they are anything. He only sees the fact that he has debts and
that we are both poor and his family won't give their consent."
Mr. Bulstrode smiled and said:
"He is naturally forced to see these things, my dear child."
The girl softened at his tone and said more gently:
"Well, they are terrible facts, of course. It only means that my heart
is broken, but it doesn't mean that I will consent to your plan, or to
his plan, Mr. Bulstrode. I won't make him break his mother's heart and
ruin his career for me."
The gentleman came up and took her hands: his voice was very gentle:
"What, then, will you do?"
"Oh, wait," she said with less spirit. "Wait until his mother
consents, or until she dies...." She began to hang her head. Her
eulogy of her lover over, only the dry facts of the present remained.
She had no more enthusiasm with which to animate her voice.
Here Mrs. Falconer and the Marquis opened the door, and started back as
the animated picture of beauty being consoled by kindness met their
view.
"Oh, come along in!" cried the girl cheerily. "I have just been
ballyragging Mr. Bulstrode!"
De Presle-Vaulx came eagerly forward:
"Don't listen to her, Monsieur! Molly's tired out after so much
success."
The startled benefactor looked doubtfully from her to the young man.
"And you?"
"Oh, I?" shrugged De Presle-Vaulx, "I'm already half cowboy!"
Mary Falconer put her arm round Molly's waist, drew her to her, "and
Molly is more than half Marquise."
"Mr. Bulstrode," again cried the girl impetuously. "_Please_ reason
with him! He's horribly obstinate. You have put this dreadful idea in
his head; now please tell him how _ridiculous_ it is. If he goes West
and spoils his career and breaks with his family, I'll never marry him!
As it is, I will wait for ever!"
"But my dear child!" Mary Falconer was determined to have the whole
thing out before them, "you don't seem to get it into your head that
you have neither of you a sou, and Maurice can never earn any money in
France."
Miss Malines, to whom money meant that she drew on her father, the
extravagant stockbroker whose seat even in the Stock Exchange was
mortgaged, and who had not ten thousand dollars' capital in the
world--lost countenance here at the cruel and vulgar introduction of
the commodity on which life turns. She sighed, her lips trembled, and
she capitulated:
"Oh, if that's really true ... as I suppose it is----"
Bulstrode watched her, she had grown pale--she drew a deep breath, and,
looking up, not at her lover, but at the elder man, said softly:
"Why, I guess I'll have to give him quite up then."
But here De Presle-Vaulx made an exclamation, and before them all took
Molly in his arms:
"No," he said tenderly, "never, never! _That_ the last of all! Mr.
Bulstrode is right. I must work for you, and I will. We'll both go
West together. Couldn't you? Wouldn't you come with me?"
... "And your mother?" asked the girl.
"Nothing--" De Presle-Vaulx whispered, "nothing, counts but _you_."
Over their heads Bulstrode met his friend's eye, and in his were--he
could not help it--triumph, keen delight, and in hers there was anger
at him and tears.
At this moment the waiter put his head in at the door and implored
Monsieur to come down if he wanted the seat in the window.
"Oh, we're coming!" Mrs. Falconer cried impatiently. "Molly, there's
some eau-de-cologne on the table. Put it on your eyes. Don't be long
or we'll lose our place. The West will keep!"
She went out of the door and Bulstrode followed her. In the hall she
said tartly:
"Well, I hope you're satisfied! I never saw a more perfect inquisitor.
Why didn't you live at the time of the Spanish persecution?"
He ignored her scathing question:
"I am satisfied," he said happily, "with both of them; they're bricks."
The lady made no reply as she rustled along by his side to the elevator.
From the floors below came the clear, bright sound of the Hungarian
music in an American cake-walk and the odor of cigars and wines and the
distinct suggestion of good things to eat came tempting their nostrils.
As Bulstrode followed the brilliant woman, a sense of defeat came over
him and with less conviction he repeated:
"I _am_ satisfied, but you, my friend, are not."
"Oh," shrugged Mary Falconer desperately, "you know _I've_ no right to
think, or feel, or criticise! I never pretend to run people's lives or
to act the benefactor or to take the place of Fate."
The light danced and sparkled on the jet in her black dress, on the
jewels on her neck. Under her black feather-hat her face, brilliant
and glowing, seemed for once to be defiant to him, her handsome eyes
were dark with displeasure.
The poor fellow could never recall having caused a cloud to ruffle her
face before in his life. It was not like her. Her tenderness for a
second had gone. He could not live without that, he knew it, what ever
else he must forego.
He said, with some sadness, "I suppose you're right: if one can buy
even _a honeymoon_ for another couple he shouldn't lose the
opportunity."
She looked up at him quickly. They had reached the ground floor--they
had left the elevator and they stood side by side in the hall. The
lady had a very trifle softened, not very much, still he noticed the
change and was duly grateful.
"We must wait here," she said, "for the others to come down. I can't
let Molly go in alone, and I don't know where my husband is; I haven't
seen him all day."
Bulstrode continued spiritlessly: "Molly, if you remember, begged me to
tell De Presle-Vaulx how 'perfectly ridiculous' my scheme for the Wild
West is. I will tell him this--you will coach me,--there'll be some
pleasure in that, at least! and then I'll find out for what sum the
Marquise de Presle-Vaulx will sell her son. I'll buy him," he said,
"for Molly, and of course," he brought it out quite simply, "I shall
_dot_ the girl."
And then the lady stepped back and looked at him. He felt, before that
she had merely swept him with her eyes; now she looked at him. She
cried his name out--"Jimmy!"--that was all.
But in the exclamation, in the change of her mobile face, in the lovely
gesture that her hand made, as if it would have gone to his, Bulstrode
was forced to feel himself eminently, gloriously repaid, and it is not
too much to say that he did.
THE FIFTH ADVENTURE
V
IN WHICH HE MAKES NOBODY HAPPY AT ALL
Bulstrode stood before the entrance of the Hôtel de Paris bidding his
friends good-night. Watching them, at least one of them, enter in
under the shelter of the glass pavilion, he considered how much more
lonely he was at that special moment than he could remember having been
before. Of course he had bidden Mary Falconer good-night a hundred
dozen times in the course of his life, but it seemed to come with a
more sublime significance than ever how he gave her up every time he
said good-by and how he was himself left alone. And yet, had Mrs.
Falconer been asked, she would have said that she never found her
friend more cold and more constrained. In his correct evening dress
with the flower she herself had given him in his buttonhole, his panama
in his hand, he had been absorbed in her beauty, in the grace of her
dark dress, bright with scintillating ornaments--her big feathered hat
under which her face was more lovely, more alluring than ever; and
nothing in his eyes told the woman what he thought and felt.
She touched his arm, saying:
"Look, Jimmy."
"Isn't that the lovely woman we've so often remarked? See, she's all
alone, how curious! She's going over to the Casino to play, I suppose.
_What_ can have happened to the man who has been with her all this
time? Where is the Prince Pollona?"
As Bulstrode turned his head in the direction indicated, through the
trees passed along the figure of a slender woman, trailing her thin
gown over the pebbles and the grass. She disappeared in the lighted
doorway of the Casino.
"You're quite bearish to-night," Mrs. Falconer said reproachfully,
"quite a bear. I believe you're angry! Dear Jimmy, you may, I
promise, carry out all your philanthropies without my interference; I
won't even criticise or tease. I promise you next time you shall go
sweetly and serenely on your foolish way!"
"Oh," he got out with effort, "I believe I've suddenly grown awfully
selfish, for I find I'm so ridiculous as only to want things for
myself----"
(When he stopped she did not help him but, instead, persisted gently
with the wicked feminine way she had of urging him, tempting him on.)
"What, then, what do you wish? Can't you tell me?"
He laughed almost roughly and said, "No, it's a secret, and I'm one of
those unusual creatures who can keep a secret."
The woman's face changed. He saw the shadow that crossed it. "Come,"
she sighed, "you must bid me good-night..."
And at this moment he had seen Jack Falconer emerge from a still more
shadowy corner, a cigar between his teeth. Drawing his wife's arm
through his, Falconer nodded to the other man and said they had all
better be going up. Bulstrode noted bitterly the satisfaction on
Falconer's bestial, indulgent face and the content that man felt with
himself this evening, his triumph at the race's termination. His horse
had won the stakes and was famous, his wife had been called to-day the
loveliest woman in Trouville, and not for the first time Bulstrode
suffered from it, the proprietorship with which Falconer considered his
wife. For the smallest part of a second he fancied that the woman drew
away, half turned away, looked toward him; and in dread that he might,
if he met her eyes, see some look like appeal, Bulstrode avoided
meeting her glance. He saw them pass under the glass roof of the hôtel
leaving him standing alone.
The deserted lover waited until they had disappeared; then, turning
abruptly, vaguely in search of human beings with whom he might exchange
a word should he feel inclined to talk, dreading the deserted gardens
ami finding his own rooms the dreariest prospect of all, he went into
the Casino with the intention of waiting for the Frenchman who he
thought more than likely would come and join him there. The Marquis
failing him, Bulstrode chose a place not far from the table where the
lovely woman, that Mrs. Falconer and himself had remarked, seated
herself before the game.
Bulstrode's sense of desolation and loneliness would not leave him. If
his luck had been bad, the excitement of the sport might have brought
him some sensation; but, on the contrary, he won. "Only," he said
humorously, as he gathered up his winnings, "only unlucky in love!"
It was well on in the night when he thrust his last roll of bank notes
into his pocket. He had beaten the bank; he had raked up and stuffed
away a small fortune. As he wandered out through the deserted rooms,
he noted, bent over the table, her head in her hand, the woman who, in
spite of his sincere absorption in Mary Falconer, had, like a
temptation, crossed his mind when he first came into the Casino. No
one disturbed her, and she had remained in this dejected posture for
some time. This one amongst the many women in Trouville, Bulstrode and
his friends had remarked for several days. She had first appeared
alone; made a discreet _début_ on the beach, passed through the Rue de
Paris and kept away from the more public parts of the town. Later she
had been joined by a man well known in the world, the Prince Pollona,
who was travelling incognito. The woman's beauty and manner were such
that her actual standing was a mooted question; it had even been
remarked that she was the princess herself incognita, but that they all
knew to be impossible.
Before the official who waited to see the last players leave the
_salle_ could speak to her, she rose of her own accord, gathering her
silken cloak about her, and went quickly from the gambling room. Once
on the stairway, however, her footsteps halted and she went slowly down
as if reluctant to leave the shelter of the brightly lighted
apartments. Bulstrode following her, observed her closely; tall, very
slender, with a fine carriage and a lovely blonde head set on the most
graceful of necks, older than Molly and younger than Mrs. Falconer, she
was quite as _comme il faut_. All along she had worn a collar and rope
of pearls which had excited Molly's enthusiasm. To-night she was
denuded of her jewels; her neck was bare. Bulstrode remarked this as
he walked behind in full view of the soft adorable _nuque_ below the
curls of the girl's fair hair. She trailed her dress slowly through
the garden walks, her white figure in the darkness escaping from him a
little as the trees made an avenue for her. But Bulstrode distinctly
felt that he was expected to follow. Whether or not he might intrude
he did not ask, as he came along, surprised however to see her actually
stop short within a few feet of him. Under the full light of one of
the big lamps, she stood motionless, her arms by her side, her chin
raised. Now that he was quite near her he found her more lovely than
he had even imagined.
He went up directly to her and, without asking how she might take his
interference, said: "You cannot remain here alone, Madame, the gardens
are deserted. What can I do for you?"
As he so spoke in his kind voice the woman lifted her head and looked
full at him; Bulstrode was surprised at her words and more particularly
at her voice.
"You--" she breathed, "you?"
Taking it for granted that for some reason or other it might be him
more than any other man, Bulstrode went on. "You seem more or less to
be in trouble, if I may say so. Won't you please let me be of some
service to you--let me at least see you out of these gloomy gardens?"
But the woman, whose face had flushed, exclaimed: "Oh, no, no! Please
don't bother; please leave me. I want to be alone." And, as she
spoke, she turned and went away from him some few steps.
Jimmy Bulstrode never knew what impulse made him spring forward and
with one sudden gesture dash from her hand what it held. But the
little object fell some distance away, hard down in the grass, to be
found the next morning by the guardians of the place and considered as
a relic of the fortunes of Casino hazard.
"Heavens!" exclaimed the gentleman, and he caught in his hand the
slender wrist from which he had just dashed the weapon. "My good God!
You poor child, why, why----" and he could go no further. The woman's
face, although moved, was singularly tranquil for the face of a woman
on the verge of self-destruction.
"Won't you leave me," she whispered and Bulstrode, gathering himself
together, said firmly:
"Leave you? Not now, certainly, not for anything in the world. And
you must let me take you home."
After a few moments' silence in which she bit her lip and apparently
controlled a burst of hysterical weeping, the young woman accepted his
offer and very lightly put her hand on his arm. "You may, if you
like," she consented, "take me home, as you call it. I am staying at
the Hôtel des Roches Noires."
From the Casino gardens through the silent town without exchanging one
word with her--for he saw she wished to be silent--Jimmy took the lady,
as he called it, home. Once in the big corridor of the vast hôtel,
into whose impersonal shelter they entered as the only late comers, he
stood for a second before bidding her good-night, whilst the porter
eyed them, scarcely with curiosity, so used was he to late entrances of
this kind which he imagined he fully understood.
"Good-night--" Bulstrode started and at once cut himself short, for he
did not really intend to say it then--he had not spoken to her and he
knew he would never leave her until at least he was sure she would not
take her life before the next morning.
The girl extended her hand, her beautiful face was gray. "Will you
not," she asked, "come up with me to my drawing-room? I am quite
alone."
Bulstrode bowed and without hesitation followed her up the stairs to
the conventional suite of hôtel rooms, where, in the little salon,
trunks stood about in the evident indications of hasty packing.
The girl threw her gloves, her handkerchief and her soft silken cloak
on the table. She then seated herself in a corner of the sofa by an
open dressing-bag and Bulstrode, at her invitation, took a chair
opposite. He scarcely knew how to begin his conversation with her, but
he determined at once to go toward what he believed to be the most
crying need.
"You lost to-night," he said. "I saw it. As it happened, I was lucky.
I have no need of money, none." He had drawn from his pocket piles of
louis; he took out from his wallet a roll of notes.
He saw, too, as well as the look of passion and admiration, that her
face was familiar, at least that there was about it something that
suggested remembrance.
"This," she said, "is a fortune!" Her accent was British and her voice
very soft and sweet. "It is quite a large fortune, isn't it? My debts
here are small. I have not fifty pounds in the world," she said
smiling, "I work for my living, too. I have been extravagant, for I
had really made a lot of money, but lately I've thrown everything away.
Yesterday my pearls were sold, and my jewels went last week; the races
and the Casino did the rest! This would make me quite rich."
"Work for her living!" Bulstrode thought, with a pang as he looked at
her. "Heavens, poor dear!" A thousand questions came to his lips, but
he asked her none. He was mastering the feelings her personality, her
trouble, and the night, aroused. He also decided to go at once, while
there was still time.
"It is very droll that this money should have come from _you;_" she
repeated "from you," with the insistence on the pronoun that he had
before remarked as strange. "Even now you don't know me, do you?
Don't you know who I am?"
"No," Bulstrode wondered, "and yet I have certainly seen you before,
but save as I have noticed and admired you here, I don't _think_ I know
you. Should I?"
"You _have_ seen me then here?" she caught delighted, "you have
actually noticed me? You said 'admire'; did you perhaps find something
in me to like?"
"Who," he said with sincerity, "could help himself! Of course I've
seen you and remarked you with your friend."
Here she bit her lip and put up her hand. "Oh, please," she frowned,
"Oh, please!"
Bulstrode, surprised at her accents of distress, murmured an excuse and
said he was much at fault, he should remember. But here the girl
smiled. "Well, it is not exactly a duty to know me; my name is not
quite unknown. I play in 'The Shining Lights Company,' 'The Warren
Company,' I am Felicia Warren--_now_, haven't you seen me play!"
He was sorry, very, very sorry that he had not! Oh, but he knew her
name and her success; they were famous. He wished he could have
assured her that he had admired her before the footlights ...!
Felicia Warren's eyes strayed down at the table on which the money was
so alluringly spread.
"I've been touring in Australia and the Colonies, still I go now and
then to the Continent, though I am almost always in London." She
paused, then regarded him fully with her great blue eyes. "Don't you
remember, Mr. Bulstrode, a great many years ago when you took a
shooting-box in Glousceshire? Don't you remember...?"
Staring at her, trying to place the image which was now taking form, he
did; he _did_ remember it and she?
"There was a mill there on the place. Rugby Doan was the miller, he is
the miller still." Didn't Mr. Bulstrode remember that Doan had a
daughter? She had been fifteen years old then, she had ambitions, she
was altogether a ridiculous and silly little thing; didn't he remember?
Bulstrode was silent.
The gentleman, Mr. Bulstrode, took a strong liking to Doan; he gave him
the money to educate his daughter. Oh, dear me, such a generous lot of
money! Then, as the girl was extraordinarily silly (she had ambitions)
she went on the stage. Her father never forgave her; poor father! She
had never seen him since. "Mr. Bulstrode, don't you remember Felicia
Doan?--I am the miller's daughter."
Bulstrode extended his hand. He wanted to say: "My poor child, my poor
little girl," but Miss Warren's dignity forbade it. "No wonder your
face was familiar," he said quietly; "no wonder! How I wish I might
have seen you play, but we must do something to make your father look
at things in a reasonable way. What can we do?"
The girl shook her head. "Nothing" she said absently, "oh, nothing.
You know what an English yeoman is! or perhaps you don't! My greatest
kindness is to keep away from the Mill on the Rose" ...
But Felicia Warren was not thinking of Glousceshire or of her father.
Still looking down at the money on the table, not even toward her
newly-found friend, she went on, "It is not half as curious, our
meeting here, as one might think. I knew you were here when I came and
I have watched you every day with--with your friend." A slight
expression of amusement crossed her face as, looking up, she caught his
puzzled expression. "Ah, you wonder about it!" she laughed gently.
Coming a little nearer to him, she went on: "You see, you have been my
benefactor, haven't you?"
(Bulstrode wondered in just how far he _had_ been beneficent!) "It's
natural I should remember you with gratitude, isn't it? Thanks to you
I have made my name." Her pride was touching. "You've made it
possible for me to know the world, to know life and to realize my
career. And now," she emphasized, "you've come to save my life and
afterward give me a little fortune." Here she again pointed to the
money. "My father took your money for years, Mr. Bulstrode, but _this,
this_ must all go back. You must take it back soon--not that it could
really tempt me, but it hurts me to see it there."
Bulstrode, more wretched than he had yet been in his philanthropic
failures stared at her helplessly. This blind beneficence, this gift
made to the miller in a moment of enthusiasm had produced--how could he
otherwise believe--fatal results? Here was this delicate creature in
the fastest place in Europe, deserted by a man who had brought her
here--on the verge of suicide.
Whilst speaking, Felicia Warren gathered up the gold and notes and she
was thrusting the money into his hand.
"Please, please be reasonable," he pleaded. "You must let me help you.
There isn't any question of delicacy in the situation where you find
yourself to-night. If ever a man should be a woman's friend, I should
be that friend to you, and you must let me. Don't refuse. Money is
such a little thing, such a stupid little thing."
Miss Warren shook her head obstinately. "Oh, that depends! I've
worked so hard that money often seems to me everything. Indeed, I
thought so to-night when I had not a sou! I shall think so to-morrow
when they seize my trunks for the hôtel bill."
"Seize your trunks!" he exclaimed. "Why--you don't mean to say----?"
The actress blushed crimson. "Oh, of course you thought otherwise,"
she said, throwing up her pretty head. "I pay for my own livelihood,
Mr. Bulstrode," she told him proudly, "I pay for _everything_ I have
and wear and eat and do. Don't feel badly at misunderstanding," she
comforted him sweetly--"You have nothing to apologize for. Why should
you or anyone think otherwise? But I don't care in the least what
people say or think; that is, _I only care what one person says_."
With some of his gold in her palm and some of his bills in her hands,
Felicia Warren put both her hands on Bulstrode's arm. "No," she said
softly, "_I only care what one person thinks_. Can't you see that you
mustn't give me this?"
"No," he persisted doggedly, charmed by her beyond his reason and angry
to find that she would not let him help her in the way he wished, "I do
_not_ see! You must let me help you, you shall not be driven to
desperation."
"Driven to desperation!" her expression seemed to say. Yes, so she had
been, but not through financial anxieties.
"Why, I had rather starve than take your money. I could far sooner
have taken it from poor Pollona; and he left me so dreadfully angry
this morning."
For a second neither spoke. He saw the soft mobile face touched to its
finest. Felicia's eyes were violet and large, and their expression at
the moment pierced him with its appeal.
"Don't you see?" she whispered. Her voice broke here. Her hands
trembled on his arm, some of the gold rattled on the floor and rolled
under the divan. She swayed and Bulstrode caught her.
"... Ever since you came to the mill," she whispered,
"ever--since--you--came--to--the--mill."
Before Bulstrode had time to realize what she said, or the fact that
his arm was about her, she had rushed across the room, thrown open the
window and gone out on the balcony. Left alone with what her words
implied, Bulstrode watched her go.
The clock on the mantel pointed to three and through the open window
came the long, rushing sound of the sea on the beach. The day was
breaking and Bulstrode could see the white figure of Felicia Warren
between the lighted room and the dawn.
He told himself that there was no reason why he should look upon her as
anything but an adventuress--and a very clever one--a very dangerous
one. But, at all events, there _was_ no doubt that she was Felicia
Doan. She refused his money, and she told him that she loved him. But
Jimmy Bulstrode, man of the world as he was, did not reason at all
along those lines. Whether because he was vain, as most men are, or
because he was susceptible as he always told himself he was, he
believed what she said. More than once during the week at Trouville,
when she should have been absorbed in Polonna, Bulstrode had caught her
eyes fastened upon himself and as soon as she had met his own she had
turned hers away. He had no difficulty now in recalling the Mill on
the Rose, or the lovely bit of country where his shooting-box had held
him captive for nearly the whole hunting season. Nor had he any
difficulty in recalling the miller and his pretty daughter. Felicia
even then had been a wonder of good looks, and very intelligent and
mature. He could even see her as a child more plainly than he could
recall the woman who had just left him. She had been a pretty,
romantic girl and--she had deeply charmed him. He had walked with her
under the willows; he had told her many things; he had gone boating
with her on the Rose; he had tramped with her along the English lanes.
Of course he had been wrong. He had known it at the time--he had known
it. And perhaps one reason why he never reverted willingly to the days
spent with the girl was because his conscience had not left him free.
The money given to Doan, Bulstrode had always felt, was a sort of
recompense for hours of pleasure to which he had no right. Even at the
time he had feared that he had disturbed the girl's peace, and because
he had not wished to disturb his own, he had given up his lease and
left the place. Twelve years! Well, they had altered her enormously,
and her life had altered her and her experiences, and she was a very
charming creature. She was, in a measure, his very own work--almost
his creation. He had helped her to change her station, to alter her
life. What had she become?
Bulstrode's reflections consumed twenty minutes by the clock. He had
smoked a cigarette and walked up and down the deserted room, passing
many times the table where his gold lay scattered.
Finally--he did not dare to trust himself to go out to her--he called
her name, Felicia Warren's name, gently, and she came directly in.
Whilst alone on the balcony she had wept. Bulstrode could see the
trace on her cheeks and she was paler even than when he had struck the
pistol from her hand in the gardens of the Casino. She came over to
where he stood and said:
"It's not a ruse, Mr. Bulstrode. Girls like me always have ideals. It
is fame with some, money with others, dress and a social craze for a
lot of them. But with me, ever since you came it has been
YOU--everything you said to me twelve years ago I have remembered.
Silly as it seems, I could almost tell the very words. I have seen a
lot of men since, too many," she said, "and known them too well. But I
have never seen anybody like you."
Bulstrode tried to stop her.
"But no," she pleaded, "let me go on. I've dreamed I might grow great,
and that some day you would see me play and that I should play so well
that you would go crazy about me! I have thought this really, and I
have lived for it, really--until--until----"
As he did not question her or interrupt, she went on:
"I said it was an ideal. Thinking of you and what I'd like to grow for
you kept me, in spite of everything--and I fancy you know in my
profession what that means--good."
Here Felicia Warren met his eyes frankly with the same look of entire
innocence with which she might have met his eyes under the willows near
her father's mill.
"I've been so horribly afraid that when you _did_ come there might be
heaps of things you would not like that I have been awfully hard on
myself, awfully!"
She was lacing and unlacing her slender fingers as she talked.
"I went to Paris this spring because I saw that you were there, and
after passing you several times in the Bois and seeing that as far as I
could judge you were just the same as you had been, I took a new
courage hoping, waiting, for you, and being the best I knew. It seems
awfully queer to hear a woman talk like this to a man," she understood
it herself--"but you see I am used to speaking in public and I suppose
it is easier for me than for most women."
Bulstrode, more eager than anything else to know what her life had
really been, surprised and incredulous at everything she said, broke in
here:
"But this--this man?"
"Oh, Pollona," she replied, "has been there for years, for years. He
has loved me ever since I first made my _début_ and he follows me
everywhere like a dog. I have never looked at any of them, until this
week."
With a sigh as if she renounced all her dreams, she said: "I grew tired
of my romantic folly. I was ill and nervous and could not play any
more, and that was dreadful. So, when Pollona came to me in Paris this
spring, I gave him a sort of promise. I told him that I was going to
Trouville for the Grande Semaine, that I would think things over and
that I would send him word."
She picked up her handkerchief from the table where it lay beside her
gloves and her cloak and twisted the delicate object in her hands,
whose whiteness and transparency Bulstrode remarked. They were clever
hands, and showed her temperament and showed also singular breeding for
one born in the state of life from which she had come.
"Well," she said shortly, "as you have seen, I gave in--I gave in at
last."
"Why," Bulstrode asked abruptly, "did he leave you?"
But instead of answering him, the girl said: "But you don't ask me why
I sent for him to come?"
He was silent.
Here she hid her face and through her fingers he could see the red rise
all along her cheek. Her attitude, and more what she implied than what
she said, and what he thought and feared, made the situation too much
for him. With a slight exclamation he put his arm about her and drew
her to him. As she rested against him he could feel her relax, hear
her sigh deeply. But, as he bent over her, she besought him to let her
go, to set her free, and he obeyed at once.
"There," she said, "don't do that again--don't! Pollona left me
because he was jealous of you."
But at this, in sheer unbelief, her hearer exclaimed: "Oh, my dear
girl!"
"Oh, yes," she nodded, "when he found that I did not love him, that I
could never love him, he forced me to tell him the truth. Oh, don't be
afraid," she said, as though she anticipated his anger, "you are in no
wise connected with it. He thinks of me as a romantic, foolish girl.
He has laughed at me, tried to shake my faith, to destroy my ideal, but
at least he was honest enough to believe me; and that is all I asked of
him."
Not for a moment did Bulstrode feel that she was weaving a web for him.
There was something about her so sincere and simple, she was so fragile
and fine and fair, there was so much of distinction in all she did and
said that it put her well nigh, one might say touchingly, apart from
the class to which she belonged. Her art and her knocking about,
instead of coarsening her, had refined her. She looked like a bit of
ivory, worn by experience, and struggle, to a fine polish; there was a
brilliance about her and he understood and felt, he instinctively saw
and knew, that she was unspoiled.
It took him some half second to pull himself together. Then to turn
her thoughts from him, his from her, if he might, he questioned:
"What sort of a man is Prince Pollona?"
"Oh," she cried warmly, "the best! a kind, good, honorable friend. He
deserves something better than the horrors I have put him through, poor
dear!"
"He seemed very devoted to you," Bulstrode said, "if one could judge."
Not without pride she admitted that he was, and that the Prince had
always wanted to marry her. "I might have married him," she repeated,
"easily a score of times. But how it appears to interest you----" she
said jealously.
"Only as he interests you," replied Bulstrode, "and what you tell me is
a great satisfaction. To be the Princess Pollona is an honor that many
women would be glad to have conferred upon them." Felicia Warren's
good looks were undeniable, her _genre_ was exquisite, and Bulstrode,
again with no effort, believed all she said. Princes had married far
less royal-looking women, of far more humble antecedents than Felicia
Warren.
"Oh, his rank didn't dazzle me," she murmured absently, "they seem all
alike, and when they find out that I am not a certain kind they ask me
to marry them... But if I could only get back to the Mill on the Rose,
Mr. Bulstrode! If I might again see it as I used, if I could see you
there as I used to see you--walk by your side; row with you on the
river; if I could hear the wheel again as I used to hear it, then"--her
voice was delicious, a very note of the river of which she spoke. Oh,
she must act well, there was no doubt about that; no wonder she had
been a success: "If I might walk there with you--titles, even my art
and all the rest"--she did not apparently dare to look at him as she
spoke, but fixed her eyes across the room as if she saw back twelve
years into ----shire ... "if I could _only, only_ go back again with
you!"
In spite of himself, carried away by her voice, Bulstrode said:
"You shall, you shall go back with me!"
"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," she gave a little cry and caught his hand,
steadying herself by the act.
"Wait," he murmured, "wait, let me think it all out." And, as she had
done, Bulstrode walked over to the window, to the balcony where the
fresh air met his face, where the breath from the sea fanned him,
blended with the scent of the meadow. Before Bulstrode the first
reflection of the morning lay like silver on the sea.
When he finally went back into the room, Felicia Warren had not moved.
Just as he left her, she sat, deep back into the divan, leaning on her
hand, with something like the glory of a dream on her face. Standing
in front of her, he said slowly:
"I'm entirely free. No one in the world depends upon me. I have no
tie, or bond to my life. I have freedom and money. So far--if what
you say is all true, don't start so, for I believe it, every word--so
far, I have spoiled your life."
But the girl shook her head.
"Oh, no, _you haven't_," she assured him. "We make our own lives, I
expect, and I told you that I could remember everything you ever said
to me in the past--you never lied to me, and you were never anything
but kind and dear. I've been a fool, a fool!"
Sitting there in her fragile evening dress, its ruffles torn where they
had trailed across the pebbles in the street, the disorder of the room
around her, its evidence of a homeless, wandering life, she seemed like
a bit of flotsam that, no matter from what ship it had been blown, had
at last drifted along the shore to his feet. Unhappy and deserted, she
reached the very tenderest part of Bulstrode's nature. Cost him what
it would, he must save her.
But, as though the girl, with an instinctive fineness divined, she rose
and going over to him very gently, laid her hand on his shoulder:
"You must go _now_: that is what I ask you to do. I have seemed, and
indeed I have thrown myself upon your mercy; but, in reality, I don't
do any such thing. You will soon forget me, as you have been able to
do all these years. The table is full of your money. I am poor, and
yet I don't take it. Doesn't _that_ prove a little my good faith?
Doesn't it? Only think of me as the most romantic dreamer you ever
saw, and of nothing more. Oh, _no_," she breathed softly, "_no_, a
thousand times...!
"I've answered your question before you've asked it! No, I couldn't;
no woman who wants love is content with pity. I would rather starve
than take money from you although I have lived on your money for years.
I would rather be unhappy than take what you could offer me for love.
You mustn't speak; you mustn't ask me. The temptation is very great,
you know, and it _might_ wreck me. No, Mr. Bulstrode, and the reason
why I say it is because I've seen."
"'I've seen?'" he repeated her words. "You've seen, but what do you
mean--what have you seen?"
"I'm going to tell you why I sent for Prince Pollona, although you
don't ask me. I came to Trouville alone. I saw you; I've watched you
with your friends." Bulstrode accepted quietly. "The two young people
are engaged to be married and the other two are husband and
wife--well...?"
A spasm of pain crossed Felicia Warren's face and she put what she had
to say with singular delicacy for an actress who had risen from the
people.
"I know," she said, "I understand, but when I saw you, I knew that
there was no hope for any other woman who loved you--and I gave you up
then. I sent for Pollona."
The introduction of even so little into the room as the suggestion of
the woman he loved, startled Bulstrode as nothing else under the
circumstances could have done. It struck him like a lash. He was
disenchanted, and he more quietly considered the girl whose confession
and whose beauty had made him nearly disloyal.
Felicia Warren, as though she took it in her own hands and, mistress of
herself, knew how much she could take and what she could deny herself,
laid her hand on his arm.
"You can do nothing at all, just as you have always done--and I--I can
learn to forget. But I have refused your money to-night," she said
piteously, "haven't I? and I am penniless; I have refused more too;
perhaps what no woman who loves could refuse as well. Don't you think
that there is something due me? Answer me this? Tell me. You _do_
love her, you _do_?"
As she leaned against him, the years seemed to fall away and to leave
her a girl again, nothing more than a child he had known. He took her
face between his hands and looked into it as one might look into a
well. He saw nothing but his own reflection there.
"God knows," he said deeply, "I could not willingly pain a living
creature, and to think that I should have made you suffer, have made a
woman suffer for years. Let me do all I can, my dear, let me--let me!"
"You love her?" she persisted.
His hands dropped to his side. "With all my soul," he said, "with all
my soul!" He thought she would sink to the floor, but instead she
caught fast hold of the table on which his money lay. She leaned on it
heavily, refusing his aid. He took one of the girl's cold hands in his.
"Listen, listen! Let me say a word. How do you think it makes a man
feel to hear what you have told me to-night? to see you as you are, to
grow to know you in such a short--in such a terrible way, and in a few
hours to grow to know you so well, to find you dear, desirable, and
then to leave you, as you tell me I must leave you. I can't do it; I
have never been so miserable in my life, and if I find I am entirely
helpless to serve you I can never get over the regret."
Felicia Warren turned a little.
"I have found you near disaster," Bulstrode urged, "I must and will see
you to the shore. If you utterly refuse to let me take care of you as
I can and will, will you then," he hesitated, then brought it
out--"Will _you marry_ Prince Pollona?"
She drew from him with a cry, and by what he said she seemed to have
gained sudden strength.
"My God!" she breathed, "You ask me _that_? Oh, it proves, it proves
how less than nothing I am..."
Bulstrode saw he could not, must not undeceive her.
"If you wish me to do _that_," she cried. "Oh, how dreadfully, how
cruelly, it breaks my dream!"
Bulstrode said authoritatively, "Listen! listen for one moment."
The eyes of the girl were dark with defiance; she brushed her hair off
her brow with the back of her hand and stared straight before her.
"--Otherwise," said Bulstrode, "I will remain here; I shall not leave
these rooms till morning and you will then be forced to marry me, and
since you think as you do, since I have told you my secret, ruin
perhaps three lives."
He had her at bay, and for a brief second, he thought she would accept
his menace. But then in a sudden her anger vanished and her face
softened.
"You know," she said, "that, loving you as I do, whatever you tell me
to do, I must. But let me go on with my career. Let me work, let me
work, and be free!"
He said decidedly, "No! You must be protected from yourself; you must
have some one with you who will take care of you as I cannot do. You
must do this for me. Is Pollona distasteful to you?" he pursued, "do
you _hate_ him?"
She made an indifferent shrug of her shoulders.
Bulstrode was watching her face keenly, and after a second said, "No,
you do not hate him. You sent for him to come to you here. He was the
one to whom you turned, Felicia; turn to him now."
As she wavered and hesitated, he insisted, coming close to her:
"You have an ideal, you told me--well we can't get on without them.
Your ideal has helped you, hasn't it? It seems pretty well to have
stood by you. I have one too, you must understand that, and I ask you
to help me to keep it secret now."
"Why, what do you mean?" she questioned breathlessly.
"I mean," he said gravely, "that I am a very lonely man. My days are
absolutely desolate excepting for those things that I can put into
them. I have nothing in my life and I am not meant for such a lot. I
am not meant for that! Such an existence has bitter temptations for
every man, and although I have never seen you before, possibly my fate
and Pollona's rest to-night with you."
Felicia Warren turned her great eyes with a sort of wonder to him.
They rested on him with a tenderness that he could not long have borne.
"You must not remain unmarried," he said, "you must not."
Without answering him she went slowly over to her little desk. She
wrote a few seconds there and came back and handed to him a little slip
of paper.
"When the telegraph office opens to-day, will you send this dispatch
for me? It will fetch Prince Pollona to me no matter where he may be.
I have asked him to meet me in Paris and I will take the morning train
from here myself."
She turned to the table on which his money lay and taking a roll of
notes said, "I will pay up everything I owe here. I think I have given
you every proof, every proof."
Bulstrode made no advance towards her. He saw how she struggled with
her emotion. He let her get herself in hand. Finally, with more
composure, she spoke again:
"I play next month in London. Will you come to see me play?"
"Oh, many times."
"No," Felicia Warren murmured, "only once, and after that I shall never
see you again."
He would have protested, but she repeated, "never again," with such
intensity that he bowed his head and he found that her decision brought
a pang whose sharpness he wondered would last how long.
He had started, with her last words, toward the door and she followed
him over to it. There, detaining him by her hand, she asked softly:
"Does she, too, love you as much as this?"
Bulstrode hesitated; then said, "I do not know."
"Not know?" cried the girl, "you don't know?"
It was with the greatest difficulty that Bulstrode could at any time
bring to his lips even the name of the woman he loved. At this moment
the vision of her as he had seen her lately on her husband's arm going
in under the pavilion of the hôtel crossed his mind with a cruel
despair and cruel disgust. A sense of his solitude, of his defrauded
life, rushed over him as he looked into the eyes of this woman who
loved him.
"No," he said intensely, "I do not know, I do not know. I have a code
of honor a million years old, but I live up to it. She is a wife, I
have never told her that I love her."
The girl's incredulity and surprise were great. It showed in the smile
which, something like happiness, crossed her lips. She drew a long
breath; she held his eyes with hers, then she laid both her arms around
his neck and Bulstrode bent and kissed her. He held her for one moment
and his heart, if it beat for another woman, beat hard and fast and its
pulse ran through her own. Then Felicia heard the door close and the
footsteps of the man died away.
It was seven o'clock when Bulstrode found himself out in the streets.
The fresh air in a keen, salt wind poured over him. Down on the beach,
for a couple of francs he bribed an attendant to open a bath-house for
him, and a few moments later, shivering a little in the keen air, he
could have been seen running down to the sea, and in a few moments more
his strong swift strokes had carried him far out into the waters which
the summer sun even at this early hour was fast turning into blue.
When Jimmy came to himself, he found that without either seeing Mrs.
Falconer again or having even bidden a decent good-bye or godspeed to
his fiancée, he was back again in Paris. He had run away. Well, that
wasn't any new thing, he was always at it. Paris, in the month of
August, gave him a hot, desolate welcome, and it was with difficulty
that he could find a lawyer who would help him down to bedrock and put
in motion the business of winding up the affairs of Molly and her
Marquis.
De Presle-Vaulx came to town and found his champion there and brought
him many messages from the ladies as well as a letter which Bulstrode
put in his pocket to read down in the country at the château of
Vaulxgoron in the seclusion of his own room.
Bulstrode played the part of the "American Uncle" to perfection. He
let the old Marquis beat him at backgammon; he wandered all over the
property with the Marquise. He bought the young man for Molly Malines
and closed up his beneficent affairs in a very decent manner indeed,
but on the night when Mrs. Falconer and Miss Malines should have
arrived at the château, Bulstrode ran away again. From then on he
became a wandering Jew. He ran up to Norway, fished a little, then
took a motor and some people, who did not know any one whom he had ever
known, and drove them through Italy. He continued to travel a little
longer, working his way northward until finally--so he put it--dusty as
"Dusty Dog Dingo," tired as "Tired Dog Dingo," Bulstrode found himself
in London, drew a deep breath and capitulated.
THE SIXTH ADVENTURE
VI
IN WHICH HE DISCARDS A KNAVE AND SAVES A QUEEN
The morning he left for Westboro' Castle, Bulstrode remembers as being
the most beautiful of days; it came to him like a golden gift of
unrivalled loveliness as it broke and showered sunlight over England.
"The very crannies of the island," he smiled at his own conceit, "must
filter out this gold to the sea."
England lay like a viking's cup full to the brim of sunlight;
especially entrancing because unusual in the British calendar, and
enchanting to the American gentleman because it absolutely accorded
with his own mood.
It was middle November, and yet there was not--so it seemed as one
looked at yellow and copper luxuriance--a leaf lost from the suave
harmony of the trees. Farms, tiled and thatched, basked in summery
warmth, forest, hedge and copse, full-foliaged and abundant, shone out
in copper and bronze, and the air's stillness, the patient
tranquillity, enfolding the land, made it seem expectantly to wait for
some sudden wind that should ultimately cast devastation through the
forests.
On leaving his ship at Plymouth the day before, Bulstrode found amongst
other letters in his mail the Duke of Westboro's invitation for a
week's shooting in the west of England: "There were sure to be heaps of
people Jimmy would know"--and Bulstrode eagerly read the subjoined list
of names until he saw in a flash the name of the One Woman in the
World. He at once telegraphed his acceptance.
The following afternoon he threw his evening papers and overcoat into a
first-class carriage whilst the guard placed his valise and
dressing-case in the rack.
As there had been several minutes to starting time, he had not
immediately taken his seat, but had stood smoking by the side of his
carriage. He might, and did, doubtless, pass with others of the well
set-up, well-looking men travelling on that day, for an Englishman, but
closer observation showed his attire to be distinguished by that
personal note which marks the cosmopolitan whose taste has been more or
less tempted by certain fantasies of other countries. Bulstrode's
clothes were brown, his gloves, cravat, and boots all in the same color
scheme--one mentions a man's dress only on rare occasions, as on this
certain day one has been led to mention the weather. That a man is
perfectly turned out should, like the weather, be taken for granted.
Bulstrode on this day, travelling as he was towards a goal, towards the
one person he wanted above all to see, had spent some unusual thought
on his toilet. At all events, on passing a florist's in Piccadilly,
after giving his order for flowers to be boxed and expressed to
Westboro', he had selected a tiny reddish-brown chrysanthemum which now
covered the button-hole of his coat's lapel; it created a distinctive
scheme of color. In point of fact it caught the eye of the lady who,
hurrying from the waiting-room towards the Westboro' express, caught
sight of the American and started. It appeared as if she would speak
to him, half advanced, thought better of it, and said to the guard, who
was about to fasten a placard on the window of a carriage:
"Please---just a second--won't you, guard?"
The bell rang, and Bulstrode found himself helping the lady into his
own compartment. The guard shut the door, which closed with the
customary soft thick sound of a lock setting, and pasted over the
window the exclusive and forbidding paper--RESERVED.
Then it was in his corner by the window, once chimney pots and suburbs
left behind, that the traveller to Westboro' watched the landscape with
the pale, transparent smoke from the little farms floating like veils
across the golden atmosphere; the slow winding streams between
low-bushed, rosy shores, and red-tinged thickets; the flocks of rooks
across fields long harvested: the flocks of sheep on the gently
swelling downs.
"England, England," he murmured, as if it were a refrain in whose
melody he found much charm, as if his traditions of insular forebears
might in some way be recalled in the word, as if it spoke more than a
chance traveller's appreciation for the melodious countryside.
He had letters, read them, and put his correspondence aside, then
comfortably settling himself in his corner, began to construct for
himself a picture of Westboro', whose lines and architecture he knew
from photographs, although he had never been there. It was agreeable
to him as he mused to fancy himself for the first time with Mrs.
Falconer in England, in the country they preferred to all the others in
the Old World. They were in sympathy with English life and manners,
and here, if (oh, of course, a world of "ifs")--here no doubt they
would both choose to live when abroad, were there any choice for them
of mutual life.
Westboro' is Elizabethan and of vast proportions. The house would
naturally be very full--how much of the time would they discover for
themselves? There would decidedly be occasions. Mary Falconer did not
hunt, and although Jimmy Bulstrode could recall having postulated that
"there are only two real occupations for a real man--to kill and to
love," he also knew what precedence he himself gave, and how little the
sportsmen of Westboro' would have cause to fear his concurrence if by
lucky chance in more or less of solitude he should find his lady there.
It was months since he had seen Mrs. Falconer--months. It had been a
long exile. Each time that he started out to run away, it was just
that--running away--it was with a curious wonder whether or not on his
return he should not find a change. Time and absence--above all, time,
worked extraordinary infidelities in other people. Why should they two
believe themselves immune? The long months might have altered _her_.
The mischief was yet to be seen. But when in the list of noble names
he had in his hand, his eyes fell upon the single prefix--_Mrs._--and
found it followed by _The Name_, if he had not sincerely known before,
his pulse at sight of the written words told Jimmy that he had not, at
all events, changed!
Thinking at this point to light a cigarette, he became at the second
mindful of the other passenger in his carriage and that they were
alone. As he looked across towards the lady who had unwound her dark
veil, he observed that she was herself smoking, holding the cigarette
in her hand as with head turned from him she scanned the landscape
through the window of the compartment.
He saw with a little start of pleasure what a delight she gave to the
eye, tastefully dressed as she too was, in leaf brown from head to
foot, with the slightest indication of forest green at buttons and hem
of her dress. Her hat, with its drooping feathers, fell rather low
over her wonderful hair, bronze in its reflections. Indeed, the lady
blended well with the November landscape, and as she apparently was not
conscious of her companion, he enjoyed the harmonious note she made to
the full.
"What scope," he mused, "what scope they all have--and how prettily
they most of them know it! So just to sit and be a thing of beauty;
with head half-drooping, and eyelash meditative, one hand ungloved, and
such a perfectly lovely hand...! (It held the half-smoked cigarette,
but his taste was not offended.) He thought her a whim too debonnaire
for a Parisian of the best world, and of _that_ she most distinctly
was--Austrian more than likely. Every woman has her history--only when
she is part of several has she a past. What had this woman so to
meditate upon? She turned and he met her eyes.
"You have naturally waited for me to speak first," she said with a
gracious gesture of her bare hand. "And _I_ was waiting till you
should have finished your letters! I, too, have wanted to think."
Her familiar address, perfectly courteous and made in a pleasant voice,
with a very slight accent, was a surprise to her companion, who
mechanically lifted his hat as he bowed to her across the narrow
distance between their seats.
"The guard," she smiled, "came very near putting the placard on the
other window! But I think we are now quite sure to be alone!" She
pointed to the seat opposite. "Sit there," she more commanded than
permitted, "we can talk better and I can watch your kind face, which
always looks as if you understood--and I shall be able to please you
better--perhaps to make you not unkind to me."
He obeyed, taking the place indicated without hesitation, and as he sat
facing her, he saw her to be one of the most beautiful women he had
ever seen. There was at once something dazzling about her--and at the
same time familiar... He had surely met her, and not long ago. Where?
And how stupid of him to have forgotten! Or had he only seen her
photograph and remarked her as a celebrity whose type of looks had
pleased him? But no, she knew him: that was clear. He met her
friendly eyes, where liking was evident as well as the suggestion of
something akin to an appeal. Bulstrode was greatly intrigued.
"Unkind?" he repeated vaguely. "But why should you think that? Please
me?"--and his graciousness did not fall short of her own--"But why
should you...?"
"Oh, true," she interrupted him, "quite true. There is no reason
why--" and she made a rather petulant gesture--"yet every woman wants
to please, and none of us relishes being judged. Never mind, however,
don't think of me as a _person_--just let me talk to you frankly, be
myself for once with someone if I can."
Jimmy Bulstrode gathered himself together and sat back in his corner.
She was very lovely at it, this being herself. Gallantry would not let
him bluntly tell her that she had made a mistake. A second more would
clear the matter and would be quite soon enough, for him at least, to
find that they were total strangers. Unless, indeed, he had met her
and forgotten it. They had possibly held some conversation together in
a London drawing-room. But how could he have been such a boor as to
forget her? She was neither a crook nor a mad woman--she might be an
adventuress; if so, she was an unusual one. He glanced at her luggage
as if it might help him--a dark-covered dressing-case, bundle of furs,
and rugs--new, everything new. Her left hand was bare of rings, she
clasped it with her gloved fellow and said warmly:
"I can't believe it possible that you came, actually came, and that we
have so smoothly met! I can't believe nothing has hitched or missed,
or that everything is so cleverly planned and arranged for me, and
least of all I can believe that it should be _you_ who are so sublimely
doing this."
"Ah--" But here Bulstrode tardily started up. _He_ doing it all? At
least if he was, then he must, if nothing else--know! He smiled at her
with a pleasant sense of being in the secret and with indulgent
amusement at her mistake.
"I think--you made a mistake," he began it with commonplaceness, but
his gesture softened the words.
But the lady made a little annoyed "tchk" with her tongue against her
teeth, and threw up her head with an impatient toss, an intensely
foreign way of dismissing his interpolation.
"Don't, in pity's sake, talk like this," she exclaimed. "_Mistake_?
Who under the blue heavens _doesn't_ make them--Certa! Haven't you,
yourself, in spite of your moral, spotless life, haven't even _you_
made them?"
"How," flushed the naïve gentleman, on the sudden betrayed into a
mental frankness of self-approval near to conceit, "how does _she_ know
me so well?"
"Who is there," his companion gave him the question in a challenging
tone "to tell each other and every one of us what is or will be a
mistake in his life? Where were everyone's eyes when I married?--Why
didn't someone tell me then that my marriage was a hideous mistake? As
for the rest of it..." she turned away for a second towards the window,
and Bulstrode saw how the hot blood had mounted and her eyes had
changed when after a moment she came back to him again. She put out
towards him a beseeching hand: "_You_ above all men, who are faithful
to an ideal, must not give me old platitudes!"
Bulstrode's head reeled. He felt like a man who after a narcotic finds
his brain suddenly alight and real things grow strange. He wanted to
rub his eyes. She appeared singularly to appreciate his daze.
"It is as strange to me as it is to you, to find myself here with a man
to whom I have never spoken before--to be under his protection, and to
talk with him like this; and yet I have seen you so often, I have
watched you in the distance, and long since I singled you out as the
one man in whom I could fancy confiding--the one man to whom I could
give a sacred trust."
With these words the incognita drew herself up, and her manner, with
amazing swiftness, changed from a childlike confidence to a dignity not
without a certain rigidness, and as Bulstrode remarked this, he also
noticed that she was very young, and he was conscious in her of a
something he had never quite met in a woman before--an extreme dignity,
an ultra poise, an assurance.--Who was she?--And whom did she take him
to be? With every turn of the fast wheels of the express it was
growing more difficult to explain. She would more keenly feel the fact
that he had not cut her frankness short--he had no right to her
confidences even though she took their mutual knowledge of each other
for granted.
"When," he ventured it delicately--"did you last see me?" It was bold,
but it did perfectly.
"Oh, an age ago, isn't it? You were last on the Continent I think in
August at Trouville, during La Grande Semaine."
Ah, he reflected, _of course_! _That_ was where, amongst so many other
celebrities and beauties, she had attracted his attention. But his
rapid mental calculations of those seven days could reveal to him no
woman's face but one. He found himself even in this unique moment
recalling the time following hard on Molly's formal engagement to her
Marquis ... and those days were amongst the brightest in his life. No,
there had been no foreign element at Trouville for him in the dazzle
and freedom of that worldly fortnight--for Jimmy Bulstrode, in all the
scene she summoned up, there was but one woman. He came back with a
start to the other.
"Then yesterday, as you passed our table at the Carlton, and it seemed
as if heaven had sent you to us to help us--at least so we both felt."
And Bulstrode doubtfully smiled and, now determined, broke in, or would
have done so, but she waved him imperiously.
"Your mind," she spoke indulgently, "is on the wrong side to-day. Try
to think only of the happiness towards which I am going so rapidly, so
rapidly." Then, as she with her word glanced out of the window, she
cried: "Oh, what if something should happen to the train--what if some
horrible delay----"
And he shook himself to action.
"My dear lady," he began gravely, "you must hear me. You have made and
are making a great mistake. I am certainly not the man..."
"I _command_ you, sir," she flashed out at him--"surely you will not
disobey me--you will not make me think as well that I am making a
mistake in you."
"Ah, but that," he gasped, and caught her words gratefully, "is just
the point."
She smiled. "Please...! Let me judge! Only don't condemn me. Only
be glad you can so marvellously help a human soul to happiness--can so
generously lend yourself for these few hours to aid in my escape."
She was escaping! Well, he had nearly guessed it! The new luggage
alone was an indication. Unless her mania was for taking strangers to
be intimate friends, she wasn't fleeing a madhouse! From what did she
so determinedly run?--and how in heaven's name was he helping her? Did
she think he was going to marry her? Into what tangle had the man he
was unwittingly impersonating got himself--and in default of his
appearing on the scene in what would his absence involve poor Bulstrode?
He took off his hat and put it down on the seat--thus his fine head was
fully revealed to the lady's view.
"I do not know you," he said determinedly. "You do not know me, but
you seem bent on not acknowledging this fact or permitting me to state
it."
But even this plain statement did him no good, for she said, quite
agreeing with him:
"If I had ever spoken with you--been near you before, I would not be
here now. You see it is just your _impersonality_--your _having_ no
connection with anything in my life that makes it possible! But why,"
she exclaimed impatiently, "do you spend these few hours with me in
this meaningless warfare? You should, it seems, take the honor more
graciously, and since you are here, have consented to be here, show me
a little kindness. Since, after all, willingly or not, you are in
effect nobly helping me to do what I am doing."
And this brought him wonderfully up to the question of what was he
doing? What was he supposed to be furthering here? It was his
expression, no doubt, that made her ask with curious aptness: "Just how
much _do_ you know?"
The poor gentleman threw out his hands desperately. "You can't think
how in the dark I am! How beyond words mystified."
"How droll!" she laughed sweetly, "and how amusing and all the more
beautiful and like you, to be, in spite of yourself, here. You see we
have switched off--just as you said we would do."
So they had indeed: they had stopped, and the fact fetched him to his
feet. He looked out: it was a fast express, a through train--the first
stop should have been Westboro' Abbey.
"Yes, we're switched off!" she cried delightedly, "as you know: as you
arranged so cleverly!--and the Westboro' people will go on without us."
Would they indeed! Lucky people, but not if he could prevent it. But
his attention to the train's procedure had come too late.
He opened the window and looked out. They stood at the side of a
switch some three hundred yards above a small squat station, and in the
far distance Bulstrode could see the end of a disappearing train. He
drew in his head and quietly asked his companion:
"What has happened to us, do you know?"
She laughed deliciously. "Know? Why, of course, I do. You're
delightful! Of course I have followed every step of the plan--the
special for Dover picks us up here in three-quarters of an hour,
doesn't it? We make the boat for Calais, and there Gela meets me and
_your_ mission is done!"
The gentleman opposite her listened quietly, and before speaking waited
a second, staring down at her, his hands in his pockets: there they
touched a little coin which he always carried: a coin that opened at a
sacred point to discover to his eyes alone a picture of a woman as
lovely as this woman, as human, and one whom he had good cause to
suppose loved another man than her husband. The woman opposite him was
escaping from her husband. _That_ was what she was doing! He who had
striven for fifteen years to prevent the like in the life of the one
woman of all, now appeared to be helping this poor thing to the same
thing. He did not believe he was to be waylaid and robbed, or that any
trick had been played upon him. The only thing he did _not_ believe
was that the woman knew him! Before, however, brushing the delusion
aside, he asked, his candid eyes upon her: "And my mission being so
done, what then becomes of you?"
The shrug of her shoulders was neither an indication of indifference
nor a pretty desperation! it rather was a relinquishing of herself
wholly to Fate--an abandon.
"What becomes of a happy woman who goes with the man she loves?"
"Her Fate," said her companion, "has no single history. She is most
often disillusioned, many times tragic, and always disgraceful."
"Ah, hush," she said angrily, "you presume too far. If you only
intended to lecture me--to condemn me--why did you come?"
At this sincerely humorous challenge Bulstrode smiled.
"I did not, to be quite accurate, come," he said, "and I assure you I
am here against my will. You refuse to listen to me; you turn my
efforts to put things straight against me--and now."
The handsome creature gave him a flash from angry eyes.
"Your Excellency is scarcely polite. But I understand. Even my rank
doesn't protect me: and although your old friendship for Gela did
overcome your scruples, and our letters did touch you--still we should
have remembered that you are, above all else, the King's friend."
Bulstrode fell a step back. Before he could take in the curious honors
that were being thrust upon him, the lady went hotly on:
"You know how indulgent of me the King has been: how he adores me
still, how blind he is, and you pity him and have no mercy for me."
Here, for she, too, had left her seat, she went over to the compartment
window and turning her back full on Bulstrode, stood looking out, and
she thus gave him time and he took it, not to consider his part of the
affair, but, as if it had been suddenly revealed to him by her words,
the woman's part in it. After all it was scarcely important whom, in
error, she believed him to be. In a strange fashion, through some
trick of resemblance, he was here and in her confidence in another's
stead--impersonating some man who, in spite of the reputation for
goodness and honor accredited him by this lady, would scarcely,
Bulstrode felt confident, be as scrupulous regarding the adventure as
he himself was fast becoming. The woman--the woman was all that
mattered. She was a Queen then? A Queen! And he had so naïvely
ignored her perquisites, been so innocently guilty of
_lèse-majesté_--that she, poor thing, attributed his _sans gêne_ to her
fallen state!
Kings and Queens, poor dears, how human they are! What royalty could
she be? And what King's friend was he so closely supposed to be? The
King's friend--well, so he was--so he must be in spite of his quick
pity for the lovely creature--in spite of chivalry and the trust she
displayed. But to be practical: what in half an hour could he hope to
accomplish--how could he keep a determined woman from wrecking her life?
His mind flew to Paddington, and his first sight of the lady on the
platform. There had been near the hour two trains for Westboro', one
of them a local which left London some few minutes later than the
Western express. _That_ later train, no doubt of it, would fetch the
real accomplice to the eloping lady. Bulstrode argued that, should he
declare himself to the Queen at this point for a total stranger, the
revelation would plunge her in despair, anger and frighten her, and
lose him his cause--There was, in view of the cause, he now felt and
nerved himself to the deception, nothing to do but to assume his rôle
in earnest and play it as well as he might. He had never sat alone in
a travelling carriage and hobnobbed with a Queen, but he gracefully
made his try at the proper address: "Your Majesty," he began, and she
whirled quickly round, pleasure on her face.
"Oh, Gresthaven!" she exclaimed with touching gratitude, extending her
hand. "Thanks, mon ami! I shall not have my title long, and I shall,
I suppose, miss it with other things."
Bulstrode, with her naming of him, knew at length who he was, and
recalled his supposed likeness to a certain Lord Almouth
Gresthaven--famous explorer, traveller and diplomat, cosmopolitan in
his tastes and a dabbler in the politics of other and less significant
countries than his own. In accepting his new personality, the American
winced a little as he bowed over the royal little hand and kissed it.
"Your Majesty will miss many things indeed," he said gravely--"your
kingdom, your people, and the King--the King," he repeated, dwelling on
the word, "who, as you say, loves you."
"My good friend," the lady made a little _moue_--"I know everything you
would say. You can't suppose I haven't thought of it all? To be so
far on my way must I not have carefully considered every step? One is,
after all, a woman--and I am a woman in love."
"One word then," pleaded her unwilling imposter--"one word. Have you
also asked yourself: what chance for happiness a woman can possibly
hope for with a man who allows her to make the sacrifice you are about
to make?"
If his words were straws before the wind to the woman, his simplicity
was impressive to her. "It has seemed to me," Jimmy Bulstrode said,
"that there is a great distinction between love and passion--and that
however great his passion for her, a man should supremely--_supremely
love_ the woman he singles out of all the world."
The Queen of Poltavia looked at the gentleman before her, who stood
very straight, his head alone bent, his clear fine eyes fixed upon her
own.
"Love!" she repeated softly, "how well you say the word."
A slight flush stole up the American's cheek.
"Supreme love," he ventured to continue, "means protection to the
woman...."
Here the Queen made an impatient gesture as though she shook away the
impression his tone made.
"My dear Gresthaven," she exclaimed, "love means above all else
happiness! One is happy with one person and miserable with another.
It's all a lottery and unless our plans miscarry I am going towards the
greatest happiness in the world. But come"--She altered her tone to
one of practical command--"Let us address ourselves to our flight. You
have your train schedule of course? The Dover train is due here at
4:50 and it only waits for the taking on of our carriage." As she
looked up at him she saw the trouble in his face, and a solicitude for
her to which she was unaccustomed.
"Mon cher ami," she said quizzically, "what, may I ask, since your
scruples are so great, ever led you to accept this mission....?"
"Frankly," he eagerly answered, and was honest in it, "the hope, the
desire that I might...."
"Persuade a woman in love against her heart?" she smiled, and so
sweetly, so convincingly, and so reasonably, he was for an instant all
on her side.
"I see my folly, your Majesty."
"There's nothing but _force majeure_, Gresthaven...."
"Yes" ... he admitted reluctantly. "Let me go out now and see to our
manoeuvres here." He was able to open the door which a passing guard
had unlocked unobserved....
The innocent royalty let him pass, thanking him with a smile, and saw
him go down the track toward the little squat station, with the guards.
Bulstrode, whose mind as he walked along was busy with train schedules,
recalled, nevertheless, the Duke's letter, which he still had in his
letter case, and he took it from his pocket and re-read it.
"... We are to have over the week-end a dash of royalty. Carmen-Magda,
the Queen of the petty kingdom of Poltavia." (This mention of the
Westboro' guests had quite escaped Bulstrode's mind in his
contemplation of the last page of the Duke's note.... "We are to have
a compatriot of your own, a Mrs. Jack Falconer.") And royalty being
very relative to the unsnobbish American, he had simply transferred the
title (with possibly a possessive pronoun before it) to the other lady!
He smiled as he reflected that the Westboro' express was destined to
arrive at the Abbey without either the royal guest or Mr. James
Thatcher Bulstrode. But more to the point, more instantly absorbing
was the fact, that within ten minutes the slow train from London to
Westboro' would arrive at Radleigh Bucks, the little station before
which he now stood, and from it, undoubtedly, would descend the real
Lord Gresthaven. If Jimmy needed encouragement in his self-imposed
rôle of Master of Fate, if he needed to forget the ardor and the
determination of the little Queen, if he needed to forget how, in
youth, he had cordially hated those interfering people who, on
horseback and in chaises, tore after flying lovers to waylay them at
Gretna Green--he found his stimulus in recalling that he was "the
King's friend."
"It's after all something of a distinction," he mused, entertained by
the idea, "a sort of royal _noblesse oblige_--and since the poor dear
herself has so made me out to be, given King the precedence, how could
I, in the cause of gallantry, have proceeded otherwise! It's this
diabolical little brown chrysanthemum," he mentally laid the fault
there. "It is evidently a telling mark. People in books are always
meeting unknowns who are to wear a red flower in the right lapel of the
coat".... and he had unintentionally gone over into a romance--and his
_triste_ part in it was that of an unsympathetic spoiler of a romance.
As after a prolonged parley with the station officials he walked
leisurely back to his carriage, his wallet grown very thin indeed and
his honest heart suffering many sincere pangs at the contemplation of
his conduct altogether, he argued: "She is absurdly young--she will,
after a little, go back to her allegiance (he put it so), and I don't
take much stock in that barbaric Gela anyway, he probably is a
Hungarian band-master or a handsome ticket-agent, a plebian creature
whose very remoteness from her own life has fascinated her."
Bulstrode, not quite sure just whom he was supposed to be by the train
people, found himself bowed and escorted back to the carriage which had
been turned and manipulated and side-tracked--reswitched and displaced,
till even its own locomotive and train of cars would have been at a
loss to find it. He had the sense of being a traitor, brute, imposter,
and Providence all in one--which combination of qualities was
sufficient to explain his embarrassment and his nervous manner when he
at length rejoined the Queen.
There was a slight transformation in the lady whose dressing bag had
aided, evidently, a brisk toilet. Under her chin flowered out a snowy
bow of tulle, and she had swathed herself in the thick veil she had
worn when first boarding the train. Indicating her disguise to
Bulstrode, she said with her pretty accent: "I think it well to be
thus." And he agreed that it was well.
His own agitation as the other train rushed in, slowed and halted, was
scarcely less than hers, indeed perhaps greater, for Carmen-Magda, pale
and quiet, her handsome brown eyes fixed on the window-pane, gave no
sign of life, until after a series of jerks, jolts and bumps, they
slowly but certainly became part of a moving train, once more
undertaking its journey. Then Bulstrode, who stood determinedly in the
window, filled it up on the station side, giving her no chance to look
out had she wished to do so, nor did he think it needful to tell the
Queen what he saw: A distinguished-looking man in rough brown clothes,
and oh, the curious coincidence: a reddish-brown chrysanthemum in his
buttonhole. His Striking Resemblance was accompanied by another
gentleman--short and stout with military mustaches, and swarthy
complexion. The two men were gesticulating wildly together, and as the
train pulled away from them, Bulstrode turned about and faced the
little Queen.
She had again lifted her veil, and he thought her pallor natural; in
the momentary excitement her large eyes were fastened upon him with a
touching confidence that nearly made the soft-hearted imposter regret
the boldest act of his history.
"Are you sure," she asked him softly, "that this is the right train?"
The coquetry of her bow of snowy tulle, the debonnaire costume of brown
and green, her gray hat with its feathers, were pathetic to him--her
attire contrasted sadly with her pale face. She was to him like a
wilful child. Not more, he decided for the sixth time, than twenty
years old. She was like a paper queen out of a child's fairy book, all
but her anxious face. "She regrets," he joyfully caught at the thought
to arm himself and give himself right. "Poor little thing, she already
regrets."
Leaning forward, he suggested kindly:
"Can't your Majesty rest a little?"
As he spoke the hypocrite knew that in less time than it would take to
settle her they would bump into the station at Westboro' Abbey.
But Carmen-Magda made no sign of recalcitrancy or regret that she was
_en route_ for her plebian Gela. She leaned over and picked up one of
the illustrated papers upon the seat and idly turned over the pages,
reverting finally back to the frontispiece where a colored photograph
displayed a young woman in hunting dress leaning on the arm of a
military-looking gentleman with black mustaches and swarthy skin. She
held it out to Bulstrode and said:
"It's a poor enough picture of me, but excellent, isn't it, of the
King?"
Bulstrode looked at it attentively with an inscrutable illumination on
his face.
"Yes, it is good of the King, very good indeed," he exclaimed with much
animation. It was strikingly so, he could with truth say it.
Gresthaven had proved himself to be the friend of the King par
excellence--the King seemed to have many friends---and the poor little
woman opposite--with her fetching bow of tulle and her mad confidence
in a stranger--her madder confidence in Lord Almouth Gresthaven--where
were _her_ friends? Jimmy leaned to her, and Mrs. Falconer could have
told that it was his voice of goodness that spoke, the voice "that
Jimmy seemed able to call at will from some wonderfully dear part of
his nature: it was for people in trouble, for people he was determined
to help in spite of themselves."
"Your Majesty has done me great honor," Bulstrode said. "You have said
I was the King's friend, I should like instead to be _your_ friend.
Women need friends ... even queens. Would it be too vast a presumption
if I should from henceforth feel myself to be...." He waited and
dared--"Carmen-Magda's friend?"
His innocent lèse-majesté, coupled with the tone he used, reached the
woman in her---not to speak of his personal charm.
"Didn't I imply friendship when I chose you for this mission?" she said.
He winced. "Of course--but I mean from now on----"
She nodded sweetly. "_Cela va sans dire_, Gresthaven."
"Don't call me so," he interrupted, "say _friend_, to please me."
She laughed.
"You are too amusing. I will say it for you then in Poltavian. It's a
sacred word with us," and she called him friend in her own tongue with
the prettiest accent and a royal inclination of her head as if she
knighted him. It cut him and pleased him at once, and he hurried to
ask her:
"What would you think of Gresthaven if, instead of meeting you, as you
had arranged he should do--he should betray you--should have warned
your husband and have gone so far _as to fetch the King to waylay you
and stop your flight_!"
But Carmen-Magda only laughed, and dismissed the ridiculous supposition
with a word of disbelief.
"Tell me," Bulstrode urged, "tell me what would you think?"
She drew herself up haughtily at his insistence as if his hypothesis
were real to her at last:
"He would be the most despicable traitor in the world."
Bulstrode pursued: "What--would you think of Gresthaven--if in order to
save you, to give you time, time to think, to reflect, to perhaps alter
your decision--he had used other means less cruel possibly, but as
surely betraying your good faith?"
Here she looked keenly through him--read him--then waited a second
before intensely exclaiming:
"Gresthaven--_what have you done_?"
His heart came into his throat and his voice nearly failed him. He did
not know Poltavians nor the queenly temper, nor did he know how all
women take any one given thing, but he knew how women the world over
admit of no change of caprice saving that variability which arises in
their own minds.
"Oh, dear," he thought, "if for no matter _what_ reason, she had only
changed her _own_ mind!"
"In five minutes," he said bravely--"your Majesty will be at Westboro'
Abbey station, our carriage has been attached to the other train which
followed us from London."
With a smothered cry the Queen sprang to her feet, rushed to the window
and stared out where nothing in the golden afternoon beauty revealed to
her in what part of England she was. Bulstrode had put his hand out
before her as if he feared she meditated climbing through the open
window.
"Oh," she cried furiously, shrinking back from him, "how have you dared
... dared?"
... "To save your Majesty? Well, it _was_ hard!" he acknowledged
practically. "Harder than you will ever believe. I may say that no
decision was ever more difficult to make. To be so trusted by you, and
to feel myself a double-dyed villain wasn't agreeable, but the issue
was a warrant for any treachery."
"Great heavens!" she exclaimed. "Who made _you_ judge of my actions,
who gave _you_ leave to decide my fate, what a fool I was to trust
you--what a fool! You have spoiled my life!" she accused him--"You
have taken from me everything in the world."
If she had been alone he knew she would have wept, and he kept his face
turned from her for some few seconds. "I have certainly established a
precedent for myself," he mused with humor. "_I_ can never run away
with a woman now--never."
Small as were the limits of the little carriage she found means to walk
it up and down several times, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing.
She spoke, he supposed, in Poltavian, for he could not follow the
meaning of her few staccato, angry words, but he did not recognise
among the incoherences that she called him friend!
As the flying scenes grew farm-like and pastoral, and the lines and
sweep of what he took to be park property, caught his eyes he once more
ventured to speak.
"I am not the cold-blooded traitor I seem, believe me," he tried to
plead, "and until we definitely passed the station at Redleigh Bucks I
was miserable to think I had, as it seems, betrayed your Majesty. But
when as we came up to the station I saw the King on the platform----"
She stopped short in front of him: "The King!" she exclaimed
incredulously.
Bulstrode nodded in a matter-of-fact way as if stray kings on
mid-country platforms were the common occurrence of his travelling
experiences.
"He had evidently followed you that far, and if the plan formed to
attach your carriage to the Dover express had been attempted, you would
have been stopped by your husband himself. As it is you are simply
going where you are expected to go--to Westboro' Castle."
This dénouement, putting a summary end to her tragic anger, left her no
place for ecstatics. She sat down in front of Bulstrode and repeated,
dazed:--
"The _King_! The King had followed me! He had been warned then, but
by whom? You above all did not....?"
"Oh no!" He was glad to be honestly able to disclaim at least this
disloyalty. "I had nothing to do with it. The King had come on with
the man who had played your Majesty false all along, the man who is
indeed more the King's friend than he is Carmen-Magda's."
And sitting there, bewildered and appealing before him, she heard him
say: "I mean Lord Almouth Gresthaven."
She murmured some words in Poltavian, then besought: "Why, why do you
play with me?" The tears started to her eyes.
"Lord Gresthaven," Bulstrode hurried now to his confession--"has
plainly betrayed you. Either he failed to meet you as planned, or else
he came too late and thought better of his connivance against your
husband--at all events, both he and the King took the slow train."
"But _you_," she interrupted, staring at him--"You are not Lord
Gresthaven?"
"No," he said quietly, "no, I am an American, nothing more than a
friend and guest of the Duke of Westboro'. I tried over and over again
to tell you this, but you would not hear me and I finally accepted the
rôle you gave me with the firm intention of taking you with me to
Westboro' Castle. My name is James Thatcher Bulstrode, I am from
Boston, in the United States." Bulstrode thus tardily introduced
himself.
And Jimmy, not pretending ever to have counted greatly on the favor of
princes, was nevertheless taken aback. Not that he had any
preconceived notion of what Carmen-Magda would do--when she eventually
knew. He had been too absorbed in his mission, its entanglements, and
his climax. He may have been prepared for some exhibition of scorn,
but he more than likely looked for a social and commonplace ending to
their ride, but for what Carmen-Magda did he was entirely unprepared.
As if in his declaration of himself and his identity he had taken a
sponge and quite wiped himself off the slate, the Queen, after
speechlessly staring at him for a few moments, quietly removed her
attention from him altogether. She took from a little bag at her wrist
a rouge stick with which she carefully touched her lips; from a tiny
gold box she lightly dusted her cheeks with powder; she adjusted her
tulle bow and her veil and then sat serenely back waiting until the
train should arrive at her forced destination.
Although, one might say, unused to the manners of royalty, Jimmy was
dumbfounded; the beautiful woman in forest-brown clothes picked out
with hunting green had become as strange to him as in the first moment
when she attracted his attention some few miles beyond London. That
she should be angry at his interference he could admit, but that she
should not be grateful to be saved from her husband's wrath he did not
understand. Was he too plebeian for her to notice? He, of course, did
not speak to her again, nor did she break the singular silence, and for
some reason he did not even care to ask her forgiveness. Finally, he
decided that she was thinking solely of Gela, the man at the other end
of the route who would wait for her in vain, and when this sentimental
view of the case occurred to him, he would have felt _de trop_ had he
not seen how completely he was ignored.
They flashed past the last miles of wooded valley and hillside.
Westboro' was very soft in line and very mellow in the evening light.
The landscape, through a half-mist, was as brown and green as the dress
of the beautiful silent woman in the opposite corner of the travelling
carriage.
Bulstrode, looking at her rather timidly, felt as if he were in a dream.
At Westboro' Abbey the guard unlocked the compartment door and
Bulstrode, who got out first, helped the Queen of Poltavia to descend.
As she put foot to the ground she said, half leaning on the arm he
gave: "I thank you--very much indeed."
He caught the few words eagerly, and was fatuous enough to fancy that
she meant something more than the common courteous acknowledgment of a
man's help from a travelling carriage.
The station was deserted. The express having arrived some half hour
before without them, there had evidently been no preparation made to
meet this train.
Surrounded by her luggage, her brand new luggage, the Queen waited on
the side of the station that faced the open country, whilst Bulstrode
made inquiries about telephoning or getting word to the castle.
At this juncture, down the lane, between red thickets and golden
hedges, a smart dog-cart tooled along driven by a lady. She waved a
welcoming hand.
"Jimmy," she said as she drove up and leaned out and nodded to him, "I
knew you'd miss the express, you're so absent-minded about trains; and
who could be expected to distinguish between a 3.50 and a 3.53? So, as
you see, I drove down on the chance."
He had not greeted her in words. The long afternoon, the romantic
extravagant episode, of which he had been unwillingly a part, made this
woman seem so real. He felt as if from a burlesque extravaganza he had
come out into the fresh air; their eyes had met and Mrs. Falconer did
not miss any other greeting.
"That lady," he then said, "whom you see standing on the edge of the
platform surrounded by her luggage, like a shipwrecked being on a
desert island, is the Queen of Poltavia."
"Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Falconer.
"Yes," he said indifferently, "we came down from London together."
"Why, the whole castle is in a state about her. A coach and postillion
went to fetch her at the express. Telegrams are flying all over the
country. Why did she take a local--and with you--Jimmy?"
"Perhaps she is absent-minded about trains as well," he smiled, "at all
events here she certainly is and it will be charming of you to drive
her up."
"But I don't know her!"
"Oh," he shrugged, "one doesn't exactly _know_ queens, I don't know her
either, but that wouldn't prevent my doing her a service. I am sure
she'd rather be driven up to a cup of tea and a fire by an American
than stand here waiting for a postilion and four. It will be nice of
you to speak to her," he suggested, and stepped back.
Gathering up her reins, Mrs. Falconer whisked her horse about and drove
up to the lady's side. Bulstrode, from a little distance, watched her
graceful inclination and heard her lovely voice. He saw Carmen-Magda
lift her disguising veil, displaying her dark, foreign face. Slowly
going up to the dog-cart's side, together with the groom's help, he
bestowed the Queen's belongings in the trap.
"I will walk on slowly up the road," he suggested, "and most possibly
you will send back for me."
"Oh, I'll drive back myself." She was quite certain about it. As he
helped the Queen into the dog-cart, as she leaned on his supporting
hand, she said:
"Thank you, thank you very much indeed." And he was so vain as to
fancy that into tone and words Carmen-Magda put more warmth, more of
meaning, than a woman usually puts into the phrase of recognition of a
man's helping hand. He could not, moreover, have sworn that at the end
of the sentence was not murmured a word in a foreign tongue which might
in Poltavian mean "friend," but as he did not understand the language
of the country he could not be sure.
As he watched the trap up the hedged lanes out of sight, he rubbed his
eyes as if he were not certain whether or not he had not dozed and
dreamed in his compartment on the slow train from London.... But at
any rate he had the delightful heavenly certainty that this was
Westboro' of an Indian summer afternoon--and that of the two women who
had just driven up the lane out of sight, one at least was adorably
real.
THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE
VII
IN WHICH HE BECOMES THE POSSESSOR OF A CERTAIN PIECE OF PROPERTY
As Bulstrode stood in the window of his room at Westboro' Castle, his
face turned toward the country, it seemed to beckon him. It called him
from the park's end where suave and smooth the curving downs met the
preciser contour of the eastern field; from hedges holding snugly in
the roadways, the roads themselves running off on pleasant excursions
to townships whose names are suggestive of romance, whose gentle
beauties have mellowed with the ages which give them value and leave
them perfect.
With the sweetness of a bell, with the invitingness of a beckoning
hand, the English countryside summoned the gentleman to come out to it,
to explore and penetrate for himself. He gazed charmed and entranced
at the expanse of rippling meadow where, enclosed by the curtains of
soft old trees, the thatch of the eaves lifted their breast to the sun
and mist, and chimneys black with immemorial fires indicated the farms
of Westboro', rich, homely and respectable, as they left upon the
landscape harmonious color and history of thrift. To the east was the
dim suggestion of the little town, and some few miles in a hollow lay
the farmlands known as The Dials, and each second growing more
distinctly visible in the deepening light rose the towers of Penhaven
Abbey.
At the Duke's urging, Bulstrode had been led to stop on at Westboro'
Castle after the house party had dissolved at the end of their week's
sojourn; and there had since been many long tramps across country, with
the dogs at his heels and by his side the Duke, for the time diverted
from his semi-melancholy, semi-egotistical cynicism, and transformed
into an enthusiastic sport.
The Duke of Westboro' was a _désenchanté_, more truly speaking a victim
of other peoples' temperaments. There were, however, not a few little
scores in the character of moral delinquencies which at least, so he
felt, he had been called upon quite fully to discharge.
The American man gave himself over to his host, and from the time
Westboro' put out a bait of "Oh, you're decidedly not turning in at
this hour, old man?" he flanked the Duke on the opposite side of the
fireplace in the East Library, there after coffee to wear away half the
night. During the following fortnight, Bulstrode found that he had
tallied up with his friend very closely the scores of the last few
miserable years.
Westboro's friendship with him dated back some ten years. Bulstrode
had first known the Englishman at Newport where, then not a young man,
he had come obviously and frankly in search of an American wife. The
search was unusual in that it was not for money, but, as Westboro' put
it, for type and race. His mother had been an American. He had adored
her, and wanted an American mother for his children. The woman
herself--and how Bulstrode saw it as he followed the deserted husband's
narrative--the woman had been a secondary thing. He recalled easily
the summary and conventional courtship and the vulgar brilliance of the
wedding. He had been one of Westboro's ushers, and his smaller part of
the affair left him with the distressing idea that he had assisted at a
sacrifice.
It would be euphemistic to say that Westboro' poured out his heart to
Bulstrode; Englishmen do not have such refreshments. Little by little,
rather in short curt phrases, a cynical word whose mocking fellow only
followed after some moments' silence--little by little, whilst the
smoky wreaths of the men's cigars veiled their confidences, the Duke
slowly told the story of ten years of married life. In this intimacy
he disclosed the history of the separation which formed at the moment
the subject of general public comment. Jimmy was relieved when the
moment came that the Duke thought opportune to say:
"There, old chap, you have the whole story! It's this cursed tradition
of marriage, and you're a lucky fellow to be free. I have never spoken
to any one before--you know it. I don't need to tell you so, but you
were in, as it were, at the start, and what do you think of the finish?"
Bulstrode reserved his opinion.
Westboro' Castle had been built in the sixteenth century by a lover of
the Virgin Queen. The stones were paved with memories. In the Picture
Hall the ardent gentleman three hundred years before had for one sole
hour entertained Elizabeth at a feast. She left him, obdurate and
unyielding, and he went crazy and followed the royal coach to the park
gate, weeping, his hands before his face; and there on the ground, his
fair curls torn, and the dust from the departing vehicles alone of the
glory that touched him, his people found him.
"How they prate of inequality, and of the crime of grafting the
American rose on these old stalks," Bulstrode mused. The beauty of
Frances, Duchess of Westboro', he had himself been one of the first to
concede; a portrait of her by Lehnbach did not to his eyes do her
justice. The fresh purity of her type had not been seized by the
German. She would be an ideal Duchess, he had said of her when the
mission of Westboro' to America had been bruited, and Westboro' had
thought: "She's a strong, fine woman, and will bear me beautiful
children."
She had borne him two. Bulstrode, in passing through the house, had
seen the low gates at the doors of two sunny rooms, the toys spread as
they had been lain. His own were the only apartments in that wing of
the castle, and the silence at the end of the hall was never broken.
When Westboro' had come to this part of his narrative, he had waited
quiet so long that his companion had naturally taken the evening to be
at its end. The Duke had thrown his cigar away, and lifting from the
table near him a leather case, opened it and handed over to Bulstrode
the photograph of two little bare-legged boys in sailor clothes. They
stood hand in hand, a pretty pair. Looking at it, and gently turning
it over on the other side, Bulstrode read:
"Frederick Cecil John Edward, Marquis of Wotherington, three years old.
Guy Perceval, Lord Feversham, aged two years."
Westboro's voice had a dull sound as he took the case from his friend's
hand.
"They are Westboro's I think, neck and crop. Scarlet fever--in three
days, Bulstrode--both in three days."
And that had been all.
Bulstrode had left the Duke and gone up-stairs. On the other side of
his cheerful rooms the empty nurseries in the ghostly moonlight held
their doors wide open as if to welcome at the low gates those bright
heads if they should come.
Jimmy, whose sentimentality consisted in his acting immediately when
anything was to be done, mixed a whiskey and soda from the array of
drinks that always exists at an Anglo-Saxon's elbow, and after a turn
or two in his dressing-room brought practically out:
"It's ridiculous! Sheer nonsense. There should be children here. The
woman is selfish and puritanical, and the man is no lover--_that's_
what's the matter! But Westboro' certainly loves her in his big, cold,
affectionate way." Jimmy smiled at his own fashion of putting it. And
how any woman, with a mind and common-sense, could help loving
Westboro' Castle and countryside, as well as Cecil, tenth Duke of the
line, the American visitor failed to see.
As the Duke of Westboro' thought of the members of his recent house
party--the women of it passed before his mental mirror. There were
several images of an American lady whose frocks and hats, whose wit and
grace, whose dark beauty had made her stay at Westboro' brilliant and
memorable. Possibly the remembrance of Mrs. Falconer, one night at
dinner, was what most persistently lingered in the Duke's mind. She
had sat on his left in a gown he remembered as becoming, and her jewels
had shone like fire on her bosom. He had particularly remarked them in
thinking of the idle jewels of his own house, left behind by the flight
of the Duchess. Mary Falconer had been more brilliant than her
ornaments, and Westboro' had thoroughly enjoyed his guest. He had
asked this woman especially because she charmed him; without forming
the reason he had a latent hope that she might do more than charm. He
wanted to forget and to be eased from the haunting memory that stung
and never soothed. From his first tête-a-tête with Mrs. Falconer he
had at once seen that there was nothing there for him.
Bulstrode had said that Westboro' was not a lover. Reserved as far as
all feeling was concerned, he had made no advances to the beautiful
American, but contented himself with watching her. She could not be in
love with her brutish husband who, out of the week spent at Westboro'
was visible only two days. Then Bulstrode had come. Pictures of the
two talking in the long twilights, riding together, walking on the
terrace side by side, came vividly to Westboro's recollection.
"That," he decided, "is a real flesh-and-blood woman, the kind of woman
I should have married. Bulstrode is a lucky devil."
"A chap," Westboro' said to Jimmy in a mild unpretentious mood of
philosophy, "is, of course, a husband; more naturally than people give
him credit for, a father; but first of all--and that's what so few
women take into consideration--_he is a man_."
The Duke had fallen into the habit of breaking through the silences
when each man, following his own thoughts, would forget the other. And
remarks such as these his companion knew, referred in sense and detail
to the long talks whose intenser personalities had ceased.
This day Westboro' brought out his little paragraph as, between the
hedges of a lowland lane, the two rode at a walk after a long hard
canter from Penhaven, some eight miles behind them on the hill. On
either side the top of the thorn was veiled with rime. Down the
hedge's thickness from his seat on his horse, Bulstrode could look into
the dark tangled interstices of the thicket and its delicious browns
and greens. Into the thorns here and there dried leaves had fallen,
and from the hedge as well as from the country, clouded and gray with
mist, came a sharpened sweetness; a blended smell of fields over which
early winter had passed; a smell of woods over which the fires cast
smoky veils. In the freshness and with the eager exercise, Bulstrode's
cheeks had reddened. He sat his horse well, and his enjoyment of life,
his ease with it, his charming spirit, shone in the face he turned to
the Duke. For some miles given over to the sympathetic task of
managing his horse, he had enjoyed like a boy, and during the ride had
thought of nothing but the physical delight of the open air and the
motion.
"Yes," he returned to his friend's remark, "as far as any point of
interest goes, we may grant you that we began as men. I mean to say
that monkeys aren't useful in one's deductions for emotional
hypotheses, at any rate. I'll grant you for our use that we were men
to begin with."
"Damn it all," said his host, "aren't we just as much so to-day, for
all our civilization?"
"Well, we don't primarily knock on the head a woman whose physique has
pleased us, and carry her off while she's unconscious."
"It might in some cases be a good thing if we did," Westboro' growled.
Bulstrode ran his hand along the silky neck of his horse, from whose
nostrils smoke came in little puffs that met the moisture of the air.
"Oh, we're not, you know, so awfully far away from our instincts in
anything, old man! There isn't any cast-iron rule about feelings.
They depend on the individual."
"Oh, you've never married," Westboro' tried frankly to irritate him,
"and you can't, you know----"
The sweet temper of the other accepted the Duke's scorn. "I'm not
married, or very theoretical about it, either. One can only, after
all, have his own point of view."
"We're not, I expect, fair to the women," the Duke generously
acknowledged. "We look for so much in them. We expect them to be so
much."
"A wife," Bulstrode completed for him, "a mother, a friend."
And Westboro' finished it. "For them and for other men. And a
mistress."
And here Bulstrode took him up for the first time with a note of
challenge in his voice.
"And what, my dear man, did you intend that the Duchess should take you
for? No, I mean to say, quite man to man, given that any woman could
or does contain all the qualities you so temperately ask?"
Westboro' smiled at the first curtness he had ever heard in his
friend's voice.
"Oh, you know, we men don't fuss about ourselves."
"You married her at eighteen," Bulstrode said. "You made her a
Duchess. You had already lived a life and she was a child beside you
in experience. You required motherhood of her, and in return...."
"Well," Westboro' turned about in his saddle and faced his earnest
friend. "What then, in your opinion, might I have been?"
"You might have been from the start," Bulstrode said it shortly, "a
lover. It's not a bad rôle. We Anglo-Saxons have no sentimental
education. Our puritanism makes us half the time timid at courtship
and love."
The gentlemen rode a little on with slackened rein. Westboro's
eyeglass cord was almost motionless as he stared out between his
horse's ears down the lane.
"Perhaps, after all," he fetched it out slowly, "there's something in
what you say."
Whether or not there was any truth in Bulstrode's commonplace remark,
it lingered in his host's mind all day. It gave him, for the first
time, a link to follow--an idea--and the Duke, entirely unused to
analysis, accustomed to act if not on impulse, certainly according to
his will and pleasure without concession, harked back in a groping,
touching fashion like an awkward boy looking for a lost treasure,
upsetting, as he went, old haunts, turning over things for years not
brought to the light of day. And it took him all the afternoon and a
good part of the evening to reach the place where he thought he had
lost originally his joy. Unlike the happier boy, he could not seize
his bliss once recovered, and stow it away; it was only remembrance
that brought him back, and with a tightening heart as he realized once
more the form and quality of his lost happiness--there he must leave it
and see it fade again into the past.
Jimmy gave his host a chance to follow his absorbed reflections. He
effaced himself, and behind a book whose lightness of touch made him
agreeably forget the heavier hand of current and daily events, he sat
in his dressing-room reading "The Vicar of Wakefield."
When Westboro' came in to him Jimmy looked up and quoted aloud: "When
lovely woman stoops to folly and finds at length that men betray...."
"Oh, they console themselves quickly," Westboro' finished. "Don't
fancy anything else, my dear fellow, they console themselves."
"They may pretend to do so."
"They succeed."
Westboro' took the little book from his friend's hand and shut it
firmly as if afraid that the rest of the verse might slip out and
refute him.
"Bulstrode, she consoles herself, she is perfectly happy."
"How are you then so sure?"
"Oh, I hear of her in Paris." The Duke's features contracted. "She's
contriving to pass her time--to pass her time."
Bulstrode leaned over towards his friend and, for Westboro' sat
opposite him, he put his hand on the Duke's knee.
"You must certainly go to her."
Westboro' stroked his moustache before he answered:
"Not if I never see her again."
"You should decidedly go to her."
The other shook his head. "Not if it meant twice the hell it is now."
"Why not?"
"I went to her once. I may say twice," he slowly said, "since we
separated." And as he stopped speaking Bulstrode could only imagine
what the result had been.
"I don't think I'm a Westboro' really, for I couldn't follow any
woman's carriage puling like a schoolboy as my ancestor did. There's a
great deal of my mother's blood in me, and it's a different blend."
Bulstrode's eyes were on the little book between the Duke's
aristocratic hands.
"She has, I grant you, a lot to forgive; but she quite well knows all
the blame I acknowledge, quite well. I don't believe I'm any worse
than the run of mankind, and whether I am or not, I've made all the
amends I can and I have nothing more to say."
His eyeglass had dropped; his face looked worn; he showed his age more
than a happier man would have done at his years His mood of thinking it
out by himself continued for so long that Bulstrode finally asked:
"What, if I may be so near you as to question, do you mean, old chap,
to do?"
Westboro' had it all laid out for himself--his ready answer showed it.
"You say I'm not a lover," he reminded his friend; "no doubt you're
right, but I'm an affectionate chap, at any rate, I can't bear this--"
He looked about hopelessly. The words were forced out by the high mark
of his unhappiness: "--this infernal solitude. Even when a good
comrade like yourself is in it, the house seems to speak to me from the
empty rooms in this wing." (Bulstrode knew he was thinking of the
nurseries with the low latches and little gates.) "I can't stand it.
When I get out of England and abroad the place fetches me back again
like a magnet. I'm a home-keeping sort of man, and I want my home."
His friend gently urged in the silence: "Well?"
"I shall wait," the Duke went on with the plan he had been forced to
make out for himself. "I shall hold on, keep along a bit, and then--_I
shall go to the other woman_." And the Duke, as he raised his eyes to
his companion, fixed his glass firmly and felt that he challenged in
every way Bulstrode's disapproval. "The Duchess will get her
divorce--it goes without saying--will get her divorce. Why she has not
already done so I can't imagine."
As Westboro' appeared inclined to leave the subject there, Bulstrode
pressed him further: "And then?"
"I fancy I shall marry the other woman."
Bulstrode started. The complexion of the idea was so foreign to him
that he could not for a moment let himself think that he understood it.
"You will," he said, "marry one woman whilst you distinctly love
another?"
The Duke nodded. "Love," he reflected, "I begin to believe I don't
know anything about. It must, of course, suppose some sort of return.
If, as you say, I love another woman, I'm not made of the stuff that
can go along doing so without anything on her side."
The dressing clock at the bedside on the little stand chimed the hour.
It was two o'clock. The Duke of Westboro' rose.
"You must think me a colossal ass, my dear friend, but if it had not
been for your awfully good companionship and your kindness, I dare say
that by now I should have already made some sort of fatal blunder."
At the door Bulstrode put his hand on his friend's arm, and, as though
nothing in the conversation apart from the Duchess had any real
significance, he said simply:
"You are then, in sum, simply waiting...?"
"Oh, yes," agreed the other rather blankly. And the other man knew
that he had been told only half the thought in his friend's mind.
"She may get a divorce at any time, you know, quite easily, without my
taking any further steps."
"Oh, I see perfectly," Jimmy accepted; and as the door closed after his
host, he said, almost aloud: "He thinks, then, there is half a chance
that the Duchess will return." And wondering very much how far a woman
is willing to sacrifice herself for a man, granted that she loves him,
he did not finish his phrase.
The next day Bulstrode, no longer able to resist the beckoning country,
went out, as it were, to it as if he said "Here I am--what will you do
with me?"
If Glousceshire could, for a while, make him forget the problems he had
been housed with, brush him up a bit, he thought it would be a good
thing. Therefore, when his horse came up to the door he threw himself
on the animal in a nervous haste to be gone, and setting off in the
direction of Penhaven, obeyed its summons at last.
Westboro' had run up to London for overnight, and Bulstrode, at the
Duke's something more than invitation, a sort of appeal, was to stay
indefinitely on. It must be confessed that he rather selfishly looked
forward to the course of an untroubled afternoon, to an evening amongst
the books whose files had tempted him for days.
But the pity of all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great
in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him
to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because
Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro'
at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him
to speak.
As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris,
surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always,
everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued,
and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle
desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the
inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household,
unless--unless--one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.
His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a
gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out
her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and
put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come
across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The
gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was
untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen.
He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a
forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he
leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the
mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods
which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and
forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a
legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first
to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must
necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion
may be said to be a doubtful quantity.
A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar;
it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles
of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base
of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus
effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place
grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was
unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought
the leaves had been blown away. Here Bulstrode dismounted, and, with
the bridle over his arm, walked towards the path's end, pleasantly
interested, and now, as he thought it should by this do, the house
struck on him through an archway contrived by the training of old trees
over a circle of stone. The house broke on him in the shape of an
Elizabethan manse; long and old with soft rose-color of brick in
places, and the color of a faded leaf in others where the dampness had
soaked in and had, through countless mid-summer suns, been burned out
again. Before the windows flashed the red of bright curtains. The
house was distinctly, and he thought it seemed happily, occupied. He
stopped where he stood by the arch, a little confused and a little
balked in his romantic treat, and not the less feeling himself an
intruder. But before he could turn his horse and unobtrusively lead
her back the way they had come, the house's occupant, no doubt she who
gave it the air of being so happily tenanted, had come out with a
garden hat on her head, a pair of garden shears in her hands, and with
the precision of intention, turned sharply towards the arched forest
walk, and in this way squarely upon Bulstrode.
The surprise to him was, without doubt, the greater, for she knew him
at once, and he for a second did not recognize her. Her extreme
English air--the straw hat tied under her chin and the face it framed,
so decidedly altered, bewildered him. His first greeting, mentally,
before he spoke aloud to her, was masculine. "Why, her beauty! What
in heaven's name had she done with it?"
"_What_ are you doing here?"
They both asked it at once, and the lady having lived so long in an
insular country was adept in its possibilities of great hospitality as
well as of freezing out an unwelcome visitor. She froze the poor
gentleman and then, touched by his utter bewilderment and his innocence
of wilful intrusion, she smiled more humanly.
"Won't you, since you _are_ here, Mr. Bulstrode, come in and have a cup
of tea?"
She at once followed their mutual question by saying: "As for being
here, you will admit that given the part of the country it is, no one
has a better right!"
"Oh, I'll admit anything you like," he laughed, "if you'll only admit
us. You see we are two."
The lady came up to him in a more friendly manner; she gave him her
hand and she really smiled beautifully. Then she put her hand on the
nose of the horse, with the touch one has for familiar things.
"She's a perfect dear, isn't she--a dear. So you are riding her then?
Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing
she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."
As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel
with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly,
willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled.
"Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the
book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."
"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat
in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I
fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has
a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived
in, as, of course, you know."
"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell
me if you have come to see me as a messenger."
"And if I have?"
It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream
for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully
appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron
and the toast was a feather.
"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed.
"I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock
over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and
with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for
another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's.
I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly
rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm
not very clever at putting on things."
The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a
second cup of tea, slowly.
"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said,
"and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture
of you indeed."
She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.
"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think
of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as
being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the
English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear
their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's
horrid of me to speak so. You, of course, are out of the category.
But as you stood there, with Banshee's nose over your shoulder you
fitted quite beautifully in with everything. I don't believe I should
mind you, ever, anywhere, and yet I more naturally think of you at
Newport, don't you see?"
Her companion cried: "Oh, no, I'm in England, and you can't alter the
fact, at least if you can, please don't; for Newport on the fifteenth
of December, and with no such tea or fire----"
"Oh," she permitted, "you may stay. I said you fitted--only----"
Bulstrode interposed: "Don't at least for a few moments entertain any
'buts' and 'onlys'--they are nearly as bad as those magical travelling
trunks that would transport me to the United States. It is so--let me
say--neutral in this place, I should think I might remain. I don't
know why you are here or with whom, nor for how long, or for how deep,
but it is singularly perfect to have found you."
His hostess had left her seat behind the table, and taking a chair by
the fireside where Bulstrode was sitting, undid the ribbons of her
garden hat and let the basket-like object fall on the floor.
"You must promise me, first of all, that you will not say you have seen
me. Otherwise I shall leave here to-morrow and nobody shall ever again
know where I am."
However her command might conflict with what was in his mind, he was
obliged to give her his word. He had no right not to do so.
"And nothing," she said, "must make you break this promise, Mr.
Bulstrode. I know how good you are, and how you do all sorts of
Quixotic funny things, but in this case please--please----"
"Mind my own business?" he nodded. "I will, Duchess, I will."
She looked at him steadily a moment and seemed satisfied, for she
relaxed the tensity of her manner, which was the first Americanism she
had displayed, and in her pretty soft drawl asked him, with less
perfunctory interest than her words implied: "You are at Westboro'?"
"Yes, since the twenty-fifth."
"And you're staying on?"
"I seem to be more or less of a fixture--until the holidays, I expect."
"Lucky you," she breathed, and at his expression of candid surprise she
half laughed. "Oh, I mean as far as the castle goes--isn't it really
too delightful?"
He was able to say honestly: "Quite the most beautiful house I have
ever seen."
"Yes, I think so too," she nodded. "It's not so important as many
others but it's more perfect, more like a home."
Bulstrode sat back in his chair and tried to make her forget him.
Between the fire and the shadow he wanted to watch her face from which
he now saw that the beauty he remembered had not faded but had been
transformed. She was beautiful in another way: the brilliant, blooming
girl, fully blown at eighteen, with the dazzling charm of health, no
longer existed in the Duchess of Westboro'. She had refined very much
indeed. The aggressive bearing of the American princess had been
replaced by the colder, more serene hauteur of the English Duchess.
She was evidently a very proud woman, the arch of her brows said so,
and the line of her lips. All her lines were sharper and finer. Her
color, and he could not, as he studied her, quite regret it; her color
was quite gone. Her pallor made her more delicate, and her eyes--it
was in them that Bulstrode thought he saw the greatest change of all;
they were now fixed upon him, there was something melancholy in their
profound and deeply circled gray.
"What rooms will they have given you?" she asked after a moment.
Then--"Wait," she commanded, "I know. The south wing, the Henry IV.
rooms that look into the gardens. I always gave those to the men.
There's something extremely homelike about them, don't you think so?
And have you ever seen anything like those winter roses in that court?
Did any bloom this year? The trellis runs up along the terrace
balustrade--or possibly you don't care for flowers? Of course you
wouldn't as a girl does."
A _girl_--with that face and those eyes? Why, she must have been
talking back ten years. Bulstrode drew a breath.
"I know the roses you mean. It would be difficult to forget them.
Your gardener takes such pride in them. For some reason they are never
gathered; they fall as they hang. The gardener, it so happened, told
me so."
She was looking at him with an intensity almost painful, but she said
nothing further, and after a moment more Bulstrode replied to another
question.
"As it happens I don't occupy the Henry IV. rooms. I have mine quite
on the other side of the castle. Don't they call them the 'West
Rooms'?"
She caught her breath a little, but she was in splendid training with
all her years of English life behind her. Her face, nevertheless,
showed how well she knew those rooms, without the added note in her
voice as she said:
"Oh, those West Rooms--you have those."
And in the quiet that fell as her eyes sought the fire, he quite knew
how her thoughts travelled down the hall to the open nursery doors with
their waiting gates. Whatever were her reasons for being here,
Bulstrode saw that he had surprised her in a moment of sadness, and
that his visit in spite of his indiscretion, was not wholly unwelcome.
But in the sudden way coming upon some one connected with her own life,
she had been completely taken unawares, and her lapse into something
like sentiment was short. Even as he looked at her she hardened.
"You have naturally not asked me anything, Mr. Bulstrode," she said,
coldly enough now, "and more naturally still I have no explanations to
give. By to-morrow I may be gone. I may live here for the rest of my
life. I never leave my garden, I am quite unknown to the people about.
If any one in Westboro' learns that I am here I shall leave at once.
You will not come again. It is discourteous to say so--to ask it."
He had risen from his chair.
"Oh, but it's quite, quite dark. However will you manage?"
"We'll pick our way back well enough," he assured her. "The distance
to the road is nothing, and from here on it runs straight to the abbey."
The Duchess followed him slowly to the door, and there she asked
abruptly: "Is Westboro' to be down all winter? I didn't know it. I
thought he was out of England or I should not have come here at all."
"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I
expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now
at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to
return--ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that--" and he
saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate
again, and if it is unlatched...."
"Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't--it's against all my
plans."
Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded
Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate
caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road,
through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a
deserted garden.
"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in
a way, fair to him--I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation
of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which
presumably should be Westboro's secret."
"You mean to say,"--the Duchess pinned him down, "that you'll give me
away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a
person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"
Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the
forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally
turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found
the Duchess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their
delightful little talks--and they had been so--not once had the name of
Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity
concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the
visitor.
"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was
fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false
than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your
secret--I need not say so--is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back
in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you
have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."
The sewing she had chosen to finger--a Duchess, and an American one at
that, is not expected to do more--lay at her feet. By her side was a
basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with
linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow.
The Duchess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her
guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its
golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly
and found great loveliness in her bending face.
"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.
"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American Duchesses?
Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what
class do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"
She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow.
Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was
wrong.
"When I married," the Duchess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip
for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really,
and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little
boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can
remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were
intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette.
I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three
months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I
assure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she
spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself
confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the
seam and endeavor to find her tiny stitches. He exclaimed:
"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"
"No."
"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside--not that I've
been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard--as a
stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The
Dials."
"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she assured him, and then abruptly:
"Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"
He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which
she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run
up that seam."
"He would not have come."
Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been,
he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in
reality have flown to her.
At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her
courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that
she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of title or
distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:
"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."
"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his
eyes now, my dear child."
The Duchess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You
are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you.
Please stay."
The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of
an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and
simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon
followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along
by his side towards the gate.
"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be
the friend of..." She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you
forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?"
She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she
renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are
there."
As he did not at once succumb to her blandishments, she asked point
blank:
"Promise me to stop on."
"I at least won't go without letting you know of it."
"Without my permission?"
"I won't say that."
"But I'm sure that you mean it," she nodded happily, "and you're _such_
a help."
She was so affectionate as she bade him good-bye, that only at the
little road did he begin to wonder just what help he was. Was he
aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of
protection to some feminine treachery?
"Oh, no," he decided; "she's incapable of any thing of the sort. But I
must clear out;" and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro'
should be at home, he would take himself to ground still more neutral
than The Dials had proved to be. But Westboro' showed no intention of
coming immediately home. Instead, with a droll egoism, as if the fact
that he had made poor Bulstrode a party to his unhappiness gave him
thereafter a right to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm
hold on Jimmy. Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the scrappy
letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at
a _bureau de poste_ in Paris:
"Don't, for God's sake, go off, old man. Keep up your end." (His
end!) "Stop on at Westboro'--Use the place as if it were all put up
for your amusement. Just live there so I may feel it's alive. Let me
find a human being at home when I turn up. I'll wire in a day or so."
"So he is in Paris, then." Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not
doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly
as well to see Madame de Bassevigne.
Poor fellow, if he were searching for the Duchess! Well, Bulstrode
would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the time being to do but
to mind other people's business. He put it so to himself. Indeed he
could not but believe it was fortunate for more than one person that
something could keep him from minding his own.
An undefined discretion kept him from going to the Moated Grange, as to
himself he styled the retreat the Duchess had made of The Dials. And,
in spite of the absolute freedom now given him to prowl about amongst
the books, in spite of his "evenings out" as he called them, Jimmy
found the time at Westboro' to drag lamentably. His own affairs, which
he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose
questions could not be solved by return mail. He became over his own
thoughts restless, and he sent a telegram to his host: "Better have a
look at things here yourself. Can't possibly stop on longer than...."
And he set a day.
"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this
unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of
soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the
silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable
to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, Duchess of Westboro', had
truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to
wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his
occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.
At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had
condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the
proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small
breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the
December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each
of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by
five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he
expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived
out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and
smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine
alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he
said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of
the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been
too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the Duchess
of Westboro'.
Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not.
Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different:
there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and
in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro'
accused himself of weakness.
"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.
The Duchess had not spoken nor had she, on the other hand, with the
fine courage of the true woman, been in any eager haste to discover
what her husband had said of her, nor had she asked if he had spoken at
all. On the other hand, aided by an extreme patience and with still
greater delicacy, she had waited, understanding that her guest, whose
mettle and character she knew would not permit him to betray a trust,
might, however naïvely, disclose what he knew without being conscious
of it.
But if Bulstrode gave himself or his host away, the Duchess made no
sign that she had profited by indiscretions. The impersonality of
their conversations was indeed a relief to Bulstrode, and it made it
possible for him to feel himself less a traitor at the Duke's hearth.
But she talked very sweetly, too, of her children. She had the second
picture to the Duke's of the little boys, a picture like the one
Bulstrode had seen at the castle, and showed it to him as the father
had done.
"Westboro' has the companion to this," he had not minded telling her as
they sat together in the small room he had grown to know as well as the
larger rooms of the castle. And at the end of a few moments Bulstrode
quite blurted out: "Why, in Heaven's name do you women make men suffer
so?"
The Duchess, who had been working, dropped her bit of muslin and
looked, with her cherry lips parted and her great serious eyes, for all
the world like a lady in a gift book. Her face was eighteenth century
and child-like.
Bulstrode nodded. "Oh, yes, you've got so easily the upper hand, the
very least of you, you know, over the best of us. It's such an unfair
supremacy. You've got such a clever knowledge of little things, such a
sense of the scale of the feelings, and you certainly make the very
most of your power over us all. Can't you--" and his eyes, half
serious and half reproachful, seemed, as he looked at her, to question
all the womankind he knew--"Can't you ever love us well enough just
quite simply to make us happy?"
The Duchess had taken up her sewing again, and her eyes were upon it.
Bulstrode waited for a little, following her stitches through the
muslin and the flash of her thimble in the light.
"Can't you?" he softly repeated. "Isn't it, after all, a good sort of
way of spending one's life, this making another happy?"
"American women aren't taught so, you know," she said. "It isn't
taught us that the end and aim of our existence is to make a man happy."
Her companion didn't seem at all surprised.
"And so you see," she went on, "those of us that do learn that after
all there may be something in what you say--those of us that learn,
only find it out after a lot of hard experiences, and it is sometimes
too late!"
She seemed to think his direct question called for a distinct answer,
for she admitted: "Oh, yes, of course there are some of us who would
give a great deal to try. And you see, moreover," she went on with her
subject as she turned the corner of her square, "you put it well when
you said 'love enough.' You see that's the whole thing, Mr. Bulstrode,
to love enough. One can, of course, in that case, do nearly all there
is to do, can't one?"
"Nearly all," he had smiled, and added: "_And a great deal more_."
The household gods, whose dignity and harmony had not been disturbed
during the absence of the master of Westboro', were unable, however, to
give him very much comfort on his return. The Duke's motor cut quickly
up the long drive and severed--clove, as it were--a way through the
frosty air and let him into the park. The poor man had only a sense of
wretchedness on coming home--"coming back," he now put it. Huddled
down deep in his fur coat, its collar hunched round his ears, his face
was as gloomy as that of a man dispossessed of all his goods; doors
thrown open into the fragrant and agreeably warmed halls fetched him
further home. But the knowledge that the house had been lived in
during his absence was not ungrateful. He sniffed the odor of a
familiar brand of cigar, and before he had quite plumbed the melancholy
of the place to its depths, Jimmy Bulstrode had sunned out of one of
the inner rooms, and the grasp of the friendly hand and the sound of
the cheerful voice struck a chord in Westboro' that shook him.
"I've been like a fiend possessed," he said to Jimmy, in the evening
when they found themselves once more before the fire. "I've scarcely
known what I've been doing, or why; but I know one thing, and that is
that I'm the most wretched man alive."
Bulstrode nodded. "You _did_ go to Paris, then!"
"Yes," said the Duke, "and what I've found out there has driven me
insane."
Although ignorant of the variations of his friend's discovery,
Bulstrode was pretty certain of one that had not been made.
"You may, old chap," he said smoothly, "not have found out all the
truth, you know."
Westboro' raised his hand. "Come," he said, "no palliations; you can't
smooth over the facts. Frances is not in Paris. She has not been in
Paris for several months." He paused.
"In itself not a tragedy," murmured his friend. "Paris is considered
at times a place as well _not_ to be in."
But Bulstrode's remark did not distract his friend from his narrative.
"She has not been in Paris since I saw her twelve months ago, and she
has left no sign or trace of where she has gone. There is no address,
no way that I can find her. Not that a discovery is not of course
ultimately possible, but what, in the interval, if I should wish to
write to her? What if I should need to see her? What if I should die?"
"Would you, in any of those cases, send for her?"
"I don't know," the Duke admitted.
"But," Jimmy asked him, "did you go to Paris this time to see the
Duchess?"
"Since you ask me frankly," the Duke admitted, "I don't think that I
did."
"At all events," the other said, "you surely did not go to spy on her,
Westboro'?"
The Duke was silent, then answered quietly:
"I should never ask a question--not if it meant a certain discovery of
something that I feared or suspected. I don't think I should ever seek
to find out something she didn't want me to know."
Bulstrode, at the blindness of a man regarding his own intentions,
smiled behind his cigar. "Well?" he helped.
"I went over to France," said the Duke--"and I suppose you'll scarcely
believe a man who you say is not a lover to be capable of such
sentimentality--simply, if possible, to have a sight of my wife, to see
her go out of the door, or to see her go in, to see her possibly get
into a carriage; and how did I know that it would not be with another
man?"
"How did you find out that she had left?"
"I asked for her at her hôtel."
"The first question, then," Jimmy smiled.
"A fair one?"
"Oh, perfectly."
"I was told that the Duchess had left Paris months before."
"And then?" the other man's voice was placid as he spoke for the Duke.
"Then you went to her bankers, her bakers and candlestick makers; in
short, you asked all over the place, didn't you?"
The Duke swore gently. "Well, what would you have a man do?"
"Why I would have him do that," nodded Jimmy, "by all means. Any man
would have done so."
In the half second of interval whilst the Duke was obliged to swallow
his friend's sarcasm, Bulstrode had time to think: "Here I am, once
more in the heart of an intrigue. Its fetters are all about me and I
am wretchedly bound by honor not to do the simple, natural thing."
Then he asked boldly: "Well, what do you think about it, Westboro'?"
"Think?" Westboro' repeated, "why, that she has deliberately escaped
from me, put herself out of any possible reach; she doesn't want a
reconciliation and she has gone away. She may have gone away alone and
she may not, that I don't know, and I don't believe I want to know."
"Oh, you'll find her." It was with the most delightful security and
contentment that his friend was able to tell the Duke this. But the
cheerful note struck the poor husband the disagreeablest of blows.
"Gad!" he laughed, "what a cold brand of creature a bachelor is! 'Find
her!' as one might speak of finding an umbrella that you've left by
mistake at your club. Of course she can be found. There are not many
mysteries that search can't solve in these days. And Duchesses don't
drop off the face of the earth. I could no doubt have found her in
twenty-four hours, but I didn't try to. I don't know that I want to
find her. It isn't the fact of where she's gone that counts--that she
wanted to go--that she has voluntarily made the separation final and
complete."
"Then," persisted the bachelor, "you don't really _want_ to find her?"
"Jove!" the Duke turned on him. "You don't know what it is to love a
woman! You've got some imagination--try to use it, can't you? Can't
you?"
He met the American's handsome eyes. A flush rose under Bulstrode's
cheek. Westboro' put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I beg your
pardon, dear old chap."
"Oh, that's all right, old chap," Bulstrode assured cheerfully.
"My dear Duchess, it seems an unconscionable waste of time and life for
any one to ignore the inevitable! It's such a prodigal throwing out of
the window of riches!"
Bulstrode took her hands, both of them, in his as she stood in the
winter sunshine, the open house door behind her, the terrace and its
broken stairs of crumbling stone before her.
"Why, my dear lady, if I kept a diary of daily events I couldn't write
down one page of good reasons why you should be living here and
Westboro' up there, and I a comic go-between, in the secret of both and
the confidence of one."
"Oh," she interrupted, "then you're in the confidence...?"
"Of your husband, yes," Bulstrode found himself startled into betrayal.
She drew her hands from him and walked on a little in the sunshine, and
he followed by her side.
"I don't mind," she permitted, "you're such a perfect dear. I
shouldn't mind at all if I thought that the confidence were a good one."
Her tone was light and cool, but the gentleman never failed to notice
when the Duchess spoke of the Duke that there was a tremor under her
words, a warmth, an agitation, which she vainly tried to control.
"Confidences," she said, "are very rarely just, you know, and _les
absents ont toujours tort_."
"Oh, you don't mean...?" Jimmy emphasized.
"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"
"A real one," she was assured.
"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."
She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came
out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her
words Bulstrode said:
"You, of course, then know how he loves you."
He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive
gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.
"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her
voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough--that's the
necessary thing for every question."
"Well?"
She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this
answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved
it."
They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black,
were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On
the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The Duchess
put her hand on the warmed stones.
"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is
warmer. I never have seen such an English December."
Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now
turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where
the sun fell on the little panes. The Duchess remained looking up a
few seconds, then she came back to her guest.
"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her.
"I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a
miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as
seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing
seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been
avoided."
"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the
first."
He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me
when I say from my own--" he put his hand down on the dial's edge.
"From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss.
The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said
with something like passion in his agreeable voice "what _do_ you all
expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will,
and you have the great luck, my dear Duchess, to be loved by your own
husband. Why don't you go to him?"
"Go to him?" she echoed.
He curtly replied: "Why not?"
"My dear friend!"
"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"
"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since
you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman,
would disobey her?"
"Westboro' would not."
The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."
"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"
"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."
"And now?"
She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I
don't quite know."
And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"
"Partly."
Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her
eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on:
"You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your
husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to
suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart,
Duchess, terribly unstable."
The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes
and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.
"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can
you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"
"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless,
wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that--utterly
unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of
all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But,"
he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to
tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great
riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck
home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man,
Duchess, only one."
"Well?" she encouraged him.
"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it
needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to
keep that man--all and forever."
He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth
stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the
time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look
of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American
girl--wilful, egotistical, spoiled--an imperious creature whose
caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and
national egoism.
At this moment, the window the Duchess looked towards opened part way:
it was under the eaves and there must have been a dovecote near, for
there came the soft sound of cooing like the call of a young bird.
Possibly the gentle note reached the woman's hearing as well, for her
face transcendently softened.
"I think," she said with evident effort to speak in a commonplace tone,
"it would be quite futile to urge Cecil to come."
"Oh, I shan't advise him so."
Bulstrode's quick answer made her look at him in so much surprise that
he went on to say: "I would not, in justice to him, in justice to the
great love I have been permitted to see, advise him to come."
The Duchess, during the months of analysis, suffering and experience,
had not admitted to herself that should her husband return she would
receive him, nor had she decided as to quite how obdurate she would be,
and she was curious at the attitude of this gentle friend. She naïvely
asked:
"Why would you not advise him so?"
Bulstrode said, still continuing his pleasant sententiousness, "The
woman's heart must be as stable as the man's is uncertain, and the man
who comes back after such a separation must not find a woman who does
not know her own mind. He must, on the contrary, find one who has no
mind or will or life but his."
As he looked at the person to whom he spoke he was somewhat struck by
the maternal look in her: he had never clearly discovered it before.
Her breast from which the fur had fallen, as it rose and fell under her
soft gown, was full, generous, and beautiful; even as he spoke in a
certain accusation against her, she seemed to have altered.
"Westboro'," he said a little confused, "must come back to a woman,
Duchess, to a woman--to a consoler. I wish I could express
myself--almost to a mother--as well as to a wife."
The ardent color dyed her face again; her lips moved. She put out her
hand towards him, and as he took it he understood that she wished him
to bid her good-by and to leave her alone. He heard what she struggled
to say:
"He must not come, he must not come."
"No," he accepted sadly for his friend, "No, he must not come."
Bulstrode had chosen those times for going to The Dials when his host
was least likely to take note of his absence; but it happened that more
than once the Duke missed him at just the wrong moment, and more than
once had been given the direction in which Bulstrode's footsteps had
turned.
One morning, during a talk with his agent, Westboro'--the map of the
district before him--enquired what had ever been done with the property
known as The Dials, and into whose hands the old place had fallen. It
seemed that it had been let for some months to a foreigner, a widow,
who lived there, and alone.
Westboro' considered the farms and forests, as they lay mapped out
before him, at the extreme foot of the castle's parks. It was a little
square of some fifty acres by itself; it had never interested him
before.
How long did the lease run on? Did the agent know? He believed for
another year.
The Duke gave instructions to have the property looked into, with a
view to purchase. And as the man put up his papers, he vouchsafed to
his employer:
"The present tenant is very exclusive; she sees nobody, has never, I
believe, even been to the Abbey. An old gardener who has been kept on
says the servants are all foreign."
The Duke gave only a tepid interest to the information which would have
passed entirely from his mind had it not been for his next meeting with
Jimmy Bulstrode.
As much to shake off the impression his last talk with the Duchess had
left on his mind, as to prolong his exercise, Jimmy had gone down out
of the garden and across the place on foot over the rough winter fields
with their rimy furrows and their barren floors. As he made his way
towards the bottom hedge, looking for a stile he knew would be there a
little farther on, cutting an entrance out through the thorn to the
road, he met Westboro', like himself, on foot, and with his hand upon
the stile. The presence of the Duke where Bulstrode knew he was least
thought to be, and where he was now sadly sure he was not opportune,
made Jimmy stop short, troubled, and, not for a moment thinking that
the fact of his being there _himself_ was singular, he made his way
determinedly through the stile. As he greeted his friend, his own
demeanor was decidedly one which said: "Don't go on in that direction,
follow rather out of the turnstile with _me_." And he led his friend
rather brusquely down the bank, hitching his arm in Westboro's, forced
him along with him into the road.
"I ran down here to look over these meadows," said Westboro.' "You
seem yourself, in a way, to be pacing the land off!"
"Oh, I _love_ cross-country walking," said Bulstrode warmly.
"You must," smiled the Duke, "to have cut off into those barren fields.
Were you lost?" Westboro' stopped and looked back. "You must have
come directly down through The Dials."
"_The Dials_?" the American helplessly repeated. "Do you mean the old
house and garden?"
Bulstrode's manner and speech were rarely curt and evasive, but he
seemed this time embarrassed and taken unawares. As the two men sat in
the motor which waited for the Duke down the road, Westboro' fixed his
glass in his eye and looked hard for a second at his friend.
Bulstrode's cheerful face was distinctly disturbed.
"I'm thinking something of buying The Dials," Westboro', after a
moment, said against the wind.
Poor Jimmy. If the house had not sufficiently up till now materialized
out of his fancy as a possession, it declared itself at once, without
doubt, as something he must look after. It was only a little bit of
England, luckily----
"Well," he exclaimed, "to be frank, old man, I've, too, been thinking I
should like to buy that property. You could surely spare me this
little corner of Glousceshire."
"Spare it!" cried Westboro', "my dear chap, fancy how ripping to have
you a landlord here! To catch and hold you so! We'll go over the
whole place together. My agent shall put the matter through for you."
"Good God, no!" said Bulstrode, "don't let your man have wind of any
such a deal. The place would go up like a rocket in price. If you
really yourself care to withdraw as much as possible, that's the most
you can do. But for God's sake keep off the place, like a good fellow."
Behind his long moustaches the Duke covered a smile, but he conciliated
his agitated friend.
"I'll keep off the grass until the turf is all your own, my dear
Bulstrode."
"Thanks!" said the other cordially, and sat back with a sigh of relief.
"There," he reflected peacefully, "my presence is explained--it's quite
perfect. I shall be a landowner in England. At all events, it's lucky
the property is sympathetic. I'm glad I didn't get balled up in this
affair in, let us say, _New Jersey_, and find myself forced to purchase
the Hackensack Meadows.
"Did the old house look deserted?" asked the Duke wickedly.
"Oh, rather!" replied the other gentleman.
"Really!" wondered Westboro'. "Why, they tell me that it is let to a
Donna Incognita--a foreign lady."
Bulstrode, whether at his own lie or at the shock of his companion's
knowledge, blushed, and his friend saw him redden. And the Duke, in
whom candor was a charm, stared at his friend, half-opened his mouth,
and then sat speechless. The suggestiveness of the whole affair rushed
over him so rapidly that he had not time to ask himself whether he
credited his suspicions or not.
"Good heavens! _Jimmy_ carrying on a vulgar intrigue in a simple
country village!" He looked at the face of the man by his side, but
Jimmy, leaning forwards, addressed some remark to the chauffeur, and
showed no intention of meeting the Duke's eyes. If it were not a
vulgar intrigue, what could it be? How difficult it grew to connect
such a _liason_ with his friend. But as he thought on, the Duke began
to ask why, after all, should it be so extraordinary! Why should he
suppose Jimmy so unlike the rest of his set? More scrupulous, more
sinless than other men--than himself? He couldn't answer his own
question, but he did so think of Bulstrode, and since his late house
party had believed that Jimmy cared for Mrs. Falconer. The lady at The
Dials was certainly not she.
Bulstrode, in the shadow of this delinquence, surrounded certainly in
the mind of the Duke by an atmosphere of intrigue, became very human,
rather consolingly human. In their mutual intercourse the Duke had
felt himself living in a clearer atmosphere than he usually breathed.
Along by Bulstrode's mode of life, points of view and principles, his
own life had seemed more mistaken than he had ever thought it to be.
And although Jimmy had never breathed a word of criticism, he had felt
himself judged by the man's just, though gentle codes.
By the time he had reached this point in his reflections the motor had
stopped at one of the side doors of the castle.
"There is, of course, some perfectly proper explanation--" the Duke
decided. It's a harmless flirtation, if any flirtation at all.
Perhaps it's a beneficent bit of benevolence; at any rate it's Jimmy's
own affair, and after all, he's going to _buy_ the property--perhaps
he's going to marry. Why not?
Ashamed to have placed his friend, if only momentarily, in an equivocal
position, he turned about as they got out of the car and put an
affectionate hand on the American's shoulder.
"Oh, I expect, old man, that you've got some wonderful scheme up your
sleeve! You're going to be married and fetch your bride to The Dials."
Poor Bulstrode unfortunately echoed: "_Married_!" with a world of scorn
in his tone. "My poor Westboro,' after what I've lately seen and heard
here--forgive me if I say that for the time at least I'm not too
sharply tempted."
"Since," he said as he greeted her, "you appear to be intending to live
here forever, you'll welcome me when I come back from London. I'm
coming back for Christmas, but if I don't run in before you'll
understand, won't you, that it is because I simply haven't dared.
Westboro' has already seen me cut across to this place."
The Duchess interrupted him. "Oh, in that case, I shall, of course, be
obliged to move away." And to her great surprise Bulstrode quickly
agreed with her.
"I should think it wise--not of course in the least knowing why you
originally came."
She looked at him rather quizzically.
"You mean to say then that you don't really know?"
"Oh,"--he was truthful--"I have rather an idea, and I hope a more or
less true one."
But the lady did not confess or in anywise help him. He went on to say:
"Your love for the castle couldn't, of course, long continue to keep
you mewed up here; and you'll be shortly discovered. As far as your
own interests are concerned it will be rather better to obtain the
divorce as soon as possible."
"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," she interposed, "don't misread me."
He nodded sagely. "On the contrary, I am translating you from sight,
my dear Duchess. And you are decidedly in your right regarding the
Duke."
She was so at his mercy that she hardly moved her lips, watching his
face. And as Bulstrode lit the cigarette she permitted him, and took
his seat before the tea things which she had set at his elbow, he went
on to make out her case for her.
"He has quite spoiled your life. He has been a brute, and not in the
least worth your----"
But the Duchess had dropped her tongs; they fell ringing on the
hard-wood floor. She raised a scarlet face to him.
"It's a _piége_," she murmured, "an _autodafé_."
"No," he said quietly, "it's a plain truth. Westboro' has told me
everything. I must think that he has done so. The man of me naturally
condones him, and the friend in me is inclined to be lenient. But the
justice and right, my dear Duchess, are all on your side."
"Oh, justice and right!" she dismissed, "only criminals need such
words."
Bulstrode said cooly: "But Westboro' has been a criminal!"
"If he were," emphasized the Duchess, "didn't I forgive him?"
"Of course, you did, my dear," her friend agreed warmly, "how
wonderfully, how beautifully, everyone knows. And he is all the more,
therefore, dreadfully to be blamed."
She said passionately: "What do you mean, Mr. Bulstrode? How--why do
you speak to me like this?"
Her extraordinary guest drank his tea with singular peace of mind.
"I think he is dreadfully to be blamed."
"But why should you tell it to me?"
"Why not?" he returned, his charming eyes on hers with the greatest
tribute of affection and sympathy--"I've known you for years, I'm fond
of you, you've been horribly wronged, and I'm going to see that things
are made right for you. I've been very blind. I have longed for a
reconciliation, I admit, with this husband who, poor stuff as he is,
loves you still. But I see what a sentimental ass I've been, and how
right you are."
She put her hand to her throat as if the soft lace suffocated her; she
had grown very pale indeed.
"What," she gasped, "do you know of my plans and my intentions, Mr.
Bulstrode? I have not told them to you."
"But I've been able to guess them," he replied.
"You've dared to, then?" she flashed.
"Oh, don't blame me," he returned. "Seeing you as I have all the
while, I've been forced to make out something--to attach some reason to
your living in this isolation. You've wanted, not unnaturally and very
cleverly, I acknowledge, to see what's been going on at Westboro', what
the Duke's been up to."
Her voice was suffocated as she said:
"Oh, stop, please! Whatever has come to you, Mr. Bulstrode, I don't
know, or why you dare to speak to me as you do."
Seeing her agitation he said smoothly: "My dear child, you're so right
in everything you've done, and of course I shall stand by you."
She made a dismissing gesture. "Oh, I don't need you, I don't want
you."
He smiled benignly on her. "But I'm here, and I'm going to see you
through."
"See me through what?"
"Through your divorce," he said practically.
"But you're Westboro's friend," she stammered, and he repudiated with
just a little hesitation in his voice:
"Oh, not so much as yours. But I'm the friend of both of you in this.
It's the best thing all round."
The gentleman's attitude so baffled her, he was so serious, and yet he
took it so lightly, apparently, that she was obliged to believe he
meant what he said.
"You talked to me very differently," she reminded him, and he shrugged.
"Oh, I've been far too emotional and unpractical. I'm going henceforth
to look at things from the worldly and conventional stand-point."
She put out her hand beseechingly. "Oh, leave that for the rest of us.
It quite spoils you."
"I don't pretend to think--" He made his gaze small as he looked past
her in an attitude of reflection. "Oh, I don't claim that, it's an
ideal way of looking at things. But there is not much idealism in the
modern divorce, is there?"
The Duchess took a turn across the floor, twisting her fair hands
together, then came round to his side and sat down on a low chair near
him.
"Are you quite serious?" she asked. "But I know that you are not. Let
me at least think so. Your words shock me horribly"--and she looked
piteously at him. "I have felt you to be such a gentle person, and
yours is such an understanding atmosphere."
Bulstrode had given himself methodically another cup of tea, and helped
himself now to sugar.
"Oh, atmosphere!" he repeated scornfully. "One can't live on air, you
know. And I have been of the most colorless kind."
"Well, you've changed terribly," she accused him.
"I've only come down to solid earth," he explained. "And the earth's
after all where we belong, Duchess. Stand firm, keep to your own part
of it, and don't cloud-gaze, or somebody with a claim will knock you
off your little foothold."
"Oh, _heavens_!" exclaimed his companion.
The gentleman, who appeared at length quite to have finished his
material enjoyment of the tea, put his second empty cup down and looked
at the lady.
"You should have married an American husband," he said to her, "a man
who would have idolized you, not cared whether you developed or not. A
duchess isn't far enough up. An American empress is higher."
The lady listening to him, shuddered a little.
"As it is," he went on regretfully, "you've been forced to develop,
whether or not you wanted to, to grow finer and freer, to go farther
on, to become more delightful. Here you are progressed and civilized,
after years of education, experience and suffering, and, my poor child,
here you are all alone."
She cried out, "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," with a little gasp.
"Oh, no, no," he softly ejaculated, "it is not fair! You're terribly
wasted, and you've been, as you too well know, terribly betrayed."
But here he felt her hand on his arm with a strong grasp. She shook
the arm a little.
"Don't go on," she said deeply. "I tell you not to go on." After a
few seconds, in which he heard the fire and the slow bubbling of the
gently boiling water and the cooing of the doves without, under the
eaves, the Duchess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to
you, let me say something now."
Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not
going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."
The Duchess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.
"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a
feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we
specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new
and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I
was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time
ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my
position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in
that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I
have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I
was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my
husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my
worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on
a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us
for being so far away."
She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when
she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.
"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to
those empty rooms."
He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."
"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably
never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find
my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized
that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me
that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it
is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he
came to me last year, at Cannes."
"You were wonderful!" he repeated again, "perfectly noble, and, as I
said before, Westboro' did not deserve you."
She did not here, as she had done before, catch him up; on the
contrary, after a few moments, she asked him point-blank:
"What then do you advise us, knowing us both, to do?"
He was distinctly disappointed that she should have put the question to
him, and gave her time to withdraw it as he asked tentatively: "You
really feel that you must ask me, Duchess?"
"Tell me, at all events."
"You are quite sure that you could not go back to your husband?"
After a little pause, she lingeringly said:
"Yes, quite sure. You must know that he will not be the first to break
the ice now." Then she pushed: "You would advise my filing my papers
for divorce?"
Held in this way pitilessly for a direct challenge, he met her eyes
with his own, asking her gently:
"Is there nothing that speaks for Westboro' more distinctly than
anything I can say? And more appealingly than anything which you in
all your pride feel?"
The Duchess assented that there was, with a movement of her lips; she
put her hands over her face and so sat quietly for a few moments, and
when she spoke again to her visitor, her words were irrelevant. When
some few moments after she bade him good-by, she regretted his absence
in London and begged him to come and see her as soon as he returned.
"Come," she said, "at least to see whether I am here or whether I have
pitched my tent and gone away."
As Bulstrode stood in the doorway she asked him: "I understand there
are a lot of people at the castle for Christmas, and among them will be
Mrs. Falconer? Isn't it so? Is she really so very lovely?"
"It's a different type of loveliness from yours," Bulstrode returned.
And the Duchess supposed: "A happier type?"
"Well, she's rather happy I think, take it all together," Jimmy said.
"Has she children?"
"None."
"Is she in love with her husband?"
And he was so long searching for a reply that the Duchess laughed
quietly.
"Poor man," she said, "don't bother. But then since she's so happy,
she must be in love with somebody else's husband."
But he put her right immediately.
"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since
happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind,
might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"
The Duchess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of
the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose
presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second
time.
"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she
wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."
When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week,
Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he
could not possibly be one of a second house party.
"Do you, then," Westboro' had asked, "_hate_ the holidays?"
The genial Bulstrode had assured him to the contrary.
"Nor do I," continued the Duke, "even though I'm a miserable man on the
verge of a divorce. I expect there's too long a line of jolly
Christmases back of the Westboro's for me to mope through the season.
But I don't want to have Christmas coming to an empty house, my dear
fellow"--He put it pathetically, "there's no one in this gloomy place
but yourself and myself. We must have a Christmas party. The tenants
will, of course, be noisy and cheerful, but I'm going to ask a lot of
people down and make the list out now."
And Bulstrode had, however, firmly insisted that he could not really
stop on--that he must go away. "There are," he wound up his arguments,
"a thousand reasons why I should go."
But Westboro' had comprehendingly suggested that they might together
bring "every reason" down to the country. "And," continued his Grace,
"we'll narrow things into the most intimate circle possible. For I
shall ask the Ravensworths of Surrey and their children, there are
eight of them, ripping little things; they used to play with my boys.
We'll turn them loose and have a tree, old man."
Jimmy watched his face with a keen pity, for there had not been one ray
of light in it as he planned for his celebration.
"But you arrange to come back for Christmas Eve. There _must_ be some
one in charge--I mean to say, some one so that if the whole thing is
too much for me, why I'll bolt and you'll have to stand by."
He was, as he spoke, writing the names on a sheet of paper. Bulstrode
felt the plan to be rather _triste_ and lifeless, and he knew that he
could not and would not keep the Duchess' secret much longer, let its
revelation cost him what it would.
"Westboro'," he said, "I shall have to be getting off to-morrow. You
know I would stand by you if I could possibly see my way clear."
"I know perfectly well," the Duke acknowledged, "what a rotten bore
I've been, and how sick of me you must be." He wrote on: "I shall ask
Mrs. Falconer (her husband is in the States); she is quite alone in
town at Lady Sorgham's." As he quoted this last name the Duke folded
his list up. He nodded affectionately at Jimmy. "You'll arrange
perhaps to come down with Mrs. Falconer on the Friday train?"
And Bulstrode capitulating weakly, murmured, "Oh, we'll fetch the toys
and things for the tree," he offered.
"Ripping!" his Grace nodded.
Jimmy, on his way at last to London, stopped once more at The Dials,
and was hurrying across the forest when the Duchess herself appeared to
him at the big dial. She wore her furs, muff, and big enveloping
stole, her hat with fur on it, and a veil. She was not in house or
garden trim. The urban air of her toilet was a surprise to Bulstrode,
and he took in her readiness for something he had not expected,
something great, something decisive.
"It's good of you to come when you must be full of delightful ways of
passing your time, Mr. Bulstrode," she said, "and I wanted so much to
see you again."
"Again?"
"Of course," she replied nodding, "again and many times. But I mean I
wanted to see you _here_." Bulstrode did not want her to tell him a
piece of final news. He did not care to learn of an arbitrary
departure, and he said, laughing: "Then you don't like my property?
Any repairs you...?"
"Oh, I adore The Dials," she said gravely, "and I can't think why they
ever let you buy it, or what you'll do with it after I'm gone." She
smiled. ".... or with whom." Before he could speak she added: "Where
is my husband to-day?"
"I left him wandering about the house like a lost spirit," Bulstrode
replied. "Looking," he went on, "all about for something or other. I
expect he himself didn't quite know what. For something to cheer up
the empty rooms."
"Oh, don't," she murmured.
But he seemed pleased with the picture he drew. "I doubt if Westboro'
stops in the house alone; he's probably gone out shooting."
"But he has a house full of people....?"
"No one has come, or is coming, after all."
"You don't mean to say that they've all refused!"
"Yes," Jimmy said, "every man of them, and all the women as well."
The Duchess put out her hand quickly, and said touchingly: "Oh, but you
don't for a moment think----"
"That it's because of the scandal, dear lady?" he smiled. "Well, that
would be a new phase. No, I think on the other hand they would revel,
and the only reason in the world that they have not come down is that
they were really asked too late. Christmas week, you know--
"And, of course, then, Mrs. Falconer," the Duchess's face brightened.
"She----"
"Oh, _she_!" Bulstrode exclaimed, "she's as right as possible. She's
sure to be along in good season."
"Oh!" accepted the Duchess, "and with whom does she come?"
Bulstrode waited. "Well, of course, the poor thing expects to find
more or less some one to help her bear up her end. And I can't say how
she will take the fact of only us two."
The Duchess interrupted cheerfully:
"Why, she, of course, will go directly back! You don't think for a
second that she would stop on alone like that?"
"Alone?" Bulstrode gave her with a little malice. "But she'll have
Westboro' and me so entirely to herself and one can always ask in the
rector or curate or corral a neighbor."
But the Duchess shook her head as if she understood. "Oh, no, not at
this time."
Bulstrode miscomprehended blithely: "Christmas time? You see, I know
the visiting lady pretty well, and I believe she'll feel me to be more
or less of a standby, and I know her spirit and her human kindness. I
am inclined to think that she will feel it's up to her not to run off
like a hare; to think that Westboro' may, in a way, need her; and that
when she finds everybody's gone back on the poor man, and there's to be
no tree after all, why, I'm tempted, by jove, to think----"
The Duchess helped him: "That she'll make a charity of it."
"Yes, if you like," he laughed. "Or be a sport," he preferred to put
it. "Stay on, stand by. It will be perfectly ripping of her, you
know."
But the Duchess had no sympathy for the other woman. Her eyes fixed
themselves on the trees before her, and as a shot rang out in the
distance she said abruptly: "Why, that might be Cecil, mightn't it?
Does he shoot birds on your premises?"
Bulstrode wondered very much for what reason she was habited in street
dress and furs, whether she had planned to leave The Dials or had
intended going up to see her husband.
"Forgive me," he said, "if I seem to be shockingly in a hurry, but I
must have a look at the time, for as it happens, even in this far-off
place, I have an engagement."
Impulsively putting out her hand the Duchess exclaimed: "I can't ever,
ever thank you."
"Oh, after your divorce----"
But she cried out so against his words that he hastened: "You want me
to think then that you do not believe...."
"Believe!" she ardently repeated, "Oh, I don't know what I believe or
think," and he saw that the poor thing spoke the truth. "It's I who am
as unstable as the sea, I who am the derelict."
He contradicted her gently: "My dear, you're only trying to solve alone
a problem which it takes two to answer. When you see Westboro' you
will know."
She turned on him with the first sparkle of humor he had ever seen her
display. "Why don't you marry Mrs. Falconer?"
He didn't start; indeed, the idea had such a familiar sound it would
have been hard to frighten him with it from any corner.
"I thought you didn't believe in divorces?"
"Oh, but you'd make a wonderful husband!"
He laughed. "No one has ever thought so--_la preuve_....?"
With great frankness in her gesture and a great--he was quick to see
it--a great affection--she put out her hand to him and said: "Oh, yes,
you'd make a wonderful companion, and you've been a wonderful friend.
If anything good comes to me now, I shall in great measure owe it to
you."
He protested: "You owe me nothing, nothing."
There were tears in her eyes as she said: "But I want to, I like to,
and I do. I don't know," she went on, "that I might not have been
reconciled ultimately to my husband, but I feel quite sure it would
only have been the basting up of the seam--it would have ripped away
again. Did you ever--" she challenged him with still a little sparkle
of humor, "hear of a thing called a change of heart?"
"Yes, at Methodist meetings."
She said gravely: "That's not what I mean. But whatever _has_ happened
it's only been since you told me things."
Her face was so girlish, her eyes so sweet, her humility so sudden,
that her companion found himself embarrassed and could hardly find
words to say good-by to her. She went on to say, in a tone so low that
he bent a little over the dial to hear her. "You told me you could not
advise my husband to come to me."
Ah, had he! It was hard to remember that. _Had_ he said so?
"I think," she whispered, "you need not keep him away now, if he should
want to come."
As her friend said nothing, she added in a voice more like a child than
a great Duchess, "You may trust me. I _want_ him to come-- There,
I've said it. I _hope_ he'll come. If he doesn't--
"Why, then, you'll go away," he finished. "You can't bear it."
The Duchess shook her head. "I'll go to him, on the contrary."
"You were going?"
"Yes, when you came."
He cried out: "Oh, I'm off then, I'm off for London, and I shan't be
back for the Christmas holidays. You may count on me."
The Duchess smiled delightfully, and was in a second the elusive woman,
intangible, and impossible to seize.
"No, no," she said, "please don't exile yourself either to-day or
to-morrow. It isn't after all the moment, and I want to prove to you
that I'm not jealous. I've decided to wait until that lovely woman has
gone away."
The waste of his territory, its largesse to no purpose, its vastness
through which only unbearable silences echoed; accumulated revenues and
hereditary title, only added to the Duke's melancholy.
He had planned the Christmas house party too late as it proved, and
refusals, one after another, came in during the week. The poor
gentleman's mood led him to resent each fresh defection on the part of
his guests as personal wounds inflicted by old friends at a time when
charity would have been sweet. And it was with really tragic
melancholy that he threw the last letter down exclaiming:
"And they all with one consent began to make excuse."
He quite waited for a line from Mrs. Falconer, which would tell him
that she, too, had decided to abandon him: and the thought of what he
believed to be Jimmy's complications at The Dials caused him half to
regard the matter with a pity for her.
"If Jimmy _isn't_ married, he's the most whited of sepulchres!"
The satin shine of holly, the glimmer of pearly mistletoe, the odor of
spruce and pine, and heavier scent of hemlock bewitched the castle
throughout with their fragrance. Setting and decoration suggested a
feast, and the Duke as he passed through the upper halls, and by the
doors of his children's rooms, saw holly wreaths on the walls and that
the little gates were twisted with green.
The day was dampish and the Duke, unable to bear the silence of the
house, with his gun and his dogs and with a lack of resource and
superfluity of ennui to urge him from the castle, started to tramp off
his unrest. The afternoon was young, and the bare, naked sunlight fell
over the bare nakedness of the land. The little low clumps of
neutral-colored underbrush, the reddish-brown thickets between wood and
field, would hide the birds well, and with his gun across his back, his
hands in his pockets, his Grace covered many miles before he at length
stopped to take in the length of the land or to listen for wings.
Coveys had flown up and away unseen by him, and their whirring unheard.
His dogs had run off, and without being abruptly brought to heel,
skulked back by themselves shamefaced and bewildered by the hunter's
indifference. The holly reddened on the hedges, the scarlet berries
bright among the glowing leaves; high in the poplars the parasite
mistletoe with crystal balls, hung tiny white globules like fairy
grapes; holiday in the air, and over the grey winter landscape the
finest possible powder of snow lay pale under the furtive sun. As the
forest edges closed about him and the Duke with still no idea of where
he was going, continued to tramp, he unconsciously entered the property
Bulstrode had lately acquired, and which he had begged his friend to
avoid.
There was something in the country air, in its pungent sweetness, and
in the season, that penetrated even Westboro's melancholy, and every
now and then he lifted his head to breathe in deeply the fragrance of
hemlock and the cold earthy aroma, the spice of bracken and the balm of
a fragrant thicket that smelled like a rose. It was winter, however,
and although a snow bird piped in it and the sun was out, there was a
December quality that, in the mood he was in, overcame all the
festivities of the time. He heard the bird who was persistent and
sharp-voiced, and, for the first time thinking of the other game he had
come out for, he paused. His dogs were gone, the beggars! He called
them to no purpose, whistled and waited. They were a new brace and
young. God knew where they had cut away to.
Before him, as he stood, the brown vistas of the winter forest opened
out here and there into ochre circles and filled at this hour with
brilliant sunlight, their round openings overflowing; the light
filtered gently out and was swallowed up by the cold and closer wood.
Under his feet there was only the faint ghost of the late snowfall on
the turned-up, curled-up edges of the dry leaves. There beeches, red
as copper, and iron-strong oaks struck their roots deep down into the
mould. Westboro' did not know where he had wandered to, but here and
there through the bare trees gleamed the white of a statue on its mossy
base, and a little farther along, a broken pedestal held its slender
column up amongst the tree trunks as mossy and veined as they, and
right in the heart of the bowl, on a brick pedestal was a sundial, a
round brass disc, cut into with the tooth of time, and all black and
green. The sun at this moment shone full on it and its slight shadow
fell along the noon. The Duke stooped down and through the glass read
the inscription:
_Utere dum licet_.
"I'm a trespasser," he thought. "This is Bulstrode's property."
Through an opening just to the right he could see a brown path, and at
the end of it a gate.
"What the deuce could Jimmy have so wanted this old place for? What
was he hiding here?"
He turned back with the intention of taking as sudden leave of the
place as he had made an entrance. He saw his dogs in front of him and
called them. Before him lay the clean low fall of the meadow with the
line of high hedge, and directly opposite him he could see the elms of
his own park. He had not gone more than a couple of hundred feet away
before he paused again and turned about to have one last look back at
the enchanting place. As he stood thus, in Jimmy's property, he at
first took it to be a trick of vision, for he stood perfectly rigid,
peering back at the opening he had left not five minutes before. He
leaned forwards, setting his eyeglass and staring at two figures who
had come into the bowl and stood close by the big dial.
He set his gun on the ground and leaned upon it. There was a cordial
meeting; he could hear the voices but he could not distinguish their
words, and during all the interview, which must have consumed some
fifteen minutes, the Duke never stirred. Finally, and curiously enough
it seemed a short time to him, they took leave of each other, the man
going out of the forest by a different path, the woman slowly turning
down the neat walk that led to the brick arch, and to the old house.
Whether or not the Duke had at this moment the vaguest suspicion of
her, suspicion of his friend or of his wife that did them wrong, he
never had time or clearness to reflect or to ask himself. A dense
blindness took his senses away from him. He put his hands out to
steady himself in vain, and staggered. His dogs were at his feet, he
fell over them, struggled to get his balance back and like a stricken
tree went down. In his heavy fall on his gun it discharged, filling
his upper arm and shoulder with a quantity of bird shot. The
scattering pain, instead of finishing his faint, roused him with a
sharp, ugly sting, and the rush of the warm, wet blood. He half picked
himself up, and then, aware of the pain tearing his muscles and flesh,
he fell back like a dog on his haunches. Through his confusion he
still contrived to remember a little path, and inch by inch he dragged
himself towards it. He pulled along over the leaves and russet paths
of ground. His bare hand finally struck the bricks of the little walk
and he could still know that he was wonderfully in the road. There was
a cloud before his swimming eyes and his troubled mind; his face, pale
as death, was lifted towards the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he
crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell
across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his
broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to
be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the
grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years
before the present Duke.
After Bulstrode had left her, the Duchess of Westboro' hurried back to
the house that was not her home; to the little long drawing-room that
was not hers. For the first time since her voluntary exile, since her
occupation of this asylum, she found it bereft of charm and the cosey,
dear place as cold to her as if the snows had drifted in and filled a
deserted nest. It had nevertheless been a cloister, and she knew it,
where the best of her had prayed, where the true woman--and the true
woman is always something of a saint--had folded submissive hands,
where self had gone away and left nothing at all but love.
On this Christmas Eve, The Dials was the loneliest corner of England.
The scarcely occupied house suggested to the Duchess the thought of a
stocking hung before a chimney when there were no children who cared
whether it was filled or not, when there was no reason why St. Nicholas
should pass. But it was only the very edge of her thoughts that
touched anything so fantastic as this picture. The Duchess was serious
and lonely. With a sigh, and winking back tears she threw off her
furs, laid off her hat, and, after poking up the fire into sparkling
brightness, she wandered up-stairs to the apartment that she had made
her bedroom. Under the low eaves the bed-chamber shone out gay with
chintz, fresh and sweet as a midwinter bouquet, the frostiness coming
in around it through the slightly opened window, and there was the
scent of the firs and the cedar wood that closely hemmed the old place
in.
"Heavens!" thought the Duchess, half aloud. "How dreadfully in love
Jimmy Bulstrode is, how dreadfully, faithfully in love!" And then she
went on to say: "How dreadfully I am myself in love, and no one is
hurrying to _me_!"
She walked aimlessly about the pretty room, irritated and annoyed at
the cloister effect. She found it too remote, too virgin, and no room
for a wife. "I promised," she mused, "to wait until Mrs. Falconer has
gone. I shall break my promise. Oh, I can't really wait at all! If
things are going to be as bad as this, I want to leave England, I want
at least to know. And Jimmy will forgive me, it's such a wonderfully
good cause ... a woman going to find her husband on Christmas Eve!"
The Duchess threw open the window to its widest. Down in the garden on
the stone wall the big dial lay in the shadow of the afternoon. She
could not read its motto, but she knew perfectly what it said--_Utere
dum licet_. As she leaned out above her garden, under her window the
snowballs hung their waxen globes in a green tree. There were a few
winter roses blooming, and the English garden had the beauty of summer
in winter time.
The Duchess heard a sharp sound close to the house. It was a rifle
shot, and died instantly on the still air. Shots were not uncommon in
this season, but here in The Dials woods they were entirely out of
character; in fact, they were quite inadmissible. There was no
shooting let, and a shot could only mean poaching, or something more
serious. The Duchess waited a few moments, but no other sound
followed. She nevertheless drew the casement in, and, going down
stairs threw her stole about her shoulders and opened the house door
into the garden. At the sight of her, down by the other end of the
wall, the gardener lifted up his bent form, and with a little pannier
of hot-house violets in his hands, hurried towards his lady.
"Mellon," said she, "have you any violets?"
The Duchess took the fragrant basket with its delicate burden.
"A mort, my lady."
"Pick them all, Mellon, and all the flowers from the green-house too,
every one of them, and fetch up whatever there is to the cottage."
The old man was deaf, as well as discreet, and if this sudden command
to vandalism surprised him, he did not say so. Holding his hand behind
his ear, he nodded.
"I shall send them," the Duchess thought, "up to Jimmy Bulstrode. I
think he will understand, and I will ask him at the same time to take
his friend off somewhere in a motor that I may go unobserved to the
castle."
She said a few more words to the old man, asked him a few questions,
then with the basket on her arm she was about to turn away when she
remembered the shot.
"Did you hear a shot, Mellon? They should not be shooting about here,
you know." But the old man had heard nothing, and, intending to find
the lodgekeeper who was clipping the trees on the lower terrace and ask
him to go through the woods for her, the Duchess walked toward the gate
and in the direction of the brick path.
As she came up to it she gave a low cry, lifted her hands to her heart;
the basket of flowers fell to the earth and scattered their purple
blooms at her feet. Then the hands that had gone to her heart
extended, she held out her arms and went forwards, crying her husband's
name.
The Duke of Westboro' had managed to pick himself up. He was a strong
man, in the fulness of health and vigor; there was nothing of the
mollycoddle about the last Duke of the line. The sound of voices had
reached his dull ear, his swoon was over, and he had manfully, with a
few sturdy curses, pulled himself up and now stood, albeit very pale,
clinging to the gatepost, leaning on it, finding his legs shaking and
his balance not all he could wish. Before him was a little brick
house, with bright curtains in the windows, and between it and himself,
lovely as a ghost, and no less white, was his wife, and her arms were
extended towards him.
"Cecil!" she cried. "Oh, my God! Cecil, what has happened to you?"
Before Westboro' knew it, the arms to which he had gone in visions were
about him and the soft shoulder gave him a prop more fragile perhaps
than the stone against which he leaned, but it was a living support,
and it felt warm and wonderful.
"Don't," he said vaguely, "get near me. I'm nasty and bloody. It's
all right; I'm only a bit scratched, really. A lot of beastly shot has
gone off into my shoulder. Just call some one to help me, will you?"
"Cecil," she said, "lean on me, put your arm around my shoulder; you
can perfectly well get along with only me. Come, come!"
The Duke saw that he could perfectly get along with another faint--he
was near to it, but something besides his wound and his light head kept
him manfully to his feet. With his left hand he very firmly pushed the
Duchess a little away from him.
"Come?" he repeated. "Come where?"
"Home," said the Duchess with a catch in her voice--she was bearing up.
"Oh, lean on me! You'll fall, you'll fall! Mellon!" she cried. "O
Mellon!"
But the Duke put up his hand. "I'm all right," he said. "Don't call.
What house is that? What home do you mean?"
"Mine," said the Duchess, "my house--that is, I mean to say, Mr.
Bulstrode's."
The Duchess saw a slight wave of red rush up her husband's pale cheek.
"Damn Bulstrode!" he breathed. "What the devil does he do here? I saw
you together--I saw you not half an hour since--that is the whole
mischief of it--it was too much for me--it took away my senses and I
fell on my gun, and the beastly thing went off. If I ever get back to
where Bulstrode is----"
"Cecil!" cried the Duchess. She again wound her arms around him, and
it was as well that she was a strong, fine creature and that the
columns of the gate were back of him, for Westboro' was swaying like a
child that has just learned to walk.
"He is fainting!" she cried. "Mellon, Mellon!"
The old man had not heard his mistress but he had seen her, and after
staring open-mouthed at the couple at the gate, he came scurrying like
a rabbit, dropping his shears on the wall. They hit the big dial with
a ring.
The Duke heard the steps and tried to start forwards; also tried weakly
to extricate himself from his wife's embrace. "I beg your pardon," he
said, with a coolness that had something of the humorous in its
formality--"I beg your pardon, but I am _not_ going to Bulstrode's
house, you know."
"_Cecil_," pleaded the woman tenderly, "how ridiculous you are!
Bulstrode's house! Why, it's mine! Oh, don't break my heart. He's
only bought it, you know, that's all."
"Break her heart!" It was a new voice that spoke to the Duke of
Westboro'. He had never heard it in all his life. It was warm and
struggling for clearness, it was full of tears and quivering, it was
the voice of love, and unmistakable, certainly, to a lover.
"What was Bulstrode doing here?" he persisted.
"Going to Mrs. Falconer," breathed the Duchess.
The Duke moved a step forwards: "What are you doing here?"
"Going to you, Cecil--I have _been_ going to you all day. I think I
have been going to you ever since you left me that night on the
Riviera; at any rate, I was on my way to the castle as you came."
The Duke halted again on his crawling way. Mellon, who had really
reached his side, was doing his best to be of some use and kept himself
well under the wounded arm, on which the blood had clotted and dried,
but ceased to flow.
"Lean hard on me, your Grace," pleaded the gardener, and with his word,
he looked over at his mistress to see if she realized who their noble
visitor was.
With fine disregard for his help or existence, the Duke said crossly:
"Send this damned gardener away."
"Oh, Cecil, no, no; you can't stand without him."
They had reached the garden wall, just at the place where the big dial,
round and shining, had come a little out of the shadow and the last of
the afternoon sun touched its edges. Westboro' lurched towards the
wall. "Send this man away," he commanded.
"He is deaf, Cecil, as the stones." But at her husband's face she
motioned to Mellon: "Stand away a bit. His Grace wants to rest on the
wall. I'll call you."
With his wife's arms about him, Westboro' leaned on the garden wall,
his ashen face lifted to her.
"I've only one arm," he said. He put it around her and he drew her
down as close to him as he could. He felt her face warm against his,
wet against his with tears. As the Duke, who, Bulstrode said, was no
lover, kissed his wife, the dial seemed to sing its motto aloud.
"You _were_ coming to me?" he breathed. "Do you forgive me? ... Then,"
said Westboro', satisfied by what he heard, "I'm cured. I love you--I
love you."
The woman could not find her voice, but as she held him she was the
warmest, sweetest prop that ever a wounded man leaned upon. After a
few seconds she helped him to rise, helped him on, and he found his
balance and his equilibrium to be very wonderful under the
circumstances, and managed to reach the door-sill. Mellon and the
maids were there, and as the Duchess passed in, leading her husband,
she bade them send for a doctor as fast as they could and to send at
once for Bulstrode at the castle.
Westboro's wound had become a sort of intoxication to him, and he
assured her, "I'll be all right in an hour. I need no one but you;
send them all away, all away."
He had never commanded her before, he had let her rule him, he had been
indifferent to her disobedience. But now she did what he bade her, and
led him to the drawing-room, suddenly repossessed of all its old charm;
led him to the lounge, where he sank down. Here, by his side, she gave
him stimulants and bathed his head and hands, waiting for the doctor to
come; and Westboro', like his ancestors who had fought in the King's
wars, bore up like a man with no resemblance whatsoever to the amorous
cavalier whose curls had met the dust of the road for love of Queen
Elizabeth.
The Duchess found him that best of all things--very much of a man, and
knew that he was hers. And he, more wild with love for her than
suffering physical pain, found her a woman and knew that she loved him
and that she was his.
The house, so deserted and desolate an hour ago, grew fresh, warm, and
rosy as over the west meadows the sunset, gilding the wall and The
Dials, flushed the windows red, and the deserted bird's-nest, lately
"filled with snow" appeared to have, as the light rained upon it,
filled itself with roses. So, an hour later, it seemed to Bulstrode,
when he came and found it housing the lovers.
THE EIGHTH ADVENTURE
VIII
IN WHICH HE COMES INTO HIS OWN
England, the heart of the countryside, freshened by December and
drifted over by delicate breaths that are scarcely fog, and through
which like a chrysanthemum seen behind ground glass the sun contrives
to shine, the English country in December is one thing, London quite
another.
Jimmy wandered across from Paddington to his destination, part of the
time on foot, part of the time peering from a crawling hansom in
immediate peril of collision with every other object that like himself
lost bearings in the nightmarish yellow fog.
He fetched up before No. ----, Portman Square, at mid-day, and rang the
door bell of Lady Sorgham's town-house, and in his eagerness to find
his friend did not ask himself how the time accorded with calling hours.
She was at home.
An insignificant footman told him this, and the gentleman reflected
that it was astounding what the words, heard often in the course of ten
years, meant to him still.
In the sitting-room, before a coal fire, a writing table at her side, a
pen in her hand, he found Mrs. Falconer.
He sincerely struggled with an inability to speak at once, even the
consoling how-d'-dos that cover for us a multitude of feelings, were
not at his tongue's end.
The fire had burned away a few feet of fog and lighted lamps and
candles shone pallidly through an obscurity about whose existence there
could be no doubt.
The inmates of Lady Sorgham's thoroughly English and thoroughly
comfortable drawing-room were aliens, possessing neither of them a
hearthstone within range of several thousand miles. But no sooner had
they greeted--Bulstrode triumphantly peering at her through both real
and mental haze--shaken hands, and each found a seat before the grate,
than an enchanting homeliness overspread the place. Bulstrode felt it
and smiled with content to think she did as well, and remembered an
occasion in America when they had both of them missed a train for some
out-of-the-way place and found themselves side by side in a mid-country
station to pass there three hours of a broiling afternoon. The flies
and mosquitoes buzzed about them, the thermometer registered ninety
degrees, but happy, cool and unruffled Mary Falconer, smiling up at him
from her hard bench, had said:
"Jimmy, let's _build_ here!"
"No one, Jimmy, is old"--Mrs. Falconer had once said to him on an
occasion when a word regarding gray hairs had drifted into their
conversation. Noticing the smooth reflection of the light along her
hair, Bulstrode had spoken of its golden quality, and the lady had
suddenly covered the strand with her hand; she knew that there ran a
line she did not want him to see.
"No one is old, Jimmy, who has even the least little bit of future
towards which he looks! It's only those people whose doors are all
shut, whose window blinds are all drawn to, who, no matter which way
they look, see no opening into a distance towards which they will want
to go--only those people are old!"
And as for Bulstrode, if Mrs. Falconer's idea were right, he was a very
young man still, for at the end of every path others opened and led
rapidly away. Scene gave on to scene, dissolved and grew new again.
Every door gave to rooms whose suites were delightful, indefinite, and
all followed towards a future whose existence Bulstrode never doubted.
But there were certainly times, as the days went methodically on, there
were decidedly many times when it took all his faith and his spirit to
endure the _étape_ that lay between self and life. Such a little
tranquil home as a certain property he had lately acquired was what he
dreamed of sharing with Mrs. Falconer. He did not, with any degree of
anxiety, ask himself whether or not it were dead men's shoes he was
waiting for, and no clear, formulated thought of tangible events took
existence in his mind. But he knew that he waited for his own.
It was with some such personal feeling that in something that looked
like a future he might one day lead the woman he loved home, that he
had taken any pleasure whatsoever in his involuntary purchase of the
old property known as The Dials. The gray house down in Glousceshire
in its half-forsaken seclusion, the lie of the land round it, its
shut-offness from the world, its ancient beauty, had been a constant
suggestion to him of a future dwelling, and the doors, the windows, the
low-inviting rooms, the shadowy stairways, ingles, gables, terraces,
the dials and sunken gardens, had appeared to him conceived, planned
and waiting to be the settings for a life of his own. He wanted very
much to tell Mrs. Falconer all about the lovely English country-seat.
In the room where they now talked, wreaths of fog filled the corners
like spiders' dusty webs that poised and swung. The odor that stamps
England hung in the mist, furthermore permeated with the scent of a
bouquet at Mrs. Falconer's elbow and which at one moment of his visit
Jimmy recognized for a lot of roses sent by parcel post from the
Westboro' greeneries.
"Do you ever sew?" he asked her, and she admitted to a thimble which
persistently, with a suggestion of reproach, turned up every now and
then amongst her belongings; now falling out from a jewel box, then
stowed away in a handkerchief case, out of place and continually
reproachful: kept because it had been her mother's.
If he did not speak other than in a general way of the rather long
visit he had been making to the Duke of Westboro' in Glousceshire, he
did tell his friend all about The Dials and dwelt on the fascination
that the old place possessed. The Dials was, in point of fact, very
agreeably described to Mrs. Falconer, who looked it out on the map of
Glousceshire, and Bulstrode's purchase (for he had legally gone in for
it, the whole thing), was made to seem a very jewel of a property.
"It's as lovely as an old print," she said, "as good as a Turner.
You're a great artist along your lines, Jimmy. Don't have it rebuilt
by some more than designing architect in trouble, or landscape-gardened
by some inebriated Adam out of charity. Leave it beautifully alone."
"Oh, I will," he assured her. "It shall tumble away and crush away in
peace. You shall see it all, however," he assured, "for you really
will come down for Christmas? You see, poor old fellow, Westboro's
house is rather empty."
"Yes," nodded Mrs. Falconer.
"You see, every one else has gone back on him."
"Poor dear," sympathized the lady. "Of course we'll go down."
No matter to what extent he had thought of her, and it was pretty sure
to be a wide one, her beauty struck him every time afresh. There was
the fine exquisiteness of _fin de race_ in Mary Falconer. Her father
had been an Irishman born, and the type of his island's lovely women
was repeated in his daughter's blue eyes, the set of her head and her
arms; her taper and small-boned little wrists, her cool hands with the
slender fingers told of muscle and moulding and completed the
well-finished, well turned-out creature whose race it had taken
generations to perfect. These distinctions her clever father
bequeathed her as well as her laugh and her wit, her blue eyes and her
curling hair.
Bulstrode stayed on in the dingy delightful room, until at an order of
his hostess, luncheon was served them on a small table, and over the
good things of an amazingly well-understood buffet and a bottle of
wine, they were left alone. Bulstrode stayed on until the fog in the
corners darkened to the blackest of ugly webs and choked the fire and
clutched the candles' slender throats as if to suffocate the flame.
Tea was served and put away and the period known as _entre chien et
loup_ at length stole up Portman Square alongside the fog and found
Bulstrode still staying on....
Later, much later, when the lamps in the street and the square found
themselves, with no visible transition, lighting night-time as they had
lighted day--when the hansoms began to swing the early diners along to
their destinations, a hansom drew up before No. ----, Portman Square.
It was at the hour soft-footed London had ceased to roll its rubber
tires down the little street, and only an occasional cab slipped by
unheard. But a small hand cart on which a piano organ was installed
wheeled by No. ----, Portman Square, and stopped directly under the
Sorghams' window and a man began to sing:
"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."
The creature was singing for his living, for his supper doubtless,
certainly for his breakfast, but he chanced to possess a remarkable
gift and he evidently loved his trade. The silence--wherein all London
appeared to listen, the quiet wherein the magically suspended room had
swung and swung until even Bulstrode's clear mind and good sense began
fatally to blur and swing with the pendulant room--was broken into by
the song.
And as Bulstrode moved and turned away his eyes from the woman's lovely
face, she sighed and covered her own eyes with her hands. The small
coffee table had been taken away. Mrs. Falconer was in a low chair
leaning forwards, her hands lying loosely in her lap. The distance
between the two his hand could have bridged in one gesture. The voice
of the street singer was superb, liquid and sweet. He sang his ballad
well.
"I'll sing thee songs of Araby
And tales of old Cashmere."
Mrs. Falconer's guest rose.
"You'll come down for Christmas," he said, "and I'll meet you as we
have arranged, to-morrow."
"Jimmy," she protested, "it's only ten o'clock."
"I must, however, go."
"Nonsense. Where will you pass the next hour and a half? There's not
a cat in town."
"Nevertheless, I promised a man to meet him at the...."
"_Jimmy_!"
He had reached the door, making his way with a dogged determination
and, like a man who has touched terra firma after months on a dancing
brig, still not feeling quite sure of the land or its tricks.
"How you hurry from me," she said softly.
"Oh, I'm hurrying off," he explained brightly, "because I want to get
hold of that chap out there and take him to supper, and to find out why
he isn't on the operatic stage. He's got a jolly voice. Good night,
good night."
He was gone from her with scant courtesy and a brusquerie she knew
well, adored and hated! During these last years she had done her cruel
best, her wicked best, to soften and change and break it down.
The curtains, as she drew them back, showed that the fog had for the
most part lifted, and she was just in time to see the piano and the two
musicians disappear in the mist which still tenaciously held the end of
the street in shadow--a gentleman in long evening cloak and high hat
hurried after the street people. The woman's face was tender as she
watched the distinguished figure melt into the fog, and at her last
glimpse of her friend she blew a kiss against the pane.
Bulstrode did not go back that night to Westboro'. He wired out that
Mrs. Falconer and himself would be down for dinner the following day
and he also wired for a motor to meet him some few miles from Penhaven
Abbey, as the motor did the next day.
As he speeded towards Penhaven Bulstrode leaned towards the man who
drove him.
"Stop first at the inn, will you, Bowles? I'll order tea there, and
then drive on to the station at the Hants. It's the three o'clock from
London we're to meet, you know, and we've just the time."
The Abbey and its clustering village hung on the hill side some fifteen
lovely miles away to the south of them. And Bulstrode, who was at
length obediently answering the call of it, and in response to the
fancied bell of the entire country side, religiously hastening to
whatever might reward him, settled himself back in his corner.
He saw the mist fly by him as his carriage cut out its way rapidly
through Glousceshire. The air was not too cold in spite of the
dampness, for the vapor rose high, and above and below it the
atmosphere was clear.
Mrs. Falconer herself had chosen Penhaven as a place possible to drive
over to as far as Bulstrode was concerned, and far enough away to stop
over in, for tea. Bulstrode carried in his pocket the note of it, she
had written out for him. It bore the arrivals of trains, the address
of the inn; she had herself written this, recurring to a pretty fallacy
she liked to indulge in that Jimmy forgot trains, missed them, and
forgot rendezvous, and that he never really knew. Well, at all events,
he was not likely to miss meeting this one. He had thought about
nothing else since he left her in London and prepared for her as he was
always preparing for her as one makes ready for the dearest guest at a
feast.
The fact that not only had she divinely consented to the Penhaven
scheme, but that she had herself arranged the whole thing, made the
romance of the idea first appeal to herself and then readily to
Bulstrode; the fact that she had been the creator of the little
excursion that gave them to each other for several hours before what
the castle had to offer them of surprise or dulness--did not in any
measure rob the occasion of the charm of the _imprévue_ for the lady
herself. Nor did she in the least feel that it was any the less his
because it was so essentially her own plan.
It proved either too cold or too late to see the cathedral, to see
anything more than the close which, side by side, they had wandered
through together a few moments before tea. Penhaven's distinguished
gloom was not disturbed, and in their subterranean vaults lying all
along their stones, the dukes and the abbés and the duchesses remained
unlit in their stern crypts by the verger's candle on this Christmas
Eve.
At the little vulgar inn (in a stuffy sitting-room a fire had
spluttered for some quarter of an hour before the train arrived), Mrs.
Falconer had made Jimmy his tea in a vulgar little bowl-like teapot,
and as her hands touched the pottery's blue glaze served very well for
a halo. As she buttered him slices of toast herself, and spread them
with gooseberry jam and herself ate and drank and laughed and
chattered, she had been, with the tea things about her and her sleeves
turned back as she cut and buttered and spread, she had been with the
roundness of her wrists and the suave grace of her capable hands, most
adorably a woman, most adorably dear.
Her furs and coat laid aside, the hat at his asking laid aside in
order, although he did not tell her so, that the air of home might be
more complete for them. _Vis-à-vis_ they had eaten together and
laughed together and talked together till it grew later and later, and
the motor waited without in the yard amongst the ravens and the ducks
who peered from the straw of their winter quarters at the big awkward
machine.
"Jimmy" ... she had started when the crumbs and dishes had been cleared
away, and for some seconds did not follow up his name with any other
word. It was always Bulstrode who took wonderful care of the time. It
was he who gave her her hat, its pins, her coat, her furs, her gloves,
one by one, her muff last, his eyes on her, as each article slowly went
to place, until her big white veil wound and wound and pinned and
fastened and hid her. "Jimmy," she whispered, as he ruthlessly and
definitely opened the door and the cold rushed in, "let's build _here_."
Still it was she who took all the blame of their tardy departure from
the homely hospitality of the inn; she assured him that she could make
a wonderful toilet and in an incredibly short time, and that for once
she wouldn't be late for dinner at the castle.
"Not," Bulstrode assured her, "that it in the least matters, but the
Duke, as likely as not, would choose to dine alone; he was a man of
moods."
"In which case," she had stopped with her foot on the auto step,
"Penhaven isn't a bad place for tea, and why wouldn't dinner at this
perfect inn...."
But Bulstrode met her words with a shake of his head and a shrug of his
shoulders, and helped her firmly into the motor and sat again by her
side.
"I can't tell you," he said, "what will be going on at the castle. I
haven't been back since I left it two days ago, and almost anything can
have happened in that time. The Duchess of Westboro' herself, in the
interval, may have gone back to her husband."
"Heavens!" Mrs. Falconer exclaimed, "in which case how horribly _de
trop_ we shall be."
But Bulstrode consoled her with the thought that if they were _de trop_
they would at least be _de trop ensemble_.
Amongst the handful of letters waiting for her in her dressing-room at
the castle there had been a despatch from America. Even this, and a
hasty look at her mail had not succeeded in holding her attention or
even carrying it beyond the house. Her husband had expected to land in
Liverpool at the end of the coming week; he was to take her home with
him. And until he arrived she was breathing, as she always did in his
absence, deeply.
There had been no one to greet them as Bulstrode and herself came into
the castle, and she had hurried to her rooms to begin without loss of
time her boasted rapid toilet. The dress, whose harmony had impressed
her host, the Duke, on a former visit at the castle, had been laid out
for her; its sumptuous color overspread the bed. But the lady chose
instead a white gown whose art of holding to her, and holding her, in
its simple lines and splendid sheen, made its beauty.
There was much of the true woman in this entirely lovely creature, as
she stood before her glass and saw herself, the best example of the
really beautiful American. Her naturalness gave her a freedom, a
frankness, a grace, a certain imperial set of the head.
Bulstrode had once said to the Duchess of Westboro' that a woman should
above all "console." Mary Falconer would have known what he meant.
That sex she gloriously represented! The sweetness and dearness of
her. Well, there were few women no doubt like her. Jimmy hoped so for
the sake of the race, for the sake of the hearts of other men. She was
the ideal fireside of home, and when, as she had twice done, she bade
him, as that time she had said, "Build here," he knew what she meant
and felt, and that she herself was exquisitely home.
Leaning over her dressing-table she scrutinized not her face, whose
ardent beauty seemed to bloom upon the glass, but her hair as it fell
and rippled and flowed round her brows. Along the edge of one of the
lustrous waves was a touch as if her powder puff had brushed her hair.
Mrs. Falconer put up her hand, smoothed the line, then let it lie as it
grew. It so declared itself to be the first unmistakable white. A
gardener's basket full of roses and camelias, gardenias and carnations
had been sent up for her; but under the diamond at her breast she chose
rather to fasten in a spray of mistletoe with its pale, grape-like
berries. A long green scarf fell over her arm and against the
whiteness of her dress like a branch of spring verdure, and permitted
by the fashion of the day, there shook and trembled in her ears long,
pear-shaped pearls which, like her thimble, had been her mother's.
As she left the security of her room and fire for the corridors and the
publicity of the lower rooms, for the first time in her life she had a
sudden feeling of _pruderie_ at the bare beauty of her neck and arms.
She felt as if she were coming unclad into the street, and drew her
scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in
the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long
desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a
footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly
coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she
should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or
friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the
satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of
Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with
keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from
Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that
she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what
extravagant bent could the two men have gone?
"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare
say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."
Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself
a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector,
whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the
Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The
rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his
appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for
forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer
smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same
afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her
slender _vis-à-vis_ presented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled
kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of
disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms,
seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that
even the dull eyes of her _vis-à-vis_ not alone reflected, but
confirmed, how lovely she was.
The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that
he already knew its hearsays and its _on dits_ and he knew when she
asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been
that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery--for as she would
she could not help falling into them even with this half-human
creature--wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to
descend to scandal; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in
her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his
cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned
forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein
which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.
"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty--"cannot, so it would
seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look
for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples
and warnings."
The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields
and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.
His hand touched the little liqueur glass. He picked it up and in a
second of abstraction tried to drain its oily emptiness.
"Let me ring," said Mrs. Falconer, "and send for some more Benedictine,
or better still, for some _fine_."
"No," he refused, and sedately put her right. "No more of anything, I
think, unless it might be a bottle of soda. You spoke of lovely
Glousceshire and then spoke of The Dials. Do you know the place?"
Only, she told him, by hearsay.
He solemnly supposed so; so he himself chiefly knew it, as indeed all
the country side was growing to know it.
The eyes of the lady to whom the rector was retailing his little gossip
were intently on him. But Mrs. Falconer in reality was not looking at
him, neither did she at once find ready words to refute, to cast down,
to blot out, his hideous suggestion that filled the room with it sooty
blot.
Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense
Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type,
now looked sharply at her companion.
The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the
indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives.
Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in
the comedies and dramas of her _contemporains_. But there are ways and
channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another.
The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very
beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared,
never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all
save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such
peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector
was not able or sufficiently daring to affirm; with a cleverness worthy
a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor
might be.
"Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse
into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?"
She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes
were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him.
He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer;
she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its
finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest
she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew.
But she saw him leave her presence with relief.
When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the
deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects
with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible
exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it,
and her chin in her hand.
Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly
said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly
listened--was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of
thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had
half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at
the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had
seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and
the carousel as well, she saw how _wooden_ the horses were and that
they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came
loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly
re-instated what could never lose caste.
Oh, The Dials! She couldn't conceive what Jimmy had in reality,
rashly, delightfully done there; what he had planted or installed, if
he had planted or installed anything. But whatever the truth was, it
was sure to be essentially right, as far as ethics went--she knew that
at least. But Jimmy's delicacy and his heart were all too fine for the
crude wisdom of the world or for her common-sense, which would have
told him no doubt, had he cared to ask, that he was rash and wild.
She was prepared to hear that he had made some Magdalen a home in this
prudish country place. At this possibility Jimmy's kindness and
charity stood out graciously in strong contrast to the prudish judgment.
There were several long mirrors set in the panels of the room like
lakes between green shores of old brocade, and they reflected her as
she leaned forwards in her chair and looked about her, taking in the
brightness of the perfect little room. It had been cut off from the
wider, grander spaces for more intimate passages in the social course
of events, but there was nothing newly planned in its colors and
tapestries, its hangings and furnishings; the effect was sombre rather,
the objects had the air of use, of having participated in past
existences, and like faithful servants, they seemed to wait to serve
perfectly new events.
The especial brightness of the room came from the gay festooning that
had found its way throughout the castle. The mirrors were dark with
the velvet rounds of hemlock from which the miserable face of scandal,
the sardonic face of divorce, under the conditions of the present
domestic situation might well grin satyr-like from the Christmas
wreaths. No doubt there were lots of ghosts about, ready to stride, to
flutter, or to walk; the American woman put their histories and their
legends impatiently by.
The facile way in which the Duchess of Westboro' had slipped out from
the chafing of domestic harness, the egotistical _geste_ with which she
had so widely thrown over her responsibilities, fetched Mrs. Falconer
up to her own life, from whose problems indeed her husband's absence
alone set her free. Her affairs had lately rapidly progressed, flying,
whirling. The circles the event of her marriage had originally
created, touched at last the farthest limit; there was nothing left for
them now but to scatter. The vortex had rapidly narrowed down, was
narrowing down, and nothing remained but a sole object in the bed of
the clear water; and as Mary Falconer looked at it she knew that the
thing was a stone.
"We spend," she had once said to Bulstrode, "half our lives forging
chains, and the other half trying to make ourselves free." Hadn't she
wrenched with all her might to be rid of hers? materially she still
wore her bonds and moved with a ball.
As she had driven away from Charing Cross Station, a month ago, after
seeing her husband aboard the Dover and Calais special, she had
breathed--breathed--breathed--stretched her arms and hands out to
London, felt on her eye and brow a dew that meant the very dawning of
liberty broke for her, and that she was for the time at least blessed
by it, and free.
The Sorghams' London house had opened its refuge wide for her, and she
had gone into it like a child, to sleep and rest, and there she had
grown up again, to begin to think and to plan, project and puzzle as
those who grow up must do. She had never thought to such practical
purpose as she did in these days, and never come so nearly reaching an
end.
Just before dressing for dinner on this night, at the sensation the
touch of her husband's telegram gave her, she realized how near to a
not unusual decision she was, and when she put the envelope by with the
rest of her mail, the part of her mind which she would not let herself
look into was in confusion and doubt.
More effectively than Falconer's coming could have done, his few
telegraphed words brought him to his wife's consideration. And the
fantastic story of The Dials helped her, ridiculous as it was,
burlesque as it was, to think; in the very humor of it, a shock, and
helped her more reasonably to consider what otherwise her feelings
would have turned to tragedy.
Jimmy's ecstasies about the place recurred to her with renewed
cordiality. He had spent an hour at least describing it, and when he
had finished with "A woman must be there, it is made for a woman," Mary
Falconer had only seen herself in the frame that the old place
presented. She exclaimed aloud: "Oh, no, no," and continued to affirm
to herself that it was too fantastically absurd--"Jimmy!"
"It's only some delightful bit of charity, and he's too afraid of my
wretched conservatism and my ironies to have told me frankly about it."
Having in a very unfeminine way opened a crack for reason, its honest
face peered through, and Mary Falconer glanced at it with a sigh and a
half-amused recognition, as if she had not been face to face with
anything so cool and eminent for a long time.
Jimmy had hinted to her of a secret, in London; there was something he
said he wished to tell her about, would tell her in full later,
something that involved much happiness to others, and could it have
been this? Could it have been that he was really secretly married?
That at last the step of which he had constantly spoken, for which
indeed there had been times when together they had half-heartedly
planned for it, could it be that the one safeguard for them both had
actually been formed by him, and alone? But only a second would she
permit this conception of The Dials to obtain hold. "Ridiculous!" she
repeated, "ridiculous! Not that I believe a word or any innuendo of
the shocking old wizard, but it only shows, it only shows the
helplessness of a woman who is not bound to a man, and how entirely the
man is free!"
Nothing a man does counts well for him with a woman but those things he
does in accordance with her estimate of what his attitude towards her
should be! And Bulstrode's high-minded control, the reserve--which
since her marriage had been maintained, only counted now against him.
Wasn't she, in it all, rather counting without her host? Their bond
was so tacit, so silent, so unworded. Indeed, he had made no bond, had
asked her for no pledge. She was tied hand and foot, but he was free.
And over that freedom what vague right had she? What dominion could
she have? Isn't it, after all, in the life of a clever, delightful
man, something not strictly a burden, the soul-absorbing entire
devotion of a woman not too old and more or less not generally
disliked? What did it--heavens, but she was analyzing--what did it
cost him? Hadn't he always gone from her at a moment's warning, and
stopped away for months and months? Imperious as by nature she was,
she had always been wise enough to reserve a summons from her that, she
had every reason to believe, would fetch him from any distance to her
side. She never tested him, she scarcely ever wrote to him; she had
been at the Sorghams', and alone for a month, and save for one
perfectly delightful day he had not once turned up to keep her company.
As the woman's thoughts encompassed the subject they brought it up to
this: that as far as things went, at all events, there was no blame: no
matter how society had coupled their names, she had at least the
conscience of her acts clear. Jimmy was to be thanked for it from
beginning to end; as far as the conscience of her thoughts went, well,
those were her own affair. Oh, she could recall skirmishes and narrow
impasses! Her tactics had more than once been those only permitted by
the codes of battle, and of another passion.
Her chair, which she had left, she passed and repassed as she walked up
and down, trailing her soft dress across the floor. She stood before
the fire, her foot held out to the fervent flame.
Her face softened as there came out clearly to her the real picture of
Jimmy that always kept itself somewhere between her eyes and her brain.
Ah, there were men of talent and fashion, who did not hesitate to make
merry, who were more or less good, more or less anti-pathetic, and for
whom society never had a word of reproach--but Jimmy! distinguished and
charming, with every taste and means to gratify them, with--so to put
it--the woman of his heart at his very doors--how did he live? Why,
for everybody in the world but for himself. And through it all, in
spite of the fact that he appeared blindly to shut his eyes against
their mutual love, he lived for her. Oh, he was the best, the best!
She listened as she stood there for the hum of the motor which might
tell her he was coming back. She wanted to ask him to tell her the
truth about The Dials. She wanted, above all else, to see him again.
She remembered them, one by one, the happy occasions they had caught
and made the most of, and each after the other they became lovely
harbors where like ships her thoughts lay at anchor. Penhaven was
certainly one of the best. She congratulated herself that she had
conceived that day, and without any blame she acknowledged it to
herself, that if Jimmy had only wished it they would have been there
together now.
She had taken her chair again and sat back deeply in the great
fauteuil. The brocade made a dark-hued background against which her
head, frankly thrown back, defined its charming lines. Her bare arms
folded across her breast, her foot swinging gently to and fro, she
continued to muse and dream, and as she thought of Bulstrode, to love
him.
Some one came in and piled up the fire and slipped out, but no message
was brought her to tell her what had become of her host and her friend.
The long sympathetic silence beginning at the fireside flowed through
the vast rooms and corridors, and out into the night, down the lanes
and the road until its completeness and tonelessness were broken by the
memory of the bells of Penhaven, as she and Jimmy had heard them whilst
they rang the angelus in the close. And the discordant note of The
Dials was drowned, confused and lost in her intense listening to the
Penhaven bells. Some chord or other, or some fine spring touched as
she so thought on, brought back to her the fact of the despatch
upstairs, which if it had any, had an imperative importance. Falconer
had sent it from Palm Beach where he had gone to get rid of a
troublesome grippe. He did not, in the few lines which told he was
seedy and had put off his sailing, suggest that she should go back.
But he would not resent her return, she knew that, he would probably
treat her decently for at least a fortnight.
"I don't know a creature," she praised herself, "who would have stayed
on with Jack, and nothing but Jimmy has helped me to stick it out. If
he really loved me would he have let me go on as I have gone on? I
don't know. Unless he loved me could he have helped me at all? I
think not."
Round the figure of her friend there began to group, as if for some
special purpose, the kindnesses and charities she had seen him display.
One by one she added up his gifts and benefits until the poor and
outcast and forgotten and despised claimed all of them to be his
friends; they gathered round him and in place of the categoric
histories of self-love and indulgence, of passion that had in more or
less degree characterized the men of her set, these things came till
the dawn of them and the light of them made his figure shine. How, she
thought, could he ever have been what he so wonderfully is, if he had
lived for himself or been anything but the best? Upstairs, in her
room, a few hours before, the mark of silver on her hair had been a
whip to urge on her rebellion; to tell her to seize and make the most
of the fleeting time, to warn her of the age which when her beauty and
her youth were gone, was all that could remain for them both. But now
there began to blow across her soul a freshness. She had indeed been
drawing long breaths in her husband's absence, but free as they were
they left her stifled and panting, as if to get the oxygen she had been
obliged to climb too far. Now, on the contrary, she was lifted as by
wings, and whilst they fluttered about her she breathed evenly yet
fully, and the air on the heights was something better than wine.
There is an unspoiled enjoyment in the thing which has never given us
pain. It may be a sensual and ecstatic prerogative of passion to make
the object suffer, but there is a different sense of happiness in that
which never does harm or hurt or wrong to the thing it loves. So she
could think of Bulstrode, without pain, without regret, without
reproach. And if the ardor and passion in her became suffused and
slowly paled, there was a starry brightness, a beauty in her face and
in her eyes such as Bulstrode, when he came in to find her waiting, had
never seen before.
With every mile of the short run from The Dials back to the castle,
Mrs. Falconer's friend had been preparing himself for his meeting with
the woman he had left some few hours before. All his emotions
culminated in a high, swinging excitement. The fact that he was going
back alone to find Mary Falconer there, was the big motif, and as he
thought of the dark, charming envelope the castle made, holding the
treasure she was, keeping her there for him, his heart beat so high
that he knew there was nothing more for him to feel. The ecstasy he
had witnessed in the little house his chivalry had purchased, the
meeting of the husband and wife, come together there after so much
unhappiness, put it poignantly to him that sterile love is a very
unsatisfactory thing indeed. And if the highest quality of gallantry
is to consider a woman's honor before her love, it at least makes real
happiness--so he felt then--impossible in the world.
One false swerve of the motor at the pace they were going, and there
would not be any more problems to solve. If he died now he might
justly say that he had not lived, he had not lived! Who would give him
back what he had missed? The motto on the dials repeated itself to
him: _Utere dum licet_.
He pushed into the castle on his arrival, hurried to dress, and went
downstairs. It seemed to him as he put aside the portières, that these
curtains were at last all there was between himself and her, that he
was going home, coming home at last; that ways he had for years seen
approaching, met at length to-night here. It was with the very clear
realization of the culmination of the time that Bulstrode went in to
find his friend.
He had stopped to make himself irreproachable, and expected to find her
waiting and friendly and lovely. What, had he found her anything else?
But as rising from her chair, the scarf slipping back from her bare
shoulders, she put out her hand and greeted him, the dazzling sense
that breaks on a man's consciousness when he finds himself alone with
the woman he loves, proved for a second that he had need of all his
control. He could not speak.
"Jimmy!" she exclaimed, "you're as white as a ghost! You look as
though you'd been to a wake; and I don't believe you've had a mouthful
of dinner."
He remembered that it might be polite to apologize to her for the
entire desertion of the household.
"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"
"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought
volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't
so much matter as did the fact that he had not, whatever festivities he
had honored, dined. Shouldn't they have something here together before
the fire?
"I seem," she said, "to have a blighting effect upon my host."
"My friend Westboro' is the happiest man in Glousceshire."
"Which means that he has found his Duchess?"
"He has found his Duchess."
When her friend entered the room, by the light on his face like the
brightness of the morning as he caught sight of her, Mary Falconer saw
that for Jimmy Bulstrode she was still the one woman in the world. In
the relief that this knowledge brought her she half attempted to play
with what had been her suspicions, and to tease him, but this mood
passed.
"That's a horrid old parson they chose to have me dine with," she said.
"He told me dreadful scandals but I think now that I see through them
all. The Duchess of Westboro' has been living incognita at The Dials,
hasn't she, and her husband at last found her there?"
Bulstrode acknowledged that she had read the drama correctly. And Mary
Falconer laughed.
"Yes, evidently the Duchess has a strong dramatic sense; she's very
romantic, isn't she?"
And the man absently exclaimed: "Oh, I dare say, I dare say." Then
turning to her with unusual vehemence: "Do, for Heaven's sake leave
them and everybody. I want to forget them all."
He threw up his hand with a sort of supplication. He had seated
himself on a tapestried stool close beside the chair she had taken
again. Using her Christian name for one of the rare times in his life,
he pleaded: "Can't we leave all other people, Mary, can't we?"
She looked at him startled and said that their host seemed pretty
effectually to have left _them_, rising from her chair with the words,
and crossing the room to one of the long windows, drew back the curtain.
The cold glass against which she pressed her cheek sent a shock through
her, but she stayed for a second close to the pane as if she would
implore the newer transport, the stiller transport, of the icy cold to
transfuse her veins.
The changed temperature had chased away the fog, and the night spread
its serene beauty over the park, where the moonlight lay along the
terrace like snow. Far down the slope rose the outlines of the bare
trees, and the wide landscape shone and shone until it finally was lost
in the mists.
Bulstrode had followed over and stood by Mary Falconer's side, and the
scene before him seemed full of joy, full of gifts, full of largesse.
The ornament on the woman's bosom stirred with her breathing, shot a
million fine sparkles, and below it the spray of mistletoe rose and
fell, rose and fell.
He put his hand out and took the spray and fastened it in his
buttonhole, saying that the mistletoe was above her head.
His voice, one she had never heard, made her unwisely turn to meet his
eyes, to shake with the emotion of the adventurer trembling on the edge
of the precipice; just to hang over which, and to shudder, he has
climbed high. She put her hand out between them, holding him back.
"I've had a telegram from my husband. He's very ill. He's in Palm
Beach and I'm going over to him next week."
[Illustration: "I've had a telegram from my husband"]
Falconer's name was sovereign for breaking spells as far as Jimmy was
concerned, but the wife's phrase this time gave him only a more violent
revelation of his cruel hope. She went on:
"It's not alarming, but with a heart like Jack's, anything might
happen. It's only when I'm with him that he keeps up any sort of
shape."
The fact of his holding in his the hand that she had put out to keep
him from her, did not serve to aid in a serene continuation of her
plans, and the silence became a burden which if she did not herself
lift would crush her.
She said hurriedly: "And you will help me to go."
And then Bulstrode spoke: "No," he said, "Oh, no."
For the briefest space she yielded to what he meant and was at last
wicked enough and human enough to promise to do. But she had on this
solemn evening--for it had so been--come too far, gone up too high to
drag down all the way with him on a single word. In supremest
happiness, however, at what he said and how he said it, she gave a
little soft laugh, and although she was under the mistletoe, she felt
that she looked down on him, loving him so much more that in adorable
weakness he had suddenly grown small and dear.
"Oh, Jimmy," she whispered, "how heavenly of you, but you can't go back
on ten years in one week. You can't, you know! You've thrown me like
a giant so _far_, I've gone right on up."
Still looking at her he shook his head as she repeated: "You'll help
me, you'll help me! You can't go back!"
"I _can_ go back," he said deeply, "_on everything and everybody in the
world_."
At the frank simple words, and the sense of what they meant, at the
sound of his new voice, it was as if all the dykes at last were down;
and strong, bright, but most beautiful, the sea came rushing in. As
she saw him coming toward her and knew that in a moment more she would
be in his arms, and that at his first touch she would let everything
go, she found one word to say and it proved only to be his name:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!"
But there was in it an appeal. She could count the times she had wept
in her life, very nearly, she had often said that a woman weeps only
when she has nothing else to do, and there had always been so much,
every minute in her life; and as if in logical affirmation there seemed
now for her nothing to do but to cry. The tears which covered her face
and fell into her palms and against the chair on which she leaned,
comforted her in a measure and served to loosen the tension of her
mind. She had succeeded in miraculously keeping away from him, just
within touch of her, held back by a hand whose white gentleness was not
so exquisitely strong but that he loved her too well to break the
tender barrier. She never afterward knew what appeals she made or how
she besought, but it must have been of great force to keep him so
transfixed and pale.
"Oh, you _have_ told me over and over again! Do you think I am deaf or
blind, or that I have found you dumb? Such love, Jimmy, such high,
sweet perfectness! Why, there isn't a woman in a million who has known
it or even dreamed what such love could mean. Why, there hasn't been a
day or an hour for ten years that you have not spoken it to me in the
most adorable way, in the most beautiful way; and in every kind thing
you have done, in every foolish, dear thing, I have been so vain as to
think that I counted for something in it, that you did it a little for
me. Other women have had their lovers, their scandals, their great
passions. But I have had you without flaw, without a change, without
regret. Hush!" she cried, wiping her tears away, "Hush. It's quite
safe to let me go on. The only fear is that _you_ may speak."
The arm which she had held out to keep him from her had fallen upon his
shoulder, lay about his neck as he knelt by her chair.
"It's been horrible!" she said, shaking her head, "Horrible--the days
and the nights, the days and the nights! There have been times when I
could have killed him and killed myself as well. But then you've come,
and your presence has helped me, and that's the way I've pulled along;
because by your silence you told me to pull along, because by the fact
that you didn't speak I understood that you thought I should be brave,
and I have been--thanks to you, and I shall be--thanks to you! Oh!"
she cried passionately, "if you think because I am saying it all out
that I want to go back, that I don't see what I am running away from,
and what you mean, you're cruel, you're cruel!"
Her other hand had found its fellow and they both lay on his shoulders.
"I only think of you," he breathed, "and of how..."
She covered his lips. "Oh, hush, hush, you have told me, in the only
way there was to tell. I'm too stupid to be able to combine a lover
and a husband. The day and the hour you spoke I should never have seen
my husband again. And that's where it stands; that's how it is, and
you know it. You loved me because I was like that, and I love you
because you are the bravest of the brave. There you are!" she cried,
and drew away from him triumphantly, letting her arms fall. "There we
both are!"
"Have you any vague conception of what this is for me?" Bulstrode asked.
"Oh, I dare say," she exclaimed, with a kind of petulance, "that I am
only thinking of my own bewildering happiness. There," she exclaimed
at his face, "I see you have a new weapon: pity. Oh, don't use that
against me, and I warn you that everything in the world will crumble if
you speak."
Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid
them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips
were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the
moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some
great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for
him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above
all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her
humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his
daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry:
"Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..."
He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair,
Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took
a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing
the real man says to the woman he really loves:
"I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do."
"Ah, then, go!"
Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a door might
unclose or a portière lift.
"Go where, pray, at this time of night, or morning?"
"Oh, to The Dials. Ring for a motor; they will take you in again; or
go to the rector's."
The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out.
Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes
on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man
knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely
it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a
second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did
not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of
a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone.
Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But
the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning
panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's
brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the
house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had
left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the
woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire.
Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the
opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable
order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already
been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn
well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly
and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.
Clean logs replaced the cold ashes: the match had just finished with
the kindlings, and Bulstrode went over to welcome the crackling of the
young blaze. The absence of his host, the castle once more handed over
to him for the time, gave him a feeling of proprietorship in the bright
cordial room, but looking up at the portraits of Westboro's in puffs
and velvets, Jimmy couldn't find an ancestor! Their amours and
indulgences had written brilliant and amusing history; the gentlemen
had gone mad at ladies' carriage wheels, they had carried off their
scandals with the highest of hands, and still held their heads well.
They had carved and raped and loved their way down to the present time,
and were none the less a proud line of pure British blood. The
American bachelor, about whose fine head nothing picturesque or worthy
of history circled, looked up at the Dukes of Westboro' musingly, and
there was not a peer or a noble better to look upon or who had been at
heart a truer lover, although he did not know it.
During the lapse of time between leaving this same room and his present
return, Bulstrode had not tossed on a sleepless bed; he had slept
soundly, and during his rest the several dials had called out like
bells, their voice, _Utere dum licet_; and finally a real bell had
roused him to the fact that it was day, a new day, and that unless he
was killed en route to the castle, nothing could keep him from the
place and from her.
He had no consolation in the fact that the honor and decency of society
were by him strengthened and retained, nor did he plan out the sane,
wise project of not seeing her again. Nor did he weigh or balance his
charge or responsibility. There had been a cessation of vibration of
any kind, and only one supreme, sovereign reality took possession of
the world and of himself, and the limitless beauty and the limitless
delight he had breathed in ever since he left her and knew how she
loved him. Nothing in life, he had so felt, could dull or tarnish the
glory of her face; nothing, no matter what life held for them both,
could efface the touch she had laid upon him, as her arms were about
him. Through the interval his past life appeared to have been, on
through the new and unlived interval to come, she would be as last
night she had been, she would look at him as last night she had looked.
"Heavens!" he meditated, in the faces of the self-indulgent, cynical
Westboro's, "I am not going to be blasé through six paradises just
because there happens to be a seventh!"
A new fire spun its lilac flames behind his back. The spicy breath of
the wreaths of hemlock was deliciously sweet. Little by little the sun
had made its eastern way and sparkled at the pane outside, and in the
radiant clarity the terrace and its charming railing, the urns with the
little cedars, stood out clearly; and more than all else, the truth
cried itself to him, that whatever happened, she was still here, still
in the house with him.
He had chosen a Christmas gift for her in London, and determined to
send it up to her now with some roses, and in this way to announce the
fact that he had come back from The Dials and was ready to use the day
as she liked. He felt only how beautiful it would be to see her, that
it did not for a second occur to him to wonder if she on her part would
feel a certain embarrassment.
In answer to his ring, not a man servant, but the perfect housekeeper
rustled in, her crisp silks, her cameos, and her "Christmas face," as
one of the little Westboro' chaps had called her rosy countenance, on
one of his few Christmas days.
"Where would Mr. Bulstrode please to have breakfast?"
"Why, wherever it best suited, went with the house, with the day.
Where, indeed, and that was more to the point, would Mrs. Falconer have
it?"
"Mrs. Falconer? Why, Mr. Bulstrode didn't know then that Mrs. Falconer
had gone?"
She saw by his face that he knew nothing less in the world.
Why, directly the despatch had been fetched over from the Abbey
station. There had been but twenty minutes between the getting of it
and her starting away. A motor had been sent with her and the maid,
and Mrs. Falconer had fortunately been able to make the train; the only
one, it so happened, being Christmas Day, that connected with the Dover
and Calais special.
The matter-of-fact bit of news came to Bulstrode so coldly and so
ruthlessly that it took some seconds for the bitter thought that she
had gone because she couldn't trust him, to penetrate. Then this gave
place to an effulgent hope that it might be _herself_ she couldn't
trust! But the discovery that she had left him no message of any kind,
and that she was above all irrevocably gone, struck him more cruelly
than had any blow in his kindly life. He could not suffer in peace
before the bland creature in silks and cameos. Crises and departures,
battle, murder, and sudden death, he felt the housekeeper would accept
serenely should any of them chance to occur at Westboro', and above all
if they were part of the sacred family history. But Mrs. Falconer and
he were not Westboro's, and he wanted to be rid of his companion and to
find himself alone in order to consult time tables, to find out why it
had been imperative to go to Calais, with what boat for America a
Christmas-Day train could possibly connect, and to turn it all over in
his mind. He at first believed that there had never been any telegram
and that she had only employed a polite ruse in order to facilitate her
flight.
Why, at all events, couldn't she have left him a line? She might, he
ruefully complained, have strained a point and wished him a Merry
Christmas! As he walked to and fro in the room now supremely deserted,
he began slowly to approach a certain hypothesis which as soon as he
granted, he as violently discarded. But the thought was imperious:
something of its kind always haunted him like a bad ghost. It could
usually be dismissed, but now it was persistent. A despatch from
Falconer had certainly come the night before. Another might have
followed on this morning, hard upon it? To have been sent over from
the Abbey on a holiday must have been a very grave message indeed; "a
matter," as the old term went, "of life and death." The phrase began
to repeat itself and the conviction to grow, and as he was obliged to
give it admittance and to face it, and to wonder what the shock would
be to her, and what the news would be to him, how it would change
things, and how they would both meet it--his promenade to and fro in
the room brought him up before the centre table and he looked down upon
it at length with a seeing eye. Why not? why not? he was wondering.
We are all essentially mortal, and lightning never had struck yet, _why
not in this place_? And since there had been neither shame nor blame,
why couldn't he face the possibility of a perfectly natural mortality?
Before him on the table lay Mrs. Falconer's green scarf, and as
Bulstrode lifted the soft thing he saw that underneath it lay a
despatch.
Then he knew instantly that Mary Falconer had left both scarf and
telegram there, and that this was her message to him. He seemed, as
the word he had not yet read met him in this form, to have been waiting
all his life for just this news. The road, so long in winding home,
had wound home at length, and now that he believed the crisis was
really reached, there was something infinitely stilling in its
solemnity.
Bulstrode could not at once draw the sheet from its envelope. He lit a
cigar and sat down before the fire.
He knew, as though he saw it all before his eyes, how the despatch had
found her this early Christmas Day, in her room--he knew how she had
read it first and borne it well--for she was a brave, strong woman--he
knew that his absence had been a relief to her. He knew how she had
worn her long, dark cloak and thick veil, and had gone out to travel
home alone. Oh, he knew her, and as he thought of the picture she had
made, and how she would begin her sad and dreadful journey, he for the
first time thought of himself--of themselves. He was too human not to
know that there would be a future and that they would build anew. In
the new house there would be no driftwood now; nor would they ever be
haunted by the sound of a bell in the dark, for with the few brave
souls who sail across the seas of life they had both of them stood by
the sinking ship until it put into port.
Mrs. Shawles came in again presently and told him that she had laid his
breakfast in the little room facing the gardens. Then she waited, and
as Bulstrode looked up at her he forced himself to smile faintly and
wished her a Merry Christmas.
She thanked him, gave him many, and said it was a happy morning for all
of the Westboro's, and that the castle and the house would see new
times and better things, and when he had stirred himself to the point
of putting what he had for her into her hand, he was not sure whether
he wanted her to go, or not, this time and leave him alone.
She still hesitated. It was a custom with them, she told him, with the
Westboro's, to have hall prayers on holidays. When the Duke himself
was there, he always read them; the servants and the children of the
place had already come in. In the absence of the family _would_ Mr.
Bulstrode...?
"Oh, no, on no account, on no account," he hurried. "Wasn't there some
one else?"
"Well, to be sure, there was Portman."
The guest was sure that Portman would do it quite in the proper way,
and as for himself, he would have his breakfast in a few moments, he
thanked her.
And Mrs. Shawles, who had expected a more favorable answer, left open
on the table the little Book which she had brought in with her.
Bulstrode took it up after she was gone.
In a few seconds he heard from the distance the sound of the children
singing. Their voices ceased, to be followed by the subdued murmur of
reading. As Bulstrode opened the Book he held, the leaves fell apart
at the marriage rite. He hurriedly passed this over, and his eyes were
arrested by the opening lines of a more solemn service. He paused to
read the beautiful, pitiful words, and then, still with the open Book
in his hands, he drew the telegram out of its cover....
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Bulstrode, by Marie Van Vorst
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