Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Does her dossier prove it? You have read it.”

  “Well, her dossier was rather incomplete. We knew that she went about a good deal in Paris — went to the Tuileries, too. She was married once. Didn’t you know even that?” 315

  “Married!” I exclaimed.

  “To a Russian brute — I’ve forgotten his name, but I’ve seen him — one of the kind with high cheek-bones and black eyes. She got her divorce in England; that’s on record, and we have it in her dossier. Then, going back still further, we know that her father was a Bavarian, a petty noble of some sort — baron, I believe. Her mother’s name was Elven, a Breton peasant; it was a mésalliance — trouble of all sorts — I forget, but I believe her uncle brought her up. Her uncle was military attaché of the German embassy to Paris.... You see how she slipped into society — and you know what society under the Empire was.”

  “Speed,” I said, “why on earth didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  “My dear fellow, I supposed Jarras had told you; or that, if you didn’t know it, it did not concern us at all.”

  “But it does concern — a person I know,” I said, quickly, thinking of poor Kelly Eyre. “And it explains a lot of things — or, rather, places them under a new light.”

  “What light?”

  “Well, for one thing, she has consistently lied to me. For another, I believe her to be hand-in-glove with Karl Marx and the French leaders — not Buckhurst, but the real leaders of the social revolt; not as a genuine disciple, but as a German agent, with orders to foment disorder of any kind which might tend to embarrass and weaken the French government in this crisis.”

  “You’re inclined to believe that?” he asked, much interested.

  “Yes, I am. France is full of German agents; the Tuileries was not exempt — you know it as well as I. Paris swarmed with spies of every kind, high and low in the social scale. The embassies were nests of spies; every salon a breeding spot of intrigue; the foreign governments employed the grande dame as well as the grisette. Do you remember the military-balloon scandal?”

  “Indistinctly.... Some poor devil gave a woman government papers.”

  “Technically they were government papers, but he considered them his own. Well, the woman who received those papers is down-stairs.”

  He gave a short whistle of astonishment.

  “You are sure, Scarlett?”

  “Perfectly certain.”

  “Then, if you are certain, that settles the question of Mademoiselle Elven’s present occupation.”

  I rose and began to move around the room restlessly.

  “But, after all,” I said, “that concerns us no longer.”

  “How can it concern two Americans out of a job?” he observed, with a shrug. “The whole fabric of French politics is rotten to the foundation. It’s tottering; a shake will bring it down. Let it tumble. I tell you this nation needs the purification of fire. Our own country has just gone through it; France can do it, too. She’s got to, or she’s lost!”

  He looked at me earnestly. “I love the country,” he said; “it’s fed me and harbored me. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to put a single patch on this makeshift of a government; I wouldn’t stave off the crash if I could. And it’s coming! You and I have seen something of the rottenness of the underpinning which props up empires. You and I, Scarlett, have learned a few of the shameful secrets which even an enemy to France would not drag out into the daylight.”

  I had never seen him so deeply moved.

  “Is there hope — is there a glimmer of hope to incite anybody while these conditions endure?” he continued, bitterly. 317

  “No. France must suffer, France must stand alone in terrible humiliation, France must offer the self-sacrifice of fire and mount the altar herself!

  “Then, and only then, shall the nation, purified, reborn, rise and live, and build again, setting a beacon of civilized freedom high as the beacon we Americans are raising,... slowly yet surely raising, to the glory of God, Scarlett — to the glory of God. No other dedication can be justified in this world.”

  XIX

  TRÉCOURT GARDEN

  About nine o’clock we were summoned by a Breton maid to the pretty breakfast-room below, and I was ashamed to go with my shabby clothes, bandaged head, and face the color of clay.

  The young countess was not present; Sylvia Elven offered us a supercilious welcome to a breakfast the counterpart of which I had not seen in years — one of those American breakfasts which even we, since the Paris Exposition, are beginning to discard for the simpler French breakfast of coffee and rolls.

  “This is all in your honor,” observed Sylvia, turning up her nose at the array of poached eggs, fragrant sausages, crisp potatoes, piles of buttered toast, muffins, marmalade, and fruit.

  “It was very kind of you to think of it,” said Speed.

  “It is Madame de Vassart’s idea, not mine,” she observed, looking across the table at me. “Will the gentleman with nine lives have coffee or chocolate?”

  The fruit consisted of grapes and those winy Breton cider-apples from Bannalec. We began with these in decorous silence.

  Speed ventured a few comments on the cultivation of fruit, of which he knew nothing; neither he nor his subject was encouraged.

  Presently, however, Sylvia glanced up at him with a malicious smile, saying: “I notice that you have been in the foreign division of the Imperial Military Police, monsieur.”

  “Why do you think so?” asked Speed, calmly.

  “When you seated yourself in your chair,” said Sylvia, “you made a gesture with your left hand as though to unhook the sabre — which was not there.”

  Speed laughed. “But why the police? I might have been in the cavalry, mademoiselle; for that matter, I might have been an officer in any arm of the service. They all carry swords or sabres.”

  “But only the military police and the gendarmerie wear aiguilettes,” she replied. “When you bend over your plate your fingers are ever unconsciously searching for those swinging, gold-tipped cords — to keep them out of your coffee-cup, monsieur.”

  The muscles in Speed’s lean, bronzed cheeks tightened; he looked at her keenly.

  “Might I not have been in the gendarmerie?” he asked. “How do you know I was not?”

  “Does the gendarmerie wear the sabre-tache?”

  “No, mademoiselle, but—”

  “Do the military police?”

  “No — that is, the foreign division did, when it existed.”

  “You are sitting, monsieur,” she said, placidly, “with your left foot so far under the table that it quite inadvertently presses my shoe-tip.”

  Speed withdrew his leg with a jerk, asking pardon.

  “It is a habit perfectly pardonable in a man who is careful that his spur shall not scratch or tear a patent-leather sabre-tache,” she said.

  I had absolutely nothing to say; we both laughed feebly, I believe.

  I saw temptation struggling with Speed’s caution; I, too, was almost willing to drop a hint that might change her amusement to speculation, if not to alarm.

  So this was the woman for whose caprice Kelly Eyre had wrecked his prospects! Clever — oh, certainly clever. But she had made the inevitable slip that such clever people always make sooner or later. And in a bantering message to her victim she had completed the chain against herself — a chain of which I might have been left in absolute ignorance. Impulse probably did it — reasonless and perhaps malicious caprice — the instinct of a pretty woman to stir up memory in a discarded and long-forgotten victim — just to note the effect — just to see if there still remains one nerve, one pulse-beat to respond.

  “Will the pensive gentleman with nine lives have a little more nourishment to sustain him?” she asked.

  Looking up from my empty plate, I declined politely; and we followed her signal to rise.

  “There is a Mr. Kelly Eyre,” she said to Speed, “connected with your circus. Has he gone with the oth
ers?”

  “Yes, mademoiselle.”

  “Really?” she mused, amiably. “I knew him as a student in Paris, when he was very young — and I was younger. I should have liked to have seen him — once more.”

  “Did you not see him?” I asked, abruptly.

  Her back was toward me; very deliberately she turned her pretty head and looked at me over her shoulder, studying my face a moment.

  “Yes, I saw him. I should have liked to have seen him — once more,” she said, as though she had first calculated the effect on me of a different reply.

  She led the way into that small room overlooking the garden where I had been twice received by Madame de Vassart. Here she took leave of us, abandoning us to our own designs. Mine was to find a large arm-chair and sit down in it, and give Speed a few instructions. Speed’s was to prowl around Paradise for information, and, if possible, telegraph to Lorient for troops to catch Buckhurst red-handed.

  He left me turning over the leaves of the “Chanson de Roland,” saying that he would return in a little while with any news he might pick up, and that he would do his best to catch Buckhurst in the foolish trap which that gentleman had set for others.

  Tiring of the poem, I turned my eyes toward the garden, where, in the sunshine, heaps of crisped leaves lay drifted along the base of the wall or scattered between the rows of herbs which were still ripely green. The apricots had lost their leaves, so had the grapevines and the fig-trees; but the peach-trees were in foliage; pansies and perpetual roses bloomed amid sere and seedy thickets of larkspurs, phlox, and dead delphinium.

  On the wall a cat sat, sunning her sleek flanks. Something about the animal seemed familiar to me, and after a while I made up my mind that this was Ange Pitou, Jacqueline’s pet, abandoned by her mistress and now a feline derelict. Speed must have been mistaken when he told me that Jacqueline had taken her cat; or possibly the home-haunting instinct had brought the creature back, abandoning her mistress to her fortunes.

  If I had been in my own house I should have offered Ange Pitou hospitality; as it was, I walked out into the sunny garden and made courteous advances which were ignored. I watched the cat for a few moments, then sat down on the bench. The inertia which follows recovery from a shock, however light, left me with the lazy acquiescence of a convalescent, willing to let the world drift for an hour or two, contented to relax, apathetic, comfortable.

  Seaward the gulls sailed like white feathers floating; the rocky ramparts of Groix rose clear-cut against a horizon where no haze curtained the sea; the breakers had receded from the coast on a heavy ebb-tide, and I saw them in frothy outline, noiselessly churning the shallows beyond the outer bar.

  And then my reverie ended abruptly; a step on the gravel walk brought me to my feet.... There she stood, lovely in a fresh morning-gown deeply belted with turquoise-shells, her ruddy hair glistening, coiled low on a neck of snow.

  For the first time she showed embarrassment in her greeting, scarcely touching my hand, speaking with a new constraint in a voice which grew colder as she hesitated.

  “We were frightened; we are so glad that you were not badly hurt. I thought you might find it comfortable here — of course I could not know that you were not seriously injured.”

  “That is fortunate for me,” I said, pleasantly, “for I am afraid you would not have offered this shelter if you had known how little injured I really was.”

  “Yes, I should have offered it — had I reason to believe you would have accepted. I have felt that perhaps you might think what I have done was unwarranted.”

  “I think you did the most graciously unselfish thing a woman could do,” I said, quickly. “You offered your best; and the man who took it cannot — dare not — express his gratitude.”

  The emotion in my voice warned me to cease; the faintest color tinted her cheeks, and she looked at me with beautiful, grave eyes that slowly grew inscrutable, leaving me standing diffident and silent before her. 323

  The breeze shifted, bringing with it the hollow sea-thunder. She turned her head and glanced out across the ocean, hands behind her, fingers linked.

  “I have come here into your garden uninvited,” I said.

  “Shall we sit here — a moment?” she suggested, without turning.

  Presently she seated herself in one corner of the bench; her gaze wandered over the partly blighted garden, then once more centred on the seaward skyline.

  The color of her hands, her neck, fascinated me. That flesh texture of snow and roses, firmly and delicately modelled, which sometimes is seen with red hair, I had seen once before in a picture by a Spanish master, but never, until now, in real life.

  And she was life incarnate in her wholesome beauty — a beauty of which I had perceived only the sad shadow at La Trappe — a sweet, healthy, exquisite woman, moulded, fashioned, colored by a greater Master than the Spanish painter dreaming of perfection centuries ago.

  In the sun a fragrance grew — the subtle incense from her gown — perhaps from her hair.

  “Autumn is already gone; we are close to winter,” she said, under her breath. “See, there is nothing left — scarcely a blossom — a rose or two; but the first frost will scatter the petals. Look at the pinks; look at the dead leaves. Ah, tristesse, tristesse! The life of summer is too short; the life of flowers is too short; so are our lives, Monsieur Scarlett. Do you believe it?”

  “Yes — now.”

  She was very still for a while, her head bent toward the sea. Then, without turning: “Have you not always believed it?”

  “No, madame.” 324

  “Then ... why do you believe it ... now?”

  “Because, since we have become friends, life seems pitiably short for such a friendship.”

  She smiled without moving.

  “That is a ... very beautiful ... compliment, monsieur.”

  “It owes its beauty to its truth, madame.”

  “And that reply is illogical,” she said, turning to look at me with brilliant eyes and a gay smile which emphasized the sensitive mouth’s faint droop. “Illogical, because truth is not always beautiful. As example: you were very near to death yesterday. That is the truth, but it is not beautiful at all.”

  “Ah, madame, it is you who are illogical,” I said, laughing.

  “I?” she cried. “Prove it!”

  But I would not, spite of her challenge and bright mockery.

  In that flash all of our comradeship returned, bringing with it something new, which I dared not think was intimacy.

  Yet constraint fell away like a curtain between us, and though she dominated, and I was afraid lest I overstep limits which I myself had set, the charm of her careless confidence, her pretty, undissembled caprices, her pleasure in a delicately intimate badinage, gave me something of a self-reliance, a freedom that I had not known in a woman’s presence for many years.

  “We brought you here because we thought it was good for you,” she said, reverting maliciously to the theme that had at first embarrassed her. “We were perfectly certain that you have always been unfit to take care of yourself. Now we have the proofs.”

  “Mademoiselle Elven said that you harbored us only because you were afraid of those bandits who have arrived in Paradise,” I observed. 325

  “Afraid!” she said, scornfully. “Oh, you are making fun of me now. Indeed, when Mr. Buckhurst came last night I had my men conduct him to the outer gate!”

  “Did he come last night?” I asked, troubled.

  “Yes.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders.

  “Alone?”

  “That unspeakable creature, Mornac, was with him. I had no idea he was here; had you?”

  I was silent. Did Mornac mean trouble for me? Yet how could he, shorn now of all authority?

  The thought seemed to occur to her, too, and she looked up quickly, asking if I had anything to fear.

  “Only for you,” I said.

  “For me? Why? I am not afraid of such men. I have servants on whom I c
an call to disembarrass me of such people.” She hesitated; the memory of her deception, of what she had suffered at Buckhurst’s hands, brought a glint of anger into her beautiful eyes.

  “My innocence shames me,” she said. “I merited what I received in such company. It was you who saved me from myself.”

  “A noble mind thinks nobly,” I said. “Theirs is the shame, not yours, that you could not understand treachery — that you never can understand it. As for me, I was an accident, which warned you in time that all the world was not as good and true as you desired to believe it.”

  She sat looking at me curiously. “I wonder,” she said, “why it is that you do not know your own value?”

  “My value — to whom?”

  “To ... everybody — to the world — to people.”

  “Am I of any value to you, madame?”

  The pulsing moments passed and she did not answer, and I bit my lip and waited. At last she said, coolly: “A man must appraise himself. If he chooses, he is valuable. But values are comparative, and depend on individual taste.... Yes, you are of some value to me,... or I should not be here with you,... or I should not find it my pleasure to be here — or I should not trust you, come to you with my petty troubles, ask your experience to help me, perhaps protect me.”

  She bent her head with adorable diffidence. “Monsieur Scarlett, I have never before had a friend who thought first of me and last of himself.”

  I leaned on the back of the bench, resting my bandaged forehead on my hand.

  She looked up after a moment, and her face grew serious.

  “Are you suffering?” she asked. “Your face is white as my sleeve.”

  “I feel curiously tired,” I said, smiling.

  “Then you must have some tea, and I will brew it myself. You shall not object! No — it is useless, because I am determined. And you shall lie down in the little tea-room, where I found you that day when you first came to Trécourt.”