The Guest of Quesnay Part 24

"Is he at the inn now?"

"No, monsieur, but two friends for whom he engaged apartments have just arrived."

"Who are they?" asked Keredec quickly.

"It is a lady and a monsieur from Paris. But not married: they have taken separate apartments and she has a domestic with her, a negress, Algerian."

"What are their names?"

"It is not ten minutes that they are installed. They have not given me their names."

"What is the lady's appearance?"

"Monsieur the Professor," replied the hostess demurely, "she is not beautiful."

"But what is she?" demanded Keredec impatiently; and it could be seen that he was striving to control a rising agitation. "Is she blonde? Is she brunette? Is she young? Is she old? Is she French, English, Spanish--"

"I think," said Madame Brossard, "I think one would call her Spanish, but she is very fat, not young, and with a great deal too much rouge--"

She stopped with an audible intake of breath, staring at my friend's white face. "Eh! it is bad news?" she cried. "And when one has been so ill--"

Keredec checked her with an imperious gesture. "Monsieur Saffren and I leave at once," he said. "I shall meet him on the road; he will not return to the inn. We go to--to Trouville. See that no one knows that we have gone until to-morrow, if possible; I shall leave fees for the servants with you. Go now, prepare your bill, and bring it to me at once. I shall write you where to send our trunks. Quick! And you, my friend"--he turned to me as Madame Brossard, obviously distressed and frightened, but none the less intelligent for that, skurried away to do his bidding--"my friend, will you help us? For we need it!"

"Anything in the world!"

"Go to Pere Baudry's; have him put the least tired of his three horses to his lightest cart and wait in the road beyond the cottage. Stand in the road yourself while that is being done. Oliver will come that way; detain him. I will join you there; I have only to see to my papers--at the most, twenty minutes. Go quickly, my friend!"

I strode to the door and out to the gallery. I was half-way down the steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren was already in the courtyard, coming toward me from the archway with a light and buoyant step.

He looked up, waving his hat to me, his face lighted with a happiness most remarkable, and brighter, even, than the strong, midsummer suns.h.i.+ne flaming over him. Dressed in white as he was, and with the air of victory he wore, he might have been, at that moment, a figure from some marble triumph; youthful, conquering--crowned with the laurel.

I had time only to glance at him, to "take" him, as it were, between two shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard flooded with suns.h.i.+ne, the figure of Madame Brossard emerging from her little office, Amedee coming from the kitchen bearing a white-covered tray, and, entering from the road, upon the trail of Saffren but still in the shadow of the archway, the discordant fineries and hatchet-face of the ex-pedestrian and tourist, my antagonist of the forest.

I had opened my mouth to call a warning.

"Hurry" was the word I would have said, but it stopped at "hur--." The second syllable was never uttered.

There came a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a captured hen, and out of the pa.s.sage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fantastically dressed in green and gold.

Her coa.r.s.e blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from which her gown hung precariously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double-chinned, coa.r.s.e, greasy, smeared with blue pencillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge.

At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly:

"Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari--c'est moi! C'est ta femme, mon coeur!"

She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical ferocity that was a very paroxysm of triumph.

"Embra.s.se moi, Larrabi! Embra.s.se moi!" she cried.

Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, he flung her off with a violence surpa.s.sing her own, and with loathing unspeakable. She screamed that he was killing her, calling him "husband," and tried to fasten herself upon him again. But he leaped backward beyond the reach of her clutching hands, and, turning, plunged to the steps and staggered up them, the woman following.

From above me leaned the stricken face of Keredec; he caught Saffren under the arm and half lifted him to the gallery, while she strove to hold him by the knees.

"O Christ!" gasped Saffren. "Is THIS the woman?"

The giant swung him across the gallery and into the open door with one great sweep of the arm, strode in after him, and closed and bolted the door. The woman fell in a heap at the foot of the steps, uttered a cracked simulation of the cry of a broken heart.

"Name of a name of G.o.d!" she wailed. "After all these years! And my husband strikes me!"

Then it was that what had been in my mind as a monstrous suspicion became a certainty. For I recognised the woman; she was Mariana--la bella Mariana la Mursiana.

If I had ever known Larrabee Harman, if, instead of the two strange glimpses I had caught of him, I had been familiar with his gesture, walk, intonation--even, perhaps, if I had ever heard his voice--the truth might have come to me long ago.

Larrabee Harman!

"Oliver Saffren" was Larrabee Harman.

CHAPTER XVIII

I do not like to read those poets who write of pain as if they loved it; the study of suffering is for the cold a.n.a.lyst, for the vivisectionist, for those who may transfuse their knowledge of it to the ultimate good of mankind. And although I am so heavily endowed with curiosity concerning the people I find about me, my gift (or curse, whichever it be) knows pause at the gates of the house of calamity. So, if it were possible, I would not speak of the agony of which I was a witness that night in the apartment of my friends at Madame Brossard's.

I went with reluctance, but there was no choice. Keredec had sent for me.

... When I was about fifteen, a boy cousin of mine, several years younger, terribly injured himself on the Fourth of July; and I sat all night in the room with him, helping his mother. Somehow he had learned that there was no hope of saving his sight; he was an imaginative child and realised the whole meaning of the catastrophe; the eternal darkness.... And he understood that the thing had been done, that there was no going back of it. This very certainty increased the intensity of his rebellion a thousandfold. "I WILL have my eyes!" he screamed. "I WILL! I WILL!"

Keredec had told his tragic ward too little. The latter had understood but vaguely the nature of the catastrophe which overhung his return to France, and now that it was indeed concrete and definite, the guardian was forced into fuller disclosures, every word making the anguish of the listener more intolerable. It was the horizonless despair of a child; and that profound protest I had so often seen smouldering in his eyes culminated, at its crisis, in a wild flame of revolt. The shame of the revelation pa.s.sed over him; there was nothing of the disastrous drunkard, sober, learning what he had done. To him, it seemed that he was being forced to suffer for the sins of another man.

"Do you think that you can make me believe _I_ did this?" he cried.

"That I made life unbearable for HER, drove HER from me, and took this hideous, painted old woman in HER place? It's a lie. You can't make me believe such a monstrous lie as that! You CAN'T! You CAN'T!"

He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering from head to foot.

"My poor boy, it is the truth," said Keredec, kneeling beside him and putting a great arm across his shoulders. "It is what a thousand men are doing this night. Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable--or more simple. Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and nothing to do. You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life. You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are right. When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were blind--you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down inside you, with its hands over its face. If it could have once stood straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away from her and from everything you had put in your life. But, in your suffering you must rejoice: the triumph is that your mind hates that old life as greatly as your soul hates it. You are as good as if you had never been the wild fellow--yes, the wicked fellow--that you were. For a man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never sinned. But though his emanc.i.p.ation can be so perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal, and each has a consequence that is never ending. And so, now, though you are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must abide it. Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing!--that suffering--compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!"

The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a broken-hearted child.

I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I lay upon my bed until dawn. Then I went for a long, hard walk, breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard's in a peasant's cart which was going that way.

I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever--as I told him.

"I have some news for you," he said after the hearty greeting--"an announcement, in fact."

"Wait!" I glanced at the interested att.i.tude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led the way into the pavilion. "You may as well not tell it in the hearing of that young man," I said, when the door was closed. "He is eccentric."

"So I gathered," returned Ward, smiling, "from his attire. But it really wouldn't matter who heard it. Elizabeth's going to marry Cresson Ingle."