Maurice Guest Part 29

The girl drank it slowly, as if swallowing were an effort, while Madeleine went round the room, touching and ordering, and opening a window. This done, she looked at her watch.

"I will go now," she said, "and see if I can persuade Sister Martha to come back. If you haven't mortally offended her, that is."

Louise started up from her chair, and put her cup, only half emptied, on the table.

"Madeleine!--please--please, don't! I can't have her back again. I am quite well now. There was nothing more she could do for me. I shall sleep a thousand times better at night if she is not here. Oh, don't bring her back again! Her voice cut like a knife, and her hands were so hard."

She trembled with excitement, and was on the brink of tears.

"Hus.h.!.+--don't excite yourself like that," said Madeleine, and tried to soothe her. "There's no need for it. If you are really determined not to have her, then she shall not come and that's the end of it. Not but what I think it foolish of you all the same," she could not refrain from adding. "You are still weak. However, if you prefer it, I'll do my best to run up this evening to see that you have everything for the night."

"I don't want you either."

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders, and her pity became tinged with impatience.

"The doctor says you must go away somewhere, for a change," she said as she beat up the pillows and smoothed out the crumpled sheets, preparatory to coaxing her patient back to bed.

Louise shook her head, but did not speak.

"A few weeks' change of air is what you need to set you up again."

"I cannot go away."

"Nonsense! Of course you can. You don't want to be ill all the winter?"

"I don't want to be well."

Madeleine sniffed audibly. "There's no reasoning with you. When you hear on all sides that it's for your own good----"

"Oh, stop tormenting me!" cried Louise, raising a drawn face with disordered hair. "I won't go away! Nothing will make me. I shall stay here--though I never get well again."

"But why? Give me one sensible reason for not going.--You can't!"

"Yes ... if ... if Eugen should come back."

The words could only just be caught. Madeleine stood, holding a sheet with both hands, as though she could not believe her ears.

"Louise!" she said at last, in a tone which meant many things.

Louise began to cry, and was shaken by hard, dry sobs. Madeleine did not look at her again, but went severely on with her bedmaking. When she had finished, she crossed to the washstand, and poured out a gla.s.s of water.

Louise took it, humbled and submissive, and gradually her sobs abated.

But now Madeleine, in place of getting ready to leave, as she had intended, sat down at the centre table, and revolved what she felt it to be her duty to say. When all sound of crying had ceased, she began to speak, persuasively, in a quiet voice.

"You have brought the matter up yourself, Louise," she said, "and, now the ice is broken, there are one or two things I should like to say to you. First then, you have been very ill, far worse than you know--the immediate danger is over now, so I can speak of it. But who can tell what may happen if you persist in remaining on here by yourself, in the state you are in?"

Louise did not stir; her face was hidden.

"The reason you give for staying is not a serious one, I hope,"

Madeleine proceeded cautiously choosing her words. "After all the ...

the precautions that were taken to ensure the ... break, it is not all likely ... he would think of returning. And Louise," she added with warmth, "even though he did--suppose he did--after the way he has behaved, and his disgraceful treatment of you----"

Louise looked up for an instant. "That is not true," she said.

"Not true?" echoed Madeleine. "Well, if you are able to admire his behaviour--if you don't consider it disgraceful--no, more than that--infamous----" She stopped, not being able to find a stronger epithet.

"It is not true," said Louise in the same expressionless voice. But now she lifted her head, and pressed the palms of her hands together.

Madeleine pushed back her chair, as if she were about to rise. "Then I have nothing more to say," she said; and went on: "If you are ready to defend a man who has acted towards you as he has--in a way that makes a respectable person's blood boil--there is indeed nothing more to be said." She reddened with indignation. "As if it were not bad enough for him to go, after all you have done for him, but that he must do it in such a mean, underhand way--it's enough to make one sick. The only thing to compare with it is his conduct on the night before he left. Do you know, pray, that on the last evening, at a KNEIPE in the GOLDENE HIRSCH, he boasted of what you had done for him--boasted about everything that had happened between you--to a rowdy, tipsy crew? More than that, he gave shameless details, about you going to his room that afternoon----"

"It's not true, it's not true," repeated Louise, as if she had got these few words by heart. She rose from her chair, and leaned on it, half turning her back to Madeleine, and holding her handkerchief to her lips.

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. "Do you think I should say it, if it weren't?" she asked. "I don't invent scandal. And you are bound to hear it when you go out again. He did this, and worse than I choose to tell you, and if you felt as you ought to about it, you would never give him another thought. He's not worth it. He's not worth any respectable person's----"

"Respectable!" burst in Louise, and raised two blazing eyes to her companion's face. "That's the second time. Why do you come here, Madeleine, and talk like that to me? He did what he was obliged to--that's all: for I should never have let him go. Can't you see how preposterous it is to think that by talking of respectability, and unworthiness, you can make me leave off caring for him?--when for months I have lived for nothing else? Do you think one can change one's feelings so easily? Don't you understand that to love a person once is to love him always and altogether?--his faults as well--everything he does, good or bad, no matter what other people think of it? Oh, you have never really cared for anyone yourself, or you would know it."

"It's not preposterous at all," retorted Madeleine. "Yes--if he had deserved all the affection you wasted on him, or if unhappy circ.u.mstances had separated you. But that's not the case. He has behaved scandalously, without the least attempt at s.h.i.+elding you. He has made you the talk of the place. And you may consider me narrow and prejudiced, but this I must say--I am boundlessly astonished at you.

When he has shown you as plainly as he can that he's tired of you, that you should still be ready to defend him, and have so little proper pride that you even say you would take him back!----"

Louise turned on her. "You would never do that, Madeleine, would you?--never so far forget yourself as to crawl to a man's feet and ask--ask?--no, implore forgiveness, for faults you were not conscious of having committed. You would never beg him to go on loving you, after he had ceased to care, or think nothing on earth worth having if he would not--or could not. As I would; as I have done." But chancing to look at Madeleine, she grew quieter. "You would never do that, would you?" she repeated. "And do you know why?" Her words came quickly again; her voice shook with excitement. "Because you will never care for anyone more than yourself--it isn't in you to do it. You will go through life, tight on to the end, without knowing what it is to care for some one--oh, but I mean absolutely, unthinkingly----"

She broke down, and hid her face again. Madeleine had carried the cups and saucers to a side-table, and now put on her hat.

"And I hope I never shall," she said, forcing herself to speak calmly.

"If I thought it likely, I should never look at a man again."

But Louise had not finished. Coming round to the front of the rocking-chair, and leaning on the table, she gazed at Madeleine with wild eyes, while her pale lips poured forth a kind of revenge for the suffering, real and imaginary, that she had undergone at the hands of this cooler nature.

"And I'll tell you why. You are doubly safe; for you will never be able to make a man care so much that--that you are forced to love him like this in return. It isn't in you to do it. I don't mean because you're plain. There are plenty of plainer women than you, who can make men follow them. No, it's your nature--your cold, narrow, egotistic nature--which only lets you care for things outside yourself in a cold, narrow way. You will never know what it is to be taken out of yourself, taken and shaken, till everything you are familiar with falls away."

She laughed; but tears were near at hand. Madeleine had turned her back on her, and stood b.u.t.toning her jacket, with a red, exasperated face.

"I shall not answer you," she said. "You have worked yourself into such a state that you don't know what you're saying. All the same, I think you might try to curb your tongue. I have done nothing to you--but be kind to you."

"Kind to me? Do you call it kind to come here and try to set me against the man I love best in the world? And who loves me best, too. Yes; he does. He would never have gone, if he hadn't been forced to--if I hadn't been a hindrance to him--a drag on him."

"It makes me ashamed of my s.e.x to hear you say such things. That a woman can so far lose her pride as to----"

"Oh, other women do it in other ways. Do you think I haven't seen how you have been trying to make some one here like you?--doing your utmost, without any thoughts of pride or self-respect.--And how you have failed? Yes, failed. And if you don't believe me, ask him yourself--ask him who it is that could bring him to her, just by raising her finger. It's to me he would come, not to you--to me who have never given him look or thought."

Madeleine paled, then went scarlet. "That's a direct untruth. You!--and not to egg a man on, if you see he admires you! You know every time a pa.s.ser-by looks at you in the street. You feed on such looks--yes, and return them, too. I have seen you, my lady, looking and being looked at, by a stranger, in a way no decent woman allows.--For the rest, I'll trouble you to mind your own business. Whatever I do or don't do, trust me, I shall at least take care not to make myself the laughing-stock of the place. Yes, you have only succeeded in making yourself ridiculous.

For while you were cringing before him, and aspiring to die for his sake, he was making love behind your back to another girl. For the last six months. Every one knew it, it seems, but you."

She had spoken with unconcealed anger, and now turned to leave the room. But Louise was at the door before her, and spread herself across it.

"That's a lie, Madeleine! Of your own making. You shall prove it to me before you go out of this room. How dare you say such a thing!--how dare you!"

Madeleine looked at her with cold aversion, and drew back to avoid touching her.