The Mountebank Part 33

"There! Look!"

And Andrew looked and beheld the photograph of a handsome, vast mustachioed, rake-h.e.l.ly officer of Zouaves, labelled as Captain Raoul Marescaux, who had died gloriously for France on the twenty-sixth of March, 1917.

For a second or two he groped for some a.s.sociation with a far distant past.

"But don't you see?" cried Elodie. "It is my husband. He has been dead for over two years."

Chapter XVII

The real discussion between them of the change that the death of Raoul Marescaux might bring about in their relations, did not take place till the next day. Each felt it as a sudden shock which, as in two chemicals. .h.i.therto mingling in placid fluidity, might cause crystallization. Up to this point, the errant husband, vanis.h.i.+ng years before across the seas in company with a little modiste of the Place de la Madeleine, had been but a shadow, less a human being than a legal technicality which stood in way of their marriage.

Occasionally during the war each had contemplated the possibility of the husband being killed. A mere fleeting speculation. As Elodie had received no official news of his death--which is astonis.h.i.+ng in view of the French Republic's accuracy in tracing the _etat civil_ of even her obscurest citizens--she presumed that he was still alive somewhere in the Shadow Land in which exist monks and Papuans and swell-mobsmen and other members of the human race with whom she had no concern. And Andrew had been far too busy to give the fellow whose name he had all but forgotten, more than a pa.s.sing thought. But now, there he was, dead, officially reported, with picture and description and distinction and place and date all complete. The shadow had melted into the definite Eternity of Shadows.

Andrew rose early, dressed, and, according to his athletic custom, took his swinging hour's walk through the streets still fresh with the lingering coolness of the night, and then, after breakfast, entered Elodie's room.

But she was still fast asleep. She seldom rose till near midday. It was only after lunch, a preoccupied meal, that they found the opportunity for discussion, in the little stuffy courtyard of the hotel, set round with dusty tubs of aloes and screened with a trellis of discontented vine. They sat on a rustic bench by a door and then coffee was served on a blistered iron table once painted yellow. There were many flies which disturbed the slumbers of an old mongrel Newfoundland sprawling on the cobbles.

And there he put to her the proposition which he had formulated during the night.

"My dear," said he, "I have something very important to say to you. You will listen--eh? You won't interrupt?"

Coffee-cup in hand, she glanced at him swiftly before she sipped.

"As you will."

"Yesterday," said he, "I met a comrade of the war, a Colonel of Australian artillery. I lunched with him, as you know."

"_Bien_," said Elodie.

"I had a long talk with him. He made certain propositions."

He repeated his conversation with Arbuthnot, described at second hand the Solomon Islands, the beauties of reef and palm, the delights of a new, free life and laid before her the guarantee of a competence and the possibilities of a fortune. As he talked, Elodie's dark face grew sullen and her eyes hardened. When he paused, she said:

"You are master of your affairs. If you wish to go, you are free. I have no right to say anything."

"You don't allow me to finish," said he, smiling patiently. "I would not go there without you."

"_Moi?_" She s.h.i.+fted round on her seat with Southern excitability and pointed her finger at her bosom. "I go to the other end of the world and live among savages and Australians who don't talk French--and I who know no word of English or any other savage tongue? No, my friend. Ask anything else of me--I give it freely, as I have given it all these years. But not that."

"You would go with me as my wife, Elodie. We will get married."

"_Pouf!_" said Elodie, contemptuously.

Without any knowledge of the terminal values so precious to women, Andrew felt a vague apprehension lest he had begun at the wrong end.

"Surely," said he, by way of reparation. "The death of your husband makes a great difference. Now there is nothing to prevent our marriage."

"There is everything to prevent it," she replied. "You no longer love me."

"The same affection exists," said he, "that has always been between us."

"Then we go on leading the life that we always have led."

"I don't think it very satisfactory," said Andrew.

"I do, if it pleases us to remain together, we remain. If we want to say 'Good-bye' we are free to do so."

He noticed that she wrung her hands nervously together.

"You don't wish to say 'good-bye,' Elodie?" he asked gently.

"Oh, no. It is only not to put ourselves into the impossibility of saying it."

"While you live, my dear," he replied, "I could never say it to you."

"If you went away to the Antipodes, you would have to say good-bye, my dear Andre, for I could not accompany you--never in life. I have heard of these countries. They may be good for men, but for women--no. Unless one is archimillionaire, one has no servants. The woman has to keep the house and wash the floor and cook the meals. And that--you know well--I can't do. It may be selfish and a little unworthy but _mon Dieu!_--I have always been frank--that's how I am. And except on tour abroad where we have lived in hotels where everybody spoke French I have never lived out of France.

That is what I was always saying to myself when you were seeking an occupation. 'What will happen to me if he does get a foreign appointment?'

I was afraid, oh, terribly afraid. But I said nothing to you. I loved you too much. But now it is necessary for me to tell you what I have in my heart. You are free to go to what wild island you like--that is why it would be absurd for us to marry--but it would be all finished between us."

"That couldn't be," said Andrew. "What would become of you?"

She averted her head and said abruptly, "Don't think of it."

"But I must think of it. During the war----"

"During the war, it was different. _A la guerre comme a la guerre._ We knew it could not last for ever. You loved me. It was natural for me to accept the support of _mon homme_, like all other women. But now, if you leave me--no. _N-i-n-i, nini, c'est fini._"

So all Andrew's beautiful dreams faded into mist. He rose and crossed the little cobbled courtyard and looked out for a while into the shabby by-street in which the hotel was situated. That Elodie should accompany him was the only feasible way, from the pecuniary point of view, of carrying out the vague scheme.

It would be a life, at first, of some roughness and privation. Arbuthnot had laid the financial side quite clearly before him. He could not expect to land on the Solomon Islands without capital (and even a borrowed capital) and expect an income of a thousand pounds a year to drop into his mouth. If Elodie, although refusing to accompany him, would accept his allowance, that allowance, would, of arithmetical necessity, be far, far less than she had enjoyed during the war. Besides, although he was bound tentatively to suggest it, he knew the odd pride, the rod of steel through her nature, which he had come up against, to his own great advantage, time after time during their partners.h.i.+p, and he would have been the most astonished man in the world had she answered otherwise.

Yes, the dream of coco-nuts and pearls had melted. She was right. Even had she consented, she would have been a ghastly failure in pioneer Colonial life. Their existence would have been mildewed and moth-eaten with misery.

She knew herself and her limitations. To go and leave her to starve or earn a precarious livelihood with her birds, on this post-war music-hall stage avid for novelty of sensation, were an act as dastardly as that of the late Raoul Mares-caux who planted her there on the platform of the Gare St.

Lazare while he was on his ways overseas with the modiste of the Place de la Madeleine.

He turned to find her dabbing her eyes with a couple of square inches of chiffon which, in spite of its exiguity, had smeared the powder on her face. He sat down beside her, with his patient smile, and took her hand and patted it.

"Come, come, my little Elodie. I am not going to leave you. It was only an idea. If it had attracted you, well and good. But as it doesn't, let us say no more about it."

"I don't want to hinder you in your life, Andre," she said brokenly. "_ca me donne beaucoup de peine_. But you see, don't you, that I couldn't do it?"

He soothed her as best he could. Les Pet.i.t Patou would invent new business, of a comicality that would once more make their fortunes. That being so, why should they not be married?

She looked at him searchingly. "You desire it as much as that?"