The Mountebank Part 44

"No," she said. "There are things which we really ought to say to each other. You do believe I wish I had never come?"

"I can quite understand," said he, stiffly.

"It hurts," she said.

"Why should it matter so much?" he asked.

"I don't know--but it does."

He drew himself up and his face grew stern.

"I don't cease to be an honourable man because of my profession; or to be worthy of respect because I am loyal to sacred obligations."

"You put me in the wrong," she said. "And I deserve it. But it all hurts.

It hurts dreadfully. Can't you see? The awful pity of it? You of all men to be condemned to a fife like this. And you suffer too. It all hurts."

"Remember," said he, "it was the life to which I was bred."

She felt hopeless. "It's my own fault for coming," she said. "I should have left things as they were when we parted in April. There was beauty--you made it quite clear that our parting was final. You couldn't have acted otherwise. Forgive me for all I've said. I pride myself on being a practical woman; but--for that reason perhaps--I'm unused to grappling with emotional situations. If I've been unkind, it's because I've been stabbing myself and forgetting I'm stabbing you at the same time."

He walked a pace or two further with her. For the first time he seemed to recognize what he, Andrew Lackaday, had meant to her.

"I'm sorry," he said gravely. "I never dreamed that it was a matter of such concern to you. If I had, I shouldn't have left you in any doubt. To me you were the everything that man can conceive in woman. I wanted to remain in your memory as the man the war had made me. Vanity or pride, I don't know. We all have our failings. I wors.h.i.+pped you as the _Princesse Loinlaine_. I never told you that I am a man who has learned to keep himself under control. Perhaps under too much control. I shouldn't tell you now, if----"

"You don't suppose I'm a fool," she interrupted. "I knew. And the Verity-Stewarts knew. And even my little cousin Evadne knew."

They still strolled along the path under the trees. He said after a while:

"I'm afraid I have made things very difficult for you."

She was pierced with remorse. "Oh, how like you! Any other man would have put it the other way round and accused me of making things difficult for him. And he would have been right. For I did come here to get news of you from Anthony Hylton. He was so discreet that I felt that he could tell me something. And I came and found you and have made things difficult for you."

He said in his sober way: "Perhaps it is for the best that we have met and had this talk. We ought to have had it months ago, but--" he turned his face wistfully on her--"we couldn't, because I didn't know. Anyhow, it's all over."

"Yes," she sighed. "It's all over. We're up against the stone wall of practical life."

"Quite so," said he. "I am Pet.i.t Patou, the mountebank; my partner is Madame Patou, whom I have known since I was a boy of twenty, to whom I am bound by indissoluble ties of mutual fidelity, loyalty and grat.i.tude; and you are the Lady Auriol Dayne. We live, as I said before, in different spheres."

"That's quite true," she said. "We have had our queer romance. It won't hurt us. It will sweeten our lives. But, as you say, it's over. It has to be over."

"There's no way out," said he. "It's doubly locked. Good-bye."

He bent and kissed her hand. To the casual French valetudinarians sitting and strolling in the park, it was nothing but a social formality. But to Auriol the touch of his lips meant the final parting of their lives, the consecrated burial of their love.

She lingered for a few moments watching his long, straight back disappear round the corner of the path, and then turned and joined me by the park gate. On our way to the hotel the only thing she said was:

"I don't seem to have much chance, do I, Tony?"

It was after lunch, while we sat, as the day before, at the end of the terrace, that she told me of what had taken place between Lackaday and herself, while I had been hanging about the gate. I must confess to pressing her confidence. Since I was lugged, even as a sort of _raisonneur_, into their little drama, I may be pardoned for some curiosity as to development. I did not seem, however, to get much further.

They had parted for ever, last April, in a not unpoetic atmosphere. They had parted for ever now in circ.u.mstances devoid of poetry. The only bit of dramatic progress was the mutual avowal, apparently dragged out of them.

It was almost an anticlimax. And then dead stop. I put these points before her. She agreed dismally. Bitterly reproached herself for giving way in Paris to womanish folly; also for deliberately bringing about the morning's explanation.

"You were cruel--which is utterly unlike you," I said, judicially.

"That horrible green, white and red thing haunted me all night--and that fat woman bursting out of her clothes. I felt shrivelled up. If only I had left things as they were!" She harped always on that note. "I thought I could walk myself out of my morbid frame of mind. Oh yes--you're quite right--morbid--unlike me. I walked miles and miles. I made up my mind to return to Paris by the night train. I should never see him again. The whole thing was dead. Killed. Washed out. I had got back some sense when I ran into the two of you. It seemed so ghastly to go on talking in that cold, dry way. I longed to goad him into some sort of expression of himself--to find the man again. That's why I told him about going to the circus last night."

She went on in this strain. Presently she said: "I could shed tears of blood over him. Don't think I'm filled merely with selfish disgust. As I told him--the pity of it--all that he must have suffered--for he has suffered, hasn't he?"

"He has gone through h.e.l.l," said I.

She was silent for a few moments. Then she said: "What's the good of going round and round in a circle? You either understand or you don't."

By way of consolation I mendaciously a.s.sured her that I understood. I don't think I understand now. I doubt whether she understood herself.

Her emotions were literally going round and round in a circle, a hideous merry-go-round with fixed staring features, to be pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed in the eternal gyration. Horror of Pet.i.t Patou. Her love for Lackaday. Madame Patou. Hatred of Lacka-day. Scorching self-contempt for seeking him out.

Pet.i.t Patou and Madame Patou. Lackaday crucified. Infinite pity for Lackaday. General Lackaday. Old dreams. The lost illusion. The tomb of love. Horror of Pet.i.t Patou--and so _da capo_, endlessly round and round.

At least, this figure gave me the only clue to her frame of mind. If she went on gyrating in this way indefinitely, she must go mad. No human consciousness could stand it. For sanity she must stop at some point. The only rational halting-place was at the Tomb. If I knew my Auriol, she would drop a flower and a tear on it, and then would start on a bee-line for Central Tartary, or whatever expanse of the world's surface offered a satisfactory field for her energies.

She swallowed the stone-cold, half-remaining coffee in her cup and rose and stretched herself, arms and back and bust, like a magnificent animal, the dark green, silken knitted jumper that she wore revealing all her great and careless curves, and drew a long breath and smiled at me.

"I've not slept for two nights and I've walked twelve miles this morning.

I'll turn in till dinner." She yawned. "Poor old Tony," she laughed. "You can have it at a Christian hour this evening."

"The one bright gleam in a hopeless day," said I.

She laughed again, blew me a kiss and went her way to necessary repose.

I remained on the terrace a while longer, in order to finish a long corona-corona, forbidden by my doctors. But I reflected that as the showman makes up on the swings what he loses on the roundabouts, so I made up on the filthy water what I lost on the cigars. How I provided myself with excellent corona-coronas in Royat, under the Paris price, I presume, of ten francs apiece, wild reporters will never drag out of me. I mused, therefore, over the last smokable half-inch, and at last, discarding it reluctantly, I sought well-earned slumber in my room. But I could not sleep. All this imbroglio kept me awake. Also the infernal band began to play. I had not thought--indeed, I had had no time to think of the note from Bakkus which I had received the first thing in the morning, and of Lackaday's confirmation of the summons to the ailing Elodie. Women, said he, had nerves. The thunder, of course. But, thought I, with elderly sagacity, was it all thunder?

As far as I could gather, from Lackaday's confessions he had never given Elodie cause for jealousy from the time they had become Les Pet.i.t Patou.

Her rout of the suggestive Ernestine proved her belief in his insensibility to woman's attractions during the war. She had never heard of Lady Auriol.

Lady Auriol, therefore, must have bounded like a tiger into the placid compound of her life. Reason enough for a _crise des nerfs_. Even I, who had nothing to do with it, found my equilibrium disturbed.

Lady Auriol and I dined together. She declared herself rested and in her right and prosaic mind.

"I have no desire to lose your company," said I, "so I hope there's no more talk of an unbooked _strapontin_ on the midnight train."

"No need," she replied. "He's leaving Clermont-Ferrand tomorrow. I'll keep to my original programme and enjoy fresh air until a wire summons me back to Paris. That's to say if you can do with me."

"If you keep on looking as alluring as you are this evening," said I, "perhaps I mayn't be able to do without you."

"I wonder why I've never been able to fall in love with a man of your type, Tony," she remarked in her frank, detached way. "You--by which I mean hundreds of men like you, much younger, of course--you are of my world, you understand the half-said thing, your conduct during the war has been irreproachable, you've got a heart beneath a cynical exterior, you've got brains, you're as clean as a new pin, you're an agreeable companion, you can turn a compliment in a way that even a savage like me can appreciate, and yet----"

"And yet," I interrupted, "when you're presented with a whole paper, row on row, of new pins, you're left cold because choice is impossible." I smiled sadly and sipped my wine. "Now I know what I am, one of a row of nice, clean, English-made pins."

"It's you that are being rude to yourself, not I," she laughed. "But you are of a type typical, and in your heart you're very proud of it. You wouldn't be different from what you are for anything in the world."

"I would give a good deal," said I, "to be different from what I am--but--from the ideal of myself--no."