The Maids of Paradise Part 52

"Let us shake hands, Kelly," I said,... "and be very good friends.

Will you?"

He gave me his hand rather shyly.

"We will never speak of her again," I said,... "unless you desire it. You have had a terrible lesson in caution; I need say no more.

Only remember that I have trusted you with a secret concerning Buckhurst's conspiracy."

His firm hand tightened on mine, then he walked away, steadily, head high. And I went out to saddle my horse for a canter across the moor to Point Paradise.

It was a gray day, with a hint of winter in the air, and a wind that set the gorse rustling like tissue-paper. Up aloft the sun glimmered, a white spot in a silvery smother; pale lights lay on moorland and water; the sea tumbled over the bar, boiling like a flood of liquid lead from which the spindrift curled and blew into a haze that buried the island of Groix and turned the anch.o.r.ed iron-clad to a phantom.

A day for a gallop, if ever there was such a day!--a day to wash out care from a troubled mind and cleanse it in the whipping, reeking, wet east wind--a day for a fox! And I rose in my saddle and shouted aloud as a red fox shot out of the gorse and galloped away across the endless moorland, with the feathers of a mallard still sticking to his whiskers.

Oh, what a gallop, with risk enough, too; for I did not know the coast moors; and the deep clefts from the cliffs cut far inland, so that eye and ear and bridle-hand were tense and ready to catch danger ere it ingulfed us in some sea-churned crevice hidden by the bracken. And how the gray gulls squealed, high whirling over us, and the wild ducks in the sedge rose with clapping wings, craning their necks, only to swing overhead in circles, whimpering, and drop, with pendent legs and wings aslant, back into the bog from which we startled them.

A ride into an endless gray land, sweet with sea-scents, rank with the perfume of salty green things; a ride into a land of gus.h.i.+ng winds, wet as spray, strong and caressing, too, and full of mischief; winds that set miles of sedge rippling; sudden winds, that turned still pools to geysers and set the yellow gorse flowers flying; winds that rushed up with a sea-roar like the sound in sh.e.l.ls, then, sudden, died away, to leave the furrowed clover motionless and the tall reeds still as death.

So, by strange ways and eccentric circles, like the aerial paths of homing sea-birds, I came at last to the spot I had set out for, consciously; yet it surprised me to find I had come there.

Before I crossed the little bridge I scented the big orange-tinted tea-roses and the pinks. Leaves on apricots were falling; the fig-tree was bare of verdure, and the wind chased the big, bronzed leaves across the beds of herbs, piling them into heaps at the base of the granite wall.

A boy took my horse; a servant in full Breton costume admitted me; the velvet humming of Sylvia Elven's spinning-wheel filled the silence, like the whirring of a great, soft moth imprisoned in a room:

"Woe to the Maids of Paradise, Yvonne!

Twice have the Saxons landed--twice!

Yvonne!

Yet shall Paradise see them thrice!

Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!

"Fair is their hair and blue their eyes, Yvonne!

Body o' me! their words are lies, Yvonne!

Maids of Paradise, oh, be wise!

Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!"

The door swung open noiselessly; the whir of the wheel and the sound of the song filled the room for an instant, then was shut out as the Countess de Va.s.sart closed the door and came forward to greet me.

In her pretty, soft gown, with a tint of blue ribbon at the neck and shoulders, she seemed scarcely older than a school-girl, so radiant, so sweet and fresh she stood there, giving me her little hand to touch in friends.h.i.+p.

"It was so good of you to come," she said; "I know you made it a duty and gave up a glorious gallop to be amiable to me. Did you?"

I tried to say something, but her loveliness confused me.

Somebody brought tea--I don't know who; all I could see clearly was her gray eyes meeting mine--the light from the leaded window touching her glorious, ruddy hair.

As for the tea, I took whatever she offered; doubtless I drank it, but I don't remember. Nor do I remember what she said at first, for somehow I began thinking about my lions, and the thought obsessed me even while striving to listen to her, even in the tingling maze of other thoughts which kept me dumb under the exquisite spell of this intimacy with her.

The delicate odor of ripened herbs stole into the room from the garden; far away, through the whispering whir of the spinning-wheel, I heard the sea.

"Do you like Sylvia's song?" she asked, turning her head to listen.

"It is a very old song--a very, very old one--centuries old. It's all about the English, how they came to harry our coasts in those days--and it has almost a hundred verses!" Something of the Bretonne came into her eyes for a moment, that shadow of sadness, that patient fatalism in which, too, there is something of distrust. The next instant her eyes cleared and she smiled.

"The Trecourts suffered much from the English raiders. I am a Trecourt, you know. That song was made about us--about a young girl, Yvonne de Trecourt, who was carried away by the English. She was foolish; she had a lover among the Saxons,... and she set a signal for him, and they came and sacked the town, and carried her away, and that was what she got for her folly."

She bent her head thoughtfully; the sound of the sea grew louder in the room; a yellow light stole out of the west and touched the window-panes, slowly deepening to orange; against it the fruit trees stood, a leafless tracery of fragile branches.

"It is the winter awaking, very far away," she said, under her breath.

Something in the hollow monotone of the sea made me think again of the low grumble of restless lions. The sound was hateful. Why should it steal in here--why haunt me even in this one spot in all the world where a world-tired man had found a moment's peace in a woman's eyes.

"Are you troubled?" she asked, then colored at her own question, as though deeming the impulse to speak unwarranted.

"No, not troubled. Happiness is often edged with a shadow. I am content to be here."

She bent her head and looked at the heavy rose lying in solitary splendor on the table. The polished wood reflected it in subdued tints of saffron.

"It is a strange friends.h.i.+p," I said.

"Ours?... yes."

I said, musing: "To me it is like magic. I scarce dare speak, scarce breathe, lest the spell break."

She was silent.

"--Lest the spell break--and this house, this room, fade away, leaving me alone, staring at the world once more."

"If there is a spell, you have cast it," she said, laughing at my sober face. "A wizard ought to be able to make his spells endure."

Then her face grew graver. "You must forget the past," she said; "you must forget all that was cruel and false and unhappy,... will you not?"

"Yes, madame."

"I, too," she said, "have much to forget and much to hope for; and you taught me how to forget and how to hope."

"I, madame?"

"Yes,... at La Trappe, at Morsbronn, and here. Look at me. Have I not changed?"

"Yes," I said, fascinated.

"I know I have," she said, as though speaking to herself. "Life means more now. Somehow my childhood seems to have returned, with all its hope of the world and all its confidence in the world, and its certainty that all will be right. Years have fallen from my shoulders like a released burden that was crus.h.i.+ng me to my knees. I have awakened from a dream that was not life at all,... a dream in which I, alone, staggered through darkness, bearing the world on my shoulders--the world doubly weighted with the sorrows of mankind,... a dream that lasted years, but..._you_ awoke me."

She leaned forward and lifted the rose, touching her face with it.

"It was so simple, after all--this secret of the world's malady. You read it for me. I know now what is written on the eternal tablets--to live one's own life as it is given, in honor, charity, without malice; to seek happiness where it is offered; to share it when possible; to uplift. But, most of all, to be happy and accept happiness as a heavenly gift that is to be shared with as many as possible. And this I have learned since ... I knew you."

The light in the room had grown dimmer; I leaned forward to see her face.

"Am I not right?" she asked.