Running Sands Part 47

"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"

"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none.

Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in another of them."

Muriel bit her red under-lip.

"Let us go back," she said.

"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."

They walked a few steps forward.

"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.

"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are presumptuous."

"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."

"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."

"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."

"What nonsense!"

"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret, madame."

Muriel's eyes flashed.

"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."

Von Klausen bowed.

"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to the reference."

"I did not."

"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close acquaintances.h.i.+p."

"I required nothing--and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was the merest trifle."

Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.

"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to your husband."

She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky cheeks were aflame.

"How low of you!" she cried.

But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.

"To mention the truth?" he murmured.

"To bring up such a trifle--to trade on such a confidence--to make of an impulsive action and of the consequences of that action--you know--I told you at the time, and you must know--that I didn't mention the circ.u.mstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you would not want your terror known."

"Ah--so you did think of me, then?"

"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."

They were now half-way along the Lac Inferieur. Under the arching trees in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.

"No!" he said, hoa.r.s.ely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always--think of me deeply. I cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must listen. I tell you now, once and forever--I tell you----"

Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with pa.s.sions wholly unloosed--the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite of all the hampering harness of convention--and she was undeniably curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last a.n.a.lysis, this soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something else--something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of elaborately conceived convention.

Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.

"Stop!" said Muriel.

Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.

"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and slowly; now----"

Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.

Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the moment before.

She raised a trembling hand.

"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe he would kill you."

Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.

"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no man that lives."

"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered: "afraid and ashamed."

"Not afraid."

"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the splendid pa.s.sion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way.

Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."

It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result.

Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was somehow inexplicably true.

Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His pa.s.sion fell from him.

His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.

Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.