Running Sands Part 48

"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry--very sorry. We will never speak of it again--not to ourselves--and not to anybody else."

"But we shall be friends?" he asked.

"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.

When one is young such promises are lightly made.

"Never," he vowed.

"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this affair to me?"

"Never again, dear lady."

"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in--in that way."

He pressed her hand ever so slightly.

"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."

"But the thoughts are wrong."

"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions.

I shall remember always his words."

She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them to fall, upon trivial things.

"You did not stop in Ma.r.s.eilles?" he asked her, turning again to the subject of her fevered trip with Jim.

"We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris."

"Warmer in Paris than Ma.r.s.eilles?"

"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Ma.r.s.eilles, and so we came right back here."

"You were not far from Ma.r.s.eilles. It is a pity that you did not see it.

It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafes, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebiere or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Ma.r.s.eilles sometime--you and your husband."

"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I."

"But the best of Ma.r.s.eilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."

She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.

"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau--the particular point that I mean--a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelene spent, in penance, the last thirty years of her life."

He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.

Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.

"You have been there, then?" she asked.

"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot--the silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

XVII

THE CALL OF YOUTH

That evening there came the beginning of the end.

The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate any sort of fete of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von Klausen had promised his two American friends, the _grand boulevard_ would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the Madelaine.

"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."

He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of the dull routine of the Emba.s.sy.

Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own part, though she told herself religiously that she had done no wrong, she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.

"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.

"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description of the evening before the fete. If he felt somewhat worn from the now unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome this chance for novel amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our pilot, Captain?"

Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.

"If," he said, "you will do me the honour--you and Mrs. Stainton--to dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of her drive this morning?"

Jim, too, looked at Muriel.

"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the Austrian's.

Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.

"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."

"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all."

He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."

"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during the remainder of the afternoon----"

"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not stop to a.n.a.lyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every minute. You _are_ sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"

Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.

"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pa.s.s the afternoon by motoring to Versailles and back."