CHAPTER IX.—VARIOUS ELEMENTS HAVE THEIR SAY.
It was a sultry night. Not a breath of air was stirring. They had escaped from the crowd on the quays and were being rowed about the lake in a little boat gaily hung with Chinese lanterns. The glare fell on their faces, confusing their view, and making all dark objects around them invisible. Their eyes caught nothing but a phantasmagoria of coloured lights. The water swarmed with them. Scores of similarly illuminated craft darted hither and thither, crossed and recrossed each other on all sides, with the dazzling effect of myriads of fireflies. All around, fixed amid the moving lights, blazed the lamps on quays, bridges and jetties. Now and then, through a momentary vista, could be seen the gas devices on the fronts of the great hotels on the Quai du Mont Blanc. Now and then, too, they neared the looming hull of the great steamer, a mass of festoons of coloured lamps. The strains of the band on board broke through the roar of many voices, with a strange effect, and died away in the general hubbub as the steamer moved slowly off.
“I am glad I came,” said Katherine. “It was nice of you to think of this boat. It is fresher on the water.”
She was happy; he was by her side. The little canopy of lanterns above their heads seemed to draw them together, isolate them from the outer world. The lights whirled around her as in a dream. Raine too, for all his man's lesser emotional impressibility, felt a slight exaltation, a continuance of the strange sense of the unreality of things. As the moments passed, this common mood grew in intensity.
They spoke of the incident of the dinner-table, but like other things it seemed to lose perspective. Meanwhile the old wizened boatman, apparently far away in the bows, rowed stolidly round and round within the basin formed by the quays and jetties.
“It is a mad story,” said Katherine. “Almost fantastic. What object had he? Was he a fiend, or a coward, or what?”
“Both,” said Raine. “With a soft sentimental heart. A fiend that is half a fool is ever the blackest of fiends. He is irresponsible for his own hell.”
“Are all men like that who make life a hell for women?”
“In a way. Men are blind to the consequences of their own actions. Apply the truism specially. Or else they see only their own paths before them. Sometimes men seem 'a little brood.' I often wonder how women can love them.”
“Do you? Would you include yourself?”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“Do you think you could ever be cruel to a woman?”
“I could never lie to her, if you mean that. The woman who loves me will find me straight, however much of an inferior brute I might be otherwise.”
“Don't,” said Katherine. “You frighten me—the suggestion—”
“But you asked me whether I could be cruel.”
“A woman's thoughts and speech are never so intense as a man's. You throw a lurid light on my words and I shrink from them. Forgive me. I know that you could be nothing but what was good and true-hearted.”
Raine looked at her. Her face was delicate in its strength, very pure in its sadness. The dim light by which it was visible suggested infinite things beyond that could be revealed in a greater brightness. He felt wonderfully drawn to her.
“Men have been cruel to you. That is why you ask.”
“Ah no!” she said, turning away her head quickly. “I will never call men cruel. I have suffered. Who has not? The greatest suffering—it is the greatest suffering in life—that which comes between man and woman.”
“It is true,” replied Raine musingly. “As it can be the greatest joy. Once I could not bear to think of it, for the pain. It is strange—”
“What is strange?” asked Katherine in a low voice.
He was scarcely conscious how he had come to strike the chord of his own life. It seemed natural at the moment.
“It is strange how like a dream it all appears now; as if another than I—a bosom friend, whose secrets I shared—had gone through it.”
She put her hand lightly on his arm, and he felt the touch to his heart.
“Would you care for me to tell you? I should like to. It would seem a way of laying a ghost peacefully and reverently. It has never passed out of me yet—not even to my father.”
“Tell me,” murmured Katherine.
“Both are dead—twelve years ago.”
“Both?”
“Yes; mother and child. I was little else than a boy—an undergraduate. She was little else than a girl—yet she had been married—then deserted by her husband and utterly alone and friendless when I met her—in London. She was a dresser at a theatre—educated though, and refined far above her class. At first I helped her—then loved her—we couldn't marry—she offered—at first I refused. But then—well, you can end it. We loved each other dearly. If she had lived, I should have been true to her till this day—I should have married her, for she would soon have become a widow. When the child was born, I was one-and-twenty—she nineteen. We were wildly, ecstatically happy. Three months afterwards the child caught diphtheria—she caught it too from the baby—first the little one died—then the mother died in my arms. I seemed to have lived all my life before I had entered upon it. It was a heavy burthen for a lad.”
“And since?” asked Katherine gently.
“I have shrunk morbidly from risking such torture a second time.”
“Yours is a nature to love altogether if it loves at all.”
“I reverence love too highly to treat it lightly,” he said. “Tell me,” he added, “do you think my punishment came upon me rightly? There are those that would. Are you one?”
“God forbid,” she replied in a low voice. “God forbid that I of all creatures should dare to judge others.”
The earnestness in her tone startled him. He caught a side-view of her face. It wore the same look of sadness as on the night they had seen “Denise” together in the winter. She had suffered. A great yearning pity for her rose in his heart.
“It is well that the past can be the past,” he said. “We live, and gather to ourselves fresh personalities. A little gradual change, a little daily hardening or softening, weakening or strengthening—and at the end of a few years we are different entities. Things become memories—reflections without life. That was why I said it was strange. Now all that time is only a vague memory, and it mingles with the far-off memory of my mother, who died when I was a tiny boy. And now I have put it to rest for ever—for it was a ghost until I knew you. Do you believe in idle fancies?”
“I live in a great many,” said Katherine.
“I fancied—that by telling you, I should be free to give myself up to a new, strange, wonderful world that I saw ready to open for me.”
“Could I ever say 'I thank you' for telling me?” replied Katherine. “I take all that you have said to my heart.”
There was a long silence. He put his hand down by her side and it rested upon hers. She made a movement to withdraw it, but his touch tightened into a clasp. She allowed it to remain, surrendering herself to the happiness. Each felt the subtle communion of spirit too precious to be broken by speech. The lantern-hung boats passed backwards and forwards. One party, just as they came abreast, struck up an attempt at a jodeling song: “Juch hol-dio hol-di-ai-do hol-di-a hol-dio.”
The suddenness startled them. Katherine drew away her hand hastily as he looked round.
“Why did you?” he asked.
“Because—because the little dream-time came to an end.”
“Why should it?”
“It is the nature of dreams.”
“Why, then, should it be a dream?”
“Because it can never be a reality.”
“It can. If you cared.”
The words were low, scarcely audible, but they stirred the woman's soul to its depths. She remained for a moment spellbound, gazing away from him, down at the fantastically flecked water. A yearning, passionate desire shook her. One glance, one touch, one little murmured word, and she would unlock the flood-gates of a love that her whole being cried aloud for. Often she had given herself up to the tremulous joy of anticipation. Now the moment had come. It depended upon her to give a sign. But she could not. She dared not. A sign would make it all a reality in sober fact. She shrank from it now that she was brought face to face with it. With a woman's instinct she sought to temporize. But what could she say? If she cared! To deny was beyond her strength. Meanwhile the pause was growing embarrassing. She felt that his eyes were fixed upon her—that he was awaiting an answer.
“What I have said has pained you.”
She turned her head to reply desperately, she scarce knew how. But the first syllable died upon her lips. A flash of lightning quivered across the space, bringing into view for a vivid, dazzling second the semicircle of the quay, the old clustering city, the Salèves; and almost simultaneously a terrific peal of thunder broke above their heads. Katherine was not a nervous woman, but the flash and the peal were so sudden, that she instinctively gave a little cry and grasped Raine's arm. Before the rumble had died away, great drops of rain fell. In another moment it came down as from a water-spout.
The evening had been close, but they had not thought of a storm. Katherine had only a light wrap to put over her thin dress. The gay lanterns swinging above their heads and before their eyes—now they were a lightless mass of wet paper—had prevented them from noticing the gradual clouding over of the sky. They were in the middle of the basin. Amid the roar of the rain and the shouts from the boats around them, they could hear the dull noise of the crowd on the quays scampering away to shelter.
“My poor child, you will get wet through,” cried Raine, “put this round you. Let us get in as quickly as we can.”
He pulled off his rough tweed coat and threw it over her shoulders; and then, before either Katherine or the old boatman were aware of his intentions, he had dispossessed the latter of his place, taken the sculls, and was pulling for shore with a vigour that the little boat had never before felt in its rowlocks.
Drenched, blinded, bewildered by the avalanche of water, Katherine felt a triumphal glow of happiness. The heavens seemed to have come to her rescue, to have given her another chance of life. She was pleased too at having his coat about her, at having heard the rough, protecting tenderness in his voice. It pleased her to feel herself borne along by his strong arms. She could just distinguish his outline in the pitch darkness, and the shimmer of his white shirt-sleeves. There was nothing particularly heroic in his action, but it was supremely that of a man, strong, prompt, and helpful. Another flash as vivid as the first showed him a smile on her face. He shouted a cheery word as the swift darkness fell again, and rowed on vigorously, delighted at the transient vision.
In a few moments they were by the Grand Quai, amidst a confusion of boats hurriedly disgorging their loads. Experienced in many a river crush, Raine skilfully brought his boat to the landing-place, paid the old boatman, and assisted Katherine to land. It was still pouring violently. When they reached the top of the quay, Raine paused for a moment to take his bearings.
“It is ridiculous to think of a cab or shelter,” he said, “We must dash home as quickly as we can. Come along.”
He passed her arm through his hurriedly, and set off at a smart pace.
“Don't take off that,” he cried, preventing an attempt on her part to remove the coat from her shoulders.
“But you—oh—I can't!”
“You must,” he said, authoritatively.
And Katherine found it sweet to yield to his will.
They walked rapidly homewards, speaking very little, owing to the exigencies of the situation, but feeling very close to one another. Even the touch of grotesqueness in this unconventional flight through the rain made them laugh happily together, as they stumbled along in their haste.
“It is very sweet of you not to mind,” he said.
She gave his arm a little pressure for reply, and laughed light-heartedly.
At the porte-cochere of the pension, Katherine paused before mounting the stairs, to take breath and to restore Raine his coat.
The gas-lamp by the door threw its light upon them and for the first time they saw each other clearly. They were drenched to the skin. A simultaneous exclamation rose to the lips of each.
“I earnestly hope you have taken no hurt,” added Raine in a tone of concern.
“Oh no! One never takes hurt when one is happy.”
The glow on her wet cheeks and the light in her eyes confirmed the statement as far as the happiness went.
They entered at the door; he gave her his hand to help her up the stairs.
“When do you start to-morrow?”
“At seven.”
“Must you go?”
“Yes. There seems to be no help for it. But I shall come back. You know that. I hate going away from you.”
They stopped at the end of the little corridor where her room was situated. He detained the parting hand she gave him.
“Tell me. Were you pained at what I said—the last thing, in the boat?”
“Pained? No.”
“Then you do care?”
She was silent. But she lifted her eyes to him and he read there what she could not speak. With a sudden impulse he threw his arm around her, dripping as she was, and kissed her. Then she broke away and fled to her room.
Raine's first act on reaching his room was to summon a servant and send Katherine a glass of cherry-brandy, which he poured from a flask he had brought with him for mountaineering chances, together with a scribbled line: “Drink this, at once.”
Then he changed his dripping garments for comfortable flannels, and went in search of his father. But the old man, though he smiled at Raine's account of his adventure, was still depressed.
“It will be wretched without you,” he said. “Yet you must go away for a time. Make it as short as you can, Raine. I shall think in the meantime of a way out of the difficulty.”
“Couldn't you take Felicia somewhere?” suggested Raine. “To Lucerne. You might start a few days before my return. I must come back for a little while. Afterwards, I might join you, when you have parted from Felicia, and go back to Oxford with you.”
“I will see,” replied the old man a little wearily.
“Poor old dad,” said Raine.
“Man is ever poor,” said his father. “He will never learn the lesson of life. Even with one foot in the grave he plants the other upon the ladder of illusion.”
CHAPTER X.—A TOUCH OF NATURE.
Raine sat smoking his pipe for a long time before going to bed. The events of the day-had crowded so fast upon one another, that he had scarcely had time to estimate their relative importance. His mind was not yet perfectly balanced. The first kiss of a new love disturbs fine equilibrium.
It was characteristic of him that he at once put aside all temptations to postpone his departure. He could not meet Katherine again, except as a declared lover. To parade such relations before Felicia's eyes, seemed to his simple experience in such things a cynical cruelty. Yet he devoutly hoped that fate would decide and the destinies decree that he should return as quickly as possible. There was a peculiar irritation in the position in which he found himself. The sense of it grew in intensity as things assumed juster proportions. After all, what had been said? He was going away with everything unasked, everything unspoken. A question, a glance, a kiss; sufficient for the glowing moment—but painfully inadequate for after-hours of longing. With almost grotesque irritation he broke into an exclamation of anger against the storm that had interrupted the outburst of his gathering passion. But for a saving sense of humour he would have felt humiliated by the remembrance of the sudden check. He could not help chafing under the feeling of incompleteness.
Unlike the woman, who had taken the kiss to her heart of hearts and nursed it there wilfully forgetful, for the first delicious after-hours, of aught else in the wide world, Raine gnawed his spirit with impatient regret that circumstances had granted him no more. If the fulness of revelation were to come on the morrow, it would have been different; but he was going away—without seeing her—for days and days—leaving her with this unsatisfying expression of his love. For he loved her, deeply, truly, with the strength of his simple, manly nature. She had roused in him every instinct of pitying protection, her delicate grace had captivated his senses, her wide experience of life, sad in its wisdom, had harmonized subtly with his robust masculine faith. Without being intellectual, she had the fine judgments of a cultured, thoughtful woman. On deep questions of ethics they met on common ground; could view the world together, and be stirred by the same sympathies. Her companionship had grown intensely dear to him. The sadness that seemed to overspread her life had appealed to his chivalry, compelled him irresistibly to her side. The sweet womanliness of her nature had been gradually revealed to him by a thousand little acts, each one weaving its charm about him, Jean-Marie, too, and his wife had drawn him within the area of their worship.
Hitherto her sadness had been attributed in his mind to no definite cause. She was a widow, had passed through much suffering, was intensely lonely, uncared for. For him that had been enough. He had scarcely thought of speculating further. But tonight the remembrance of agitated tones in her voice forced him to a surmise. He pondered over her self-accusing cry when he had submitted to her judgment the ethical side of the poor tragedy of his early manhood.
“God forbid that I of all creatures should dare to judge others.”
Women do not utter such words lightly, least of all women like Katherine. He fitted them as a key-stone into the grey, vague arch of the past. His face grew stern and thoughtful as he lay back in his seat, and passed his hand heavily through his hair, contemplating the apparition. For a time it loomed as a shadow between himself and her. And then—was it the ghost that he had laid that evening, come back as the eternal spirit of love, or was it merely his strong human faith? A light seemed to pour down from above, and Katherine emerged serene and radiant from the mist, which spread behind her thin and formless.
He sprang to his feet, rubbed his eyes and laughed to himself. His love for her thrilled buoyantly through him. He loved her for what she had shown herself to be; a woman fair and brave and womanly—and one who loved him; that he had seen in her eyes as he had kissed her.
At half-past six on the following morning, the porter came to convey his luggage to the diligence, which starts from the Grand Quai, and a little later he himself left the house. He did so very wistfully. His quixotic flight caused him a greater pang even than he had anticipated. In the street he could not forbear giving a regretful glance upwards at the pension. To his delight, Katherine was standing on the little balcony outside her window.
The bright morning sunlight fell upon her. She was wearing a cream-coloured wrapper; a pale blue scarf about her head half covered her fair hair. Seen through the clear, pure atmosphere, she looked the incarnation of the morning. Her face flushed red all over, as she met the gladness in his eyes. She had risen early, unable to sleep; had dressed herself with elaborate care, searching earnestly in her glass for the accusing lines of her thirty years. She would send a note, she had thought, by the waiter who would bring up his coffee, saying that she was astir and could see him in the salon before he started. But she had only got as far as biting the end of a pencil before a blank sheet of paper. All her preparations and fluttering of heart had ended in her going on to the balcony, to see him walk twenty yards before he turned the corner of the street. And there she had wished tremulously against her will that he would look up as he crossed the road. He had done so, was standing below her. She blushed like a young girl. But he only stood for a moment. With an eager sign he motioned her inwards, and ran back to the house.
They met outside the salon door. He rushed up to her, a little breathless from his race up the stairs, and drew her with him into the room.
“You—up at this hour—just to see me start!—are you an angel?”
He was rapturously incoherent. Her act seemed to him to be truly angelic. In the early stages of love a man rarely takes the woman's passionate cravings into account. Acts that proceed from desires as self-centred as his own he puts down to pure, selfless graciousness towards him. And perhaps as a general principle this is just as well. The woman loves the tribute; and one of her fairest virtues is none the less fair through being won under false pretences.
Katherine looked up at him with strange shyness. He had the power of evoking that which was sweetest and most womanly in her.
“You see that I do care—greatly.”
His arms were about her before the soundwave had passed his ear. A flood of burning words burst impatiently from his lips. She leant back her head, in the joy of surrender.
“I have loved you from the first—since last Christmas. You came to me as nothing else has ever come to me—brave and strong above all men.”
The words fell from her in a murmur strung to passion-pitch. One such radiant moment eclipsed the waste of grey years. She would have sold her soul for it.
She disengaged herself gently.
“I must not make you late.”
“You will write to me?”
“If you write.”
“Every hour, beloved, till I come back.”
“Oh, let it be soon.”
“How great is your trust in me. Another than you might have reproached me for going—at such a time.”
She looked at him, her eyes and lips one smile.
“I can guess the reason. I honour you for it. I would not keep you. But oh! it will be long till I see you again.”
“And to me. I am not one of those to whom waiting is easy. But I take away all, all yourself with me.”
“All.”
“Good-bye—Katherine,” he whispered. “You haye never called me by my name. Let me hear it from you.”
“Raine!”
Again their lips met. In another moment he was speeding to catch the diligence. She went on to the balcony, kissed both hands to him as he turned the corner. Then she went slowly back up the stairs, holding by the hand-rail, and shaken with joy and fear.
When Raine arrived at Chamonix, instead of finding Rogers and his party at the Hotel Royale as he had expected, he found a telegram awaiting him.
“Accident to Bryce. Party broken up. Letter to follow.”
On inquiring of the manager, Raine learned that his telegram of the day before had been forwarded on to Rogers to Courmayeur, whence the latter had written to the hotel countermanding the rooms he had ordered. And by the next post came a letter giving details of the accident. Bryce had slipped down a crevasse and injured himself, perhaps fatally. All thoughts of further climbing were abandoned. Raine was somewhat shocked at the news. He did not know Bryce, who was a Cambridge friend of the junior Dean's, but he was sincerely concerned at the tragic end of the expedition.
The point, however, that touched him practically was that he found himself stranded at Chamonix. He eagerly scanned the long table-d'hote in the hope of discovering a familiar face. But not one was visible. He was alone in that crowded resort which only exists as a rallying point for excursionists and climbers. The sole distraction the place afforded were glaciers which he derived little interest in contemplating, and peaks which he had not the remotest desire to scale. It would have been different, if he had met a cheerful party. He had bargained with himself for their society. It was part of the contract. Now that he was forced to depend on the Alps alone for companionship, he felt aggrieved, and began to dislike them cordially. The notion, however, of going on solitary mountaineering excursions entirely against his will, appealed to his sense of humour.
“The relations between us are simply ridiculous,” he said, apostrophizing the mighty snow-clad pile.
But as there was no help for it, he prepared, like Mahomet, to go the mountain cheerfully. So he secured a guide to the Tête Noire for the following day.
That done, he gave himself up entirely to the new sweetness that had come into his life.
The few moments of the morning's meeting had lit up the day. Much still remained unspoken, but there was no longer the irritating sense of incompleteness that had filled him the night before. Yet all the deeper, subtler pulsations of his love craved immediate expression. He sat in his hotel bedroom far into the night, writing her his first letter.
For the next few days he occupied himself strenuously with the sights of Chamonix. He joined a party over the Mer de Glace, took one day over the Grands Mulets, ascended the Aiguille Verte, and then rested with a feeling of well-earned repose. His great event of the day was the Geneva post. He had received two letters from Katherine. One she had written a few hours after his departure—he put it to his lips. The second, for which he waited with a lover's impatience, was in answer to the first he had written. At first he read it with a slight shade of disappointment. It seemed to lack the spontaneity of the other. But Raine, by nature chivalrous towards women, and holding them as creatures with emotions more delicately balanced than men and subject to a thousand undreamed-of shynesses, quickly assigned to such causes the restraint he had noticed, and, reading in, as it were a touch of passion into every touch of tenderness, satisfied the longings of his heart. There were letters too from his father. The first stated that he had mooted the plan to Felicia of the little jaunt to Lucerne, and that she had acceded to it joyfully, but in the second the old man complained of sudden poorliness. From the third Raine learned that he was in bed with a bad cold, and that Lucerne had been postponed indefinitely.
The news depressed him slightly. No letter from Katherine had accompanied it, to cheer him. On the evening of his day of rest, therefore, he was less in love with Chamonix than ever. By way of compensation the weather was bright and clear, and the sunny seat under the firs in the hotel gardens, whither he had retired with his travelling edition of “Tristram Shandy,” was warm and reposeful. He was speculating over the Rabelaisian humour of Mr. Shandy's domestic concerns, and enjoying the incongruity between it and the towering masses of rock and glacier and snow on the other side of the valley, when a man sauntered up the gravelled path, stopped before him, and asked for a light.
Raine looked up, and recognizing the newcomer as one with whom he had exchanged casual remarks during the last few days, readily complied with his request.
He was a thin, wiry man of about seven and thirty, with a clean-shaven face which bore a curious expression of mingled simplicity and shrewdness. His thin lips seemed to smile at the deception practised by his guileless pale-blue eyes. Unlike Raine, who wore the Englishman's Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heavy heather-mixture stockings, he was attired in grey summer trousers and a black jacket. A soft felt hat of the Tyrolese shape, a pair of field-glasses slung over his shoulder, a great gold solitaire fastening his shirt-cuff, which showed conspicuously as he lit his cigar, suggested the nationality that was confirmed by his speech.
He was an American, his name was Hockmaster, and he was visiting Europe for the first time. With these facts he had already acquainted Raine on a previous occasion.
When the American had returned the match-box, he sat down on the bench by Raine's side.
“If you want to be alone, you've only got to tell me and I'll evaporate,” he said cheerfully. “But I've been getting somewhat lonesome in this valley. Nature's a capital thing in mixed society, but when you have got her all to yourself, she is a thundering dull companion.”
The remark so exactly echoed Raine's sentiments of the past few days that he burst out laughing, closed “Tristram Shandy,” and prepared to gossip sympathetically with his new acquaintance.
“You are not ecstatic over all this,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“Only within reasonable limits,” replied the American. “It's very pretty, and when you see it for the first time it fetches you in the pit of your stomach. Some folks say it touches the soul, but I don't take much stock of souls anyway. Well, then you get over it, like sea-sickness, and it doesn't fetch you any more. But I'm glad I've seen it. That is what I came over for.”
“To see the Alps?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. But to sample Europe generally. To get a bird's-eye view of all the salient features. It is very interesting. America is a fine country, but it's not the microcosm of the universe.”
“But you have scenery much more grandiose than this, in the Californian Sierras,” said Raine.
“We may. I don't know. And I hope I shall never know, for mountains and glaciers are not my strong point. But if they were fifty times as sublime, American mountains could not have the glamour and sentiment that brings thousands of my countrymen to gape at Mount Blanc. Other mountains may do business on a larger scale, but the Alps is an old-established firm. They have the connection, and people stick to them. Mount Blanc, too, is a sort of Westminister Abbey to Americans, and the Rigi a Stratford-on-Avon. They like to feel they have a share in it. I don't say these are my views personally. I am afraid I take my glamour neat and get it over quickly.”
As Raine had nothing particular to reply to this philosophy, and as he saw that Mr. Hockmaster would be more entertaining as a talker than as a listener, he uttered a polite commonplace by way of antistrophe, and the American again took up his parable. He spoke well and fluently. Behind the ingenuousness of his remarks there generally lurked a touch of incisiveness, which stimulated his listener's interest. His manners were those of a gentleman. Raine began to like him.
“What part of England do you come from?” he asked at length.
“Oxford.”
“The University?”
“Yes.”
“I haven't been there yet. I've been through Cambridge. But Oxford I am keeping until I get back. Your English institutions interest me more than anything in Europe. It's a cumbrous old bit of machinery, and won't stand comparison with ours; but we seem to live for the sake of our institutions, whereas you let yours rip and make use of them when they serve your purpose.”
He lit another cigar from the stump of the old one, and continued,—
“I come from Chicago. It is a go-ahead place, and, if it were near the sea, could become the capital of the world, when Universal Federation sets in. I love it, as perhaps you love Oxford. You have literature—'literae humaniores' you call it at Oxford—in your blood, and I have business in mine. I am a speculator in a small way. I have just floated a company—got it shipshape before I sailed—for a patent process of making white lead. Now, I am as keen upon that white lead as if it were a woman. It has kept me awake at nights, and danced before my eyes during the day. I have dreamed of every ship flying American colours painted with my white lead. To make a pile out of it was quite secondary to the poetry of it. Now I bet you don't see any poetry at all in a patent white lead process—in making the land hum with it.”
“What about the neat glamour?” asked Raine, smiling.
“Ah! There's a difference. I have got this all out of my own head. It is a bit of me. Whereas the Alps aren't—” He stared at them innocently—“Not a little bit.”
The sound of the gong for the mid-day meal reached them, resonant through the rarefied air. They rose and walked together towards the hotel.
“I guess I'll come and sit next to you, if you have no objection,” said Mr. Hockmaster.
“Do,” replied Raine cordially, “I shall be delighted.”
They lunched together, and in the afternoon walked to the Boissons and back, a pleasant three hours' excursion. Raine did not wish to absent himself from the hotel for a longer time, being anxious concerning posts. But no letters came for him, save a couple of business communications from Oxford. He was troubled about his father's health, and longing for a line from Katherine. He began to reflect that perhaps, after all, he had come on a fool's errand to Chamonix. Poor little Felicia would have to be disillusioned sooner or later. If the Lucerne plan had fallen through, owing to his father's illness, there was no chance of sparing her the ultimate revelation of the love between himself and Katherine. He could not remain at Chamonix indefinitely; to take up other quarters at Geneva would only set the whole pension speculating; and Raine knew full well that the speculation of a whole pension is perilous to the most Calphurnian reputation.
He decided, however, to be guided by the next day's letters.
CHAPTER XI.—“THE WOMAN WHO DELIBERATES.”
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is an excellent maxim. Its only fault is its capacity of a too wide extension. If a saying clause had been added with reference to its non-application to one's neighbour's business, it would have been perfect. But, perhaps, after all, in its faultiness lies its excellence, for counsels of perfection are of no great use to mankind, which, in its ethical systems, loves disguised loopholes for original sin.
However little the inmates of the Pension Boccard may have observed the maxim itself, they obeyed its extension to a nicety. Not only because they were women. Sometimes communities of men have been known to gossip about each other's affairs. It is but human to speculate upon events around us, and speculation, anticipating Raine's fear, was rife at the Pension Boccard.
In the first place, the dramatic ending of poor Miss Bunter's romance kept wits and tongues exercised for days. And secondly, certain facts had become common property which pointed to interesting relations between Mrs. Stapleton and Raine Chetwynd. The chief of these facts was the early morning interview. The summer waiter reported it to the cook, who informed Madame Boccard, who mentioned it in confidence to Madame Popea, who in her satirical way described it to Frâulein Klinkhardt. From the latter it passed to Frau Schultz, who barbed it carefully in accordance with her own spite against Katherine, and sent it round on its travels again. In this form it reached Felicia.
The girl found herself just in the humour of bitterness to accept it. After the heartless, systematic deception that had been practised on Miss Bunter for fifteen years, it seemed possible to credit humanity with anything. Not that she felt any resentment against Raine Chetwynd on her own score. She was bound to confess to herself, with tears of self-scorn, that he had never treated her with anything but the most brotherly frankness and courtesy. But in her dislike of Katherine, she certainly credited him with a commonplace amour, and thereby set him down lower in her estimation. Then her pride came, speciously to her rescue, but really, after the way of pride in women's hearts, to embitter the struggle that was taking place within her. One bright, pure feeling, however, rose above the turmoil—an intense pity for the poor frail creature out of whom had been crushed the hope of life. To have stood by as witness and comforter during that agony of despair had been one of those lurid experiences that set in motion the springs of infinitely reaching sympathies.
When old Mr. Chetwynd proposed the trip to Lucerne she sprang at it eagerly. It would be a relief to leave the pension and its associations. For the whole of the day she busied herself feverishly with preparations. It was a keen disappointment when the old man fell ill and the trip had to be indefinitely postponed. She longed passionately for October, when she was to join her uncle and aunt in Bermuda. Meanwhile she copied out manuscript assiduously, nursed the old man as far as he would allow her, and devoted the rest of her time to whatever gaieties were afoot in the pension.
Katherine lived in a fool's paradise after Raine had gone, for a couple of days. His kiss was on her lips, the pressure of his arms lingered round her, the vibrating words rang in her ear. If unbidden thoughts came, she put them aside with a passionately rebellious will. The long morning passed like a dream. The day and evening in an intoxicated sense of happiness. In the night she slept and waked, alternately, heedless of the hours. She had won his love. It had been given to her in full, overflowing measure. It flooded her presence with sunlight. She surrendered herself to the delicious joy that it was to feel, instead of to think.
On the evening of the second day, however, came Raine's letter. She sat by her window, reading it with a beating heart. At times the words swam before her. Until then she had not realized the wholeness, the simple nobility of his love. To her it was more than a love-letter. It was the revelation of a strong, high soul that was given her, to companion and illuminate the rest of her days upon earth. She, who in her self-abasement before him, felt unworthy to kiss the hem of his raiment, saw herself revered, worshipped, filling a holy of holies in his heart. She was to be his wife.
She read the letter through twice. Then a great fear chilled her. Its premonitions had come that evening on the lake, just before the thunder broke, and through all her after-intoxication it had loomed threateningly. Only her will had staved it off. Now it held her in its grip.
His wife. The words stared her in the face, repeated over and over again with every surrounding of passion, tenderness, and devotion. She grew cold. A lump rose in her throat. She walked across the room, poured herself out a glass of water, and sat down again. The dream, the illusion, the joy, all was over. A great pain was in her eyes as she gazed sightlessly straight in front of her.
As she gazed, a temptation crept insidiously into her heart, relaxed and soothed for a moment her tense nerves. Why should she tell him that which she knew his fine nature would never ask? All her future to all eternity was his. What mattered the past?
Her eyes fell upon his letter on her lap, caught a few chance phrases. Then a shudder passed through her like a wave of self-contempt and revulsion, and, leaning forward, she buried her face in her hands and cried.
He was too noble to be deceived—to be entrapped as by a common adventuress. The thought scorched her. Silence would be metal too base to repay the pure gold of his love. A million times sooner speak and lose him than keep him with a lie. All that was pure and true and womanly in her revolted at the temptation.
For a long time she remained with bowed head, her thoughts whirling round the means whereby she was to deal the death-blow at her happiness. The moments passed quickly, and the shadows gathered as the afternoon began to melt into evening. A message from Mme. Boccard, asking her whether she was coming down to dinner, was the first thing that made her conscious of the flight of time. She sent down word that she was poorly. A plate of soup brought up to her would be all that she required. Then she fell back into her despairing thoughts. The cry wrung from the soul of Denise hummed in her ears until it became a meaningless burthen. Since that night in January when she had seen the play with Raine, she had morbidly applied that cry to herself—“Je suis de celles qu'on aime, mais qu'on n'epouse pas.”
A faint ray of hope shot across the darkness. He had told her his own story. To him it was a sacred memory. The girl that he had loved, the mother of his child, was in his eyes the purest of women. Would not that mitigate the judgment he would have to pass on her? She clung to the hope revealed, as she lost grip of herself. He would not despise her. He would still love her. She would be to him what that other had been. Her thoughts for a while grew hysterical.
The effort she was forced to make when the servant entered with her meal, and the physical strength given her by the warm soup, restored calm and order in her mind. She read Raine's letter through once more. It inspired her with sad, despairing courage. She became for the time the Katherine she had been so long, hopeless, resigned, fatalistic. Before she crept broken and exhausted into bed, she had written him a long calm letter telling him all. She did not spare herself, hiding behind sophistries, neither did she blacken herself like a remorseful Magdalen. She wrote it with her heart's blood, at the dictates of her highest self. Only once perhaps in a lifetime is the power given to human beings to lay thus bare their souls as they appear before the eyes of the high gods. It was a higher Katherine than she wot of, that had written that letter.
But in the morning, the human woman yearning dumbly for happiness beheld it, addressed, stamped, ready for post, and her heart was ice within her. She stood for a moment holding it in her hand, irresolute whether to break the seal and read it over again. Perhaps, she weakly thought, something in it might be better expressed. Her finger mechanically sought the flap corner of the envelope, and she tore it slowly. Then she went back to bed with the letter. Nothing could be altered. She would readdress it and despatch it that day.
Whilst dressing she paused at her reflection in the glass, with a feminine catch at the heart. She looked pale, old, faded, she thought; faint lines were around the corners of her eyes; her features seemed pinched. She shivered slightly—hurried foolishly over her hair, so that she could be spared the sight of her face as soon as possible.
“After all,” she said to herself, bitterly, “what does it matter? When that letter has gone, who in the world will care whether you look old or young?”
Life seemed to end for her from the moment the letter would fall from her hands into the letter-box. She kept it by her all day, unable to cut herself adrift. The small extra effort required to address a fresh envelope just raised the task above her strength. Once during the day she flung herself on the bed in a fit of sobbing. She could not send it. It would spoil his trip. She would wait till he returned, till she had seen his eye light up once more as he looked at her, and heard, for one last time, the throb in his voice that she was never to hear again. Just one more hour of happiness. Then she would give him the letter, stay by him as he read it, as a penance for her present pusillanimity. Feeling miserably guilty, yet glad of the respite, she wrote him the second letter that he had received. The one that she was to have sent she carried about with her in her pocket, until the outside grew soiled and dogs-eared.
They were not happy days. But she moved about the pension outwardly calm and serene, to all appearances her own self. The feeling of self-reproach for her cowardice wore off. She resigned herself to her lot. One sight of his face—and then the end of all things. She knew, with the knowledge of herself given by years of solitude and self-repression, that she would not falter in her second resolution.
So centred, however, were her thoughts in the tragic side of her relations with Raine that she gave no heed to the possibility of gossip. None reached her ears. Her long sustained attitude of reserve, a superiority of personality, a certain dignity of manner and conduct, had won for her the respect, if not the love, of the pension. Even Frau Schultz, who hated her, found it impossible to utter the spiteful innuendo that trembled on her lips. But Mme. Popea, who was the chartered libertine of the pension, by reason of her good-nature and unblushing liberty of speech, summoned up courage one day to tread upon the ice.
“Mon Dieu,” she said, as if by way of invoking the deity's aid in her venture, “it is getting dull again. I long to see Mr. Chetwynd back.
“He makes himself missed,” replied Katherine calmly, continuing her sewing.
Mme. Popea had come into her room with the ostensible purpose of borrowing a stiletto. It was one of her ways to stock her work-basket with loans.
“If the dear professor grows worse, he will return soon, I suppose. They are like women to each other, those two—good ones, in the vie de famille of novels. I hear the professor is much worse to-day.”
“Who told you?”
“Miss Graves. She is nursing him. What a charming girl! Her devotion to him is touching. It would be quite a romance if she married Monsieur Raine. He is so handsome.”
Katherine regarded the plump, irresponsible lady with placid gravity.
“You seem to take a romantic interest in them, Madame Popea.”
“Mon Dieu, yes. Anything that concerns love is interesting, especially the idyllic. But you, Madame, would you be surprised if on his return they were betrothed?”
“Il ne faut jamais s'étonner de rien,” quoted Katherine, smiling imperturbably.
“I once thought he had a tendresse for Madame,” ventured Mme. Popea archly.
“Oh, Madame Popea,” laughed Katherine. “You know what men are—and we women ought never to tell each other our impressions. If I told you the flattering remarks I have heard about you this last fortnight, your head would be turned.”
“Ah, who has spoken of me?”
Katherine rose, took out a bonnet from a drawer and somewhat ostentatiously unrolled a veil, while she returned a laughing answer.
“I am too old not to have learned discretion. It is my one vice.”
And Mme. Popea, seeing that Katherine was not to be surprised into any admission, lingered a moment idly, and then took her departure. Katherine, who read through Mme. Popea, smiled to herself somewhat sadly. But her visitor's announcement regarding the old professor gave her subject for reflection. If his father grew worse, Raine would have to return at once. For a moment she half wished he would delay his coming. Her heart throbbed painfully in anticipation of what lay before her.
The announcement was true. The old man had taken a severe chill. The doctor had just spoken rather alarmingly to Felicia. She determined that Raine should be summoned.
“You must let me send a telegram to Chamonix,” she said, standing by the bedside, while the old man drank his tisane. “It would cheer you to see him, wouldn't it?”
The old man shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“It would be such a pity. He is enjoying himself.”
“I should think he would not be sorry to come back,” said Felicia.
An unwonted sub-acidity in her tone surprised him. He paused, with the cup at his lips, his eyes luminous. Her glance fell beneath his, and she coloured.
“I don't think he went away to enjoy himself,” she said, giving expression to vague conjectures that had been taking shape in her mind the last few days. “Besides, his friends have left him in the lurch—not their fault—unhappily—but still he is alone. He would be glad to come back if you sent for him.”
The old man was perplexed. He was also weakened by his attack of cold.
“Do you think that I sent him away, Felicia?” he asked.
Felicia was feminine enough to perceive his admission. She was sure of her guess now. Katherine was at the bottom of the matter. The proceedings, however, struck her as particularly futile. As they were, actually, on the real grounds. She took the empty cup from his hands, smoothed his pillow deftly, and as he laid his head back, she bent over him and whispered,—“He went away to please you—and he will return to please you. Let me telegraph to him.”
“But you—my dear child—how could you bear—?”
“I?” asked Felicia in surprise. “What have I to do with it?”
“Oh, Mr. Chetwynd!” she added after a moment's silence. “You must not remember any foolish things I told you once—I think I must have been a child then. I am ashamed of them now. I have grown older,”—she struggled bravely—“and I have got over those silly feelings. I would not wish to be anything more than friends—ever—so it would make no difference to me, if he were here—except as a friend.”
The old man reached out his thin hand, took hers, and laid it against his cheek.
“Then there was no need at all of his going away, since you knew?”
Felicia gave a little involuntary cry, and twitched her hand, as the revelation burst upon her. The blood flooded her cheeks and sang in her ears. The former shame was nothing to this new one.
“He went away because he saw that I cared for him?” she asked chokingly.
“My poor little darling,” said the old man tenderly, “we did it all for the best.”
She stood by him in silence for a long time, while he petted her hand. At last she gathered strength.
“Tell him,” she said, “that it was all a mistake—that he acted nobly and generously and delicately—but that I smiled when I heard it. Tell him that I smiled, won't you, dear professor? See, I am smiling—quite gaily, like the Felicia you spoil. And now,”—she withdrew her hand gently—“I am going to telegraph to him. He and I together will soon bring you round again—but I alone am not sufficient.”
She administered a few feminine touches to the things on the table beside him, and went upon her self-imposed errand.
“I should like you to return as quickly as possible.
“Chetwynd.”
She composed the wording of the telegram on her way to the office. It kept her from thinking of other things.
“There,” she said to herself as she wrote.
“That will not alarm him.”
Meanwhile the invalid was sorely puzzled.
“I have made a mess of it from beginning to end,” he murmured wearily. “And yet I don't think it can be dotage yet awhile. Let me reason it all out.”
His eyes closed. He had put the argument into a syllogism in Barbara, when his brain refused to act, and he fell asleep.