XVIII
A CONVERSATION OVERHEARD
In the upper chamber at La Lierre the days dragged very slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of green things growing.
He suffered little pain. There was, for the first three or four days, a dull and feverish ache in his wounded leg, but presently even that passed, and the leg hurt him only when he moved it. He thought sometimes that he would be grateful for a bit of physical anguish to make the hours pass more quickly.
The other inmates of the house held aloof from him. Once a day O'Hara came in to see to the wound, but he maintained a well-nigh complete silence over his work, and answered questions only with a brief yes or no. Sometimes he did not answer them at all. The old Michel came twice daily, but this strange being had quite plainly been frightened into dumbness, and there was nothing to be got out of him. He shambled hastily about the place, his one scared eye upon the man in bed, and as soon as possible fled away, closing the door behind him. Sometimes Michel brought in the meals, sometimes his wife, a creature so like him that the two might well have passed for twin survivors of some unknown race; sometimes--thrice altogether in that first week--Coira O'Hara brought the tray, and she was as silent as the others.
So Ste. Marie was left alone to get through the interminable days as best he might, and ever afterward the week remained in his memory as a sort of nightmare. Lying idle in his bed, he evolved many surprising and fantastic schemes for escape, for getting word to the outside world of his presence here, and one by one he gave them up in disgust as their impossibility forced itself upon him. Plans and schemes were useless while he lay bedridden, unfamiliar even with the house wherein he dwelt, with the garden and park that surrounded it.
As for aid from any of the inmates of the place, that was to be laughed at. They were engaged together in a scheme so desperate that failure must mean utter ruin to them all. He sometimes wondered if the two servants could be bribed. Avarice unmistakable gleamed from their little, glittering, ratlike eyes, but he was sure that they would sell out for no small sum, and in so far as he could remember there had been in his pockets, when he came here, not more than five or six louis. Doubtless the old Michel had managed to abstract those in his daily offices about the room, for Ste. Marie knew that the clothes hung in a closet across from his bed. He had seen them there once when the closet-door was open.
Any help that might come to him must come from outside--and what help was to be expected there? Over and over again he reminded himself of how little Richard Hartley knew. He might suspect Stewart of complicity in this new disappearance, but how was he to find out anything definite? How was any one to do so?
It was at such times as this, when brain and nerves were strained and worn almost to breaking-point, that Ste. Marie had occasion to be grateful for the Southern blood that was in him, the strong tinge of fatalism which is common alike to Latin and to Oriental. It rescued him more than once from something like nervous breakdown, calmed him suddenly, lifted his burdens from outwearied shoulders, and left him in peace to wait until some action should be possible. Then, in such hours, he would fall to thinking of the girl for whose sake, in whose cause, he lay bedridden, beset with dangers. As long before, she came to him in a sort of waking vision--a being but half earthly, enthroned high above him, calm-browed, very pure, with passionless eyes that gazed into far distance and were unaware of the base things below. What would she think of him, who had sworn to be true knight to her, if she could know how he had bungled and failed? He was glad that she did not know, that if he had blundered into peril the knowledge of it could not reach her to hurt her pride.
And sometimes, also, with a great sadness and pity, he thought of poor Coira O'Hara and of the pathetic wreck her life had fallen into. The girl was so patently fit for better things! Her splendid beauty was not a cheap beauty. She was no coarse-blown, gorgeous flower, imperfect at telltale points. It was good blood that had modelled her dark perfection, good blood that had shaped her long and slim and tapering hands.
"A queen among goddesses!" The words remained with him, and he knew that they were true. She might have held up her head among the greatest, this adventurer's girl; but what chance had she had? What merest ghost of a chance?
He watched her on the rare occasions when she came into the room. He watched the poise of her head, her walk, the movements she made, and he said to himself that there was no woman of his acquaintance whose grace was more perfect--certainly none whose grace was so native.
Once he complained to her of the desperate idleness of his days, and asked her to lend him a book of some kind, a review, even a daily newspaper, though it be a week old.
"I should read the very advertisements with joy," he said.
She went out of the room and returned presently with an armful of books, which she laid upon the bed without comment.
"In my prayers, Mademoiselle," cried Ste. Marie, "you shall be foremost forever!" He glanced at the row of titles and looked up in sheer astonishment. "May I ask whose books these are?" he said.
"They are mine," said the girl. "I caught up the ones that lay first at hand. If you don't care for any of them, I will choose others."
The books were: Diana of the Crossways, Richard Feverel, Henri Lavedan's Le Duel, Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Mélisande, Don Quixote de la Mancha, in Spanish, a volume of Virgil's Eclogues, and the Life of the Chevalier Bayard, by the Loyal Servitor. Ste. Marie stared at her.
"Do you read Spanish," he demanded, "and Latin, as well as French and English?"
"My mother was Spanish," said she. "And as for Latin, I began to read it with my father when I was a child. Shall I leave the books here?"
Ste. Marie took up the Bayard and held it between his hands.
"It is worn from much reading, Mademoiselle," he said.
"It is the best of all," said she. "The very best of all. I didn't know I had brought you that."
She made a step toward him as if she would take the book away, and over it their eyes met and were held. In that moment it may have come to them both who she was, who so loved the knight without fear and without reproach--the daughter of art Irish adventurer of ill repute--for their faces began suddenly to flush with red, and after an instant the girl turned away.
"It is of no consequence," said she. "You may keep the book if you care to."
And Ste. Marie said, very gently: "Thank you, Mademoiselle. I will keep it for a little while."
So she went out of the room and left him alone.
This was at noon on the sixth day, and, after he had swallowed hastily the lunch which had been set before him, Ste. Marie fell upon the books like a child upon a new box of sweets. Like the child again, it was difficult for him to choose among them. He opened one and then another, gloating over them all, but in the end he chose the Bayard, and for hours lost himself among the high deeds of the Preux Chevalier and his faithful friends--among whom, by the way, there was a Ste. Marie who died nobly for France. It was late afternoon when at last he laid the book down with a sigh and settled himself more comfortably among the pillows.
The sun was not in the room at that hour, but from where he lay he could see it on the tree-tops, gold upon green. Outside his south window the leaves of a chestnut which stood there quivered and rustled gently under a soft breeze. Delectable odors floated in to Ste. Marie's nostrils, and he thought how very pleasant it would be if he were lying on the turf under the trees instead of bedridden in this upper chamber, which he had come to hate with a bitter hatred.
He began to wonder if it would be possible to drag himself across the floor to that south window, and so to lie down for a while with his head in the tiny balcony beyond, his eyes turned to the blue sky. Astir with the new thought, he sat up in bed and carefully swung his feet out till they hung to the floor. The wound in the left leg smarted and burned, but not too severely, and with slow pains Ste. Marie stood up. He almost cried out when he discovered that it could be done quite easily. He essayed to walk, and he was a little weak, but by no means helpless. He found that it gave him pain to raise his left leg in the ordinary action of walking or to bend that knee, but he could get about well enough by dragging the injured member beside him, for when it was straight it supported him without protest.
He took his pillows across to the window and disposed them there, for it was a French window opening to the floor, and the level of the little balcony outside was but a few inches above the level of the room. Then the desire seized him to make a tour of his prison walls. He went first to the closet where he had seen his clothes hanging, and they were still there. He felt in the pockets and withdrew his little English pigskin sovereign-purse. It had not been tampered with, and he gave an exclamation of relief over that, for he might later on have use for money. There were eight louis in it, each in its little separate compartment, and in another pocket he found a fifty-franc note and some silver. He went to the two east windows and looked out. The trees stood thick together on that side of the house, but between two of them he could see the park wall fifty yards away. He glanced down, and the side of the house was covered thick with the ivy which had given the place its name, but there was no water-pipe near, nor any other thing which seemed to offer foot or hand hold, unless, perhaps, the ivy might prove strong enough to bear a man's weight. Ste. Marie made a mental note to look into that when he was a little stronger, and turned back to the south window where he had disposed his pillows.
The unaccustomed activity was making his wound smart and prickle, and he lay down at once with head and shoulders in the open air, and out of the warm and golden sunshine and the emerald shade the breath of summer came to him and wrapped him round with sweetness and pillowed him upon its fragrant breast.
He became aware after a long time of voices below, and turned upon his elbows to look. The ivy had clambered upon and partly covered the iron grille of the little balcony, and he could observe without being seen. Young Arthur Benham and Coira O'Hara had come out of the door of the house, and they stood upon the raised and paved terrace which ran the width of the façade, and seemed to hesitate as to the direction they should take. Ste. Marie heard the girl say:
"It's cooler here in the shade of the house," and after a moment the two came along the shady terrace whose outer margin was set at intervals with stained and discolored marble nymphs upon pedestals, and between the nymphs with moss-grown stone benches. They halted before a bench upon which, earlier in the day, a rug had been spread out to dry in the sun and had been forgotten, and after a moment's further hesitation they sat down upon it. Their faces were turned toward the house, and every word that they spoke mounted in that still air clear and distinct to the ears of the man above.
Ste. Marie wriggled back into the room and sat up to consider. The thought of deliberately listening to a conversation not meant for him sent a hot flush to his cheeks. He told himself that it could not be done, and that there was an end to the matter. Whatever might hang upon it, it could not be asked of him that he should stoop to dishonor. But at that the heavy and grave responsibility, which really did hang upon him and upon his actions, came before his mind's eye and loomed there mountainous. The fate of this foolish boy who was set round with thieves and adventurers--even though his eyes were open and he knew where he stood--that came to Ste. Marie and confronted him; and the picture of a bitter old man who was dying of grief came to him; and a mother's face; and hers. There could be no dishonor in the face of all this, only a duty very clear and plain. He crept back to his place, his arms folded beneath him as he lay, his eyes at the thin screen of ivy which cloaked the balcony grille.
Young Arthur Benham appeared to be giving tongue to a rather sharp attack of homesickness. It may be that long confinement within the walls of La Lierre was beginning to try him somewhat.
"Mind you," he declared, as Ste. Marie's ears came once more within range--"mind you, I'm not saying that Paris hasn't got its points. It has. Oh yes! And so has London, and so has Ostend, and so has Monte Carlo. Verree much so! I like Paris. I like the theatres and the vaudeville shows in the Champs-Elysées, and I like Longchamps. I like the boys who hang around Henry's Bar. They're good sports all right, all right! But, by golly, I want to go home! Put me off at the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway, and I'll ask no more. Set me down at 7 P.M., right there on the corner outside the Knickerbocker, for that's where I would live and die." There came into the lad's somewhat strident voice a softness that was almost pathetic. "You don't know Broadway, Coira, do you? Nix! of course not. Little girl, it's the one street of all this large world. It's the equator that runs north and south instead of east and west. It's a long, bright, gay, live wire!--that's what Broadway is. And I give you my word of honor, like a little man, that it--is--not--slow. No-o, indeed! When I was there last it was being called the 'Gay White Way.' It is not called the 'Gay White Way' now. It has had forty other new, good names since then, and I don't know what they are, but I do know that it is forever gay, and that the electric signs are still blazing all along the street, and the street-cars are still killing people in the good old fashion, and the news-boys are still dodging under the automobiles to sell you a Woild or a Choinal or, if it's after twelve at night, a Morning Telegraph. Coira, my girl, standing on that corner after dark you can see the electric signs of fifteen theatres, not one of them more than five minutes' walk away; and just round the corner there are more. I want to go home! I want to take one large, unparalleled leap from here and come down at the corner I told you about. D'you know what I'd do? We'll say it's 7 P.M. and beginning to get dark. I'd dive into the Knickerbocker--that's the hotel that the bright and happy people go to for dinner or supper--and I'd engage a table up on the terrace. Then I'd telephone to a little friend of mine whose name is Doe--John Doe--and in about ten minutes he'd have left the crowd he was standing in line with and he'd come galloping up, that glad to see me you'd cry to watch him. We'd go up on the terrace, where the potted palms grow, for our dinner, and the tables all around us would be full of people that would know Johnnie Doe and me, and they'd all make us drink drinks and tell us how glad they were to see us aboard again. And after dinner," said young Arthur Benham, with wide and smiling eyes--"after dinner we'd go to see one of the roof-garden shows. Let me tell you they've got the Marigny or the Ambassadeurs or the Jardin de Paris beaten to a pulp--to--a--pulp! And after the show we'd slip round to the stage-door--you bet we would!--and capture the two most beautiful ladies in the world and take 'em off to supper."
He wrinkled his young brow in great perplexity. "Now I wonder," said he, anxiously--"I wonder where we'd go for supper. You see," he apologized, "it's two years since I left the Real Street, and, gee! what a lot can happen on Broadway in two years! There's probably half a dozen new supper-places that I don't know anything about, and one of them's the place where the crowd goes. Well, anyhow, we'd go to that place, and there'd be a band playing, and the electric fans would go round and round, and Johnnie Doe and I and the two most beautiful ladies would put it all over the other pikers there."
Young Benham gave a little sigh of pleasure and excitement. "That's what I'd like to do to-night," said he, "and that's what I'll do, you can bet your sh--boots, when all this silly mess is over and I'm a free man. I'll hike back to good old Broadway, and if ever you see any one trying to pry me loose from it again you can laugh yourself to death, because he'll never, never succeed.
"That's where I'll go," he said, nodding, "when this waiting is over--straight back to Liberty Land and the bright lights. The rest of the family can stay here till they die, if they want to--and I suppose they do--I'm going home as soon as I've got my money. Old Charlie'll manage all that for me. He'll get a lawyer to look after it, and I won't have to see anybody in the family at all.
"Nine more weeks shut in by stone walls!" said the boy, staring about him with a sort of bitterness. "Nine weeks more!"
"Is it so hard as that?" asked the girl.
There was no foolish coquetry in her tone. She spoke as if the words involved no personal question at all, but there was a little smile at her lips, and Arthur Benham turned toward her quickly and caught at her hands.
"No, no!" he cried. "I didn't mean that. You know I didn't mean that. You're worth nine years' waiting. You're the best--d'you hear?--the best there is. There's nobody anywhere that can touch you. Only--well, this place is getting on my nerves. It's got me worn to a frazzle. I feel like a criminal doing time."
"You came very near having to do time somewhere else," said the girl. "If this M. Ste. Marie hadn't blundered we should have had them all round our ears, and you'd have had to run for it."
"Yes," the boy said, nodding gravely. "Yes, that was great luck."
He raised his head and looked up along the windows above him.
"Which is his room?" he asked, and Mlle. O'Hara said:
"The one just overhead, but he's in bed far back from the window. He couldn't possibly hear us talking."
She paused for a moment in frowning hesitation, and in the end said:
"Tell me about him, this Ste. Marie! Do you know anything about him?"
"No," said Arthur Benham, "I don't--not personally, that is. Of course I've heard of him. Lots of people have spoken of him to me. And the odd part of it is that they all had a good word to say. Everybody seemed to like him. I got the idea that he was the best ever. I wanted to know him. I never thought he'd take on a piece of dirty work like this."
"Nor I," said the girl, in a low voice. "Nor I."
The boy looked up.
"Oh, you've heard of him, too, then?" said he.
And she said, still in her low voice, "I--saw him once."
"Well," declared young Benham, "it's beyond me. I give it up. You never can tell about people, can you? I guess they'll all go wrong when there's enough in it to make it worth while. That's what old Charlie always says. He says most people are straight enough when there's nothing in it, but make the pot big enough and they'll all go crooked."
The young man's face turned suddenly hard and old and bitter.
"Gee! I ought to know that well enough, oughtn't I?" he said. "I guess nobody knows that better than I do after what happened to me.... Come along and take a walk in the garden, Maud! I'm sick of sitting still."
TELL ME ABOUT
HIM, THIS STE. MARIE! DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HIM?
Mlle. Coira O'Hara looked up with a start, as if she had not been listening, but she rose when the boy held out his hand to her, and the two went down from the terrace and moved off toward the west.
Ste. Marie watched them until they had disappeared among the trees, and then turned on his back, staring up into the softly stirring canopy of green above him and the little rifts of bright blue sky. He did not understand at all. Something mysterious had crept in where all had seemed so plain to the eye. Certain words that young Arthur Benham had spoken repeated themselves in his mind, and he could not at once make them out. Assuredly there was something mysterious here.
In the first place, what did the boy mean by "dirty work"? To be sure, spying, in its usual sense, is not held to be one of the noblest of occupations, but--in such a cause as this! It was absurd, ridiculous, to call it "dirty work." And what did he mean by the words which he had used afterward? Ste. Marie did not quite follow the idiom about the "big enough pot," but he assumed that it referred to money. Did the young fool think he was being paid for his efforts? That was ridiculous, too.
The boy's face came before him as it had looked with that sudden hard and bitter expression. What did he mean by saying that no one knew the crookedness of humanity under money temptation better than he knew it after something that had happened to him? In a sense his words were doubtless very true. Captain Stewart--and he must have been "old Charlie"; Ste. Marie remembered that the name was Charles--O'Hara, and O'Hara's daughter stood excellent examples of that bit of cynicism, but obviously the boy had not spoken in that sense--certainly not before Mlle. O'Hara! He meant something else, then. But what--what?
Ste. Marie rose with some difficulty to his feet and carried the pillows back to the bed whence he had taken them. He sat down upon the edge of the bed, staring in great perplexity across the room at the open window, but all at once he uttered an exclamation and smote his hands together.
"That boy doesn't know!" he cried. "They're tricking him, these others!"
The lad's face came once more before him, and it was a foolish and stubborn face, perhaps, but it was neither vicious nor mean. It was the face of an honest, headstrong boy who would be incapable of the cold cruelty to which all circumstances seemed to point.
"They're tricking him somehow!" cried Ste. Marie again. "They're lying to him and making him think--"
What was it they were making him think, these three conspirators? What possible thing could they make him think other than the plain truth? Ste. Marie shook a weary head and lay down among his pillows. He wished that he had "old Charlie" in a corner of that room with his fingers round "old Charlie's" wicked throat. He would soon get at the truth then; or O'Hara, either, that grim and saturnine chevalier d'industrie, though O'Hara would be a bad handful to manage; or--Ste. Marie's head dropped back with a little groan when the face of young Arthur's enchantress came between him and the opposite wall of the room and her great and tragic eyes looked into his.
It seemed incredible that that queen among goddesses should be what she was!
XIX
THE INVALID TAKES THE AIR
When O'Hara, the next morning, went through the formality of looking in upon his patient, and after a taciturn nod was about to go away again, Ste. Marie called him back. He said, "Would you mind waiting a moment?" and the Irishman halted inside the door. "I made an experiment yesterday," said Ste. Marie, "and I find that, after a poor fashion, I can walk--that is to say, I can drag myself about a little without any great pain if I don't bend the left leg."
O'Hara returned to the bed and made a silent examination of the bullet wound, which, it was plain to see, was doing very well indeed. "You'll be all right in a few days," said he, "but you'll be lame for a week yet--maybe two. As a matter of fact, I've known men to march half a day with a hole in the leg worse than yours, though it probably was not quite pleasant."
"I'm afraid I couldn't march very far," said Ste. Marie, "but I can hobble a bit. The point is, I'm going mad from confinement in this room. Do you think I might be allowed to stagger about the garden for an hour, or sit there under one of the trees? I don't like to ask favors, but, so far as I can see, it could do no harm. I couldn't possibly escape, you see. I couldn't climb a fifteen-foot wall even if I had two good legs; as it is, with a leg and a half, I couldn't climb anything."
The Irishman looked at him sharply, and was silent for a time, as if considering. But at last he said: "Of course there is no reason whatever for granting you any favors here. You're on the footing of a spy--a captured spy--and you're very lucky not to have got what you deserved instead of a trumpery flesh wound." The man's face twisted into a heavy scowl. "Unfortunately," said he, "an accident has put me--put us in as unpleasant a position toward you as you had put yourself toward us. We seem to stand in the position of having tried to poison you, and--well, we owe you something for that. Still, I'd meant to keep you locked up in this room so long as it was necessary to have you at La Lierre." He scowled once more in an intimidating fashion at Ste. Marie, and it was evident that he found himself embarrassed. "And," he said, awkwardly, "I suppose I owe something to your father's son.... Look here! If you're to be allowed in the garden, you must understand that it's at fixed hours and not alone. Somebody will always be with you, and old Michel will be on hand to shoot you down if you try to run for it or if you try to communicate with Arthur Benham. Is that understood?"
"Quite," said Ste. Marie, gayly. "Quite understood and agreed to. And many thanks for your courtesy. I sha'n't forget it. We differ rather widely on some rather important subjects, you and I, but I must confess that you're very generous, and I thank you. The old Michel has my full permission to shoot at me if he sees me trying to fly over a fifteen-foot wall."
"He'll shoot without asking your permission," said the Irishman, grimly, "if you try that on, but I don't think you'll be apt to try it for the present--not with a crippled leg." He pulled out his watch and looked at it. "Nine o'clock," said he. "If you care to begin to-day you can go out at eleven for an hour. I'll see that old Michel is ready at that time."
"Eleven will suit me perfectly," said Ste. Marie. "You're very good. Thanks once more!" The Irishman did not seem to hear. He replaced the watch in his pocket and turned away in silence. But before he left the room he stood a moment beside one of the windows, staring out into the morning sunshine, and the other man could see that his face had once more settled into the still and melancholic gloom which was characteristic of it. Ste. Marie watched, and for the first time the man began to interest him as a human being. He had thought of O'Hara before merely as a rather shady adventurer of a not very rare type, but he looked at the adventurer's face now and he saw that it was the face of a man of unspeakable sorrows. When O'Hara looked at one, one saw only a pair of singularly keen and hard blue eyes set under a bony brow. When those eyes were turned away, the man's attention relaxed, the face became a battle-ground furrowed and scarred with wrecked pride and with bitterness and with shame and with agony. Most soldiers of fortune have faces like that, for the world has used them very ill, and they have lost one precious thing after another until all are gone, and they have tasted everything that there is in life, and the flavor which remains is a very bitter flavor--dry, like ashes.
It came to Ste. Marie, as he lay watching this man, that the story of the man's life, if he could be made to tell it, would doubtless be one of the most interesting stories in the world, as must be the tale of the adventurous career of any one who has slipped down the ladder of respectability, rung by rung, into that shadowy no-man's-land where the furtive birds of prey foregather and hatch their plots. It was plain enough that O'Hara had, as the phrase goes, seen better days. Without question he was a villain, but, after all, a generous villain. He had been very decent about making amends for that poisoning affair. A cheaper rascal would have behaved otherwise. Ste. Marie suddenly remembered what a friend of his had once said of this mysterious Irishman. The two had been sitting on the terrace of a café, and as O'Hara passed by Ste. Marie's friend pointed after him and said: "There goes some of the best blood that ever came out of Ireland. See what it has fallen to!"
Seemingly it had fallen pretty low. He would have liked very much to know about the downward stages, but he knew that he would never hear anything of them from the man himself, for O'Hara was clad, as it were, in an armor of taciturnity. He was incredibly silent. He wore mail that nothing could pierce.
The Irishman turned abruptly away and left the room, and Ste. Marie, with all the gay excitement of a little girl preparing for her first nursery party, began to get himself ready to go out. The old Michel had already been there to help him bathe and shave, so that he had only to dress himself and attend to his one conspicuous vanity--the painstaking arrangement of his hair, which he wore, according to the fashion of the day, parted a little at one side and brushed almost straight back, so that it looked rather like a close-fitting and incredibly glossy skullcap. Richard Hartley, who was inclined to joke at his friend's grave interest in the matter, said that it reminded him of patent-leather.
When he was dressed--and he found that putting on his left boot was no mean feat--Ste. Marie sat down in a chair by the window and lighted a cigarette. He had half an hour to wait, and so he picked up the volume of Bayard, which Coira O'Hara had not yet taken away from him, and began to read in it at random. He became so absorbed that the old Michel, come to summon him, took him by surprise. But it was a pleasant surprise and very welcome. He followed the old man out of the room with a heart that beat fast with eagerness.
The descent of the stairs offered difficulties, for the wounded leg protested sharply against being bent more than a very little at the knee. But by the aid of Michel's shoulder he made the passage in safety and so came to the lower story. At the foot of the stairs some one opened a door almost in their faces, but closed it again with great haste, and Ste. Marie gave a chuckle of laughter, for, though it was almost dark there, he thought he had recognized Captain Stewart.
"So old Charlie's with us to-day, is he?" he said, aloud, and Michel queried:
"Comment, Monsieur?" because Ste. Marie had spoken in English.
They came out upon the terrace before the house, and the fresh, sweet air bore against their faces, and little flecks of live gold danced and shivered about their feet upon the moss-stained tiles. The gardener stepped back for an instant into the doorway, and reappeared bearing across his arms the short carbine with which Ste. Marie had already made acquaintance. The victim looked at this weapon with a laugh, and the old Michel's gnomelike countenance distorted itself suddenly and a weird cackle came from it.
"It is my old friend?" demanded Ste. Marie, and the gardener cackled once more, stroking the barrel of the weapon as if it were a faithful dog.
"The same, Monsieur," said he. "But she apologizes for not doing better."
"Beg her for me," said the young man, "to cheer up. She may get another chance."
Old Michel's face froze into an expression of anxious and rather frightened solicitude, but he waved his arm for the prisoner to precede him, and Ste. Marie began to limp down across the littered and unkempt sweep of turf. Behind him, at the distance of a dozen paces, he heard the shambling footfalls of his guard, but he had expected that, and it could not rob him of his swelling and exultant joy at treading once more upon green grass and looking up into blue sky. He was like a man newly released from a dungeon rather than from a sunny and by no means uncomfortable upper chamber. He would have liked to dance and sing, to run at full speed like a child until he was breathless and red in the face. Instead of that he had to drag himself with slow pains and some discomfort, but his spirit ran ahead, dancing and singing, and he thought that it even halted now and then to roll on the grass.
As he had observed a week before, from the top of the wall, a double row of larches led straight down away from the front of the house, making a wide and long vista interrupted half-way to its end by a rond point, in the centre of which were a pool and a fountain. The double row of trees was sadly broken now, and the trees were untrimmed and uncared for. One of them had fallen, probably in a wind-storm, and lay dead across the way. Ste. Marie turned aside toward the west and found himself presently among chestnuts, planted in close rows, whose tops grew in so thick a canopy above that but little sunshine came through, and there was no turf under foot, only black earth, hard-trodden, mossy here and there.
From beyond, in the direction he had chanced to take, and a little toward the west, a soft morning breeze bore to him the scent of roses so constant and so sweet, despite its delicacy, that to breathe it was like an intoxication. He felt it begin to take hold upon and to sway his senses like an exquisite, an insidious wine.
"The flower-gardens, Michel?" he asked, over his shoulder. "They are before us?"
"Ahead and to the left, Monsieur," said the old man, and he took up once more his slow and difficult progress.
But again, before he had gone many steps, he was halted. There began to reach his ears a rich but slender strain of sound, a golden thread of melody. At first he thought that it was a 'cello or the lower notes of a violin, but presently he became aware that it was a woman singing in a half-voice without thought of what she sang--as women croon to a child, or over their work, or when they are idle and their thoughts are far wandering.
The mistake was not as absurd as it may seem, for it is a fact that the voice which is called a contralto, if it is a good and clear and fairly resonant voice, sounds at a distance very much indeed like a 'cello or the lower register of a violin. And that is especially true when the voice is hushed to a half-articulate murmur. Indeed, this is but one of the many strange peculiarities of that most beautiful of all human organs. The contralto can rarely express the lighter things, and it is quite impossible for it to express merriment or gayety, but it can thrill the heart as can no other sound emitted by a human throat, and it can shake the soul to its very innermost hidden deeps. It is the soft, yellow gold of singing--the wine of sound; it is mystery; it is shadowy, unknown, beautiful places; it is enchantment. Ste. Marie stood still and listened. The sound of low singing came from the right. Without realizing that he had moved, he began to make his way in that direction, and the old Michel, carbine upon arm, followed behind him. He had no doubt of the singer. He knew well who it was, for the girl's speaking voice had thrilled him long before this. He came to the eastern margin of the grove of chestnuts and found that he was beside the open rond point, where the pool lay within its stone circumference, unclean and choked with lily-pads, and the fountain--a naked lady holding aloft a shell--stood above. The rond point was not in reality round; it was an oval with its greater axis at right angles to the long, straight avenue of larches. At the two ends of the oval there were stone benches with backs, and behind these, tall shrubs grew close and overhung, so that even at noonday the spots were shaded.
XX
THE STONE BENCH AT THE ROND POINT
Mlle. Coira O'Hara sat alone upon the stone bench at the hither end of the rond point. With a leisurely hand she put fine stitches into a mysterious garment of white, with lace on it, and over her not too arduous toil she sang, à demi voix, a little German song all about the tender passions.
Ste. Marie halted his dragging steps a little way off, but the girl heard him and turned to look. After that she rose hurriedly and stood as if poised for flight, but Ste. Marie took his hat in his hands and came forward.
"If you go away, Mademoiselle," said he, "if you let me drive you from your place, I shall limp across to that pool and fall in and drown myself, or I shall try to climb the wall yonder and Michel will have to shoot me."
He came forward another step.
"If it is impossible," he said, "that you and I should stay here together for a few little moments and talk about what a beautiful day it is--if that is impossible, why then I must apologize for intruding upon you and go on my way, inexorably pursued by the would-be murderer who now stands six paces to the rear. Is it impossible, Mademoiselle?" said Ste. Marie.
The girl's face was flushed with that deep and splendid understain. She looked down upon the white garment in her hand and away across the broad rond point, and in the end she looked up very gravely into the face of the man who stood leaning upon his stick before her.
"I don't know," she said, in her deep voice, "what my father would wish. I did not know that you were coming into the garden this morning, or--"
"Or else," said Ste. Marie, with a little touch of bitterness in his tone--"or else you would not have been here. You would have remained in the house."
He made a bow.
"To-morrow, Mademoiselle," said he, "and for the remainder of the days that I may be at La Lierre, I shall stay in my room. You need have no fear of me."
All the man's life he had been spoiled. The girl's bearing hurt him absurdly, and a little of the hurt may have betrayed itself in his face as he turned away, for she came toward him with a swift movement, saying:
"No, no! Wait!--I have hurt you," she said, with a sort of wondering distress. "You have let me hurt you.... And yet surely you must see,... you must realize on what terms.... Do you forget that you are not among your friends... outside?... This is so very different!"
"I had forgotten," said he. "Incredible as it sounds, I had for a moment forgotten. Will you grant me your pardon for that? And yet," he persisted, after a moment's pause--"yet, Mademoiselle, consider a little! It is likely that--circumstances have so fallen that it seems I shall be here within your walls for a time, perhaps a long time. I am able to walk a little now. Day by day I shall be stronger, better able to get about. Is there not some way--are there hot some terms under which we could meet without embarrassment? Must we forever glare at each other and pass by warily, just because we--well, hold different views about--something?"
It was not a premeditated speech at all. It had never until this moment occurred to him to suggest any such arrangement with any member of the household at La Lierre. At another time he would doubtless have considered it undignified, if not downright unwise, to hold intercourse of any friendly sort with this band of contemptible adventurers. The sudden impulse may have been born of his long week of almost intolerable loneliness, or it may have come of the warm exhilaration of this first breath of sweet, outdoor air, or perhaps it needed neither of these things, for the girl was very beautiful--enchantment breathed from her, and, though he knew what she was, in what despicable plot she was engaged, he was too much Ste. Marie to be quite indifferent to her. Though he looked upon her sorrowfully and with pain and vicarious shame, he could not have denied the spell she wielded. After all, he was Ste. Marie.
Once more the girl looked up very gravely under her brows, and her eyes met the man's eyes. "I don't know," she said. "Truly, I don't know. I think I should have to ask my father about it.--I wish," she said, "that we might do that. I should like it. I should like to be able to talk to some one--about the things I like--and care for. I used to talk with my father about things; but not lately. There is no one now." Her eyes searched him. "Would it be possible, I wonder," said she. "Could we two put everything else aside--forget altogether who we are and why we are here. Is that possible?"
"We could only try, Mademoiselle," said Ste. Marie. "If we found it a failure we could give it up." He broke into a little laugh. "And besides," he said, "I can't help thinking that two people ought to be with me all the time I am in the garden here--for safety's sake. I might catch the old Michel napping one day, you know, throttle him, take his rifle away, and escape. If there were two, I couldn't do it."
For an instant she met his laugh with an answering smile, and the smile came upon her sombre beauty like a moment of golden light upon darkness. But afterward she was grave again and thoughtful. "Is it not rather foolish," she asked, "to warn us--to warn me of possibilities like that? You might quite easily do what you have said. You are putting us on our guard against you."
"I meant to, Mademoiselle," said Ste. Marie. "I meant to. Consider my reasons. Consider what I was pleading for!" And he gave a little laugh when the color began again to rise in the girl's cheeks.
She turned away from him, shaking her head, and he thought that he had said too much and that she was offended, but after a moment the girl looked up, and when she met his eyes she laughed outright.
"I cannot forever be scowling and snarling at you," said she. "It is quite too absurd. Will you sit down for a little while? I don't know whether or not my father would approve, but we have met here by accident, and there can be no harm, surely, in our exchanging a few civil words. If you try to bring up forbidden topics I can simply go away; and, besides, Michel stands ready to murder you if it should become necessary. I think his failure of a week ago is very heavy on his conscience."
Ste. Marie sat down in one corner of the long stone bench, and he was very glad to do it, for his leg was beginning to cause him some discomfort. It felt hot and as if there were a very tight band round it above the knee. The relief must have been apparent in his face, for Mlle. O'Hara looked at him in silence for a moment, and she gave a little, troubled, anxious frown. Men can be quite indifferent to suffering in each other if the suffering is not extreme, and women can be, too, but men are quite miserable in the presence of a woman who is in pain, and women, before a suffering man, while they are not miserable, are always full of a desire to do something that will help. And that might be a small, additional proof--if any more proof were necessary--that they are much the more practical of the two sexes.
The girl's sharp glance seemed to assure her that Ste. Marie was comfortable, now that he was sitting down, for the frown went from her brows, and she began to arrange the mysterious white garment in her lap in preparation to go on with her work.
Ste. Marie watched her for a while in a contented silence. The leaves overhead stirred under a puff of air, and a single yellow beam of sunlight came down and shivered upon the girl's dark head and played about the bundle of white over which her hands were busy. She moved aside to avoid it, but it followed her, and when she moved back it followed again and danced in her lap as if it were a live thing with a malicious sense of humor. It might have been Tinker Bell out of Peter Pan, only it did not jingle. Mlle. O'Hara uttered an exclamation of annoyance, and Ste. Marie laughed at her, but in a moment the leaves overhead were still again, and the sunbeam, with a sense of humor, was gone to torment some one else.
Still neither of the two spoke, and Ste. Marie continued to watch the girl bent above her sewing. He Was thinking of what she had said to him when he asked her if she read Spanish--that her mother had been Spanish. That would account, then, for her dark eyes. It would account for the darkness of her skin, too, but not for its extraordinary clearness and delicacy, for Spanish women are apt to have dull skins of an opaque texture. This was, he said to himself, an Irish skin with a darker stain, and he was quite sure that he had never before seen anything at all like it.
Apart from coloring, she was all Irish, of the type which has become famous the world over, and which in the opinion of men who have seen women in all countries, and have studied them, is the most beautiful type that exists in our time.
Ste. Marie was dark himself, and in the ordinary nature of things he should have preferred a fair type in women. In theory, for that matter, he did prefer it, but it was impossible for him to sit near Coira O'Hara and watch her bent head and busy, hovering hands, and remain unstirred by her splendid beauty. He found himself wondering why one kind of loveliness more than another should exert a potent and mysterious spell by virtue of mere proximity, and when the woman who bore it was entirely passive. If this girl had been looking at him the matter would have been easy to understand, for an eye-glance is often downright hypnotic; but she was looking at the work in her hands, and, so far as could be judged, she had altogether forgotten his presence; yet the mysterious spell, the potent enchantment, breathed from her like a vapor, and he could not be insensible to it. It was like sorcery.
The girl looked up so suddenly that Ste. Marie jumped. She said:
"You are not a very talkative person. Are you always as silent as this?"
"No," said he, "I am not. I offer my humblest apologies. It seems as if I were not properly grateful for being allowed to sit here with you, but, to tell the truth, I was buried in thought."
They had begun to talk in French, but midway of Ste. Marie's speech the girl glanced toward the old Michel, who stood a short distance away, and so he changed to English.
"In that case," she said, regarding her work with her head on one side like a bird--"in that case you might at least tell me what your thoughts were. They might be interesting."
Ste. Marie gave a little embarrassed laugh.
"I'm sorry," said he, "but I'm afraid they were too personal. I'm afraid if I told you you'd get up and go away and be frigidly polite to me when next we passed each other in the garden here. But there's no harm," he said, "in telling you one thing that occurred to me. It occurred to me that, as far as a young girl can be said to resemble an elderly woman, you bear a most remarkable resemblance to a very dear old friend of mine who lives near Dublin--Lady Margaret Craith. She's a widow, and almost all of her family are dead, I believe--I didn't know any of them--and she lives there in a huge old house with a park, quite alone with her army of servants. I go to see her whenever I'm in Ireland, because she is one of the sweetest souls I have ever known."
He became aware suddenly that Mlle. O'Hara's head was bent very low over her sewing and that her face, or as much of it as he could see, was crimson.
"Oh, I--I beg your pardon!" cried Ste. Marie. "I've done something dreadful. I don't know what it is, but I'm very, very sorry. Please forgive me if you can!"
"It is nothing," she said, in a low voice, and after a moment she looked up for the swiftest possible glance and down again. "That is my--aunt," she said. "Only--please let us talk about something else! Of course you couldn't possibly have known."
"No," said Ste. Marie, gravely. "No, of course. You are very good to forgive me."
He was silent a little while, for what the girl had told him surprised him very much indeed, and touched him, too. He remembered again the remark of his friend when O'Hara had passed them on the boulevard:
"There goes some of the best blood that ever came out of Ireland. See what it has fallen to!"
"It is a curious fact," said he, "that you and I are very close compatriots in the matter of blood--if 'compatriots' is the word. You are Irish and Spanish. My mother was Irish and my people were Béarnais, which is about as much Spanish as French; and, indeed, there was a great deal of blood from across the mountains in them, for they often married Spanish wives."
He pulled the Bayard out of his pocket.
"The Ste. Marie in here married a Spanish lady, didn't he?"
The girl looked up to him once more.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I remember. He was a brave man, Monsieur. He had a great soul. And he died nobly."
"Well, as for that," he said, flushing a little, "the Ste. Maries have all died rather well."
"Though I must admit," said he, "that the last of them came precious near falling below the family standard a week ago. I should think that probably none of my respected forefathers was killed in climbing over a garden-wall. Autres temps, autres moeurs."
He burst out laughing again at what seemed to him rather comic, but Mlle. O'Hara did not smile. She looked very gravely into his eyes, and there seemed to be something like sorrow in her look. Ste. Marie wondered at it, but after a moment it occurred to him that he was very near forbidden ground, and that doubtless the girl was trying to give him a silent warning of it. He began to turn over the leaves of the book in his hand.
"You have marked a great many pages here," said he.
And she said: "It is my best of all books. I read in it very often. I am so thankful for it that there are no words to say how thankful I am--how glad I am that I have such a world as that to--take refuge in sometimes when this world is a little too unbearable. It does for me now what the fairy stories did when I was little. And to think that it's true, true! To think that once there truly were men like that--sans peur et sans reproche! It makes life worth while to think that those men lived even if it was long ago."
Ste. Marie bent his head over the little book, for he could not look at Mlle. O'Hara just then. It seemed to him well-nigh the most pathetic speech that he had ever heard. His heart bled for her. Out of what mean shadows had the girl to turn her weary eyes upward to this sunlight of ancient heroism!
"And yet, Mademoiselle," said he, gently, "I think there are such men alive to-day, if only one will look for them. Remember, they were not common even in Bayard's time. Oh yes, I think there are preux chevaliers nowadays, only perhaps they don't go about things in quite the same fashion. Other times, other manners," he said again.
"Do you know any such men?" she demanded, facing him with shadowy eyes.
And he said: "Yes, I know men who are in all ways as honorable and as high-hearted as Bayard was. In his place they would have acted as he did, but nowadays one has to practise heroism much less conspicuously--in the little things that few people see and that no one applauds or writes books about. It is much harder to do brave little acts than brave big ones."
"Yes." she agreed, slowly. "Oh yes, of course."
But there was no spirit in her tone, rather a sort of apathy. Once more the leaves overhead swayed in the breeze, opened a tiny rift, and the little trembling ray of sunshine shot down to her where she sat. She stretched out one hand cup-wise, and the sunbeam, after a circling gyration, darted into it and lay there like a small golden bird panting, as it were, from fright.
"If I were a painter," said Ste. Marie, "I should be in torture and anguish of soul until I had painted you sitting there on a stone bench and holding a sunbeam in your hand. I don't know what I should call the picture, but I think it would be something figurative--symbolic. Can you think of a name?"
Coira O'Hara looked up at him with a slight smile, but her eyes were gloomy and full of dark shadows. "It might be called any one of a great number of things, I should think," said she. "Happiness--belief--illusion. See! The sunbeam is gone."