A Fool and His Money Part 14

My face fell. "Oh!" said I, and got no further for a moment or two.

"I--I--please don't tell me you are married!"

"What would you think of me if I were to tell you I'm not?" she cried indignantly.

"I beg your pardon," I stammered, blushing to the roots of my hair.

"Stupid a.s.s!" I muttered.

Crossing to the fireplace, she stood looking down into the coals for a long time, while I remained where I was, an awkward, gauche spectator, conscious of having put my clumsiest foot into my mouth every time I opened it and wondering whether I could now safely get it out again without further disaster.

Her back was toward me. She was dressed in a dainty, pinkish house gown--or maybe it was light blue. At any rate it was a very pretty gown and she was wonderfully graceful in it. Ordinarily in my fiction I am quite clever at describing gowns that do not exist; but when it comes to telling what a real woman is wearing, I am not only as vague as a savage, but painfully stupid about colors. Still, I think it was pink. I recall the way her soft brown hair grew above the slender neck, and the lovely white skin; the smooth, delicate contour of her half-averted cheek and the firm little chin with the trembling red lips above it; the shapely back and shoulders and the graceful curves of her hips, suggestive of a secret perfection. She was taller than I had thought at first sight, or was it that I seemed to be getting smaller myself? A hasty bit of comparison placed her height at five feet six, using my own as something to go by. She couldn't have been a day over twenty-two. But she had a baby!

Facing me once more she said: "If you will sit down, Mr. Smart, and be patient and generous with me, I shall try to explain everything.

You have a right to demand it of me, and I shall feel more comfortable after it is done."

I drew up a chair beside the table and sat down. She sank gracefully into another, facing me. A delicate frown appeared on her brow.

"Doubtless you are very much puzzled by my presence in this gloomy old castle. You have been asking yourself a thousand questions about me, and you have been shocked by my outrageous impositions upon your good nature. I confess I have been shockingly impudent and--"

"Pardon me; you are the only sauce I've had for an excessively bad bargain."

"Please do not interrupt me," she said coldly. "I am here, Mr. Smart, because it is the last place in the world where my husband would be likely to look for me."

"Your husband? Look for you?"

"Yes. I shall be quite frank with you. My husband and I have separated.

A provisional divorce was granted, however, just seven months ago. The final decree cannot be issued for one year."

"But why should you hide from him?"

"The--the court gave him the custody of our child during the probationary year. I--I have run away with her. They are looking for me everywhere. That is why I came here. Do you understand?"

I was stunned. "Then, I take it, the court granted _him_ the divorce and not you," I said, experiencing a sudden chill about the heart. "You were deprived of the child, I see. Dear me!"

"You are mistaken," she said, a flash in her eyes. "It was an Austrian court. The Count--my husband, I should say--is an Austrian subject.

His interests must be protected." She said this with a sneer on her pretty lips. "You see, my father, knowing him now for what he really is, has refused to pay over to him something like a million dollars, still due for the marriage settlement. The Count contends that it is a just and legal debt and the court supports him to this extent: the child is to be his until the debt is cleared up, or something to that effect. I really don't understand the legal complications involved.

Perhaps it were better if I did."

"I see," said I, scornful in spite of myself. "One of those happy international marriages where a bride is thrown in for good measure with a couple of millions. Won't we ever learn!"

"That's it precisely," she said, with the utmost calmness and candour.

"American dollars and an American girl in exchange for a t.i.tle, a lot of debts and a ruined life."

"And they always turn out just this way. What a lot of blithering fools we have in the land of the free and the home of the knave!"

"My father objected to the whole arrangement from the first, so you must not speak of him as a knave," she protested. "He doesn't like Counts and such things."

"I don't see that it helps matters. I can hardly subst.i.tute the word 'brave' for the one I used," said I, trying to conceal my disgust.

"Please don't misunderstand me, Mr. Smart," she said haughtily. "I am not asking for pity. I made my bed and I shall lie in it. The only thing I ask of you is--well, kindness."

She seemed to falter again, and once more I was at her feet, figuratively speaking.

"You are in distress, in dread of something, madam," I cried. "Consider me your friend."

She shook her head ruefully. "You poor man! You don't know what you are in for, I fear. Wait till I have told you everything. Three weeks ago, I laid myself liable to imprisonment and heaven knows what else by abducting my little girl. That is really what it comes to--abduction.

The court has ordered my arrest, and all sorts of police persons are searching high and low for me. Now don't you see your peril? If they find me here, you will be in a dreadful predicament. You will be charged with criminal complicity, or whatever it is called, and--Oh, it will be frightfully unpleasant for you, Mr. Smart."

My expression must have convicted me. She couldn't help seeing the dismay in my face. So she went on, quite humbly.

"Of course you have but to act at once and all may be well for you.

I--I will go if you--if you command me to--"

I struck my knee forcibly. "What do you take me for, madam? Hang the consequences! If you feel that you are safe here--that is, comparatively safe,--_stay!_"

"It will be terrible if you get into trouble with the law," she murmured in distress. "I--I really don't know what might happen to you." Still her eyes brightened. Like all the rest of her ilk, she was selfish.

I tried to laugh, but it was a dismal failure. After all, wasn't it likely to prove a most unpleasant matter? I felt the chill moisture breaking out on my forehead.

"Pray do not consider my position at all," I managed to say, with a resolute a.s.sumption of gallantry. "I--I shall be perfectly able to look out for myself,--that is, to explain everything if it should come to the worst." I could not help adding, however: "I certainly hope, however, that they don't get on to your trail and--" I stopped in confusion.

"And find me here?" she completed gloomily.

"And take the child away from you," I made haste to explain.

A fierce light flamed in her eyes. "I should--kill--some one before that could happen," she cried out, clenching her hands.

"I--I beg of you, madam, don't work yourself into a--a state," I implored, in considerable trepidation. "Nothing like that can happen, believe me. I--"

"Oh, what do you know about it?" she exclaimed, with most unnecessary vehemence, I thought. "He wants the child and--and--well, you can see why he wants her, can't you? He is making the most desperate efforts to recover her. Max says the newspapers are full of the--the scandal.

They are depicting me as a brainless, law-defying American without sense of love, honour or respect. I don't mind that, however. It is to be expected. They all describe the Count as a long-suffering, honourable, dreadfully maltreated person, and are doing what they can to help him in the prosecution of the search. My mother, who is in Paris, is being shadowed; my two big brothers are being watched; my lawyers in Vienna are being trailed everywhere--oh, it is really a most dreadful thing. But--but I will not give her up! She is mine. He doesn't love her. He doesn't love me. He doesn't love anything in the world but himself and his cigarettes. I know, for I've paid for his cigarettes for nearly three years. He has actually ridiculed me in court circles, he has defamed me, snubbed me, humiliated me, cursed me. You cannot imagine what it has been like. Once he struck me in--"

"Struck you!" I cried.

"--in the presence of his sister and her husband. But I must not distress you with sordid details. Suffice it to say, I turned at last like the proverbial worm. I applied for a divorce ten months ago. It was granted, provisionally as I say. He is a degenerate. He was unfaithful to me in every sense of the word. But in spite of all that, the court in granting me the separation, took occasion to placate national honour by giving him the child during the year, pending the final disposition of the case. Of course, everything depends on father's att.i.tude in respect to the money. You see what I mean? A month ago I heard from friends in Vienna that he was shamefully neglecting our--my baby, so I took this awful, this perfectly bizarre way of getting her out of his hands. Possession is nine points in the law, you see. I--'

"Alas!" interrupted I, shaking my head. "There is more than one way to look at the law. I'm afraid you have got yourself into a serious--er--pickle."'

"I don't care," she said defiantly. "It is the law's fault for not prohibiting such marriages as ours. Oh, I know I must seem awfully foolish and idiotic to you, but--but it's too late now to back out, isn't it?"

I did not mean to say it, but I did--and I said it with some conviction: "It is! You _must_ be protected."

"Thank you, thank you!" she cried, clasping and unclasping her little hands. I found myself wondering if the brute had dared to strike her on that soft, pink cheek!

Suddenly a horrible thought struck me with stunning force.

"Don't tell me that your--your husband is the man who owned this castle up to a week ago," I cried. "Count James Hohendahl?"

She shook her head. "No. He is not the man." Seeing that I waited for her to go on, she resumed: "I know Count James quite well, however.