Grey Roses Part 9

Already, at the end of my first dinner, he had singled himself out and left an impression. I went into the smoking-room, and began to wonder, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, who he was. I had not heard his voice; he hadn't talked much, and his few observations had been murmured into the ears of his next neighbours. All the same, he had left an impression, and I found myself wondering who he was, the young man with the square-cut features and the reddish-brown hair. I have said that his features were square-cut and plain, but they were small and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common. And his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a character, an expression. They _said_ something, something I couldn't perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he had made up his mind to put the best face on a sorry business. This was carried out by a certain abruptness, a slight lack of suavity, in his movements, in his manner of turning his head, of using his hands.

It hinted a degree of determination which, in the circ.u.mstances, seemed superfluous. He had unfolded his napkin and attacked his dinner with an air of resolution, like a man with a task before him, who mutters, 'Well, it's got to be done, and I'll do it.' At a hazard, he was two- or three-and-thirty, but below his neck he looked older. He was dressed like everybody, but his costume had, somehow, an effect of soberness beyond his years. It was decidedly not smart, and smartness was the dominant note at the Hotel d'Angleterre.

I was still more or less vaguely ruminating him, in a corner of the smoking-room, on that first evening, when I became aware that he was standing near me. As I looked up, our eyes met, and for the fraction of a second fixed each other. It was barely the fraction of a second, but it was time enough for the transmission of a message. I knew as certainly as if he had said so that he wanted to speak, to break the ice, to sc.r.a.pe an acquaintance; I knew that he had approached me and was loitering in my neighbourhood for that specific purpose. I _don't_ know, I have studied the psychology of the moment in vain to understand, why I felt a perverse impulse to put him off. I was interested in him, I was curious about him; and there he stood, testifying that the interest was reciprocal, ready to make the advances, only waiting for a glance or a motion of encouragement; and I deliberately secluded myself behind my coffee-cup and my cigarette smoke. I suppose it was the working of some obscure mannish vanity--of what in a woman would have defined itself as coyness and coquetry. If he wanted to speak--well, let him speak; I wouldn't help him. I could realise the processes of _his_ mind even more clearly than those of my own--his desire, his hesitancy. He was too timid to leap the barriers; I must open a gate for him. He hovered near me for a minute longer, and then drifted away. I felt his disappointment, his spiritual shrug of the shoulders; and I perceived rather suddenly that I was disappointed myself. I must have been hoping all along that he would speak _quand meme_, and now I was moved to run after him, to call him back. That, however, would imply a consciousness of guilt, an admission that my att.i.tude had been intentional; so I kept my seat, making a mental rendezvous with him for the morrow.

Between my Irish _vis-a-vis_ Flaherty and myself there existed no such strain. He presently sauntered up to me, and dropped into conversation as easily as if we had been old friends.

'Well, and are you here for your health or your entertainment?' he began. 'But I don't need to ask that of a man who's drinking black coffee and smoking tobacco at this hour of the night. I'm the only invalid at our end of the table, and I'm no better than an amateur meself. It's a barrister's throat I have--I caught it waiting for briefs in me chambers at Doblin.'

We chatted together for a half-hour or so, and before we parted he had given me a good deal of general information--about the town, the natives, the visitors, the sands, the golf-links, the hunting, and, with the rest, about our neighbours at table.

'Did ye notice the pink-faced bald little man at me right? That's Cornel Escott, C.B., retired. He takes a sea-bath every morning, to live up to the letters; and faith, it's an act of heroism, no less, in weather the like of this. Three weeks have I been here, and but wan day of sunshine, and the mercury never above fifty. The other fellow, him at me left, is what you'd be slow to suspect by the look of him, I'll go bail; and that's a bar'net, Sir Richard Maistre, with a place in Hampshire, and ten thousand a year if he's a penny. The young lady beside yourself rejoices in the euphonious name of Hicks, and trains her Popper and Mommer behind her like slaves in a Roman triumph.

They're Americans, if you must have the truth, though I oughtn't to tell it on them, for I'm an Irishman myself, and it's not for the pot to be bearing tales of the kettle. However, their tongues bewray them; so I've violated no confidence.'

The knowledge that my young man was a baronet with a place in Hampshire somewhat disenchanted me. A baronet with a place in Hampshire left too little to the imagination. The description seemed to curtail his potentialities, to prescribe his...o...b..t, to connote turnip-fields, house-parties, and a whole system of British commonplace. Yet, when, the next day at luncheon, I again had him before me in the flesh, my interest revived. Its lapse had been due to an a.s.sociation of ideas which I now recognised as unscientific. A baronet with twenty places in Hampshire would remain at the end of them all a human being; and no human being could be finished off in a formula of half a dozen words. Sir Richard Maistre, anyhow, couldn't be. He was enigmatic, and his effect upon me was enigmatic too. Why did I feel that tantalising inclination to stare at him, coupled with that reluctance frankly to engage in talk with him? Why did he attack his luncheon with that appearance of grim resolution? For a minute, after he had taken his seat, he eyed his knife, fork, and napkin, as a labourer might a load that he had to lift, measuring the difficulties he must cope with; then he gave his head a resolute nod, and set to work. To-day, as yesterday, he said very little, murmured an occasional remark into the ear of Flaherty, accompanying it usually with a sudden short smile; but he listened to everything, and did so with apparent appreciation.

Our proceedings were opened by Miss Hicks, who asked Colonel Escott, 'Well, Colonel, have you had your bath this morning?'

The Colonel chuckled, and answered, 'Oh, yes--yes, yes--couldn't forego my bath, you know--couldn't possibly forego my bath.'

'And what was the temperature of the water?' she continued.

'Fifty-two--fifty-two--three degrees warmer than the air--three degrees,' responded the Colonel, still chuckling, as if the whole affair had been extremely funny.

'And you, Mr. Flaherty, I suppose you've been to Bayonne?'

'No, I've broken me habit, and not left the hotel.'

Subsequent experience taught me that these were conventional modes by which the conversation was launched every day, like the preliminary moves in chess. We had another ritual for dinner: Miss Hicks then inquired if the colonel had taken his ride, and Flaherty played his game of golf. The next inevitable step was common to both meals.

Colonel Escott would pour himself a gla.s.s of the _vin ordinaire_, a jug of which was set by every plate, and holding it up to the light, exclaim with simulated gusto, 'Ah! Fine old wine! Remarkably full rich flavour!' At this pleasantry we would all gently laugh; and the word was free.

Sir Richard, as I have said, appeared to be an attentive and appreciative listener, not above smiling at our mildest sallies; but, watching him out of the corner of an eye, I noticed that my own observations seemed to strike him with peculiar force--which led me to talk _at_ him. Why not to him, with him? The interest was reciprocal; he would have liked a dialogue; he would have welcomed a chance to commence one; and I could at any instant have given him such a chance.

I talked _at_ him, it is true; but I talked _with_ Flaherty or Miss Hicks, or _to_ the company at large. Of his separate ident.i.ty he had no reason to believe me conscious. From a mixture of motives, in which I'm not sure that a certain heathenish enjoyment of his embarra.s.sment didn't count for something, I was determined that if he wanted to know me he must come the whole distance; I wouldn't meet him half-way. Of course I had no idea that it could be a matter of the faintest real importance to the man. I judged his feelings by my own; and though I was interested in him, I shall have conveyed an altogether exaggerated notion of my interest if you fancy it kept me awake at night. How was I to guess that _his_ case was more serious--that he was not simply desirous of a little amusing talk, but starving, starving for a little human sympathy, a little brotherly love and comradeship?--that he was in an abnormally sensitive condition of mind, where mere negative unresponsiveness could hurt him like a slight or a rebuff?

In the course of the week I ran over to Pau, to pa.s.s a day with the Winchfields, who had a villa there. When I came back I brought with me all that they (who knew everybody) could tell about Sir Richard Maistre. He was intelligent and amiable, but the shyest of shy men. He avoided general society, frightened away perhaps by the British Mamma, and spent a good part of each year abroad, wandering rather listlessly from town to town. Though young and rich, he was neither fast nor ambitious: the Members' entrance to the House of Commons, the stage-doors of the music halls, were equally without glamour for him; and if he was a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lieutenant, he had become so through the tacit operation of his stake in the country. He had chambers in St. James's Street, was a member of the Travellers Club, and played the violin--for an amateur rather well. His brother, Mortimer Maistre, was in diplomacy--at Rio Janeiro or somewhere. His sister had married an Australian, and lived in Melbourne.

At the Hotel d'Angleterre I found his shyness was mistaken for indifference. He was civil to everybody, but intimate with none. He attached himself to no party, paired off with no individuals. He sought n.o.body. On the other hand, the persons who went out of their way to seek him, came back, as they felt, repulsed. He had been polite, but languid. These, however, were not the sort of persons he would be likely to care for. There prevailed a general conception of him as cold, unsociable. He certainly walked about a good deal alone--you met him on the sands, on the cliffs, in the stiff little streets, rambling aimlessly, seldom with a companion. But to me it was patent that he played the solitary from necessity, not from choice--from the necessity of his temperament. A companion was precisely that which above all things his heart coveted; only he didn't know how to set about annexing one. If he sought n.o.body, it was because he didn't know how. This was a part of what his eyes said; they bespoke his desire, his perplexity, his lack of nerve. Of the people who put themselves out to seek him, there was Miss Hicks; there were a family from Leeds, named Bunn, a father, mother, son, and two redoubtable daughters, who drank champagne with every meal, dressed in the height of fashion, said their say at the tops of their voices, and were understood to be auctioneers; a family from Bayswater named Krausskopf. I was among those whom he had marked as men he would like to fraternise with. As often as our paths crossed, his eyes told me that he longed to stop and speak, and continue the promenade abreast.

I was under the control of a demon of mischief; I took a malicious pleasure in eluding and baffling him--in pa.s.sing on with a nod. It had become a kind of game; I was curious to see whether he would ever develop sufficient hardihood to take the bull by the horns. After all, from a conventional point of view, my conduct was quite justifiable. I always meant to do better by him next time, and then I always deferred it to the next. But, from a conventional point of view, my conduct was quite una.s.sailable. I said this to myself when I had momentary qualms of conscience. Now, rather late in the day, it strikes me that the conventional point of view should have been re-adjusted to the special case. I should have allowed for his personal equation.

My cousin Wilford came to Biarritz about this time, stopping for a week, on his way home from a tour in Spain. I couldn't find a room for him at the Hotel d'Angleterre, so he put up at a rival hostelry over the way; but he dined with me on the evening of his arrival, a place being made for him between mine and Monsieur's. He hadn't been at the table five minutes before the rumour went abroad who he was--somebody had recognised him. Then those who were within reach of his voice listened with all their ears--Colonel Escott, Flaherty, Maistre, and Miss Hicks, of course, who even called him by name: 'Oh, Mr.

Wilford,' 'Now, Mr. Wilford,' &c. After dinner, in the smoking-room, a cl.u.s.ter of people hung round us; men with whom I had no acquaintance came merrily up and asked to be introduced. Colonel Escott and Flaherty joined us. At the outskirts of the group I beheld Sir Richard Maistre. His eyes (without his realising it perhaps) begged me to invite him, to present him; and I affected not to understand! This is one of the little things I find hardest to forgive myself. My whole behaviour towards the young man is now a subject of self-reproach; if it had been different, who knows that the tragedy of yesterday would ever have happened? If I had answered his timid overtures, walked with him, talked with him, cultivated his friendship, given him mine, established a kindly human relation with him, I can't help feeling that he might not have got to such a desperate pa.s.s, that I might have cheered him, helped him, saved him. I feel it especially when I think of Wilford. His eyes attested so much; he would have enjoyed meeting him so keenly. No doubt he was already fond of the man, had loved him through his books, like so many others. If I had introduced him? If we had taken him with us the next morning on our excursion to Cambo?

Included him occasionally in our smokes and parleys?

Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hotel d'Angleterre. We were busy 'doing' the country, and never chanced to be at Biarritz at the dinner hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir Richard Maistre.

Another little circ.u.mstance that rankles especially now would have been ridiculous except for the way things have ended. It isn't easy to tell--it was so petty and I am so ashamed. Colonel Escott had been abusing London, describing it as the least beautiful of the capitals of Europe, comparing it unfavourably to Paris, Vienna, and St.

Petersburg. I took up the cudgels in its defence, mentioned its atmosphere, its tone; Paris Vienna, St. Petersburg were lyric, London was epic; and so forth and so forth. Then, shifting from the aesthetic to the utilitarian, I argued that of all great towns it was the healthiest, its death-rate was lowest. Sir Richard Maistre had followed my dissertation attentively, and with a countenance that signified approval; and when, with my reference to the death-rate, I paused, he suddenly burned his ships. He looked me full in the eye, and said, 'Thirty-seven, I believe?' His heightened colour, a nervous movement of the lip, betrayed the effort it had cost him; but at last he had _done it_--screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and spoken. And I--I can never forget it--I grow hot when I think of it--but I was possessed by a devil. His eyes hung on my face, awaiting my response, pleading for a cue. 'Go, on,' they urged. 'I have taken the first, the difficult step--make the next smoother for me.' And I--I answered lackadaisically with just a casual glance at him, 'I don't know the figures,' and absorbed myself in my viands.

Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.

All this happened last March at Biarritz. I never saw him again till three weeks ago. It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James's Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and thus we approached each other. He didn't see me, however, till we had drawn rather near to a conjunction: then he gave a little start of recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand prepared to advance itself--and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way.

Don't ask why I did it. It is enough to confess it without having to explain it. I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder. He was standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me.

But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about, and continued his descent of the street.

That was only three weeks ago. Only three weeks ago I still had it in my power to act. I am sure--I don't know why I am sure, but I _am_ sure--that I could have deterred him. For all that one can gather from the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite motive; he had met with no losses, got into no sc.r.a.pe; he was simply tired and sick of life and of himself. 'I have no friends,' he wrote.

'n.o.body will care. People don't like me; people avoid me. I have wondered why; I have tried to watch myself and discover; I have tried to be decent. I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I suppose I am a "bad sort."' He had a morbid notion that people didn't like him, that people avoided him! Oh, to be sure, there were the Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough: but he understood what it was that attracted _them_. Other people, the people _he_ could have liked, kept their distance--were civil, indeed, but reserved. He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. It never struck him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him. But I--I knew that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I _knew_ that he wanted bread: and that knowledge const.i.tuted my moral responsibility.

I didn't know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to absolve myself with the reflection. I ought to have made inquiries.

When I think of that afternoon in St. James's Street--only three weeks ago--I feel like an a.s.sa.s.sin. The vision of him, as he stopped and looked after me--I can't banish it. Why didn't some good spirit move me to turn back and overtake him?

It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable.

I can't shake off a sense that there is something to be done. I can't realise that it is too late.

CASTLES NEAR SPAIN

I.

That he should not have guessed it from the beginning seems odd, if you like, until one stops to consider the matter twice; then, I think, one sees that after all there was no shadow of a reason why he should have done so,--one sees, indeed, that even had a suspicion of the truth at any time crossed his mind, he would have had the best of reasons for scouting it as nonsense. It is obvious to us from the first word, because we know instinctively that otherwise there would be no story; it is that which knits a mere sequence of incidents into a coherent, communicable whole. But, to his perceptions, the thing never presented itself as a story at all. It wasn't an anecdote which somebody had b.u.t.tonholed him to tell; it was an adventure in which he found himself launched, an experience to be enjoyed bit by bit, as it befell, but in no wise suggestive of any single specific climax. What earthly hint had he received from which to infer the ident.i.ty of the two women? On the contrary, weren't the actions of the one totally inconsistent with what everybody a.s.sured him was the manner of life--with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit--of the other? If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,--in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw whom he had caught.

II.

On that first morning,--the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal, and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other in the forest,--he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to Granjolaye. He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion. His mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to nurse. To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would itself be romantic. In a little while he would come to the park gates, and could look up the long, straight avenue to the chateau,--there where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one of those strange, inarticulate pa.s.sions that almost every childhood knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.

And then he heard the rhythm of a horse's hoofs; and looking forward, down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady cantering towards him.

In an instant she had pa.s.sed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image--which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a mult.i.tude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a _toque_, set upon a loosely-fastened ma.s.s of black hair; a face intensely white--a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.

It was not much, certainly, but it persisted. The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion. It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background. Anyhow, it pursued him. He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Helene, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now: but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration. The emotion he had looked for did not come. An essential part of him was elsewhere,--following the pale lady in the black riding-habit, trying to get a clearer vision of her face, blaming him for his inattention when she had been palpable before him, wondering who she was.

'If she should prove to be a neighbour, I shan't bore myself so dreadfully down here after all,' he thought. 'I wonder if I shall meet her again as I go home.' She would very likely be returning the way she had gone. But, though he loitered, he did not meet her again. He met n.o.body. It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.

III.

At Saint-Graal Andre was waiting to lunch with him.

'When we were children,' Paul wrote in a letter to Mrs Winchfield, 'Andre, our gardener's son, and I were as intimate as brothers, he being the only companion of my s.e.x and age the neighbourhood afforded.

But now, after a separation of twenty years, Andre, who has become our cure, insists upon treating me with distance. He won't waive the fact that I am the lord of the manor, and calls me relentlessly Monsieur.

I've done everything to entice him to unbend, but his backbone is of granite. From the merriest of mischief-loving youngsters, he has hardened into the solemnest of square-toes, with _such_ a long upper-lip, and manners as stiff as the stuff of his awful best ca.s.sock, which he always buckles on prior to paying me a visit.

Whatever is a poor young man to do? At our first meeting, after my arrival, I fell upon his neck, and thee-and-thou'd him, as of old time; he repulsed me with a _vous_ italicised. At last I demanded reason. "Why _will_ you treat me with this inexorable respect? What have I done to deserve it? What can I do to forfeit it?" _Il devint cramoisi_ (in the traditional phrase) and stared.--This is what it is to come back to the home of your infancy.'

Andre, in his awful best ca.s.sock, was waiting on the terrace. It was on the terrace that Paul had ordered luncheon to be served. The terrace at Saint-Graal is a very jolly place. It stretches the whole length of the southern facade of the house, and is generously broad.

It is paved with great lozenge-shaped slabs of marble, stained in delicate pinks and greys with lichens; and a marble bal.u.s.trade borders it, overgrown, the columns half uprooted and twisted from the perpendicular, by an aged wistaria-vine, with a trunk as stout as a tree's. Seated there, one can look off over miles of richly-timbered country, dotted with white-walled villages, and traversed by the Nive and the Adour, to the wry ma.s.ses of the Pyrenees, purple curtains hiding Spain.

Here, under an awning, the table was set, gay with white linen and glistening gla.s.s and silver, a centrepiece of flowers and jugs of red and yellow wine. The wistaria was in blossom, a world of colour and fragrance, shaken at odd moments by the swift dartings of innumerable lizards. The sun shone hot and clear; the still air, as you touched it, felt like velvet.