Madcap Part 45

"You've tried me too far."

She had; and she knew it. There was nothing for it but to skurry for the wings of convention. Alas, for Pan! Hermia was a nymph no longer--only a girl of the cities, upon the defensive for the security of her traditions. She drew aside and sank breathless upon a rock.

"Love is not so ruthless--it does not shock or sear, John Markham," she gasped.

"I've served you patiently--and long," he muttered.

"A week."

"It's enough."

"No."

"You'll marry me."

She raised her head and met his eyes fairly.

"No. I refuse you."

He could not understand.

"You--"

"I refuse to marry you. Is that clear?" she cried.

What had come over her? The warm color had flooded back to her heart and her eyes were cold like dead embers.

"I won't believe you," he said doggedly.

"You must. It was a mistake--all this--a mistake from the first. I was made to have followed you. You should have denied me--then--back there--"

"I loved you then--I know it now--and you--"

"No--not love, John Markham," she went on. "If you had loved me you would have sent me back to Paris--and saved me from--from myself. You loved me then, you say," she laughed scornfully. "What kind of love is this that slinks in hiding, preaches of friendship for its own ends and rants of philosophy? What kind of love that scoffs at public opinion and finds itself at last a topic of amus.e.m.e.nt at a fashionable dining table? A selfish love, a nameless love from which all tenderness, all gentleness and beauty--"

"Hermia!" He had caught her by the shoulders and held her gaze with his own.

"Let me go. It's true. And you ask me to marry you. Why should you marry me when you can win my lips without it?"

She laughed up at him, a hard little laugh, like a buffet in his face.

Still he held her--away from him.

"Your lips are mine," he said gently, "I could take them now--again and again. But I will not. See, I am all tenderness again. Your words cannot harm me--nor yourself. For love is greater than either of us.

It is the secret you once asked of me, the secret of life. I've told it to you. I tell it to you now--when I let you go."

Her color came and went and her eyes drooped before him. He dropped his hands, turned his back and walked away.

"That is my reply," he said softly.

Could he have seen the glory that rode suddenly in her eyes as she looked at him, he would have read the heart of her. But that was not to be. Followed a silence. He would not trust himself again. The embers of their fire still smoked. With his foot he crushed them out.

"You will go, at once, to Paris," he said quietly, not looking at her.

She did not move, or reply, and only watched him as he made the preparations for departure. They went down the hill to the village in silence, Markham leading Clarissa at his side. At the _gare_ a train was due in half an hour, and so they sat and waited, looking straight before them, no word pa.s.sing, and when the train came he found a compartment and put her in it, with her bundle, then stood with head uncovered, until a stain of smoke above the trees was all that remained to him. Presently that, too, vanished, when soberly he took up his cudgel and went his way.

CHAPTER XXIII

A LADY IN THE DUSK

Halfway between the turbid currents of the lower city and the more swiftly running streams to the northward sits Washington Square, an isle of rest amid the tides of humanity which lap its sh.o.r.es.

Here is the true gateway to the city--below it the polyglot of Europe; above, the amalgam which makes America. It is a neighborhood of traditions which speak in the aspect of the solidly built row of houses facing to the south, breasting the living surge, its front unbroken.

This park, with its stretch of green, its dusky maples and shaded benches, afforded asylum to Markham, the painter, who liked to come when the day's work was over and watch the shadows fall across the square, creeping slowly up the walls of the Arch, bringing into higher relief the rosy tints on cornice and medallion which remained animate a moment against the purple filigree beyond, a thing of joy and of beauty, a symbol of eternal freedom. He was never sure whether it was more wonderful then, or when a moment later the golden glory gone from its cap, it stood silent amid the roar of the city wrapped in pallid dignity at the end of the glittering Avenue. That Avenue was a symbol, too. It meant the world to which Markham had returned after his glimpse of Elysium, a world not too kind, already laughing perhaps at his secret and Hermia's.

His problem still puzzled him. He had had no word from Olga Tcherny, though he had sought her in Alenon and Trouville. She had gone to Paris, he had been informed, but he had not been able to find her there in her usual haunts.

Nor had he succeeded in finding Hermia, though he had left no stone unturned in the search. He had watched the hotel registers, inquired at her bankers, and scanned the sailing lists in vain. Had the earth engulfed them both they could not have more mysteriously disappeared.

Cables to New York had been unavailing, and at last, his time growing short, he had sailed from Cherbourg, a sadder but no wiser man. A call at the Challoner house at the upper end of the Avenue had only produced the information that the person he so eagerly sought had not yet returned, and that, in default of instructions to the contrary, her mail was forwarded, as before, to Paris. There was nothing for it but to wait, and Markham became aware that love, in addition to being all the things that he and Hermia had described it, was a grievous hunger which would feed upon no food but itself. He was quite wretched, painted abominably by day and prowled in the streets by night, his disembodied spirit off among the highways of Vagabondia.

November came, and still no letter nor any word of her. He was desperate. Her silence, at first only disappointing, now became ominous. Whatever their misunderstandings in the last hour of their pilgrimage, he deserved something better of her than this. Here in New York it already seemed difficult to visualize her. He could see nothing but the belled cap and coa.r.s.e stockings of Yvonne, the "woman orchestra." They filled his eye as her essence filled his heart. The broadcloth and beaver of her metropolitan sisters puzzled and dismayed him. He had only seen her once in town and then she had resembled nothing so much as a flippant cherub in skirts--an example of how New York taught the young female idea to shoot. It hadn't been the kind of shooting he had liked. Thimble Island had individualized her--differently; Westport had given her color; but it was Normandy that had completed the human doc.u.ment. She was Hermia, that was all!

But here in New York, with Vagabondia but a memory, he was not sure that he would know her. The Avenue was full of young female ideas in the process of shooting, all dressed very much alike, all flippant, all cherubic, and he scanned them with a new interest, wondering at the lapse of circ.u.mstance which somehow could not be bridged. Yvonne tailor made! The thing was impossible.

And yet he found it necessary to realize that here in New York it was to be no Yvonne that he would find. Her silence, too, now advised him that she was to be upon the defensive, all her armor bristling with commonplace, against which the flight of his quiver of memorabilia might be dented in vain. How was she thinking of him yonder? In what terms? Did she think of him at all? His questions had even descended to that low condition. He had had such a little share in her life after all, her real life in the cities, which laid its impress with such certainty on those who were its children. He saw the marks of it all about him, the thing one called "good form," the undercurrent of strife for social honor, the corrugated brow of envy, the pomp and circ.u.mstance of spilled riches--ah! here was where his shoe would pinch him the most. For Hermia Challoner was wealthy beyond the touch of Midas. If the Westport house or her taste in automobiles had not been green in his memory, it only remained to him to view the stately splendor of the Challoner mansion up town to be reminded that his vagabond companion of a week rightfully belonged to another world in which he was only a reluctant and somewhat captious visitor. Her riches bewildered him. They obtruded unbearably, proclaiming their importance in terms which there was no denying. Vagabondia, it seemed, was a forgotten country.

Had Hermia forgotten? Was his idyl, the one dream of his life, to end in waking? Was Hermia's mad excursion but another item in the long list of entertainments by means of which she exacted from life payment in diversion which she considered her due? Had he, Markham, been but an incident in this entertainment, a humble second-liner like Luigi Fabiani, who broke stones upon his mighty brother and caught the infant Stella when she was hurled at him? The thought was unpleasant to him, and did his lady no honor--so he dismissed it with reservations. But, whatever unction he laid to his soul, the truth would not be downed that two months had elapsed since that parting in the railway station at S?es during which time he had neither heard from nor of her.

One comfort he had when hope was at low ebb--the vision of a pale face at a trap-door, its eyes wide in concern--Hermia's face when Olga's fowling piece was discharged; two comforts--the memory of the roses of Pre Gu?gou! Both gave him joy--and reconciled him to her present intolerance which time and an ardor which knew no abating must wipe away. If it hadn't been for Olga!

This was a most exasperating _if_, a heart-wracking _if_, an _if_ that made him pause among the ruins of his ancient friendship. He could not believe that it was altogether to chance that he and Hermia owed Olga's discovery of their strange intimacy. In his infatuation he had forgotten that the Ch?teau de Cahors was near Alenon and that here was a spot which should at any costs have been avoided.

Hermia must have known, too, and yet it seems they had both rushed to their danger with heedlessness which deserved no better fate. But their pursuit and the certainty with which Olga provided the culminating drama created a belief, in his own mind, at least, that had he and Hermia been in Kamschatka, their discomfiture would have been just as surely accomplished. If Olga's motives still remained shrouded in mystery, it was clear that her object had been to bring their companionship to an end, and this she had done, though not precisely in the way she had planned. Hermia hadn't believed that rot about La Croix and Compigne. Olga had overshot the mark. Her pleasantry with the loaded shotgun had been better aimed and her frightened game had fallen. It angered him to think how ruthless had been her plan, medival in its simplicity, and how successful she had been in carrying it out. As to her motives--Hermia had insisted that Olga wanted to marry him! Olga and he!

With a muttered word Markham rose from his bench and made his way toward the Arch. Its phase of splendor had pa.s.sed, for the dusk had fallen swiftly, but its bulk loomed in ghostly grandeur, a solemn sentinel at the meeting place of East and West. The street lights were winking merrily and brougham and limousine pa.s.sed beneath it, moving rapidly northward. With the setting of the sun a chill had fallen on the wonderful day of Indian summer and people moved briskly on their homeward way. Markham b.u.t.toned his light overcoat across his chest and bent his steps in the direction of his apartment, when at the corner of the Avenue he found his way blocked by a solitary female person fashionable attire who for some reason was laughing gaily.

He stopped, awakened suddenly to the fact that the lady of his dreams was before him.

"O Monsieur Philidor!" she laughed. "Well met, upon my word! Have you waited for me long?"

"Olga!"

"The same--flushed with victory over the pa.s.sing years, joyous, too, at the sight of you. I counted on finding you here."

"I'm delighted--but how--"

"I know your habits, my dear. You always loved to prowl. And there used to be a time, you know, when we prowled together."

He found himself glad to see her--so glad that he forgot how angry he was.