Maurice Guest Part 47

When he crossed the threshold, Louise came towards him with one of those swift movements which meant that she was in good spirits, and confident of herself. She held out her hands, and smiled at him with all her dark, mobile face, saying words that were as impulsive as her gesture. Maurice was always vaguely chilled by her outbursts of light-heartedness: they seemed to him strained and unreal, so accustomed had he grown to the darker, less adaptable side of her nature.

"You have come back?" he said, with her hand in his.

"Yes, I'm here--for the present, at least."

The last words caught in his ear, and buzzed there, making his foreboding a certainty. On the spot, his courage failed him; and though Louise continued to ring all the changes her voice was capable of, he did not recover his spirits. It was not merely the sense of strangeness, which inevitably attacked him after he had not seen her for some time; on this occasion, it was more. Partly, it might be due to the fact that she was dressed in a different way; her hair was done high on her head, and she wore a light grey dress of modish cut and design. Her face, too, had grown fuller; the hollows in her cheeks had vanished; and her skin had that peculiar clear pallor that was characteristic of it in health.

He was stupidly silent; he could not join in her careless vivacity.

Besides, throughout the visit, nothing was said that it was worth his coming to hear.

But when she wished him good-bye, she said, with a strange smile: "Altogether, I am very grateful to you, Maurice, for having made me go away."

He himself no longer felt any satisfaction at what he had done. As soon as he left her, he tried to comprehend what had happened: the change in her was too marked for him to be able to console himself that he had imagined it. Not only had she seemingly recovered, as if by magic, from the la.s.situde of the winter--he could even have forgiven her the alteration in her style of dress, although this, too, helped to alienate her from him. But what he ended by recognising, with a jealous throb, was that she had mentally recovered as well; she was once more the self-contained girl he had first known, with a gift for keeping an outsider beyond the circle of her thoughts and feelings. An outsider!

The weeks of intimate companionship were forgotten, seemed never to have been. She had no further need of him, that was the clue to the mystery, and the end of the matter.

And so it continued, the next day, and the next again; Louise deliberately avoided touching on anything that lay below the surface.

She vouchsafed no explanation of the words that had disquieted him, nor was the letter Maurice had written her once mentioned between them.

But, though she seemed resolved not to confide in him, she could not dispense with the small, practical services, he was able to render her.

They were even more necessary to her than before; for, if one thing was clear, it was that she no longer intended to cloister herself up inside her four walls: the day after her return, she had been out till late in the afternoon, and had come home with her hands full of parcels. She took it now as a matter of course that Maurice should accompany her; and did not, or would not, notice his abstraction.

After the lapse of a very short time, however, the young man began to feel that there was something feverish in the continual high level of her mood. She broke down, once or twice, in trying to sustain it, and was more of her eloquently silent self again: one evening, he came upon her, in the dusk, when she was sitting with her chin on her hand, looking out before her with the old questioning gaze.

Occasionally he thought that she was waiting for something: in the middle of a sentence, she would break off, and grow absent-minded; and more than once, the unexpected advent of the postman threw her into a state of excitement, which she could not conceal. She was waiting for a letter. But Maurice was proud, and asked no questions; he took pains to use the cool, friendly tone, she herself adopted.

Not a week had dragged out, however, since her return, before he was suffering in a new way, in the oldest, cruellest way of all.

The PENSION at which she had stayed in Dresden, had been frequented by leisured foreigners: over twenty people, of various nationalities, had sat down daily at the dinner-table. Among so large a number, it would have been easy for Louise to hold herself aloof. But, as far as Maurice could gather, she had felt no inclination to do this. From the first, she seemed to have been the nucleus of an admiring circle, chief among the members of which was a family of Americans--a brother and two sisters, rich Southerners, possessed of a vague leaning towards art and music. The names of these people recurred persistently in her talk; and, as the days went by, Maurice found himself listening for one name in particular, with an irritation he could not master. Raymond van Houst--a ridiculous name!--fit only for a backstairs romance. But as often as she spoke of Dresden, it was on her lips. Whether in the Galleries, or at the Opera, on driving excursions, or on foot, this man had been at her side; and soon the mere mention of him was enough to set Maurice's teeth on edge.

One afternoon, he found her standing before an extravagant ma.s.s of flowers, which were heaped up on the table; there were white and purple violets, a great bunch of lilies of the valley, and roses of different colours. They had been sent to her from Dresden, she said; but, beyond this, she offered no explanation. All the vases in the room were collected before her; but she had not begun to fill them: she stood with her hands in the flowers, tumbling them about, enjoying the contact of their moist freshness.

To Maurice's remark that she seemed to take a pleasure in destroying them, she returned a casual: "What does it matter?" and taking up as many violets as she could hold, looked defiantly at him over their purple leaves. Through all she said and did ran a strong undercurrent of excitement.

But before Maurice left, her manner changed. She came over to him, and said, without looking up: "Maurice I want to tell you something."

"Yes; what is it?" He spoke with the involuntary coolness this mood of hers called out in him; and she was quick to feel it. She returned to the table.

"You ask so prosaically: you are altogether prosaic to-day. And it is not a thing I can tell you off-hand. You would need to sit down again.

It's a long story; and you were going; and it's late. We will leave it till to-morrow: that will be time enough. And if it is fine, we can go out somewhere, and I'll tell you as we go."

It was a brilliant May afternoon: great white clouds were piled one on the top of another, like bales of wool; and their fantastic bulging roundnesses made the intervening patches of blue seem doubly distant.

The wind was hardly more than a breath, which curled the tips of thin branches, and fluttered the loose ends of veils and laces. In the ROSENTAL, where the meadow-slopes were emerald-green, and each branch bore its complement of delicately curled leaves, the paths were so crowded that there could be no question of a connected conversation.

But again, Louise was not in a hurry to begin.

She continued meditative, even when they had reached the KAISERPARK, and were sitting with their cups before them, in the long, wooden, shed-like building, open at one side. She had taken off her hat--a somewhat showy white hat, trimmed with large white feathers--and laid it on the table; one dark wing of hair fell lower than the other, and shaded her forehead.

Maurice, who was on tenterhooks, subdued his impatience as long as he could. Finally, he emptied his cup at a draught, and pushed it away.

"You wanted to speak to me, you said."--His manner was curt, from sheer nervousness.

His voice startled her. "Yes, I have something to tell you," she said, with a hesitation he did not know in her. "But I must go back a little.--If you remember, Maurice, you wrote to me while I was away, didn't you?" she said, and looked not at him, but at her hands clasped before her. "You gave me a number of excellent reasons why it would be better for me not to come back here. I didn't answer your letter at the time because ... What should you say, Maurice, if I told you now, that I intended to take your advice?"

"You are going away?" The words jerked out gratingly, of themselves.

"Perhaps.--That is what I want to speak to you about. I have a chance of doing so."

"Chance? How chance?" he asked sharply.

"That's what I am going to tell you, if you will give me time."

Drawing a letter from her pocket, she smoothed the creases out of the envelope, and handed it to him.

While he read it, she looked away, looked over the enclosure. Some people were crossing it, and she followed them with her eyes, though she had often seen their counterparts before. A man in a heavy ulster--notwithstanding the mildness of the day--stalked on ahead, unconcerned about the fate of his family, which dragged, a woman and two children, in the rear: like savages, thought Louise, where the male goes first, to scent danger. But the crackling of paper recalled her attention; Maurice was folding the sheet, and replacing it in the envelope, with a ludicrous precision. His face had taken on a pinched expression, and he handed the letter back to her without a word.

She looked at him, expecting him to say something; but he was obdurate.

"This was what I was waiting all these days to tell you," she said.

"You knew it was coming then?" He scarcely recognised his own voice; he spoke as he supposed a judge might speak to a proven criminal.

Louise shrugged her shoulders. "No. Yes.--That is, as far as it's possible to know such a thing."

Through the crude gla.s.s window, the sun cast a medley of lines and lights on her hands, and on the checkered table-cloth. There were two rough benches, and a square table; the coffeecups stood on a metal tray; the lid of the pot was odd, did not match the set: all these inanimate things, which, a moment ago, Maurice had seen without seeing them, now stood out before his eyes, as if each of them had acquired an independent life, and no longer fitted into its background.

"Let us go home," he said, and rose.

"Go home? But we have only just come!" cried Louise, with what seemed to him pretended surprise. "Why do you want to go home? It is so quiet here: I can talk to you. For I need your advice, Maurice. You must help me once again."

"I help you?--in this? No, thank you. All I can do, it seems, is to wish you joy." He remained standing, with his hand on the back of the bench.

But at the cold amazement of her eyes, he took his seat again. "It is a matter for yourself--only you can decide. It's none of my business." He moved the empty cups about on the cloth.

"But why are you angry?"

"Haven't I good reason to be? To see you--you!--accepting an impertinence of this kind so quietly. For it IS an impertinence, Louise, that a man you hardly know should write to you in this c.o.c.ksure way and ask you to marry him. Impertinent and absurd!"

"You have a way of finding most things I want to do absurd," she answered. "In this case, though, you're mistaken. The tone of the letter is all it should be. And, besides, I know Mr. Van Houst very well."

Maurice looked at her with a sardonic smile.

"Seven weeks is a long time," she added.

"Seven weeks!--and for a lifetime!"

"Oh, one can get to know a man inside out, in seven weeks," she said, with wilful flippancy. "Especially if, from the first, he shows so plainly ... Maurice, don't be angry. You have always been kind to me; you're not going to fail me now that I really need help? I have no one else, as you very well know." She smiled at him, and held out her hand.

He could not refuse to take it; but he let it drop again immediately.

"Let me tell you all about it, and how it happened, and then you will understand," Louise went on, in a persuasive voice--he had once believed that the sound of this voice would reconcile him to any fate.

"You think the time was short, but we were together every day, and sometimes all day long. I knew from the first that he cared for me; he made no secret of it. If anything, it is a proof of tactfulness on his part that he should have written rather than have spoken to me himself.

I like him for doing it, for giving me time. And then, listen, Maurice, what I should gain by marrying him. He is rich, really rich, and good-looking--in an American way--and thirty-two years old. His sisters would welcome me--one of them told me as much, and told me, too, that her brother had never cared for anyone before. He would make an ideal husband," she added with a sudden recklessness, at the sight of Maurice's unmoved face. "Americanly chivalrous to the fingertips, and with just enough of the primitive animal in him to ward off monotony."