Maurice Guest Part 7

"Now upon my soul, who would have thought of seeing you here, you baggage, you?" he cried vociferously.

The woman was speechless from amazement; her packages fell to the ground, and she gazed open-mouthed at the wild-haired lad before her, making, at the same time, vain attempts to free her hands.

"No, this really is luck," he went on, holding her fast. "Come, a kiss, my duck, just one! EIN KUSSCHEN IN EHREN, you know----" and, in very fact, he leaned forward and pecked at her cheek.

The blood dyed her face and she panted with rage.

"You young scoundrel!" she gasped. "You impertinent young dog! I'll give you in charge. I'll--I'll report you to the police. Let me go this instant--this very instant, do you hear?--or I'll scream for help."

The other two had come over to enjoy the fun. Schilsky turned to them with a comical air of dismay, and waved his arm. "Well I declare, if I haven't been and made a mistake!" he exclaimed, and slapped his forehead. "I'm out by I don't know how much--by twenty years, at least.

No thank you, Madam, keep your kisses! You're much too old and ugly for me."

He flourished his big hat in her face, pirouetted on his heel, and the three of them went down the street, hallooing with laughter.

They had supper together at the BAVARIA, Schilsky standing treat; for they had gone by way of the BRUDERSTRa.s.sE, where he called in to investigate the vase mentioned in the letter. Afterwards, they commenced an informal wandering from one haunt to another, now by themselves, now with stray acquaintances. Krafft, who was still enfeebled by the previous night, and who, under the best of circ.u.mstances, could not carry as much as his friends, was the first to give in. For a time, they got him about between them. Then Furst grew obstreperous, and wanted to pour his beer on the floor as soon as it was set before him, so that they were put out of two places, in the second of which they left Krafft. But the better half of the night was over before Schilsky was comfortably drunk, and in a state to unbosom himself to a sympathetic waitress, about the hardship it was to be bound to some one older than yourself. He shed tears of pity at his lot, and was extremely communicative. "'N KORPER, SCHA-AGE IHNEN, 'N KORPER!" but old, old, a "HALB'SCH JAHR' UND'RT" older than he was, and desperately jealous.

"It's too bad; such a nice young man as you are," said the MAMSELL, who, herself not very sober, was sitting at ease on his knee, swinging her legs. "But you nice ones are always chicken-hearted. Treat her as she deserves, my chuck, and make no bones about it. Just let her rip--and you stick to me!"

VI.

One cold, windy afternoon, when dust was stirring and rain seemed imminent, Maurice Guest walked with bent head and his hat pulled over his eyes. He was returning from the ZEITZERSTRa.s.sE, where, in a photographer's show-case, he had a few days earlier discovered a large photograph of Louise. This was a source of great pleasure to him. Here, no laws of breeding or delicacy hindered him from gazing at her as often as he chose.

On this particular day, whether he had looked too long, or whether the unrest of the weather, the sense of something impending, the dusty dryness that craved rain, had got into his blood and disquieted him: whatever it was, he felt restless and sick for news of her, and, at this very moment, was on his way to Madeleine, in the foolish hope of hearing her name.

But a little adventure befell him which made him forget his intention.

He was about to turn the corner of a street, when a sudden blast of wind swept round, bearing with it some half dozen single sheets of music. For a moment they whirled high, then sank fluttering to the ground, only to rise again and race one another along the road. Maurice instinctively gave chase, but it was not easy to catch them; no sooner had he secured one than the next was out of his reach.

Meanwhile their owner, a young and very pretty girl, looked on and laughed, without making any effort to help him; and the more he exerted himself, the more she laughed. In one hand she was carrying a violin-case, in the other a velvet m.u.f.f, which now and again she raised to her lips, as if to conceal her mirth. It was a graceful movement, but an unnecessary one, for her laughter was of that charming kind, which never gives offence; and, besides that, although it was continuous, it was neither hearty enough nor frank enough to be unbecoming the face was well under control. She stood there, with her head slightly on one side, and the parted lips showed both rows of small, even teeth; but the smile was unvarying, and, in spite of her merriment, her eyes did not for an instant quit the young man's face, as he darted to and fro.

Maurice could not help laughing himself, red and out of breath though he was.

"Now for the last one," he said in German.

At these words she seemed more amused than ever. "I don't speak German," she answered in English, with a strong American accent.

Having captured all the sheets, Maurice tried to arrange them for her.

"It's my Kayser," she explained with a quick, upward glance, adding the next minute with a fresh ripple of laughter. "He's all to pieces."

"You have too much to carry," said Maurice. "On such a windy day, too."

"That's what Joan said--Joan is my sister," she continued. "But I guess it's so cold this afternoon I had to bring a m.u.f.f along. If my fingers are stiff I can't play, and then Herr Becker is angry." But she laughed again as she spoke, and it was plain that the master's wrath did not exactly incite fear. "Joan always comes along, but to-day she's sick."

"Will you let me help you?" asked Maurice, and a moment later he was walking at her side.

She handed over music and violin to him without a trace of hesitation; and, as they went along the PROMENADE, she talked to him with as little embarra.s.sment as though they were old acquaintances. It was so kind of him to help her, she thought; she couldn't imagine how she would ever have got home without him, alone against the wind; and she was perfectly sure he must be American--no one but an American would be so nice. When Maurice denied this, she laughed very much indeed, and was not sure, this being the case, whether she could like him or not; as a rule, she didn't like English people; they were stiff and horrid, and were always wanting either to be introduced or to shake hands. Here she carried her m.u.f.f up to her lips again, and her eyes shone mischievously at him over the dark velvet. Maurice had never known anyone so easily moved to laughter; whenever she spoke she laughed, and she laughed at everything he said.

Off the PROMENADE, where the trees were of a marvellous Pale green, they turned into a street of high s.p.a.cious houses, the dark lines of which were here and there broken by an arched gateway, or the delicate tints of a spring garden. To a window in one of the largest houses Maurice's little friend looked up, and smiled and nodded.

"There's my sister."

The young man looked, too, and saw a dark, thin-faced girl, who, when she found four eyes fixed on her, abruptly drew in her head, and as abruptly put it out again, leaning her two hands on the sill.

"She's wondering who it is," said Maurice's companion gleefully. Then, turning her face up, she made a speaking-trumpet of her hands, and cried: "It's all right, Joan.--Now I must run right up and tell her about it," she said to Maurice. "Perhaps she'll scold; Joan is very particular. Good-bye. Thank you ever so much for being so good to me--oh, won't you tell me your name?"

The very next morning brought him a small pink note, faintly scented.

The pointed handwriting was still childish, but there was a coquettish flourish beneath the pretty signature: Ephie Cayhill. Besides a graceful word of thanks, she wrote: WE ARE AT HOME EVERY SUNDAY. MAMMA WOULD BE VERY PLEASED.

Maurice did not scruple to call the following week, and on doing so, found himself in the midst of one of those English-speaking coteries, which spring up in all large, continental towns. Foreigners were not excluded--Maurice discovered two or three of his German friends, awkwardly balancing their cups on their knees. In order, however, to gain access to the circle, it was necessary for them to have a smattering of English; they had also to be flint against any open or covert fun that might be made of them or their country; and above all, to be skilled in the art of looking amiable, while these visitors from other lands heatedly readjusted, to their own satisfaction, all that did not please them in the life and laws of this country that was temporarily their home.

Mrs. Cayhill was a handsome woman, who led a comfortable, vegetable existence, and found it a task to rise from the plump sofa-cushion. Her pleasant features were slack, and in those moments of life which called for a sudden decision, they wore the helpless bewilderment of a woman who has never been required to think for herself. Her grasp on practical matters was rendered the more lax, too, by her being an immoderate reader, who fed on novels from morning till night, and slept with a page turned down beside her bed. She was for ever lost in the joys or sorrows of some fict.i.tious person, and, in consequence, remained for the most part completely ignorant of what was going on around her. When she did happen to become conscious of her surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for, compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives, which make up art: in other words, life demanded that unceasing work of selection and rejection, which it is the story-teller's duty to Perform for his readers. All novels were fish to Mrs. Cayhill's net; she lived in a world of intrigue and excitement, and, seated in her easy-chair by the sitting-room window, was generally as remote from her family as though she were in Timbuctoo.

There was a difference of ten years in age between her daughters, and it was the younger of the two whose education was being completed.

Johanna, the elder, had been a disappointment to her mother. Left to her own devices at an impressionable age, the girl had developed bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but she was not of a self-a.s.sertive nature, and when Mrs. Cayhill, who felt her world toppling about her ears at the mention of such a thing, said: "Not while I live!" she yielded, without a further word; and the fact that such an emphatic expression of opinion had been drawn from the mild-tempered mother, made it a matter of course that no other member of the family took Johanna's part. So she buried her ambitions, and kept her mother's house in an admirable, methodical way.

It was not the sacrifice it seemed, however, because Johanna adored her little sister, and would cheerfully have given up more than this for her sake. Ephie, who was at that time just emerging from childhood, was very pretty and precocious, and her mother had great hopes of her. She also tired early of her lesson-books, and, soon after she turned sixteen, declared her intention of leaving school. As at least a couple of years had still to elapse before she was old enough to be introduced in society, Mrs. Cayhill, taking the one decisive step of her life, determined that travel in Europe should put the final touches to Ephie's education: a little German and French; some finishing lessons on the violin; a run through Italy and Switzerland, and then to Paris, whence they would carry back with them a complete and costly outfit.

So, valiantly, Mrs. Cayhill had her trunks packed, and, together with Johanna, who would as soon have thought of denying her age as of letting these two helpless beings go out into the world alone, they crossed the Atlantic.

For some three months now, they had been established in Leipzig. A circulating library, rich in English novels, had been discovered; Mrs.

Cayhill was content; and it began to be plain to Johanna that the greater part of their two years' absence would be spent in this place.

Ephie, too, had already had time to learn that, as far as music was concerned, her business was not so much with finishing as with beginning, and that the road to art, which she with all the rest must follow, was a steep one. She might have found it still more arduous, had Herr Becker, her master, not been a young man and very impressionable. And Ephie never looked more charming than when, with her rounded, dimpled arm raised in an exquisite curve, she leaned her cheek against the glossy brown wood of her violin.

She was pretty with that untouched, infantine prettiness, before which old and young go helplessly down. She was small and plump, with a full, white throat and neck, and soft, rounded hands and wrists, that were dimpled like a baby's. Her brown hair was drawn back from the low forehead, but, both here and at the back of her neck, it broke into innumerable little curls, which were much lighter in colour than the rest. Her skin, faintly tinged, was as smooth as the skin of a cherry; it had that exquisite freshness which is only to be found in a very young girl, and is lovelier than the bloom on ripe fruit. Her dark blue eyes were well opened, but the black lashes were so long and so peculiarly straight that the eyes themselves were usually hidden, and this made it all the more effective did she suddenly look up. Moulded like wax, the small, upturned nose seemed to draw the top lip after it; anyhow, the upper lip was too short to meet the lower, and consequently, they were always slightly apart, in a kind of questioning amaze. This mouth was the real beauty of the face: bright red, full, yet delicate, arched like a bow, with corners that went in and upwards, it belonged, by right of its absolute innocence, to the face of a little child; and the thought was monstrous that nature and the years would eventually combine to destroy so perfect a thing.

She also had a charming laugh, with a liquid note in it, that made one think of water bubbling on a dry summer day.

It was this laugh that held the room on Sunday afternoon, and drew the handful of young men together, time after time.

Mrs. Cayhill, who, on these occasions, was wont to lay aside her book, was virtually a deeper echo of her little daughter, and Johanna only counted in so far as she made and distributed cups of tea at the end of the room. She did not look with favour on the young men who gathered there, and her manner to them was curt and unpleasing. Each of them in turn, as he went up to her for his cup, cudgelled his brain for something to say; but it was no easy matter to converse with Johanna.

The ordinary small change and polite commonplace of conversation, she met with a silent contempt. In musical chit-chat, she took no interest whatever, and pretended to none, openly indeed "detested music," and was unable to distinguish Mendelssohn from Wagner, "except by the noise;" while if a bolder man than the rest rashly ventured on the literary ground that was her special demesne, she either smiled at what he said, in a disagreeably sarcastic way, or flatly contradicted him.

She was the thorn in the flesh of these young men; and after having dutifully spent a few awkward moments at her side, they stole back, one by one, to the opposite end of the room. Here Ephie, bewitchingly dressed in blue, swung to and fro in a big American rocking-chair--going backwards, it carried her feet right off the ground--and talked charming nonsense, to the accompaniment of her own light laugh, and her mother's deeper notes, which went on like an organ-point, Mrs. Cayhill finding everything Ephic said, matchlessly amusing.

As Dove and Maurice walked there together for the first time--it now leaked out that Dove spent every Sunday afternoon in the LESSINGSTRa.s.sE--he spoke to Maurice of Johanna. Not in a disparaging way; Dove had never been heard to mention a woman's name otherwise than with respect. And, in this case, he deliberately showed up Johanna's good qualities, in the hope that Maurice might feel attracted by her, and remain at her side; for Dove had fallen deeply in love with Ephie, and had, as it was, more rivals than he cared for, in the field.

"You should get on with her, I think, Guest," he said slily. "You read these German writers she is so interested in. But don't be discouraged by her manner. For though she's one of the most unselfish women I ever met, her way of Speaking is sometimes abrupt. She reminds me, if it doesn't sound unkind, of a faithful watch-dog, or something of the sort, which cannot express its devotion as it would like to."

When, after a lively greeting from Ephie, and a few pleasant words from Mrs. Cayhill, Maurice found himself standing beside Johanna, the truth of Dove's simile was obvious to him. This dark, unattractive girl had apparently no thought for anything but her tea-making; she moved the cups this way and that, filled the pot with water, blew out and lighted again the flame of the spirit-lamp, without paying the least heed to Maurice, making, indeed, such an ostentatious show of being occupied, that it would have needed a brave man to break in upon her duties with idle words. He remained standing, however, in a constrained silence, which lasted until she could not invent anything else to do, and was obliged to drink her own tea. Then he said abruptly, in a tone which he meant to be easy, but which was only jaunty: "And how do you like being in Germany, Miss Cayhill? Does it not seem very strange after America?"

Johanna lifted her shortsighted eyes to his face, and looked coolly and disconcertingly at him through her gla.s.ses, as if she had just become aware of his presence.

"Strange? Why should it?" she asked in an unfriendly tone.

"Why, what I mean is, everything must be so different here from what you are accustomed to--at least it is from what we are used to in England," he corrected himself. "The ways and manners, and the language, and all that sort of thing, you know."