Running Sands Part 52

XVIII

OUR LADY OF PROTECTION

For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel, because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however, was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.

"Let's take it," said Muriel.

She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of hotels.

"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may want to be getting back home when--when all's well again."

"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease,"

Muriel serenely a.s.sured him.

Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at once.

They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she was heartily sorry for Jim.

It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to press once more the question of their return to New York. They were sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their villa, and were looking over the blue bay.

"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"

His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.

"Perhaps," she granted.

On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherch.e.l.l; then they climbed the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.

The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers answered or to the making of other prayers.

"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused, "that these people wanted."

Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.

"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."

His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.

"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."

"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in here."

"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze out there."

"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."

Muriel's lips tightened.

"Very well," she said.

She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled to the side overlooking the bay.

Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the ma.s.sed houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cite Chabas and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point, where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue; the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of land where towers the Chateau d'If.

She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a landscape of which she had only heard:

"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

"Muriel!"

It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner serious.

"How did you come here?"

The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her weapons of defence.

"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and they told me Ma.r.s.eilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come here."

His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her poise.

"How dared you come?" she asked.

"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.

"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."

"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."

"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"

"You must." He came nearer to her.

"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."

"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that you have told him nothing."

She eyed him menacingly.

"Are you so sure of that?"

"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."

"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider me?--But of course you don't!"

"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear that I should cause you annoyance----"

"You annoy me now."