Running Sands Part 54

"Why are you going away to-morrow?"

Jim was surprised.

"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"

"Then I think you might have told me when _he_ wasn't here."

"My dear, you gave me no chance."

"And you booked pa.s.sage back, Jim?"

"Pa.s.sage home, yes."

Muriel's mouth drooped.

"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.

He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked searchingly into hers.

"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"

"I know, Jim, but I never promised----"

"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."

He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that, within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in France or America.

"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want to leave early. We had better go to bed."

She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent, and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and watched him climb aboard his train.

She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none.

As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown into her drawing-room.

"You shouldn't," she said--"you shouldn't have come!"

Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young and handsome.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because of Jim."

"He invited me."

"Yes, I know, but----" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted her fingers.

"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."

"He was queer. His manner--I don't know. Only I had not promised to go home in three weeks."

"No?"

"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"

Von Klausen smiled.

"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"

"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."

"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of business. I know that; surely you should know it better."

"That business wasn't like him."

"It was very--shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself.

Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once more!'"

She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa, the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.

The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say good-bye forever.

Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal pa.s.sion had a.s.serted itself in Paris, and because that pa.s.sion seemed to be the characteristic of those b.u.t.terfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether.

This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal G.o.ddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that G.o.ddess is unknown.

They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.

"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong."

"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right."

"Not the ruin of our lives?"

"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's----"

"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow--I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."

"Nevertheless, you are married to him."

"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when----"

"A divorce is always wrong."

"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?"

"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding."

"But marriage is a contract."

"Marriage is a sacrament."