The Call of the Blood Part 4

She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason.

Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true.

Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.

Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are; but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmes of j.a.pan, as playthings, and insisted on one thing only--that they must be pretty. A Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly emanc.i.p.ated from the la pet.i.te femme tradition, which will never be outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built, big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was being badly treated by his hostess.

Yet he had been observing this woman closely.

Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little chatterbox of the Mousme type. Therefore he came over to be presented to Hermione with rather a bad grace.

And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was now troubling him in the fog.

By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only then, caused him some astonishment.

Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained ever since.

Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante, often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he wandered--he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a man may love a very chic cocotte--he wrote to Hermione long letters, into which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures, triumphs. They were human doc.u.ments, and contained much of his secret history.

It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause for his melancholy--his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.

When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him.

Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.

Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was pa.s.sionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual spirit.

He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick, low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small, straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south, Artois thought.

As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity, he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised for flight to the G.o.ds, his mission accomplished, the expression of an intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the pa.s.sionate, leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous, unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.

Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy, enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he still felt angry.

Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse, a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in those who watched it.

Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased, and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from Delarey--generally interrogative--and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed ba.n.a.lities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics--the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them--were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said, irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced, said it was the woman's.

"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that often accompanies pa.s.sion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are brilliant critics of literature?"

"Yes, yes."

"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there had been harmony."

"You, Emile! How was that?"

"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If you like I will give it you, and leave you to create--separately, not together--what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out.

At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but created great interest in our circle--you know it, Hermione, that dines at Reneau's on Thursday nights?"

"Yes. Well, what happened?"

"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written in the French language."

"And Madame Lagrande?"

"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated Robert."

"And you dare to say she has a n.o.ble nature?"

"Yes, a n.o.ble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible impulse, she has lapsed."

"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning forward to her fiance, "you're not in literature any more than I am, you're an outsider--bless you! What d'you say to that?"

Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.

"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart.

You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession.

Would--could a n.o.ble nature yield to such an impulse?"

"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.

"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach between them."

"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its various forms?"

"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."

"Yet you must be capable of it."

"You think every one is?"

"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am certain, are."

Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the narrow room.

"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared for some one and was cared for--"

"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain, limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection elsewhere--what then?"

"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection would die. My love subsists on sympathy--take that food from it and it would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."

He smiled.

"What is?"

"The point is--can a n.o.ble nature lapse like that from its n.o.bility?"

"Yes, it can."

"Then it changes, it ceases to be n.o.ble. You would not say that a brave man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."

"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain circ.u.mstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the point from which it started. The inherently n.o.ble nature will, because it must, return eventually to its n.o.bility. Then comes the really tragic moment with the pa.s.sion of remorse."