The Guest of Quesnay Part 10

I laughed sceptically; and he flinched, but repeated that what he had said was only the truth. "I don't understand; it was all beyond me," he added huskily.

"What was it you said to her?"

"I spoke her name--'Madame d'Armand.'"

"You said more than that!"

"I asked her if she would let me see her again."

"What else?"

"Nothing," he answered humbly. "And then she--then for a moment it seemed--for a moment she didn't seem to be able to speak--"

"I should think not!" I shouted, and burst out at him with satirical laughter. He stood patiently enduring it, his lowered eyes following the aimless movements of his hands, which were twisting and untwisting his flexible straw hat; and it might have struck me as nearer akin to tragedy rather than to a thing for laughter: this spectacle of a grown man so like a schoolboy before the master, shamefaced over a stammered confession.

"But she did say something to you, didn't she?" I asked finally, with the gentleness of a cross-examining lawyer.

"Yes--after that moment."

"Well, what was it?"

"She said, 'Not now!' That was all."

"I suppose that was all she had breath for! It was just the inconsequent and meaningless thing a frightened woman WOULD say!"

"Meaningless?" he repeated, and looked up wonderingly.

"Did you take it for an appointment?" I roared, quite out of patience, and losing my temper completely.

"No, no, no! She said only that, and then--"

"Then she turned and ran away from you!"

"Yes," he said, swallowing painfully.

"That PLEASED you," I stormed, "to frighten a woman in the woods--to make her feel that she can't walk here in safety! You ENJOY doing things like that?"

He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.

I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said.

This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his att.i.tude until I had finished--and more than finished.

"There--and that's all!" I said desperately, when the things were strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. "Let's be off, in heaven's name!"

At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see that he had grown very pale.

"I wouldn't have frightened her for the world," he said, and his voice and his whole body shook with a strange violence. "I wouldn't have frightened her to please the angels in heaven!"

A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control the pa.s.sion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers Keredec's training had built for his protection, they were down now.

"You think I told a lie!" he cried. "You think I lied when I said I couldn't help speaking to her!"

"No, no," I said earnestly. "I didn't mean--"

"Words!" he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling vehemence. "And what does it matter? You CAN'T understand. When YOU want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I look back--AH!" He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent syllable. "I look back and it's all--BLIND! All these things you CAN do and CAN'T do--all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows--but _I_ don't know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don't know. I haven't HAD my life. It's gone! All I have is words that Keredec has said to me, and it's like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d'Armand? Can life itself teach you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?"

"I don't know," I answered honestly.

"I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body," he went on, with the same wild intensity, "rather than trouble her or frighten her, but I couldn't help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to see her again--the feeling that I MUST--whatever you say or do, whatever Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do.

And I will! It isn't a thing to choose to do, or not to do. I can't help it any more than I can help being alive!"

He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain. I made nervous haste to seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly:

"But if it should distress the lady?"

"Yes--then I could keep away. But I must know that."

"I think you might know it by her running away--and by her look," I said mildly. "Didn't you?"

"NO!" And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.

"Well, well," I said, "let's be on our way, or the professor will be wondering if he is to dine alone."

Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward home. He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain control of himself. I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were upon the main road near the Baudry cottage. Then he said in a steadier voice:

"Why should it distress her?"

"Well, you see," I began, not slackening the pace "there are formalities--"

"Ah, I know," he interrupted, with an impatient laugh. "Keredec once took me to a marionette show--all the little people strung on wires; they couldn't move any other way. And so you mustn't talk to a woman until somebody whose name has been spoken to you speaks yours to her!

Do you call that a rule of nature?"

"My dear boy," I laughed in some desperation, "we must conform to it, ordinarily, no matter whose rule it is."

"Do you think Madame d'Armand cares for little forms like that?" he asked challengingly.

"She does," I a.s.sured him with perfect confidence. "And, for the hundredth time, you must have seen how you troubled her."

"No," he returned, with the same curious obstinacy, "I don't believe it. There was something, but it wasn't trouble. We looked straight at each other; I saw her eyes plainly, and it was--" he paused and sighed, a sudden, brilliant smile upon his lips--"it was very--it was very strange!"

There was something so glad and different in his look that--like any other dried-up old blunderer in my place--I felt an instant tendency to laugh. It was that heathenish possession, the old insanity of the risibles, which makes a man think it a humourous thing that his friend should be discovered in love.

But before I spoke, before I quite smiled outright, I was given the grace to see myself in the likeness of a leering stranger trespa.s.sing in some cherished inclosure: a garden where the gentlest guests must always be intruders, and only the owner should come. The best of us profane it readily, leaving the coa.r.s.e prints of our heels upon its paths, mauling and man-handling the fairy blossoms with what pudgy fingers! Comes the poet, ruthlessly leaping the wall and trumpeting indecently his view-halloo of the chase, and, after him, the joker, snickering and hopeful of a kill among the rose-beds; for this has been their hunting-ground since the world began. These two have made us miserably ashamed of the divine infinitive, so that we are afraid to utter the very words "to love," lest some urchin overhear and pursue us with a sticky forefinger and stickier taunts. It is little to my credit that I checked the silly impulse to giggle at the eternal marvel, and went as gently as I could where I should not have gone at all.

"But if you were wrong," I said, "if it did distress her, and if it happened that she has already had too much that was distressing in her life--"

"You know something about her!" he exclaimed. "You know--"

"I do not," I interrupted in turn. "I have only a vague guess; I may be altogether mistaken."