The Guest of Quesnay Part 16

"He didn't mean to," I said warmly. "You understood that?"

"Yes, I understood."

"I am glad. I'd been waiting the chance to try to explain--to ask you to pardon him--"

"But there wasn't any need."

"You mean because you understood--"

"No," she interrupted gently, "not only that. I mean because he has done it himself."

"Asked your pardon?" I said, in complete surprise.

"Yes."

"He's written you?" I cried.

"No. I saw him to-day," she answered. "This afternoon when I went for my walk, he was waiting where the paths intersect--"

Some hasty e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, I do not know what, came from me, but she lifted her hand.

"Wait," she said quietly. "As soon as he saw me he came straight toward me--"

"Oh, but this won't do at all," I broke out. "It's too bad--"

"Wait." She leaned forward slightly, lifting her hand again. "He called me 'Madame d'Armand,' and said he must know if he had offended me."

"You told him--"

"I told him 'No!'" And it seemed to me that her voice, which up to this point had been low but very steady, shook upon the monosyllable. "He walked with me a little way--perhaps It was longer--"

"Trust me that it sha'n't happen again!" I exclaimed. "I'll see that Keredec knows of this at once. He will--"

"No, no," she interrupted quickly, "that is just what I want you not to do. Will you promise me?"

"I'll promise anything you ask me. But didn't he frighten you? Didn't he talk wildly? Didn't he--"

"He didn't frighten me--not as you mean. He was very quiet and--" She broke off unexpectedly, with a little pitying cry, and turned to me, lifting both hands appealingly--"And oh, doesn't he make one SORRY for him!"

That was just it. She had gone straight to the heart of his mystery: his strangeness was the strange PATHOS that invested him; the "singularity" of "that other monsieur" was solved for me at last.

When she had spoken she rose, advanced a step, and stood looking out over the valley again, her skirts pressing the bal.u.s.trade. One of the moments in my life when I have wished to be a figure painter came then, as she raised her arms, the sleeves, of some filmy texture, falling back from them with the gesture, and clasped her hands lightly behind her neck, the graceful angle of her chin uplifted to the full rain of moonshine. Little Miss Elliott, in the glamour of these same blue showerings, had borrowed gauzy weavings of the fay and the sprite, but Mrs. Harman--tall, straight, delicate to fragility, yet not to thinness--was transfigured with a deeper meaning, wearing the sadder, richer colours of the tragedy that her cruel young romance had put upon her. She might have posed as she stood against the marble railing--and especially in that gesture of lifting her arms--for a bearer of the gift at some foredestined luckless ceremony of votive offerings. So it seemed, at least, to the eyes of a moon-dazed old painter-man.

She stood in profile to me; there were some jasmine flowers at her breast; I could see them rise and fall with more than deep breathing; and I wondered what the man who had talked of her so wildly, only yesterday, would feel if he could know that already the thought of him had moved her.

"I haven't HAD my life. It's gone!" It was almost as if I heard his voice, close at hand, with all the pa.s.sion of regret and protest that rang in the words when they broke from him in the forest. And by some miraculous conjecture, within the moment I seemed not only to hear his voice but actually to see him, a figure dressed in white, far below us and small with the distance, standing out in the moonlight in the middle of the tree-bordered avenue leading to the chateau gates.

I rose and leaned over the railing. There was no doubt about the reality of the figure in white, though it was too far away to be identified with certainty; and as I rubbed my eyes for clearer sight, it turned and disappeared into the shadows of the orderly grove where I had stood, one day, to watch Louise Harman ascend the slopes of Quesnay. But I told myself, sensibly, that more than one man on the coast of Normandy might be wearing white flannels that evening, and, turning to my companion, found that she had moved some steps away from me and was gazing eastward to the sea. I concluded that she had not seen the figure.

"I have a request to make of you," she said, as I turned. "Will you do it for me--setting it down just as a whim, if you like, and letting it go at that?"

"Yes, I will," I answered promptly. "I'll do anything you ask."

She stepped closer, looked at me intently for a second, bit her lip in indecision, then said, all in a breath:

"Don't tell Mr. Saffren my name!"

"But I hadn't meant to," I protested.

"Don't speak of me to him at all," she said, with the same hurried eagerness. "Will you let me have my way?"

"Could there be any question of that?" I replied, and to my astonishment found that we had somehow impulsively taken each other's hands, as upon a serious bargain struck between us.

CHAPTER XIII

The round moon was white and at its smallest, high overhead, when I stepped out of the phaeton in which Miss Elizabeth sent me back to Madame Brossard's; midnight was tw.a.n.ging from a rusty old clock indoors as I crossed the fragrant courtyard to my pavilion; but a lamp still burned in the salon of the "Grande Suite," a light to my mind more suggestive of the patient watcher than of the scholar at his tome.

When my own lamp was extinguished, I set my door ajar, moved my bed out from the wall to catch whatever breeze might stir, "composed myself for the night," as it used to be written, and lay looking out upon the quiet garden where a thin white haze was rising. If, in taking this coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath some immoderate weight, and the n.o.ble form of Keredec emerged upon my field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed him to be either barefooted or in his stockings. His visible costume consisted of a sleeping jacket tucked into a pair of trousers, while his tousled hair and beard and generally tossed and rumpled look were those of a man who had been lying down temporarily.

I heard him sigh--like one sighing for sleep--as he went noiselessly across the garden and out through the archway to the road. At that I sat straight up in bed to stare--and well I might, for here was a miracle! He had lifted his arms above his head to stretch himself comfortably, and he walked upright and at ease, whereas when I had last seen him, the night before, he had been able to do little more than crawl, bent far over and leaning painfully upon his friend. Never man beheld a more astonishing recovery from a bad case of rheumatism!

After a long look down the road, he retraced his steps; and the moonlight, striking across his great forehead as he came, revealed the furrows ploughed there by an anxiety of which I guessed the cause. The creaking of the wooden stairs and gallery and the whine of an old door announced that he had returned to his vigil.

I had, perhaps, a quarter of an hour to consider this performance, when it was repeated; now, however, he only glanced out into the road, retreating hastily, and I saw that he was smiling, while the speed he maintained in returning to his quarters was remarkable for one so newly convalescent.

The next moment Saffron came through the archway, ascended the steps in turn--but slowly and carefully, as if fearful of waking his guardian--and I heard his door closing, very gently. Long before his arrival, however, I had been certain of his ident.i.ty with the figure I had seen gazing up at the terraces of Quesnay from the borders of the grove. Other questions remained to bother me: Why had Keredec not prevented this night-roving, and why, since he did permit it, should he conceal his knowledge of it from Oliver? And what, oh, what wondrous specific had the mighty man found for his disease?

Morning failed to clarify these mysteries; it brought, however, something rare and rich and strange. I allude to the manner of Amedee's approach. The aged gossip-demoniac had to recognise the fact that he could not keep out of my way for ever; there was nothing for it but to put as good a face as possible upon a bad business, and get it over--and the face he selected was a marvel; not less, and in no hasty sense of the word.

It appeared at my door to announce that breakfast waited outside.

Primarily it displayed an expression of serenity, masterly in its a.s.sumption that not the least, remotest, dreamiest shadow of danger could possibly be conceived, by the most immoderately pessimistic and sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest, you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the first-born--that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous, diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles, beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my repast with an unconcealed fondness at once maternal and reverential.

I did not attempt to speak. I came out silently, uncannily fascinated, my eyes fixed upon him, while he moved gently backward, cooing pleasant words about the coffee, but just perceptibly keeping himself out of arm's reach until I had taken my seat. When I had done that, he leaned over the table and began to set useless things nearer my plate with frankly affectionate care. It chanced that in "making a long arm" to reach something I did want, my hand (of which the fingers happened to be closed) pa.s.sed rather impatiently beneath his nose. The madonna expression changed instantly to one of horror, he uttered a startled croak, and took a surprisingly long skip backward, landing in the screen of honeysuckle vines, which, he seemed to imagine, were some new form of hostility attacking him treacherously from the rear. They sagged, but did not break from their fastenings, and his behaviour, as he lay thus entangled, would have contrasted unfavourably in dignity with the actions of a panic-stricken hen in a hammock.

"And so conscience DOES make cowards of us all," I said, with no hope of being understood.

Recovering some measure of mental equilibrium at the same time that he managed to find his feet, he burst into shrill laughter, to which he tried in vain to impart a ring of debonair carelessness.

"Eh, I stumble!" he cried with hollow merriment. "I fall about and faint with fatigue! Pah! But it is nothing: truly!"

"Fatigue!" I turned a bitter sneer upon him. "Fatigue! And you just out of bed!"

His fat hands went up palm outward; his heroic laughter was checked as with a sob; an expression of tragic incredulity shone from his eyes.