The Guest of Quesnay Part 18

She continued to look thoughtful for a moment longer, then with a resumption of her former manner--the pretence of an earnestness much deeper than the real--"Will you take me painting with you?" she said.

"If it will convince you that I mean it, I'll give up my hopes of seeing that SUMPTUOUS Mr. Saffren and go back to Quesnay now, before he comes home. He's been out for a walk--a long one, since it's lasted ever since early this morning, so the waiter told me. May I go with you? You CAN'T know how enervating it is up there at the chateau--all except Mrs. Harman, and even she--"

"What about Mrs. Harman?" I asked, as she paused.

"I think she must be in love."

"What!"

"I do think so," said the girl. "She's LIKE it, at least."

"But with whom?"

She laughed gaily. "I'm afraid she's my rival!"

"Not with--" I began.

"Yes, with your beautiful and mad young friend."

"But--oh, it's preposterous!" I cried, profoundly disturbed. "She couldn't be! If you knew a great deal about her--"

"I may know more than you think. My simplicity of appearance is deceptive," she mocked, beginning to set her sketch-box in order. "You don't realise that Mrs. Harman and I are quite HURLED upon each other at Quesnay, being two ravishingly intelligent women entirely surrounded by large bodies of elementals. She has told me a great deal of herself since that first evening, and I know--well, I know why she did not come back from Dives this afternoon, for instance."

"WHY?" I fairly shouted.

She slid her sketch into a groove in the box, which she closed, and rose to her feet before answering. Then she set her hat a little straighter with a touch, looking so fixedly and with such grave interest over my shoulder that I turned to follow her glance and encountered our reflections in a window of the inn. Her own shed a light upon THAT mystery, at all events.

"I might tell you some day," she said indifferently, "if I gained enough confidence in you through a.s.sociation in daily pursuits."

"My dear young lady," I cried with real exasperation, "I am a working man, and this is a working summer for me!"

"Do you think I'd spoil it?" she urged gently.

"But I get up with the first daylight to paint," I protested, "and I paint all day--"

She moved a step nearer me and laid her hand warningly upon my sleeve, checking the outburst.

I turned to see what she meant.

Oliver Saffren had come in from the road and was crossing to the gallery steps. He lifted his hat and gave me a quick word of greeting as he pa.s.sed, and at the sight of his flushed and happy face my riddle was solved for me. Amazing as the thing was, I had no doubt of the revelation.

"Ah," I said to Miss Elliott when he had gone, "I won't have to take pupils to get the answer to my question, now!"

CHAPTER XIV

"Ha, these philosophers," said the professor, expanding in discourse a little later--"these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell you that spirit is abstract!" He waved his great hand in a sweeping semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of honeysuckle. "Ha, the folly!"

"What do YOU say it is?" I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden.

"I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are only a question of names, and when I use the word 'spirit' I mean ident.i.ty--universal ident.i.ty, if you like. It is what we all are, yes--and those flowers, too. But the spirit of the flowers is not what you smell, nor what you see, that look so pretty: it is the flowers themself! Yet all spirit is only one spirit and one spirit is all spirit--and if you tell me this is Pant'eism I will tell you that you do not understand!"

"I don't tell you that," said I, "neither do I understand."

"Nor that big Keredec either!" Whereupon he loosed the rolling thunder of his laughter. "Nor any brain born of the monkey people! But this world is full of proof that everything that exist is all one thing, and it is the instinct of that, when it draws us together, which makes what we call 'love.' Even those wicked devils of egoism in our inside is only love which grows too long the wrong way, like the finger nails of the Chinese empress. Young love is a little sprout of universal unity.

When the young people begin to feel it, THEY are not abstract, ha? And the young man, when he selects, he chooses one being from all the others to mean--just for him--all that great universe of which he is a part."

This was wandering whimsically far afield, but as I caught the good-humoured flicker of the professor's glance at our companion I thought I saw a purpose in his deviation. Saffren turned toward him wonderingly, his unconscious, eager look remarkably emphasised and brightened.

"All such things are most strange--great mysteries," continued the professor. "For when a man has made the selection, THAT being DOES become all the universe, and for him there is nothing else at all--nothing else anywhere!"

Saffren's cheeks and temples were flushed as they had been when I saw him returning that afternoon; and his eyes were wide, fixed upon Keredec in a stare of utter amazement.

"Yes, that is true," he said slowly. "How did you know?"

Keredec returned his look with an attentive scrutiny, and made some exclamation under his breath, which I did not catch, but there was no mistaking his high good humour.

"Bravo!" he shouted, rising and clapping the other upon the shoulder.

"You will soon cure my rheumatism if you ask me questions like that!

Ho, ho, ho!" He threw back his head and let the mighty salvos forth.

"Ho, ho, ho! How do I know? The young, always they believe they are the only ones who were ever young! Ho, ho, ho! Come, we shall make those lessons very easy to-night. Come, my friend! How could that big, old Keredec know of such things? He is too old, too foolish! Ho, ho, ho!"

As he went up the steps, the courtyard reverberating again to his laughter, his arm resting on Saffren's shoulders, but not so heavily as usual. The door of their salon closed upon them, and for a while Keredec's voice could be heard booming cheerfully; it ended in another burst of laughter.

A moment later Saffren opened the door and called to me.

"Here," I answered from my veranda, where I had just lighted my second cigar.

"No more work to-night. All finished," he cried jubilantly, springing down the steps. "I'm coming to have a talk with you."

Amedee had removed the candles, the moon had withdrawn in fear of a turbulent mob of clouds, rioting into our sky from seaward; the air smelled of imminent rain, and it was so dark that I could see my visitor only as a vague, tall shape; but a happy excitement vibrated in his rich voice, and his step on the gravelled path was light and exultant.

"I won't sit down," he said. "I'll walk up and down in front of the veranda--if it doesn't make you nervous."

For answer I merely laughed; and he laughed too, in genial response, continuing gaily:

"Oh, it's all so different with me! Everything is. That BLIND feeling I told you of--it's all gone. I must have been very babyish, the other day; I don't think I could feel like that again. It used to seem to me that I lived penned up in a circle of blank stone walls; I couldn't see over the top for myself at all, though now and then Keredec would boost me up and let me get a little glimmer of the country round about--but never long enough to see what it was really like. But it's not so now.

Ah!"--he drew a long breath--"I'd like to run. I think I could run all the way to the top of a pretty fair-sized mountain to-night, and then"--he laughed--"jump off and ride on the clouds."

"I know how that is," I responded. "At least I did know--a few years ago."

"Everything is a jumble with me," he went on happily, in a confidential tone, "yet it's a heavenly kind of jumble. I can't put anything into words. I don't THINK very well yet, though Keredec is trying to teach me. My thoughts don't run in order, and this that's happened seems to make them wilder, queerer--" He stopped short.

"What has happened?"

He paused in his sentry-go, facing me, and answered, in a low voice: