The Maids of Paradise Part 43

She courtesied and vanished.

"Little minx," I thought, "what mischief are you preparing now?" and I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden, where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and saffron.

Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.

I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a horse's hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly, just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and gave me her gloved hand.

Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave young Countess whom I had known in Alsace--this incarnation of all that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had happened?

I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned, _opened_, with a strange note from Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some word from me, here in Paradise, since September; "waited impatiently," she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows for a moment--a moment only.

"But come out to my garden," she said, smiling, and stripping off her little buff gauntlets. "There we will have tea a l'Anglaise, and sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will," she added, laughing and coloring up; "for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do not believe I have given you one second to open your lips."

Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips and listen to the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell with my own.

She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a sunny wall, a wall built of ma.s.sive granite, deeply thatched with fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-b.u.t.terflies flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.

Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and loveliness--the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual innocence on a tired, unstrung man?

"First of all," she said, impulsively, "I know your life--all of it in minute particular. Are you astonished?"

"No, madame," I replied; "Mornac showed you my dossier."

"That is true," she said, with a troubled look of surprise.

I smiled. "As for Mornac," I began, but she interrupted me.

"Ah, Mornac! Do you suppose I believed him? Had I not proof on proof of your loyalty, your honor, your courtesy, your chivalry--"

"Madame, your generosity--and, I fear, your pity--overpraises."

"No, it does not! I know what you are. Mornac cannot make white black! I know what you have been. Mornac could not read you into infamy, even with your dossier under my own eyes!"

"In my dossier you read a sorry history, madame."

"In your dossier I read the tragedy of a gentleman."

"Do you know," said I, "that I am now a performer in a third-rate travelling circus?"

"I think that is very sad," she said, sweetly.

"Sad? Oh no. It is better than the disciplinary battalions of Africa."

Which was simply acknowledging that I had served a term in prison.

The color faded in her face. "I thought you were pardoned."

"I was--from prison, not from the battalion of Biribi."

"I only know," she said, "that they say you were not guilty; that they say you faced utter ruin, even the possibility of death, for the sake of another man whose name even the police--even Monsieur de Mornac--could never learn. Was there such a man?"

I hesitated. "Madame, there is such a man; _I_ am the man who _was_."

"With no hope?"

"Hope? With every hope," I said, smiling. "My name is not my own, but it must serve me to my end, and I shall wear it threadbare and leave it to no one."

"Is there no hope?" she asked, quietly.

"None for the man who _was_. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions and general mountebank," I said, laughing down the rising tide of bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had forgotten--my dead self.

"No hope?" she repeated.

Suddenly the ghost of all I had lost rose before me with her words--rose at last after all these years, towering, terrible, free once more to fill the days with loathing and my nights with h.e.l.l eternal,... after all these years!

Overwhelmed, I fought down the spectre in silence. Kith and kin were not all in the world; love of woman was not all; a chance for a home, a wife, children, were not all; a name was not all. Raising my head, a trifle faint with the struggle and the cost of the struggle, I saw the distress in her eyes and strove to smile.

"There is every hope," I said, "save the hopes of youth--the hope of a woman's love, and of that happiness which comes through love. I am a man past thirty, madame--thirty-five, I believe my dossier makes it.

It has taken me fifteen years to bury my youth. Let us talk of Mornac."

"Yes, we will talk of Mornac," she said, gently.

So with infinite pains I went back and traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness.

She sat motionless, her face like cold marble, as I carefully gathered the threads of the plot and gently twitched that one which galvanized the mask of Mornac.

"Mornac!" she stammered, aghast.

I showed her why Buckhurst desired to come to Paradise; I showed her why Mornac had initiated her into the mysteries of my dossier, taking that infernal precaution, although he had every reason to believe he had me practically in prison, with the keys in his own pocket.

"Had it not been for my comrade, Speed," I said, "I should be in one of Mornac's fortress cells. He overshot the mark when he left us together and stepped into his cabinet to spread my dossier before you.

He counted on an innocent man going through h.e.l.l itself to prove his innocence; he counted on me, and left Speed out of his calculations.

He had your testimony, he had my dossier, he had the order for my arrest in his pocket.... And then I stepped out of sight! I, the honest fool, with my knowledge of his infamy, of Buckhurst's complicity and purposes--I was gone.

"And now mark the irony of the whole thing: he had, criminally, destroyed the only bureau that could ever have caught me. But he did his best during the few weeks that were left him before the battle of Sedan. After that it was too late; it was too late when the first Uhlan appeared before the gates of Paris. And now Mornac, shorn of authority, is shut up in a city surrounded by a wall of German steel, through which not one single living creature has penetrated for two months."

I looked at her steadily. "Eliminate Mornac as a trapped rat; cancel him as a dead rat since the ship of Empire went down at Sedan. I do not know what has taken place in Paris--save what all now know that the Empire is ended, the Republic proclaimed, and the Imperial police a memory. Then let us strike out Mornac and turn to Buckhurst. Madame, I am here to serve you."

The dazed horror in her face which had marked my revelations of Buckhurst's villanies gave place to a mantling flush of pure anger.

Shame crimsoned her neck, too; shame for her credulous innocence, her belief in this rogue who had betrayed her, only to receive pardon for the purpose of baser and more murderous betrayal.

I said nothing for a long time, content to leave her to her own thoughts. The bitter draught she was draining could not harm her, could not but act as the most wholesome of tonics.

Hers was not a weak character to sink, embittered, under the weight of knowledge--knowledge of evil, that all must learn to carry lightly through life; I had once thought her weak, but I had revised that opinion and subst.i.tuted the words "pure in thought, inherently loyal, essentially unsuspicious."

"Tell me about Buckhurst," I said, quietly. "I can help you, I think."

The quick tears of humiliation glimmered for a second in her angry eyes; then pride fell from her, like a stately mantle which a princess puts aside, tired and content to rest.