The Maids of Paradise Part 64

Presently, however, Sylvia glanced up at him with a malicious smile, saying: "I notice that you have been in the foreign division of the Imperial Military Police, monsieur."

"Why do you think so?" asked Speed, calmly.

"When you seated yourself in your chair," said Sylvia, "you made a gesture with your left hand as though to unhook the sabre--which was not there."

Speed laughed. "But why the police? I might have been in the cavalry, mademoiselle; for that matter, I might have been an officer in any arm of the service. They all carry swords or sabres."

"But only the military police and the gendarmerie wear aiguilettes,"

she replied. "When you bend over your plate your fingers are ever unconsciously searching for those swinging, gold-tipped cords--to keep them out of your coffee-cup, monsieur."

The muscles in Speed's lean, bronzed cheeks tightened; he looked at her keenly.

"Might I not have been in the gendarmerie?" he asked. "How do you know I was not?"

"Does the gendarmerie wear the sabre-tache?"

"No, mademoiselle, but--"

"Do the military police?"

"No--that is, the foreign division did, when it existed."

"You are sitting, monsieur," she said, placidly, "with your left foot so far under the table that it quite inadvertently presses my shoe-tip."

Speed withdrew his leg with a jerk, asking pardon.

"It is a habit perfectly pardonable in a man who is careful that his spur shall not scratch or tear a patent-leather sabre-tache," she said.

I had absolutely nothing to say; we both laughed feebly, I believe.

I saw temptation struggling with Speed's caution; I, too, was almost willing to drop a hint that might change her amus.e.m.e.nt to speculation, if not to alarm.

So this was the woman for whose caprice Kelly Eyre had wrecked his prospects! Clever--oh, certainly clever. But she had made the inevitable slip that such clever people always make sooner or later.

And in a bantering message to her victim she had completed the chain against herself--a chain of which I might have been left in absolute ignorance. Impulse probably did it--reasonless and perhaps malicious caprice--the instinct of a pretty woman to stir up memory in a discarded and long-forgotten victim--just to note the effect--just to see if there still remains one nerve, one pulse-beat to respond.

"Will the pensive gentleman with nine lives have a little more nourishment to sustain him?" she asked.

Looking up from my empty plate, I declined politely; and we followed her signal to rise.

"There is a Mr. Kelly Eyre," she said to Speed, "connected with your circus. Has he gone with the others?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"Really?" she mused, amiably. "I knew him as a student in Paris, when he was very young--and I was younger. I should have liked to have seen him--once more."

"Did you not see him?" I asked, abruptly.

Her back was toward me; very deliberately she turned her pretty head and looked at me over her shoulder, studying my face a moment.

"Yes, I saw him. I should have liked to have seen him--once more,"

she said, as though she had first calculated the effect on me of a different reply.

She led the way into that small room overlooking the garden where I had been twice received by Madame de Va.s.sart. Here she took leave of us, abandoning us to our own designs. Mine was to find a large arm-chair and sit down in it, and give Speed a few instructions.

Speed's was to prowl around Paradise for information, and, if possible, telegraph to Lorient for troops to catch Buckhurst red-handed.

He left me turning over the leaves of the "Chanson de Roland," saying that he would return in a little while with any news he might pick up, and that he would do his best to catch Buckhurst in the foolish trap which that gentleman had set for others.

Tiring of the poem, I turned my eyes toward the garden, where, in the sunshine, heaps of crisped leaves lay drifted along the base of the wall or scattered between the rows of herbs which were still ripely green. The apricots had lost their leaves, so had the grapevines and the fig-trees; but the peach-trees were in foliage; pansies and perpetual roses bloomed amid sere and seedy thickets of larkspurs, phlox, and dead delphinium.

On the wall a cat sat, sunning her sleek flanks. Something about the animal seemed familiar to me, and after a while I made up my mind that this was Ange Pitou, Jacqueline's pet, abandoned by her mistress and now a feline derelict. Speed must have been mistaken when he told me that Jacqueline had taken her cat; or possibly the home-haunting instinct had brought the creature back, abandoning her mistress to her fortunes.

If I had been in my own house I should have offered Ange Pitou hospitality; as it was, I walked out into the sunny garden and made courteous advances which were ignored. I watched the cat for a few moments, then sat down on the bench. The inertia which follows recovery from a shock, however light, left me with the lazy acquiescence of a convalescent, willing to let the world drift for an hour or two, contented to relax, apathetic, comfortable.

Seaward the gulls sailed like white feathers floating; the rocky ramparts of Groix rose clear-cut against a horizon where no haze curtained the sea; the breakers had receded from the coast on a heavy ebb-tide, and I saw them in frothy outline, noiselessly churning the shallows beyond the outer bar.

And then my reverie ended abruptly; a step on the gravel walk brought me to my feet.... There she stood, lovely in a fresh morning-gown deeply belted with turquoise-sh.e.l.ls, her ruddy hair glistening, coiled low on a neck of snow.

For the first time she showed embarra.s.sment in her greeting, scarcely touching my hand, speaking with a new constraint in a voice which grew colder as she hesitated.

"We were frightened; we are so glad that you were not badly hurt. I thought you might find it comfortable here--of course I could not know that you were not seriously injured."

"That is fortunate for me," I said, pleasantly, "for I am afraid you would not have offered this shelter if you had known how little injured I really was."

"Yes, I should have offered it--had I reason to believe you would have accepted. I have felt that perhaps you might think what I have done was unwarranted."

"I think you did the most graciously unselfish thing a woman could do," I said, quickly. "You offered your best; and the man who took it cannot--dare not--express his grat.i.tude."

The emotion in my voice warned me to cease; the faintest color tinted her cheeks, and she looked at me with beautiful, grave eyes that slowly grew inscrutable, leaving me standing diffident and silent before her.

The breeze shifted, bringing with it the hollow sea-thunder. She turned her head and glanced out across the ocean, hands behind her, fingers linked.

"I have come here into your garden uninvited," I said.

"Shall we sit here--a moment?" she suggested, without turning.

Presently she seated herself in one corner of the bench; her gaze wandered over the partly blighted garden, then once more centred on the seaward skyline.

The color of her hands, her neck, fascinated me. That flesh texture of snow and roses, firmly and delicately modelled, which sometimes is seen with red hair, I had seen once before in a picture by a Spanish master, but never, until now, in real life.

And she was life incarnate in her wholesome beauty--a beauty of which I had perceived only the sad shadow at La Trappe--a sweet, healthy, exquisite woman, moulded, fashioned, colored by a greater Master than the Spanish painter dreaming of perfection centuries ago.

In the sun a fragrance grew--the subtle incense from her gown--perhaps from her hair.

"Autumn is already gone; we are close to winter," she said, under her breath. "See, there is nothing left--scarcely a blossom--a rose or two; but the first frost will scatter the petals. Look at the pinks; look at the dead leaves. Ah, tristesse, tristesse! The life of summer is too short; the life of flowers is too short; so are our lives, Monsieur Scarlett. Do you believe it?"

"Yes--now."

She was very still for a while, her head bent toward the sea. Then, without turning: "Have you not always believed it?"