The Truants Part 47

He glanced at the superscription and gave it back. "It is not for me,"

he said, and M. Giraud went away from the terrace. Tony turned back to his wife. His mind was full of a comparison between the ways in which he and she had each spent the years of absence. For him they had been years of endeavour, persisted in through failure and perplexity until success, but for her, was reached. And how had Millie spent them? He looked at her sternly, and she said again in a faltering voice--

"I am innocent, Tony."

And he replied--

"Could you have said as much to-morrow had I not come back to-night?"

Millie had no answer to that question--she attempted none; and it was even at that moment counted to her credit by her husband. She stood silent for a while, and only the murmur of the sea breaking upon the beach filled the room. A light wind breathed through the open window, cool and fragrant, and made the shaded candles flicker upon the table.

Millie had her one poor excuse to offer, and she pleaded it humbly.

"I thought that you had ceased to care what became of me," she said.

Tony looked sharply at her. She was sincere--surely she was sincere.

"You thought that?" he exclaimed; and he replaced her chair at the table. "Sit down here! Let me understand! You thought that I had ceased to care for you? When I ceased to write, I suppose?"

Millie shook her head.

"Before that?"

Tony dropped into the chair on which Callon had been sitting.

"Before that?" he exclaimed in perplexity. "When? Tell me!"

Millie sat over against him at the table.

"Do you remember the evening when you first told me that you had made up your mind to go away and make a home for both of us? It was on that evening. You gave your reason for going away. We had begun to quarrel--we were drifting apart."

"I remember," said Tony; "but we had not ceased to care then, neither you nor I. It was just because I feared that at some time we might cease to care that I was resolved to go away."

"Ah," said Millie; "but already the change had begun. Yes, yes! Things winch you thought you never could remember without a thrill you remembered already with indifference--you remembered them without being any longer moved or touched by the a.s.sociations which they once had had. I recollect the very words you used. I sat as still as could be while you spoke them; but I never forgot them, Tony. There was a particular instance which you mentioned--a song----" And suddenly Tony laughed; but he laughed harshly, and there was no look of amus.e.m.e.nt on his face. Millie stared at him in surprise, but he did not explain, and she went on with her argument.

"So when you ceased to write I was: still more convinced that you had reaped to care. When you remained away after your father had died I was yet more sure."

Tony leaned across the white table-cloth with its glittering silver, and fixed his eyes on her.

"I will tell you why I ceased to write. Every letter which you wrote to me when I was in New York was more contemptuous than the letter which had preceded it. I had failed, and you despised me for my failure. I had allowed myself to be tricked out of your money----" And upon that Millie interrupted him--

"Oh no!" she cried; "you must not say that I despised you for that.

No! That is not fair. I never thought of the money. I offered you what was left."

Tony had put himself in the wrong here. He recognised his mistake, he accepted Millie's correction.

"Yes, that is true," he said; "you offered me all that was left--but you offered it contemptuously; you had no shadow of belief that I would use it to advantage--you had no faith in me at all. In your eyes I was no good. Mind, I don't blame you. You were justified, no doubt.

I had set out to make a home for you, as many a man has done for his wife. Only where they had succeeded I had failed. If I thought anything at all----" he said, with an air of hesitation.

"Well?" asked Millie.

"I thought you might have expressed your contempt with a little less of unkindness, or perhaps have hidden it altogether. You see, I was not having an easy time in New York, and your letters made it very much harder."

"Oh, Tony," she said, in a low voice of self-reproach. She was sitting with her hands clenched in front of her upon the table-cloth, her forehead puckered, and in her eyes a look of great pain.

"Never mind that," he replied; and he resumed his story. "I saw then quite clearly that with each letter which you received from me, each new instalment of my record of failure--for each letter was just that, wasn't it?--your contempt grew. I was determined that if I could help it your contempt should not embitter all our two lives. So I ceased to write. For the same reason I stayed away, even after my father had died. Had I come back then I should have come back a failure, proved and self-confessed. And your scorn would have stayed with you. My business henceforth was to destroy it, to prove to you that after all I was some good--if not at money-making, at something else. I resolved that we should not live together again until I could come to you and say, 'You have no right to despise me. Here's the proof.'"

Millie was learning now, even as Tony had learnt a minute ago. All that he said to her was utterly surprising and strange. He had been thinking of her, then, all the time while he was away! Indifference was in no way the reason of his absence.

"Oh, why did you not write this to me?" she cried. "It need not have been a long letter, since you were unwilling to write. But just this you might have written. It would have been better, kinder"--and she paused upon the word, uttering it with hesitation and a shy deprecating smile, as though aware that she had no claim upon his kindness. "It would have been kinder than just to leave me here, not knowing where you were, and thinking what I did."

"It is true," said Tony, "I might have written. But would you have believed me if I had? No."

"Then you might have come to me," she urged. "Once--just for five minutes--to tell me what you meant to do."

"I might," Tony agreed; "in fact, I very nearly did. I was under the windows of the house in Berkeley Square one night." And Millie started.

"Yes, you were," she said slowly.

"You knew that?"

"Yes; I knew it the next day." And she added, "I wish now, I think, that you had come in that night."

"Suppose that I had," said Tony; "suppose that I had told you of my fine plan, you would have had no faith in it. You would merely have thought, 'Here's another folly to be added to the rest.' Your contempt would have been increased, that's all."

It was quite strange to Millie Stretton that there ever could have been a time when she had despised him. She saw him sitting now in front of her, quiet and stern; she remembered her own terror when he burst into the room, when he flung Callon headlong through the windows, when he turned at last towards her.

"We have been strangers to one another."

"Yes," he replied; "I did not know you. I should never have left you--now I understand that. I trusted you very blindly, but I did not know you."

Millie lowered her eyes from his face.

"Nor I you," she answered. "What did you do when you went away that night from Berkeley Square?"

"I enlisted in the Foreign Legion in Algeria."

Millie raised her head again with a start of surprise.

"Soldiering was my trade, you see. It was the one profession where I had just a little of that expert knowledge which is necessary nowadays if you are to make your living."

Something of his life in the Foreign Legion Tony now told her. He spoke deliberately, since a light was beginning dimly to shine through the darkness of his perplexities. Of a set purpose he described to her the arduous perils of active service and the monotony of the cantonments. He was resolved that she should understand in the spirit and in the letter the life which for her sake he had led. He related his expedition to the Figuig oasis, his march into the Sahara under Tavernay. He took from his pocket the medals which he had won, and laid them upon the tablecloth before her.

"Look at them," he said; "I earned them. These are mine. I earned them for you; and while I was earning them what were you doing?"

Millie listened and looked. Wonder grew upon her. It was for her that he had laboured and endured and succeeded! His story was a revelation to her. Never had she dreamed that a man would so strive for any woman. She had lived so long among the little things of the world--the little emotions, the little pa.s.sions, the little jealousies and rivalries, the little aims, the little methods of attaining them, that only with great difficulty could she realise a simpler and a wider life. She was overwhelmed now. Pride and humiliation fought within her--pride that Tony had so striven for her in silence and obscurity, humiliation because she had fallen so short of his example. It was her way to feel in superlatives at any crisis of her destiny, but surely she had a justification now.

"I never knew--I never thought! Oh, Tony!" she exclaimed, twisting her hands together as she sat before him.

"I became a sergeant," he said. "Then I brought back the remnants of the geographical expedition to Ouargla." He taxed his memory for the vivid details of that terrible retreat. He compelled her to realise something of the dumb, implacable hostility of the Sahara, to see, in the evening against the setting sun, the mounted figures of the Touaregs, and to understand that the day's march had not shaken them off. She seemed to be on the march herself, wondering whether she would live out the day, or, if she survived that, whether she would live out the night.