The Truants Part 48

"But you succeeded!" she cried, clinging to the fact that they were both here in France, with the murmur of the Mediterranean in their ears. "You came back."

"Yes, I came back. One morning I marched my men through the gate of Ouargla--and what were you doing upon that day?"

Talking, perhaps, with Lionel Callon, in one of those unfrequented public places with which London abounds! Millie could not tell. She sat there and compared Lionel Callon with the man who was before her.

Memories of the kind of talk she was wont to hold with Lionel Callon recurred to her, filling her with shame. She was glad to think that when Tony led his broken, weary force through the gate of Ouargla Lionel Callon had not been with her--had indeed been far away in Chili. She suddenly placed her hands before her face and burst into tears.

"Oh, Tony," she whispered, in an abas.e.m.e.nt of humiliation. "Oh, Tony."

"By that homeward march," he went on, "I gained my commission. That was what I aimed at all the while, and I had earned it at the last.

Look!"

He took from his pocket the letter which his colonel had handed to him at Ain-Sefra. He had carefully treasured it all this while. He held it out to her and made her read.

"You see?" he said. "A commission won from the ranks in the hardest service known to soldiers, won without advantage of name, or friends, or money. Won just by myself. That is what I strove for. If I could win that I could come back to you with a great pride. I should be no longer the man who was no good. You yourself might even be proud of me. I used to dream of that--to dream of something else."

His voice softened a little, and a smile for a moment relaxed the severity of his face.

"Of what?" she asked.

"Out there among the sand hills, under the stars at night, I used to dream that we might perhaps get hold again of the little house in Deanery Street, where we were so happy together once. We might pretend almost that we had lived there all the time."

He spoke in a voice of great longing, and Millie was touched to the heart. She looked at Tony through her tears. There was a great longing astir within her at this moment. Was that little house in Deanery Street still a possibility? She did not presume to hope so much; but she wished that she could have hoped. She pressed the letter which she held against her breast; she would have loved to have held it to her lips, but that again she did not dare to do.

"At all events, you did succeed." she said; "I shall be glad to know that. I shall always be glad--whatever happens now."

"But I did not succeed," Tony replied. "I earned the commission, yes!--I never held it. That letter was given to me one Monday by my colonel at Ain-Sefra. You mentioned a song a minute ago, do you remember?... I had lost the a.s.sociations of that song. I laughed when you mentioned it, and you were surprised. I laughed because when I received that letter I took it away with me, and that song, with all that it had ever meant, came back to my mind. I lay beneath the palm trees, and I looked across the water past the islands, and I saw the lights of the yachts in Oban Bay. I was on the dark lawn again, high above the sea, the lighted windows of the house were behind me. I heard your voice. Oh, I had got you altogether back that day," he exclaimed, with a cry. "It was as though I held your hands and looked into your eyes. I went back towards the barracks to write to you, and as I went some one tapped me on the shoulder and brought me news of you to wake me out of my dreams."

Just for a moment Millie wondered who it was who had brought the news; but the next words which Tony spoke drove the question from her mind.

"A few more weeks and I should have held that commission. I might have left the Legion, leaving behind me many friends and an honoured name.

As it was, I had to desert--I deserted that night."

He spoke quite simply; but, nevertheless, the words fell with a shock upon Millie. She uttered a low cry: "Oh, Tony!" she said.

"Yes," he said, with a nod of the head, "I incurred that disgrace. I shall be ashamed of it all my life. Had I been caught, it might have meant an ign.o.ble death; in any case, it would have meant years of prison--and I should have deserved those years of prison."

Millie shut her eyes in horror. Everything else that he had told her, every other incident--his sufferings, his perils--all seemed of little account beside this crowning risk, this crowning act of sacrifice. It was not merely that he had risked a shameful death or a shameful imprisonment. Millie was well aware that his whole nature and character must be in revolt against the act itself. Desertion! It implied disloyalty, untruth, deceit, cowardice--just those qualities, indeed, which she knew Tony most to hate, which perhaps she had rather despised him for hating. No man would have been more severe in the punishment of a deserter than Tony himself. Yet he had deserted, and upon her account. And he sat there telling her of it quietly, as though it were the most insignificant action in the world. He might have escaped the consequences--he would certainly not have escaped the shame.

But Millie's cup of remorse was not yet full.

"Yet I cannot see that I could do anything else. To-night proves to me that I was right, I think. I have come very quickly, yet I am only just in time." There was a long stain of wine upon the table-cloth beneath his eyes. There Callon had upset his gla.s.s upon Tony's entrance.

"Yes, it was time that I returned," he continued. "One way or another a burden of disgrace had to be borne--if I stayed, just as certainly as if I came away; I saw that quite clearly. So I came away." He forbore to say that now the disgrace fell only upon his shoulders, that she was saved from it. But Millie understood, and in her heart she thanked him for his forbearance. "But it was hard on me, I think,"

he said. "You see, even now I am on French soil, and subject to French laws."

And Millie, upon that, started up in alarm.

"What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly.

"There has been a disturbance here to-night, has there not? Suppose that the manager of this restaurant has sent for a gendarme!"

With a swift movement Millie gathered up the medals and held them close in her clenched hands.

"Oh, it does not need those to convict me; my name would be enough.

Let my name appear and there's a deserter from the Foreign Legion laid by the heels in France. All the time we have been talking here I have sat expecting that door to open behind me."

Millie caught up a lace wrap which lay upon a sofa. She had the look of a hunted creature. She spoke quickly and feverishly, in a whisper.

"Oh, why did not you say this at once? Let us go!"

Tony sat stubbornly in his chair.

"No," said he, with his eyes fixed upon her. "I have given you an account of how I have spent the years during which we have been apart.

Can you do the same?"

He waited for her answer in suspense. To this question all his words had been steadily leading; for this reason he had dwelt upon his own career. Would she, stung by her remorse, lay before him truthfully and without reserve the story of her years? If she did, why, that dim light which shone amidst the darkness of his perplexities might perhaps shine a little brighter. He uttered his question. Millie bowed her head, and answered--

"I will."

"Sit down, then, and tell me now."

"Oh no," she exclaimed; "not here! It is not safe. As we go back to Eze I will tell you everything."

A look of relief came upon Tony's face. He rose and touched the bell.

A waiter appeared.

"I will pay the bill," he said.

The waiter brought the bill and Tony discharged it.

"The gentleman--M. Callon," the waiter said. "A doctor has been. He has a concussion. It will be a little time before he is able to be moved."

"Indeed?" said Tony, with indifference. He walked with his wife out of the little gaily-lighted room into the big, silent restaurant. A single light faintly illuminated it. They crossed it to the door, and went up the winding drive on to the road. The night was dry and clear and warm. There was no moon. They walked in the pure twilight of the stars round the gorge towards Eze.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

MILLIE'S STORY

They walked for a while in silence, side by side, yet not so close but that there was an interval between them. Millie every now and then glanced at Tony's face, but she saw only his profile, and with only the glimmer of the starlight to serve her for a reading-lamp, she could guess nothing of his expression. But he walked like a man utterly dispirited and tired. The hopes, so stoutly cherished during the last few years, had all crumbled away to-night. Perpetually his thoughts recurred to that question, which now never could be answered--if he had gone into the house in Berkeley Square on that distant evening when he had been contented to pace for a little while beneath the windows, would he have averted the trouble which had reached its crisis to-night at the _Reserve?_ He thought not--he was not sure; only he was certain that he should have gone in. He stopped and turned back, looking towards the _Reserve_. A semicircle of lights over the doorway was visible, and as he looked those lights were suddenly extinguished. He heard Millie's voice at his side.

"I will tell you now how the time has pa.s.sed with me." And he saw that she was looking steadfastly into his eyes. "The story will sound very trivial, very contemptible, after what you have told me. It fills me utterly with shame. But I should have told you it none the less had you not asked for it--I rather wish that you had not asked for it; for I think I must have told you of my own accord."

She spoke in a quick, troubled voice, but it did not waver; nor did her eyes once fall from his. The change in her was swift, no doubt.

But down there in the _Reserve_, where the lights were out, and the sea echoed through empty rooms, she had had stern and savage teachers.