The Way of Ambition Part 64

"It is good to be out of the city!" Claude said, as they came to the rubble of the unfinished track on the farther side, where Arabs worked under the supervision of a French overseer. "I did not know you were a walker."

"I don't think you knew very much about me."

"That's quite true. Where do you wish to go?"

"Anywhere--to the left. Let us sit on a rock under the trees and look at the view."

"Can you get up here?"

"If you give me your hand."

They walked a little way in the shadow of the fir-trees, leaving the hospital on their right. The plantation was almost deserted. The soldiers were evidently retiring, for the clarions sounded more distant now. Here and there the figure of an Arab was visible sauntering slowly among the trees, with the smoke of his cigarette dispersing above him.

Some young Jews went by, holding hands, laughing and talking. They sent glances of hard inquiry at Mrs. Shiffney's broad figure from their too intelligent eyes. Soon their thin forms vanished among the gray trunks.

"Shall we sit there?" asked Claude.

"Yes; just in the sun."

"Oh, but you wanted--"

"No, let us sit in the sun."

She opened her green parasol.

Almost at the edge of the cliff, which descended steeply to the high road to Philippeville, was a flat ledge of rock warmed by the sunbeams.

"It's perfect here," she said, sitting down. "And what a view!"

They were exactly opposite to the terrific Grand Rocher, a gray and pale yellow precipice, with the cascades and the Grand Moulin at its foot, the last houses of the city perched upon its summit in the sky.

"And to think that women have been flung from there!" said Claude, clasping his hands round his knees.

"Unfaithful women! Rather hard on them!" she answered. "If London husbands--" She stopped. "No don't let us think of London. And yet I suppose you loved it in that little house of yours?"

"I think I did."

"Don't you ever regret that little house?"

She saw his eyebrows move downward.

"Oh, I--I'm very fond of Djenan-el-Maqui."

"And no wonder! Only you seemed so much a part of your London home. You seemed to belong to it. There was an odd little sense of mystery."

"Was there?"

"And I felt it was necessary to you, to your talent. How could I feel that without ever hearing your music? I did."

"Don't I seem to belong to Djenan-el-Maqui?"

"I've never seen you there," she answered, with a deliberate evasiveness.

Claude looked at her for a moment, then looked away over the immense view. It seemed to him that this woman was beginning to understand him too well, perhaps.

"Of course," she added. "There is a sense of mystery in an Arab house.

But it's such a different kind. And I think we each have our own particular brand of mystery. Now yours was a very special brand, quite unlike anyone else's."

"I certainly got to love my little house."

"Because it was doing things for you."

Claude looked at her again, and thought how intelligent her eyes were.

As he looked at them they seemed to grow more intelligent--as if in answer to his gaze.

"Right things," she added, with an emphasis on the penultimate word.

"But--forgive me--how can you know?"

"I do know. I'm an ignoramus with marvellous instincts in certain directions. That's why a lot of people--silly people, you think, I daresay--follow my lead."

"Well, but--"

"Go on!"

"I think I'd better not."

"You can say anything to me. I'm never in a hurry to take offense."

"I was going to say that you seemed rather to wish once to draw me out of my sh.e.l.l into a very different kind of life," said Claude slowly, hesitatingly, and slightly reddening.

"I acted quite against my artistic instinct when I did that."

"Why?"

Mrs. Shiffney looked at him in silence for a moment. She was wishing to blush. But that was an effort beyond her powers.

Very far away behind them a clarion sounded.

"The soldiers must be going back to barracks, I suppose," she said.

Claude was feeling treacherous, absurdly. The thought of Charmian had come to him, and with it the disagreeable, almost hateful sensation.

"Yes, I suppose they are," he said coldly.

He did not mean to speak coldly; but directly he had said the words he knew that his voice had become frigid.

"What a stupid a.s.s I am!" was his comment on himself. But how to be different?

Mrs. Shiffney was looking very grave. Her drawn-down brows, her powerful lips suggested to him at this moment suffering. In London he had thought of her as a typical pleasure-seeking woman, greedy of sensation, reckless in the chase after it. And he had disliked, almost feared her, despite her careless charm. Now he felt differently about her. He had come to that point in a man's acquaintance with a woman when he says to himself, "I never understood her properly." He seemed to himself a brute. Yet what had he done?