“In the meantime,” I said sharply, as he paused for breath, “there is a keen-faced young man who took a room in the inn this morning and who has come to spy upon you, I believe.”
“What is it you say?”
He came to a sudden stop.
I had not meant to deliver my information quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now, and I repeated the statement, giving him a terse account of my two encounters with the rattish youth, and adding:
“He seemed to be certain that ‘Oliver Saffren’ is an assumed name, and he made a threatening reference to the laws of France.”
The effect upon Keredec was a very distinct pallor. He faced me silently until I had finished, then in a voice grown suddenly husky, asked:
“Do you think he came back to the inn? Is he here now?”
“I do not know.”
“We must learn; I must know that, at once.” And he went to the door.
“Let me go instead,” I suggested.
“It can’t make little difference if he see me,” said the professor, swallowing with difficulty and displaying, as he turned to me, a look of such profound anxiety that I was as sorry for him now as I had been irritated a few minutes earlier by his galliard air-castles. “I do not know this man, nor does he know me, but I have fear” — his beard moved as though his chin were trembling— “I have fear that I know his employers. Still, it may be better if you go. Bring somebody here that we can ask.”
“Shall I find Amedee?”
“No, no, no! That babbler? Find Madame Brossard.”
I stepped out to the gallery, to discover Madame Brossard emerging from a door on the opposite side of the courtyard; Amedee, Glouglou, and a couple of carters deploying before her with some light trunks and bags, which they were carrying into the passage she had just quitted. I summoned her quietly; she came briskly up the steps and into the room, and I closed the door.
“Madame Brossard,” said the professor, “you have a new client to-day.”
“That monsieur who arrived this morning,” I suggested.
“He was an American,” said the hostess, knitting her dark brows— “but I do not think that he was exactly a monsieur.”
“Bravo!” I murmured. “That sketches a likeness. It is this ‘Percy’ without a doubt.”
“That is it,” she returned. “Monsieur Poissy is the name he gave.”
“Is he at the inn now?”
“No, monsieur, but two friends for whom he engaged apartments have just arrived.”
“Who are they?” asked Keredec quickly.
“It is a lady and a monsieur from Paris. But not married: they have taken separate apartments and she has a domestic with her, a negress, Algerian.”
“What are their names?”
“It is not ten minutes that they are installed. They have not given me their names.”
“What is the lady’s appearance?”
“Monsieur the Professor,” replied the hostess demurely, “she is not beautiful.”
“But what is she?” demanded Keredec impatiently; and it could be seen that he was striving to control a rising agitation. “Is she blonde? Is she brunette? Is she young? Is she old? Is she French, English, Spanish—”
“I think,” said Madame Brossard, “I think one would call her Spanish, but she is very fat, not young, and with a great deal too much rouge—”
She stopped with an audible intake of breath, staring at my friend’s white face. “Eh! it is bad news?” she cried. “And when one has been so ill—”
Keredec checked her with an imperious gesture. “Monsieur Saffren and I leave at once,” he said. “I shall meet him on the road; he will not return to the inn. We go to — to Trouville. See that no one knows that we have gone until to-morrow, if possible; I shall leave fees for the servants with you. Go now, prepare your bill, and bring it to me at once. I shall write you where to send our trunks. Quick! And you, my friend” — he turned to me as Madame Brossard, obviously distressed and frightened, but none the less intelligent for that, skurried away to do his bidding— “my friend, will you help us? For we need it!”
“Anything in the world!”
“Go to Pere Baudry’s; have him put the least tired of his three horses to his lightest cart and wait in the road beyond the cottage. Stand in the road yourself while that is being done. Oliver will come that way; detain him. I will join you there; I have only to see to my papers — at the most, twenty minutes. Go quickly, my friend!”
I strode to the door and out to the gallery. I was half-way down the steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren was already in the courtyard, coming toward me from the archway with a light and buoyant step.
He looked up, waving his hat to me, his face lighted with a happiness most remarkable, and brighter, even, than the strong, midsummer sunshine flaming over him. Dressed in white as he was, and with the air of victory he wore, he might have been, at that moment, a figure from some marble triumph; youthful, conquering — crowned with the laurel.
I had time only to glance at him, to “take” him, as it were, between two shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard flooded with sunshine, the figure of Madame Brossard emerging from her little office, Amedee coming from the kitchen bearing a white-covered tray, and, entering from the road, upon the trail of Saffren but still in the shadow of the archway, the discordant fineries and hatchet-face of the ex-pedestrian and tourist, my antagonist of the forest.
I had opened my mouth to call a warning.
“Hurry” was the word I would have said, but it stopped at “hur — .” The second syllable was never uttered.
There came a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a captured hen, and out of the passage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fantastically dressed in green and gold.
Her coarse blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from which her gown hung precariously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double-chinned, coarse, greasy, smeared with blue pencillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge.
At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly:
“Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari — c’est moi! C’est ta femme, mon coeur!”
She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical ferocity that was a very paroxysm of triumph.
“Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!” she cried.
Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, he flung her off with a violence surpassing her own, and with loathing unspeakable. She screamed that he was killing her, calling him “husband,” and tried to fasten herself upon him again. But he leaped backward beyond the reach of her clutching hands, and, turning, plunged to the steps and staggered up them, the woman following.
From above me leaned the stricken face of Keredec; he caught Saffren under the arm and half lifted him to the gallery, while she strove to hold him by the knees.
“O Christ!” gasped Saffren. “Is THIS the woman?”
The giant swung him across the gallery and into the open door with one great sweep of the arm, strode in after him, and closed and bolted the door. The woman fell in a heap at the foot of the steps, uttered a cracked simulation of the cry of a broken heart.
“Name of a name of God!” she wailed. “After all these years! And my husband strikes me!”
Then it was that what had been in my mind as a monstrous suspicion became a certainty. For I recognised the woman; she was Mariana — la bella Mariana la Mursiana.
If I had ever known Larrabee Harman, if, instead of the two strange glimpses I had caught of him, I had been familiar with his gesture, walk, intonation — even, perhaps, if I had ever heard his voice — the truth might have come to me long ago.
Larrabee Harman!
“Oliver Saffren” was Larrabee Harman.
CHAPTER XVIII
I DO NOT like to read those poets who write of pain as if they loved it; the study of suffering is for the cold analy
st, for the vivisectionist, for those who may transfuse their knowledge of it to the ultimate good of mankind. And although I am so heavily endowed with curiosity concerning the people I find about me, my gift (or curse, whichever it be) knows pause at the gates of the house of calamity. So, if it were possible, I would not speak of the agony of which I was a witness that night in the apartment of my friends at Madame Brossard’s. I went with reluctance, but there was no choice. Keredec had sent for me.
... When I was about fifteen, a boy cousin of mine, several years younger, terribly injured himself on the Fourth of July; and I sat all night in the room with him, helping his mother. Somehow he had learned that there was no hope of saving his sight; he was an imaginative child and realised the whole meaning of the catastrophe; the eternal darkness.... And he understood that the thing had been done, that there was no going back of it. This very certainty increased the intensity of his rebellion a thousandfold. “I WILL have my eyes!” he screamed. “I WILL! I WILL!”
Keredec had told his tragic ward too little. The latter had understood but vaguely the nature of the catastrophe which overhung his return to France, and now that it was indeed concrete and definite, the guardian was forced into fuller disclosures, every word making the anguish of the listener more intolerable. It was the horizonless despair of a child; and that profound protest I had so often seen smouldering in his eyes culminated, at its crisis, in a wild flame of revolt. The shame of the revelation passed over him; there was nothing of the disastrous drunkard, sober, learning what he had done. To him, it seemed that he was being forced to suffer for the sins of another man.
“Do you think that you can make me believe I did this?” he cried. “That I made life unbearable for HER, drove HER from me, and took this hideous, painted old woman in HER place? It’s a lie. You can’t make me believe such a monstrous lie as that! You CAN’T! You CAN’T!”
He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering from head to foot.
“My poor boy, it is the truth,” said Keredec, kneeling beside him and putting a great arm across his shoulders. “It is what a thousand men are doing this night. Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable — or more simple. Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and nothing to do. You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life. You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are right. When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were blind — you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down inside you, with its hands over its face. If it could have once stood straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away from her and from everything you had put in your life. But, in your suffering you must rejoice: the triumph is that your mind hates that old life as greatly as your soul hates it. You are as good as if you had never been the wild fellow — yes, the wicked fellow — that you were. For a man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never sinned. But though his emancipation can be so perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal, and each has a consequence that is never ending. And so, now, though you are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must abide it. Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing! — that suffering — compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!”
The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a broken-hearted child.
I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I lay upon my bed until dawn. Then I went for a long, hard walk, breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard’s in a peasant’s cart which was going that way.
I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever — as I told him.
“I have some news for you,” he said after the hearty greeting— “an announcement, in fact.”
“Wait!” I glanced at the interested attitude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led the way into the pavilion. “You may as well not tell it in the hearing of that young man,” I said, when the door was closed. “He is eccentric.”
“So I gathered,” returned Ward, smiling, “from his attire. But it really wouldn’t matter who heard it. Elizabeth’s going to marry Cresson Ingle.”
“That is the news — the announcement — you spoke of?”
“Yes, that is it.”
To save my life I could not have told at that moment what else I had expected, or feared, that he might say, but certainly I took a deep breath of relief. “I am very glad,” I said. “It should be a happy alliance.”
“On the whole, I think it will be,” he returned thoughtfully. “Ingle’s done his share of hard living, and I once had a notion” — he glanced smiling at me— “well, I dare say you know my notion. But it is a good match for Elizabeth and not without advantages on many counts. You see, it’s time I married, myself; she feels that very strongly and I think her decision to accept Ingle is partly due to her wish to make all clear for a new mistress of my household, — though that’s putting it in a rather grandiloquent way.” He laughed. “And as you probably guess, I have an idea that some such arrangement might be somewhere on the wings of the wind on its way to me, before long.”
He laughed again, but I did not, and noting my silence he turned upon me a more scrutinising look than he had yet given me, and said:
“My dear fellow, is something the matter? You look quite haggard. You haven’t been ill?”
“No, I’ve had a bad night. That’s all.”
“Oh, I heard something of a riotous scene taking place over here,” he said. “One of the gardeners was talking about it to Elizabeth. Your bad night wouldn’t be connected with that, would it? You haven’t been playing Samaritan?”
“What was it you heard?” I asked quickly.
“I didn’t pay much attention. He said that there was great excitement at Madame Brossard’s, because a strange woman had turned up and claimed an insane young man at the inn for her husband, and that they had a fight of some sort—”
“Damnation!” I started from my chair. “Did Mrs. Harman hear this story?”
“Not last night, I’m certain. Elizabeth said the gardener told her as she came down to the chateau gates to meet me when I arrived — it was late, and Louise had already gone to her room. In fact, I have not seen her yet. But what difference could it possibly make whether she heard it or not? She doesn’t know these people, surely?”
“She knows the man.”
“This insane—”
“He is not insane,” I interrupted. “He has lost the memory of his earlier life — lost it through an accident. You and I saw the accident.”
“That’s impossible,” said George, frowning. “I never saw but one accident that you—”
“That was the one: the man is Larrabee Harman.”
George had struck a match to light a cigar; but the operation remained incomplete: he dropped the match upon the floor and set his foot upon it. “Well, tell me about it,” he said.
“You haven’t heard anything about him since the accident?”
“Only that he did eventually recover and was taken away from the hospital. I heard that his mind was impaired. Does Louise—” he began; stopped, and cleared his throat. “Has Mrs. Harman heard that he is here?”
“Yes; she has seen him.”
“Do you mean the scoundrel has been bothering her? Elizabeth didn’t tell me of this—”
“Your sister doesn’t know,” I said, lifting my hand to check him. “I think you ought to understand the whole case — if you’ll let me tell you what I know about it.”
“Go ahead,” he bade me. “I’ll try to listen patiently, though the very thought of the fellow has always set my teeth on edge.”
“He’s not at all what you think,” I said. “There’s an enormous difference, almost impossible to explain to you, but something you’d understand at once if you saw him. It’s such a difference, in fact, that when I found that he was Larrabee Harman the revelation was inexpressibly shocking and distressing to me. He came here under another name; I had no suspicion that he was any one I’d ever heard of, much less that I’d actually seen him twice, two years ago, and I’ve grown to — well, in truth, to be fond of him.”
“What is the change?” asked Ward, and his voice showed that he was greatly disquieted. “What is he like?”
“As well as I can tell you, he’s like an odd but very engaging boy, with something pathetic about him; quite splendidly handsome—”
“Oh, he had good looks to spare when I first knew him,” George said bitterly. “I dare say he’s got them back if he’s taken care of himself, or been taken care OF, rather! But go on; I won’t interrupt you again. Why did he come here? Hoping to see—”
“No. When he came here he did not know of her existence except in the vaguest way. But to go back to that, I’d better tell you first that the woman we saw with him, one day on the boulevard, and who was in the accident with him—”
“La Mursiana, the dancer; I know.”
“She had got him to go through a marriage with her—”
“WHAT?” Ward’s eyes flashed as he shouted the word.
“It seems inexplicable; but as I understand it, he was never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half-stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him. There’s no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she’s taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman. She means to hang on.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 107