“Some will swear one way; some will swear another,” he said. “The only thing it is safe to swear is that Don Arturo ought not to have walked so far alone after the dark!”
“No,” Rennie returned dryly. “That is evident.”
“Evident? Perhaps. He is in politics.”
“So? You think it was political?”
“Who can say? Somewhere there was a whispering—” Onorati stopped, and shook his head.
“Yes? What was the whispering?”
“It could not be true, I am sure; but there was some foolish whispering that Don Arturo had talked a little recklessly of some gentlemen; but I heard nothing that would permit me to guess who the gentlemen are.”
“What had he said of them?”
“Nobody knows.”
“To whom did he talk?”
Onorati rubbed his right cheek and then his left cheek. “Ah, yes! I remember hearing that it might have been to some foreign ladies at the convent.” By the “convent” he meant the hotel that had been a monastery, and Eugene Rennie, on his way there, stopped halfway down a flight of stone steps, and made a sound as of a dolorous kind of laughter. Then he questioned himself upon this very sound. “Why the devil will a man do that?” he asked himself. “How is it that one is able to see something grotesquely humorous even in a tragedy? In this one, probably because the character of the heroine makes it a tragi-comedy — with the emphasis on the first half of the word, I’m afraid. Avanti, then, for my own miserable part in it!”
The concierge informed him that Miss Ambler was in the garden, and Rennie went there at once to find her. Miss Orbison had just brought her brother out to his chair. He was standing, leaning upon the back of it, and beside him was the American girl. Miss Orbison had paused with an unfolded rug hanging from her hands; and all three of them wore the pained and incredulous look of people who have just heard startling news. This, in fact, was their condition, for the Princess Liana stood facing them.
Rennie halted where he was.
XIX
SHE WAS NATURALLY a pale woman, of a uniform whiteness of complexion that Rennie, who was an old friend of hers, had never seen varied; but he saw a variation now. Her whole face showed colour; it was flushed to a tint between rose and rust; and she held this emotional face high, too, with her chin lifted and her slim neck straight upon her slim straight body. She was speaking to Claire in a loud voice.
“My son send me,” the princess said. “I would not have come myself. They wish’ to give him an opiate for his suffering; but he say to me he will not take it if I will not promise to come to speak to you immediately. So I speak to you his message. He wish’ me to tell you that what has happen’ to him is from politics. He say you mus’ not think there was any other cause. He say you might be afraid there was some other reason; he say you mus’ not belief so. That is what he send me to tell you and I have told you, Miss Ambler; so now I will go back to him.”
“Oh — please!” Claire cried. “Will you let me go with you? Would he let me see him?”
“No!” the princess answered sharply. “You could not see him. What do you think? A man all beaten and crush’ wish’ to be coquetted with? I would not let you see him, Miss Ambler. You have made him unhappy enough and you have done him harm enough; I hope from the deeps of my heart that he will never in his life see you again!”
She turned quickly, and as she walked toward the doorway of the hotel, she came near Rennie. He stepped forward, and she gave him her hand.
“We are not going to let him die,” she said. “They have already promise’ me that.”
“I heard you say Arturo was beaten—”
“He was. When they finish’, they threw him down from the Salto. Everyone know’ who is responsible. But there will be no court. Arturo has some friends who know very well what to do!”
Then, with a sombre flash of her dark eyes to his troubled blue ones, she went on; and he joined the group at the invalid’s chair.
Claire was weeping. “You know it’s true!” she said accusingly to Orbison. “Anybody with any intelligence at all knows he wouldn’t have sent that message to me if he’d believed it himself! She didn’t believe it! She made it plain enough, didn’t she? She meant that her son sent me that message because he wanted me not to be so wretched as I would be if I thought I’d been the cause, and to make me understand that my name wouldn’t be involved. Didn’t she mean just that? She made it plain enough how she hates me, didn’t she? Yes! And you’re making something else pretty plain, Mr. Orbison!”
“I?” Oribson leaned more heavily upon the chair. “What am I making plain?”
Claire came close to him, facing him; she disregarded the others. “You know!” she said. “You’ve thought from the first I was getting him into trouble. You said so, and you as much as said I was a little fool. You did!”
“No — I”
“You did!” she said passionately. “You thought it! You’ve thought all along that I was nothing but a little fool and now you think it’s ‘proved! That’s what you’re making plain to me, Mr. Orbison, just as she made it plain how she hates me! Do you think I don’t see it?”
Orbison answered her sharply. “There’s a rather badly smashed young man down yonder in that hospital on the road to the sea,” he said. “It seems to me you might be more concerned with him than with other people’s opinion of you.”
Claire stepped back from him so quickly and awkwardly that it was almost as if she staggered, while her right arm and shoulder oddly made a semblance of the gesture of one who strives to shield his head from harm. And with that she began to weep aloud. “Oh!” she said. “I see! You hate me for — for not wanting you to think I’m just a little fool! Well — all right!” She began to walk away; but she did not go all the distance to the hotel doorway. She stopped, came back toward Orbison; and, in a broken voice, pathetically sweet, like that of a quietly sobbing child, “I don’t care!” she said. “You — you did like one thing about me. I never meant to tell you, but you did like one thing I did. I did it for you. You said — you said it gave you the — the loveliest moment in the — in the greatest hour of beauty you’d ever known. It was — it was I that sang at the Greek theatre for you. And anyway, you did say — you did say you liked that!”
Then, her slender shoulders heaving with the sobs that came faster and more convulsively as she went, she ran to the doorway and disappeared within that portal of the ancient house of refuge from the world.
Miss Orbison helped her brother to let himself down into his chair, where he reclined, sighing, with a hand over his eyes; but immediately she made a sign to Eugene Rennie, and walked to a little distance.
“I thought what you promised me might not be necessary,” she said hurriedly, as the American joined her. “I thought the poor foolish little thing had done it herself and saved us the trouble, when Charles spoke to her like that. He did make it pretty plain that he saw how absurdly self-centred she was, I must say! I thought then there might be no need for you to speak to her; but since she told him she was the person who sang at the Greek theatre, I’m afraid you must do it. He’s talked of it again and again; nothing in his life ever made such an impression on him as that voice, and now he knows it was hers — well, I’m afraid you must go ahead, Mr. Rennie. You’ll try to make her understand?”
“Yes,” he said dejectedly. “I suppose so.”
He waited an hour; then he went to the door of the cell used as a salon by Mrs. Ambler and her daughter, and knocked.
Claire was there alone.
“My poor dear child,” he said as he came in. “Do you think you could stand a lecture on invalids and what’s good for them — from a fellow countryman?”
She looked at him gently. “My mother’s been wanting us to go away,” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
XX
THE LITTLE SALON was between the two bedrooms, and both mother and daughter slept with their doors open, because of a ne
rvousness Mrs. Ambler felt about her heart. This was an organ without defect; but she was ill-persuaded of its soundness, and customarily spoke of various indigestions she had suffered as “heart attacks.” She was apprehensive of such an attack coming upon her in the night, and wished to be able, even with a voice stricken possibly almost to a whisper, to summon her daughter.
Thus, that last night of theirs in Raona, Mrs. Ambler not only could have spoken to Claire in little more than a whisper, but she could also hear a sound as small as that from her daughter’s room; and, waking suddenly, toward morning she did hear such a sound. She listened for a little while; then she spoke. “Claire, are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
“It sounds like it.”
“Well, I’m not,” the daughter insisted.
“I shouldn’t think you would,” Mrs. Ambler said. “I should think you’d be glad to leave a place where they do such awful things as those ruffians did to poor young Mr. Liana. And you needn’t cry over him, either. He’s perfectly certain to get well.”
“I told you I wasn’t crying.”
“I think you’re very foolish. You know you adore Paris.”
“I’m not crying!”
“Very well,” Mrs. Ambler said. “How long have you been awake like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. For heaven’s sake, stop that crying and try to get some sleep!”
Claire’s voice became petulant. “Please let me alone, Mother!”
Mrs. Ambler sighed and let her alone. No one else could have known in the morning how desolately her daughter had wept, most of the night. Above all, no one would have guessed such a thing of Claire at noon when Miss Orbison came for her and took her to the invalid’s cell to say good-bye to him.
He sat by the open window listening absently to the talk of his friend Rennie; the air out over the garden beyond them was bright with the strong spring sunshine; but nothing anywhere was brighter than the eyes of the American girl as she came in and gave them greeting. She was charming, in her lively Parisian travelling dress of blue silk, as knowingly scant as any other of her dresses; her slim and rakish black slippers glittered below the fine long shapes of silk stockings that left some doubt of their being stockings at all; her silken blue helmet disclosed just two small curved glints of her fair hair before her hidden ears; and at her waist she wore a cluster of diminutive fresh pink roses.
She spoke first to Rennie: “So sweet of you to send me these!” She touched her bouquet as she sat down between the two men. “The nicest possible bits of Raona one could take away! I’ll keep them, Mr. Rennie; and when you come to New York, some day, if you want a reminder of your lovely garden here, I’ll show them to you.”
“Dear me!” Orbison said. “That’s another advantage owning a villa gives a chap over one who merely sojourns at a hotel — a villa can have a garden. There isn’t a florist in Raona, unfortunately.”
“Mr. Orbison!” Claire laughed. “I’ll remember you without your sending me a going-away corsage!.”
“I hope so.”
“You know darn well I will!” she said gayly. “I’ve certainly been brazen enough in showing you the devastating impression you made on me from the first. I’ve really pursued you in the most unmaidenly way, and I’m afraid I’d keep right on doing it if we were going to stay any longer. Fortunately for you, my mother’s been simply dying for weeks to get back to Paris, and yesterday evening she reached such a climax of rebellion she just broke my spirit and I gave in. Lucky for you, I did!”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s very lucky for me, Miss Ambler.”
“What? Not even after the scene I made yesterday afternoon because you scolded me for something I darn well deserved to be scolded for? You don’t think you’re lucky, even after that?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Not even after — anything!”
For an instant, as he said this, she looked startled; then she laughed. “Well, then I’m the lucky one to be going, Mr. Orbison.”
“Why?”
“Well, you see,” she answered merrily, in the manner of a little belle who coquettes with her grandfather, “if I stayed much longer I might be getting too serious about you! Just think how far it’s gone with me already!”
“Has it?”
“‘Has it!’ Dear me! Didn’t I confess to you yesterday I sang the Pastorale that night at the Greek theatre absolutely for you? I did! Absolutely! If you don’t believe me, you can ask my mother. I told her when I came home that night; and this is the honest truth, Mr. Orbison. I said, ‘That nice Mr. Orbison was there and he hasn’t taken the trouble to meet us; I think maybe he would if he knew I sang the Pastorale just to make him!’” And with that her laughter tinkled out in childlike merriment. “But it didn’t make you. After all my trouble! If I hadn’t eavesdropped when you were talking to your sister I’d never even have known you liked it at all!”
“‘Liked it,”’ he repeated. “I’m glad you eavesdropped, because you know what I felt about it better than if I’d said the same things to you. It was the most beautiful thing that’s ever been in my life; and it remains that, Miss Ambler, as long as I have any life. I hope you’ll always remember my” — he faltered, then finished huskily— “my gratitude for it.” Then, though only during an instant, her eyes wavered from their careless-seeming gayety. There was a flickering in her expression as of some portended sharp change in it; but the instant passed. “Well, I’m glad,” she said; and she flashed to him the sidelong insouciant glance, merry and brilliant, of the confessed coquette admitting the worst of her coquetries and impudently claiming the worst of them to be pretty. “Of course Arturo Liana was with me there, and he felt a little gratitude, too, Mr. Orbison!” Orbison’s troubled expression altered into something like a wondering dismay; but he contrived to laugh. “Everybody was grateful. You mustn’t think I took so beautiful a thing as that all to myself just because you said it was!”
Claire seemed to be as light-headed as she was light-hearted. “Murder! What I said? My mother tells me, I don’t know how many times a day, that if I had to be held responsible for everything I say, I’d be guillotined! But don’t you think I didn’t mean a great big part of it, for you, Mr. Orbison; I did, honestly! Honestly, I thought of you while I was singing it and wondered if you liked it, and that’s true anyhow, absolutely!”
She jumped up briskly and put forth her hand to Miss Orbison. “Good-bye. If you ever do come to New York, remember, you’ve promised on your word of honour to let us know. Mr. Rennie—”
“I’m going to be at the station,” he said. “We’ll say good-bye there.”
“How lovely of you!” She turned to Orbison, and he took her extended hand in his cold long fingers. “Good-bye,” she said cheerfully. “You’ve been absolutely sweet to Mother and me I’m going to read Plato and everything. I hope you won’t forget us quite.”
“No,” he murmured. “I’ll never—”
“You’re lovely to say so,” she said. “We won’t forget you either. I never will, Mr. Orbison. Good-bye — and thank all of you for everything!”
Her cheeriness continued till the door had closed upon her and the continuously accompanying sound of half-laughter with which she expressed her high cordiality. But Rennie thought her voice had shaken a little when she said, “I never will, Mr. Orbison”; and Orbison himself, as he sank down upon his chair, had a disturbing impression that her hand had trembled within his loose and feeble clasp.
He sat staring out of the window, while his friend, watching him, thought the look upon his face the most deeply puzzled, and yet the most melancholy, he had ever seen upon it. Eugene Rennie’s own look, as Orbison did not observe, was one of growing doubt and sharp compunction — the look of a man who finds himself involved in what he fears may prove to be, in the end, a grave mistake.
Miss Orbison had no such
expression. She was serious, but not doubtful; and she began briskly to talk casual commonplaces with the anxious caller.
He stayed with them half an hour longer; then got to his feet, saying that it was time for him to be on his way to the station.
Orbison, who had not spoken since Claire left the room, turned his head and stared vaguely at his departing friend.
“We didn’t find out, Eugene,” he said.
“Didn’t find what out?”
“We didn’t find out what was in that pretty little head. And now we’ll never know; but I’m sure — I’m sure—”
“Yes?”
“In spite of all her lightness and her self-centred youthfulness—” Orbison paused again; then he said, “I’m sure it was something fine and sweet — in spite of anything!”
XXI
THE STATION AT Raona is by the water, and the road down from the great cliff to the sea level is one that in a photograph seems to be an interminable gray ribbon strewn back and forth upon the landscape. Rennie drove down in a donkey cart he owned, and he was late. When he arrived upon the platform the passengers were all aboard and the train was slowly beginning to be in motion. He looked up and down the length of it, disappointed.
“Mr. Rennie! Mr. Rennie!”
Claire had seen him, and she called loudly from the open window of a wagon-lit compartment.
“Mr. Rennie! Here, Mr. Rennie!”
He looked again, then catching a glimpse of a waving hand, saw framed in the open window the face he sought. Upon it were the glistening streaks of heavy tears; but her eyes were wide and staring with an anxiety more poignant than her grief. The train was moving faster.
“Mr. Rennie!” she screamed. “Mr. Rennie !”
He ran toward her, and for a few seconds maintained a pace as rapid as the train’s. She leaned from the window and seized his uplifted hand.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 429