A dusty and dirty and perspiring man is at a disadvantage with himself. His misdemeanours assume exaggerated proportions, especially when he is confronted with a girl in a cool gown that is perfumed by blossoms pure and spotless and fragrant as the young breast that crushes them.
So when he had found old Pierre and had followed him to a bath-room, the water that washed the stains from brow and wrist seemed also to purify the stain that is popularly supposed to resist earthly ablutions. A clean body and a clean conscience is not a proverb, but there are, perhaps, worse maxims in the world.
When he dried his face and looked into a mirror, his sins had dwindled a bit; when Pierre dusted his clothes and polished his spurs and boots, life assumed a brighter aspect. Fatigue, too, came to dull that busybody — that tireless, gossiping gadabout — conscience. Fatigue and remorse are enemies; slumber and the white flag of sleep stand truce between them.
“Pierre,” he said; “get a dog-cart; I am going to drive to Morteyn. You will find me in the arbour on the lawn. Is the marquis visible?”
“No, Monsieur Jack, he is still locked up in the turret.”
“And the balloon?”
“Dame! Je n’en sais rien, monsieur.”
So Jack walked down-stairs and out through the porch to the lawn, where he saw Lorraine already seated in the arbour, placing the long-stemmed lilies in gilded bowls.
“It will be dark soon,” he said, stepping up beside her. “Thank you for being good to my horse. Is it more than a scratch?”
“No — it is nothing. The horse shall stand in our stable until to-morrow. Are you very tired? Sit beside me. Do you care to tell me anything of what you did?”
“Do you care to know?”
“Of course,” she said.
So he told her; not all, however — not of that ride and the chase and the shots from the saddle. But he spoke of the Emperor and the distant battle that had seemed like a scene in a painted landscape. He told her, too, of Georges Carrière.
“Why, I know him,” she said, brightening with pleasure; “he is charming — isn’t he?”
“Why, yes,” said Jack; but for all he tried his voice sounded coldly.
“Don’t you think so?” asked Lorraine, opening her blue eyes.
Again he tried to speak warmly of the friend he was really fond of, and again he felt that he had failed. Why? He would not ask himself — but he knew. This shamed him, and he began an elaborate eulogy on poor Georges, conscientious, self-effacing, but very, very unsatisfactory.
The maid beside him listened demurely. She also knew things that she had not known a week ago. That possibly is why, like a little bird stretching its new wings, she also tried her own resources, innocently, timidly. And the torment of Jack began.
“Monsieur Marche, do you think that Lieutenant Carrière may come to Morteyn?”
“He said he would; I — er — I hope he will. Don’t you?”
“I? Oh yes. When will he come?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, sulkily.
“Oh! I thought you were very fond of him and that, of course, you would know when—”
“Nobody knows; if he’s gone with the army into Germany it is impossible to say when the war will end.” Then he made a silly, boorish observation which was, “I hope for your sake he will come soon.”
Oh, but he was ashamed of it now! The groom in the stable yonder would have had better tact. Truly, it takes a man of gentle breeding to demonstrate what under-breeding really can be. If Lorraine was shocked she did not show it. A maid unloved, unloving, pardons nothing; a maid with a lover invests herself with all powers and prerogatives, and the greatest of these is the power to pardon. It is not only a power, it is a need, a desire, an imperative necessity to pardon much in him who loves much. This may be only because she also understands. Pardon and doubt repel each other. So Lorraine, having grown wise in a week, pardoned Jack mentally. Outwardly it was otherwise, and Jack became aware that the atmosphere was uncomfortably charged with lightning. It gleamed a moment in her eyes ere her lips opened.
“Take your dog-cart and go back to Morteyn,” said Lorraine, quietly.
“Let me stay; I am ashamed,” he said, turning red.
“No; I do not wish to see you again — for a long, long time — forever.”
Her head was bent and her fingers were busy among the lilies in the gilded bowl.
“Do you send me away?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you are more than rude.”
“I am ashamed; forgive me.”
“No.”
She glanced up at him from her drooping lashes. She had pardoned him long ago.
“No,” she repeated, “I cannot forgive.”
“Lorraine—”
“There is the dog-cart,” she whispered, almost breathlessly. So he said good-night and went away.
She stood on the dim lawn, her arms full of blossoms, listening to the sound of the wheels until they died away beyond the park gate.
She had turned whiter than the lilies at her breast. This was because she was still very young and not quite as wise as some maidens.
For the same reason she left her warm bed that night to creep through the garden and slip into the stable and lay her tear-stained cheeks on the neck of Jack’s horse.
CHAPTER XII
FROM THE FRONTIER
During the next three days, for the first time since he had known her, he did not go to see Lorraine. How he stood it — how he ever dragged through those miserable hours — he himself never could understand.
The wide sculptured eyes of Our Lady of Morteyn above the shrine seemed to soften when he went there to sit at her feet and stare at nothing. It was not tears, but dew, that gathered under the stone lids, for the night had grown suddenly hot, and everything lay moist in the starlight. Night changed to midnight, and midnight to dawn, and dawn to another day, cloudless, pitiless; and Jack awoke again, and his waking thought was of Lorraine.
All day long he sat with the old vicomte, reading to him when he wished, playing interminable games of chess, sick at heart with a longing that almost amounted to anger. He could not tell his aunt. As far as that went, the wise old lady had divined that their first trouble had come to them in all the appalling and exaggerated proportions that such troubles assume, but she smiled gently to herself, for she, too, had been young, and the ways of lovers had been her ways, and the paths of love she had trodden, and she had drained love’s cup at bitter springs.
That night she came to his bedside and kissed him, saying: “To-morrow you shall carry my love and my thanks to Lorraine for her care of the horse.”
“I can’t,” muttered Jack.
“Pooh!” said Madame de Morteyn, and closed the bedroom door; and Jack slept better that night.
It was ten o’clock the next morning before he appeared at breakfast, and it was plain, even to the thrush on the lawn outside, that he had bestowed an elaboration upon his toilet that suggested either a duel or a wedding.
Madame de Morteyn hid her face, for she could not repress the smile that tormented her sweet mouth. Even the vicomte said: “Oh! You’re not off for Paris, Jack, are you?”
After breakfast he wandered moodily out to the terrace, where his aunt found him half an hour later, mooning and contemplating his spotless gloves.
“Then you are not going to ride over to the Château de Nesville?” she asked, trying not to laugh.
“Oh!” he said, with affected surprise, “did you wish me to go to the Château?”
“Yes, Jack dear, if you are not too much occupied.” She could not repress the mischievous accent on the “too.” “Are you going to drive?”
“No; I shall walk — unless you are in a hurry.”
“No more than you are, dear,” she said, gravely.
He looked at her with sudden suspicion, but she was not smiling.
“Very well,” he said, gloomily.
About ele
ven o’clock he had sauntered half the distance down the forest road that leads to the Château de Nesville. His heart seemed to tug and tug and urge him forward; his legs refused obedience; he sulked. But there was the fresh smell of loam and moss and aromatic leaves, the music of the Lisse on the pebbles, the joyous chorus of feathered creatures from every thicket, and there were the antics of the giddy young rabbits that scuttled through the warrens, leaping, tumbling, sitting up, lop-eared and impudent, or diving head-first into their burrows.
Under the stems of a thorn thicket two cock-pheasants were having a difference, and were enthusiastically settling that difference in the approved method of game-cocks. He lingered to see which might win, but a misstep and a sudden crack of a dry twig startled them, and they withdrew like two stately but indignant old gentlemen who had been subjected to uncalled-for importunities.
Presently he felt cheerful enough to smoke, and he searched in every pocket for his pipe. Then he remembered that he had dropped it when he dropped his silver flask, there in the road where he had first been startled by the Uhlans.
This train of thought depressed him again, but he resolutely put it from his mind, lighted a cigarette, and moved on.
Just ahead, around the bend in the path, lay the grass-grown carrefour where he had first seen Lorraine. He thought of her as he remembered her then, flushed, indignant, blocking the path while the map-making spy sneered in her face and crowded past her, still sneering. He thought, too, of her scarlet skirt, and the little velvet bodice and the silver chains. He thought of her heavy hair, dishevelled, glimmering in her eyes. At the same moment he turned the corner; the carrefour lay before him, overgrown, silent, deserted. A sudden tenderness filled his heart — ah, how we love those whom we have protected! — and he stood for a moment in the sunshine with bowed head, living over the episode that he could never forget. Every word, every gesture, the shape of the very folds in her skirt, he remembered; yes, and the little triangular tear, the broken silver chain, the ripped bodice!
And she, in her innocence, had promised to see him there at the river-bank below. He had never gone, because that very night she had come to Morteyn, and since then he had seen her every day at her own home.
As he stood he could hear the river Lisse whispering, calling him. He would go — just to see the hidden rendezvous — for old love’s sake; it was a step from the path, no more.
Then that strange instinct, that sudden certainty that comes at times to all, seized him, and he knew that Lorraine was there by the river; he knew it as surely as though he saw her before him.
And she was there, standing by the still water, silver chains drooping over the velvet bodice, scarlet skirt hanging brilliant and heavy as a drooping poppy in the sun.
“Dear me,” she said, very calmly, “I thought you had quite forgotten me. Why have you not been to the Château, Monsieur Marche?”
And this, after she had told him to go away and not to return! Wise in the little busy ways of the world of men, he was uneducated in the ways of a maid.
Therefore he was speechless.
“And now,” she said, with the air of an early Christian tête-à-tête with Nero— “and now you do not speak to me? Why?”
“Because,” he blurted out, “I thought you did not care to have me!”
Surprise, sorrow, grief gave place to pity in her eyes.
“What a silly man!” she observed. “I am going to sit down on the moss. Are you intending to call upon my father? He is still in the turret. If you can spare a moment I will tell you what he is doing.”
Yes, he had a moment to spare — not many moments — he hoped she would understand that! — but he had one or two little ones at her disposal.
She read this in his affected hesitation. She would make him pay dearly for it. Vengeance should be hers!
He stood a moment, eying the water as though it had done him personal injury. Then he sat down.
“The balloon is almost ready, steering-gear and all,” she said. “I saw papa yesterday for a moment; I tried to get him to stay with me, but he could not.”
She looked wistfully across the river.
Jack watched her. His heart ached for her, and he bent nearer.
“Forgive me for causing you any unhappiness,” he said. “Will you?”
“Yes.”
Oh! where was her vengeance now? So far beneath her!
“These four days have been the most wretched days to me, the most unhappy I have ever lived,” he said. The emotion in his voice brought the soft colour to her face. She did not answer; she would have if she had wished to check him.
“I will never again, as long as I live, give you one moment’s — displeasure.” He was going to say “pain,” but he dared not.
Still she was silent, her idle white fingers clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed on the river. Little by little the colour deepened in her cheeks. It was when she felt them burning that she spoke, nervously, scarcely comprehending her own words: “I — I also was unhappy — I was silly; we both are very silly — don’t you think so? We are such good friends that it seems absurd to quarrel as we have. I have forgotten everything that was unpleasant — it was so little that I could not remember if I tried! Could you? I am very happy now; I am going to listen while you amuse me with stories.” She curled up against a tree and smiled at him — at the love in his eyes which she dared not read, which she dared not acknowledge to herself. It was there, plain enough for a wilful maid to see; it burned under his sun-tanned cheeks, it softened the firm lips. A thrill of contentment passed through her. She was satisfied; the world was kind again.
He lay at her feet, pulling blades of grass from the bank and idly biting the whitened stems. The voice of the Lisse was in his ears, he breathed the sweet wood perfume and he saw the sunlight wrinkle and crinkle the surface ripples where the water washed through the sedges, and the long grasses quivered and bent with the glittering current.
“Tell you stories?” he asked again.
“Yes — stories that never have really happened — but that should have happened.”
“Then listen! There was once — many, many years ago — a maid and a man—”
Good gracious — but that story is as old as life itself! He did not realize it, nor did she. It seemed new to them.
The sun of noon was moving towards the west when they remembered that they were hungry.
“You shall come home and lunch with me; will you? Perhaps papa may be there, too,” she said. This hope, always renewed with every dawn, always fading with the night, lived eternal in her breast — this hope, that one day she should have her father to herself.
“Will you come?” she asked, shyly.
“Yes. Do you know it will be our first luncheon together?”
“Oh, but you brought me an ice at the dance that evening; don’t you remember?”
“Yes, but that was not a supper — I mean a luncheon together — with a table between us and — you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” she said, smiling dreamily; so he knew that she did.
They hurried a little on the way to the Château, and he laughed at her appetite, which made her laugh, too, only she pretended not to like it.
At the porch she left him to change her gown, and slipped away up-stairs, while he found old Pierre and was dusted and fussed over until he couldn’t stand it another moment. Luckily he heard Lorraine calling her maid on the porch, and he went to her at once.
“Papa says you may lunch here — I spoke to him through the key-hole. It is all ready; will you come?”
A serious-minded maid served them with salad and thin bread-and-butter.
“Tea!” exclaimed Jack.
“Isn’t that very American?” asked Lorraine, timidly. “I thought you might like it; I understood that all Americans drank tea.”
“They do,” he said, gravely; “it is a terrible habit — a national vice — but they do.”
“Now you are laughing at me!” she
cried. “Marianne, please to remove that tea! No, no, I won’t leave it — and you can suffer if you wish. And to think that I—”
They were both laughing so that the maid’s face grew more serious, and she removed the teapot as though she were bearing some strange and poisonous creature to a deserved doom.
As they sat opposite each other, smiling, a little flurried at finding themselves alone at table together, but eating with the appetites of very young lovers, the warm summer wind, blowing through the open windows, bore to their ears the songs of forest birds. It bore another sound, too; Jack had heard it for the last two hours, or had imagined he heard it — a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat of noon.
Still it was always there; and now, turning his ear to the window, he laid down knife and fork to listen.
“I have also noticed it,” said Lorraine, answering his unasked question.
“Do you hear it now?”
“Yes — more distinctly now.”
A few moments later Jack leaned back in his chair and listened again.
“Yes,” said Lorraine, “it seems to come nearer. What is it?”
“It comes from the southeast. I don’t know,” he answered.
They rose and walked to the window. She was so near that he breathed the subtle fragrance of her hair, the fresh sweetness of her white gown, that rustled beside him.
“Hark!” whispered Lorraine; “I can almost hear voices in the breezes — the murmur of voices, as if millions of tiny people were calling us from the ends and outer edges of the earth.”
“There is a throbbing, too. Do you notice it?”
“Yes — like one’s heart at night. Ah, now it comes nearer — oh, nearer! nearer! Oh, what can it be?”
He knew now; he knew that indefinable battle — rumour that steals into the senses long before it is really audible. It is not a sound — not even a vibration; it is an immense foreboding that weights the air with prophecy.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 63