“It is true,” said Tony, “I might have written. But would you have believed me if I had? No.”
“Then you might have come to me,” she urged. “Once — just for five minutes — to tell me what you meant to do.”
“I might,” Tony agreed; “in fact, I very nearly did. I was under the windows of the house in Berkeley Square one night.” And Millie started.
“Yes, you were,” she said slowly.
“You knew that?”
“Yes; I knew it the next day.” And she added, “I wish now, I think, that you had come in that night.”
“Suppose that I had,” said Tony; “suppose that I had told you of my fine plan, you would have had no faith in it. You would merely have thought, ‘Here’s another folly to be added to the rest.’ Your contempt would have been increased, that’s all.”
It was quite strange to Millie Stretton that there ever could have been a time when she had despised him. She saw him sitting now in front of her, quiet and stern; she remembered her own terror when he burst into the room, when he flung Callon headlong through the windows, when he turned at last towards her.
“We have been strangers to one another.”
“Yes,” he replied; “I did not know you. I should never have left you — now I understand that. I trusted you very blindly, but I did not know you.”
Millie lowered her eyes from his face.
“Nor I you,” she answered. “What did you do when you went away that night from Berkeley Square?”
“I enlisted in the Foreign Legion in Algeria.”
Millie raised her head again with a start of surprise.
“Soldiering was my trade, you see. It was the one profession where I had just a little of that expert knowledge which is necessary nowadays if you are to make your living.”
Something of his life in the Foreign Legion Tony now told her. He spoke deliberately, since a light was beginning dimly to shine through the darkness of his perplexities. Of a set purpose he described to her the arduous perils of active service and the monotony of the cantonments. He was resolved that she should understand in the spirit and in the letter the life which for her sake he had led. He related his expedition to the Figuig oasis, his march into the Sahara under Tavernay. He took from his pocket the medals which he had won, and laid them upon the tablecloth before her.
“Look at them,” he said; “I earned them. These are mine. I earned them for you; and while I was earning them what were you doing?”
Millie listened and looked. Wonder grew upon her. It was for her that he had laboured and endured and succeeded! His story was a revelation to her. Never had she dreamed that a man would so strive for any woman. She had lived so long among the little things of the world — the little emotions, the little passions, the little jealousies and rivalries, the little aims, the little methods of attaining them, that only with great difficulty could she realise a simpler and a wider life. She was overwhelmed now. Pride and humiliation fought within her — pride that Tony had so striven for her in silence and obscurity, humiliation because she had fallen so short of his example. It was her way to feel in superlatives at any crisis of her destiny, but surely she had a justification now.
“I never knew — I never thought! Oh, Tony!” she exclaimed, twisting her hands together as she sat before him.
“I became a sergeant,” he said. “Then I brought back the remnants of the geographical expedition to Ouargla.” He taxed his memory for the vivid details of that terrible retreat. He compelled her to realise something of the dumb, implacable hostility of the Sahara, to see, in the evening against the setting sun, the mounted figures of the Touaregs, and to understand that the day’s march had not shaken them off. She seemed to be on the march herself, wondering whether she would live out the day, or, if she survived that, whether she would live out the night.
“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 abasement 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 associations 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 ignoble 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 glass 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 XXXIII
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 Réserve? 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 Réserve. 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 passed 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 Réserve, where the lights were out, and the sea echoed through empty rooms, she had had stern and savage teachers. Terror, humiliation, and the spectacle of violence had torn away a veil from before her eyes. She saw her own life in its true perspective. And, that she might see it the more clearly and understand, she had the story of another life wherewith to compare it. It is a quality of big performances, whether in art or life, that while they surprise when first apprehended, they appear upon thought to be so simple that it is astonishing surprise was ever felt. Something of that quality Tony’s career possessed. It had come upon Millie as a revelation, yet, now she was thinking: “Yes, that is what Tony would do. How is it I never guessed?” She put him side by side with that other man, the warrior of the drawing-rooms, and she was filled with shame that ever she could have preferred the latter even for a moment of madness.
They walked slowly on again. Millie drew her lace wrap more closely about her throat.
“Are you cold?” asked Tony. “You are lightly clothed to be talking here. We had better perhaps walk on, and keep what you have to tell me until to-morrow.”
“No,” she answered quickly, “I am not cold. And I must tell you what I have to tell you to-night. I want all this bad, foolish part of my life to end to-night, to be extinguished just as those lights were extinguished a minute since. Only there is something I should like to say to you first.” Millie’s voice wavered now and broke. “If we do not walk along the road together any more,” she went on timidly, “I will still be glad that you came back to-night. I do not know that you will believe that — I do not, indeed, see why you should; but I should very much like you to believe it; for it is the truth. I have learned a good deal, I think, during the last three hours. I would rather go on alone — if it is to be so — in this dim, clean starlight, than ever be back again in the little room with its lights and flowers. Do you understand me?”
“I think so,” said Tony.
“At all events, the road is visible ahead,” she went on. “One sees it glimmering, one can keep between the banks; while, in the little lighted room it is easy to get lost.”
And thus to Millie now, as to Pamela when she rode back from her last interview with Warrisden at the village of the three poplars, the riband of white road stretching away in the dusk became a parable.
“Yes,” said Tony, “perhaps my path was really the easier one to follow. It was direct and plain.”
“A
h,” said Millie, “it only seems so because you have traversed it, and are looking back. I do not think it was so simple and direct while you walked upon it.” And Tony, remembering the doubts and perplexities which had besieged him, could not but assent.
“I do not think, too, that it was so easy to discover at the beginning.”
There rose before Tony’s eyes the picture of a ketch-rigged boat sailing at night over a calm sea. A man leaned over the bulwarks, and the bright glare from a lightship ran across the waves and flashed upon his face. Tony remembered the moment very clearly when he had first hit upon his plan; he remembered the weeks of anxiety of which it was the outcome. No, the road had not been easy to find at the beginning. He was silent for a minute, and then he said gently —
“I am sorry that I asked you to tell your story — I am sorry that I did not leave the decision to you. But it shall be as though you told it of your own accord.”
The sentence was a concession, no less in the manner of its utterance than in the words themselves. Millie took heart, and told him the whole story of her dealings with Lionel Callon, without excuses and without concealments.
“I seemed to mean so much to him, so little to you,” she said. “You see, I did not understand you at all. You were away, too, and he was near. I do not defend myself.”
She did not spare herself, she taxed her memory for the details of her days; and as she spoke the story seemed more utterly contemptible and small than even she in her abasement had imagined it would be. But she struggled through with it to the end.
“That night when you stood beneath the windows in Berkeley Square,” she said, “he was with me. He ran in from Lady Millingham’s party and talked with me for half an hour. Yes, at the very time when you were standing on the pavement he was within the house. I know, for you were seen, and on the next day I was told of your presence. I was afraid then. The news was a shock to me. I thought, ‘Suppose you had come in!’”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 421