Several pairs of brighter eyes followed my companion THE GUEST OF QUESNAY BY BOOTH TARKINGTON ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1917 qt \ \ COPYRIGHT, 1008, BY DOUBLEDAY. PAGE & COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY TO OVID BUTLER JAMESON A ft LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Several pajrs of brighter eyes followed my companion Frontispiece FACING PAGE "I haven't had my life. It's gone!" . . 166 "You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren't you?" ... . .198 "Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried . 240 CHAPTER I THERE are old Parisians who will tell you pompously that the boulevards, like the po- litical cafes, have ceased to exist, but this means only that the boulevards no longer gossip of Louis Napoleon, the Return of the Bourbons, or of General Boulanger, for these highways are always too busily stirring with present movements not to be forgetful of their yesterdays. In the shade of the buildings and awnings, the loungers, the look- ers-on in Paris, the audience of the boulevard, sit at little tables, sipping coffee from long glasses, drinking absinthe or bright-coloured sirops, and gazing over the heads of throngs afoot at others borne along through the sunshine of the street in carriages, in cabs, in glittering automobiles, or high on the tops of omnibuses. From all the continents the multitudes come to join in that procession: Americans, tagged with race-cards and intending hilarious disturbances; puzzled Americans, worn with guide-book plodding; 4 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY Chinese princes in silk; queer Antillean dandies of swarthy origin and fortune; ruddy English, think- ing of nothing; pallid English, with upper teeth bared and eyes hungrily searching for sign-boards of tea-rooms; over-Europeanised Japanese, unpleas- antly immaculate; burnoosed sheiks from the desert, and red-fezzed Semitic peddlers; Italian nobles in English tweeds; Soudanese negroes swaggering in frock coats; slim Spaniards, squat Turks, travellers, idlers, exiles, fugitives, sportsmen all the tribes and kinds of men are tributary here to the Parisian stream which, on a fair day in spring, already over- flows the banks with its own much-mingled waters. Soberly clad burgesses, bearded, amiable, and in no fatal hurry; well-kept men of the world swirling by in miraculous limousines; legless cripples flopping on hands and leather pads; thin- whiskered stu- dents in velveteen; walrus-moustached veterans in broadcloth; keen-faced old prelates; shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass; work- ingmen turned horse and harnessed to carts; side- walk jesters, itinerant vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to resemble gold- showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy musicians, blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple- CHAPTER ONE 5 faced, glazed-hatted, scarlet- waistcoated, cigarette- smoking cabmen, calling one another "onions," "camels," and names even more terrible. Women prevalent over all the concourse; fair women, dark women, pretty women, gilded women, haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry women. Fine women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor women in fine clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick- glimpsed, in multiple veils of white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women draped, coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened poet-milliners and the hasheesh dreams of ladies' tailors. About the procession, as it moves interminably along the boulevard, a blue haze of fine dust and burnt gasoline rises into the sunshine like the haze over the passages to an amphitheatre toward which a crowd is trampling; and through this the multi- tudes seem to go as actors passing to their cues. Your place at one of the little tables upon the side- walk is that of a wayside spectator: and as the performers go by, in some measure acting or look- 6 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ing their parts already, as if in preparation, you guess the r61es they play, and name them comedians, tragedians, buffoons, saints, beauties, sots, knaves, gladiators, acrobats, dancers; for all of these are there, and you distinguish the principles from the unnumbered supernumeraries pressing forward to the entrances. So, if you sit at the little tables often enough that is, if you become an amateur boulevardier you begin to recognise the transient stars of the pageant, those to whom the boulevard allows a dubious and fugitive r61e of celebrity, and whom it greets with a slight nutter: the turning of heads, a murmur of comment, and the incredulous boulevard smile, which seems to say: "You see? Madame and monsieur passing there evidently they think we still believe in them!" This flutter heralded and followed the passing of a white touring-car with the procession one afternoon, just before the Grand Prix, though it needed no boulevard celebrity to make the man who lolled in the tonneau conspicuous. Simply for thai, notoriety was superfluous; so were the remark- able size and power of his car; so was the elaborate touring-^ojrlimie of flannels and pongee he wore; so was even the enamelled presence of the dancer who CHAPTER ONE 7 sat beside him. His face would have done it with- out accessories. My old friend, George Ward, and I had met for our aperitif at the Terrace Larue, by the Made- leine, when the white automobile came snaking its way craftily through the traffic. Turning in to pass a victoria on the wrong side, it was forced down to a snail's pace near the curb and not far from our table, where it paused, checked by a block- ade at the next corner. I heard Ward utter a half -suppressed guttural of what I took to be amaze- ment, and I did not wonder. The face of the man in the tonneau detached him to the spectator's gaze and singled him out of the concourse with an effect almost ludicrous in its incongruity. The hair was dark, lustrous and thick, the forehead broad and finely modelled, and certain other ruinous vestiges of youth and good looks remained; but whatever the features might once have shown of honour, worth, or kindly sem- blance had disappeared beyond all tracing in a blurred distortion. The lids of one eye were dis- coloured and swollen almost together; other traces of a recent battering were not lacking, nor was cosmetic evidence of a heroic struggle, on the part 8 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY of some valet of infinite pains, to efface them. The nose lost outline in the discolorations of the puffed cheeks; the chin, tufted with a small im- perial, trembled beneath a sagging, gray lip. And that this bruised and dissipated mask should suffer the final grotesque touch, it was decorated with the moustache of a coquettish marquis, the ends waxed and exquisitely elevated. The figure was fat, but loose and sprawling, seemingly without the will to hold itself together; in truth the man appeared to be almost in a semi- stupor, and, contrasted with this powdered Silenus, even the woman beside him gained something of human dignity. At least, she was thoroughly alive, bold, predatory, and in spite of the gross embon-point that threatened her, still savagely graceful. A purple veil, dotted with gold, floated about her hat, from which green-dyed ostrich plumes cascaded down across a cheek enamelled dead white. Her hair was plastered in blue-black waves, parted low on the forehead; her lips were splashed a startling carmine, the eyelids painted blue; and, from between lashes gummed into little spikes of blacking, she favoured her companion with a glance of carelessly simulated tenderness, a look all too CHAPTER ONE 9 vividly suggesting the ghastly calculations of a cook wheedling a chicken nearer the kitchen door. But I felt no great pity for the victim. "Who is it?" I asked, staring at the man in the automobile and not turning toward Ward. "That is Mariana '/a bella Mariana la Mursi- ana,' " George answered; ' one of those women who come to Paris from the tropics to form them- selves on the legend of the one great famous and infamous Spanish dancer who died a long while ago. Mariana did very well for a time. I've heard that the revolutionary societies intend striking medals in her honour: she's done worse things to royalty than all the anarchists in Europe! But her great days are over: she's getting old; that type goes to pieces quickly, once it begins to slump, and it won't be long before she'll be horribly fat, though she's still a graceful dancer. She danced at the Folie Rouge last week." "Thank you, George," I said gratefully. "I hope you'll point out the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower to me some day. I didn't mean Mariana." "What did you mean?" What I had meant was so obvious that I turned to my friend in surprise. He was nervously tapping 10 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY his chin with the handle of his cane and staring at the white automobile with very grim interest. "I meant the man with her," I said. "Oh!" He laughed sourly. "That carrion?" "You seem to be an acquaintance." "Everybody on the boulevard knows who he is," said Ward curtly, paused, and laughed again with very little mirth. "So do you," he continued; "and as for my acquaintance with him yes, I had once the distinction of being his rival in a small way, a way so small, in fact, that it ended in his Becoming a connection of mine by marriage. He's Larrabee Harman." That was a name somewhat familiar to readers of American newspapers even before its bearer was fairly out of college. The publicity it then attained (partly due to young Harman's conspicuous wealth) attached to some youthful exploits not without a certain wild humour. But frolic degenerated into brawl and debauch: what had been scrapes for the boy became scandals for the man; arid he gathered a more and more unsavoury reputatioi until its like was not to be found outside a pen- itentiary. The crux of his career in his own country was reached during a midnight quarrel in Chicago CHAPTER ONE 11 when he shot a negro gambler. After that, the negro having recovered and the matter being some- how arranged so that the prosecution was dropped, Harman's wife left him, and the papers recorded her application for a divorce. She was George Ward's second cousin, the daughter of a Baltimore clergyman; a belle in a season and town of belles, and a delightful, headstrong creature, from all accounts. She had made a runaway match of it with Harman three years before, their affair having been earnestly opposed by all her relatives espec- ially by poor George, who came over to Paris just after the wedding in a miserable frame of mind. The Chicago exploit was by no means the end of Harman's notoriety. Evading an v effort (on the part of an aunt, I believe) to get him locked up safely in a "sanitarium," he began a trip round the world w^ith an orgy which continued from San Francisco to Bangkok, where, in the company of some congenial fellow travellers, he interfered in a native ceremonial with the result that one of his companions was drowned. Proceeding, he was reported to be in serious trouble at Constantinople, the result of an inquisitiveness little appreciated by Orientals. The State Department, bestirring 12 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY itself, saved him from a very real peril, and he continued his journey. In Rome he was rescued with difficulty from a street mob that unreasonably refused to accept intoxication as an excuse for his riding down a child on his way to the hunt. Later, during the winter just past, we had been hearing from Monte Carlo of his disastrous plunges at that most imbecile of all games, roulette. Every event, no matter how trifling, in this man's pitiful career had been recorded in the Amer- ican newspapers with an elaboration which, for my part, I found infuriatingly tiresome. I have lived in Paris so long that I am afraid to go home: I have too little to show for my years of pottering with paint and canvas, and I have grown timid about all the changes that have crept in at home. I do not know the "new men," I do not know how they would use me, and fear they might make no place for me; and so I fit myself more closely into the little grooves I have worn for myself, and re- sign myself to stay. But I am no "expatriate" I know there is a feeling at home against us who remain over here to do our work, but in most in- stances it is a prejudice which springs from a mis- understanding. I think the quality of patriotism CHAPTER ONE IS in those of us who "didn't go home in time" is almost pathetically deep and real, and, like many another oldish fellow in my position, I try to keep as close to things at home as I can. All of my old friends gradually ceased to write to me, but I still take three home newspapers, trying to fol- low the people I knew and the things that happen; and the ubiquity of so worthless a creature as Larrabee Harman in the columns I dredged for real news had long been a point of irritation to this present exile. Not only that: he had usurped space in the Continental papers, and of late my favourite Parisian journal had served him to me with my morning coffee, only hinting his name, but offering him with that gracious satire character- istic of the Gallic journalist writing of anything American. And so this grotesque wreck of a man was well known to the boulevard one of its sights. That was to be perceived by the flutter he caused, by the turning of heads in his direction, and the low laughter of the people at the little tables. Three or four in the rear ranks had risen to their feet to get a better look at him and his companion. Some one behind us chuckled aloud. "They say Mariana beats him." 14 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Evidently!" The dancer was aware of the flutter, and called Harman's attention to it with a touch upon his arm and a laugh and a nod of her violent plumage. At that he seemed to rouse himself somewhat: his head rolled heavily over upon his shoulder, the lids lifted a little from the red-shot eyes, show- ing a strange pride when his gaze fell upon the many staring faces. Then, as the procession moved again and the white automobile with it, the sottish mouth widened in a smile of dull and cynical contempt: the look of a half-poisoned Augustan borne down through the crowds from the Palatine after supping with Caligula. Ward pulled my sleeve. "Come," he said, "let us go over to the Lux- embourg gardens where the air is cleaner." CHAPTER H WARD is a portrait-painter, and in the matter of vogue there seem to be no pinnacles left for him to surmount. I think he has painted most of the very rich women of fashion who have come to Paris of late years, and he has become so prosperous, has such a polite celebrity, and his opinions upon art are so con- clusively quoted, that the friendship of some of us who started with him has been dangerously strained. He lives a well-ordered life; he has always led that kind of life. Even in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high- school would have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well- dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat re- served, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in appearance and manner. He has always been 15 16 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY well tended and cared for by women; in his stu- dent days his mother lived with him; his sister, Miss Elizabeth, looks after him now. She came with him when he returned to Paris after his dis- appointment in the unfortunate Harman affair, and she took charge of all his business as well as his social arrangements (she has been accused of a theory that the two things may be happily com- bined), making him lease a house in an expensively modish quarter near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Miss Elizabeth is an instinctively fash- ionable woman, practical withal, and to her mind success should be not only respectable but "smart." She does not speak of the "right bank" and the "left bank" of the Seine; she calls them the "right bank" and the "wrong bank." And yet, though she removed George (her word is "rescued") from many of his old associations with Montparnasse, she warmly encouraged my friendship with him yea, in spite of my living so deep in the wrong bank that the first time he brought her to my studio, she declared she hadn't seen anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the-old-hag's-cellar-at-mid- night since her childhood. She is a handsome woman, large, and of a fine, high colour; her manner CHAPTER TWO 17 is gaily dictatorial, and she and I got along very well together. Probably she appreciated my going to some pains with the clothes I wore when I went to their house. My visits there were infrequent, not because I had any fear of wearing out a welcome, but on account of Miss Elizabeth's "day," when I could see nothing of George for the crowd of lionising women and time-wasters about him. Her "day" was a dread of mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it to my misery, for, beginning with those pri- mordial indignities suffered in youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door as a preliminary to polite usages, my child- hood's, manhood's prayer has been: From all such days, Good Lord, deliver me! It was George's habit to come much oftener to see me. He always really liked the sort of so- ciety his sister had brought about him; but now and then there were intervals when it wore on him a little, I think. Sometimes he came for me in his automobile and we would make a mild ex- cursion to breakfast in the country; and that is 18 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY what happened one morning about three weeks after the day when we had sought pure air in the Luxembourg gardens. We drove out through the Bois and by Suresnes, striking into a roundabout road to Versailles be- yond St. Cloud. It was June, a dustless and balmy noon, the air thinly gilded by a faint haze, and I know few things pleasanter than that road on a fair day of the early summer and no sweeter way to course it than in an open car; though I must not be giving myself out for a "motorist ' I have not even the right cap. I am usually nervous in big machines, too; but Ward has never caught the speed mania and holds a strange powei over his chauffeur; so we rolled along peacefully, not madly, and smoked (like the car) in hasteless content. "After all," said George, with a pjacid wave of the hand, "I sometimes wish that the landscape had called me. You outdoor men have all the health and pleasure of living in the open, and as for the work oh! you fellows think you work, but you don't know what it means." "No?" I said, and smiled as I always meanly do when George "talks art." He was silent for a few moments and then said irritably, CHAPTER TWO Id "Well, at least you can't deny that the academic rrowd can DRAW!" Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way perhaps* a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he returned to his theme: "Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight; two up, two down, cross and repeat. Take that ahead of us. Could anything be simpler to paint?" He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert. Beyond, stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches. An old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet handkerchief knotted about her head. "You think it's easy?" I asked. "Easy! Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done at least, the way you fellows do it!" He clenched his fingers as if upon the handle of a house-painter's brush. "Slap, dash there's your road." He paddled the air with the, imaginary brush as though painting the side of a barn. "Swish, swash there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit! Speck! And there's your 20 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your dealer will probably call 'the human interest/ all complete. Squirt the edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over the whole, and there's your haze. Call it 'The Golden Road,* or 'The Bath of Sunlight,' or 'Quiet Noon/ Then you'll probably get a criticism beg : nning, Tew in- deed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward ploughman ' ' He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white touring-car swung round us from behind at a speed that sick- ened me to see, and, snorting thunder, passed us "as if we had been standing still." It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in its swirling tail of dust. "Seventy miles an hour!" gasped George, swab- bing at his eyes. "Those are the fellows that get into the pa Oh, Lord! There they go!" Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in CHAPTER TWO 21 upon the reverse curve to clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car; and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the road, ten feet from the cul- vert, the old woman struggled frantically to get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her perhaps, for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the shriek of the machine drowned the human scream as the automobile struck. The shock of contact was muffled. But the mass of machinery hoisted itself in the air as if it had a life of its own and had been stung into sudden madness. It was horrible to see, and so grotesque that a long-forgotten memory of my boyhood leaped instantaneously into my mind, a recollection of the evolutions performed by a Newfoundland dog that rooted under a board walk and found a hive of wild bees. The great machine left the road for the fields on the right, reared, fell, leaped against the stone side of the culvert, apparently trying to climb it, stood straight on end, whirled backward in a half-somersault, crashed over on its side, flashed with flame and explosion, and lay hidden under a cloud of dust and smoke. 22 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY Ward's driver slammed down his accelerator, sent us spinning round the curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply at the culvert. The fabric of the road was so torn and distorted one might have thought a steam dredge had begun work there, but the fragments of wreckage were oddly isolated and inconspicuous. The peasant's cart, tossed into a clump of weeds, rested on its side, the spokes of a rimless wheel slowly revolving on the hub uppermost. Some tools were strewn in a semi-circular trail in the dust; a pair of smashed goggles crunched beneath my foot as I sprang out of Ward's car, and a big brass lamp had fallen in the middle of the road, crumpled like waste paper. Beside it lay a gold rouge box. The old woman had somehow saved herself or perhaps her saint had helped her for she was sitting in the grass by the roadside, wailing hysteri- cally and quite unhurt. The body of a man lay in a heap beneath the stone archway, and from his clothes I guessed that he had been the driver of the white car. I say "had been" because there were reasons for needing no second glance to com- prehend that the man was dead. Nevertheless, I CHAPTER TWO 3 knelt beside him and placed my hand upon his breast to see if his heart still beat. Afterward I concluded that I did this because I had seen it done upon the stage, or had read of it in stories; and even at the time I realised that it was a silly thing for me to be doing. Ward, meanwhile, proved more practical. He was dragging a woman out of the suffocating smoke and dust that shrouded the wreck, and after a moment I went to help him carry her into the B fresh air, where George put his coat under ner head. Her hat had been forced forward over her face and held there by the twisting of a system of veils she wore; and we had some difficulty in unravelling this; but she was very much alive, as a series of muffled imprecations testified, leading us to con- clude that her sufferings were more profoundly of rage than of pain. Finally she pushed our hands angrily aside and completed the untanglement her- self, revealing the scratched and smeared face of Mariana, the dancer. "Cornichon! Chameau! Fond du bain!" she gasped, tears of anger starting from her eyes. She tried to rise before we could help hex, but dropped back with a scream. 24 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Oh, the pain!" she cried. "That imbecile! If he has let me break my leg! A pretty dancer I should be! I hope he is killed." One of the singularities of motoring on the main- travelled roads near Paris is the prevalence of cars containing physicians and surgeons. Whether it be testimony to the opportunism, to the sporting proclivities, or to the prosperity of gentlemen of those professions, I do not know, but it is a fact that I have never heard of an accident (and in the season there is an accident every day) on one of these roads when a doctor in an automobile was not almost immediately a chance arrival, and for- tunately our case offered no exception to this rule. Another automobile had already come up and the occupants were hastily alighting. Ward shouted to the foremost to go for a doctor. "I am a doctor," the man answered, advancing and kneeling quickly by the dancer. "And you you may be of help yonder." We turned toward the ruined car where Ward's driver was shouting for us. "What is it?" called Ward as we ran toward him. "Monsieur," he replied, "there is some one under the tonneau here!" CHAPTER TWO 25 The smoke had cleared a little, though a rivulet of burning gasoline ran from the wreck to a pool of flame it was feeding in the road. The front cushions and woodwork had caught fire and a couple of labourers, panting with the run across the fields, were vainly belabouring the flames with brushwood. From beneath the overturned tonneau projected the lower part of a man's leg, clad in a brown puttee and a russet shoe. Ward's driver had brought his tools; had jacked up the car as high as possible; but was still unable to release the imprisoned body. "I have seized that foot and pulled with all my strength," he said, "and I cannot make him move one centimetre. It is necessary that as many people as possible lay hold of the car on the side away from the fire and all lift together. Yes," he added, "and very soon!" Some carters had come from the road and one of them lay full length on the ground peering be- neath the wreck. "It is the head of monsieur," explained this one; "it is the head of monsieur which is fastened under there." "Eh, but you are wiser than Clemenceau!" said the chauffeur. "Get up, my ancient, and you there, 6 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY with the brushwood, let the fire go for a moment and help, when I say the word. And you, mon- sieur," he turned to Ward, "if you please, will you pull with me upon the ankle here at the right moment?" The carters, the labourers, the men from the other automobile, and I laid hold of the car together. "Now, then, messieurs, LIFT!" Stifled with the gasoline smoke, we obeyed. One or two hands were scorched and our eyes smarted blindingly, but we gave a mighty heave, and felt the car rising. ' Vell done!" cried the chauffeur. "Well done! But a little more! The smallest fraction HA! It is finished, messieurs!" We staggered back, coughing and wiping our eyes. For a minute or two I could not see at all, and was busy with a handkerchief. Ward laid his hand on my shoulder. "Do you know who it is?" he asked. "Yes, of course," I answered. When I could see again, I found that I was look- ing almost straight down into the upturned face of Larrabee Harman, and I cannot better express what this man had come to be, and what the degrada- CHAPTER TWO 27 tion of his life had written upon him, than by say- ing that the dreadful thing I looked upon now was no more horrible a sight than the face I had seen, fresh from the valet and smiling in ugly pride at the starers, as he passed the terrace of Larue on the day before the Grand Prix. We helped to carry him to the doctor's car, and to lift the dancer into Ward's, and to get both of them out again at the hospital at Versailles, where they were taken. Then, with no need to ask each other if we should abandon our plan to breakfast in the country, we turned toward Paris, and rolled along almost to the barriers in silence. "Did it seem to you," said George finally, "that a man so frightfully injured could have any chance of getting well?" "No," I answered. "I thought he was dying as we carried him into the hospital." "So did I. The top of his head seemed all crushed in Whew!" He broke off, shivering, and wiped his brow. After a pause he added thoughtfully, "It will be a great thing for Louise." Louise was the name of his second cousin, the girl who had done battle with all her family and 28 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY then run away from them to be Larrabee Harman 's wife. Remembering the stir that her application for divorce had made, I did not understand how Harman's death could benefit her, unless George had some reason to believe that he had made a will in her favour. However, the remark had been made more to himself than to me and I did not respond. The morning papers flared once more with the name of Larrabee Harman, and we read that there was "no hope of his surviving." Ironic phrase! There was not a soul on earth that day who could have hoped for his recovery, or who for his sake cared two straws whether he lived or died. And the dancer had been right; one of her legs was badly broken: she would never dance again. Evening papers reported that Harman was "lin- gering." He was lingering the next day. He was lingering the next week, and the end of a month saw him still "lingering." Then I went down to Capri, where for he had been after all the merest episode to me I was pleased to forget all about him c CHAPTER HI A GREAT many people keep their friends in mind by writing to them, but more do not; and Ward and I belong to the majority. After my departure from Paris I had but one missive from him, a short note, written at the request of his sister, asking me to be on the lookout for Italian earrings, to add to her collec- tion of old jewels. So, from time to time, I sent her what I could find about Capri or in Naples, and she responded with neat little letters of ac- knowledgment . Two years I stayed on Capri, eating the lotus which grows on that happy island, and painting very little only enough, indeed, to be remembered at the Salon and not so much as knowing how kindly or unkindly they hung my pictures there. But even on Capri, people sometimes hear the call of Paris and wish to be in that unending move- ment: to hear the multitudinous rumble, to watch the procession from a cafe terrace and to dine at Foyot's. So there came at last a fine day when I, 29 30 THE GUEST OF QUESNEY knowing that the horse-chestnuts were in bloom along the Champs Elysees, threw my rope-soled shoes to a beggar, packed a rusty trunk, and was off for the banks of the Seine. My arrival just the drive from the Gare de Lyon to my studio was like the shock of surf on a bather's breast. The stir and life, the cheerful energy of the streets, put stir and life and cheerful energy into me. I felt the itch to work again, to be at it, at it in earnest to lose no hour of daylight, and to paint better than I had painted! Paris having given me this impetus, I dared not tempt her further, nor allow the edge of my eager- ness time to blunt; therefore, at the end of a fort- night, I went over into Normandy and deposited that rusty trunk of mine in a corner of the summer pavilion in the courtyard of Madame Brossard's inn, Les Trois Pigeons, in a woodland neighbor- hood that is there. Here I had painted through a prolific summer of my youth, and I was glad to find as I had hoped nothing changed; for the place was dear to me. Madame Brossard (dark, thin, demure as of yore, a fine-looking woman with a fine manner and much the flavour of old Norman CHAPTER THREE 31 portraits) gave me a pleasant welcome, remember- ing me readily but without surprise, while Amedee, the antique servitor, cackled over me and was as proud of my advent as if I had been a new egg and he had laid me. The simile is grotesque; but Amedee PS the most henlike waiter in France. He is a white-haired, fat old fellow, always well- ihaved; as neat as a billiard-ball. In the daytime, when he is partly porter, he wears a black tie, a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet, and, from waist to feet, a white apron like a skirt, and so competently encircling that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real necessity; but after six o'clock (becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel) he is clad as any other formal gentleman. At all times he wears a fresh table-cloth over his arm, keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at hand on a ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard, so that he may never be shamed by getting caught without one. His conception of life is that all worthy persons were created as receptacles for food and drink; and five minutes after my arrival he had me seated (in spite of some meek protests) in a wicker chair with a pitcher of the right Three I*- jteons cider on the 32 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY table before me, while he subtly dictated what manner of dinner I should eat. For this interval Amedee's exuburance was sobered and his bandinage dismissed as being mere garniture, the questions now before us concerning grave and inward matters. His suggestions were deferential but insistent; his manner was that of a prime minister who goes through the form of convincing the sovereign. He greeted each of his own decisions with a very loud "Bien!" as if startled by the brilliancy of my selections, and, the menu being concluded, exploded a whole volley of "Biens" and set off violently to instruct old Gaston, the cook. That is Amedee's way; he always starts violently for anywhere he means to go. He is a little lame and his progress more or less sidelong, but if you call him, or new guests arrive at the inn, or he receives an order from Madame Brossard, he gives the effect of running by a sudden movement of the whole body like that of a man about to run, and moves off using the gestures of a man who is running; after which he proceeds to his destina- tion at an exquisite leisure. Remembering this old habit of his, it was with joy that I noted his head- long departure. Soi *e ten feet of his progress ac- CHAPTER THREE 33 complished, he halted (for no purpose but to scratch his head the more luxuriously); next, strayed from the path to contemplate a rose-bush, and, selecting a leaf with careful deliberation, placed it in his mouth and continued meditatively upon his way to the kitchen. I chuckled within me; it was good to be back at Madame Brossard's. The courtyard was more a garden; bright with rows of flowers in formal little beds and blossom- ing up from big green tubs, from red jars, and also from two brightly painted wheel-barrows. A long arbour offered a shelter of vines for those who might choose to dine, breakfast, or lounge beneath, and, here and there among the shrubberies, you might come upon a latticed bower, thatched with straw. My own pavilion (hah* bedroom, half studio) was set in the midst of all and had a small porch of its own with a rich curtain of. climbing honeysuckle for a screen from the rest of the courtyard. The inn itself is gray with age, the roof sagging pleasantly here and there; and an old wooden gal- lery runs the length of each wing, the guest-cham- bers of the upper story opening upon it like the 34 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY deck-rooms of a steamer, with boxes of tulips and hyacinths along the gallery railings and window ledges for the gayest of border-lines. Beyond the great open archway, which gives entrance to the courtyard, lies the quiet country road; passing this, my eyes followed the wide sweep of poppy-sprinkled fields to a line of low green hills; and there was the edge of the forest sheltering those woodland interiors which I had long ago tried to paint, and where I should be at work to-morrow. In the course of time, and well within the bright twilight, Amedee spread the crisp white cloth and served me at a table on my pavilion porch. He feigned anxiety lest I should find certain dishes (those which he knew were most delectable) not to my taste, but was obviously so distended with fatuous pride over the whole meal that it became a temptation to denounce at least some trifling sauce or garnishment; nevertheless, so much men- dacity proved beyond me and I spared him and my own conscience. This puffed-uppedness of his was to be observed only in his expression of manner, for during the consumption of food it was his worthy custom to practise a ceremonious, nay, a reverential, CHAPTER THREE 35 hush, and he never offered (or approved) conver- sation until he had prepared the salad. That accomplished, however, and the water bubbling in the coffee machine, he readily favoured me with a discourse on the decline in glory of Les Trois Pigeons. "Monsieur, it is the automobiles; they have done it. Formerly, as when monsieur was here, the painters came from Paris. They would come in the spring and would stay until the autumn rains. What busy times and what drolleries! Ah, it was gay in those days! Monsieur remembers well. Ha, Ha! But now, I think, the automobiles have frightened away the painters; at least they do not come any more. And the automobiles themselves; they come sometimes for lunch, a few, but they love better the seashore, and we are just close enough to be too far away. Those automobiles, they love the big new hotels and the casinos with roulette. They eat hastily, gulp down a liqueur, and pouf! off they rush for Trouville, for Houlgate for heaven knows where! And even the automo- biles do not come so frequenlty as they did. Our road used to be the best from Lisieux to Beuzeval, but now the maps recommend another. Th^y pass 36 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY us by, and yet yonder only a few kilometres is the coast with its thousands. We are near the world but out of it, monsieur." He poured my coffee; dropped a lump of sugar from the tongs with a benevolent gesture "One lump: always the same. Monsieur sees that I re- member well, ha?" and the twilight having fallen, he lit two orange-shaded candles and my cigar with the same match. The night was so quiet that the candle-lights burned as steadily as flames in a globe, yet the air was spiced with a cool fra- grance, and through the honeysuckle leaves above me I saw, as I leaned back in my wicker chair, a glimmer of kindly stars. "Very comfortably out of the world, Amedee," I said. "It seems to me I have it all to myself." "Unhappily, yes!" he exclaimed; then excused himself, chuckling. "I should have said that we should be happier if we had many like monsieur. But it is early in the season to despair. Then, too, our best suite is already engaged." "By whom?" "Two men of science who arrive next week. One is a great man. Madame Brossard is pleased that he is coming to Les Trois Pigeons, but I tell CHAPTER THE! 37 her it is only natural. He comes now for the first time because he likes the quiet, but he will come again, like monsieur, because he has been here before. That is what I always say: 'Any one who has been here must come again.' The problem is only to get them to come the first time. Truly!" "Who is the great man, Amedee?" "Ah! A distinguished professor of science. Truly." "What science?" "I do not know. But he is a member of the Institute. Monsieur must have heard of that great Professor Keredec?" "The name is known. W 7 ho is the other?" "A friend of his. I do not know. All the upper floor of the east wing they have taken the Grande Suite those two and their valet-de-chambre. That is truly the way in modern times the philosophers are rich men." "Yes," I sighed. "Only the painters are poor nowadays." "Ha, ha, monsieur!" Amedee laughed cunningly. "It was always easy to see that monsieur only amuses himself with his painting." "Thank you, Amedee," I responded. "I have amused other people with it too, I fear." 38 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Oh, without doubt!" he agreed graciously, as he folded the cloth. I have always tried to believe that it was not so much my pictures as the fact that I paid my bills the day they were presented which convinced everybody about Les Trois Pig- eons that I was an amateur. But I never became happily enough settled in this opinion to risk press- ing an investigation; and it was a relief that Amedee changed the subject. "Monsieur remembers the Chateau de Quesnay at the crest of the hill on the road north of Dives?" "I remember." "It is occupied this season by some rich Americans." "How do you know they are rich?" "Dieu de Dieu!" The old fellow appealed to heaven. "But they are Americans!" "And therefore millionaires. Perfectly, Amedee." "Perfectly, monsieur. Perhaps monsieur knows them." "Yes, I know them." "Truly!" He affected dejection. "And poor Madame Brossard thought monsieur had returned to our old hotel because he liked it, and remembered CHAPTER THREE 39 our wine of Beaune and the good beds and old Gaston's cooking!" "Do not weep, Amedee," I said. "I have come to paint; not because I know the people who have taken Quesnay." And I added: "I may not see them at all." In truth I thought that very probable. Miss Elizabeth had mentioned in one of her notes that Ward had leased Quesnay, but I had not sought quarters at Les Trois Pigeons because it stood within walking distance of the chateau. In my industrious frame of mind that circumstance seemed almost a drawback. Miss Elizabeth, ever hos- pitable to those whom she noticed at all, would be doubly so in the country, as people always are; and I wanted all my time to myself no very selfish wish since my time was not conceivably of value to any one else. I thought it wise to leave any encounter with the lady to chance, and as the by-paths of the country-side were many and intricate, I intended, without ungallantry, to render the chance remote. George himself had just sailed on a business trip to America, as I knew from her last missive; and until his return, I should put in all my time at painting and nothing else, though 40 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY I liked his sister, as I have said, and thought of her often. Amedee doubted my sincerity, however, for he laughed incredulously. "Eh, well, monsieur enjoys saying it!" "Certainly. It is a pleasure to say what one means." "But monsieur could not mean it. Monsieur will call at the chateau in the morning" the com- placent varlet prophesied "as early as it will be polite. I am sure of that. Monsieur is not at all an old man; no, not yet! Even if he were, aha! no one could possess the friendship of that won- derful Madame d'Armand and remain away from the chateau." "Madame d'Armand?" I said. "That is not the name. You mean Mademoiselle Ward." "No, no!" He shook his head and his fat cheeks bulged with a smile which I believe he intended to express a respectful roguishness. "Mademoiselle Ward" (he pronounced it "Ware") "is magnifi- cent; every one must fly to obey when she opens her mouth. If she did not like the ocean there below the chateau, the ocean would have to move! It needs only a glance to perceive that Made' CHAPTER THREE 41 moiselle Ward is a great lady but Madame d'Ar- mand! AHA!" He rolled his round eyes to an effect of unspeakable admiration, and with a gesture indicated that he would have kissed his hand to the stars, had that been properly reverential to Madame d'Armand. "But monsieur knows very well for himself!" "Monsieur knows that you are very confusing- even for a maitre d'hotel. We were speaking of the present chatelaine of Quesnay, Mademoiselle Ward. I have never heard of Madame d'Armand.' 5 "Monsieur is serious?" "Truly!" I answered, making bold to quote his shibboleth. "Then monsieur has truly much to live for. Truly!" he chuckled openly, convinced that he had obtained a marked advantage in a conflict of wits, shaking his big head from side to side with an exasperating air of knowingness. "Ah, truly! When that lady drives by, some day, in the car- riage from the chateau eh? Then monsieur wil 1 see how much he has to live for. Truly, truly, truly!" He had cleared the table, and now, with a final explosion of the word which gave him such im- 42 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY moderate satisfaction, he lifted the tray and made one of his precipitate departures. "Am6dee," I said, as he slackened down to his sidelong leisure. "Monsieur?" "Who is Madame d'Armand?" "A guest of Mademoiselle Ward at Quesnay. In fact, she is in charge of the chateau, since Made- moiselle Ward is, for the time, away." "Is she a Frenchwoman?" "It seems not. In fact, she is an American, though she dresses with so much of taste. Ah, Madame Brossard admits it, and Madame Brossard knows the art of dressing, for she spends a week of every winter in Rouen and besides there is Trouville itself only some kilometres distant. Ma- dame Brossard says that Mademoiselle Ward dresses with richness and splendour and Madame d'Armand with economy, but beauty. Those were the words used by Madame Brossard. Truly." "Madame d'Armand's name is French," I ob- served. "Yes, that is true," said Amdee thoughtfully. "No one can deny it; it is a French name." He rested the tray upon a stump near by and scratched CHAPTER THREE 43 his head. "I do not understand how that can be," he continued slowly. "Jean Ferret, who is chief gardener at the chateau, is an acquaintance of mine. We sometimes have a cup of cider at Pere Baudry's, a kilometre down the road from here; and Jean Ferret has told me that she is an American. And yet, as you say, monsieur, the name is French. Perhaps she is French after all." "I believe," said I, 'that if I struggled a few days over this puzzle, I might come to the con- clusion that Madame d'Armand is an American lady who has married a Frenchman." The old man uttered an exclamation of triumph. "Ha! without doubt! Truly she must be an American lady who has married a Frenchman. Monsieur has already solved the puzzle. Truly, truly!" And he trulied himself across the darkness, to emerge in the light of the open door of the kitchen with the word still rumbling in his throat. Now for a time there came the clinking of dishes, sounds as of pans and kettles being scoured, the rolling gutturals of old Gaston, the cook, and the treble pipings of young "Glouglou," his grandchild and scullion. After a while the oblong of light from the kitchen door disappeared; the voices 44 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY departed; the stillness of the dark descended, and with it that unreasonable sense of pathos which night in the country brings to the heart of a wan- derer. Then, out of the lonely silence, there issued a strange, incongruous sound as an execrable voice essayed to produce the semblance of an air odiously familiar about the streets of Paris some three years past, and I became aware of a smell of some dread- ful thing burning. Beneath the arbour I perceived a glowing spark which seemed to bear a certain relation to an oval whitish patch suggesting the front of a shirt. It was Amedee, at ease, smoking his cigarette after the day's work and convinced that he was singing. "Pour qu'j'finisse Mon service Au Tonkin je suis parti Ah! quel beau pays, mesdames! C'esi Fparadis des p'lites femmes!" I rose from the chair on my little porch, to go to bed; but I was reminded of something, and called to him. "Monsieur?" his voice came briskly. CHAPTER THREE 45 "How often do you see your friend, Jean Ferret, the gardener of Quesnay?" "Frequently, monsieur. To-morrow morning I could easily carry a message if "That is precisely what I do not wish. And you may as well not mention me at all when you meet him." "It is understood. Perfectly." "If it is well understood, there will be a beau- tiful present for a good maitre d'hdtel some day." "Thank you, monsieur." "Good night, Amedee." "Good night, monsieur." Falling to sleep has always been an intricate matter with me: I liken it to a nightly adventure in an enchanted palace. Weary-limbed and with burning eyelids, after long waiting in the outer court of wakefulness, I enter a dim, cool ante- chamber where the heavy garment of the body is left behind and where, perhaps, some acquaintance or friend greets me with a familiar speech or a bit of nonsense or an unseen orchestra may play music that I know. From here I go into a spacious apartment where the air and light are of a fine 46 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY clarity, for it is the hall of revelations, and in it the secrets of secrets are told, mysteries are resolved, perplexities cleared up, and sometimes I learn what to do about a picture that has bothered me. This is where I would linger, for beyond it I walk among crowding fantasies, delusions, terrors and shame, to a curtain of darkness where they take my memory from me, and I know nothing of my own ad- ventures until I am pushed out of a secret door into the morning sunlight. Amedee was the ac- quaintance who met me in the antechamber to-night. He remarked that Madame d'Armand was the most beautiful woman in the world, and vanished. And in the hall of revelations I thought that I found a statue of her but it was veiled. I wished to remove the veil, but a passing stranger stopped and told me laughingly that the veil was all that would ever be revealed of her to me of her, or any other woman! CHAPTER IV I WAS up with the birds in the morning; had my breakfast with them a very drowsy-eyed Amedee assisting and made off for the forest to get the sunrise through the branches, a pack on my back and three sandwiches for lunch in my pocket. I returned only with the failing light of evening, cheerfully tired and ready for a fine dinner and an early bed, both of which the good inn sup- plied. It was my daily programme; a healthy life "far from the world," as Amedee. said, and I was sorry when the serpent entered and disturbed it, though he was my own. He is a pet of mine; has been with me since my childhood. He leaves me when I live alone, for he loves company, but returns whenever my kind are about me. There are many names for snakes of his breed, but, to deal char- itably with myself, I call mine Interest-In-Other- People's-Affairs, One evening I returned to find a big van from Dives, the nearest railway station, drawn up in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs leading to the 47 48 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY gallery, and all of the people of the inn, from Ma- dame Brossard (who directed) to Glouglou (who madly attempted the heaviest pieces), busily in- stalling trunks, bags, and packing-cases in the suite engaged for the "great man of science" on the second floor of the east wing of the building. Neither the great man nor his companion was to be seen, however, both having retired to their rooms im- mediately upon their arrival so Amedee informed me, as he wiped his brow after staggering up the steps under a load of books wrapped in sacking. I made my evening ablutions removing a Joseph's coat of dust and paint; and came forth from my pavilion, hoping that Professor Keredec and his friend would not mind eating in the same garden with a man in a corduroy jacket and knickerbockers; but the gentlemen continued invisible to the public j* eye, and mine was the only table set for dinner in the garden. Up-stairs the curtains were care- fully drawn across all the windows of the east wing; little leaks of orange, here and there, betraying the lights within. Glouglou, bearing a tray of covered dishes, was just entering the salon of the "Grande Suite," and the door closed quickly after him. "It is to be supposed that Professor Keredec and CHAPTER FOUR 49 his friend are fatigued with their journey from Paris?" I began, a little later. * 'Monsieur, they did not seem fatigued," said Amedee. "But they dine in their own rooms to-night." "Every night, monsieur. It is the order of Pro- fessor Keredec. And with their own valet-de- chambre to serve them. Eh?" He poured my coffee solemnly. "That is mysterious, to say the least, isn't it?" "To say the very least," I agreed. "Monsieur the professor is a man of secrets, it appears," continued Amedee. "When he wrote to Madame Brossard engaging his rooms, he in- structed her to be careful that none of us should mention even his name; and to-day when he came, he spoke of his anxiety on that point." "But you did mention it." "To whom, monsieur?" asked the old fellow blankly. "To me." "But I told him I had not," said Am6dee placidly. "It is the same thing." "I wonder," I began, struck by a sudden thought, "if it will prove quite the same thing in my own 50 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY case. I suppose you have not mentioned the cir- cumstance of my being here to your friend, Jean Ferret of Quesnay?" He looked at me reproachfully. "Has monsieur been troubled by the people of the chateau?" " Troubled' by them?" "Have they come to seek out monsieur and disturb him? Have they done anything whatever to show that they have heard monsieur is here?" "No, certainly they haven't," I was obliged to retract at once. "I beg your pardon, Amedee." "Ah, monsieur!" He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still deeper in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with a forgiving hand. "All the same," he pursued, "it seems very mysterious this Keredec affair!" "To comprehend a great man, Amedee," I said, "is the next thing to sharing his greatness." He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle. "But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this fine weather?" I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon of Madame Brossard's CHAPTER FOUR 51 "Grande Suite" must be, while the garden was fragrant in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle tonic. Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the salon. When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention. The smaller the com- munity the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some scandal about the goat. Thus, though I treated the "Keredec affair" with a seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal out, and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, vir- tually, I was receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day's doings of Professor Keredec and his companion. The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in their rooms. Professor Keredec's voice could often be heard in every part of the inn; at times holding 52 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY forth with such protracted vehemence that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering a lecture to his companion. "Say then!" exclaimed Amedee "what king of madness is that? To make orations for only one auditor!" He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The rela- tion between the two men, he contended, was more like that between teacher and pupil. "But a pupil with gray hair!" he finished, raising his fat hands to heaven. "For that other monsieur has hair as gray as mine." "That other monsieur" was farther described as a thin man, handsome, but with a "singular air," nor could my colleague more satisfactorily define this air, though he made a racking struggle to do so. "In what does the peculiarity of his manner lie?" I asked. "But it is not so much that his manner is pe- culiar, monsieur; it is an air about him that is singular. Truly !" "But how is it singular?" "Monsieur, it is very, very singular." CHAPTER FOUR 53 "You do not understand," I insisted. "What kind of singularity has the air of 'that other mon- sieur'?" "It has," replied Amedee, with a powerful effort, "a very singular singularity." This was as near as he could come, and, fear- ful of injuring him, I abandoned that phase of our subject. The valet-de-chambre whom my fellow-lodgers had brought with them from Paris contributed nothing to the inn's knowledge of his masters, I learned. This struck me not only as odd, but unique, for French servants tell one another every- thing, and more very much more. "But this is a silent man," said Amedee impressively. "Oh! very silent! He shakes his head wisely, yet he will not open his mouth. However, that may be be- cause" and now the explanation came "because he was engaged only last week and knows nothing. Also, he is but temporary; he returns to Paris soon and Glouglou is to serve them." I ascertained that although "that other mon- sieur" had gray hair, he was by no means a person of great age; indeed, Glouglou, who had seen him oftener than any other of the staff, maintained 54 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY that he was quite young. Amedee's own oppor- tunities for observation had been limited. Every afternoon the two gentlemen went for a walk; but they always came down from the gallery so quickly, he declared, and, leaving the inn by a rear entrance, plunged so hastily into the nearest by-path leading to the forest, that he caught little more than glimpses of them. They returned after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same ap- pearance of haste to be out of sight, the professor always talking, "with the manner of an orator, but in English." Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it was certain that Professor Keredec's friend was neither an American nor an Englishman. "Why is it certain?" I asked. "Monsieur, he drinks nothing but water, he does not smoke, and Glouglou says he speaks very pure French.'/ "Glouglou is an authority who resolves the diffi- culty. 'That other monsieur' is a Frenchman." "But, monsieur, he is smooth-shaven." "Perhaps he has been a maitre d'hdtel." "Eh! I wish one that 7 know could hope to dress as well when he retires ! Besides, Glouglou says that other monsieur eats his soup silently." CHAPTER FOUR 55 "I can find no flaw in the deduction," I said, rising to go to bed. "We must leave it there for to-night." The next evening Amedee allowed me to per- ceive that he was concealing something under his arm as he stoked the coffee-machine, and upon my asking what it was, he glanced round the court- yard with histrionic slyness, placed the object on the table beside my cap, and stepped back to watch the* impression, his manner that of one who de- claims: "At last the missing papers are before you!" "What is that?" I said. "It is a book." "I am persuaded by your candour, Amedee, as well as by the general appearance of this article," I returned as I picked it up, "that you are speaking the truth. But why do you bring it to me?" "Monsieur," he replied, in the tones of an old conspirator, "this afternoon the professor and that other monsieur went as usual to walk in the forest." He bent over me, pretending to be busy with the coffee-machine, and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. "When they returned, this book fell from the pocket of that other moniseur's coat as he 56 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ascended the stair, and he did not notice. Later I shall return it by Glouglou, but I thought it wise that monsieur should see it for himself." The book was Wentworth's Algebra elementary principles. Painful recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as I let the leaves turn under my fingers. "What do you make of it?" I asked. His tone became even more confidential. "Part of it, monsieur, is in English; that is plain. I have found an English word in it that I know the word *O.' But much of the printing is also in Arabic." "Arabic!" I exclaimed. "Yes, monsieur, look there." He laid a fat fore- finger on "(a + b) 2 = a 2 + 2ab + b 2 ." "That is Arabic. Old Gaston has been to Algeria, and he says that he knows Arabic as well as he does French. He looked at the book and told me it was Arabic. Truly! Truly!" "Did he translate any of it for you?" "No, monsieur; his eyes pained him this after- noon. He says he will read it to-morrow." "But you must return the book to-night." "That is true. Eh! It leaves the mystery deeper CHAPTER FOUR 57 than ever, unless monsieur can find some clue in those parts of the book that are English." I shed no light upon him. The book had been Greek to me in my tender years; it was a pleasure now to leave a fellow-being under the impression that it was Arabic. But the volume took its little revenge upon me, for it increased my curiosity about Professor Keredec and "that other monsieur." Why were two grown men one an eminent psychologist and the other a gray-haired youth with a singular air carrying about on their walks a text-book for the instruction of boys of thirteen or fourteen? The next day that curiosity of mine was piqued in earnest. It rained and I did not leave the inn, but sat under the great archway and took notes in colour of the shining road, bright drenched fields, and dripping sky. My back was toward the court- yard, that is, "three-quarters" to it, and about noon I became distracted from my work by a strong self -consciousness which came upon me without any visible or audible cause. Obeying an impulse, I swung round on my camp-stool and looked up directly at the gallery window of the salon of the "Grande Suite." 58 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY A man with a great white beard was standing at the window, half hidden by the curtain, watching me intently. He perceived that I saw him and dropped the cur- tain immediately, a speck of colour in his buttonhole catching my eye as it fell. The spy was Professor Keredec. But why should he study me so slyly and yet so obviously? I had no intention of intruding upon him. Nor was I a psychological "specimen," though I began to suspect that "that other monsieur" was. CHAPTER V 1HAD been painting in various parts of the forest, studying the early morning along the eastern fringe and moving deeper in as the day advanced. For the stillness and warmth of noon I went to the very woodland heart, and in the late afternoon moved westward to a glade a chance arena open to the sky, the scene of my most audacious endeavours, for here I was trying to paint foliage luminous under those long shafts of sunshine which grow thinner but rud- dier toward sunset. A path closely bordered by underbrush wound its way to the glade, crossed it, then wandered away into shady dingles again; and with my easel pitched in the mouth of this path, I sat at work, one late afternoon, wonderful for its still loveliness. The path debouched abruptly on the glade and was so narrow that when I leaned back my elbows were in the bushes, and it needed care to keep my palette from being smirched by the leaves; though there was more room for my canvas and easel, as I had placed them at arm's length before me, fairly in the open. 59 60 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY I had the ambition to paint a picture here to do the whole thing in the woods from day to day, instead of taking notes for the studio and was at work upon a very foolish experiment: I had thought to render the light broken by the branches and foliage with broken brush-work, a short stroke of the kind that stung an elder painter to swear that its practitioners painted in shaking fear of the concierge appearing for the studio rent. The attempt was alluring, but when I rose from my camp-stool and stepped back into the path to get more distance for my canvas, I saw what a mess I was making of it. At the same time, my hand, falling into the capacious pocket of my jacket, encountered a package, my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat, whereupon, becoming suddenly aware that I was very hungry, I began to eat Ame- deVs good sandwiches without moving from where I stood. Absorbed, gazing with abysmal disgust at my can- vas, I was eating absent-mindedly and with all the restraint and dignity of a Georgia darky attacking a watermelon when a pleasant voice spoke from just behind me. "Pardon, monsieur; permit me to pass, if you please." CHAPTER FIVE 61 That was all it said, very quietly and in French, but a gunshot might have startled me less. I turned in confusion to behold a dark-eyed lady, charmingly dressed in lilac and white, waiting for me to make way so that she could pass. Nay, let me leave no detail of my mortification unrecorded: I have just said that I "turned in con- fusion"; the truth is that I jumped like a kangaroo, but with infinitely less grace. And in my nervous haste to clear her way, meaning only to push the camp-stool out of the path with my foot, I put too much valour into the push, and with horror saw the camp-stool rise in the air and drop to the ground again nearly a third of the distance across the glade. Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and my cheeks burning. There are women who will meet or pass a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no ref- 62 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY erence to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with sandwich that I dared not speak. d "Thank you," she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings. I stood looking after her as she crossed the clear- ing and entered the cool winding of the path on the other side. I stared and wished wished that I could have painted her into my picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that I had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer hat, which was the last bit of her to disap- pear, had vanished. Then, discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and, recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again. I did not immediately begin. The passing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no moment to a man, and the passing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is an episode even to a middle-aged landscape painter. CHAPTER FIVE 63 "An episode?" quoth I. I should be ashamed to with- hold the truth out of my fear to be taken for a senti- mentalist: this woman who had passed was of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there in the woods and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face burned again. With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds. He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white flannels, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him. At sight of me he stopped short. "Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her hat?" he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick eagerness 64 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY which caused me no wonder for I had seen the lady. What did surprise me, however, was the instan- taneous certainty with which I recognised the speaker from Amedee's description; certainty founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old fellow's powers. My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so clear and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might have passed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I guessed his years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome young fellows with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though out of the world we were near it. It was the new-comer's "singular air" which established his identity. Amedee's vague- ness had irked me, but the thing itself the "singular air" was not at all vague. Instantly perceptible, it was an investiture; marked, definite and intan- gible. My interrogator was "that other monsieur." In response to his question I asked him another: "Were the roses real or artificial?" "I don't know," he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical assumption of gravity. "It wouldn't matter, would it? Have you seen her?" CHAPTER FIVE 65 He stooped to brush the brambles from his trou- sers, sending me a sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and inquiring, like a boy's. At the same time it struck me that whatever the nature of the singularity investing him it par- took of nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness ; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him odd enough. "Isn't your description," I said gravely, thinking to suit my humour to his own, "somewhat too general? Over yonder a few miles lies Houlgate. Trouville itself is not so far, and this is the season. A great many white hats trimmed with roses might come for a stroll in these woods. If you would com- plete the items " and I waved my hand as if invit- ing him to continue. "I have seen her only once before," he responded promptly, with a seriousness apparently quite genu- ine. "That was from my window at an inn, three days ago. She drove by in an open carriage without 66 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY looking up, but I could see that she was very hand- some. No " he broke off abruptly, but as quickly resumed "handsome isn't just what I mean. Lovely, I should say. That is more like her and a better thing to be, shouldn't you think so?" "Probably yes I think so," I stammered, in considerable amazement. "She went by quickly," he said, as ft he were talk- ing in the most natural and ordinary way in the world, "but I noticed that while she was in the shade of the inn her hair appeared to be dark, though when the carriage got into the sunlight again it looked fair." I had noticed the same thing when the lady who had passed emerged from the shadows of the path into the sunshine of the glade, but I did not speak of it now; partly because he gave me no opportu- nity, partly because I was almost too astonished to speak at all, for I was no longer under the delusion that he had any humourous or whimsical intention. "A little while ago," he went on, "I was up in the branches of a tree over yonder, and I caught a glimpse of a lady in a light dress and a white hat and I thought it might be the same. She wore a dress like that and a white hat with roses when she CHAPTER FIVE 67 drove by the inn. I am very anxious to see her again. "You seem to be!" "And haven't you seen her? Hasn't she passed this way?" He urged the question with the same strange eagerness which had marked his manner from the first, a manner which confounded me by its absurd resemblance to that of a boy who had not mixed with other boys and had never been teased. And yet his expression was intelligent and alert; nor was there anything abnormal or "queer" in his good- humoured gaze. "I think that I may have seen her," I began slowly; "but if you do not know her I should not advise- I was interrupted by a shout and the sound of a large body plunging in the thicket. At this the face of "that other monsieur" flushed slightly; he smiled, but seemed troubled. "That is a friend of mine," he said. "I am afraid he will want me to go back with him." And he raised an answering shout. Professor Keredec floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished 68 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock- coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to "that other monsieur," for his own was on his head. One glance of scrutiny and recognition he shot at me from his silver-rimmed spectacles; and seized the young man by the arm. "Ha, my friend!" he exclaimed in a bass voice of astounding power and depth, "that is one way to study botany: to jump out of the middle of a high tree and to run like a crazy man!" He spoke with a strong accent and a thunderous rolling of the "r." "What was I to think?" he demanded. "What has arrived to you?" "I saw a lady I wished to follow," the other answered promptly. "A lady! What lady?" "The lady who passed the inn three days ago. I spoke of her then, you remember." "Tonnerre de Dieu!" Keredec slapped his thigh with the sudden violence of a man who remembers CHAPTER FIVE 69 that he has forgotten something, and as a final addi- tion to my amazement, his voice rang more of remorse than of reproach. "Have I never told you that to follow strange ladies is one of the things you cannot do?" "That other monsieur" shook his head. "No, you have never told me that. I do not understand it," he said, adding irrelevantly, "I believe this gentle- man knows her. He says he thinks he has seen her." "If you please, we must not trouble this gentleman about it," said the professor hastily. "Put on your hat, in the name of a thousand saints, and let us go !" "But I wish to ask him her name," urged the other, with something curiously like the obstinacy of a child. "I wish " "No, no!" Keredec took him by the arm. "We must go. We shall be late for our dinner." "But why?" persisted the young man. "Not now!" The professor removed his broad felt hat and hurriedly wiped his vast and steaming brow a magnificent structure, corniced, at this moment, with anxiety. "It is better if we do not discuss it now." "But I might not meet him again." 70 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY Professor Keredec turned toward me with a half- desperate, half-apologetic laugh which was like the rumbling of heavy wagons over a block pavement; and in his flustered face I thought I read a signal of genuine distress. "I do. not know the lady," I said with some sharp- ness. "I have never seen her until this afternoon." Upon this "that other monsieur" astonished me in good earnest. Searching my eyes eagerly with his clear, inquisitive gaze, he took a step toward me and said: "You are sure you are telling the truth?" The professor uttered an exclamation of horror, sprang forward, and clutched his friend's arm again. "Malheureiix!" he cried, and then to me: "Sir, you will give him pardon if you can? He has no mean- ing to be rude." "Rude?" The young man's voice showed both astonishment and pain. "Was that rude? I didn't know. I didn't mean to be rude, God knows ! Ah," he said sadly, "I do nothing but make mistakes. I hope you will forgive me." He lifted his hand as if in appeal, and let it drop to his side; and in the action, as well as in the tone of his voice and his attitude of contrition, there was CHAPTER FIVE 71 something that reached me suddenly, with the touch of pathos. "Never mind," I said. "I am only sorry that it was the truth." "Thank you," he said, and turned humbly to Keredec. "Ha, that is better!" shouted the great man, apparently relieved of a vast weight. "We shall ge home now and eat a good dinner. But first " his silver-rimmed spectacles twinkled upon me, and he bent his Brobdingnagian back in a bow which against my will reminded me of the curtseys performed by Orloff's dancing bears "first let me speak some words for myself. My dear sir" he addressed him- self to me with grave formality "do not suppose I have no realization that other excuses should be made to you. Believe me, they shall be. It is now that I see it is fortunate for us that you are our fellow-innsman at Les Trois Pigeons." I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affect- ing considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query: "Why, how did you know that?" Professor Keredec's laughter rumbled again, grow- ing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods 72 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him. <4 Ho, ho, ho!" he shouted. "But you shall not take me for a window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you! Ho, ho!" Then, followed submissively by "that other mon- sieur," he strode into the path and went thundering forth through the forest. CHAPTER VI NO doubt the most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of Professor Ke- redec and his singular friend would have been to settle myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting and that is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting. I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the phrase, "seated in a brown study," I pictured my hero in a brown chair, beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses of ordinary corre- spondence allowed the occasion for it to remain unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at its mildest, a profound purple. The confession has been made of my curiosity con- cerning my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; 73 74 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so sud- denly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, "What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?" This was the sillier inasmuch as the word "wrong" (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to "that other mon- sieur." There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know. Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his nationality; his face was of the lean, right, American structure; but they had hit the relation between the two men: Keredec was the master and "that other monsieur" the scholar a pupil studying boys' textbooks and receiving instruction in matters and manners that children are taught. And yet I could not believe him to be a simple case of arrested development. For the matter of that, I did not like to think of him as a "case" CHAPTER SIX 75 at all. There had been something about his bright youthf ulness perhaps it was his quick contrition for his rudeness, perhaps it was a certain wistful quality he had, perhaps it was his very * 'singularity "- which appealed as directly to my liking as it did urgently to my sympathy. I came out of my vari-coloured study with a start, caused by the discovery that I had absent-mindedly squeezed upon my palette the entire contents of an expensive tube of cobalt violet, for which I had no present use; and sighing (for, of necessity, I am an economical man), I postponed both of my problems till another day, determined to efface the one with a palette knife and a rag soaked in turpentine, and to defer the other until I should know more of my fellow-lodgers at Madame Brossard's. The turpentine rag at least proved effective; I scoured away the last tokens of my failure with it, wishing that life were like the canvas and that men had knowledge of the right celestial turpentine. After that I cleaned my brushes, packed and shoul- dered my kit, and, with a final imprecation upon all sausage-sandwiches, took up my way once more to Les Trois Pigeons. Presently I came upon an intersecting path where, 76 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY on my previous excursions, I had always borne to the right; but this evening, thinking to discover a shorter cut, I went straight ahead. Striding along at a good gait and chanting sonorously, "On Linden when the sun was low," I left the rougher boscages of the forest behind me and emerged, just at sunset, upon an orderly fringe of woodland where the ground was neat and unencumbered, and the trimmed trees stood at polite distances, bowing slightly to one another with small, well-bred rustlings. The light was somewhere between gold and pink when I came into this lady's boudoir of a grove. "Isar flowing rapidly" ceased its tumult abruptly, and Linden saw no sterner sight that evening: my voice and my feet stopped simultaneously for I stood upon Quesnay ground. Before me stretched a short broad avenue of turf, leading to the chateau gates. These stood open, a gravelled driveway climbing thence by easy stages between kempt shrubberies to the crest of the hill, where the gray roof and red chimney-pots of the chateau were glimpsed among the tree-tops. The slope was terraced with strips of flower-gardens and intervals of sward; and against the green of a rising lawn I marked the figure of a woman, pausing to CHAPTER SIX , 77 bend over some flowering bush. The figure was too slender to be mistaken for that of the present chate- laine of Quesnay: in Miss Elizabeth's regal ampli- tude there was never any hint of fragility. The lady upon the slope, then, I concluded, must be Madame d'Armand, the inspiration of Amedee's "Monsieur has much to live for!" Once more this day I indorsed that worthy man's opinion, for, though I was too far distant to see clearly, I knew that roses trimmed Madame d'Ar- inand's white hat, and that she had passed me, no long time since, in the forest. I took off my cap. "I have the honour to salute you," I said aloud. "I make my apologies for misbehaving with sand- wiches and camp-stools in your presence, Madame d'Armand." Something in my own pronunciation of her name struck me as reminiscent: save for the prefix, it had sounded like "Harman," as a Frenchman might pro- nounce it. Foreign names involve the French in terrible diffi- culties. Hughes, an English friend of mine, has lived in France some five-and-thirty years without recon- ciling himself to being known as "Monsieur Ig." 78 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Armand'* might easily be Jean Ferret's translation of "Harman." Had he and Amedee in their admira- tion conferred the prefix because they considered it a plausible accompaniment to the lady's gentle bear- ing? It was not impossible; it was, I concluded, very probable. I had come far out of my way, so I retraced my steps to the intersection of the paths, and thence made for the inn by my accustomed route. The light failed under the roofing of foliage long before I was free of the woods, and I emerged upon the road to Les Trois Pigeons when twilight had turned to dusk. Not far along the road from where I came into it, stood an old, brown, deep-thatched cottage a branch of brushwood over the door prettily beckon- ing travellers to the knowledge that cider was here for the thirsty; and as I drew near I perceived that one availed himself of the invitation. A group stood about the open door, the lamp-light from within disclosing the head of the house filling a cup for the wayfarer; while honest Mere Baudry and two gene- rations of younger Baudrys clustered to miss no word of the interchange of courtesies between Pere Baudry and his chance patron. CHAPTER SIX 79 It afforded me some surprise to observe that the latter was a most mundane and elaborate wayfarer, indeed; a small young man very lightly made, like a jockey, and point-device in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equip- ped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently, though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleas-* ant delusion that he employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share of the con- versation in a slow patois. As both men spoke at the same time and neither understood two consecutive words the other said, it struck me that the dialogue might prove unproductive of any highly important results this side of Michaelmas; therefore, discover- ing that the very pedestrian gentleman was making some sort of inquiry concerning Les Trois Pigeons,, I came to a halt and proffered aid. "Are you looking for Madame Brossard's?" I asked in English. The traveller uttered an exclamation and faced 80 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY about with a jump, birdlike for quickness. He did not reply to my question with' the same promptness; however, his deliberation denoted scrutiny, not sloth. He stood peering at me sharply until I repeated it. Even then he protracted his examination of me, a favour I was unable to return with any interest, owing to the circumstance of his back being toward the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little 'person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of France as "le Sport." "Say," he responded in a voice of unpleasant nasality, finally deciding upon speech, "you're 'Num- meric'n, ain't you?" "Yes," I returned. "I thought I heard you inquiring for " "Well, m' friend, you can sting me!" he inter- rupted with condescending jocularity. "My style French does f r them camels up in Paris all right. Me at Nice, Monte Carlo, Chantilly bow to the CHAPTER SIX 81 p'fess'r; he's right! But down here I don't seem to be gud enough fr these sheep-dogs; anyway they bark different. I'm lukkin' fer a hotel called Les Trois Pigeons" "I am going there," I said; "I will show you the way." "Whur is 't?" he asked, not moving. I pointed to the lights of the inn, flickering across the fields. "Yonder beyond the second turn of the road," I said, and, as he showed no signs of accom- panying me, I added, "I am rather late." "Oh, I ain't goin' there t'night. It's too dark t' see anything now," he remarked, to my astonish- ment. "Dives and the choo-choo back t* little ole Trouville fr mine! I on'y wanted to take a luk at this pigeon-house joint." "Do you mind my inquiring," I said, "what you expected to see at Les Trois Pigeons?" "Why!" he exclaimed, as if astonished at the question, "I'm a tourist. Makin' a pedestrun trip t' all the reg'ler sights." And, inspired to eloquence, he added, as an afterthought: "As it were." "A tourist?" I echoed, with perfect incredulity. "That's whut I am, m' friend," he returned firmly. "You don't have to have a red dope-book in one 82 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY hand and a thoid-class choo-choo ticket in the other to be a tourist, do you?" "But if you will pardon me," I said, "where did you get the notion that Les Trois Pigeons is one of the regular sights?" "Ain't it in all the books?" "I don't think that it is mentioned in any of the guide-books." "No! I didn't say it was, m' friend," he retorted with contemptuous pity. "I mean them history- books. It's in all o' them!" "This is strange news," said I. "I should be very much interested to read them!" "Lookahere," he said, taking a step nearer me; "in oinest now, on your woid: Didn* more'n half them Jeanne d'Arc tamales live at that hotel wunst?" "Nobody of historical importance or any other kind of importance, so far as I know ever lived there," I informed him. "The older portions of the inn once belonged to an ancient farm-house, that is all." "On the level," he demanded, "didn't that William the Conker nor none o' them ancient gilt-edges live there?" "No." "Stung again!" He broke into a sudden loud CHAPTER SIX 83 cackle of laughter. "Why! the feller tole me 'at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it come t' history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy raws-tache," pursued the pedestrian, apparently fearing his narrative might lack colour. "I met him right comin' out o' the Casino at Trouville, yes'day aft 'noon; c'udn' a' b'en more'n four o'clock hoi* on though, yes 'twas, 'twas nearer five, about twunty minutes t' five, say an' this feller tells me " He cackled with laugh- ter as palpably disingenuous as the corroborative details he thought necessary to muster; then he became serious, as if marvelling at his own won- drous verdancy. "M' friend, that feller soitn'y found me easy. But he can't say I ain't game; he passes me the limes, but I'm jest man enough to drink his health fer it in this sweet, sound ole-fashioned cider 'at ain't got a headache in a barrel of it. He played me gud, and here's to him!" Despite the heartiness of the sentiment, my honest tourist's enthusiasm seemed largely histrionic, and his quaffing of the beaker too reminiscent of drain- the-wine-cup-free in the second row of the chorus, for he absently allowed it to dangle from his hand 84 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY before raising it to his lips. However, not all of its contents was spilled, and he swallowed a mouthful of the sweet, sound, old-fashioned cider but by mistake, I was led to suppose, from the expression of displeasure which became so deeply marked upon his countenance as to be noticeable, even in the feeble lamplight. I tarried no longer, but bidding this good youth and the generations of Baudry good-night, hastened on to my belated dinner. "Amedee," I said, when my cigar was lighted and the usual hour of consultation had arrived; "isn't that old lock on the chest where Madame Brossard keeps her silver getting rather rusty?" "Monsieur, we have no thieves here. We are out of the world." "Yes, but Trouville is not so far away." "Truly." "Many strange people go to Trouville: grand- dukes, millionaires, opera singers, princes, jockeys, gamblers "Truly, truly!" "And tourists," I finished. "That is well known," assented Amedee, nodding. "It follows," I continued with the impressiveness CHAPTER SIX 85 of all logicians, "that many strange people may come from Trouville. In their excursions to the surround- ing points of interest " "Eh, monsieur, but that is true!" he interrupted, laying his right forefinger across the bridge of his nose, which was his gesture when he remembered any- thing suddenly. "There was a strange monsieur from Trouville here this very day." "What kind of person was he?" "A foreigner, but I could not tell from what country." "What time of day was he here?" I asked, with growing interest. "Toward the middle of the afternoon. I was alone, except for Glouglou, when he came. He wished to see the whole house and I showed him what I could, except of course monsieur's pavilion, and the Grande Suite. Monsieur the Professor and that other mon- sieur had gone to the forest, but I did not feel at liberty to exhibit their rooms without Madame Bros- sard's permission, and she was spending the day at Dives. Besides," added the good man, languidly snapping a napkin at a moth near one of the candles, "the doors were locked." "This person was a tourist?" I asked, after a 86 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY pause during which Amedee seemed peacefully un- aware of the rather concentrated gaze I had fixed upon him. "Of a kind. In speaking he employed many peculiar expressions, more like a thief of a Parisian cabman than of the polite world." "The devil he did!" said I. "Did he tell you why he wished to see the whole house? Did he contem- plate taking rooms here?" "No, monsieur, it appears that his interest was historical. At first I should not have taken him for a man of learning, yet he gave me a great piece of information; a thing quite new to me, though I have lived here so many years. We are distinguished in history, it seems, and at one time both William the Conqueror and that brave Jeanne d'Arc ' I interrupted sharply, dropping my cigar and leaning across the table: "How was this person dressed?" "Monsieur, he was very much the pedestrian." And so, for that evening, we had something to talk about besides "that other monsieur"; indeed, we found our subject so absorbing that I forgot to ask Amedee whether it was he or Jean Ferret who had prefixed the "de" to "Armand." CHAPTER VII THE cat that fell from the top of the Wash- ington monument, and scampered off un- hurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a certain painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been seen to depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated Norman stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone wall of good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered pebble, some ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected over the wall, snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned aforetime; it was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the painter-man. I could count on little less than a week of idle- ness within the confines of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker long-chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were 87 88 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY strutting on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying trem- ulously in the hot sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest from the ample figure of our maitre d'hdtel reposing in a rustic chair which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when first occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee's upper eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a hazy gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon his left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant jerk, without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou, rolling and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac, watched with button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost of some convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter. A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a deep inquiring rumble the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to expect some advances on his CHAPTER SEVEN 89 ,>art toward friendliness, or, at least, in the direc- tion of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply for a moment to make sure I had heard aright. The name was repeated. "Here I am," I called, "in the pavilion, if you wish to see me." "Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir." With that the professor's great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside. "I have come to condole with you, if you allow it." "To smoke with me, too, I hope," I said, not a little pleased. "That I will do," he returned, and came in slowly, walking with perceptible lameness. "The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only from the heart, it is from the latissimus dor si" he continued, seating himself with a cavernous groan. "I am your confrere in illness, my dear sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back." "I hope it is not painful." "Ha, it is so-so," he rumbled, removing his spec- tacles and wiping his eyes, dazzled by the sun. "There is more of me than of most men more to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs 90 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY when she made this big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war." "You'll take a cigarette?" "I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe." He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch. "Always my pipe for me," he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. "Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul." And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he con- cluded, with gusto, "It is my first pipe since yesterday." "That is being a good smoker," I ventured sen- ten tiously; "to whet indulgence with abstinence." "My dear sir," he protested, "I am a man with- out even enough virtue to be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now." "He has never smoked, your young friend?" I CHAPTER SEVEN 91 asked, glancing at my visitor rather curiously, I fear. "Mr. Saffren has no vices." Professor Keredee replaced his silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence. "He is in good condition, all pure, like little children and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very irach from the window" there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor's torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle "yes very much, since the passing of that charming lady some days ago." "You say your young friend's name is Saffren?" "Oliver Saffren." The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the seeming shadow upon my visitor's fore- 92 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY head became a reality, deepening to a look of per- plexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: "It is about him that I have come to talk to you." "I shall be very glad," I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality aside with a gesture of remonstrance. "Ha, my dear sir," he cried; "but you are a man of feeling! We are both old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth! It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman's excuses when he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject; it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!" "No, no," I protested hastily. "The name of Professor Keredec " "The name of no man," he thundered, interrupt- ing, "can protect his reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I know what you think. You think, 'He is a nice fine man, that old professor, oh, very nice only he hides behind the curtains sometimes! Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.' Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you have been thinking, my dear sir!" CHAPTER SEVEN 93 "Not at all," I laughed; "I thought you might fear that / was a spy." "Eh?" He became sharply serious upon the in- stant. "What made you think that?" "I supposed you might be conducting some experi- ments, or perhaps writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter." "So! And that is all," he returned, with evident relief. "No, my dear sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what kind of a man you are. And so," he concluded with an opening of the hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for concealment, "and so I have watched you." "Why?" I asked. "The explanation is so simple: it was necessary." "Because of of Mr. Saffren?" I said slowly, and with some trepidation. "Precisely." The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Because I am sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am how should it be said? perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian." 94 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "I see." "Forgive me," he rejoined quickly, "but I am afraid you do not see. I am not his guardian by the law." "I had not supposed that you were," I said. "Why not?" "Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case his case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane." "Ha, my dear sir, you are right!" exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me, much pleased. "You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now much more sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like the little children's mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more ha, at the greatest, a year from now and he will not be different any longer; he will be like the rest of us. Only" the professor leaned forward and his big fist came down on the arm of his chair "he shall be better than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now," he continue^ CHAPTER SEVEN 95 leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential tone, "it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily, those same people might meet him again after a while. 'Ha,' they would say, 'there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!' And so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this quiet place where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any foolish people. But, my dear sir" he leaned forward again, and spoke emphatically "it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening 'but every evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone. It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the world, but a thousand saints! let us be civilised to one another!" 96 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "With all my heart," I said. "Ha! I wish you to know my young man," Keredec went on. "You will like him no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him and he is your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make friends, for he needs them." "I think he has a host of them," said I, "in Pro- fessor Keredec." My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and sighed. "That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor Keredec. And yet," he went on sadly, "it is all the friends that poor boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?" Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: "You will join me at the table on my veranda, won't you? I can hobble that far but not much farther." Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most closely screened by the vines and said: CHAPTER SEVEN 97 "May the table be placed yonder?" "Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone." "Ha, that is good," he exclaimed. "It is not human for a Frenchman to eat in the house in good weather." "It is a pity," I said, "that I should have been such a bugbear." This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions were altogether due to my presence at the inn. And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Kere- dec's mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident. 98 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "The reproach is deserved," he returned, after a pause. "It is to be wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we had the courage, or the slyness" he laughed "to investi- gate them." I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his back as he rose. "Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!" He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road. We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse, He crossed our vision and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a quick picture, like a flash of the cinemato- graph, but the pose of the lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she was not in white but in light blue, and her plain CHAPTER SEVEN 99 sailor hat was certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in recognising her. At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of foot- steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled pigeons fluttered up from the garden- path, betaking themselves to flight, and "that other monsieur" came leaping across the courtyard, through the archway and into the road. "Glouglou! Look quickly!" he called loudly, in French, as he came; "Who is that lady?" Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth. Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway, carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling on- ward at a speed which for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress. "That lady, monsieur?" he gasped, checking him- self at the young man's side and gazing after the trap, "that is Madame d'Armand." "Madame d'Armand," Saffren repeated the name slowly. "Her name is Madame d'Armand." "Yes, monsieur," said Amedee complacently; "it is an American lady who has married a French nobleman." CHAPTER VIII LIKE most painters, I have supposed the tools of my craft harder to manipulate than those of others. The use of words, particularly, seemed readier, handier for the con- trivance of effects than pigments. I thought the language of words less elusive than that of colour, leaving smaller margin for unintended effects; and. believing in complacent good faith that words con- veyed exact meanings exactly, it was my innocent conception that almost anything might be so de- scribed in words that all who read must inevitably perceive that thing precisely. If this were true, there would be little work for the lawyers, who produce such tortured pages in the struggle to be definite, who swing riches from one family to an- other, save men from violent death or send them to it, and earn fortunes for themselves through the dangerous inadequacies of words. I have learned how great was my mistake, and now I am wishing I could shift paper for canvas, that I might paint the young man who came to interest me so deeply. 100 CHAPTER -EIt?gan rather hesitatingly, "to be sure that I would not, for the world, make any effort to in- trude in your affairs, or Mr. Saffren's, and that I would not force your confidence in the remotest "No, no, no!" he interrupted. "Please do not fear I shall misinterpretate whatever you will say. You are our friend. We know it." CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 229 "Very well," I pursued; "then I speak with no fear of offending. When you first came to the inn I couldn't help seeing that you took a great many precautions for secrecy; and when you afterward explained these precautions to me on the ground that you feared somebody might think Mr. Saffren not quite sane, and that such an impression might injure him later well, I could not help seeing that your explanation did not cover all the ground." "It is true it did not." He ran his huge hand through the heavy white waves of his hair, and shook his head vigorously. "No; I knew it, my dear sir, I knew it well. But, what could I do? I would not have telled my own mother! This much I can say to you: we came here at a risk, but I thought that with great care it might be made little. And I thought a great good thing might be accomplish if we should come here, something so fine, so wonderful, that even if the danger had been great I would have risked it. I will tell you a little more: I think that great thing is being accomplish!" Here he rose to his feet excitedly and began to pace the room as he talked, the ancient floor shaking with his tread. "I think it is done! And ha! my dear sir, if it should be, this big Keredec will not 230 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY have lived in vain! It was a great task I under- take with my young man, and the glory to see it finish is almost here. Even if the danger should come, the thing is done, for all that is real and has true meaning is inside the soul!" "It was in connection with the risk you have mentioned that I came to talk," I returned with some emphasis, for I was convinced of the reality of Mr. Earl Percy and also very certain that he had no existence inside or outside a soul. "I think it necessary that you should know " But the professor was launched. I might as well have swept the rising tide with a broom. He talked with magnificent vehemence for twenty minutes, his theme being some theory of his own that the indi- viduality of a soul is immortal, and that even in perfection, the soul cannot possibly merge into any Nirvana. Meantime, I wondered how Mr. Percy was employing his time, but after one or two in- effectual attempts to interrupt, I gave myself tu silence until the oration should be concluded. "And so it is with my boy," he proclaimed, com- ing at last to the case in hand. "The spirit of him, the real Oliver Saffren, that has never change! The outside of him, those thing that belong to him, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 231 like his memory, they have change, but not himself, for himself is eternal and unchangeable. I have taught him, yes; I have helped him get the small things we can add to our possession a little knowl- edge, maybe, a little power of judgment. But, my dear sir, I tell you that such things are only pos- sessions of a man. They are not the man! All that a man is or ever shall be, he is when he is a baby. So with Oliver; he had lived a little while, twenty-six years, perhaps, when pft like that! he became almost as a baby again. He could re- member how to talk, but not much more. He had lost his belongings they were gone from the lobe of the brain where he had stored them; but he was not gone, no part of the real himself was lacking. Then presently they send him to me to make new his belongings, to restore his possessions. Ha, what a task! To take him with nothing in the world of his own and see that he get only good possessions, good knowledge, good experience! I took him to the mountains of the Tyrol two years and there his body became strong and splen- did while his brain was taking in the stores. It was quick, for his brain had retained some habits; it was not a baby's brain, and some small part of THE GUEST OF QUESNAY its old stores had not been lost. But if anything useless or bad remain, we empty it out I and those mountain 5 with their pure air. Now, I say he is all good and the work was good; I am proud! But I wish to restore all that was good in his life; your Keredec is something of a poet. You may* put it: much the old fool! And for that greates' restoration of all I have brought my boy back to France; since it was necessary. It was a madness, and I thank the good God I was mad enough to do it. I cannot tell you yet, my dear sir; bui> you shall see, you shall see what the folly of that old Keredec has done! You shall see, you shall and I promise it what a Paradise, when the good God helps, an old fool's dream can make!" A half-light had broken upon me as he talked, pacing the floor, thundering his psean of triumph, his Titanic gestures bruising the harmless air. Only one explanation, incredible, but possible, sufficed. Anything was possible, I thought anything was probable with this dreamer whom the trump of J?ame, executing a whimsical fantasia, proclaimed a man of science! "By the wildest chance," I gasped, "y u don't mean that you wanted him to fall in love " CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 233 He had reached the other end of the room, but at this he whirled about on me, his laughter rolling out again, till it might have been heard at Pere Baudry's. "Ha, my dear sir, you have said it! But you Toiew it; you told him to come to me and tell me.'.' "But I mean that you unless I utterly mis- understand you seem to imply that you had selected some one now in France whom you planned that he should care for that you had selected the lady whom you know as Madame d'Armand." "Again," he shouted, "you have said it!" "Professor Keredec," I returned, with asperity, "I have no idea how you came to conceive such a preposterous scheme, but I agree heartily that the word for it is madness. In the first place', I must tell you that her name is not even d'Armand " , "My dear sir, I know. It was the mistake of that absurd Amedee. She is Mrs. Harman." "You knew it?" I cried, hopelessly confused. "But Oliver still speaks of her as Madame d'Ar- mand." "He does not know. She has not told him." 234 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "But why haven't you told him?" "Ha, that is a story, a poem," he cried, beginning to pace the floor again "a ballad as old as the oldest of Provence! There is a reason, my dear sir, which I cannot tell you, but it lies within the romance of what you agree is my madness. Some day, I hope, you shall understand and applaud! In the meantime "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: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 235 "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 pro- found 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 236 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY 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 like- ness. 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." CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 237 "What is the lady's appearance?" "Monsieur the Professor," replied the hostess demurely, "she is not beautiful." "But what is she?" demanded Keredec impa- tiently; 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 238 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY 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 sun- shine 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 tune only to glance at him, to "take" CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 239 him, as it were, between two shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard flooded with sunshine, the figure of Madame Bros- sard 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 discord- ant 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 pas- sage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fan- tastically dressed in green and gold. Her coarse blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from which her gown hung precari- ously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double- chinned, coarse, greasy, smeared with blue pen- cillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge. At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly: 240 THE GUEST OF QIJESNAY "Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari c'est moil C'est ta femme, mon cceur!" She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical ferocity that was a very parox- ysm 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 Ke- redec; 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. "Embrasse moi, Larrabi ! Embrasse moi ! " she cried CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 241 "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 XVin 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 analyst, 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, which- ever 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 Bros- sard'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 him- self 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 dark- ness. . . . And he understood that the thing had 242 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 243 been done, that there was no going back of it. This very certainty increased the intensity of his rebellion a thousandfold. "I will have nay 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 intol- erable. 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 disas- trous 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!" 244 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY 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 unex- plainable 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 stag- gering, 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, CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 245 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 puri- fied, 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, break- fasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame 246 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY 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 pros- perous 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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 247 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 248 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY 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." CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 249 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 under- stand 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 aU 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 250 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY when I found that he was Larrabee Harman the revelation was inexpressibly shocking and distress- ing 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 >? "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." CHAPTER EIGHTEEN "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 con- dition. 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 des- perate 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." "I'm glad of that!" said George, striking his knee with his open palm. "That will go a great way toward " He paused, and asked suddenly: "Did this mar- riage take place in France?" "Yes. You'd better hear me through," I remonstrated. "When he was taken from the hospital, he was placed in charge of a Professor Keredec, a madman of whom you've probably heard." "Madman? Why, no; he's a member of the THE GUEST OF QUESNAY Institute; a psychologist or metaphysician, isn't he? at any rate of considerable celebrity." "Nevertheless," I insisted grimly, "as misty a vapourer as I ever saw; a poetic, self -contradicting and inconsistent orator, a blower of bubbles, a seer of visions, a mystic, and a dreamer about as scien- tific as Alice's White Knight! Harman's aunt, who lived in London, the only relative he had left, I believe and she has died since put him in Keredec's charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden for two years, the idea being literally to give him something like an education Keredec's phrase is 'restore mind to his soul'! What must have been quite as vital was to get him out of his horrible wife's clutches. And they did it, for she could not find him. But she picked up that rat in the garden out yonder he'd been some sort of stable-manager for Harman once and set him the track. He ran the poor boy down, and yes day she followed him. Now it amounts to a speci of sordid siege." "She wants money, of course." "Yes, more money; a fair allowance has always been sent to her. Keredec has interviewed her notary and she wants a settlement, naming a su er ., CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 253 actually larger than the whole estate amounts to. There were colossal expenditures and equally large shrinkages; what he has left is invested in English securities and is not a fortune, but of course she won't believe that and refuses to budge until this impossible settlement is made. You can imagine about how competent such a man as Keredec would be to deal with the situation. In the mean time, his ward is in so dreadful a state of horror and grief I am afraid it is possible that his mind may really give way, for it was not in a normal condition, of course, though he's perfectly sane, as I tell you. If it should," I concluded, with some bitterness, "I suppose Keredec will be still prating upliftingly on the saving of his soul!" "When was it that Louise saw him?" "Ah, that," I said, "is where Keredec has been a poet and a dreamer indeed. It was his plan that they should meet." "You mean he brought this wreck of Harman, these husks and shreds of a man, down here for Louise to see?" Ward cried incredulously. "Oh, monstrous !" "No," I answered. "Only insane. Not because there is anything lacking in Oliver in Harman, 254 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY I mean for I think that will be righted in time, but because the second marriage makes it a use- less cruelty that he should have been allowed to fall in love with his first wife again. Yet that was Keredec's idea of a 'beautiful restoration,' as he calls it!" "There is something behind all this that you don't know," said Ward slowly. "I'll tell you after I've seen this Keredec. When did the man make you his confidant?" "Last night. Most of what I learned was as much a revelation to his victim as it was to me. Harman did not know till then that the lady he had been meeting had been his wife, or that he had ever seen her before he came here. He had mistaken her name and she did not enlighten him." "Meeting?" said Ward harshly. "You speak as if " "They have been meeting every day, George." "I won't believe it of her!" he cried. "She couldn't " "It's true. He spoke to her in the woods one day; I was there and saw it. I know now that she knew him at once; and she ran away, but not in anger. I shouldn't be a very good fri( CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 255 of yours," I went on gently, "if I didn't give you the truth. They've been together every day since then, and I'm afraid miserably afraid, Ward- that her old feeling for him has been revived." I have heard Ward use an oath only two or three times in my life, and this was one of them. "Oh, by God!" he cried, starting to his feet; "I should like to meet Professor Keredec!" "I am at your service, my dear sir," said a deep voice from the veranda. And opening the door, the professor walked into the room. CHAPTER XIX HE looked old and tired and sad; it was plain that he expected attack and equally plain that he would meet it with fanatic serenity. And yet, the magnificent blunderer pre- sented so fine an aspect of the tortured Olympian, he confronted us with so vast a dignity the driven snow of his hair tousled upon his head and shoulders, like a storm in the higher altitudes that he regained, in my eyes, something of his mountain grandeur before he had spoken a word in defence. But sym- pathy is not what one should be entertaining for an antagonist; therefore I said cavalierly: "This is Mr. Ward, Professor Keredec. He is Mrs. Harman's cousin and close friend." "I had divined it." The professor made aFrench bow, and George responded with as slight a saluta- tion as it has been my lot to see. "We were speaking of your reasons," I con- tinued, "for bringing Mr. Harman to this place. Frankly, we were questioning your motive." 256 CHAPTER NINETEEN 257 "My motives? I have wished to restore to two young people the paradise which they had lost". Ward uttered an exclamation none the less violent because it was half-suppressed, while, for my part, I laughed outright; and as Keredec turned his eyes questioningly upon me, I said: "Professor Keredec, you'd better understand at once that I mean to help undo the harm you've done. I couldn't tell you last night, in Harman's presence, but I think you're responsible for the whole ghastly tragi-comedy as hopeless a tangle as ever was made on this earth!" This was even more roughly spoken than I had intended, but it did not cause him to look less mildly upon me, nor was there the faintest shadow of resentment in his big voice when he replied: "In this world things may be tangled, they may be sad, yet they may be good." "I'm afraid that seems rather a trite generality. I beg you to remember that plain-speaking is of some importance just now." "I shall remember." 'Then we should be glad of the explanation," said Ward, resting his arms on my table and leaning across it toward Keredec. 258 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "We should, indeed," I echoed. "It is simple," began the professor. "I learned my poor boy's history well, from those who could tell me, from his papers yes, and from the bundles of old-time letters which were given me since it was necessary that I should know everything. From all these I learned what a strong and beautiful soul was that lady who loved him so much that she ran away from her home for his sake. Hdlas! he was already the slave of what was bad and foolish, he had gone too far from himself, was overlaid with the habit of evil, and she could not save him then. The spirit was dying in him, although it was there, and it was good- Ward's acrid laughter rang out in the room, and my admiration went unwillingly to Keredec for the way he took it, which was to bow gravely, as if acknowledging the other's right to his own poii of view. "If you will study the antique busts," he "you will find that Socrates is Silenus dignifi< I choose to believe in the infinite capacities of men and in the spirit in all. And so I try to restore my poor boy his capacities and his spirit. But that was not all. The time was coming when I could do CHAPTER NINETEEN 259 DO more for him, when the little education of books would be finish' and he must go out in the world again to learn all newly how to make of himself a man of use. That is the time of danger, and the thought was troubling me when I learned that Madame Harman was here, near this inn, of which I knew. So I brought him." "The inconceivable selfishness, the devilish bru- tality of it!" Ward's face was scarlet. "You didn't care how you sacrificed her "Sacrificed!" The professor suddenly released the huge volume of his voice. "Sacrificed!" he thundered. "If I could give him back to her as he is now, it would be restoring to her all that she had loved in him, the real self of him! It would be the greatest gift in her life." "You speak for her?" demanded Ward, the ques- tion coming like a lawyer's. It failed to disturb Keredec, who replied quietly: "It is a quibble. I speak for her, yes, my dear sir. Her action in defiance of her family and her friends proved the strength of what she felt for the man she married; that she have remained with him three years until it was impossible proved its persistence; her letters, which I read with reverence, 260 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY proved its beauty to me. It was a living passion, one that could not die. To let them see each other again; that was all I intended. To give them their new chance and then, for myself, to keep out of the way. That was why " he turned to me "that was why I have been guilty of pretending to have that bad rheumatism, and I hope you will not think it an ugly trick of me! It was to give him his chance freely; and though at first I had much anxiety it was done. In spite of all his wicked follies theirs had been a true love, and nothing in this world could be more inevitable than that they should come together again if the chance could be given. And they have, my dear sirs! It has so hap- pened. To him it has been a wooing as if for the first time; so she has preferred it, keeping him to his mistake of her name. She feared that if he knew that it was the same as his own he might ask questions of me, and, you see, she did not know that I had made this little plan, and was afraid " "We are not questioning Mrs. Harman's motive George interrupted hotly, "but yours!" "Very well, my dear sir; that is all. I have explained them." CHAPTER NINETEEN 261 "You have?" I interjected. "Then, my dear Keredec, either you are really insane or I am! You knew that this poor, unfortunate devil of a Harman was tied to that hyenic prowler yonder who means to fatten on him, and will never release him; you knew that. Then why did you bring him down here to fall in love with a woman he he can never have? In pity's name, if you didn't hope to half kill them both, what did you mean?" "My dear fellow," interposed George quickly, "you underrate Professor Keredec's shrewdness* His plans are not so simple as you think. He knows that my cousin Louise never obtained a divorce from her husband." "What?" I said, not immediately comprehending his meaning. "I say, Mrs. Harman never obtained a divorce." "Are you delirious?" I gasped. "It's the truth; she never did." "I saw a notice of it at the time. 'A notice?' I saw a hundred !" "No. What you saw was that she had made an application for divorce. Her family got her that far and then she revolted. The suit was dropped." 262 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "It is true, indeed," said Keredec. "The poor boy was on the other side of the world, and he thought it was granted. He had been bad before, but from that time he cared nothing what became of him. That was the reason this Si woman I turned upon him sharply. "You knew it?" "It is a year that I have known it; when his estate was "Then why didn't you tell me last night?" "My dear sir, I could not in his presence, because it is one thing I dare not let him know. This Spanish woman is so hideous, her claim upon him is so horrible to him I could not hope to conti him he would shout it out to her that she cam call him husband. God knows what he would do! "Well, why shouldn't he shout it out to her?' "You do not understand," George interpc again, "that what Professor Keredec risked for 'poor boy,' in returning to France, was a trial the charge of bigamy!" The professor recoiled from the definite brutalil "My dear sir! It is not possible that such a thii can happen." "I conceive it very likely to happen," said Georj CHAPTER NINETEEN 263 : 'unless you get him out of the country before the .ady now installed here as his wife discovers the truth." "But she must not!" Keredec lifted both hands toward Ward appealingly; they trembled, and his voice betrayed profound agitation. "She cannot! She has never suspected such a thing; there is nothing that could make her suspect it!" "One particular thing would be my telling her," said Ward quietly. "Never!" cried the professor, stepping back from him. "You could not do that!" "I not only could, but I will, unless you get him out of the country and quickly!" "George!" I exclaimed, coming forward between them. "This won't do at all. You can't " "That's enough," he said, waving me back, and I saw that his hand was shaking, too, like Keredec's. His face had grown very white; but he controlled himself to speak with a coolness that made what he said painfully convincing. "I know what you think," he went on, addressing me, "but you're wrong. It isn't for myself. When I sailed for New York in the spring I thought there was a chance that she would carry out the action she begun four years ago and 264 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY go through the form of ridding herself of him d( tritely; that is, I thought there was some hope me; I believed there was until this morning. I know better now. If she's seen him again, am he's been anything except literally unbearable, it's all over with me. From the first, I never had a chance against him; he was a hard rival, even when he'd become only a cruel memory." His voice rose. "I've lived a sober, decent life, and I've treated her with gentleness and reverence since she was born, and he's done nothing but make a stew- pan of his life and neglect and betray her when he had her. Heaven knows why it is; it isn't because of anything he's done or has, it's just because it's him, I suppose, but I know my chance is goi for good! That leaves me free to act for her; one can accuse me of doing it for myself. And I swear she sha'n't go through that slough of spond again while I have breath in my body!" "Steady, George!" I said. "Oh, I'm steady enough," he cried. "Proft Keredec shall be convinced of it! My cousin is not going into the mire again; she shall be freed of it for ever: I speak as her relative now, the repre- sentative of her family and of those who care for CHAPTER NINETEEN 265 her happiness and good. Now she shall make the separation definite and legal! And let Professor Keredec get his 'poor boy* out of the country. Let him do it quickly! I make it as a condition of my not informing the woman yonder and her lawyer. And by my hope of salvation I warn you- -" "George, for pity's sake!" I shouted, throwing my arm about his shoulders, for his voice had risen to a pitch of excitement and fury that I feared must bring the whole place upon us. He caught himself up suddenly, stared at me blankly for a moment, then sank into a chair with a groan. As he did so. I became aware of a sound that had been worrying my subconsciousness for an indefinite length of time, and realised what it was. Some one was knocking for admission. I crossed the room and opened the door. Miss Elizabeth stood there, red-faced and flustered, and behind her stood Mr. Cresson Ingle, who looked dubiously amused. "Ah come in," I said awkwardly. "George is here. Let me present Professor Keredec " 'George is here!' ' echoed Miss Elizabeth, interrupting, and paying no attention whatever to 266 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY an agitated bow on the part of the professor, should say he was! They probably know that the way to Trouville!" "We were discussing " I began. "Ah, I know what you were discussing," she impatiently. "Come in, Cresson." She turned to Mr. Ingle, who was obviously reluctant. "It is a family matter, and you'll have to go through with it now." "That reminds me," I said. "May I offer "Not now!" Miss Elizabeth cut short a rather embarrassed handshake which her betrothed and I were exchanging. "I'm in a very nervous and dis- tressed state of mind, as I suppose we all are, for that matter. This morning I learned the true siti tion over here; and I'm afraid Louise has he? at least she's not at Quesnay. I got into a pj for fear she had come here, but thank heaven si does not seem to Good gracious! What's It was the discordant voice of Mariana la Mi siana, crackling in strident protest. My door still open; I turned to look and saw her, hot-fac< tousle-haired, insufficiently wrapped, striving ascend the gallery steps, but valiantly opposed Madame Brossard, who stood in the way. CHAPTER NINETEEN 267 "But no, madame," insisted Madame Brossard, excited but darkly determined. "You cannot ascend. There is nothing on the upper floor of this wing except the apartment of Professor Keredec." "Name of a dog!" shrilled the other. "It is my husband's apartment, I tell you. II y a une femme avec lui!" "It is Madame Harman who is there," said Keredec hoarsely in my ear. "I came away and left them together." "Come," I said, and, letting the others think what they would, sprang across the veranda, the professor beside me, and ran toward the two women who were beginning to struggle with more than their tongues. I leaped by them and up the steps, but Keredec thrust himself between our hostess and her opponent, planting his great bulk on the lowest step. Glanc- ing hurriedly over my shoulder, I saw the Spanish woman strike him furiously upon the breast with both hands, but I knew she would never pass him. I entered the salon of the "Grande Suite," and closed the door quickly behind me. Louise Harman was standing at the other end of the room; she wore the pretty dress of white and 268 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY lilac and the white hat. She looked cool and beau- tiful and good, and there were tears in her eyes. To come into this quiet chamber and see her so, after the hot sunshine and tawdry scene below, was like leaving the shouting market-place for a shadowy chapel. Her husband was kneeling beside her; he held one of her hands in both his, her other rested upon his head; and something in their attitudes made me know I had come in upon their leave-taking. But from the face he lifted toward her all trace of his tragedy had passed: the wonder and worship written there left no room for anything else. "Mrs. Harman " I began. "Yes?" she said. "I am coming." "But I don't want you to. I've come for fear you would, and you you must not," I stammered. "You must wait." "Why?" "It's necessary," I floundered. "There is scene ' "I know," she said quietly. "That must be, course." Harman rose, and she took both his hands, hold- ing them against her breast. CHAPTER NINETEEN 269 "My dear," she said gently, "my dearest, you must stay. Will you promise not to pass that door, even, until you have word from me again?" "Yes," he answered huskily, "if you'll promise it shall come some day?" "It shall, indeed. Be sure of it." I had turned away, but I heard the ghost of his voice whispering "good-bye." Then she was beside me and opening the door. I tried to stay her. "Mrs. Harman," I urged, "I earnestly beg you- "No," she answered, "this is better." She stepped out upon the gallery; I followed, and she closed the door. Upon the veranda of my pavilion were my visitors from Quesnay, staring up at us apprehensively; Madame Brossard and Keredec still held the foot of the steps, but la Mursiana had abandoned the siege, and, accom- panied by Mr. Percy and Rameau, the black- bearded notary, who had joined her, was crossing the garden toward her own apartment. At the sound of the closing door, she glanced over her shoulder, sent forth a scream, and, whirl- 270 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ing about, ran viciously for the steps, where she was again blocked by the indomitable Keredec. "Ah, you foolish woman, I know who you are," she cried, stepping back from him to shake a menac- ing hand at the quiet lady by my side. "You want to get yourself into trouble! That man in the room up there has been my husband these two years and more." "No, madame," said Louise Harman, "you are mistaken; he is my husband." "But you divorced him," vociferated the other wildly. "You divorced him in America!" "No. You are mistaken," the quiet voice replied. "The suit was withdrawn. He is still my husband." I heard the professor's groan of despair, but it was drowned in the wild shriek of Mariana. "What? You tell me that? Ah, the miserable! If what you say is true, he shall pay bitterly! He shall wish that he had died by fire! What! You think he can marry me, break my leg so that I cannot dance again, ruin my career, and then go away with a pretty woman like you and be happy? Aha, there are prisons in France for people who marry two Uke that; I do not know what they do in youf CHAPTER NINETEEN 271 barbaric country, but they are decent people over here and they punish. He shall pay for it in suffer- ing " her voice rose to an incredible and unbear- able shriek "and you, you shall pay, too! You can't come stealing honest women's husbands like that. You shall pay!" I saw George Ward come running forward with his hand upraised in a gesture of passionate warn- ing, for Mrs. Harman, unnoticed by me I was watching the Spanish woman had descended the steps and had passed Keredec, walking straight to Mariana. I leaped down after her, my heart in my throat, fearing a thousand things. "You must not talk like that," she said, not lift- ing her voice yet every one in the courtyard heard her distinctly. "You can do neither of us any harm in the world." CHAPTER XX IT is impossible to say what Mariana would have done had there been no interference, for she had worked herself into one of those furies which women of her type can attain when they feel the occasion demands it, a paroxysm none the less dangerous because its foundation is histrionic. But Rameau threw his arms about her; Mr. Percy came hastily to his assistance, and Ward and I sprang in between her and the too-fearless lady she strove to reach. Even at that, the finger-nails of Mariana's right hand touched the pretty white hat but only touched it and no more. Rameau and the little spy managed to get their vociferating burden across the courtyard and into her own door, where she suddenly subsided, dis- appearing within the passage to her apartment in unexpected silence indubitably a disappointment to the interested Amedee, to Glouglou, Francois, and the whole personnel of the inn, who hastened to group themselves about the door in attentive a1 tudes. 272 CHAPTER TWENTY 273 "In heaven's name," gasped Miss Elizabeth, seiz- ing her cousin by the arm, "come into the pavilion. Here's the whole world looking at us!" "Professor Keredec " Mrs. Harman began, resist- ing, and turning to the professor appealingly. "Oh, let him come too!" said Miss Elizabeth desperately. "Nothing could be worse than this!" She led the way back to the pavilion, and, refus- ing to consider a proposal on the part of Mr. Ingle and myself to remain outside, entered the room last, herself, producing an effect of "shooing" the rest of us in; closed the door with surprising force, relapsed in a chair, and burst into tears. "Not a soul at Quesnay," sobbed the mortified chatelaine "not one but will know this before dinner! They'll hear the whole thing within two hours." "Isn't there any way of stopping that, at least?" Ward said to me. "None on earth, unless you go home at once and turn your visitors and their servants out of the house," I answered. "There is nothing they shouldn't know," said Mrs. Harman. George turned to her with a smile so bravely man- 274 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY aged that I was proud of him. "Oh, yes, there is," he said. "We're going to get you out of all this." "All this?" she repeated. "All this mire!" he answered. "We're going to get you out of it and keep you out of it, now, for good. I don't know whether your revelation to the Spanish woman will make that easier or harder, but I do know that it makes the mire deeper." "For whom?" "For Harman. But you sha'n't share it!" Her anxious eyes grew wider. "How have I made it deeper for him? Wasn't it necessary that the poor woman should be told the truth?" "Professor Keredec seemed to think it important that she shouldn't." She turned to Keredec with a frightened gesture and an unintelligible word of appeal, as if entreat- ing him to deny what George had said. The pi fessor's beard was trembling; he looked haggai an almost pitiable apprehension hung upon his lids; but he came forward manfully. "Madame," he said, "y u could never in y< life do anything that would make harm. You w< right to speak, and I had short sight to fear, it was the truth." CHAPTER TWENTY 275 "But why did you fear it?" "It was because " he began, and hesitated. "I must know the reason," she urged. "I must know just what I've done." "It was because," he repeated, running a nervous hand through his beard, "because the knowledge would put us so utterly in this people's power. Already they demand more than we could give them; now they can "They can do what?" she asked tremulously. His eyes rested gently on her blanched and stricken face. "Nothing, my dear lady," he answered, swallowing painfully. "Nothing that will last. I am an old man. I have seen and I have I have thought. And I tell you that only the real survives; evil actions are some phantoms that disappear. They must not trouble us." "That is a high plane," George intervened, and he spoke without sarcasm. "To put it roughly, these people have been asking more than the Harman estate is worth; that was on the strength of the woman's claim as a wife; but now they know she is not one, her position is immensely strengthened, for she has only to go before the nearest Commissaire de Police " 276 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Oh, no!" Mrs. Harman cried passionately, haven't done that! You mustn't tell me I You mustn't!" "Never!" he answered. "There could not be a greater lie than to say you have done it. The responsibility is with the wretched and vicious boy who brought the catastrophe upon himself. But don't you see that you've got to keep out of it, that we've got to take you out of it?" "You can't! I'm part of it; better or worse, it's as much mine as his." "No, no!" cried Miss Elizabeth. "You mustn't tell us thai!" Still weeping, she sprang up and threw her arms about her brother. "It's too hor- rible of you- " "It is what I must tell you," Mrs. Harman said. "My separation from my husband is over. I shall be with him now for "I won't listen to you!" Miss Elizabeth lifted her wet face from George's shoulder, and there was a note of deep anger in her voice. "You don't know what you're talking about; you haven't the faintest idea of what a hideous situation that creature has made for himself. Don't you know that that awful woman was right, and there are laws in CHAPTER TWENTY 277 France? When she finds she can't get out of him all she wants, do you think she's going to let him off? I suppose she struck you as being quite the sort who'd prove nobly magnanimous! Are you so blind you don't see exactly what's going to happen? She'll ask twice as much now as she did before; and the moment it's clear that she isn't going to get it, she'll call in an agent of police. She'll get her money in a separate suit and send him to prison to do it. The case against him is positive; there isn't a shadow of hope for him. You talk of being with him; don't you see how preposterous that is? Do you imagine they en- courage family housekeeping in French prisons?" "Oh, come, this won't do!" The speaker was Cresson Ingle, who stepped forward, to my sur- prise; for he had been hovering in the background wearing an expression of thorough discomfort. "You're going much too far," he said, touching his betrothed upon the arm. "My dear Elizabeth, there is no use exaggerating; the case is unpleasant enough just as it is." "In what have I exaggerated?" she demanded. "Why, I knew Larrabee Harman," he returned. "I knew him fairly well. I went as far as Honolulu 278 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY with him, when he and some of his heelers started round the world; and I remember that papers were served on him in San Francisco. Mrs. Harman had made her application; it was just before he sailed. About a year and a half or two years later I met him again, in Paris. He was in pretty bad shape; seemed hypnotised by this Mariana and afraid as death of her; she could go into a tantrum that would frighten him into anything. It was a joke down along the line of the all-night dancers and cafes that she was going to marry him; and some one told me afterward that she claimed to have brought it about. I suppose it's true; bi there is no question of his having married her good faith. He believed that the divorce hi been granted; he'd offered no opposition to it whj ever. He was travelling continually, and I doi think he knew much of what was going on, ev< right around him, most of the time. He with cognac and absinthe in the morning, you For myself, I always supposed the suit had carried through; so did people generally, I thii He'll probably have to stand trial, and of coui he's technically guilty, but I don't believe h< be convicted though I must say it would hai CHAPTER TWENTY 279 been a most devilish good thing for him if he could have been got out of France before la Mursiana heard the truth. Then he could have made terms with her safely at a distance she'd have been powerless to injure him and would have precious soon come to time and been glad to take whatever he'd give her. Now, I suppose, that's impossible, and they'll arrest him if he tries to budge. But this talk of prison and all that is nonsense, my dear Elizabeth!" "You admit there is a chance of it!" she re- torted. "I've said all I had to say," returned Mr. Ingle with a dubious laugh. "And if you don't mind, I believe I'll wait for you outside, in the machine. I want to look at the gear-box." He paused, as if in deference to possible opposi- tion, and, none being manifested, went hastily from the room with a sigh of relief, giving me, as he carefully closed the door, a glance of profound commiseration over his shoulder. Miss Elizabeth had taken her brother's hand, not with the effect of clinging for sympathy; nor had her throwing her arms about him produced that effect; one could as easily have imagined Brunhilda 280 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY hiding her face in a man's coat-lapels. George's sister wept, not weakly: she was on the defensive, but not for herself. "Does the fact that he may possibly escape going to prison" she addressed her cousin "make his position less scandalous, or can it make the man himself less detestable?" Mrs. Harman looked at her steadily. There was a long and sorrowful pause. "Nothing is changed," she ,-aid finally; her eyes still fixed gravely on Miss Elizabeth's. At that, the other's face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked exclamation. "Oh," she cried "you've fallen in love with playing the martyr; it's self-lovel You see yourself in the role! No one on earth could make me believe you're in love with this degraded imbecile all that's left of the wreck of a vicious life! It isn't that! It's be- cause you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on your knees and wash off the vileness from this befouled creature; you want " "Madame!" Keredec interrupted tremendously, "you speak out of no knowledge!" He leaned toward her across the table, which shook under the wei| CHAPTER TWENTY 281 of his arms. "There is no vileness; no one who is clean remains befouled because of the things that are gone." "They do not?" She laughed hysterically, and for my part, I sighed in despair for there was no stopping him. "They do not, indeed! Do you know the rela- tion of time to this little life of ours? We have only the present moment; your consciousness of that is your existence. Your knowledge of each present moment as it passes and it passes so swiftly that each word I speak now overlaps it yet it is all we have. For all the rest, for what has gone by and what is yet coming that has no real existence; it is all a dream. It is not alive. It is not! It is nothing! So the soul that stands clean and pure to-day is clean and pure and that is all there is to say about that soul!" "But a soul with evil tendencies," Ward began impatiently, "if one must meet you on your own ground " "Ha! my dear sir, those evil tendencies would be in the soiling memories, and my boy is free from them." "He went toward all that was soiling before. THE GUEST OF QUESNAY Surely you can't pretend he may not take that direction again?" "That," returned the professor quickly, "is his to choose. If this lady can be with him now, he will choose right." "So!" cried Miss Elizabeth, "you oner her the role of a guide, do you? First she is to be his com- papion through a trial for bigamy in a French court, and, if he is acquitted, his nurse, teacher, and moral preceptor?" She turned swiftly to her cousin. "That's your conception of a woman's mission?" "I haven't any mission," Mrs. Harman answered quietly. "I've never thought about missions; I only know I belong to him; that's all I ever thought about it. I don't pretend to explain it, or make it seem reasonable. And when I met him again, here, it was it was it was proved to me." "Proved?" echoed Miss Elizabeth incredulously. "Yes; proved as certainly as the sun shining proves that it's day." "Will you tell us?" It was I who asked the question: I spoke involun- tarily, but she did not seem to think it strai that I should ask. CHAPTER TWENTY 283 "Oh, when I first met him," she said tremulously, "I was frightened; but it was not he who frightened me it was the rush of my own feeling. I did not know what I felt, but I thought I might die, and he was so like himself as I had first known him but so changed, too; there was something so wonderful about him, something that must make any stranger feel sorry for him, and yet it is beau- tiful She stopped for a moment and wiped her eyes, then went on bravely: "And the next day he came, and waited for me I should have come here for him if he hadn't and I fell in with the mis- take he had made about my name. You see, he'd heard I was called 'Madame d'Armand,' and I wanted him to keep on thinking that, for I thought if he knew I was Mrs. Harman he might find out She paused, her lip beginning to tremble. "Oh, don't you see why I didn't want him to know? I didn't want him to suffer as he would as he does now, poor child! but most of all I wanted I wanted to see if he would fall in love with me again! I kept him from knowing, because, if he thought I was a stranger, and the same thing hap- pened again his caring for me, I mean She had begun to weep now, freely and openly, but 84 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY not from grief. "Oh!" she cried, "don't you see how it's all proven to me?" "I see how it has deluded you!" said Miss Eliza- beth vehemently. "I see what a rose-light it has thrown about this creature; but it won't last, thank God! any more than it did the other time. The thing is for you to come to your senses before "Ah, my dear, I have come to them at last and for ever!" The words rang full and strong, though she was white and shaking, and heavy tears filled her eyes. "I know what I am doing now, if I never knew before!" "You never did know " Miss Ward began, but George stopped her. "Elizabeth!" he said quickly. "We mustn't go on like this; it's more than any of us can bear. Come, let's get out into the air; let's get back to Quesnay. We'll have Ingle drive us around the longer way, by the sea." He turned to his cousin. "Louise, you'll come now? If not, we'll have to stay here with you." "I'll come," she answered, trying bravely to stop the tears that kept rising in spite of her; "if you'll wait till" and suddenly she flashed through them a smile so charming that my heart ached the harder for George "till I can stop crying!" CHAPTER XXI MR. EARL PERCY and I sat opposite each other at dinner that evening. Perhaps, for charity's sake, I should add that though we faced each other, and, indeed, eyed each other solemnly at intervals, we partook not of the same repast, having each his own table; his being set in the garden at his constant station near the gallery steps, and mine, some fifty feet distant, upon my own veranda, but moved out from behind the honeysuckle screen, for I sat alone and the night i was warm. To analyse my impression of Mr. Percy's glances, I cannot conscientiously record that I found favour in his eyes. For one thing, I fear he may not have recalled to his bosom a clarion sentiment (which ! doubtless he had ofttimes cheered from his native gallery in softer years): the honourable declaration that many an honest heart beats beneath a poor man's coat. As for his own attire, he was even as the lilies of Quesnay; that is to say, I beheld upon him the same formation of tie that I had seen there, 285 286 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY the same sensuous beauty of the state waistcoat, though I think that his buttons were, if anything, ! somewhat spicier than those which had awed me at the chateau. And when we simultaneously reached the fragrant hour of coffee, the cigarette case that glittered in his hand was one for which some lady- friend of his (I knew intuitively) must have given her All and then been left in debt. Amedee had served us both; Glouglou, as afore- time, attending the silent "Grande Suite," where the curtains were once more tightly drawn. Mon- sieur Rameau dined with his client in her own salon, evidently; at least, Victorine, thefemme de chambre, passed to and from the kitchen in that direction, bearing laden trays. When Mr. Percy's cigarette had been lighted, hesitation marked the manner of our maitre d'hotel; plainly he wavered, but finally old custom prevailed; abandoning the cigarette, he chose the cigar, and, hastily clearing my fashionable opponent's table, approached the pavilion with his most conversational face. I greeted him indifferently, but with hidd pleasure, for my soul (if Keredec is right and I have one) lay sorrowing. I needed relief, and whatever else Amedee was, he was always that. I spoke first : . CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 287 "Amedee, how long a walk is it from Quesnay to Pere Baudry's?" "Monsieur, about three-quarters of an hour for a good walker, one might say." "A long way for Jean Ferret to go for a cup of cider," I remarked musingly. "Eh? But why should he?" asked Amedee blankly. "Why indeed? Surely even a Norman gardener lives for more than cider! You usually meet him there about noon, I believe?" Methought he had the grace to blush, though there is an everlasting doubt in my mind that it may have been the colour of the candle-shade pro- ducing that illusion. It was a strange thing to see, at all events, and, talcing it for a physiological fact at the time, I let my willing eyes linger upon it as long as it (or its appearance) was upon him. "You were a little earlier than usual to-day," I continued finally, full of the marvel. "Monsieur?" He was wholly blank again. "Weren't you there about eleven? Didn't you go about two hours after Mr. Ward and his friends left here?" He scratched his head. "I believe I had an 288 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY errand in that direction. Eh? Yes, I remember. Truly, I think it so happened." "And you found Jean Ferret there?" "Where, monsieur?" "At Pere Baudry's." "No, monsieur." "What?" I exclaimed. "No, monsieur." He was firm, somewhat re- proachful. "You didn't see Jean Ferret this morning?" "Monsieur?" "Amedee!" "Eh, but I did not find him at Pere Baudry's! It may have happened that I stopped there, but he did not come until some time after." "After you had gone away from Pere Baudry's, you mean?" "No, monsieur; after I arrived there. Truly." "Now we have it! And you gave him the news of all that had happened here?" "Monsieur!" A world no, a constellation, a universe! of reproach was in the word. "I retract the accusation," I said promptly. "I meant something else." CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 289 "Upon everything that takes place at our hotel here, I am silent to all the world." "As the grave!" I said with enthusiasm. "Truly that is a thing well known. But Jean Ferret, jthen? He is not so discreet; I have suspected that j you are in his confidence. At times you have even iiinted as much. Can you tell me if he saw the automobile of Monsieur Ingle when it came back to the chateau after leaving here?" "It had arrived the moment before he de- parted." "Quite so! I understand," said I. "He related to me that Mademoiselle Ward tiad the appearance of agitation, and Madame i'Armand that of pallor, which was also the case with Monsieur Ward." "Therefore," I said, "Jean Ferret ran all the way to Pere Baudry's to learn from you the reason for this agitation and this pallor?" "But, monsieur " "I retract again!" I cut him off to save time. "What other news had he?" There came a gleam into his small, infolded eyes, |% tiny glitter reflecting the mellow candle-light, but changing it, in that reflection, to a cold and sinister 290 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY point of steel. It should have warned me, but, as he paused, I repeated my question. "Monsieur, people say everything," he answered, frowning as if deploring what they said in some secret, particular instance. "The world is full of idle gossipers, tale-bearers, spreaders of scandal! And, though I speak with perfect respect, all the people at the chateau are not perfect in such ways." "Do you mean the domestics?" "The visitors!" "What do they say?" "Eh, well, then, they say but no!" He con- triVed a masterly pretense of pained reluctance. "I cannot " "Speak out," I commanded, piqued by his^shilly- shallying. "What do they say?" "Monsieur, it is about" he shifted his weight from one leg to the other "it is about about that beautiful Mademoiselle Elliott who sometimes comes here." This was so far from what I had expected that I was surprised into a slight change of attitude, which all too plainly gratified him, though he made an effort to conceal it. "Well," I said uneasily, "what do they find to say of Mademoiselle Elliott?" CHAPTER TWENTY-ON "They say that her painting is only a ruse to see monsieur." "To see Monsieur Saffren, yes." "But, no!" he cried. "That is not " "Yes, it is," I assured him calmly. "As you know, Monsieur Saffren is very, very handsome, and Mademoiselle Elliott, being a painter, is naturally anxious to look at him from time to time." "You are sure?" he said wistfully, even plain- tively. "That is not the meaning Jean Ferret put upon it." "He was mistaken." "It may be, it may be," he returned, greatly crestfallen, picking up his tray and preparing to go. "But Jean Ferret was very positive." "And I am even more so!" "Then that malicious maid of Mademoiselle Ward's was mistaken also," he sighed, "when she said that now a marriage is to take place between Mademoiselle Ward and Monsieur Ingle "Proceed," I bade him. He moved a few feet nearer the kitchen. "The malicious woman said to Jean Ferret " He paused and coughed. "It was in reference to those Italian jewels monsieur used to send " 292 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "What about them?" I asked ominously. "The woman says that Mademoiselle Ward- he increased the distance between us "that now she should give them to Mademoiselle Elliott! Good night, monsieur!" His entrance into the kitchen was precipitate. I sank down again into the wicker chair (from which I had hastily risen) and contemplated the stars. But the short reverie into which I then fell was interrupted by Mr. Percy, who, sauntering leisurely about the garden, paused to address me. "You folks thinks you was all to the gud, gittin* them trunks off, what?" "You speak in mysterious numbers," I returned, having no comprehension of his meaning. "I suppose you don 5 know nothin' about it," he laughed satirically. "You didn' go over to Lisieux 'saft'noon to ship 'em? Oh, no, not you!" "I went for a long walk this afternoon, Mr. Percy. Naturally, I couldn't have walked so far as Lisieux and back:" "Luk here, m'friend," he said sharply "I reco'- nise 'at you're tryin' t' play your own hand, but I ast you as man to man: Do you think you got any chanst t' git that feller off t' Paris?" CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 293 "Z>o you think it will rain to-night?" I in- quired. The light of a reflecting lamp which hung on the wall near the archway enabled me to perceive a bitter frown upon his forehead. "When a gentleman asts a question as a gen'leman," he said, his voice expressing a noble pathos, "I can't see no call for no other gen'leman to go an' play the smart Aleck and not answer him." In simple dignity he turned his back upon me and strolled to the other end of the courtyard, leaving me to the renewal of my reverie. It was not a happy one. My friends old and new I saw inextricably caught in a tangle of cross-purposes, miserably and hopelessly involved in a situation for which I could i predict no possible relief. I was able to understand now the beauty as well as the madness of Keredec's plan; and I had told him so (after the departure of the Quesnay party), asking his pardon for my brusquerie of the morning. But the towering edifice his hopes had erected was now tumbled about his ears: he had failed to elude the Mursiana. There could be no doubt of her absolute control of the situation. That was evident in the every 294 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY step of the youth now confidently parading before me. Following his active stride with my eye, I ob- served him in the act of saluting, with a gracious nod of his bare head, some one, invisible to me, who was approaching from the road. Immediately after and altogether with the air of a person merely "happening in" a slight figure, clad in a long coat, a short skirt, and a broad-brimmed, veil-bound brown hat, sauntered casually through the archway and came into full view in the light of the reflector. I sprang to my feet and started toward her, uttering an exclamation which I was unable to stifle, though I tried to. "Good evening, Mr. Percy," she said cheerily. "It's the most exuberant night. You're quite hearty, I hope?" "Takin* a walk, I see, little lady," he observed with genial patronage. "Oh, not just for that," she returned. "It's more to see him.' 9 She nodded to me, and, as I reached her, carelessly gave me her left hand. "You know I'm studying with him," she continued Mr. Percy, exhibiting a sketch-book under her ai "I dropped over to get a criticism." CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 295 "Oh, drawin'-lessons?" said Mr. Precy tolerantly. ''Well, don' lemme interrup' ye." He moved as if to withdraw toward the steps, }ut she detained him with a question. "You're spending the rest of the summer here?" "That depends," he answered tersely. "I hear you have some passionately interesting ,'riends." "Where did you hear that?" "Ah, don't you know?" she responded commiser- itingly. "This is the most scandalously gossipy neighbourhood in France. My dear young man, 3very one from here to Timbuctu knows all about t by this time!" "All about what?" "About the excitement you're such a valuable Dart of; about your wonderful Spanish friend and low she claims the strange young man here for ler husband." "They'll know more'n that, I expec'," he re- turned with a side glance at me, "before very ong." "Every one thinks I am so interesting," she attled on artlessly, "because I happened to meet /ou in the woods. I've held quite a levee all day. 296 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY In a reflected way it makes a heroine of me, you see, because you are one of the very most prominent figures in it all. I hope you won't think I've been too bold," she pursued anxiously, "in claiming that I really am one of your acquaintances?" "That'll be all right," he politely assured her. "I am so glad." Her laughter rang out gaily. "Because I've been talking about you as if we were the oldest friends, and I'd hate to have them find me out. I've told them everything about your appearance you see, and how your hair was parted, and how you were dressed, and "Luk here," he interrupted, suddenly discharging his Bowery laugh, "did you tell 'em how he was dressed?" He pointed a jocular finger at me. "That wud 'a' made a hit!" "No; we weren't talking of him." "Why not? He's in it, too. Bullieve me, he thinks he is!" "In the excitement, you mean?" "Right!" said Mr. Percy amiably. "He goes round holdin' Rip Van Winkle Keredec's hand when the ole man's cryin'; helpin' him sneak his trunks off t' Paris playin' the hired man gener'ly. Oh, he thinks he's quite the boy, in this trouble!" CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 297 "I'm afraid it's a small part," she returned, "compared to yours." "Oh, I hold my end up, I guess." "I should think you'd be so worn out and sleepy you couldn't hold your head up!" "Who? Me? Not t'-night, m'little friend. I tuk my sleep 's aft'noon and let Rameau do the Sherlock a little while." She gazed upon him with unconcealed admiration. "You are wonderful," she sighed faintly, and "Won- derful!" she breathed again. "How prosaic are drawing-lessons," she continued, touching my arm and moving with me toward the pavilion, "after listening to a man of action like that!" Mr. Percy, establishing himself comfortably in a garden chair at the foot of the gallery steps, was heard to utter a short cough as he renewed the light of his cigarette. My visitor paused upon my veranda, humming, "Quand 1' Amour Meurt" while I went within and lit a lamp. "Shall I bring the light out there?" I asked, but, turning, found that she was already in the room. "The sketch-book is my duenna," she said, sink- 298 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ing into a chair upon one side of the centre table, upon which I placed the lamp. "Lessons are un- questionable, at any place or time. Behold Ihe beautiful posies!" She spread the book open on the table between us, as I seated myself opposite her, revealing some antique coloured smudges of flowers. "Elegancies of Eighteen-Forty ! Isn't that a survival of the period when young ladies had 'accomplishments/ though ! I found it at the chateau and " "Never mind," I said. "Don't you know that you can't ramble over the country alone at this time of night?" "If you speak any louder," she said, with some urgency of manner, "you'll be 'hopelessly com- promised socially,' as Mrs. Alderman McGinnis and the Duchess of Gwythyl-Corners say" she directed my glance, by one of her own, through the open door to Mr. Percy "because he'll hear you and know that the sketch-book was only a shallow pretext of mine to see you. Do be a little man- fully self-contained, or you'll get us talked about! And as for 'this time of night,' I believe it's almost half past nine." "Does Miss Ward know " CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 299 "Do you think it likely? One of the most con- venient things about a chateau is the number of ways to get out of it without being seen. I had a choice of eight. So I 'suffered fearfully from neu- ralgia/ dined in my own room, and sped through the woods to my honest forester." She nodded brightly. "That's you!" "You weren't afraid to come through the woods alone?" I asked, uncomfortably conscious that her gaiety met a dull response from me. "No." "But if Miss Ward finds that you're not at the chateau " "She won't; she thinks I'm asleep. She brought me up a sleeping-powder herself." "She thinks you took it?" "She knows I did," said Miss Elliott. "I'm full of it! And that will be the reason if you notice that I'm particularly nervous or excited." "You seem all of that," I said, looking at her eyes, which were very wide and very brilliant. "However, I believe you always do." "Ah!" she smiled. "I knew you thought me atrocious from the first. You find myriads of objections to me, don't you?" 300 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY I had forgotten to look away from her eyes, and I kept on forgetting. (The same thing had happened several times lately; and each time, by a some- what painful coincidence, I remembered my age at precisely the instant I remembered to look away.) "Dazzling" is a good old-fashioned word for eyes like hers; at least it might define their effect on me. "If I did manage to object to you," I said slowly, "it would be a good thing for me wouldn't it?" "Oh, I've won!" she cried. "Won?" I echoed. "Yes. I laid a wager with myself that I'd have a pretty speech from you before I went out of your life" she checked a laugh, and concluded thrill- ingly "forever! I leave Quesnay to-morrow!" "Your father has returned from America?" "Oh dear, no," she murmured. "I'll be quite at the world's mercy. I must go up! to Paris and retire from public life until he does come. I shall take the vows in some obscure but respectable pension" "You can't endure the life at the chateau any longer?" "It won't endure me any longer. If I shouldn't CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 301 go to-morrow I'd be put out, I think after to- night!" "But you intimated that no one would know about to-night!" "The night isn't over yet," she replied enig- matically. "It almost is for you," I said; "because in ten minutes I shall take you back to the chateau gates." She offered no comment on this prophecy, but gazed at me thoughtfully and seriously for several moments. "I suppose you can imagine," she said, in a tone that threatened to become tremulous, "what sort of an afternoon we've been having up there?" "Has it been " I began. "Oh, heart-breaking! Louise came to my room as soon as they got back from here, this morning, and told me the whole pitiful story. But they didn't let her stay there long, poor woman!" "They?" I asked. "Oh, Elizabeth and her brother. TheyVe bee* at her all afternoon off and on." "To do what?" "To 'save herself,' so they call it. They're in- 302 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY sisting that she must not see her poor husband again. They're determined she sha'n't." "But George wouldn't worry her," I objected. "Oh, wouldn't he?" The girl laughed sadly. "I don't suppose he could help it, he's in such a state himself, but between him and Elizabeth it's hard to see how poor Mrs. Harman lived through the day." "Well," I said slowly, "I don't see that they're not right. She ought to be kept out of all this as much as possible; and if her husband has to go through a trial ; "I want you to tell me something," Miss Elliott interrupted. "How much do you like Mr. Ward?" "He's an old friend. I suppose I like my old friends in about the same way that other people like theirs." "How much do you like Mr. Saffren I mean Mr. Harman?" "Oh, thai!" I groaned. "If I could still call him 'Oliver Saffren/ if I could still think of him as 'Oliver Saffren,' it would be easy to answer. I never was so 'drawn' to a man in my life before. But when I think of him as Larrabee Harman, I am full of misgivings." "Louise isn't," she put in eagerly, and with some- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 303 thing oddly like the manner of argument. "His wife isn't!" "Oh, I know. Perhaps one reason is that she never saw him at quite his worst. I did. I had only two glimpses of him of the briefest but they inspired me with such a depth of dislike that I can't tell you how painful it was to discover that 'Oliver Saffren' this strange, pathetic, attractive friend of mine is the same man." "Oh, but he isn't!" she exclaimed quickly. "Keredec says he is," I laughed helplessly. "So does Louise," returned Miss Elliott, disdain- ing consistency in her eagerness. "And she's right and she cares more for him than she ever did!" "I suppose she does." "Are you ' the girl began, then stopped for a moment, looking at me steadily. "Aren't you a little in love with her?" "Yes," I answered honestly. "Aren't you?" "That's what I wanted to know!" she said; and i as she turned a page in the sketch-book for the benefit of Mr. Percy, I saw that her hand had begun to tremble. "Why?" I asked, leaning toward her across the table. 304 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "Because, if she were involved in some under- taking something that, if it went wrong, would endanger her happiness and, I think, even her life for it might actually kill her if she failed, and brought on a worse catastrophe "Yes?" I said anxiously, as she paused again. "You'd help her?" she said. "I would indeed," I assented earnestly. "I told her once I'd do anything in the world for her." "Even if it involved something that George Ward might never forgive you for?" "I said, 'anything in the world/ " I returned, perhaps a little huskily. "I meant all of that. If there is anything she wants me to do, I shall do it." She gave a low cry of triumph, but immediately checked it. Then she leaned far over the table, her face close above the book, and, tracing the outline of an uncertain lily with her small, brown- gloved forefinger, as though she were consulting me on the drawing, "I wasn't afraid to come through the woods alone," she said, in a very low voice, "because I wasn't alone. Louise came with me." "What?" I gasped. "Where is she?" "At the Baudry cottage down the road. They CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE .'505 won't miss her at the chateau until morning; I locked her door on the outside, and if they go to bother her again though I don't think they will they'll believe she's fastened it on the inside and is asleep. She managed to get a note to Keredec late this afternoon; it explained everything, and he had some trunks carried out the rear gate of the inn and carted over to Lisieux to be shipped to Paris from there. It is to be supposed or hoped, at least that this woman and her people will believe that means Professor Keredec and Mr. Harman will try to get to Paris in the same way." "So," I said, "that's what Percy meant about the trunks. I didn't understand." "He's on watch, you see," she continued, turning a page to another drawing. "He means to sit up all night, or he wouldn't have slept this afternoon. He's not precisely the kind to be in the habit of afternoon naps Mr. Percy!" She laughed ner- vously. "That's why it's almost absolutely necessary for us to have you. If we have the thing is so simple that it's certain." "If you have me for what?" I asked. "If you'll help" and, as she looked up, her eyes, now very close to mine, were dazzling indeed 306 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY "I'll adore you for ever and ever! Oh, much longer than you'd like me to!" "You mean she's going to "I mean that she's going to run away with him again," she whispered. CHAPTER XXII x AT midnight there was no mistaking the pal- pable uneasiness with which Mr. Percy, faithful sentry, regarded the behaviour of Miss Elliott and myself as we sat conversing upon the veranda of the pavilion. It was not fear for the security of his prisoner which troubled him, bur the unseemliness of the young woman's persistence in remaining to this hour under an espionage no more matronly than that of a sketch-book abandoned on the table when we had come out to the open. The youth had veiled his splendours with more splendour: a long overcoat of so glorious a plaid it paled the planets above us; and he wandered rest- lessly about the garden in this refulgence, glancing at us now and then with what, in spite of the in- sufficient revelation of the starlight, we both recog- nised as a chilling disapproval. The lights of the inn were all out; the courtyard was dark. The Spanish woman and Monsieur Rameau had made their appearance for a moment, half an hour earlier, to exchange a word with their fellow vigilant, a: HI, 307 308 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY soon after, the extinguishing of the lamps in their respective apartments denoted their retirement for the night. In the "Grande Suite" all had been dark and silent for an hour. About the whole place the only sign of life, aside from those signs furnished by our three selves, was a rhythmical sound from an open window near the kitchen, where incon- trovertibly slumbered our maitre d'hbtel after the cares of the day. Upon the occasion of our forest meeting Mr. Percy had signified his desire to hear some talk of Art. I think he had his fill to-night and more; for that was the subject chosen by my dashing companion, and vivaciously exploited until our awaited hour was at hand. Heaven knows what nonsense I prattled, I do not; I do not think I knew at the time. I talked mechanically, trying hard not to betray my increasing excitement. Under cover of this traduction of the Muse I served, I kept going over and over the details of Louise Harman's plan, as the girl beside me had outlined it, bending above the smudgy sketch-book. "To make them think the flight is for Paris," she had urged, "to Paris by way of Lisieux. To make that man yonder believe that it is toward Lisieux, CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 309 while they turn at the crossroads, and drive across the country to Trouville for the morning boat to Havre." It was simple; that was its great virtue. If they were well started, they were safe; and well started meant only that Larrabee Harman should leave the inn without an alarm, for an alarm sounded too soon meant "racing and chasing on Canoby Lea," before they could get out of the immediate neigh- bourhood. But with two hours' start, and the pur- suit spending most of its energy in the wrong direction that is, toward Lisieux and Paris they would be on the deck of the French-Canadian liner to-morrow noon, sailing out of the harbour of Le Havre, with nothing but the Atlantic Ocean between :hem and the St. Lawrence. I thought of the woman who dared this flight lor her lover, of the woman who came full-armed petween him and the world, a Valkyr winging lown to bear him away to a heaven she would nake for him herself. Gentle as she was, there nust have been a Valkyr in her somewhere, or she mild not attempt this. She swept in, not only >etween him and the world, but between him and he destroying demons his own sins had raised to 310 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY beset him. There, I thought, was a whole love; or there she was not only wife but mother to him. And I remembered the dream of her I had before I ever saw her, on that first night after I came down to Normandy, when Amedee's talk of "Madame d'Armand" had brought her into my thoughts. I remembered that I had dreamed of finding her statue, but it was veiled and I could not uncover it. And to-night it seemed to me that the veil had lifted, and the statue was a figure of Mercy in the beautiful likeness of Louise Harman. Then Keredec was wrong, optimist as he was, since a will such as hers could save him she loved, even from his own acts. "And when you come to Monticelli's first style- Miss Elliott's voice rose a little, and I caught the sound of a new thrill vibrating in it -"you find a hundred others of his epoch doing it quite as well, not a bit of a bit less commonplace She broke off suddenly, and looking up, as I had fifty times in the last twenty minutes, I saw that a light shone from Keredec's window. "I dare say they are commonplace," I remarked, CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 311 ising. "But now, if you will permit me, I'll offer , r ou my escort back to Quesnay." I went into my room, put on my cap, lit a lantern, ind returned with it to the veranda. "If you are eady?" I said. "Oh, quite," she answered, and we crossed the garden as far as the steps. Mr. Percy signified his approval. "Gunna see the little lady home, are you?" he aid graciously. "I was thinkin' it was about time, n'self!" The salon door of the "Grand Suite" opened, ibove me, and at the sound, the youth started, pringing back to see what it portended, but I ran quickly up the steps. Keredec stood in the door- ray, bare-headed and in his shirt-sleeves; in one hand held a travelling-bag, which he immediately gave ne, setting his other for a second upon my shoulder. "Thank you, my good, good friend," he said rith an emotion in his big voice which made me lad of what I was doing. He went back into the oom, closing the door, and I descended the steps s rapidly as I had run up them. Without pausing, started for the rear of the courtyard, Miss Elliott ccompanying me. 312 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY The sentry had watched these proceedings open- mouthed, more mystified than alarmed. "Luk here," he said, "I want t' know whut this means." "Anything you choose to think it means," I laughed, beginning to walk a little more rapidly. He glanced up at the windows of the "Grande Suite," which were again dark, and began to follow us slowly. "What you gut in that grip?" he asked. "You don't think we're carrying off Mr. Harman?" "I reckon he's in his room all right," said the youth grimly; "unless he's flew out. But I want t' know what you think y're doin'?" "Just now," I replied, "I'm opening thi door." This was a fact he could not question. We emerged at the foot of a lane behind the inn; it was long and narrow, bordered by stone walls, and at the other end debouched upon a road which passed the rear of the Baudry cottage. Miss Elliott took my arm, and we entered lane. Mr. Percy paused undecidedly. "I want t' know whut you think y're doin'?" he repeated angri calling after us. . CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 313 "It's very simple," I called in turn. "Can't I do an errand for a friend? Can't I even carry his travelling-bag for him, without going into ex- planations to everybody I happen to meet? And," I added, permitting some anxiety to be marked in my voice, "I think you may as well go back. We're not going far enough to need a guard." Mr. Percy allowed an oath to escape him, and we heard him muttering to himself. Then his foot- steps sounded behind us. "He's coming!" Miss Elliott whispered, with nervous exultation, looking over her shoulder. "He's going to follow." "He was sure to," said I. We trudged briskly on, followed at some fifty paces by the perturbed watchman. Presently I heard my companion utter a sigh so profound that it was a whispered moan. "What is it?" I murmured. "Oh, it's the thought of Quesnay and to-morrow; facing them with this!" she quavered. "Louise has written a letter for me to give them, but I'll have to tell them " "Not alone," I whispered. "I'll be there when you come down from your room in the morning." 314 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY We were embarked upon a singular adventure, not unattended by a certain danger; we were tingling with a hundred apprehensions, occupied with the vital necessity of drawing the little spy after us and that was a strange moment for a man (and an elderly painter-man of no mark, at that!) to hear himself called what I was called then, in a tremulous whisper close to my ear. Of course she has denied it since; nevertheless, she said it twice, for I pre- tended not to hear her the first time. I made no answer, for something in the word she called me, and in her seeming to mean it, made me choke up so that I could not even whisper; but I made up my mind that, after that, if this girl saw Mr. Earl Percy on his way back to the inn before she wished him to go, it would be because he had killed me. We were near the end of the lane when the neigh of a horse sounded sonorously from the road be- yond. Mr. Percy came running up swiftly and darted by us. "Who's that?" he called loudly. "Who's that in the cart yonder?" I set my lantern on the ground close to the wall, and at the same moment a horse and cart drew CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 315 up on the road at the end of the lane, showing against the starlight. It was Pere Baudry's best horse, a stout gray, that would easily enough make Trouville by daylight. A woman's figure and a man's (the latter that of Pere Baudry himself) could be made out dimly on the seat of the cart. "Who is it, I say?" shouted our excited friend. "What kind of a game d'ye think y're puttin' up on me here?" He set his hand on the side of the cart and sprang upon the hub of the wheel. A glance at the occupants satisfied him. "Mrs. Harman!" he yelled. "Mrs. Harman!" He leaped down into the road. "I knowed I was a fool to come away without wakin' up Rameau. But you haven't beat us yet!" He drove back into the lane, but just inside its entrance I met him. "Where are you going?" I asked. "Back to the pigeon-house in a hurry. There's devilment here, and I want Rameau. Git out o' my way!" "You're not going back," said I. "The hell I ain't!" wud Mr. Percy. "I give 316 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY ye two seconds t' git out o' my Take yer hands off a me!" I made sure of my grip, not upon the refulgent overcoat, for I feared he might slip out of that, but upon the collars of his coat and waistcoat, which I clenched together in my right hand. I knew that he was quick, and I suspected that he was "scientific," but I did it before he had finished talking, and so made fast, with my mind and heart and soul set upon sticking to him. My suspicions as to his "science" were perfer- vidly justified. "You long-legged devil!" he yelled, and I instantly received a series of concussions upon the face and head which put me in supreme doubt of my surroundings, for I seemed to have plunged, eyes foremost, into the Milky Way. But I had my left arm around his neck, which probably saved me from a coup de grace, as he was forced to pommel me at half-length. Pommel it was; to use so gentle a word for what to me was crash, bang, smash, battle, murder, earthquake and tornado. I was con- scious of some one screaming, and it seemed a consoling part of my delirium that the cheek of Miss Anne Elliott should be jammed tight against mine through one phase of the explosion. My CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 317 arms were wrenched, my fingers twisted and tor- tured, and, when it was all too clear to me that I could not possibly bear one added iota of physical pain, the ingenious fiend began to kick my shins and knees with feet like crowbars. Conflict of any sort was never my vocation. I had not been an accessory-during-the-fact to a fight since I passed the truculent age of fourteen; and it is a marvel that I was able to hang to that dynamic bundle of trained muscles which defines Mr. Earl Percy well enough for more than ten seconds. Yet I did hang to him, as Pere Baudry testifies, for a minute and a half, which seems no inconsiderable lapse of time to a person under- going such experiences as were then afflicting me. It appeared to me that we were revolving in enormous circles in the ether, and I had long since given my last gasp, when there came a great roaring wind in my ears and a range of mountains toppled upon us both; we went to earth beneath it. "Ha! you must create violence, then?" roared the avalanche. And the voice was the voice of Keredec. Some one pulled me from underneath my strug- gling antagonist, and, the power of sight in a hazy, 318 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY zigzagging fashion coming back to me, I perceived the figure of Miss Anne Elliott recumbent beside me, her arms about Mr. Percy's prostrate body. The extraordinary girl had fastened upon him, too, though I had not known it, and she had gone to ground with us; but it is to be said for Mr. Earl Percy that no blow of his touched her, and she was not hurt. Even in the final extremities of tem- per, he had carefully discriminated in my favour. Mrs. Harman was bending over her, and, as the girl sprang up lightly, threw her arms about her. For my part, I rose more slowly, section by section, wondering why I did not fall apart; lips, nose, and cheeks bleeding, and I had a fear that I should need to be led like a blind man, through my eyelids swell- ing shut. That was something I earnestly desired should not happen; but whether it did, or did not or if the heavens fell! I meant to walk back to Quesnay with Anne Elliott that night, and, mangled, broken, or half-dead, presenting whatever appear- anee of the prize-ring or the abattoir that I might, I intended to take the same train for Paris on the morrow that she did. For our days together were not at an end; nor was it hers nor my desire that they should be. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 319 It was Oliver Saffren as I like to think of him who helped me to my feet and wiped my face with his handkerchief, and when that one was ruined, brought others from his bag and stanched the wounds gladly received, in the service of his wife. "I will remember " he said, and his voice broke. "These are the memories which Keredec says make a man good. I pray they will help to redeem me." And for the last time I heard the child in him speaking: "I ought to be redeemed; I must be, don't you think, for her sake?" "Lose no time!" shouted Keredec. "You must be gone if you will reach that certain town for the five-o'clock train of the morning." This was for the spy's benefit; it indicated Lisieux and the train to Paris. Mr. Percy struggled; the professor knelt over him, pinioning his wrists in one great hand, and holding him easily to earth. "Ha! my friend " he addressed his captive "you shall not have cause to say we do you any harm; there shall be no law, for you are not hurt, and you are not going to be. But here you shall stay quiet for a little while till I say you can go." As he spoke he bound the other's wrists with a short rope which he took from his pocket, performing the -820 THE GUEST OF QUESNAY same office immediately afterward for Mr. Percy's ankles. "I take the count!" was the sole remark of that philosopher. "I can't go up against no herd of elephants." "And now," said the professor, rising, "good- bye! The sun shall rise gloriously for you tomorrow. Come, it is time." The two women were crying in each other's arms. "Good-bye!" sobbed Anne Elliott. Mrs. Harman turned to Keredec. "Good-bye! for a little while." He kissed her hand. "Dear lady, I shall come within the year." She came to me, and I took her hand, meaning to kiss it as Keredec had done, but suddenly she was closer and I felt her lips upon my battered cheek. I remember it now. I wrung her husband's hand, and then he took her in his arms, lifted her to the foot-board of the cart, and sprang up beside her. "God bless you, and good-bye!" we called. And their voices came back to us. "God bless you and good-bye!" CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 321 They were carried into the enveloping night. We stared after them down the road; watching the lantern on the tail-board of the cart diminish; watching it dim and dwindle to a point of gray; listening until the hoof -beats of the heavy Norman grew fainter than the rustle of the branch that rose above the wall beside us. But it is bad luck to strain eyes and ears to the very last when friends are parting, because that so sharpens the loneliness; and before the cart went quite beyond our ken, two of us set out upon the longest way to Quesnay. THE END THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, *. Y. YB 6W4 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY