CHAPTER IX.

_A TORMENTED SPIRIT._

Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted; The glory of the moon is dead, Night's ghosts and dreams have now departed: Thine own soul still is true to thee, But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

In the mean time, L'Estrange, in his enforced retirement, had not forgotten to supply himself with a means of knowing everything that went on in the house. In most places he had an agent of some kind; where he had not his intimate knowledge of human nature made it not difficult for him to find out the creature he needed.

He had heard of the Austrian lady's flight. This small episode, which in days gone by would scarcely have caused him a moment's thought, had wrought upon his mind to such an extent that a serious relapse had been the consequence.

It was pretty much as the landlord had conjectured. The proud lady who had put down her pride so woefully, trampling her own and her husband's honor in the dust, was one of the many to whom this man had vowed undying attachment. She had tired him, and he had abandoned her; and from the day of their parting years before in sunny Italy to this time, when L'Estrange and she found themselves strangely under the same roof, they had never met. The fair Austrian had been forgotten, relegated in his mind to the record of past absurdities, but she had never forgotten him.

Her life had been uneventful, lived out in a small German town, where petty gossip is the sole excitement. She had married a man for whom she cared little, simply because to marry had been rendered almost necessary by the exigencies of her position. She had had no children. What wonder, then, that her mind dwelt, ever more morbidly as the slow years passed by, on this one warm, passionate episode in her otherwise cold career?

In any case, so it was. She believed that the man who had loved her then--the man whose tender speeches rung ever in her ears--loved her still with the same passion, and that only necessity, biting poverty or unacknowledged ties, had forced him to leave her so cruelly. After all, it was only a very commonplace and every-day matter. To the woman this summer-day's love-making had been that one great epoch from which everything past and future should thenceforward be dated--the era of an awakening into life of feelings that had before lain dormant and unsuspected in her being. To the man it was nothing more than one sweet out of many--a sweet which, when it should cloy upon his fastidious taste, could be put away without a sigh to the memory of its sweetness.

With the idea in her mind of his continued faithfulness, the Austrian lady had persuaded her husband to travel, only that she might search for her lost lover through the length and breadth of Europe. But for the greater part of two years they had been wanderers, and still they had come upon no traces of him who had formerly seemed to be ubiquitous. She had begun to mourn for him as the dead, when suddenly, in this out-of-the-way corner, at this strange season, she saw his face once more.

It was seldom that this proud lady betrayed the emotions of her soul. It may be that her inner consciousness of want of rectitude of purpose had been one great agent in the formation of those barriers of steel with which she sought to surround herself. But this time there was no help for her. The pent-up torrent had grown in force and intensity, until no bounds could restrain its impetuous overflow. She was a woman, and the haggardness of the face of the man she loved, the stooping walk, the whitened hair, spoke so powerfully to her imagination that she could scarcely be calm. Was it for her he had been sorrowing? And yet in that flash of recognition at the dinner-table she had read nothing but cold indifference. She knew him to be a consummate actor: was this, then, put on? In her hungry desire to know the whole truth she prepared an interview for that evening; but before it her measures had been taken. There was a person in the house--one she had met before--who, her woman's instinct told her, would willingly lay down his life in her service. She would take him into her counsels; and if the presentiment which lay cold at her heart as she looked upon the well-known face that evening should turn out to be true--if she could never be consoled with this man's love--she would flee from the place, leave her husband, give up her position in society and hide her humiliation in a convent.

And so it had all happened. What could L'Estrange say when she spoke to him passionately of their former love, when she asked him plainly if there remained any vestige of it in his heart?

He thought to do what was best and wisest; he thought to kill the madness in her soul by letting her see at once that all which had passed between them was as though it had never been. For Laura's unconscious influence and those struggles through which he had passed had not been altogether in vain; L'Estrange was a better man than he had been in almost any period of his strange, wild career.

Deeply as he pitied the erring lady, he told her the truth--told her that in his heart all such feelings as she would have striven to awaken were for ever dead. It was painful to listen to her wild reproaches, to hear that it was he who had made her life a desolation--painful, with only the frail panels of a dividing door between them and the pure child, to bow his head beneath the torrent of her well-deserved anger. But it did not last long. In his dark eyes, made brilliant by fever, in the stern lines written by trouble on his strong face, in the determined tones of his voice, she read his resolve, and with the coming on of darkness she fled over the snows to a hamlet in the mountains, there to stay, under the roof of a poor herdsman, until the first hue-and-cry should be over. Those who helped her flight were faithful to her cause; their measures were well taken, and the drifting of the snow obliterated all marks of footsteps. In time she reached the distant convent, and the mystery of her disappearance was never solved.

But into L'Estrange's soul the iron entered. At the threshold of a new life past evil--evil irrevocable--was meeting him, and before the irrevocable the spirit of the strong man sank. That night he would not touch the beguiling potion. He almost hailed the bitter physical and mental pain which this abstaining entailed. It seemed like a kind of expiation for the follies of his life. He could not close his eyes. Throughout the long watches of the night he paced his room, body and soul racked with inconceivable anguish. The pain was beginning to tell on his strong frame.

When, early on the following morning, the little Laura went into her friend's room, she found him stretched on the sofa pale and gaunt, like one who has passed through a death-agony. She noticed the change at once, and ran to his side: "Mon pere is worse?"

"Yes, Laura," he replied; then he took her small face in his hands, and holding it there for a few moments gazed on it earnestly: "Petite cherie, we must lose no time."

"In finding papa?" replied the little one seriously. "Mon pere, I think it will be soon. Last night I dreamt I saw him. Is he here, in this house, I wonder?"

But her friend turned away: "Little one, you are too much shut up here, and this makes you imaginative. It is a fine day. We must ask the good girl who waits on you to take you for a run on the crisp snow."

The little girl clapped her hands. "Yes," she said, "it will be nice, but mon pere must have breakfast first."

She rang the bell and proceeded to arrange everything, to have the stove lighted, to set out the breakfast-things in their little sitting-room, and to superintend the preparation of chocolate _a la Francaise_, for Laura had become quite a little woman in her ways: then, as she saw that her friend was still suffering, she sat by his side and sang to him in her sweet, childish way till his eyes closed. The little child-heart, by the outcome of its tenderness, had brought rest to the weary brain, the pain-racked soul.

It was nearly midday when, all radiant with color and life, Laura returned from her ramble with the good-natured chambermaid. As she entered the room one of the waiters left it. She found L'Estrange dressed, and sitting in an easy-chair close by the stove, which showed a little patch of glowing red.

He called her to his side, and lifting her on to his knees took off her warm cloak and hood with all the tenderness of a woman, then stroking back her fair hair he kissed her on the brow. "Laura, petite cherie," he said in a low tone, as if speaking to himself rather than addressing her, "the time has nearly come."

She put her arms round his neck, and resting her fair head on his shoulder looked up into his strong, pale face. "What time, mon pere?" she asked in an awed whisper.

"When thou and I must part, fillette."

But the child lifted her head and shook her golden curls. The clear, bracing air, the brilliant sunshine, the glittering snow had breathed a spirit of gladness into her heart. She could not see the necessity for such sad forebodings.

"Mon pere," she answered eagerly, "you should not say things like that; indeed, indeed, it's very wrong. You are going back with me to mamma, who'll be ever so glad to see us; and my own papa is to be found: he will thank you, mon pere, for bringing me, and then we shall all be _so_ happy together."

For this was always the end of the child's plans. She could not imagine anything else. Her friend smiled, and then he sighed. "Soit donc, petite sage," he replied enigmatically, and Laura was perfectly satisfied.

Once or twice during that day the mysterious waiter interviewed L'Estrange, and each time Laura was condemned to be mystified. They spoke in a language which was a jargon to her; but she was accustomed to mystery where this strange friend of hers was concerned.

The waiter was keeping him _au courant_ in the most trivial details that concerned those inhabitants of the house in whom L'Estrange was interested. He heard of the hue-and-cry that followed the Austrian lady, and of her husband's despair; he heard of the several arrivals, first Maurice Grey's, and then Arthur Forrest's; he knew that they had dined together tete-a-tete and sat a long time over their wine, evidently in deep converse; finally, when the two men were closeted in Maurice's room, his confidential emissary was hovering about, ready to report the slightest extraordinary demonstration. For L'Estrange did not credit Arthur Forrest with so much diplomacy as he had hitherto used in his treatment of the delicate mission with which Margaret had entrusted him, and he knew that fire lay hidden under Maurice Grey's cold reserve. The name of his wife blundered out by a stranger, who would appear to know the sad details of her history and his own, might very possibly cause an explosion of some kind; indeed, during that long evening, whose tedious hours not even Laura's gentle ministries could beguile, the Frenchman was on the alert. From moment to moment he expected to hear the door of the neighboring room pushed violently open, and to understand from his well-feed observer that the young peace-maker had been thrust out from the presence of the proud Englishman, who would feel himself doubly injured by this interference.

Laura did not tell her friend about the strange look which had met hers that evening, though the child pondered it in her simple heart, trying to find out what there was in it that had affected and fascinated her. She would have asked L'Estrange if he thought that this man who had looked at her with a kind of yearning in his sad face could be, indeed, the father they were seeking; but one of his dark moods was on him, and for the first time in all their intercourse she feared to break it.

Since their dinner in the afternoon he had not stirred from the one position, except when the mysterious informant had come in to report progress, and then he had looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a glance that would have killed deceit at its very birth. At other times he remained silent, his hands clasped over an ancient staff, on his strong face a look of pain--but pain crushed down by indomitable will--his lips and nostrils faintly quivering as any sound came from outside, his eyes fixed on the small patch of glowing red that was waning and fading out as the day passed away behind the western mountains.

But though Laura feared to break in upon his silence, she did not fear him. She sat at his feet, curled up like a kitten wearied with play, on a crimson cushion that belonged to the heavy-looking couch, trying by the shimmering firelight to look over a book of very gaudy pictures which the landlady, who pitied her apparent isolation, had lent her.

Evening deepened into the early night of the season. Candles were brought by Laura's friend, the good-natured Swiss chambermaid, and before the little girl had succeeded in tracing a history for half of the wonderful pictures in her book, she grew so sleepy that her friend was moved from his abstraction to ring the bell and give her into the care of Gretchen, after a most loving good-night and many tender recommendations to the waiting-maid to take every care of his little treasure.

He did not leave his place by the fireside till his delicate ear told him that there was nothing stirring in the house but himself.