Part 8

“There are many things, perhaps, that you cannot see,” commented young De Chartreuil, and at the tone in his voice there was one thing that Fair did see, and that was red.

“Well, I can see this,” she cried in a voice shaken with sheer fury, “I can see that it’s possible to be just as much of a slacker after the war as during it.”

“Mademoiselle!”

“In America men _work_,” stormed Fair. “They----”

“In America you save your generosity for your own faults, it seems.” He raised a commanding hand, and Fair stood voiceless, literally transfixed with rage. “No, wait, I beg you; I have not yet finished. Perhaps in your great country you forget that work is the means--that it is not the end; no, no, believe me, it is not the end. It is also not very wise to condemn utterly that which may differ only in kind, not in degree. To you courage may be a dark and stern thing--a duty--but to some--to one at least, Mademoiselle--it is a shining and gay and splendid gift; it is a joy.”

“Are you through with your lessons for the day?” asked Fair icily. “Because if you are, I’m going!” She whirled the red mallet about her head like a battle-axe, and sent it spinning far from her after the neglected ball. “Good-bye--I’m off. Tell the others I twisted my ankle--got a headache--tell them any old lie you think of----”

“But, Mademoiselle, you cannot----”

Fairfax Carter halted for a moment in her tumultuous progress, the wind whipping her leaf-brown skirts about her and sending the bright curls flying about the reckless, stubborn little face.

“Can’t I?” she called back defiantly. “Can’t I? Well, wait and see! I’m going to tell your precious Philippe de Lautrec just exactly what I think of a hero who spends his life resting on his laurels while his sisters work their fingers to the bone--and you and Foch and the Archangel Gabriel can’t stop me, so I’d advise you to stick to croquo-golf. Good-bye!”

She was gone in a brilliant whirl of flying skirts and scarf and hair. Young De Chartreuil watched her disappearing down the long hill that led past Daudin’s farm to the far gate of the château with an expression in which dismay was tempered by a grim satisfaction. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders briefly, retrieved the scarlet ball and mallet, and set off slowly toward the sounds of distant laughter that marked the other players. Well, let her go; she was richly in need of a lesson, that lovely little demon! And to think that for a moment he had dreamed--ah, name of Heaven, what an escape!----

Fair, in the meantime, raced lightly on her chosen way. She was in a towering rage at De Chartreuil for his presumptuous insolence, and in an even more towering rage at herself for the effect that it had had on her. Even immature reflection revealed the unmistakable fact that she had behaved a good deal more like a fish-wife than the traditional great lady. About the only things that she had failed to do were boxing his ears and screaming at the top of her lungs. And she had felt terribly--oh, but terribly--like doing both of them. No, it was all very well to have a temper, but it was a bad strategic error to lose it. Possession is nine points of the law, especially with tempers. Fortunately, the hateful De Chartreuil child had been even worse than she. He had looked at one time as though it would have been pure ecstasy to throttle the life out of her--the time that she had got in that neat thrust about peace-time slackers. Well, she was on her way to tell one of them exactly what she thought of him as fast as her stubby brown boots would carry her. She wrenched impatiently at the iron latch on the great north gate--it yielded with an unexpectedness that nearly threw her off her feet, and she heard it clang to behind her as she raced up the long alley of lime trees that led to the stone terrace. If she were lucky, she might find the object of her righteous wrath basking there in the sunlight, without so much as a book in his graceless hands, dreaming away the hours, his dark face turned to the golden fields of his inheritance. She had found him there before--and, yes, fate was with her--there he was now in his great chair with his back to the lime trees, lounging deep. For a moment she hesitated, her heart thundering in her ears, and then she swung recklessly across the sun-warmed flags, hands deep in her pockets, her chin tilted at an outrageous angle.

“Oh, there you are!” she hailed in her magic voice, but there was something behind the words that turned them from a salutation to a challenge.

Philippe le Gai sat quite still for a moment, and then, without rising, he flung her a radiant smile over his shoulder.

“And there are you!” he said. “All finished, the croquo-golf?”

“No--just finished for me. It’s a stupid game, don’t you think?”

“Me? I think no game stupid that once I have started--no, not one. Then I must play it through to the end, or count myself defeated!”

Fair’s eyes darkened ominously.

“But you don’t start many games, do you?” she asked.

“No,” acquiesced the young man in the chair. “As you say, not many.”

Fair set her teeth. Did he think that if he continued to sprawl all his splendid length there, unmoving, that she would pass on? Was this his method of once more conveying to her the information that her presence was an intrusion? Oh, for a man--for some slim, freckled, young American--to take this insolent foreigner by his coat collar and jerk him to his unworthy feet! Perhaps it might be better to have two of them--he was disgustingly tall. She swung round the corner of the chair, flames dancing in her eyes.

“Are you--very busy?” she inquired in a dangerously polite little voice.

Philippe le Gai showed all of his white teeth in another flashing smile.

“But no!” he replied accurately, and made a swift motion as though to rise, only to check himself more swiftly. “Be seated, I pray you!”

The look of consuming rage that Fair flashed on him as she seated herself in the small iron chair opposite him would have shrivelled a normally sensitive soul to gray ashes. Her impervious host, however, merely leaned deeper into his bright cushions, the smile still edging his lips.

“Laure still plays?”

“Yes,” replied Fair. She spoke with considerable difficulty; the royal condescension of that “Be seated” had left her feeling slightly dizzy.

“I have here a paper which will need her sharp wits--she will not be long, perhaps?”

“I don’t know,” replied Fair sombrely. Just how, she wondered, did you lead up to telling a comparative stranger that you despised him? It was harder than she had thought it would be, out there in the meadow--it was the proud turn of the black head, and the sure strength of the long brown hands, and the sheer beauty of the flashing smile that made it hard. No one had a right to look like that--and to be despicable. It wasn’t fair.

“I think that those poor Gods in Heaven must envy us our earth to-day!” said the object of her scorn, turning his face to the deep blue of the autumn sky. “So warm, so cold, so sweet--like some mad Bacchante, bare of throat and arm for all her warm fur skins, with grapes of purple weighing down her curls, and wine of gold tripping up her light heels.... Once, you know, when I was the smallest of little boys, Monsieur my grandfather call me to come down from my sleep to drink the health of my very new sister--of young Laure. There was a great banquet, a table brave with fruit and flowers and lace and candles, and they put me onto that table, and give me a little burning golden brandy to drink in a great cool glass of crystal--and straight to my head it flew--ah, Dieu, the lucky, curly head! I remember still, you see--I remember how the world must feel to-day. The world and I, we have been fortunate.”

Fair’s mouth was a rose-red line of stern distaste. It might be all very French to take a perfectly good autumn day and turn it into an intoxicated heathen, but in her opinion, which was far from humble, it was simply outrageous. And those detestable people, giving brandy to that darling little boy--well, all little boys were more or less darling. It was their truly lamentable degeneration at about the age of twenty-nine that was occupying her at present. She leaned forward swiftly, her hands very cold and her eyes very hot.

“Monsieur Philippe, don’t you ever, ever get tired of just sitting around doing _nothing_?”

Perhaps the passion in the clear voice touched him--for a moment Philippe le Gai belied his name. Then he made a slight gesture with the hand that held the papers, a gesture of dismissal to such folly as sober thought.

“Tired, Mistress Fairy? How should I be tired, doing nothing? And how are you so sure that I do nothing while I sit around--how are you so sure of that, I wonder?”

“Because I can see you,” replied Fair with despairing emphasis.

“Can you then, Wise Eyes? Can you see so well? Then you must see that it is not nothing that I do.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her voice. “Isn’t it?”

“But never! While I sit around, I am being very, very busy, me, being alive--and being amused--and being, believe me, most eternally and most exultantly grateful. You call that doing nothing?”

“Of course I call that doing nothing,” replied Fair fiercely.

“Now that is strange--because, you know, I am so busy doing it that I can find time to do nothing else. To sit with the sun and beauty and silence all about, that is better than heaven, I think. Always I have loved Beauty better than life and once I thought that I had lost her for ever--and, see, she is mine again! In other fields--fields churned to madness, horrors of white clay and red blood, with the proud trees stripped to dirty black stumps--in other fields I remembered these, and I swore to that god of battles that if he would send me back to this golden grace--to this greenness and kind quiet--I would ask nothing more. And where those stenches made the poor soul sicker than the body, I could sometimes hold my breath, and smell apple-blossoms in the spring moonlight, and yellow roses in the summer sunlight, and spiced wood burning in the great chimneys, and cider blowing across the autumn winds. Now--now I need not hold the breath to smell the good ripe fruit, now I need not close my eyes to see my fields of gold, with the little warm gray sheep against the hills. Now I have come home to my fields, and I keep faith with the god of battles--I ask for nothing more. Look before you, Wise Eyes; what do you see?”

“The alley of lime trees and the north gate and the meadow,” said Fair, fighting to harden the voice that wanted only to break.

“Look farther----”

“I can see the thatch on Daudin’s roof and the road to the village and the little steeple on the church.”

“Nothing more?”

“There’s nothing more to see.”

“You do not see a little boy climbing that iron gate and racing home up that long alley, singing--racing quick, quick because it begins to grow dark?”

“Of course I don’t see him,” replied Fair defiantly, but she leaned forward, straining her eyes.

“Look farther--look far away; you cannot see the other little boys, many, many, all hurrying while they sing to get home before it is dark? No? Ah, poor Wise Eyes! Perhaps it is because it is years that those little boys hurry down, instead of just an alley of lime trees--they are hurrying home clean across the centuries. Since that first Philippe came singing up from the south, they have loved these gray stones best of all the earth--best, I think, of heaven. And that last little boy, he did not love it least, believe me. Perhaps he is singing louder than them all, because though they have made it, those others, he has saved it.”

“He didn’t save it any more than a good many million other people,” commented Fair ruthlessly.

Philippe le Gai threw back his black head with a ringing peal of laughter. “Truly as you say, not more. But that is another reason why he sings, believe me.”

“But what did you do before you started in to save it?” pursued the remorseless inquisitor, and suddenly she sickened at her task. The radiance flagged in the dark face before her; for a moment Philippe le Gai looked mortally tired.

“Me? I was an artist--and an engineer.” He sat staring ahead of him, tense and straight; and then he relaxed easily, the smile playing again. “Not so good an artist, and not so bad an engineer. I was oh, most young, and oh, most vain, and gray-headed old gentlemen from far away came to beg a little advice as to what to do with their sick mines.”

“Mines?” Fair’s face was alight. “That was what Dad used to do before he went in for cotton. It was copper, you know. D’you know about copper?”

“Every kind of mine that ever was I knew about,” he assured her lightly. “But now I have forgotten.”

“How could you?” she cried. “How could you, when they need you so? Don’t you think that that little boy would be ashamed if he could see you sitting on this terrace--just sitting and sitting like a great enormous lazy black cat? Don’t you?”

“Why, no,” replied Philippe le Gai. “No, I do not think that he would be ashamed.”

Fair wrung her hands together; she felt defeat closing about her.

“Those fields that you talked about--don’t you want to make them green and golden again, too?”

“They are very tired, those fields,” said the man. “Shall we not let them rest?”

“Oh!” cried Fair, and the valiant voice struggled and broke. “Oh, how can you--oh, oh, how can you?”

“Fair----”

He was on his feet at last--the swift move sent the paper flying, and it came fluttering irresponsibly across the sunlit space between them, dancing to a halt almost at her feet. It had blown open, and her incredulous eyes were riveted on the letterhead--the little thick black letters spelling out the name of Dad’s attorney, Henry C. Forrester, Wall Street--she stared down blankly:

Dear Sir--

In further reply to your request for full details as to the fortune left Miss Carter by her father----

A wave of scarlet swept over her from heel to brow; she felt as though she were drowning, she felt as though she were being buried alive, she felt as though a bolt of lightning had passed clean through her body, leaving her quite dead and still.

“So that’s what you are?” she said. “You--you! I might have known.”

“What I am?” His voice was touched with a little wonder. “No, but I do not understand; what is it that I am?”

“There’s no word for you,” she told him between her clicking teeth. She was shaking violently, uncontrollably, like someone in a chill. “Crawling to my lawyers--you--you--a common adventurer----”

“You are mad,” he said.

“It’s here,” cried Fair. “Look. It’s here in black and white--are you going to deny it?”

“Give me that letter,” said Philippe le Gai.

“I wouldn’t touch it in a thousand years,” she flung at him. “Not in a hundred hundred thousand. It’s filthy--it can lie there till it rots.”

“Pick it up,” he told her.

“How dare you?” she whispered. “How dare you?”

“It is not so very greatly daring,” he assured her. “Pick it up, I tell you.”

Fair stared at him voicelessly where he stood, tall and splendid and terrible in the sunlight. No, no, this was nightmare--this was not real. It was not she who bent to the bidding of this relentless monster--it was some other Fairfax caught in a hideous dream. The paper rattled in her fingers like goblin castanets.

“Now bring it to me.”

She crossed the little space of sun-warmed bricks, her eyes fixed and brilliant as a sleep-walker.

“Closer,” bade the still voice. “Closer yet. Yes. Now put it in my hand. That way--yes. It was not yours, you see; did you forget that?”

Fair made no answer. She stood frozen, watching the brown fingers folding the bit of white paper into a neat oblong.

“I would not, I think, say any word to Laure of this,” said the voice. “And I would not, I think, stay here longer. I would forget all this, and go.”

“I am going this afternoon,” she told him through her stiff lips. “And I am going to tell Laure--everything.”

“Do not,” he said. “Do not, believe me.” He stood staring down at the paper, and then he spoke again.

“I am, as you say, an adventurer,” said Philippe le Gai, in that terrible and gentle voice. “And adventure is, as you say, common. For which I thank my gods. You have nothing more to say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then that is all, I think, Miss Carter.”

Obviously, the audience was over, the courtier was dismissed. Oh, for one word--one little, little word--to blast him where he stood, gentle and insolent and relentless. She could not find that word, and she would die before she would give him any other. The brown boots stumbled in their haste on the terrace steps; at the foot she turned once more to face him, flinging him a last look of terror and defiance and despair--and deeper than all, wonder. But Philippe le Gai’s face was turned once more to his golden fields.

Far away, at the end of the long alley, she could see the players coming back; she could hear them, too, laughing and calling to each other--Bravo was barking frenziedly, heedless of Diane’s small, peremptory shouts--there, he was off, with Raoul and Diane in pursuit, headed straight for the distant stables. She clung to the stone railing for a moment, limp and sick, and then she flung back her head, spurred her flagging feet, and set off down the arching lime trees, running. Running because she was desperately tired and desperately frightened; because it was toward battle that she ran, and she must get there swiftly. Laure hailed from the far end.

“Ah, small deserter, you come to surrender? Come quick, then, and do penance.”

“I’ve not come to do penance,” said the deserter. She stood very straight with her hands clasped tightly behind her. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” echoed Laure. “Here, André, take this mallet, this ball. What folly is this, Fair?”

“It’s not folly; the folly’s been in staying. I’ve learned quite a lot of things in the last few minutes, Laure. Monsieur de Lautrec has some papers that he wants to show you.”

“Papers? Well, but what is all this mystery? Come, now, Fair, you are not well, I know. The doctor he said you should not be excited.”

“I am not in the least excited,” replied Fair, her eyes two glittering danger signals. “Are you in this plot, too, Monsieur André?”

“_Plot?_ No, decidedly, this is fever! Let me feel your hands, _mon enfant_----”

“Don’t touch me, please,” said Fair, clearly and distinctly.

“Did I say fever? But it is delirium! I am not to touch you?”

“No.” She took a step farther away from Laure who stood looking down at her, clear and quiet, with that incredulous lift to her brows. “Don’t pretend any more, please; it makes me rather sick. I know about everything, you see.”

“That is very exactly what I do not do, _ma petite_. No, André, do not go--you, too, will wait and see. What is this nonsense, Fair?”

“You needn’t keep it up any longer, I tell you,” returned Fair fiercely. “I’ve found out what you and Monsieur de Lautrec have been doing. I thought that you loved me, Laure--you did it pretty well--and all the time you were nothing but fortune hunters, were you?”

“You told Philippe--that?” asked Laure. Every atom of colour had drained out of her face, but she did not lift her voice. “No, wait, André. I am not yet through. It would be a good hunter who could find your fortune, Fairfax. You have none to hunt for.”

“I have two million dollars,” said Fair.

“You have not half a million centimes. It was all in cotton, that great fortune; it is gone. Your lawyers had cabled to you while you were ill in Germany, but the doctors they said you must not hear that bad news then; they asked me to tell you, gently, when you were much better. So I have waited, and Philippe, he has cabled three--no, four times, to see whether skill and thought and work might not save that so mighty fortune. To-day he thought perhaps that we might have heard----”

“Oh,” said Fair in a small, childish voice. “Oh.” She put her hand to her head; it hurt dreadfully. “Well, then, I can go to work----” She made a vague gesture, as though if she stretched out her hand work would be there for her to cling to--and Laure smiled, a fine, cruel little smile. Something snapped in Fair’s head. “That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, Laure? But you see, I’m not over six feet tall, I’m not stronger than steel--I’m not busy twelve hours a day sitting around in the sun being an ex-hero--so I’m going to work.”

“Did you, perhaps, tell my brother that you thought that of him, too?” asked Laure.

“I told him that, and I told him more,” said Fair.

Laure came toward her, something so terrible in her white face that for a moment Fair thought that she was going to kill her.

“Little fool!” she said very softly. “Little, wicked, wicked fool, Philippe cannot work--Philippe is blind.”

“No!” cried Fair. She clapped her hands over her ears, to shut out those dreadful words, her face a twisted mask of terror. “No, no, no!”

“And I tell you yes, yes, yes,” repeated the tall girl before her, closing her long fingers over the small wrists, wrenching the clinging hands down relentlessly. “Blind like a stone, I tell you--blind.”

“He couldn’t be--he couldn’t be--I’d have seen----”

“What have you ever seen that did not touch yourself?” asked Philippe’s sister. “He is blind, but not so blind as you. When you came to us, never, never did we think that you would not see, though we could not talk of it--not yet. But Philippe--Philippe he said: ‘No, no--let her alone. She has need of peace and mirth and sunshine, those doctors said--darkness it must not touch her. We will be careful, and perhaps she will not know.’ You have well repaid that care, have you not, Fairfax?”

“But his eyes--his eyes----”

“His eyes--because they are still there, you think they see? They saw too much, those eyes; they see no more. What made the light behind them--that nerve behind them--it is paralyzed. You who know so much about the war, you do not know that shock could do that? That there are men blind because their eyes turned rebel, and they would see no more horror--deaf because they would not hear more horror--dumb because they could not tell their horror. Philippe--Philippe he loved beauty--and after a long while his eyes they went mad--and he is blind. Work--work, you little fool! All day, all night, he works, he works. To learn to read--to learn to write--to learn to live, to live, you hear----”

“Please let me go, Laure,” whispered Fair. “Please, Laure--please, Laure.”

“I will tell Marie Léontine to help you with your packing,” said Laure. “And I am glad indeed to let you go. Come, André.”

Fair watched them cutting across the garden to the east entrance--not the terrace, not the terrace. She couldn’t run any more--she felt as though she could never run again--but perhaps if she started now and went very carefully, holding to the lime trees, she could get there before he left. She must, she must get there before he left.... Not until she was at the steps did she dare to raise her eyes. He was still there.

“Laure?” he called. “Laure?”

“It’s Fair,” she said. “I came back.”

She saw him grind the paper between his hands--and then he turned toward her, smiling a little.

“You had forgotten something?”

“Yes.” She was quite near now, but her voice was so low that it barely reached him. “I came back to tell you--to tell you----”

The smile deepened on the dark young face. “Ah, _tiens_! There was something, then, that you forgot to tell me? Never should I have said it!”

“Please,” she entreated, in that shadow of a voice. “Please. I know now about--about--Laure told me!”