Chapter 9

At the Hôtel d'Angleterre I found his shyness was mistaken for indifference. He was civil to everybody, but intimate with none. He attached himself to no party, paired off with no individuals. He sought nobody. On the other hand, the persons who went out of their way to seek him, came back, as they felt, repulsed. He had been polite, but languid. These, however, were not the sort of persons he would be likely to care for. There prevailed a general conception of him as cold, unsociable. He certainly walked about a good deal alone--you met him on the sands, on the cliffs, in the stiff little streets, rambling aimlessly, seldom with a companion. But to me it was patent that he played the solitary from necessity, not from choice--from the necessity of his temperament. A companion was precisely that which above all things his heart coveted; only he didn't know how to set about annexing one. If he sought nobody, it was because he didn't know how. This was a part of what his eyes said; they bespoke his desire, his perplexity, his lack of nerve. Of the people who put themselves out to seek him, there was Miss Hicks; there were a family from Leeds, named Bunn, a father, mother, son, and two redoubtable daughters, who drank champagne with every meal, dressed in the height of fashion, said their say at the tops of their voices, and were understood to be auctioneers; a family from Bayswater named Krausskopf. I was among those whom he had marked as men he would like to fraternise with. As often as our paths crossed, his eyes told me that he longed to stop and speak, and continue the promenade abreast. I was under the control of a demon of mischief; I took a malicious pleasure in eluding and baffling him--in passing on with a nod. It had become a kind of game; I was curious to see whether he would ever develop sufficient hardihood to take the bull by the horns. After all, from a conventional point of view, my conduct was quite justifiable. I always meant to do better by him next time, and then I always deferred it to the next. But, from a conventional point of view, my conduct was quite unassailable. I said this to myself when I had momentary qualms of conscience. Now, rather late in the day, it strikes me that the conventional point of view should have been re-adjusted to the special case. I should have allowed for his personal equation.

My cousin Wilford came to Biarritz about this time, stopping for a week, on his way home from a tour in Spain. I couldn't find a room for him at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, so he put up at a rival hostelry over the way; but he dined with me on the evening of his arrival, a place being made for him between mine and Monsieur's. He hadn't been at the table five minutes before the rumour went abroad who he was--somebody had recognised him. Then those who were within reach of his voice listened with all their ears--Colonel Escott, Flaherty, Maistre, and Miss Hicks, of course, who even called him by name: 'Oh, Mr. Wilford,' 'Now, Mr. Wilford,' &c. After dinner, in the smoking-room, a cluster of people hung round us; men with whom I had no acquaintance came merrily up and asked to be introduced. Colonel Escott and Flaherty joined us. At the outskirts of the group I beheld Sir Richard Maistre. His eyes (without his realising it perhaps) begged me to invite him, to present him; and I affected not to understand! This is one of the little things I find hardest to forgive myself. My whole behaviour towards the young man is now a subject of self-reproach; if it had been different, who knows that the tragedy of yesterday would ever have happened? If I had answered his timid overtures, walked with him, talked with him, cultivated his friendship, given him mine, established a kindly human relation with him, I can't help feeling that he might not have got to such a desperate pass, that I might have cheered him, helped him, saved him. I feel it especially when I think of Wilford. His eyes attested so much; he would have enjoyed meeting him so keenly. No doubt he was already fond of the man, had loved him through his books, like so many others. If I had introduced him? If we had taken him with us the next morning on our excursion to Cambo? Included him occasionally in our smokes and parleys?

Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hôtel d'Angleterre. We were busy 'doing' the country, and never chanced to be at Biarritz at the dinner hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir Richard Maistre.

Another little circumstance that rankles especially now would have been ridiculous except for the way things have ended. It isn't easy to tell--it was so petty and I am so ashamed. Colonel Escott had been abusing London, describing it as the least beautiful of the capitals of Europe, comparing it unfavourably to Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. I took up the cudgels in its defence, mentioned its atmosphere, its tone; Paris Vienna, St. Petersburg were lyric, London was epic; and so forth and so forth. Then, shifting from the æsthetic to the utilitarian, I argued that of all great towns it was the healthiest, its death-rate was lowest. Sir Richard Maistre had followed my dissertation attentively, and with a countenance that signified approval; and when, with my reference to the death-rate, I paused, he suddenly burned his ships. He looked me full in the eye, and said, 'Thirty-seven, I believe?' His heightened colour, a nervous movement of the lip, betrayed the effort it had cost him; but at last he had _done it_--screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and spoken. And I--I can never forget it--I grow hot when I think of it--but I was possessed by a devil. His eyes hung on my face, awaiting my response, pleading for a cue. 'Go, on,' they urged. 'I have taken the first, the difficult step--make the next smoother for me.' And I--I answered lackadaisically with just a casual glance at him, 'I don't know the figures,' and absorbed myself in my viands.

Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.

All this happened last March at Biarritz. I never saw him again till three weeks ago. It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James's Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and thus we approached each other. He didn't see me, however, till we had drawn rather near to a conjunction: then he gave a little start of recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand prepared to advance itself--and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way. Don't ask why I did it. It is enough to confess it without having to explain it. I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder. He was standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me. But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about, and continued his descent of the street.

That was only three weeks ago. Only three weeks ago I still had it in my power to act. I am sure--I don't know why I am sure, but I _am_ sure--that I could have deterred him. For all that one can gather from the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite motive; he had met with no losses, got into no scrape; he was simply tired and sick of life and of himself. 'I have no friends,' he wrote. 'Nobody will care. People don't like me; people avoid me. I have wondered why; I have tried to watch myself and discover; I have tried to be decent. I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I suppose I am a "bad sort."' He had a morbid notion that people didn't like him, that people avoided him! Oh, to be sure, there were the Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough: but he understood what it was that attracted _them_. Other people, the people _he_ could have liked, kept their distance--were civil, indeed, but reserved. He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. It never struck him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him. But I--I knew that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I _knew_ that he wanted bread: and that knowledge constituted my moral responsibility. I didn't know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to absolve myself with the reflection. I ought to have made inquiries. When I think of that afternoon in St. James's Street--only three weeks ago--I feel like an assassin. The vision of him, as he stopped and looked after me--I can't banish it. Why didn't some good spirit move me to turn back and overtake him?

It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable. I can't shake off a sense that there is something to be done. I can't realise that it is too late.

CASTLES NEAR SPAIN

I.

That he should not have guessed it from the beginning seems odd, if you like, until one stops to consider the matter twice; then, I think, one sees that after all there was no shadow of a reason why he should have done so,--one sees, indeed, that even had a suspicion of the truth at any time crossed his mind, he would have had the best of reasons for scouting it as nonsense. It is obvious to us from the first word, because we know instinctively that otherwise there would be no story; it is that which knits a mere sequence of incidents into a coherent, communicable whole. But, to his perceptions, the thing never presented itself as a story at all. It wasn't an anecdote which somebody had buttonholed him to tell; it was an adventure in which he found himself launched, an experience to be enjoyed bit by bit, as it befell, but in no wise suggestive of any single specific climax. What earthly hint had he received from which to infer the identity of the two women? On the contrary, weren't the actions of the one totally inconsistent with what everybody assured him was the manner of life--with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit--of the other? If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,--in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw whom he had caught.

II.

On that first morning,--the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal, and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other in the forest,--he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to Granjolaye. He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion. His mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to nurse. To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would itself be romantic. In a little while he would come to the park gates, and could look up the long, straight avenue to the château,--there where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one of those strange, inarticulate passions that almost every childhood knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.

And then he heard the rhythm of a horse's hoofs; and looking forward, down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady cantering towards him.

In an instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image--which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a _toque_, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a face intensely white--a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.

It was not much, certainly, but it persisted. The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion. It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background. Anyhow, it pursued him. He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Hélène, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now: but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration. The emotion he had looked for did not come. An essential part of him was elsewhere,--following the pale lady in the black riding-habit, trying to get a clearer vision of her face, blaming him for his inattention when she had been palpable before him, wondering who she was.

'If she should prove to be a neighbour, I shan't bore myself so dreadfully down here after all,' he thought. 'I wonder if I shall meet her again as I go home.' She would very likely be returning the way she had gone. But, though he loitered, he did not meet her again. He met nobody. It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.

III.

At Saint-Graal André was waiting to lunch with him.

'When we were children,' Paul wrote in a letter to Mrs Winchfield, 'André, our gardener's son, and I were as intimate as brothers, he being the only companion of my sex and age the neighbourhood afforded. But now, after a separation of twenty years, André, who has become our curé, insists upon treating me with distance. He won't waive the fact that I am the lord of the manor, and calls me relentlessly Monsieur. I've done everything to entice him to unbend, but his backbone is of granite. From the merriest of mischief-loving youngsters, he has hardened into the solemnest of square-toes, with _such_ a long upper-lip, and manners as stiff as the stuff of his awful best cassock, which he always buckles on prior to paying me a visit. Whatever is a poor young man to do? At our first meeting, after my arrival, I fell upon his neck, and thee-and-thou'd him, as of old time; he repulsed me with a _vous_ italicised. At last I demanded reason. "Why _will_ you treat me with this inexorable respect? What have I done to deserve it? What can I do to forfeit it?" _Il devint cramoisi_ (in the traditional phrase) and stared.--This is what it is to come back to the home of your infancy.'

André, in his awful best cassock, was waiting on the terrace. It was on the terrace that Paul had ordered luncheon to be served. The terrace at Saint-Graal is a very jolly place. It stretches the whole length of the southern façade of the house, and is generously broad. It is paved with great lozenge-shaped slabs of marble, stained in delicate pinks and greys with lichens; and a marble balustrade borders it, overgrown, the columns half uprooted and twisted from the perpendicular, by an aged wistaria-vine, with a trunk as stout as a tree's. Seated there, one can look off over miles of richly-timbered country, dotted with white-walled villages, and traversed by the Nive and the Adour, to the wry masses of the Pyrenees, purple curtains hiding Spain.

Here, under an awning, the table was set, gay with white linen and glistening glass and silver, a centrepiece of flowers and jugs of red and yellow wine. The wistaria was in blossom, a world of colour and fragrance, shaken at odd moments by the swift dartings of innumerable lizards. The sun shone hot and clear; the still air, as you touched it, felt like velvet.

'Oh, what a heavenly place, what a heavenly day,' cried Paul; 'it only needs a woman.' And then, meeting André's eye, he caught himself up, with a gesture of contrition. 'I beg a thousand pardons. I forgot your cloth. If you,' he added, 'would only forget it too, what larks we might have together. _Allons, à table_.'

And they sat down.

If Paul had sincerely wished to forfeit André's respect, he could scarcely have employed more efficacious means to do so, than his speech and conduct throughout the meal that followed. You know how flippant, how 'fly-away,' he can be when the mood seizes him, how wholeheartedly he can play the fool. To-day he really behaved outrageously; and, since the priest maintained a straight countenance, I think the wonder is that he didn't excommunicate him.

'I remember you were a teetotaller, André, when you were young,' his host began, pushing a decanter towards him.

'That, monsieur, was because my mother wished it, and my father was a drunkard,' André answered bluntly. 'Since my father's death, I have taken wine in moderation.' He filled his glass.

'I remember once I cooked some chestnuts over a spirit-stove, and you refused to touch them, on the ground that they were alcoholic.'

'That would have been from a confusion of thought,' the curé explained, with never a smile.

But it was better to err on the side of scrupulosity than on that of self-indulgence.'

'Ah, that depends. That depends on whether the pleasure you got from your renunciation equalled that you might have got from the chestnuts.'

'You're preaching pure Paganism.'

'Oh, I'm not denying I'm a Pagan--in my amateurish way. Let me give you some asparagus. Do you think a man can be saved who smokes cigarettes between the courses?'

'Saved?' questioned André. 'What have cigarettes to do with a man's salvation?'

'It's a habit I learned in Russia. I feared it might relate itself in some way to the Schism.' And he lit a cigarette. 'I'm always a rigid Catholic when I'm in France.'

'And when you're in England?'

'Oh, one goes in for local colour, for picturesqueness, don't you know. The Church of England's charmingly overgrown with ivy. And besides, they're going to disestablish it. One must make the most of it while it lasts. Tell me--why can you never get decent _brioches_ except in Catholic countries?'

'Is that a fact?'

'I swear it.'

'It's very singular,' said André.

'It's only one of the many odd things a fellow learns from travel.--Hush! Wait a moment.'

He rose hastily, and made a dash with his hand at the tail of a lizard, that was hanging temptingly out from a bunch of wistaria leaves. But the lizard was too quick for him. With a whisk, it had disappeared. He sank back into his chair, sighing. 'It's always like that. They'll never keep still long enough to let me catch them. What's the use of a university education and a cosmopolitan culture, if you can't catch lizards? Do you think they have eyes in the backs of their heads?'

André stared.

'Oh, I see. You think I'm frivolous,' Paul said plaintively. 'But you ought to have seen me an hour or two ago.'

André's eyes asked, 'Why?'

'Oh, I was plunged in all the most appropriate emotions--shedding floods of tears over my lost childhood and my misspent youth. Don't you like to have a good cry now and then? Oh, I don't mean literal tears, of course; only spiritual ones. For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. I walked over to Granjolaye.'

André looked surprise. 'To Granjolaye? Have you--were you--'

He hesitated, but Paul understood. 'Have you heard from her? Were you invited?' 'Oh, dear, no,' he answered. 'No such luck. Not to the Château, only to the gates--the East Gate.' (The principal entrance to the home park of Granjolaye is the South Gate, which opens upon the Route Départementale.) 'I stood respectfully outside, and looked through the grating of the grille. I walked through the forest, by the Sentier des Contrebandiers.'

'Ah,' said André.

'And on my way what do you suppose I met?'

'A--a viper,' responded André. 'The hot weather is bringing them out. I killed two in my garden yesterday.'

'Oh, you cruel thing! What did you want to kill the poor young creatures for? And then to boast of it!--But no, not a viper. A lady.'

'A lady?'

'Yes--a real lady; she wore gloves. She was riding. I hope you won't think I'm asking impertinent questions, but I wonder if you can tell me who she is.'

'A lady riding in the Sentier des Contrebandiers?' André repeated incredulously.

'She looked like one. Of course I may have been deceived. I didn't hear her speak. Do you think she was a cook?'

'I didn't know any one ever rode in the Sentier des Contrebandiers.'

'Oh, for that, I give you my word of honour. A lady--or say a female--in a black riding-habit; dark hair and eyes; very pale, with red lips and things. Oh, I'm not trying to impose upon you. It was about half a mile this side of where the path skirts the road.'

'You might stop in the Sentier des Contrebandiers from January to December and not meet a soul,' said André.

'Ah, I see. There's no convincing you. Sceptic! And yet, twenty years ago, you'd have been pretty sure to meet a certain couple of small boys there, wouldn't you?'

'_Si fait_,' assented André. 'We went there a good deal. But we were privileged. The only boys in this country now are peasants' children, and they have no leisure for wandering in the wood. When they're not at school, they're working in the fields. As for their elders, the path is rough and circuitous; the high road's smoother and shorter, no matter where you're bound. Since our time, I doubt if twenty people have passed that way.'

'That argues ill for people's taste. The place is lovely. Underfoot, it's quite overgrown with mosses; and the branches interlace overhead. Where the sun filters through, you get adorable effects of light and shadow. It's fearfully romantic; perfect for making love in, and that sort of thing. Oh, if all the women hereabouts hadn't such hawk-like noses! You see, the Duke of Wellington was here in 1814.--No? He wasn't? I thought I'd read he was.--Ah, well, he was just over the border. But my lady of this morning hadn't a hawk-like nose. I can't quite remember what style of nose she did have, but it wasn't hawk-like. I say, frankly, as between old friends, have you any notion who she was?'

'What kind of horse had she?'

'Ah, there!' cried Paul, with a despairing gesture. 'You've touched my vulnerable point. I never shall have any memory for horses. I think it was black--no, brown--no, grey--no, green. Oh, what am I saying? I can't remember. Do--do you make it an essential?'

'She might have been from Bayonne.'

'Who rides from Bayonne? Fancy a Bayonnaise on a horse! They're all busy in their shops.'

'You forget the military. She may have been the wife of an officer.'

'Oh, horror! Do you really think so? Then she must have been frowsy and provincial, after all; and I thought her so smart and distinguished-looking and everything.'

'Or perhaps an Englishwoman from Biarritz. They sometimes ride out as far as this.'

'Dear André, if she were English, I should have known it at a glance--and there the matter would have rested. I have at least a practised eye for English women. I haven't lived half my life in England without learning something.'

'Well, there are none but English at Biarritz at this season.'

'She was never English. Don't try to bully _me_. Besides, she evidently knew the country. Otherwise, how could she have found the Sentier des Contrebandiers?--She wasn't from Granjolaye?'

'There's no one at Granjolaye save the Queen herself.'

'Deceiver! Manuela told me last night. She has her little Court, her maids-of-honour. I think my _inconnue_ looked like a maid-of-honour.'

'She has her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, and a couple of German women, countesses or baronesses or something, with unpronounceable names.'

'I can't believe she's German. Still, I suppose there are _some_ Christian Germans. Perhaps....'

'They're both middle-aged. Past fifty, I should think.'

'Oh.--Ah, well, that disposes of them. But how do you know her Majesty hasn't a friend, a guest, staying with her?'