Chapter 28

THE BRASS BELL

Hermia, waiting for him! What did Mrs. Hammond mean? Was the woman mad? Hermia had fled from New York, her proud little head bent before this cruel story which, of course, had gathered impetus in the telling and now indicted her of sins unwritten in the fair page of her experience. Poor child! She had suffered--and he, fool that he was, had sat in his studio, the victim of his false pride, wrapped in his own ego while this vile plot was brewing. He might have done something if he had had his wits about him, instead of hiding his head like an ostrich and imagining himself unseen. Olga--he did not dare to think of Olga Tcherny or of De Folligny. He had given his word to Mrs. Hammond to leave the entire matter in her hands. Even while she had given him her word not to speak she had been planning this refined vengeance, probably knew that Pierre de Folligny had already made a good story of their adventure for some of his new intimates at the Club. He would have a reckoning with her--some day--and with De Folligny! His fingers tightened on his stick, and an angry tide warmed his face and temples. Had he met them, there upon the Avenue at that moment, all his promises to Mrs. Hammond must have been forgotten--and he would have made short work of that unspeakable gentleman. Of Olga Tcherny he thought with hardly less rancor. At one time--a year ago now--Olga had loomed large upon his horizon. Now in the light of his present knowledge of her he wondered how he could have ever thought of her friendship seriously.

She belonged in an atmosphere too sophisticated for his simple rustic soul. She had always lied to him; her friendship was a lie; her love, too--a lie. That declaration--Good God!--and he had been actually at the point of being sorry for her. He had nothing to regret now with regard to Olga Tcherny. She had wiped the slate clean, and made a new account at poor Hermia's expense.

Hermia in exile--and suffering! Her innocence could not make her heart pangs any the less real. Like a child she had followed the line of least resistance, and seeking freedom from the trammels of convention had obeyed her impulses blindly. It was such a trivial transgression to find so crushing a retribution. And he, Markham, walked the streets of New York the envied hero of an "armourette." This was the law, which says that women may sin if they are not found out and that men may sin when they please.

Poor little penitent, atoning for sins uncommitted! All his heart went out to her, and his memory, passing the forbidding vision of her last appearance, now pictured the real Hermia that he knew, a brave, buoyant Hermia, who knew nothing of discouragements and greeted the sunrise with a smile, her head now bowed and, like _Niobe_, "all tears."

Was she waiting for him? If so, why had she not written? A line, and he would have sped to her. She knew that. She must have known it when she had fled. Where was she now? At Westport, perhaps? In the South somewhere, alone with her maid, avoiding the newspapers, seeking the company of strangers that her ears might not hear or her eyes see the record of her transgression? Had she gone abroad again? Who would know? He might inquire of Phyllis Van Vorst or Caroline Anstell over the telephone. But when he reached his rooms and had taken up the receiver he saw that even this information was denied to him. Any manifest interest or anxiety on his part with regard to Hermia would be regarded with suspicion. Nor was he any more positive than before that his quest would meet with the approval of its object. He was powerless. There was nothing for him but to wait.

The thought of going to his club to dine was repellant to him. The story that Mrs. Hammond had let him read was not common property and, though none of his acquaintances would have had the bad taste to mention his connection with it, his appearance among them must revive its disagreeable details, at Hermia's expense. So for some days he dined alone at an obscure restaurant, glooming over the evening paper and wondering what could be done. Night after night he walked the street until, at last, wearied and no nearer the solution of his problem, he went home and to bed, to toss restlessly most of the night and plan impossibilities. Through his thoughts, the friendship of Mrs. Berkeley Hammond hovered comfortingly. She was not a woman to promise idly. She had been interested in his story and felt herself morally bound to make some sort of restitution to Hermia for her own unwilling responsibility in the attention that had been drawn to it. He did not doubt that she would use all her influence to minimize the effect of Olga's machinations, and he felt sure with such a friend at court that Hermia need have little fear from the opinions of Mrs. Hammond's friends and her own, and these after all were the only opinions that mattered to her.

An early morning, a few days after the interview with Mrs. Hammond, found Markham at his studio, somber and dark eyed, regarding his latest work with a savage eye of disapproval. He didn't feel like working, and by a piece of good fortune his time was free for him to do what he chose. He would have liked above all things to have employed it in a visit to the house of Olga Tcherny and thence with dispatch to the hotel of Monsieur de Folligny, where what remained of his wrath could be honestly expended in a manner befitting the occasion. This occupation being denied him, there was nothing left but to take what pleasure he could from the mental picture that he made of it.

At last he rose and groped for his tobacco. A precious lot of good that would do him! It would have been a pity, too, because murder, even such justifiable murder, had not yet received the sanction of society as represented in the New York Department of Police. He paced the floor restlessly and brought up before his desk, where the janitor of the building had a few moments ago laid the morning mail. He took it up idly--and glanced over it--a note or two in the fashionable feminine scrawl about sittings, a letter from a framemaker, one from his Paris agent, and the usual litter of circulars. He took them up one by one, opened them, put some of them aside and consigned others to the paper basket. A small package lay at the bottom of the pile, an unobtrusive package neatly tied with string--evidently an advertisement of some sort--of a paint or of a canvas. He was about to drop it with the others when he was made aware that as he turned the small parcel over it emitted a tinkle as of two metal objects striking together. He turned it again and examined the address and stamp. His name was printed in ink as though with a bad pen and the stamp was French. Now really curious as to its contents and aware of its individuality, he cut the string and opened it. There was an inner wrapping of tissue paper containing a small white pasteboard box which bore the name of a fashionable New York jeweler, and inside the box the origin of the tinkle was revealed in a small brass bell.

He took the object out, his wonder growing, and held it suspended between his thumb and forefinger. A brass bell no larger than his thumbnail, a tarnished little trinket, no longer new, which tinkled merrily under his astonished gaze. He examined the thing more carefully, his bewilderment increasing, noting the curious construction, which was unlike that of the toy bells which had adorned the necks of the wooly beasts abroad at Christmas-time. It was heavy for its size, and when he moved it had a decisive and very mellow note. Who would send him a thing like this and why? There must have been a mistake. He took up the paper wrapper from the waste basket and examined it with renewed interest.

John Markham, Esquire, --West--th Street, New York City.

With a stamp of the French Republic and a postmark of--What were the postmarks? Paris. Of course. And the other? VAL-E--? Valence? Valence was in the South of France on the Rhone. He had never been there. No. That wouldn't do. VAL-L-E--Vallécy!

A brass bell from Vallécy! Still he did not understand. He took the object up again and scrutinized it, its meaning dawning slowly. Vallécy! That was the village where he and Hermia had stayed with Mère Guégou. There was the garden of the golden roses where--The bell! It was from Hermia's head-dress--the belled cap of the _Femme Orchestre_! He knew it now. It was a token. Hermia had sent it--from Vallécy. A token.

In high excitement he examined the obscure postmark again. The accent on the E, a little smudged, but quite legible. Hermia had sent the bell as a token from Vagabondia which meant that she was there in Père Guégou's garden, whither she had fled when her own world had renounced her. She was waiting for him. She needed him, and took this means of showing him that all things that had happened to them both since they had parted in the forest at Sées were to be forgotten--that they were both to take life up--from Vallécy. He stood a moment in joyous uncertainty, his glance on the clock, then, quickly wrapping the memento in its tissue paper, thrust it into his coat pocket and in a moment was striding like a madman down the street. At his apartment he rang for a taxicab, thrust a few things into a suitcase, wrote a note or two and in half an hour was on his way to the bank and then to the steamship wharf.

He had no definite plans except that he must take the first steamer which left New York for Europe. A brief glance at his morning paper advised him of two sailings this morning, one for Havre and the other for Cherbourg, and he had made up his mind to take one steamer or the other. The taxicab crawled, it seemed, and on the way downtown was caught in a block of traffic which delayed him for ten minutes, during which he fumed silently. But he reached the dock with scarcely a quarter of an hour to spare, and after a difficulty which was cleared away, found himself upon the deck of the _Kaiserin Augusta_, a somewhat flustered individual, with many loose ends dangling in retrospect, with no cabin as yet assigned to him, sober of face but inexpressibly happy.

It was really not until his ship was well out at sea and the voyage fairly begun that Markham had the opportunity to settle down comfortably and mediate upon the surprising events of the morning. He found a steamer chair in a quiet place and then gave himself up to his thoughts. He took the tiny object from his breast pocket and turned it over in his fingers. Of course it was Hermia's. The wonder was that he had not recognized it at first glance. This bell and its other small companions had tinkled their way into his heart at each step she had taken down the long road from Evreux to Alençon--tinkled merrily at Passy, joyously at Vallécy, disdainfully at Verneuil, and contentedly at La Mesle. Alençon had made them tragic so they had been packed in Hermia's bundle which went with her to Sées and were heard no more, except in a faint tinkle of protest as she was put aboard the train for Paris. Wonderful bells they were, tiny chimes that had rung in the season of their joy and lingered in their memory never to be forgotten. Tokens--Hermia had realized it--symbols of her greatest happiness and his, with life reduced to the simplest elements, in which there had been no place for the extravagant commonplaces of the other life which they both had lived and endured. Hermia had fled to Vallécy to the motherly breast of Mère Guégou, and there perhaps was weeping out her troubles. He took out the square of paper (he had clipped it with his penknife) which bore the address and examined it again. This and the bell were all he had had to start him off on his fateful pilgrimage. But they were enough. She could not have written him after her treatment of him in New York. She had thrown herself upon his mercy, given her message ambiguity that he might ignore it if he chose, or read, as she had hoped he would, the message of her heart, across the distances. It was the message of a vagabond like himself, as definite a message as the gypsy _patteran_ which shows the way from one camp to another. His _patteran_ pointed to Vallécy, that lovely village by the Arth where he had first told Hermia that he loved her. Beyond Vallécy had come misunderstanding, bitterness, misfortune. She had chosen that spot as though by instinct. She wanted him to remember her there where love had first been spoken. Alone and waiting for him among the roses of Père Guégou--

He started up from his chair in bewilderment, staring blankly at the sunlit sea, suddenly mindful of the fact that in the hurry of getting away he had not cabled her. He threw his rugs aside and made his way hastily to the office, to find unluckily that the wireless had gotten out of order, and that it might be several hours before it was repaired. He strolled on deck again, thoughtful, suddenly impressed with the potency of the charm that had called him. The thought of replying to her message had not until this moment entered his head. All that he had been able to think of was that he must get to her at once, follow the _patteran_ at top speed. He had done so and now unhappily remembered a dozen neglected people who must wonder at his extraordinary disappearance. But he only smiled joyously. He had another engagement.

He took up his walk along the promenade deck, careless of the enemies he had made, careless of the friendships he might lose, all his thoughts of the small vagabond at Vallécy. His inability to communicate with her by wireless set him thinking. Wasn't that, too, a symbol? If he got a message over what would be its effect? Would she still wait for him, looking forward to the precious hour of their meeting? Or would her mind change at the last moment and send her flying from him again? This was more like Hermia, the real Hermia that he knew. He feared her moods still. And if he refused to cable her would her patience last until he got to France? He cast is memory over the months that had passed in New York. He guessed how much she had suffered. He had followed her social career through the newspapers and he knew now that she had gone gaily that she might hide her terror. She was tired--poor child--tired in body and spirit, and that was why she had not stayed in Paris among the fashionable people she knew there; that was why she had fled to Vallécy, where at least she might be at peace, unreminded by those of her own social sphere of the villainous story which pursued her. There at Vallécy she sat remote, with her own innocence for company, convalescent--amid these primitive surroundings--from the sickness that her world had given her. She would wait for him _if she wasn't sure that he would come_. He smiled. He would not send the wireless. Nor would he wire her from Cherbourg.

A search of the postmark of his much-beloved package revealed the date "_Av. 22_." She had sent her token on the twenty-second of April and it was now only the second of May. Ten days only had passed, and he was already well on his way to her. In less than a week more he would be in Vallécy. She would wait for him. Markham, as will be observed, was learning something about women--about one woman at least, the only woman in the world who mattered.

The voyage seemed interminable, through the ship was a fast one, and the day's run (on paper) highly satisfactory. He knew no one aboard but some of the officers, with whom he had crossed before, and he was thankful that he was therefore left alone with his thoughts, which were infinitely more pleasing to him than the chatter of the salon or smoking-room. He read novels, or tried to, but his own story was so much more interesting, so much more real than those he could find that he gave them up after a trial or two and lived again his own romance. The time to take it up again where he had left it off came slowly, but at last the _Lizard_ hove into sight and the passengers for France prepared for debarkation. Morning of the next day found Markham in the express to Paris. Evreux was his station, and from there to Verneuil was a little over an hour, most of it along the road he and Hermia had so blithely traveled. The road from Verneuil to Vallécy--he would cover it afoot if there were no vehicles to be begged, borrowed or stolen.