Part 11

“Captain Tupper,” said he, “her Grace will take the fastest cutter to the town to catch the Blue Train to Calais. Should a sleeper on the Blue Train be unavailable, you will see to it that she is accommodated with one of a suitable colour. We, in the cool of the evening, will make for Naples. Thank you.”

The Duke closed his eyes again, for he was sleepy. The Duchess stared as though into the heart of the still blue bay, and who shall say what it was that she saw in that deep place, whether she saw the towers of her love torn down by the winds of man’s discontent, the ruins of her marriage washed in the infinite sea of man’s inconstancy? Her eyes darkened, and presently she said, bemused: “I am going now. _Adieu_, Maximilian.”

“Leonora,” he said, with closed eyes, “I wish you all happiness and content.”

“Content!” said she, and laughed.

“Good-bye, Leonora.”

She said: “Max, we were very happy once. We were lovers once. So happy--once upon a time!”

He whispered:

“‘_Out upon it, I have loved_ _Three whole days together!_ _And am like to love three more,_ _If it prove fine weather._’”

She: “Oh, but I can match you one vulgar Restoration gallant against another!

“‘_Then talk not of inconstancy,_ _False hearts and broken vows;_ _If I by miracle can be_ _This live-long minute true to thee,_ ’_Tis all that Heaven allows._’”

He sighed: “How I loved you, Leonora! As I had never loved anyone before, as I will never love anyone again!”

“How I loved you, Maximilian! But now!” And she said: “A legal separation is a silly quibble. Besides, you might want to marry again. Or I might.”

“Might, Leonora? But you will, must, can’t help but! With your beauty, youth, wealth.”

“Thank you. I have often noticed that one’s friends like one best as one is leaving them. Then, Maximilian, shall I divorce you?”

“If you please, dear. My lawyers are Messrs. Onward & Christian. They will arrange the matter with yours in the usual way.”

“Remember, dear, that your King will not receive a divorced Duke at court.”

“The King can do no wrong,” yawned the Duke. “It must be rather hard on him sometimes, but the law is the law.”

His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-the-mist, and lo! was gone. She said softly: “You are such a baby, Max!”

Seamen passed by, bearing a great leather Innovation trunk to the side. A black cloud rose up from Africa and hid the sun. A shadow walked across the pretty town of Cannes and drove the youth from painted faces.

“And because,” said the young Duchess wistfully, “you are such a baby, I don’t put it beyond you to make love to my sister if you should meet her. She has always been jealous of me, so she would enjoy nothing so much as your making love to her. Promise not to, Max, please, oh, please! She has just come over to Paris, so I read this morning in _The New York Herald_. Max, promise not to make a fool of me to my own sister!”

“She’s pretty?”

“Pretty? Are words so scarce, sir, that you must use a copper coin? And she my twin!”

“Ah me! Oh dear!”

Her voice scarce disturbed the silence of the yacht: “Good-bye, Duke Maximilian. Our lives go different ways. I do wish you success, happiness, health. Good-bye.”

As he lay, with closed eyes, his fingers found her hand and raised it to his lips.

“Good-bye,” said he. Such was his farewell.

She looked back from the side. He lay silent. She said:

“Courtesy, Maximilian?”

A sea-bird mocked the silence. The cloud athwart the sun was now as large as half the world. The Duchess of Mall said:

“Chivalry, Maximilian?”

The sea-bird screamed and flew away, and Leonora of Mall cried: “I will forgive you all things but your farewell, Maximilian. The very birds are appalled to see chivalry so low in a man that he will take his lady’s _adieu_ lying down.”

Her maid, hatted and veiled for travelling, whispered to her ear:

“Your Grace, he is asleep.”

III

It is a sorry business to enquire into what men think, when we are every day only too uncomfortably confronted with what they do. Moreover, the science of psychology--for that is what we are talking about--is as yet but a _demoiselle_ among the sciences; and that writer carries the least conviction who tries to wind his tale about her immature coils. Therefore we will not enquire into the young Duke’s thoughts, but merely relate his actions: we will leave his psychology to the fishes of the tideless sea, while we let him confront us with all his vanity.

The time came when the young Duke awoke. Now the winds of the sea were playing about him, the sun was certainly not where he had left it, and the angle of his deck-chair was peculiar. The world was very dark. He looked upon the sea and found it odd, and he looked upon the land and did not find it at all.

“Ho!” cried the Duke. “Where is the land, the land of France? Ho there, Captain Tupper! What have you done with the fair land of France? I do not see it anywhere. Our French allies will be exceedingly annoyed when they hear we have mislaid them. And do my eyes deceive me, or is that a wave making for us over there?”

“It is blowing moderate from the southeast, your Grace.”

“Moderate, upon my word! Captain Tupper, moderation sickens me. Ho, I see some land over there!”

“We have just left Nice behind, your Grace.”

“I sincerely hope, Captain Tupper, that you are not among those who affect to despise Nice. Queen Victoria was very fond of Nice. It may not be Deauville or Coney Island, Captain Tupper, but Nice can still offer attractions of a homely sort.”

“But I understood, your Grace, that----”

“These are strange words, Captain Tupper! But proceed.”

“--that our direction was Naples.”

“Naples? Good God, Naples! And look, there’s another wave making straight for us! Hang on, Tupper. I’ll see you are all right. You sailors aren’t what you were in the days when you each had a port in every----”

“A wife in every port is the correct form of the libel, your Grace.”

“But hang it, I call this, don’t you, a damned rough sea? However, I feel very gay this evening. I have just had an idea. Now, Tupper, let me hear no more of this high-handed talk about turning your back on Nice.”

“But, your Grace, we are making for Naples!”

“Your obsession for Naples seems to me singularly out of place on a windy evening. I think you might consider me a little, even though I am on my own yacht. I detest, I deplore, Naples. Put back to Nice, Captain Tupper. I am for Paris!”

“For Paris, your Grace!”

“For Paris, Captain Tupper, with a laugh and a lance and a tara-tara-diddle for to break a pretty heart!”

IV

Students of sociology have of recent years made great strides in their alleviation of the conditions prevailing among the poor; but is it not a fact that, as a notorious daily paper lately asked, the study of those conditions appears to attract the interest of only the lighter sort of society people and the pens of only the most ambitious novelists? And that the benefits of this study, at least to novelists, are not mean, was proved beyond all doubt only the other day, when perhaps the wealthiest of contemporary writers increased his fortune by writing a tale about a miser in a slum. No one, on the other hand, will deny that the achievements of sociologists among the poor are as nothing compared with those of students of hospitality who, poor and unrewarded though they remain, have of late years done yeoman work in alleviating the conditions prevailing among the rich. It is to the generous spadework of men such as these that American hostesses in Europe owe the betterment of their lot; and it is by the support of their merciful hands that ladies burdened with great wealth are prevented from sinking down in the rarefied atmosphere to which they have been called.

Mere students of hospitality had not, however, been strong enough to support the ailing burden of Mrs. Omroy Pont when that lady had first come over from America at the call of certain voices that had advised her that her mission lay in European society. It had needed graduates of that brotherhood, lean with endeavour in ball-rooms and browned with the suns of the Riviera, to prevent that ample lady from succumbing to the exhaustion of carrying her wealth through the halls of her houses in London and Paris among guests who had failed to catch her name on being introduced. But the Good Samaritans had worked unceasingly on her behalf, and since Mrs. Omroy Pont had both great wealth and infinite insensibility she was soon in a position to give a ball at which quite half the guests knew her by sight.

The morning after the Duke’s arrival in Paris there was this notice in the Continental _Daily Mail_: “The Duke of Mall has arrived at his residence in the Avenue du Bois, and will spend the spring in Paris.” And presently the good Mrs. Omroy Pont was on the telephone, first here, then there and finally to the Duke himself, saying: “My dear Duke, how do you do, how do you do? I am so glad you are in Paris just now, Paris is so attractive in the spring. You mustn’t fail to see the tulips in the Tuileries, they are as beautiful as _débutantes_. My dear Duke, I am giving a party to-morrow night, you must come, you really must come, now don’t say you won’t because I can’t bear that, and really I must say, my dear Duke, that your unfortunate inability to accept any of my invitations so far has seemed almost marked, whereas----”

“I am afraid,” began the Duke, who had not the faintest intention of going anywhere near one of Mrs. Omroy Pont’s parties, for she bored him and life is short.

“But you mustn’t be afraid!” cried Mrs. Omroy Pont. “Now, my dear Duke, I want you particularly to come to this party because there is someone who wants to meet you, someone very lovely, positively I am not pulling your leg----”

“Really this is too much!” the Duke muttered, coldly saying out aloud: “Dear Mrs. Omroy Pont, you do me great honour but I am afraid that an extremely previous and decidedly prior engagement----”

“It is Miss Ava Lamb who wants to meet you, my dear Duke. She has just come over to Paris. Dinner is at nine. Thank you, thank you. It will be such fun. You will not have to talk unless you want to and you may go to sleep just when you like as I have engaged Mr. Cherry-Marvel to conduct the conversation over dinner. At nine then, my dear Duke.”

V

The Duke, as he fairly acknowledged to himself the morning after Mrs. Omroy Pont’s party, had been diverted beyond all expectation by his meeting with Miss Lamb. While she, candour compelled him to admit, hadn’t seemed any less sensible to the pleasant quality of their companionship. A beautiful girl, a sensible girl, with a lively interest in the passing moment and a delicious capacity for deriving pleasure from the twists in conversation which came so naturally to the Duke but were become, it has to be confessed, a shade familiar to his friends. She hadn’t, he reflected over his morning coffee, said anything throughout the evening that didn’t interest and entertain; and, since she had come to Europe for the first time but the other day, had amused him vastly with her impressions, which weren’t by any means all favourable, since Miss Lamb confessed to a taste for simplicity; which was very agreeable to the Duke, who was also wealthy.

All this made very pleasant thinking for the Duke over his morning coffee; but had he consulted his memory more carefully, it might have emerged that Miss Lamb had listened with pretty attention the while he had talked, the matter of his talk seldom being so abstract in nature that she couldn’t entirely grasp it by just looking at him.

What, of course, had instantly impressed him, as it impressed all who knew the Duchess, was the amazing resemblance between the sisters; since the fact that twins are very frequently as alike as two peas never does seem to prepare people for the likeness between the twins they actually meet. Now between Miss Lamb and the Duchess of Mall there wasn’t, you dared swear, so much as a shadow of difference in grace of line and symmetry of feature. But why, as Ava Lamb sensibly protested, why on earth should there be or need there be or could there be, since Leonora and she had been twins as punctually to the second as was possible?

A nearer view, however, discovered a deal of difference between the sisters: in those small gestures of voice, habits of expression, capacity for attention and the like, which, so the Duke had warmly said, contribute far more than actual looks to mark the difference between one woman and another. Nor were they less dissimilar in colouring, for whereas both the Duchess and Miss Lamb had those small white faces and immense blue eyes generally affected by American ladies for the conquest of Europe, the Duchess’s hair was of a rich and various auburn shaded here to the deep lights of Renaissance bronze and there to the glow of Byzantine amber--the Duchess’s hair was, in fact, fair to fairish, while Miss Lamb’s was as near black as is proper in anyone with blue eyes who is without Irish blood.

In the course of the ball that inevitably followed Mrs. Omroy Font’s dinner-party the Duke had had further opportunity of judging the differences between his wife and her beautiful sister. And presently he had thought it only fair to tell Miss Lamb that he and her sister had decided, for each their sakes, to break their marriage; and he had thought it only fair to himself to point his confession with a sigh, a sigh which he explained, after a silence quite beautifully bridged by an understanding look from her, as being forced from him by the fact that there was no pleasing some women.

“You mustn’t for a moment think,” he’d added wretchedly, “that I am trying to enlist your sympathy against your own sister, but----”

“Please!” Miss Lamb had protested quite unhappily to that. And here was another and the sweetest difference of all between the sisters, for Miss Lamb’s was the prettiest American accent imaginable, whereas the Duchess had long since and all too completely achieved the cold and ironic monotony of the mother-tongue.

To be with Ava Lamb, the Duke had gratefully reflected at that moment, was to look on all the beauty of his wife in atmospheric conditions undisturbed by his wife’s sarcastic habit of mind. Miss Lamb hadn’t a touch of that irony and sophistication which is so often mistaken by American ladies for European culture, she was perfectly that rarest of all visitors to a bored continent, a fresh and simple American lady.

And “Please!” was all she had said about her sister! But to the young Duke that one word had meant so much, forced as it had been so unhappily from her lips, as if half to shield her pert sister against the consequences of her folly, half to prevent him from seeing how deeply she disapproved of that sister, and wholly and sweetly to stay his tongue from exploring further into that misguided sister’s character--it had meant so much that he had been content to wait on her understanding even before she’d quietly added: “Oh, I understand----”

“But do you, do you?” he had cried emphatically, and she had let silence present him anew with her deep sense of understanding. She had a delicious talent for silence.

“My dear”--it had just slipped out of him like that, quite naturally, quite wonderfully--“if only other women were like you! To understand, I mean, just to understand!”

“And men?” Miss Lamb had dropped the two words with perceptible unwillingness yet with just a touch of defiance, as who should say that she too, on so rare an occasion, must for once say what was in her mind.

“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.

“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of men?”

“Enough surely, surely!”

“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”

“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew nothing of men?”

“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just because, like all rare people, you’re--well, fastidious!”

“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t know....”

“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to wait.”

“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”

“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”

“But are you so sure, Duke?” She was pleading with him. They were alone. The music and the dance passed behind them. He met her eyes humbly. “Are you so sure you’ve waited long enough--I mean, my friend, for time to bring the best out of someone you love?”

“But,” he’d cried wretchedly, “I don’t love her! That’s just, don’t you see, the awful mistake and pity of it all! It’s not that Leonora and I have quarrelled, but that we’ve each just found the other out.”

Miss Lamb sighed: “Oh! Oh, dear! And why, why? Way back home I’ve wondered, you know, about many things. All this sadness in life! It hurts to hear this. It hurts me--for you both. Poor, poor Leonora!”

The Duke said very earnestly: “Look here, don’t for a moment think that I’m being cruel or anything like that. Believe me, your sister loves me no more than she has driven me into loving her. Honest to God, Miss Lamb.”

“You _say_ that! But I know her, Duke. My own sister! Go to her now, and you will see. I am telling you to go to Leonora now and you will find her crying for her lost love.”

“She left me cruelly, completely. I had done nothing. She left me, as a matter of fact, while I was asleep. She took herself from my yacht as though--look here, as though I was a plague! You call that caring, Miss Lamb? I’d rather be hated in purgatory than cared for on earth after that fashion. But let us talk of something else. Of you!”

“Oh, me! Just a tourist in Europe....”

“Of your heart, then, in America! You left it there? Now confess!”

“Dear no! I wouldn’t have my heart jumped by man or god, not I!”

“Bravo, bravo!”

“So my heart’s with me here and now, I thank you.”

“What, you feel it beating!”

“Perhaps. A little.”

“Oh!”

“At being in Paris, Duke.”

“I deserved the snub. Go on, please.”

“My friend,” she said softly, “the history of my life is the history of my dreams. When I was a girl I had--oh, such dreams!”

“Girls, Miss Lamb dear, do! And when they grow up and marry they use the sharpest pieces of those broken dreams to beat their husbands with. Oh, I know! Every husband in the world is held responsible for the accidents that befall the dreams of his wife’s girlhood! Oh, I know! I’ve been, Miss Lamb dear, most utterly married.”

“I’m growing afraid of you, Duke. You’ve a cruel tongue!”

“Ava, I wouldn’t have you think I’m abusing your sister to you. But she certainly was born to be a good man’s wife, and she’s certainly never let me forget why she has failed to live up to the promise of her birth.”

“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no! My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”

The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the _concierge’s_ wife talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the anguish of ravished countries--the miraculous art of men to worship their own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried: “Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!”

The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make me think of all that is impossible.”

Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the Seine shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the night to the dignity of fallen archangels driving chariots to the conquest of the Heavens. And a three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash from the _beau quartier_ about the Place Victor Hugo.

“There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent----”

“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”

“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely name for a town built by men to have!”

And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted--and all, honest to God, by companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to renew all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to increase it, for wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise enough to appreciate enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like this girl, why, since they were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a little of Ava’s warm attention and quick understanding? And again the Duke, in solace for self-pity, cast back to yesternight, how he had warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of Paris and had told her the tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and the way of that was this:

“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of the dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of France. Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I mean. Now that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to rest himself after the tumult of battle with the worship of art and beauty, which is not at all the fashion among princes nowadays, because of course we have progressed so far since then. And so our prince, when he had killed as many natives of the conquered country as the honour of war demands, chained the rest with iron chains and put them to the building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And when at last the city was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the world, as all who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young prince hated argument.