Part 15

She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.

"You--you----" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"

It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.

"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"

"Go!"

Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with hate and shame.

"Go!"

"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."

"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"

"But, Muriel----"

"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring for the servants."

"Muriel----"

"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again, I'll ring."

He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.

Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination, Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the window.

Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.

"Muriel!" he cried.

She opened her heavy eyes.

"Jim!"

He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father strokes the hair of his weary child.

"My poor little girl!" he said.

Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth, or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him while he did that.

"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought--I hardly know what I thought."

"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"

Muriel started.

"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's----" She laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It stuck--the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the pieces from the floor."

She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of marital ethics.

After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of deception. Truth became impossible.

She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy against her lover and heightened her affection--call it love as she would, it would now be no more than affection--for Jim. She wanted to tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that barred her way.

She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.

"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."

At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.

"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is really no reason for you to worry."

She did not look up, but she shook her head.

"I am not," she repeated.

He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her cheek, which her hands left bare.

"There, there," he said.

At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.

"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."

He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.

"What--what----" he stammered.

"O, Jim!" she cried.

"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What--how? When? You don't mean----"

"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.

Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he began again:

"You don't mean----"

"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"

He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.

"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"

Her head sank lower in her hands.

"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."

"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"

"I suppose so."

"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You must know! How did this happen?"

Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her breast.

"Answer me!" he demanded.

She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into a sheet.

"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a drive. Coming back--here at the hotel--I fell from the cab--getting out. I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor--_not_ Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said it was easy--They said I would be all right in a week.--I thought I was--But I have suffered--O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't, please, think----"

She crashed to the floor at his feet.

Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.

Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.

"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have had rest, and instead----Why didn't you tell me? Why?"

"I was afraid," she said, simply.

"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"

Her words were a fresh stab.

"Yes. I knew how much you wanted----And I was afraid."

"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."

"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time, perhaps----Only now--oh, take me away!"

"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to our own country. Back home."

But at that she shuddered.

"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than Paris. Don't you see? We left there happy, expecting----Not there. No, I couldn't bear that."

Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand, brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.

She drew the hand from him.

"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."

"It is--there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk about getting away."

"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we were in Italy."

"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."

"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not anything I have said about it?"

"Not that. I don't know. Something before that----"

"Because you lost me in the crowd?"

"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I--I don't like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."

He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in unfamiliar surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.

New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris and different from New York.

"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.

She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.

The next morning they left for Marseilles.

XVIII

OUR LADY OF PROTECTION

For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel, because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however, was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.

"Let's take it," said Muriel.

She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of hotels.

"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may want to be getting back home when--when all's well again."

"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease," Muriel serenely assured him.

Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at once.

They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she was heartily sorry for Jim.

It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to press once more the question of their return to New York. They were sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their villa, and were looking over the blue bay.

"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"

His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.

"Perhaps," she granted.

On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.

The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers answered or to the making of other prayers.

"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused, "that these people wanted."

Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.

"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."

His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.

"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."

"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in here."

"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze out there."

"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."

Muriel's lips tightened.

"Very well," she said.

She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled to the side overlooking the bay.

Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cité Chabas and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point, where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue; the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of land where towers the Château d'If.

She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a landscape of which she had only heard:

"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

"Muriel!"

It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner serious.

"How did you come here?"

The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her weapons of defence.

"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come here."

His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her poise.

"How dared you come?" she asked.

"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.

"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."

"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."

"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"

"You must." He came nearer to her.

"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."

"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that you have told him nothing."

She eyed him menacingly.

"Are you so sure of that?"

"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."

"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider me?--But of course you don't!"

"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear that I should cause you annoyance----"

"You annoy me now."

"But if you have not told him----Well, what I have to say is my excuse. If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste in saying it."

He moved still nearer.

"I have told him," she said.

"No."

"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes, her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.

"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied. I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now--now, _ach_, I know I love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my punishment--for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still be hopeless."

She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the cold.

"Hopeless?" she repeated.

"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."

She remembered her teaching in the convent school.

"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.

"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact, you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."

She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning the corner of the promenade.

"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything. Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone with you before--before----"

"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our lives."

The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.

"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.

Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself altogether at the best.

"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been homesick for a long time without knowing."

"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"

"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."

"Then you are returning soon?"

"Three weeks from to-day."

Muriel looked at Jim.

"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.

"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed, didn't we, dear?"

She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She could only nod.

"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not mention it to me when we met to-day."

"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."

She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her were not the sense of her deception of him.

"I forgot," she said.

"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing, my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the Captain for a few minutes with his _dubonais_. We have an outside stateroom on the upper deck of the _Prinzess Wilhelmina_, and we sail from Genoa."

He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced another surprise.

"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."

This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.

"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."

"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you had to to run right off to dress, you know."

"Why must you go?"

"Those French purchasers again."

"I thought you were through with them."

"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I wrote to them and fixed a price on that."

"You don't mean that you tricked them?"

"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of doing business."

"You didn't say you had written them."

"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening and see that she is not too much depressed."