Chapter 3

"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."

"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are increasing."

"And the tragedies of the heart--are they diminishing in consequence? Oh, Emile!" And she laughed.

"Hermione--your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently, pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."

"Thank you, Maurice."

She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.

"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern, is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a full-fledged monster."

Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione. Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused despair, and exclaimed:

"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."

"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"

"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."

"Ah!"

"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.

"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we have it here?"

"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."

She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:

"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"

"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have never been in Sicily or Italy."

"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."

"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois. "What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"

They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and unspoiled by any awkward shyness.

Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.

"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the coffee he went out, glowing.

"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.

"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I--it doesn't matter to me. Wherever it is will be the same to me."

"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's profoundly true."

"Don't you--don't you know?" ventured Delarey.

"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."

He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they were.

"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that you have never known the happiness that makes of every place--Clapham, Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement--an Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered, had your ambition and your freedom--"

"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on life watching the manifestations of life."

"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good, Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one sees--one must see--everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps I don't put it well, but--"

"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."

"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.

His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration and love.

Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had arrived.

"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you bring to my mind at this moment."

"What's that, Emile?"

"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of which you speak--what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably, followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."

"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"

"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup of sorrow."

Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the vehement exclamation:

"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you, Emile."

"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"

He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.

"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"

Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy--for so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway--Artois hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.

"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent them from living, too. Live, live--enter into the garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."

"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."

"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"

"I!" said Delarey.

He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked confused.

"I don't know if I can say," he answered, at last. "But I think if the present was happy I should try to live in that, and if it was sad I should have a shot at looking forward to something better."

"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard," said Hermione, "and after my own heart. Long live the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"

Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then three men came in smoking cigars. Hermione looked at her watch.

"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go. Emile, will you drive with me home?"

"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"

He glanced at Delarey.

"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."

They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his hand to Artois.

"I am glad to have been allowed to meet Hermione's best friend," he said, simply. "I know how much you are to her, and I hope you'll let me be a friend, too, perhaps, some day."

He wrung Artois's hand warmly.

"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.

He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.

Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog had lifted, and it was possible to see to right and left of the greasy thoroughfare.

"Need we go straight back?" said Hermione. "Why not tell him to drive down to the Embankment? It's quiet there at night, and open and fine--one of the few fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have a last talk with you, Emile."

Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his stick.

"The Embankment--Thames," he said to the cabman, with a strong foreign accent.

"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.

As soon as the trap was shut down above her head Hermione exclaimed:

"Emile, I'm so happy, so--so happy! I think you must understand why now. You don't wonder any more, do you?"

"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any wonder?"

"I think you felt some. But I knew when you saw him it would go. He's got one beautiful quality that's very rare in these days, I think--reverence. I love that in him. He really reverences everything that is fine, every one who has fine and noble aspirations and powers. He reverences you."

"If that is the case he shows very little insight."

"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing the matter now, is there?"

Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did not hasten to give it. Instead he turned the conversation once more to Delarey.

"Tell me something more about him," he said. "What sort of family does he come from?"

"Oh, a very ordinary family, well off, but not what is called specially well-born. His father has a large shipping business. He's a cultivated man, and went to Eton and Oxford, as Maurice did. Maurice's mother is very handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern blood comes from her side."

"Oh--how?"

"Her mother was a Sicilian."

"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"

"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."

"How do you know that?"

"You mean that our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow if he'd have me."

"I'm quite sure you would."

"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious old dear. But didn't you like Maurice, Emile? I felt so sure you did."

"I--yes, I liked him. I see his fascination. It is almost absurdly obvious, and yet it is quite natural. He is handsome and he is charming."

"And he's good, too."

"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."

"The messenger of the gods--yes, he is like that."

She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.

"A bearer of good tidings--that is what he has been to me. I want you to like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one else."

The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment--a street that was obscure and that looked sad and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.

"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."

"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."

"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me--you for one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"

She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the spreading night.

"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't work, but I'm glad to say he does."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand Maurice, and that's the important matter."

They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side; on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of existence?

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide. Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:

"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly--don't be afraid now. What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely:

"Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."

"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that--I am relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."

"He is, through and through."

"I think so--now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us when the time comes. He is modest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining influence."

"Against what?"

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione said. "He's much younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."

"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty years ahead of him in all essentials. Don't you feel it?"

"I suppose--yes, I do."

"Mercury--he should be mercurial."

"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He is full of swiftness."

"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."

"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather as a horse--"

"Why not say an ass?"

She laughed.

"An ass, then, my dear, lies down sometimes and rolls in dust. I think you are doing it to-night. I think you were preparing to do it this afternoon. Perhaps it is the effect of London upon you?"

"London--by-the-way, where are you going for your honeymoon? I am sure you know, though Monsieur Delarey may not."

"Why are you sure?"

"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be Italian."

She laid her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had brought across her happiness.

"You're right; I've decided."

"Italy--and hotels?"

"No, a thousand times no!"

"Where then?"

"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."

"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a summer four or five years ago contemplating Etna?"

"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken it again. All the little furniture I had--beds, straw chairs, folding-tables--is stored in a big room in the village at the foot of the mountain. Gaspare, the Sicilian boy who was my servant, will superintend the carrying up of it on women's heads--his dear old grandmother takes the heaviest things, arm-chairs and so on--and it will all be got ready in no time. I'm having the house whitewashed again, and the shutters painted, and the stone vases on the terrace will be filled with scarlet geraniums, and--oh, Emile, I shall hear the piping of the shepherds in the ravine at twilight again with him, and see the boys dance the tarantella under the moon again with him, and--and--"

She stopped with a break in her voice.

"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment. "Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise--tell me that!"

But he only said, even more gravely:

"So you're taking him to the real South?"

"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon. He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with me, and he shall love it as I love it."

He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from him. And now she saw that, and said again:

"London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."

"It's very possible," he replied. "But--I can say it to you--I have a certain gift of--shall I call it divination?--where men and women are concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can, almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."