Part 16
He became aware, after a long time, of voices below, and turned upon his elbows to look. The ivy had clambered upon and partly covered the iron grille of the little balcony and he could observe without being seen. Young Arthur Benham and Coira O'Hara had come out of the door of the house, and they stood upon the raised and paved terrace which ran the width of the facade, and seemed to hesitate as to the direction they should take. Ste. Marie heard the girl say--
"It's cooler here in the shade of the house," and, after a moment, the two came along the shady terrace, whose outer margin was set at intervals with stained and discoloured marble nymphs upon pedestals, and, between the nymphs, with moss-grown stone benches. They halted before a bench upon which, earlier in the day, a rug had been spread out to dry in the sun and had been forgotten, and, after a moment's further hesitation, they sat down upon it. Their faces were turned towards the house and every word that they spoke mounted in that still air clear and distinct to the ears of the man above.
Ste. Marie wriggled back into the room and sat up to consider. The thought of deliberately listening to a conversation not meant for him sent a hot flush to his cheeks. He told himself that it could not be done, and that there was an end to the matter. Whatever might hang upon it it could not be asked of him that he should stoop to dishonour. But at that the heavy and grave responsibility which really did hang upon him and upon his actions came before his mind's eyes and loomed there mountainous. The fate of this foolish boy, who was set round with thieves and adventurers--even though his eyes were open and he knew where he stood--that came to Ste. Marie and confronted him: and the picture of a bitter old man who was dying of grief came to him: and a mother's face: and _hers_. There could be no dishonour in the face of all this, only a duty very clear and plain. He crept back to his place, his arms folded beneath him as he lay, his eyes at the thin screen of ivy which cloaked the balcony grille.
Young Arthur Benham appeared to be giving tongue to a rather sharp attack of homesickness. It may be that long confinement within the walls of La Lierre was beginning to try him somewhat.
"Mind you," he declared, as Ste. Marie's ears came once more within range, "mind you, I'm not saying that Paris hasn't got its points. It has. Oh yes! And so has London, and so has Ostend, and so has Monte Carlo--Verree much so!--I like Paris. I like the theatres and the vaudeville shows in the Champs Elysees, and I like Longchamps. I like the boys who hang around Henry's bar. They're good sports, all right, all right! But, by Golly, I want to go home! Put me off at the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway and I'll ask no more. Set me down at seven p.m. right there on the corner outside the _Knickerbocker_, for that's where I would live and die." There came into the lad's somewhat strident voice a softness that was almost pathetic.
"You don't know Broadway, Coira, do you? Nix! of course not. Little girl, it's the one, one street of all this large world. It's the equator that runs north and south instead of east and west. It's a long bright gay live wire, that's what Broadway is. And I give you my word of honour like a little man that it--is--not--slow. No indeed! When I was there last it was being called the _Gay White Way_. It is not called the _Gay White Way_ now. It has had forty other new good names since then, and I don't know what they are, but I do know that it is forever gay, and that the electric signs are still blazing all along the street, and the street cars are still killing people in the good old fashion, and the newsboys are still dodging under the automobiles to sell you a _Woild_ or a _Choinal_ or, if it's after twelve at night, a _Morning Telegraph_. Coira, my girl, standing on that corner after dark you can see the electric signs of fifteen theatres, no one of them more than five minutes' walk away, and just round the corner there are more.
"I want to go home! I want to take one large unparalleled leap from here and come down at the corner I told you about. D'you know what I'd do? We'll say it's seven p.m. and beginning to get dark. I'd dive into the _Knickerbocker_ (that's the hotel that the bright and happy people go to for dinner or supper), and I'd engage a table up on the terrace. Then I'd telephone to a little friend of mine, whose name is Doe--John Doe--and in about ten minutes he'd have left the crowd he was standing in line with and he'd come galloping up that glad to see me you'd cry to watch him. We'd go up on the terrace, where the potted palms grow, for our dinner, and the tables all around us would be full of people that would know Johnnie Doe and me, and they'd all make us drink drinks and tell us how glad they were to see us aboard again.
"And after dinner," said young Arthur Benham, with wide and smiling eyes, "after dinner we'd go to see one of the Roof Garden shows. Let me tell you they've got the _Marigny_, or the Ambassadeurs, or the Jardin de Paris beaten to a pulp--to--a--pulp! And after the show we'd slip round to the stage door--you bet we would!--and capture the two most beautiful ladies in the world and take 'em off to supper." He wrinkled his young brow in great perplexity.
"Now I wonder," said he anxiously. "I wonder where we'd go for supper.
"You see," he apologised, "it's two years since I left the Real Street, and Gee, what a lot can happen on Broadway in two years! There's probably half a dozen new supper places that I don't know anything about, and one of them's the place where the crowd goes. Well, anyhow, we'd go to that place, and there'd be a band playing, and the electric fans would go round, and round, and Johnnie Doe and I and the two most beautiful ladies would put it all over the other pikers there."
Young Benham gave a little sigh of pleasure and excitement.
"That's what I'd like to do to-night," said he, "and that's what I'll do, you can bet your sh--boots, when all this silly mess is over and I'm a free man. I'll hike back to good old Broadway, and if ever you see any one trying to pry me loose from it again, you can laugh yourself to death, because he'll never, never succeed.
"Nine more weeks shut in here by stonewalls!" said the boy, staring about him with a sort of bitterness. "Nine weeks more!"
"Is it so hard as that?" asked the girl. There was no foolish coquetry in her tone. She spoke as if the words involved no personal question at all, but there was a little smile at her lips, and Arthur Benham turned towards her quickly and caught at her hands.
"No, no!" he cried. "I didn't mean that. You know I didn't mean that. You're worth nine years' waiting. You're the best, d'you hear? the best there is. There's nobody anywhere that can touch you. Only--well, this place is getting on my nerves. It's got me worn to a frazzle. I feel like a criminal doing time."
"You came very near having to do time somewhere else," said the girl. "If this M. Ste. Marie hadn't blundered we should have had them all round our ears, and you'd have had to run for it."
"Yes," the boy said, nodding gravely. "Yes, that was great luck." He raised his head and looked up along the windows above him.
"Which is his room?" he asked, and Mlle. O'Hara said--
"The one just overhead, but he's in bed far back from the window. He couldn't possibly hear us talking." She paused for a moment in frowning hesitation, and, in the end, said--
"Tell me about him, this Ste. Marie! Do you know anything about him?"
"No," said Arthur Benham, "I don't--not personally, that is. Of course I've heard of him. Lots of people have spoken of him to me. And the odd part of it is that they all had a good word to say. Everybody seemed to like him. I got the idea that he was the best ever. I wanted to know him. I never thought he'd take on a piece of dirty work like this."
"Nor I!" said the girl, in a low voice. "Nor I!" The boy looked up.
"Oh, you've heard of him too, then?" said he. And she said, still in her low voice--
"I--saw him once."
"Well," declared young Benham, "it's beyond me. I give it up. You never can tell about people, can you? I guess they'll all go wrong when there's enough in it to make it worth while. That's what old Charlie always says. He says most people are straight enough when there's nothing in it, but make the pot big enough and they'll all go crooked." The young man's face turned suddenly hard and old and bitter.
"Gee! I ought to know that well enough, oughtn't I?" he said. "I guess nobody knows that better than I do after what happened to me... Come along and take a walk in the garden, Maud! I'm sick of sitting still."
Mlle. Coira O'Hara looked up with a start, as if she had not been listening, but she rose, when the boy held out his hand to her, and the two went down from the terrace and moved off towards the west.
Ste. Marie watched them until they had disappeared among the trees, and then turned on his back, staring up into the softly stirring canopy of green above him, and the little rifts of bright blue sky. He did not understand at all. Something mysterious had crept in where all had seemed so plain to the eye. Certain words that young Arthur Benham had spoken repeated themselves in his mind and he could not at once make them out. Assuredly there was something mysterious here.
In the first place what did the boy mean by "dirty work"? To be sure spying in its usual sense is not held to be one of the noblest of occupations, but--in such a cause as this! It was absurd, ridiculous, to call it "dirty work." And what did he mean by the words which he had used afterwards? Ste. Marie did not quite follow the idiom about the "big enough pot," but he assumed that it referred to money. Did the young fool think he was being paid for his efforts? That was ridiculous too.
The boy's face came before him as it had looked with that sudden hard and bitter expression. What did he mean by saying that no one knew the crookedness of humanity under money temptation better than he knew it after something that had happened to him? In a sense his words were doubtless very true. Captain Stewart (and he must have been "old Charlie"--Ste. Marie remembered that the name was Charles), O'Hara and O'Hara's daughter stood excellent samples of that bit of cynicism, but obviously the boy had not spoken in that sense--certainly not before Mlle. O'Hara! He meant something else, then. But what? What?
Ste. Marie rose with some difficulty to his feet, and carried the pillows back to the bed whence he had taken them. He sat down upon the edge of the bed, staring in great perplexity across the room at the open window, but all at once he uttered an exclamation, and he smote his hands together.
"That boy doesn't know!" he cried. "They're tricking him, these others!"
The lad's face came once more before him, and it was a foolish and stubborn face perhaps, but it was neither vicious nor mean. It was the face of an honest headstrong boy, who would be incapable of the cold cruelty to which all circumstances seemed to point.
"They're tricking him somehow!" cried Ste. Marie again. "They're lying to him and making him think----"
What was it they were making him think, these three conspirators? What possible thing could they make him think other than the plain truth? Ste. Marie shook a weary head and lay down among his pillows. He wished that he had "old Charlie" in a corner of that room with his fingers round "old Charlie's" wicked throat. He would soon get at the truth then: or O'Hara either, that grim and saturnine _chevalier d'industrie_, though O'Hara would be a bad handful to manage: or--Ste. Marie's head dropped back with a little groan when the face of young Arthur's enchantress came between him and the opposite wall of the room, and her great and tragic eyes looked into his.
It seemed incredible that that queen among goddesses should be what she was!
*CHAPTER XIX*
*THE INVALID TAKES THE AIR*
When O'Hara, the next morning, went through the formality of looking in upon his patient, and after a taciturn nod was about to go away again, Ste. Marie called him back. He said--
"Would you mind waiting a moment?" and the Irishman halted inside the door.
"I made an experiment yesterday," said Ste. Marie, "and I find that, after a poor fashion, I can walk--that is to say, I can drag myself about a little, without any great pain, if I don't bend the left leg."
O'Hara returned to the bed and made a silent examination of the bullet wound which, it was plain to see, was doing very well indeed.
"You'll be all right in a few days," said he, "but you'll be lame for a week yet--maybe two. As a matter of fact, I've known men to march half a day with a hole in the leg worse than yours, though it probably was not quite pleasant."
"I'm afraid I couldn't march very far," said Ste. Marie, "but I can hobble a bit. The point is, I'm going mad from confinement in this room. Do you think I might be allowed to stagger about the garden for an hour, or sit there under one of the trees? I don't like to ask favours, but--so far as I can see it could do no harm. I couldn't possibly escape, you see. I couldn't climb a fifteen foot wall even if I had two good legs: as it is, with a leg and a half, I couldn't climb anything."
The Irishman looked at him sharply, and was silent for a time as if considering. But at last he said--
"Of course there is no reason whatever for granting you any favours here. You're on the footing of a spy--a captured spy, and you're very lucky not to have got what you deserved instead of a trumpery flesh wound." The man's face twisted into a heavy scowl.
"Unfortunately," said he, "an--accident has put me--put us in as unpleasant a position towards you as you had put yourself towards us. We seem to stand in the position of having tried to poison you, and--well, we owe you something for that. Still, I'd meant to keep you locked up in this room so long as it was necessary to have you at La Lierre." He scowled once more in an intimidating fashion at Ste. Marie, and it was evident that he found himself embarrassed.
"And," he said awkwardly, "I suppose I owe something to your father's son.... Look here! if you're to be allowed in the garden you must understand that it's at fixed hours and not alone. Somebody will always be with you, and old Michel will be on hand to shoot you down if you try to run for it, or if you try to communicate with Arthur Benham. Is that understood?"
"Quite!" said Ste. Marie gaily.
"Quite understood and agreed to. And many thanks for your courtesy. I shan't forget it. We differ rather widely on some rather important subjects, you and I, but I must confess that you're very generous, and I thank you. The old Michel has my full permission to shoot at me if he sees me trying to fly over a fifteen foot wall."
"He'll shoot without asking your permission," said the Irishman grimly, "if you try that on, but I don't think you'll be apt to try it for the present--not with a crippled leg." He pulled out his watch and looked at it.
"Nine o'clock," said he. "If you care to begin to-day you can go out at eleven for an hour. I'll see that old Michel is ready at that time."
"Eleven will suit me perfectly," said Ste. Marie. "You're very good. Thanks once more!" The Irishman did not seem to hear. He replaced the watch in his pocket and turned away in silence. But before he left the room he stood a moment beside one of the windows, staring out into the morning sunshine, and the other man could see that his face had once more settled into the still and melancholic gloom which was characteristic of it. Ste. Marie watched and, for the first time, the man began to interest him as a human being. He had thought of O'Hara before merely as a rather shady adventurer of a not very rare type, but he looked at the adventurer's face now, and he saw that it was the face of a man of unspeakable sorrows. When O'Hara looked at one, one saw only a pair of singularly keen and hard blue eyes set under a bony brow. When those eyes were turned away, the man's attention relaxed, the face became a battleground furrowed and scarred with wrecked pride and with bitterness and with shame and with agony. Most soldiers of fortune have faces like that, for the world has used them very ill, and they have lost one precious thing after another until all are gone; and they have tasted everything that there is in life, and the flavour which remains is a very bitter flavour--dry like ashes.
It came to Ste. Marie, as he lay watching this man, that the story of the man's life, if he could be made to tell it would doubtless be one of the most interesting stories in the world, as must be the tale of the adventurous career of any one who has slipped down the ladder of respectability rung by rung into that shadowy no-man's-land, where the furtive birds of prey foregather and hatch their plots. It was plain enough that O'Hara had, as the phrase goes, seen better days. Without question he was a villain, but after all a generous villain. He had been very decent about making amends for that poisoning affair. A cheaper rascal would have behaved otherwise. Ste. Marie suddenly remembered what a friend of his had once said of this mysterious Irishman. The two had been sitting on the terrace of a cafe, and, as O'Hara passed by, Ste. Marie's friend pointed after him and said: "There goes some of the best blood that ever came out of Ireland. See what it has fallen to!"
Seemingly it had fallen pretty low. He would have liked very much to know about the downward stages, but he knew that he would never hear anything of them from the man himself, for O'Hara was clad, as it were, in an armour of taciturnity. He was incredibly silent. He wore mail that nothing could pierce.
The Irishman turned abruptly away and left the room, and Ste. Marie, with all the gay excitement of a little girl preparing for her first nursery party, began to get himself ready to go out. The old Michel had already been there to help him bathe and shave, so that he had only to dress himself and attend to his one conspicuous vanity--the painstaking arrangement of his hair, which he wore, according to the fashion of the day, parted a little at one side and brushed almost straight back, so that it looked rather like a close-fitting and incredibly glossy skull-cap. Richard Hartley, who was inclined to joke at his friend's grave interest in the matter, said that it reminded him of patent leather.
When he was dressed--and he found that putting on his left boot was no mean feat--Ste. Marie sat down in a chair by the window and lighted a cigarette. He had half an hour to wait, and so he picked up the volume of Bayard, which Coira O'Hara had not yet taken away from him, and began to read in it at random. He became so absorbed that the old Michel, come to summon him, took him by surprise. But it was a pleasant surprise and very welcome. He followed the old man out of the room with a heart that beat fast with eagerness.
The descent of the stairs offered difficulties, for the wounded leg protested sharply against being bent more than a very little at the knee. But, by aid of Michel's shoulder, he made the passage in safety, and so came to the lower story. At the foot of the stairs some one opened a door almost in their faces, but closed it again with great haste, and Ste. Marie gave a chuckle of laughter, for, though it was almost dark there, he thought he had recognised Captain Stewart.
"So old Charlie's with us to-day, is he?" he said aloud, and Michel queried: "_Comment, monsieur?_" because Ste. Marie had spoken in English.
They came out upon the terrace before the house, and the fresh sweet air bore against their faces, and little flecks of live gold danced and shivered about their feet upon the moss-stained tiles. The gardener stepped back for an instant into the doorway and reappeared, bearing across his arms the short carbine with which Ste. Marie had already made acquaintance. The victim looked at this weapon with a laugh, and the old Michel's gnome-like countenance distorted itself suddenly and a weird cackle came from it.
"It is my old friend?" demanded Ste. Marie, and the gardener cackled once more, stroking the barrel of the weapon as if it were a faithful dog.
"The same, monsieur," said he. "But she apologises for not doing better."
"Beg her for me," said the young man, "to cheer up. She may get another chance." Old Michel's face froze into an expression of anxious and rather frightened solicitude, but he waved his arm for the prisoner to precede him, and Ste. Marie began to limp down across the littered and unkempt sweep of turf. Behind him at the distance of a dozen paces he heard the shambling footfalls of his guard, but he had expected that, and it could not rob him of his swelling and exultant joy at treading once more upon green grass and looking up into blue sky. He was like a man newly released from a dungeon, rather than from a sunny and by no means uncomfortable upper chamber. He would have liked to dance and sing, to run at full speed like a child until he was breathless and red in the face. Instead of that he had to drag himself with slow pains and some discomfort, but his spirit ran ahead, dancing and singing, and he thought that it even halted now and then to roll on the grass.
As he had observed, a week before from the top of his wall, a double row of larches led straight down away from the front of the house, making a wide and long vista interrupted, halfway to its end, by a _rond point_, in the centre of which was a pool and a fountain. The double row of trees was sadly broken now, and the trees were untrimmed and uncared for. One of them had fallen, probably in a wind storm, and lay dead across the way. Ste. Marie turned aside towards the west and found himself presently among chestnuts, planted in close rows, whose tops grew in so thick a canopy above that but little sunshine came through, and there was no turf under foot, only black earth hard trodden, mossy here and there.
From beyond, in the direction he had chanced to take and a little towards the west, a soft morning breeze bore to him the scent of roses, so constant and so sweet despite its delicacy that to breathe it was like an intoxication. He felt it begin to take hold upon and to sway his senses like an exquisite, an insidious wine.
"The flower gardens, Michel?" he asked over his shoulder. "They are before us?"
"Ahead and to the left, monsieur," said the old man, and he took up once more his slow and difficult progress. But again, before he had gone many steps, he was halted. There began to reach his ears a rich but slender strain of sound, a golden thread of melody. At first he thought that it was a cello or the lower notes of a violin, but presently he became aware that it was a woman singing in a half-voice without thought of what she sang--as women croon to a child, or over their work, or when they are idle and their thoughts are far wandering.