Part 12

"St. Pierre des Champs, madame. If madame goes there and inquires, everyone will confirm what I tell her."

"And such miracles have happened again?"

"At dawn on each seventh of September, madame. I assure madame I speak the truth."

"Listen," said madame de Val Fleury. "I shall go and hear what they say. If I am satisfied, are you willing to--to exchange your face for mine? I will not haggle with you, I will pay what you want. It is a large amount, but you shall have it--a hundred thousand francs."

"One would have to think over the price, madame," said the girl hesitatingly.

"What? It is the figure you named."

"Yes--for an exchange. But it is possible I might change with someone of my own years. Naturally I should prefer that."

"You do not suppose a young girl would pay a hundred thousand francs?" cried madame de Val Fleury, wincing. "If she has youth already, what for?"

"For beauty. There are many young girls who would be content to do so."

"There will not be many living in a little village."

"Ah, madame, people who know arrive from all parts. Besides, it might be better for me to take even fifty thousand francs with a young face than a hundred thousand with--with one more mature. Madame understands that I am human--I am not indifferent to the other sex. If I sacrifice all my prospects of admiration, sweethearts, husband, it is worth a great sum."

"I shall go and hear what they say," repeated madame de Val Fleury, deeply mortified. "What is your name?"

"Berthe Cheron, madame."

"Put it down for me, and your private address. If what I hear convinces me perhaps we may come to terms."

All night the old woman dreamt she was again of surpassing loveliness, the envy of all the women of her world.

She went to Brittany the same week, and returned palpitating with the tales that had been told her. She agreed with mademoiselle Cheron to pay 120,000 francs if the metamorphosis occurred, and it was arranged that, when the time came, they should travel to St. Pierre des Champs together.

In the meanwhile her rapturous reflections were not free from anxiety. If the dawning of the longed-for date should indeed yield her Berthe Cheron's face, she would be no longer recognised as madame de Val Fleury. Her social circle would not know her; monsieur Septfous, her banker--she banked at a private bank, and monsieur Septfous was practically her man of business--would not know her; her servants themselves would not know her when she came back to Paris. To explain would be to meet with perpetual embarrassments. On the whole, the best plan would be to change her name as well. It would mean relinquishing a few friendships that she valued, but----Again, she foresaw herself dazzlingly fair, and caught her breath. Her loveliness would compensate a million-fold.

Her income was derived chiefly from Municipal Bonds and Métro shares. At the bank she had also a substantial sum on deposit. She told monsieur Septfous that she had decided to spend the rest of her life in the country, and she took a draft, payable to bearer, for the full amount of cash, and removed her box of securities.

She determined to call herself madame de Beaulieu.

Late on the evening of the 6th of September the old woman and the girl arrived at St. Pierre des Champs.

They had expected to arrive earlier, but the train crept into Pont Chouay at 7.30 instead of 5.15, and thence they were dependent on the local fiacres, which were hard to find and slow to move. Madame de Val Fleury reached the village, impatient and fatigued.

In the little moonlit market-place, with its vacant stalls, when they entered it at last, many figures circulated, scrutinising one another's features eagerly. Most of the men and women bore lanterns, and one of the stalls had evidently been sub-let for the evening; under the sign "Christophe: Cheese, Eggs, and Butter," a humpback had electric torches for sale. As the pair made their way, across the cobbles, to the shrine that had been erected beside the water-mill, no face of much beauty met their view. The sellers appeared to be chiefly buxom peasant girls, wholesome looking, but no more. Those who had come to buy were of types more various. Here, an old roue, fraudulently dyed and painted, peered avidly at the features of a youth, who raised his lantern and rebuffed him with a jeer. There, an individual with crafty lips and predatory eyes, obviously a sharper, was to be seen bargaining for the physiognomy of a simpleton. A man with a round humorous face darted each moment from one melancholy countenance to another, and a passer-by said, loud enough to be overheard: "Look at Jibily, the low comedian--he is crazy to play tragic parts!" Irritating and incessant was the shrill outcry of a female broker, hobbling with a file of maids-of-all-work at her heels. "Fine faces cheap!" clamoured the crone. "Fine faces cheap!"

It became very cold beside the water-mill. As the laggard night wore by, madame de Val Fleury shivered distressfully. Alternately she prayed and despaired. More than once she glanced, tense with hope, at her companion, striving to detect some promise of the sought-for change, but the girl's face remained unaltered. In the serene radiance of the moon its fairness was exquisite beyond words, and the woman wrung her hands with the intensity of her desire.

Slowly, slowly the moonlight faded. The pallor of dawn streaked the sky; and a hundred faces were upturned beseechingly, a hundred suppliants trembled. Wan and white grew the scene. A tremor and a rustling stirred the huddled figures. Suddenly, somewhere a woman wailed, "No use!" and burst into sobs. Berthe Cheron, fearful now the moment had come, of beholding herself gaunt-cheeked and wrinkled, bowed her head, shuddering, in her hands. Madame de Val Fleury, half dazed with exhaustion and suspense, bent to the shining surface of the pool. The pool receded. It became suddenly unreal. Next, her pounding heart was squeezed with terror--she didn't know if the reflection she beheld was her own, or Berthe Cheron's, from behind her. She nodded wildly at her reflection; she grimaced and gesticulated at it, like a madwoman.... It had happened! She thought she gave an ear-piercing shriek of joy, but she fainted, without a sound.

* * * * *

After the money was paid she neither saw nor heard anything of Berthe Cheron. Aided by a lady whose birth gave her the passport to society, and whose income made her amenable to a financial offer, madame de Val Fleury, or, as she now called herself, Victorine de Beaulieu, was the sensation of Paris that autumn. The consummate toilettes permitted by her wealth lent to her face a beauty even more transcendent than Berthe Cheron's had been. When she drove, people pressed forward on the sidewalks to regard her. When she entered her box at the Opéra, everybody in the house to whom the box was visible looked at her as much as at the stage. In salons, faces the most admired before her advent paled in her presence, like candle flames in sunshine. She was paramount and she revelled in the knowledge. Yet the transformation had its lack. She missed her game of écarté with her erstwhile neighbour. She missed the garrulity of familiar friends whom she no longer met. There were hours when, despite the transports afforded by the mirror now, she found time hang heavy on her hands. And the hands, of course, had not recovered girlishness and beauty. Nor her body, nor her mind.

That was the drawback. Only her face was young. Physically and mentally she was old. Her corsetiere could not provide her with a figure to match the face. Her physician could not give back to her the energies that had gone. Her mirror itself was impotent to revive the enthusiasm and illusions of her youth.

Men made love to the bewildering "young widow." After the first thrill of amazed exultance she was bored. Their fervour kindled no responsive spark. Her aged heart beat no faster. The sentiment, the rhapsodies poured into her ear seemed drearily stupid to the old woman, as she posed on balconies, wishing she were in her bedroom with a cup of tisane and her slippers. During the third passionate proposal addressed to her, it was with extreme difficulty that she restrained her jaws from yawning.

"Why are you so cold--why won't you hear me?" men cried to her. And she answered dully: "I am not impressionable. It doesn't interest me to be made love to. I am tired of all that."

And she was spoken of in Paris as the "girl who was tired of love."

Many evenings during the winter there were when the knowledge that she would be wearied by some man's appeal, if she went out, determined her to remain at home. The opportunity to out-shine other women failed to lure her from the fireside, and she sat in her dressing-gown, playing écarté with her new maid. "It is marvellous what a head for the game madame has, seeing she is so young!" exclaimed the maid, awestruck. "I cannot say as much for _you_," snapped her mistress, mourning that quondam neighbour.

When the summer came and she went to the coast, with a score of wonderful dresses, she sighed for companionship more drearily yet. Hitherto, at such places, she had sat among her compeers, amiably chatting. Now she appeared too young to be congruous to the circle of the old--was too old to participate in the pastimes of the young. Scant of breath and stiff in the joints, she viewed morosely the laughing women trooping to the tennis courts. Shrunken beneath her youthful frocks, she dared not don a bathing costume and reveal her wasted form among the sirens lolling by the tents. Queer as the fact seemed, her years irked her more this summer than they had done while she looked her age.

The anniversary of the miracle found her in low spirits, and suffering from lumbago.

There was a lad, attractive, promising, on the threshold of a career--such a lad as, thirty-eight years earlier, she had pictured her baby growing up to be. She had made his acquaintance at a "feeve o'clock," where, being so young, he felt shy, and where to find himself speaking to this enchantress confused him more still. But her tone had promptly relieved him of his dread that he ought to play the courtier. When she invited him to call on her, she asked him as she might have asked a schoolboy. Her interest in Guy Verne's ambitions yielded to her gradually a healthier outlook. Stranger still, as the months passed, a real and deep affection stole into the old egoist's nature. She was less purposeless, less futile for it. Almost, as she entered into his boyish forecasts, and made fight of his little setbacks, it seemed to her as if her son had lived.

One day the boy flung his arms round her and begged her to be his wife.

It was horrible. She repulsed him, shuddering.

"Don't, Guy, don't!"

Entreaties poured from him.

"If you understood!" she moaned. "I shall have gone to my grave while you're a young man."

He thought she meant that she was very ill.

"I'll nurse you back to health. Victorine, I love you with all my soul."

"You don't love me a bit," she said. "There is nothing in me for you to love--I am as utterly different from you as if there were fifty years between us; you only imagine you love me because you admire my face. Good heavens, have I ever said a single word to lead you to think I cared for you in such a way?"

An English boy might have suffered as much, but would have taken it more quietly. This boy was French, and he did not hide what he felt. He answered vehemently that she had led him to think so every time they talked of his future. "If you didn't care for me, why should it interest you?" He raved of his broken heart. He loaded her with reproaches. "You've shammed to me, mocked me, just to amuse yourself!"

"No." She was crying. "I _am_ fond of you--fonder of you than of anybody in the world. But not like that. I shall never care like that again for anyone."

"I wish I had never seen you. I wish I were dead."

"You mustn't come here any more," she found the strength to tell him--and not till then had she realised how very dear he had become to her.

"I'm so sorry, Guy--so dreadfully sorry."

He fell at her feet, imploring her anew. He broke down, and besought one kiss before he left her. Her misery was deeper than his as she bent to him, but the boy didn't know it.

"My God," he sobbed, "I adore you--and you kiss me as if you were my mother!"

The mirror provided no comfort in her loss. She stared, lonely, at the alien face reflected--stared at it, by slow degrees, with aversion. It was not she. The unlovely form and jaded mind were she--the spent passion, and the infirmities. What benefit was the face of youth without youth's pulses? The mirror mocked her weary thoughts each day.

Upon her grief a woman, white-lipped and shaken, intruded to upbraid her.

"You have ruined my son's career," she said. "He neglects his work, he thinks of nothing but you. I hope and pray you may be punished as you deserve!"

"At Guy's age a career is not ruined by a foolish attachment," pleaded madame de Val Fleury piteously.

"And at yours such an answer is abominable," cried the other. "You do not lessen your guilt by cynicism. If ever a girl encouraged a young man, you encouraged my son. Foolish as his devotion to you may be, he _is_ devoted to you. By what right did you tempt him to come here constantly if you had no tenderness for him? Your treatment of him has been infamous."

"As a mother, do you know only one kind of tenderness, madame? My affection for your son was true and great. My interest in his future was no less deep than yours. I swear to you that what has happened distresses me so much that I have been able to think of nothing else."

Madame Verne advanced upon her with clenched hands.

"Your hypocrisy is even more revolting than your cynicism. If I know more than one kind of tenderness? Yes. But not in a girl for a young man! You swear to me you are distressed. _I_ swear to _you_ something else. My boy is all I have--and I am frightened for him; I do not know what he may do in his despair. If I lose him he shall be revenged. Take care, madame de Beaulieu. If you hear of his death, take care! The very next day, if possible, or the next month, or the next year--whenever I can reach you--as Heaven is my witness, I will mark that face of yours with vitriol."

She rang the bell, and went--and the maid that entered found her mistress in a swoon upon the floor.

For a week her shattered nerves kept madame de Val Fleury abed. And for several weeks terror prevented her from setting foot outside the flat. She had a grille constructed in the door, and a hundred times she repeated to the servants that it was not to be opened for the merest instant to madame Verne, or any stranger. Such precautions could not yield composure, however. The day was rendered ghastly with false alarms; and when she glanced at the mirror, dread flared upon her now a face seared and repulsive, a mutilated, sightless thing of horror. The night brought dreams so fearful that she was, more than once, wakened by a scream that had burst from her. Thrice the awfulness of the tension impelled her to falter, through the telephone, sympathetic and ingratiating inquiries to madame Verne; and when the mother rang off without vouchsafing a reply, the poor old creature tottered with panic.

At last, towards the close of February, she had the unspeakable relief of learning that madame Verne and her son had gone to Monaco, and once again she was able to step into her car with a sense of safety. Nevertheless, the thought of the unhappiness that she had brought upon the boy was black in her mind. She tried to thrust the thought aside by reading, but fiction had lost its power to charm her. Gradually, as her health improved, she turned, for respite from her sad reflections, to the theatre. When there remained no more fashionable programmes for her to see, she would adventure the second-rate. One night, as she was coming out of a little theatre in the Montmartre quarter, she started and stopped short, trembling in every limb at a sight that met her gaze. She could not withdraw her gaze--she was magnetised by the sight; it thrilled her as if the dead had risen to her view. She was looking at the face that had been hers--she was looking at Berthe Cheron.

Berthe Cheron, handsomely dressed, had also jerked to a standstill, and for a few seconds the two fronted each other dumbly--the young girl's puckered eyes, her furrowed cheeks rancorous with regret. It was she who was the first to speak.

"Blast you!" she said.

"What do you mean--I treated you fairly, didn't I?" stammered madame de Val Fleury.

"I wish--I wish----" Resentment choked her.

"I paid all you wanted."

"Paid? It wouldn't have been good enough if you'd paid a million. _You_ knew--_you_ knew who was getting the best of it. Paid? What's the use of the money without any fun? Do you think fine clothes make up for that? I want to be danced with, I want to be kissed. To hell with your money--I want love!"

"Don't talk so loudly, don't! That man's looking at us."

"He's not looking at _me_. No man ever looks at me. Paid? If we were both as we were, you could pay some other fool--it wouldn't be me you'd get!"

"If we were both as we were, I'd pay no one," groaned madame de Val Fleury.

"What?"

"It's true. Quite, quite true."

For a moment they were silent again, studying each other. Then madame de Val Fleury said breathlessly:

"I want to ask you something. Come home with me--get into my car. Don't abuse me any more, don't rail at me--I'm an old woman and I can't bear it."

As the car bore them away, she explained herself, weeping.

"I know it seems strange to you, my not being satisfied--I know I've got the things you want so much. But _you_ retain the capacity to enjoy those things, and _I don't_. If I could have had your youth as well, it would have been different. The old are happiest in their old ways, with their old friends. We both made an error. If--do you think, if we were to go there again----?" Berthe Cheron turned to her wildly. "If we were to go there again?" she gasped.

"If we were to go there again--in humbleness of spirit this time, in contrition, beseeching pardon for our error--do you think it might be undone?"

"Oh, let us try, let us try!" cried the girl, seizing her hand. And she, too, wept. "But I could not refund more than about half the money," she faltered, dismayed.

"I would not ask you to refund a son of it," said madame de Val Fleury. "You should keep it as a marriage portion."

In the flat they talked till late, mingling their tears and comforting each other.

Nearly four months had to pass before the coming of the date they craved, but on the evening of the 6th of September the two victims of their own folly reached St. Pierre des Champs once more. And in the eerie market-place, the lanterns swayed amid the flitting figures, and again they heard the shrill clamour of the crone, shuffling among the naked stalls. "Fine faces cheap!" And the long, long night grew cold, and the penitents' teeth chattered; and as the elder knelt and prayed, as never had she prayed before, the pebbles bit into her knees.

* * * * *

A few days afterwards, monsieur Septfous, in the private office of the bank, saw the door open to admit a caller that surprised him.

"My dear madame de Val Fleury," he exclaimed, "how delighted I am to greet you! Dare I hope you have returned to Paris for good?"

"For good, my friend--the country got on my nerves. At my time of life not every change is desirable," replied the old lady, beaming.

And subsequently one man said to another:

"Funny thing; at Bullier last night I saw a girl just like madame de Beaulieu, who vanished to New York or somewhere--excepting that she had her arms round a chap's neck and looked so happy."

"Lucky chap, by Jove! Know him?"

"A fellow called Guy Verne."

XII

IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1918

DEAR NELLY,

I was in the theatre last night, just to have a look at you again, and I saw you when you came out of the stage door. Saw the toff and the taxi waiting to take you to supper. Wonder if you can call my name to mind any more? Alf. Alf that was your sweetheart when you were in the fancy department at Skinner and Mopham's. Loved you true, I did.

Remember the early closing days when we used to go to the theatre together, Nelly? Remember _me_ taking you to supper at the ham and beef shop four years ago? Wouldn't set foot in the ham and beef shop now, would you? No class. But I've been fair sick with longing for the sight of it, myself, since the day I joined up, and you cried in the City Road, with your arms round my neck. Bright as heaven it looked, the gas shining on all the sausages, when I was all over lice in the line, with my jaws chattering. Thought of it just as I was going over the top once. Saw the chap in his white jacket, cutting a sandwich and smearing the mustard on. Saw him plain.

Bit I read in a London paper over there said the "pre-war time, now it had passed away, seemed like an evil dream." It didn't seem like that to _me_. The "bad old days of peace," the paper called it. Said all us boys would "find it painful to go back to business, after the great romance and glory of war." I _don't_ think. I know one of them that would have given something to be back, calling "Sign," in the bad old days of peace, while he was sticking that great romance. Made me feel funny all over to see London again at last, and look at the "civilian population that was bearing their trials with such heroic fortitude." Too good to be true it felt, till I got a mouthful of what they call beer in this better world I hear we've made, and found the lord duke behind the bar treating me as if I was dirt. Made me wonder if paying sixpence for half a pint was asking for charity. Seem to have forgotten how to be civil, all the publicans, now it's the law for them to loaf the best part of the day, and make you pay so that they do as well in one week as they used to do in three. That's what I'm told by a chap, whose uncle has got a pub--the profit on one week's loafing is about the same as it was on three weeks' work. Done too well in the shops to be civil, too, I notice, while I've been freezing and bleeding in that there great romance. It's "Hope the war lasts for ever," isn't it? Mother couldn't bear to go out, because of what the neighbours are saying. People with sons of their own, too. It makes me wonder who I've been doing it for. There's mother--and there used to be you. Makes me wonder about lots of things, religion and that. At church, on Sunday, the collection was for teaching our Christianity to the heathen, the peaceful heathen that aren't busy bombing one another. And nobody laughed.