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relating it as an amusing story to absolute strangers—turned out—how can I
say it, Ermengarde? for silly—for compromising intimacy—ugh!—with the
hotel-keeper's daughter's fiancé——"
"And find you with that accursed young French idiot at your feet——"
"Ah! It's just as well you put in that 'apparently'," she commented quite
tranquilly, though all the time she was saying to herself, "Bluff,
Ermengarde, bluff! it's your only chance."
"Probably; I've had a good deal to cry about of late——" She looked
down as she spoke to arrange the set of her blouse, and gave her drapery a
few careful little pats.
"My dear child, this folly must end; this is a serious matter and not an
amateur farce. You have landed yourself in a most compromising situation,
made yourself the cause, the patent, acknowledged, loudly proclaimed
cause, of an engagement being broken off; and you simply laugh at the
whole thing."
"And if I have, as you say, brought myself into such a situation, pray,
whose fault was it?"
"Whose should it be but your own, your own folly and wilfulness and
insane disregard of common proprieties and decent conventions."
"Who refused to take me abroad for my health when I needed it, and
then followed me secretly in disguise to spy out and magnify every mistake
I might make? Who employed spies about me to report and distort every
incident of my life here? Who had grown so cold and cruel and faithless to
me at home that it was no home any more, and I felt I could endure it no
longer? Who was too busy and too poor to send his wife to the South after
illness, when he had just made a great success and was planning a tour of
his own to the very place he actually followed her to, disguised as a spy?
Who kept all his good fortune from his wife's knowledge?" A faint sob,
disguised as a cough, interrupted this interrogatory.
"What," she cried, losing her head suddenly, and throwing prudence and
pride to the winds, though still adhering to the Socratic method—"what did
you mean by that scene in your study, the night I came home early with a
headache from my mother's, and looked in?"
"Oh, of course!"
"Really one might almost suppose you had lowered yourself to some
vulgar suspicions——"
They had now arrived by slow degrees, and after various stops and turns
to emphasize rhetoric, at a place where the top of the ridge widened, and the
path ran between pine-woods clothing the side of the ravine, that here
sloped steeply instead of falling perpendicularly.
"You poor little fool!" he cried, suddenly turning, taking both her hands
and looking straight into her eyes, "you must have been off your head——"
"My child, you must have had hysteria rather badly. I must have been
brutally impatient; I was so rushed just then. Poor Miss Scott brought some
typing that night and wrote shorthand notes until she was tired out. Then I
just happened to ask her a question about a family trouble I knew was
worrying her—you remember I engaged her on a family recommendation;
her people are old friends of mine—my question was an unlucky one, and
the poor girl broke down; she was so thoroughly tired out. You must have
chosen that exact moment to open the door——"
"And if I had stooped to ask explanations," she interrupted; "I ask none;
I wish none now; I merely suggest that before you demand explanations of
what you must know can have been nothing you could possibly complain
of, certain little eccentricities on your own part require to be cleared up.
What, for instance, took place under the olives yonder only yesterday
morning? Why all those secret meetings and communications in cipher with
a young woman of doubtful antecedents, of mysteries, of evasions, of
perpetual assignations and private interviews with notorious usurers and
pretended cousins? I don't wish to know—but—I resent the imputations you
cast upon my intercourse with a young man who is half secretary and half
waiter at this house, and at the beck and call of all here alike. I might," she
added, "go further, and ask why you chose to follow me about in a
ridiculous disguise, and worry and frighten me to death by spying on me
and posing as an Anarchist and conspirator?"
"Because I was an ass, probably. And when did I pose as anything but a
foreigner? Except at the Carnival, which is all masquerade"—"The
Carnival?" she murmured, puzzled—"We have both been infernal idiots,
Ermengarde. We quarrelled about nothing in particular to begin with——"
"I certainly was a beast. Such a rush of work had come all at once, and I
hadn't time to consider that that infernal Flu had made you hysterical. And
you did cut into me about going abroad on your own finance. But look here,
Ermengarde, how could I have let you go alone, weak as you were? First I
got Miss Scott to go and look after you as your companion——"
"Miss Scott? Why, I never saw the woman in my life—except her back
in the study that night—if it was she—and as for a companion, I never had
such a thing in my life——"
"She doesn't care to typewrite and do secretary under her own name,
but, coming here with you, and having relations she was bound to meet all
over the place——"
"Yes; her cousin, her uncle's stepson—she had to go back to her own
name. And then, that blessed book coming out and at once promising a
boom, unexpectedly put me in funds to come and look after you myself. I
was a good deal used-up, and ordered a rest-cure. As intelligence officer
and paper correspondent I've done disguises before—the only way to get
information—and incidentally I've picked up a lot of copy and been able to
help Agatha Somers in that family trouble, too. I didn't mean to keep up the
disguise more than to see you safe here at first. But it turned out to be so
useful. And, I say, look here, you little silly; don't let's quarrel any more."
It was pleasant on the wooded steep; myrtle-bushes gave out a delicious
aroma; innumerable bees made an organ-bourdon in grey masses of
rosemary-bloom; grasshoppers chirped in shrill pleasure; loveliest tints and
shadows were tangled in drooping olive-foliage; rugged peaks, soaring far
above gorge and ridge, ran up into a velvety blue sky; and, looking far
down the ravine's course, the connexions by marriage caught the deep warm
bloom of a peacock-blue sea, glowing in full sunshine and crossed by
silvery sails and long black hulls of steam vessels.
After all, a good hard shoulder is a pleasanter thing to lean one's head
upon than a cold, sharp rock or a rough and turpentiny tree-trunk; and any
more comfortable place to have a really good cry on has never yet been
imagined. Besides, however perverse and exasperating they may be,
husbands occasionally come in handy, when things suited to their obtuse
intellects have to be done—bills paid—insolent landladies tackled—hotel
accommodation provided.
"I always wanted to show you this bit," Ermengarde said, when the
woods parted and sank at the top of the ridge and a sudden burst of broad
purple sea glowed to the east, where the gorge opened, and a smaller bay
disclosed itself on the west, all golden shimmer under a rose-gold sun. "And
you had been seeing it all the time. What a fraud you are!"
"I tell you what, Ermengarde; let's have the boy out when your mother
comes later on. She can bring him. Easter falls early; and, after all, the little
chap might as well miss the fag-end of the term. That'll set the old lady up,
eh? Italian lakes on the way home, or a look at Florence, or what?"
When they reached the hotel-gate, a woman with a tired, but serene and
sweet, face came down the twisted pine-root steps from the convent, with a
little start and flush of surprise at seeing them—the ex-anarchist now a
respectable, clean-shaven Briton, with a stable-cap in place of the broad felt
hat, and the cloak rolled in a neatly strapped bundle.
"Well, pretty fair at times," she admitted, observing that Mrs. Allonby
wore a diamond and pearl chain, closely resembling that flung to her by the
Spaniard at the Carnival, and afterwards exposed for sale in a Monte Carlo
window.
"Thought you'd sneaked the thing," Arthur blurted out with a grin, in
that exasperating way of his.
"I didn't," she stoutly contradicted; "I thought he had sneaked it and
made you the cat's paw to sell it. And, oh, my goodness, Miss Somers!" she
laughed out suddenly, "if I didn't think at one time that you were this man's
wife! And didn't I pity you, just! But we are not going to act charades any
longer. Nobody is to be anybody else any more; no, not even that wretched
young Isidore, the fraud! Ah! I wonder if Mr. Welbourne will turn out to be
some discontented duke in disguise," she cried, suddenly becoming aware
of the mystified countenance of the thin man, who had come by the mule-
path round the convent; "I'm not cracked, Mr. Welbourne, only a little crazy.
Let me introduce my husband—just arrived."
The thin man congratulated and opined that the arrival was singularly
opportune under the circumstances, while Arthur confessed that Mr.
Welbourne's virtues had long been familiar to him through correspondence.
And then, after proper comments on the weather, Arthur, with no
outward sign of terror, whatever he felt, sought the awful presence of
Madame Bontemps, while Ermengarde, with her heart in her mouth, and
cold chills running all over her, tried to be admitted to private conference
with Mlle. Geneviève, the woman of mystery acting as intermediary in this
difficult piece of diplomacy.
"The chain was from Spink's, after all," Mrs. Allonby admitted with a
blush, observing Agatha's glance upon it, "and people with glass houses
shouldn't throw stones. My husband saw the thing for sale at Poupart's, and
went in and redeemed it. He knew it by a flaw in a pearl. And you may
imagine I've had to sing pretty small, smaller than even the poor Boundrish
this afternoon—and with better reason, I'm afraid."
"You have sung very sweetly to me, dear Mrs. Allonby, and, after all, I
must have been a horrid nuisance——"
"You certainly were. But my husband, poor man, has to reckon with me
for that."
"And thief——"
"No, no; but that miserable man of mine pays the bill for all. And when
you marry, dear Miss Somers, take my advice; keep him well in hand, but
never let it come to a long sulk. Whatever it is, have it out with him at once
and have done with it."
But Mr. Allonby, declining the chair, much to Madame's regret, as she
found it easier to heckle opponents sitting than standing, began to address
her sternly but gently, more in sorrow than anger, and always with that air
of surprised dignity and unabated command. He had been led to suppose, he
said very politely, that Les Oliviers was an exceptionally well-managed and
high-class hotel, else, as Madame might easily surmise, he would never
have selected it for the temporary sojourn of his wife while waiting till he
would be able to join her. What, then, was his astonishment on learning that
Mrs. Allonby had actually been requested to leave the house? Such a thing
was outrageous, unheard-of, and must be apologized for without delay.
But the stolid Englishman, surveying the afflicted parents with that
direct, undauntable soldier-look of his, appeared to be entirely unmoved and
awaiting further remarks from Madame Bontemps; and as these were not
after some seconds forthcoming, he ventured to represent to Madame with
infinite courtesy that she appeared to be the victim of an absurd
misapprehension, which, in a woman of her intellect and capacity,
paralyzed him with amazement. She had possibly taken some exaggerated
statements uttered in the course of a lover's quarrel literally. Madame's
words almost pointed to some vague suspicion that his wife—"my little
wife," he repeated, smiling—had perturbed the relations between those
young people, such a very droll supposition. If—as Madame here hastened
to assert—M. le Vicomte de Vieuxbois, whose father had been a friend of
his own, had been observed to converse in an agitated manner with Mrs.
Allonby, to whom, as to other pensionnaires, the Vicomte had obligingly
given Italian lessons, what more natural—Mrs. Allonby was herself a
mother, the wife of the Vicomte's father's friend; she was older than she
appeared, while M. de Vieuxbois was younger—what more natural than for
a young man, suffering from the apparent coldness and misunderstandings
of his betrothed, and far from his own mother, to seek counsel and comfort
of a lady by her age and experience eminently calculated to give them? As a
simple matter of fact, he was aware of all that had occurred; he had been
deeply interested in the course of the young man's love, which had met with
unusual, but not unnatural, obstacles, triumphantly and happily surmounted,
until this unfortunate, but truly absurd, little misunderstanding arose.
Madame probably knew that English wives had no secrets from their
husbands, so that for M. de Vieuxbois to confide in Mrs. Allonby the depth
of his passion and the misfortune of the various obstacles to its fulfilment,
was in effect to confide in himself. What a pity to let suspicions so absurd
divide two young and loving hearts! Mademoiselle's ear had doubtless been
abused by mischievous, misunderstood tittle-tattle. Girls were like that, he
knew from experience, and, having had the good fortune to win the best and
most charming of wives himself, it hurt him to think of M. de Vieuxbois
missing such a blessing—merely because of a little misconception of his
conduct—a misconception absolutely incredible in a person of Madame's
sagacity and knowledge of the world. In his anxiety for the young people's
happiness, he actually found himself forgetting the necessity for extracting
an apology for an unwarrantable act of incivility to his wife, the necessity
of which both Monsieur and Madame Bontemps would at once admit.
They did at once admit it, and with a celerity and sudden change of
front that not only took Mr. Allonby's breath away, but also that of M.
Isidore, who happened—no doubt by the merest chance—to be lounging
outside the ever open office door, intently studying the Figaro, and who
also happened to have dispatched Heinrich, the porter, on an errand, by the
latter deemed trivial and unnecessary to the last degree.
"It was all that little cat, Dorris," Ermengarde confided afterwards to
those fellow-conspirators, the ex-Anarchist and the woman of mystery; "so
that what she got this morning was perhaps not altogether wasted. Only I
wish she hadn't had it quite so hot."
"It—it really was such a very lovely place—such a unique charm about
it," she said in apology.
"Tell you what, old lady, we'll come again next year if the boom keeps
up," Arthur replied, lighting his pipe in the shelter of a rocky scarp. "But I
bar squabbles first."
Before them the slender tower of St. Michel, just topping the mountain
spur that hides the Old Town, gleamed white on a clear blue sea; it had
rained during the night, and some cloud-wreaths still floated round the
craggy summits, leaving light veinings of snow on the amethystine peaks;
cheery voices and sounds rose from the saw-mill niched in the bottom of a
little gorge across the torrent; the plane avenue was alive with passing
wheels and steps and people of every sort and kind, but all gay as if they
had never known a care; the sea had richer and deeper hues, the sun a
warmer gold, the soaring mountains a more majestic outline, vegetation a
more varied luxuriance and colouring; and Ermengarde, listening to
Arthur's familiar, intermittent growl, and imparting pleasant secrets to him,
was lighter of heart than ever before. The full magic and splendour of the
azure shore was at last upon her, and the exhilaration and the pure joy of
living went to her head, sparkled in her eyes, glowed in her cheeks, and
thrilled her to the very finger-tips.
And yet she was at heart, if not a sadder, at least a wiser, and hoped to
be a better, woman than before those joyous adventures on the Côte d'Azur.
THE END
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