The Arm Chair at the Inn Part 13

"Again that old story was repeated: the mother begged and pleaded; the girl drowned herself in tears, but the father stormed on. Poor Henri continued to peep over the fence at Loyette when she went milking, or met her clandestinely on the path behind the cow sheds, and everybody was wretched for months trying to make water run uphill.

"Then Loyette confided in me. I had started to walk to the village and she had seen me cross the broad road and had followed. Poor child!--I can see her now, the tears streaming down her cheeks as she poured out her heart: how she and Henri had always loved each other; how fine and brave and truthful he was, and how kind and n.o.ble: she emptying her heart of her most precious secret--the story of her first love--a story, gentlemen"--here the marquise's voice dropped into tones of infinite sweetness--"which the angels bend their ears to catch, for there is nothing more holy nor more sublime.

"I listened, her hand in mine--we were about the same age and I could, therefore, the better understand--her pretty blue eyes like wet violets searching for my own--and when her story was all told, I comforted her as best I could, telling her what I firmly believed--that no father with a spark of tenderness in his heart could be obdurate for long and not to worry--true love like hers always winning its way--whereupon she dried her eyes, kissed my hand, and I left her.

"What happened I do not know, for I went to Paris shortly after and was married myself, and did not return to my old home for some years. Then one day, in the effort to pick up once more the threads of my old life, there suddenly popped into my mind Loyette's love story. I sent at once for one of the old servants who had lived with us since before I was born.

"'And Loyette--the girl with the big ugly father--did he relent and did she marry the young fellow she was in love with?'

"'No, madame,' she answered sadly, with a shake of the head; 'she married the cattleman, Marceaux, and a sad mess they made of it, for he was old enough then to be her father, and he is now half paralyzed, and goes around in a chair on wheels, and there are no children--and Loyette, who was so pretty and so happy, must follow him about like a dog tied to a blind man, and she never laughs the whole livelong day.

That was her father's work--he made her do it, and now she must pay the price.'

"'And what became of the pig of a father?' I had hated him before; I loathed him now.

"'Dead; so is her mother.'

"'And the young fellow?'

"'He had to do his service, and was gone three years, and when he came back it was too late.'

"'Well, but why did she give in?'

"'Don't they all have to give in at last? Did the husband not settle the farm on her, and fifty head of cattle, and the pasturage and barns? Is not that better for an only daughter than digging in the fields bending over was.h.i.+ng-boards all day and breaking your back hanging out the clothes? How did she know he would be only a sick child in a chair on wheels--and this a year after marriage?'

"'And what did the young fellow do?'

"'What could he do? It was all over when he came back. And now he never laughs any more, and will look at none of the women--and it is a pity, for he is prosperous and can well take care of a wife.'

"I had it all now, just as plain as day; they had tricked the girl into a marriage; had maligned the young fellow in the same cowardly way, and had embittered them both for life. It was the same old game; I had seen it played a hundred times in different parts of the world. Often the cards are stacked. Sometimes it is a jewel--or a handful of them--or lands--or rank--or some other such make-believe. This trick is to be expected in the great world where success in life is a game, and where each gambler must look to the cards--but not here among our peasantry"--and again she shot her glance at Lemois--"where a girl grows up as innocent as a heifer, her nature expanding, her only ambition being to find a true mate who will help her bear the burdens her station lays upon her.

"I resolved to see her for myself. If I had been wrong in my surmises--and it were true that so sweet and innocent a creature had of her own free will married a man twenty years her senior when her heart was wholly another's--I should lose faith in girl nature: and I have looked into many young hearts in my time. That her father--big brute as he was--would have dared force her into such an alliance without her consent I did not believe, for the mother would then have risen up.

These Norman peasants fight for their children as a bear fights for her cubs--women of the right kind--and she was one.

"My own father shrugged his shoulders when I sought his counsel, and uttered the customary man-like remark: 'Better for her, I expect, than hoeing beets. All she has to do now is to see him comfortably fixed in his chair--a great blessing, come to think of it, for she can always find him when she wants him.'

"This view of the case brought me no relief, and so the next day I mounted my horse, took my groom, and learning that her cripple of a husband had bought another and a larger farm a few kilometres away, rode over to see her.

"I shall never forget what I found. Life presents some curious spectacles, and the ironies of fate work out the unexpected. In front of the low door of a Norman farm-house of the better cla.s.s sat a gray-haired, shrivelled man with a blanket across his knees--his face of that dirty, ash-colored hue which denotes disease and constant pain. My coming made some stir, for he had seen me making my way through the orchard and had recognized my groom, and at his call the wife ran out to welcome me. My young beauty was now a thin, utterly disheartened, and worn-out woman who looked twice her age, and on whose face was stamped the hall-mark of suffering and sorrow. The brown-gold hair, the white teeth, and deep-blue eyes were there, but everything else was a wreck.

"When the horses were led away, and I had expressed my sympathy for the cripple, I drew her inside the house, shut the door, and took a chair beside her.

"'Now tell me the whole story--not your suffering, nor his--I see that in your faces--but how it could all happen. The last time you talked to me we were girls together--we are girls now.'

"'Madame la marquise,' she began, 'I----'

"'No, not madame la marquise,' I interrupted, taking her hand in mine; 'just one woman talking to another. Whose fault was it--yours or Henri's?'

"'Neither. They lied about him; they said he would never come back; then, when he did not write and no news came of him and I was wild and crazy with grief, they told me more things of which I won't speak; and one of the old women in the village, who wanted him for her granddaughter, laughed and said the things were true and that she didn't mind, and n.o.body else should; and then all the time my father was saying I must marry the other'--and she pointed in the direction of the cripple--'and he kept coming every day, and was kind and sympathetic, and good to me I must say, and is now, and at last my heart was worn out--and they took me to the church, and it was all over. And then the next month Henri came back from Algiers, where he had been ill in the hospital, and came straight here and sat down in that chair over there, and looked about him, and then he said: "I would not have come home if I had known how things were; I would rather have been shot. I cannot give you all this"--and he pointed to the furniture--"and you did not want them when we first loved each other."

"'And then he told me how many times he had written, and we hunted through my father's chest which I had brought here with me--he had died that year, and so had my dear mother--and there we found all Henri's letters tied together with a string, and not one of them opened.'

"'What did you do?' I asked.

"'I went at once to my husband and told him everything. He burst into a great rage; and the two had hard words, and then the next day he was out in the field and the sun was very hot, and he was brought home, and has been as you see him ever since.'

"'And where is Henri?'

"'He is here on the farm. When the doctor gave my husband no hope of ever being well again, my husband sent for him and begged Henri's pardon for what he had said, saying he wanted no one to hate him now that he could not live; that all Henri had done was to love me as a man should love a woman, and that, if I would be willing, Henri should take care of the farm and keep it for me. This was four years ago, and Henri is still here and my husband has never changed. When the weather is good, Henri puts him in his chair, the one we bought in Rouen, and wheels him about under the apple-trees, and every night he comes in and sits beside him and goes over the accounts and tells him of the day's work. Then he goes back home, six kilometres away, to his mother's, where he lives.'"

Madame la marquise paused and shook the ashes from her cigarette, her head on one side, her eyes half-closed, a thoughtful, wholly absorbed expression on her face. Lemois, who had listened to every word of the strange narrative, his gaze fastened upon her, made no sound, nor did he move.

"And now listen to the rest: Two years later the poor cripple pa.s.sed away and the next spring the two were married. The last time she came to me she brought her child with her--a baby in arms--but the dazzling light of young motherhood did not s.h.i.+ne in her eyes--the baby had come, and she was glad, but that was all. They are both alive to-day, sitting in the twilight--their youth gone; robbed of the joy of making the first nest, together--meeting life second-hand, as it were--content to be alive and to be left alone.

"As for me, knowing the whole story, I had only a deep, bitter, intense sense of outrage. I still have it whenever I think of her wrongs. G.o.d is over all and pardons us almost every sin we commit--even without our asking, I sometimes think--but the men and women who for pride's sake rob a young girl of a true and honorable love have shut themselves out of heaven."

X

IN WHICH WE ENTERTAIN A JAIL-BIRD

What effect madame's story had made upon Lemois became at once an absorbing question. He had listened intently with deferential inclination of the head, and when she had finished had risen from his seat and thanked her calmly with evident sincerity, but whether he was merely paying a tribute to her rare skill--and she told her story extremely well, and with such rapid changes of tones and gestures that every situation and character stood out in relief--or because he was grateful for a new point of view in Mignon's case, was still a mystery to us. While she was being bundled up by Herbert and Louis for her ride home, Marc had delivered himself of the opinion that Mignon would have her lover in the end; that nothing madame had ever tried to do had failed when once she set her heart and mind to work, and that the banns might as well be published at once. But, then, Marc would have begun to set nets for larks and bought both toaster and broiler had the same idol of his imagination predicted an immediate fall of the skies. That his inamorata was twenty years his senior made no difference to the distinguished impressionist; that Marc was twenty years her junior made not the slightest difference to madame--nor did Marc himself, for that matter. All good men were comrades to her--and Marc was one: further she never went. Her rule of life was freedom of thought and action, and absolute deference to her whims, however daring and foolish.

Nor did the marquise herself enlighten us further as to what she thought of Mignon's love affairs or Lemois' narrow matrimonial views. She had become suddenly intent on having the smashed villa pulled uphill and set on its legs again, with Marc as adviser and Le Blanc's friend, The Architect, as director-in-chief--an appointment which blew into thin air that gentleman's determination to put into dramatic form the new Robinson Crusoe of which Herbert had told us, with Goringe, the explorer, as star, the lady remarking sententiously that she had definite reasons for the restoration and wanted the work to begin at once and to continue with all possible speed.

This last Le Blanc told us the next day when he returned in madame's motor, bringing with him an old friend of his--a tall, sunburned, grizzly bearded man of fifty, with overhanging eyebrows shading piercing brown eyes, firm, well-b.u.t.tressed nose, a mouth like a ruled line--so straight was it--and a jaw which used up one-third of his face. When they entered Herbert was standing with his back to the room. An instant later the stranger had him firmly by the hand.

"I heard you were here, Herbert," he cried joyously, "but could hardly believe it. By Jove! It's good to see you again! When was the last time, old man?--Borneo, wasn't it?--in that old shack outside the town, and those devils howling for all they were worth."

Introductions over, he dropped into a chair, took a pipe from his pocket, and in a few minutes was as much a part of the coterie as if we had known him all his life: his credentials of accomplishment, of pluck, of self-sacrifice, of endurance and skill were accepted at sight; the hearty welcome he gave Herbert, and the way his eyes shone with the joy of meeting him, completing the last and most important requirement on our list--good-fellows.h.i.+p. That he had lived outside the restrictions of civilization was noticeable in his clothes, which were of an ancient cut and looked as if they had just been pulled out of a trunk where they had lain in creases for years, which was true, for during the past decade he had been acting Engineer-in-Chief of one section of the great dam on the Nile, and was now home on leave. He had, he told us, left London the week before, had crossed with his car at Dieppe, and was making a run down the coast by way of Trouville when he b.u.mped into Le Blanc and, hearing Herbert was within reach, had made bold to drop in upon us.

When Mignon and Lea had cleared the table, dinner being over, and the coffee had been served--and somehow the real talk always began after the coffee--for then Lemois was with us--Herbert looked at The Engineer long and searchingly, a covetous light growing in his eyes--the look of a housed sailor sniffing the brine on a comrade's reefer just in from the sea--and said dryly:

"Are you glad to get home?"

"Yes and no. My liver had begun to give out and they sent me to England for a few months, but I shall have to go back, I'm afraid, before my time is up. Gets on my nerves here--too much sand on the axles--too much friction and noise--such a lot of people, too, chasing bubbles. Seems queer when you've been away from it as long as I have. How do you stand it, old man?"

Herbert tapped the table-cloth absently with the handle of his knife and remarked slowly:

"I don't stand it. I lie down and let it roll over me. If I ever thought about it at all I'd lose my grip. Sometimes a longing to be again in the jungle sweeps over me--to feel its dangers--its security--its genuineness and freedom from all shams, if you will"--and a strange haunting look settled in his eyes.

"But you always used to dream of getting home; I've lain awake by the hour and heard you talk."

"Yes, I know," he answered rousing himself, "it was a battle even in those days. I would think about it and then decide to stay a year or two longer; and then the hunger for home would come upon me again and I'd begin to shape things so I could get back to England. Sometimes it took a year to decide--sometimes two or three--for you can't get rid of that kind of a nightmare in a minute."

"You were different from me, Herbert," remarked Le Blanc. "You went to the wilds because you loved them; I went because they locked the front and back gates on me. I suppose I deserved it, for n.o.body got much sleep when I was twenty. But it sounds funny to have you say it would take you two years to make up your mind whether you'd come home or not. It wouldn't have taken me five seconds."