The Happy Foreigner Part 28

She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky and pierced her--she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.

Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red, wooden face like a Hindoo G.o.d made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said: "We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.

"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly and the street is very full."

"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."

Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both with his cynical impa.s.sivity.

"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!

In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug--her expectations closing, unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the gla.s.s of the car and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of the Grand Conde. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as the car stopped.

"Now mademoiselle!"

And there stood Julien, at the end of the pa.s.sage, he whom she had left, sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited, he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.

"f.a.n.n.y, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous etes en beaute!"

Within, a table was laid for three--three chairs, three plates, three covers. He saw her looking at this.

"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.

My old friend--Where is Alfred?"

"I am here."

"My old friend--four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.

He has heard--"

("----Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend; he is against me!")

"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand.

She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he beheld it too.

"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.

"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I am not allowed."

The impa.s.sive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little eyes wandered to f.a.n.n.y with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man, how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him.

Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said, and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk, f.a.n.n.y, talk, f.a.n.n.y, you have an audience. To-night you have two to dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might as easily dazzle a mahogany G.o.d, a little G.o.d alive beneath its casing with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should she want to be praised, she had it from his eye--or be a.s.sured of love, it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of Alfred, he could put nothing into words--because he must be dumb she could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.

She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.

When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back with the car in half an hour, to take f.a.n.n.y to the river.

"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.

f.a.n.n.y said she would. "And _do_ you like him?" f.a.n.n.y said she did.

"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."

"Did she treat him badly?"

"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"

"A beautiful woman?" interrupted f.a.n.n.y, who liked details.

"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had pa.s.sed him this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan- Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared, and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the roses, she never has written one since."

"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"

"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.

He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself, 'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the remaining horse."

"It was then he grew cool about women!"

"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who insisted in the most amazing fas.h.i.+on, that she loved him. He could not understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'

"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said: 'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.

What shall I do?'

'Why _shouldn't_ you marry her?' I said.

And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much.

You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'

"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and then to England."

"But why did the girl--?"

"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct, but it was inexplicable."

"He should have asked her twice."

"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was a whim."

"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we are flawed?"

"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a creature half-lunatic, half-snake."

"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"

"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."

"But--(alas, poor Alfred)--you have made a charming confidante for us!"

"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."

"To me?"