The Second Class Passenger Part 24

"I knew," he said, "I knew. I can paint. So can you, Monsieur-- sometimes. We two---we know!"

He frowned heavily as realization returned to him. "And now I never shall," he said. "I never shall! Ah, it is horrible! A man is two people, and both die like a single soul. You know, for you are an artist."

"I--I have done my best," said Rufin despairingly. "If I could go instead and leave you to paint--oh, believe me, I would go now gladly, proudly, for I should have given the world pictures--great pictures."

A spasm of emotion filled his eyes with tears, and some one touched his arm and drew him aside. He strove with himself fiercely and looked up again to see that three men had entered the room and were going toward the prisoner. The priest had come forward and was raising the kneeling girl.

"A moment," cried the prisoner, as the three laid hands upon him.

"Just a moment." They took no notice. "Monsieur Rufin," he cried, "it is my hand I offer you--only that."

Somebody near Rufin spoke a brief order and the three were still. He saw Giaconi's intent face across their shoulders, his open hand reaching forward between them. He clasped it silently.

The priest had set the girl on her knees before the improvised altar and stood beside her in silence. The three, with no word spoken, proceeded with their business. With deft speed they lashed their man's hands behind his back, forcing them back with rough skill. The chief of them motioned his subordinates to take him by the elbows and signed to the priest with his hand. The priest came forward, holding the crucifix, and took his place close to the prisoner. For a final touch of the grotesque the executioner produced and put on a tall silk hat.

"March!" he said, and they took the condemned man toward the door. He twisted his head round for a last glance at the room.

"Good-bye, little one!" he cried loudly. The kneeling girl only moaned.

"Good-bye, M'sieur Rufin."

Rufin stepped forward and bowed mechanically.

"Adieu, Maitre," he answered.

He saw that the condemned man's eyes lightened, a flush rose in his face; he smiled as if in triumph. Then they pa.s.sed out, and Rufin, after standing for a moment in uncertainty, crossed the room and knelt beside the girl, with his hands pressed to his ears.

VIII

"PARISIENNE"

"At least," said the Comtesse, still staring at the brisk fire in the steel grate--"at least he saw them with his own eyes."

She was thinking aloud, and Elsie Gray, her distant relative and close companion, only looked up without reply. The Comtesse's face stood in profile against the bright appointments of the fireplace, delicate and serene; the tall salon, with its white panels gleaming discreetly in the light of the candles, made a chaste frame for her fragile presence. The window-curtains had been drawn to shut out the evening which shed its damp melancholy over the Faubourg, and to the girl the great, still room seemed like a stage set for a drama. She sat on a stool beside the Comtesse's chair, her fingers busy with many-colored skeins of silk, and the soft stir of the fire and the tick of a little clock worked themselves into her patient thoughts.

"He was to come at nine, I think," said the Comtesse at last, without turning her head.

"Yes," said Elsie, leaning forward to look at the little clock. "It still wants twenty minutes."

The Comtesse nodded slowly; all her gestures had the gentle deliberation of things done ceremonially.

"It is not much longer to wait, is it?" she said. "After twenty years, one should be patient. But to think! To-night, for the first time I hear of Jeanne from one who saw her at the end. Not a lawyer who has sought out the tale and rearranged it, but one who knew. You see, Elsie?"

Elsie put a hand on her arm, and her little thrill of excitement died out at once.

"Yes," said the girl; "I see, but you must be tranquil."

"I will be tranquil," promised the Comtesse. "I will have consideration for my heart. It is only the waiting which tries me."

"And that is nearly at an end." Elsie released her arm, and the Comtesse turned again to the fire. The tick of the clock renewed its tiny insistence; the great room again enveloped them in the austerity of its silence. The girl returned to the silk strings in her lap. She knew the occasion of the Comtesse's sudden emotion; it was a familiar tale, and not the loss familiar for being told in whispers. She had heard it first when she came from her English home to be the Comtesse's companion. It had been told to her officially, as it were, to guide her in her dealings with the Comtesse. A florid French uncle, with a manner of confidential discretion that made her blush, had been the mouthpiece of the family, and from him she had learned how Jeanne, the Comtesse's half-sister, had run away with a rogue, a man who got his deserts, an officer in a regiment stationed in Algeria.

"Eventually he committed suicide, but before that there were pa.s.sages," the French uncle had said. The dreadful word "pa.s.sages"

seemed to contain the story, and he gave it an accent of unspeakable significance. "The Comtesse has suffered," he told her further. "It was a sad affair, and she had much tenderness for Jeanne." And that, at first, seemed to be the whole of it, though once or twice the uncle checked himself on the brink of details. But on this evening the tale was to be told afresh. There had arrived from Africa one Colonel Saval, who had served with the sorry hero of poor Jeanne's romance; he had known him and dealt with him; and he was appointed to come to the Comtesse in the quality of eye-witness.

He was punctual, at all events; the little clock was yet striking when the gaunt footman opened the door and spoke his name. The Comtesse looked up, and Elsie Gray rose to receive him; he advanced and made his bow.

"Madame la Comtesse?" he said, with a faint note of inquiry. The Comtesse's inclination answered him. "Madame la Comtesse honors me. I am happy to be of service."

He bowed to Elsie, who gave him "Good evening;" the footman set forward a chair for him and withdrew. His white hair stood about his head like a delicate haze; under it, the narrow wise face was brick- red, giving news of his long service under the sun of North Africa.

He was short and slight, a tiny vivacious man, full of charming formalities, and there was about him something gentle and suave, that did not quite hide a trenchant quality of spirit. He stood before them, smiling in a moment of hesitation, half paternal, wholly gallant.

"Madame la Comtesse is suffering," said Elsie, in the s.p.a.cious French idiom. "There is little that she can say. But she thanks Monsieur most sincerely for giving himself this trouble. But please be seated."

He was active in condolences at once. "I am most sympathetic," he said seriously. "And for the trouble"--he nicked it from him--"there is no trouble. I am honored."

The Comtesse bowed to him. "Monsieur is very amiable," she murmured.

He hitched up his chair and sat down, facing the pair of them. His shrewd eye took the measure of the Comtesse and her infirmity, without relinquis.h.i.+ng a suggestion of admiration. He was a man panoplied with the civil arts; his long career in camps and garrisons had subtracted nothing of social dexterity. There was even a kind of grace in his att.i.tude as he sat, his cane and hat in one hand, with one knee crossed upon the other. He spent a moment in consideration.

"It is of the Capitaine Bertin that I am to speak? Yes?" he asked suddenly.

The Comtesse stirred a little in her chair. "Yes," she answered, in a voice like a sigh--a sigh of relief, perhaps.

"Ah!" He made a little gesture of acknowledgment. "Le Capitaine Bertin! Then Madame will compose herself to hear little that is agreeable, for it is a tale of tragedy." His eyes wandered for a moment; he seemed to be renewing and testing again the flavor of memories. Under his trim moustache the mouth set and grew harder.

Then, without further preamble, he began to speak.

"Bertin and I were of the same rank," he said, "and of much the same age. There was never a time when we were friends; there stood between us too p.r.o.nounced a difference--a difference, Madame, of spirit, of aim, and even of physique. Bertin was large, sanguine, with the face of a bold lover, of a man noticeably gallant. I recall him most vividly as he sat in a cafe behind a little round table. It was thus one saw him most frequently, with his hard, swarthy face and moustaches that curled like a ram's horns. In such places he seemed most at home, with men about him and cards ready to his hand; and yet--has Madame seen the kind of man who is never wholly at his ease, who stands for ever on his guard, as it were! Bertin was such a one; there were many occasions when I remarked it. He would be in the centre of a company of his friends, a.s.sured, genial, dominant; and yet, at each fresh arrival in the room, he would look up with something furtive and defensive in his expression. I have seen deserters like that, but in Bertin it lacked an explanation."

"And there was a further matter yet. He was my fellow officer; I saw him on parade and at mess; but his life, the life of his own choice, was lived among those who were not our equals. How shall I make that clear to you, Madame? In those days, Europe drained into Algiers; it had its little world of men who gambled and drank much, and understood one another with a complete mistrust; it was with such as these that Bertin occupied his leisure. It was with them that his harshness and power were most efficacious. Naturally, it was not pleasant for us, his colleagues, to behold him for ever with such companions; the most of them seemed to be men connected with one sport or another, with billiards, or racing, or the like; but there was nothing to be done."

The Comtesse s.h.i.+fted slightly in her chair. "He had power," she said thoughtfully.

The little Colonel nodded twice. "He had power, as Madame observes.

He had many good qualities--not quite enough, it is true, but many.

There were even those that loved him, dogs, horses, waiters, croupiers and the poor women who made up the background of his life.

I have thought, sometimes, that it is easy for a man to be loved, Madame, if he will take that responsibility. But what befell Bertin was not commonplace. He returned to France on leave, for six months, and it was then, I believe, that he first met the lady who became Madame Bertin?"

He gave the words the tone of a question, and the Comtesse answered with a slow gesture of a.s.sent.

"Yes, I have heard that it was so," said the Colonel. "Of what took place at that time I can tell nothing, naturally, and Madame is no doubt sufficiently informed. But I saw him--I saw them both--within a week of their return. Upon that occasion I dined at a hotel with two friends, Captain Vaucher and Lieutenant de Sailles. Bertin, with some friends and his wife, was at a table near-by. She was the only lady of the party; her place was between an Englishman, a lean, twisted man with the thin legs of a groom, and a Belgian who pa.s.sed for an artist. It was de Sailles who pointed them out; and in effect it was a group to see with emotion. The lady--she was known to you, Madame?

Then the position will be clear. She was of that complete and perfect type we honor as the Parisienne, a product of the most complex life in the world. She was slender and straight--ah! straight as a lance, with youth and spirit and buoyancy in the carriage of her head, the poise of her body, the color upon her cheeks. But it was not that-- the beauty and the courage--that caused her to stand out among those men as a climbing rose stands out from an old wall; it was the schooled and perfected quality of her, the fineness and delicacy of her manner and expression, the--in short, the note of breeding, Madame, the unmistakable ensign of caste. The Englishman fidgeted and lounged beside her; the fat Belgian drank much and was boisterous; Bertin was harsh and rudely jovial and loud. It was as though she were enveloped in a miasma."

"'So that is what Bertin has brought back,' said Vaucher slowly, as his custom was."

"'It is a crime,' said de Sailles."

"'I wonder,' said Vaucher, and drank his wine. He was much my friend, a man with the courage and innocence of a good child; but his thought was not easy to follow. He gave Bertin's group another look under puckered brows, and then turned his back on it and began to talk of other matters. I might have known then that--but I must tell my tale in order."