Chapter XXI: The Man and His God 333 (6)

"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."

"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem stingy after all this discussion of it."

He handed her a ten-franc louis.

The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.

"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the folding-doors.

Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly foolish, gazed at his wife.

"What do you think of that?" he choked.

Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.

"How _dared_ you?" she demanded.

"_I?_" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth did _I_ do?"

"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.

"But, my dear, _I_ didn't do anything. It was the girl----"

"You permitted it."

"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid. And she meant it as a compliment."

"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."

"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."

"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."

He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they went.

They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway, while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was looking into the elaborate room.

Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no mission there save the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.

Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the dance.

Quickly she wheeled to her husband.

"I don't want to go in here," she said.

"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.

She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.

"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."

She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.

In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between sobs, to kissing him.

"I love you!--I love you!" she cried.

The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.

XIII

WORMWOOD

When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed, often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply, bidding her sleep and not bother.

Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.

Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes and gladly let him go.

On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their surmise and the truth.

He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round tables on the sidewalk outside a corner cafe. Only one of them was in use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other customer.

A dirty waiter appeared from the cafe and shuffled forward, adjusting his apron.

"_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled.

Stainton did not return this salutation.

"_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered.

He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago. He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.

The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink, put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.

The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles; the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their own hearts; but Jim hated them all.

He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage, went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but, when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.

Was _M. le medecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he doubted if _M. le medecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early, and _M. le medecin_ rarely saw any patients before--

Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily bade him enter.

"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, _hein_? Did the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend? Sit."

The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiene Sociale," Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier, Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits, there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.

Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample mouth were contracted.

"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something else. I dare say it's not--not much. I know that these things may be the merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical weariness, or--or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does like to have a physician's assurance."

Boussingault peered through his bar-bound _pince-nez_. He began to understand.

"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe before the _dejeuner_."

Stainton tried to smile.

"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life," he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I took it on an empty stomach."

The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.

"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"

"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but----"

"But you do not come here to pass the time, _hein_?"

"No, doctor."

"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take absinthe for the second time in your life."

He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be founded.

"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you--you met my wife last evening."

Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.

"What then?" he inquired.

"What do you think of her?"

"I think that she is very charming--and, M. Stainton, very young."

It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with significance.

"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk even to my physician of--of certain intimate matters; but"--he glanced at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf--"from the titles of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within the limits of your specialty."

He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he could find a suitable one, his vis-a-vis, looking him straight in the eyes, had settled the matter:

"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded, "she is how old?"

Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his anxiety to protect himself.

"She is nearly nineteen."

"Eighteen, _bien_. And you?"

Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the arms of his chair.

"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I had myself looked over carefully by one of the most eminent physicians in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition, that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact----"

Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.

"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your _biceps flexor_. How many years are you alive?"

"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand----"

"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"

"On the contrary."

"And your age?"

Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.

"Fifty," he belligerently declared.

Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.

"_Vous voila!_"

"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand----"

"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl of eighteen----"

"But I have lived a careful life!"

"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are moderate drinkers."

"I drink no more than you."

"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."

"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.

"La-la-la!"

"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely abstemious."

It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant effort to speak as if he did not.

"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."

Stainton rose.

"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.

Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled the more knowingly.

"Yet you are here," said he.

Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.

"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl----"

"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come to consult me."

"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression--all my life of--of----"

Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk and, with a touch of genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.

"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!' The old roue, he comes to me and says--the same thing. We all some day curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it with regard to no man."

"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."

"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"

"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.

The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.

"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt, I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts--you try to live downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is not cruel. It is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now--Poof! It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us. Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more. You must yourself rest."

He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same strain, as before.

"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been easier."

"In a little while?"

"There will be a child."

Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.

"What?" he said. "And you--you----Thousand thunders, these Americans here!"

At this Stainton himself grew angry.

"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."

"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '_Avis Important_' he there has posted on the door."

It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of maturity.

"A week," he said, patting Stainton's broad, straight back. "One little week. We must ourself sever from the so charming lady for so long, for we know that, ultimately, an absence will work for even her good. Is it not, _hein_? But the not-knowing profound of mankind! Incredible! Truly. Nine-tens of my women patients, they are married, who of themselves know not half so much as the savage little girl of ten years. And the men, they I think no more wise."

Stainton passed through the now crowded waiting-room and into the sunlit street in a mood that wavered between rebellion and submission. He walked to the Chatham and, once arrived, walked past the hotel. He did this twice, when, with the realisation that he hesitated from fear of Muriel, he mastered his timidity and entered.

His wife was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, but Stainton knew that she was not asleep. He went to her and kissed her.

"Muriel," he said, "I am going to Lyons."

She did not open her eyes.

"Yes," she said.

"I think that I ought to go," said Stainton, "and clean up this matter of the sale. I shall get the American consul there to recommend a good lawyer, and I'll complete the whole transaction as soon as I can."

"Yes."

"It will probably take an entire week," pursued Stainton. He waited. "I don't like to leave you alone in Paris, but you'd be frightfully lonely in Lyons, and I shall be busy--very busy. Now, I know you don't like Boussingault. I don't like his opinions myself, but he is a leading man in his specialty, and his wife is a good woman. She has said that she will call on you this afternoon and take you to stay with her."

Muriel was silent.

"That's all," said Stainton, "except that there is a train from the Gare de Lyon at noon, and I ought to take it."

"Then you have been to Dr. Boussingault?" asked Muriel.

"Yes, dear."

"And he----"

"He said the--the change was what I needed."

He busied himself packing a bag. At last he came again to the bed and bent over her.

"Good-bye," he said.

She raised her lips, and he strained her to him. He did not trust himself to say more, and he was grateful to her for her refusal to ask any further question. She kissed him, her eyes unopened. All that he knew was that she kissed him.

Muriel lay quiet for some time. Then she got up and dressed and shuddered when she looked at herself in the mirror, and tightened her stays. Yet she dressed carefully before going out for a long walk.

In the Tuileries Gardens she watched the gaily costumed maids and wet nurses with their little charges. She saw a woman of the working class, who was soon to be a mother. She looked away.

She hailed a passing cab.

"Drive me to the Boulevard Clichy," she said in French.

The driver nodded.

Muriel entered the cab. She had an important errand.

Late in the afternoon she returned to the Chatham and left it with a suitcase in her hand. She told the unsurprised clerk at the _bureau_ that her rooms were to be held for her, but that she would be absent for five days.

"If anyone calls," she said, "you will say that I have gone to Lyon with monsieur."

XIV

RUNAWAYS

Stainton returned to Paris at the end of eight days in far better spirits than he had been in when he left. He had sold the mine at nearly his own figure, and he had what he considered reasons for believing that Dr. Boussingault had exaggerated his condition. Muriel's letters had, to be sure, been unsatisfactory; they had been brief and hurried; far from congratulating him on the success of his business affairs when he announced it, they made no mention of it; but then, he had never before received any letters from Muriel, and doubtless these represented her normal method of correspondence. He concluded that if they were below the normal, that was due to the cares of her condition.

Their sitting-room at the Chatham was dim when he entered it, for the day was dull, and Muriel had several of the curtains drawn. She rose to meet him, and he embraced her warmly.

"Hello," he said. "You understood my wire, didn't you? I didn't want to have to say 'howdy' to my sweetheart at the Boussingaults'. Oh, but it's good to be with you again!"

"What wire?" asked Muriel.

"Why, didn't you get it?" said Stainton. "The wire telling you to come here."

"Oh," said Muriel, "that one? Yes."

"You see," explained Jim as he kissed her again and again, "I wanted to have you right away all to myself; that's why I asked you to come back here."

"Yes," said Muriel, "that was better. I didn't want to have you meet me before those strangers."

"Not exactly strangers, dear; but it's better to be together, just our two selves--just our one self, isn't it? And we'll be that always now," he continued joyously as he sat down in an arm-chair and drew her to his knee. "Just we two. No more business. Never again. I have earned my reward and got it. The blessed mine has served its turn and is gone--going, going, gone--and at a splendid figure. Sold to M. Henri Duperre Boussingault et Cie., for----I told you the figure, didn't I--_our_ figure? Isn't it splendid?"

"I am glad," said Muriel.

"You don't really object?" he asked.

"Why should I? Of course I am glad."

"But don't you remember? Once you said that you didn't want me to sell it."

"Did I? Oh, yes; I do remember--but you showed me how foolish that was."

He laughed happily.

"I am a great converter," he said. "If you could only have heard me converting those Frenchmen to my belief in the mine, Muriel--and mostly through interpreters, too; for only two of them spoke any English, and you know what my French is. But I wrote you all that."

"Yes," replied Muriel, "you wrote me all that."

"I can't say so much for your letters," Jim went on. "They were a little brief, dearie: brief and rather vague. Did you miss me?"

"Yes, Jim."

"Did you? Maybe I didn't miss you! Oh, how I wanted to be with you. On Wednesday, while they were thinking it over for the hundredth time and there was nothing for me to do but knock about Lyons, I nearly jumped on a train to come all the way here to see you. How would you have liked that?"

"I should----" She stopped and put her head on his shoulder.

"Poor dear," he said; "poor lonely girly! You did miss me, then? Were the Boussingaults kind? Of course they were; but how were they kind? Tell me all about your visit there. I was glad to get every line you wrote me; I kissed your signature every night and each morning; but you didn't tell me much news, dearest. Tell me now about your visit to the Boussingaults."

Muriel sat upon his knee.

"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she said.

"What?" Stainton started so that he almost unseated her.

"I didn't go to the Boussingaults," she repeated.

"But, dearest, how--What?--Where were you? You mean to say that you stayed here, alone, in this hotel?"

She nodded.

Stainton was amazed; he was shocked that she could have deceived him and sorely troubled at the effect of this on the Boussingaults.

"You never told me," he said. "You might have told me, Muriel. Why did you do such a foolish thing? Why did you do it?"

Muriel stood up. She turned her back toward him.

"I don't know," she said. "I--Oh, you know I couldn't bear that man!"

"But you might have told me, dear. Why, all my letters went there! Then you never got my letters?"

She shook her head.

"Muriel! And you pretended--Didn't Madame Boussingault call for you? She said she would call the afternoon that I left."

"I suppose she did."

"Suppose! Don't you know?" Jim also was on his feet. "Didn't you see her? You don't mean to say that you didn't see her?"

"I didn't see her. I left word at the _bureau_ that I was out. I left word that I had gone to Lyons with you."

"Good heavens, Muriel! What will they think? What must they be thinking right now? My letters to you went there. I wrote every day. They would know from the arrival of those letters addressed to you from Lyons that you weren't with me."

She sank on a chair and began feebly to cry.

Jim knelt by her, his annoyance remaining, but his heart touched.

"There, there!" he said. "I understand. You wanted to go with me and were afraid to say so. I wish now that you had gone. That doctor is a fool. He must be a fool. And he isn't a pleasant man. I understand, dearie. Don't say any more. I was cruel----"

"No, no!" sobbed Muriel.

"I was. Yes, I was."

"You are the best man in the world, only--only----"

"I was the worst, the very worst. If you only had told me how you felt, dearest. If you only hadn't deceived me!"

"I had to."

"Out of consideration for me."

"No."

"It was. I understand. You thought the trip alone would do me good, and so you wouldn't say a word to change my plans." He had no thought for anything but contrition now. "And you stuck it out. My poor, brave, lonely darling! To think of me being so callous! How could I? And you in your condition!"

She drew from him.

"Jim----" she said.

"I won't hear you accuse yourself," he protested.

"But, Jim----"

"Not now. Not ever. Not another word. Never mind the Boussingaults. Boussingault is a physician, after all, and will understand when I tell him."

"Don't tell him, Jim."

"We'll see; we'll see."

"Please don't. I hate him so, I never want to have to think of him again."

"Don't you bother, dearie. You are the finest woman that ever lived."

"But, Jim, I'm not." She kept her head averted. "I am--I dare say I am as bad----"

"Stop," he commanded. "I won't hear it. Not even from you. I will not. Think, dearest: we are foolish to be unhappy. We have every reason in the world to be happy. We are rich. We have no business to bother or interfere with whatever we may want to do. We love each other and soon"--he broke the tacit treaty of silence concerning their child--"in a few months we are to have a little baby to complete everything."

"Don't!" said Muriel.

But Stainton took her by both hands and raised her and kissed her.

"Not this time," he said. "This once I am going to have my way. I am going to make you happy in spite of yourself. We shall never see or hear of Boussingault again if you are only as obedient as you are nearly always. It is still early afternoon. We are going out together and make a tour of the shops."

She lifted her face with a troubled smile.

"I have everything I want," she said.

"Poor dear," said Stainton, "you're pale. I suppose you scarcely dared to go out of doors while I was away. No, come on: we shall go now."

"Please," said Muriel; "I have all I want."

"All?" smiled her husband.

"Of course I have. You've got me such loads of lovely things already that I don't know what I am to do with them all and where to pack them. You know you have got me ever so much, Jim."

"For yourself, perhaps I have got you a few things, dearie; and I'm glad you like them. But I have always heard that Paris was the place to get some other sort of things. Aren't there some of those--some little things--some little lace things that we ought to get against the arrival of the newcomer? I am so proud, Muriel, and I want the newcomer to know I am."

Muriel's voice faltered.

"So soon----" she said.

"We might as well make what preparations we can while we are in the city where the best preparations can be made. No, no. You must come. Come along."

She went with him, pale and silent, and Jim led her through shop after shop and forced her, by good-natured insistence, to buy baby clothes. She protested at the start; she tried to cut the expedition in half; she endeavoured to postpone this purchase or that; but he would not heed her. He urged her to suggest articles of the infantile toilette of which he was totally ignorant; when she declared that she knew as little as he, he made her translate his questions to the frankly delighted shop clerks. He had been inspired with the idea that, by such a process as this, he could bring her to a proper point of view in regard to the approaching event, and he did not concede failure until Muriel at last broke down and fainted in their _taxi-metre_.

The next morning she told Jim that she wanted to go away.

"All right," said Stainton: after his journey from Lyons he had slept long and heavily and was still very tired. "Where'd you like to go?"

"I don't know. Anywhere. I'm not particular."

"Well, we'll think it over to-day and look up the time-tables."

They were in their sitting-room at the hotel. Muriel parted the curtains and stood looking out upon a grey day.

"I don't want to think it over," she said.

"But we've got to know where we're going before we start."

"I don't see why. Besides, I said I wasn't particular where we went. I want to go to-day."

"To-day?" Jim did not like to rush about so madly, and his voice showed it.

"Why not? Look at the weather. Half the time we've been here it's been like this. I don't think Paris agrees with me."

He softened.

"Aren't you well?"

"No."

"What is it? My dear child!" He came toward her.

"Don't call me that," she said.

"Why not, Muriel?"

"It sounds as if you were so much older than I am. Jim----" She put her hand in his--"I'm horrid, I know----"

"You're never that!"

"Yes I am. I'm horrid now. You don't know. I'm not ill, but I'm so tired of Paris. It grates on my nerves. Let's go away now. The servants can pack, and we can be somewhere else by evening."

Again Muriel took refuge at the window.

"There's Switzerland," she said. "I should like to see the Alps."

"Isn't it rather early in the year for them?"

"I don't think so."

"It'll be cold, dear."

"Well, we can stand a little cold, Jim. If we wait till the warm weather, we shall run into all the summer tourists."

She had her way. The servants packed, and Jim went out to make arrangements. In an hour he was back.

"All right," he triumphantly announced. "I've ordered our next batch of mail sent on as far as Neuchatel. We can get a train in forty-five minutes to Dijon, where we might as well stop over night. I found a ticket-seller that spoke some sort of English--and here are the tickets. Can you be ready?"

She was ready. They started at once upon a feverish and constantly distracting journey.

The night was passed at Dijon. In the early morning they boarded their train for Switzerland, went through the flat country east of Mouchard, then swept into the Juras, climbing high in air and looking over fruitful plains that stretched to the horizon and were cut by white strips of road which seemed to run for lengths of ten miles without deviation from their tangent. The train would plunge into a black tunnel and emerge to look down at a little valley among vineyards with old red-tiled cottages clustered around a high-spired church. Another tunnel would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchatel with the white Sentis to the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst.

But a day at Neuchatel sufficed Muriel; on the next morning she wanted to move on. She made enquiries.

"We might motor to Soleure," she said to Stainton, and when the motor was finally chosen, she decided for the train and Zurich.

"Why, they say there is nothing much to see in Zurich," Jim faintly protested.

"Let's find out for ourselves," said Muriel. "Besides, we have done almost no travelling, and that's what we came for, and now you've no business and nothing else to do."

So they were en route again on the day following, by way of Berne, through the wooded mountains, past the loftily placed castle of Aarburg, past picturesque Olten and Brugg with its ancient abbey of Koenigsfelden, where the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes of Hungary had sought to commemorate the murder of the Emperor Albert of Austria by John of Swabia, five hundred years before. They saw the hotels of Baden and the Cistercian abbey of Wettingen, and they came, by noon, to Zurich.

They lunched and took a motor drive about the city. In the midst of their tour, just as they were speeding through the Stadthaus-Platz on their way to the Gross-Muenster, Muriel said:

"I believe you were right, after all, Jim. There isn't much to see here. Let's go on to-morrow."

It was a tribute to his powers of prediction.

"Very well," he answered. "As a matter of fact, I should like to go back to the hotel this minute and lie down."

She would not hear of that.

"Oh, no!" she protested. "There is the Zwingli Museum, the Hohe Promenade, and the National Museum to see. We mustn't miss them, you know. What would Aunt Ethel say?"

Nor could she permit him to miss them. She seemed to thrive as much upon the labour as if she had been shopping as she used to shop in her unmarried days, and she dragged him after her, a husband more weary than he had often been in his pilgrimages through the Great Desert.

"To-morrow," he yawned, as he flung himself down to sleep, eight hours later, "we shall start for some place where we can rest and see a few real Alps. We'll go to the Engadine."

Muriel was seated at some distance from the bed. She was stooping to loosen her boots, and her hair fell over her face and hid it.

"Don't let's go there," she said. "Let's go to Innsbruck."

"Innsbruck? That's in Austria, isn't it?"

"Is it? Well, what if it is, Jim?"

"I thought you wanted to see Switzerland."

"We've seen it, haven't we?"

"Only a slice of it; and it must be a long and tiresome ride to Innsbruck."

Muriel dropped one boot and then the other and carried them outside the door.

"Anyhow," she said, returning, "we have seen enough of Switzerland to know what it's like, Jim. I'm awfully tired of it." She came to the bed and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Do you mind, dear?" she added.

"Oh, no," he sighed. "I suppose not. Only let's go to sleep now: I am about done up."

Muriel said nothing to that, but the next morning she assumed the plan to be adopted, and they went to Innsbruck. They went by the way that Franz von Klausen had described to her: by the narrow, mountain-guarded Waldersee, the Castle Lichtenstein, the ruins of Graephang and, on the great rock that rises over Berschia, the pilgrim-church of St. Georgen.

Jim had tipped the guard to secure, at least for a time, the privacy of their compartment, and the guard, a little fellow with flaring moustaches and a uniform that was almost the uniform of an officer, saluted gravely and promised seclusion. Thus, for some hours, they had the place to themselves, but the train gradually filled, and at last there entered a young Austrian merchant, who insisted upon giving them a sense of his knowledge of English and American literature.

"All Austrians of culture read your Irving," he said; "also your Harte and Twain and Do-_nel_li."

"Our what?" asked Jim.

"Please?"

"I didn't catch that last name."

"Donelli--Ignatius Donelli."

"Oh! Ignatius Donnelly--yes."

"Indeed, yes, sir; and you will find few that do not by the heart know of Shakespeare: 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, come listen to me!'"

The Austrian left the train just before they reached the six-and-a-half-mile Arlberg Tunnel and, when they returned to daylight after twenty minutes, Stainton asked his wife:

"Didn't that fellow remind you of von Klausen?"

Muriel moved uneasily. Von Klausen's name had not been mentioned more than twice between them since they had left the _Friedrich Barbarossa_.

"Why, no," she answered.

"I thought they spoke alike, Muriel."

"Did you? As I remember the Captain, his English was better."

Stainton reflected.

"Perhaps it was," he admitted. "But, by the way, your Austrian seemed rather to neglect us in Paris."

"_My_ Austrian? Why mine?"

"By right of discovery. You discovered him, didn't you?"

"You mean that he discovered me. I don't like Captain von Klausen."

He attempted to argue against her prejudice, and they came near to quarrelling. In the end, Muriel protested with tears that she hated all Austrians and all Austria, and that they must move on to Italy at once.

Stainton obtained only a day's respite in Innsbruck. They drove to the Triumphal Gate at the extremity of the Maria-Theresien-Strasse and then across to the scene of the Tyrolese battles at Berg Isel, returning by way of the Stadthaus Platz, where the band was playing in the pale spring sunshine and where, in roles of gallants to the fashionable ladies of the city, strolled, in uniforms of grey, of green, and of light blue, scores of dapper, slim-waisted Austrian officers. But Muriel said that the women were dowdy and their escorts effeminate; she scorned the "Golden Roof" because the gilt was disappearing and the copper showing through; she pronounced the Old Town, with its mediaeval roofed-streets, unwholesome; she would not stop for beer at the Goldene Adler, where Hofer drank. That worn and tarnished Hofkirche, "the Westminster of the Tyrol," with its grotesque statues and its empty tomb of Maximilian, she dismissed as "a dirty barn."

Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf. So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure these things--and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.

Muriel was again in tears.

"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."

"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear. Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit."

"But I'm tired of looking and waiting--we've been doing that ever since we went away. Let's go back to Paris."

Back to Paris! She had taken him on this nerve-destroying journey; she had headed for this place and swerved to that; she had exhausted them both by her unaccountable whims and her switching resolutions--and now she wanted to go back to Paris!

"You said that Paris didn't agree with you, dear," pleaded Stainton.

"I know; but now it will be spring there--real spring--and everyone says that is the most beautiful time of the year in Paris."

"Yet the climate----"

"It will suit me in the spring; I know it will."

"Do you think"--Stainton put his hand upon hers--"do you think that you can rest there: really rest?"

"I know I can. O, Jim, I try to like it here, but I can't speak a word of Italian, and the French of these people is simply awful. I did my best to be good in Innsbruck, but I don't know any German, either, and so I hated that. Do you realise that we've been hurrying--hurrying--hurrying, so that we are really worn to shreds?"

"I know it," said Stainton. He was so travel-wearied that he looked sixty years old.

"I dare say that is what has made me so horrid," said Muriel: "that pull, pull, pull at my nerves. I don't know _what's_ the matter with me; but I'm quite sure that getting back to Paris will be like getting back home."

This is how it came about that, two days later, they were once more quartered at the Chatham.

XV

"NOT AT HOME"

"A gentleman to see madame."

The servant came into the sitting-room with a card. Jim was at the barber's; he had done nothing but sleep since their return, twenty-four hours earlier, and Muriel had urged him to "go down and get rubbed up" at a shop where, as he had discovered during their first stay in Paris, there was a French barber that did not get the lather up his patient's nose. She was now, therefore, alone. She took the card: it was that of Captain von Klausen.

"I am not at home," said Muriel.

"Yes, madame," said the servant. He hesitated a moment and then added: "This same gentleman called, I believe, on the afternoon of the day that madame, last week, left. I chanced to be in the bureau at the time, and it was there that he made his enquiries. The gentleman seemed disappointed."

"I am not at home," repeated Muriel.

This time the servant received the phrase in silence. He bowed himself out and left her seated, a touch of red burning in her pale and somewhat wasted cheeks; but he had scarcely gone before the door of the sitting-room again opened and Jim appeared. He had met von Klausen downstairs and had brought him along.

In his frock-coat the Austrian looked taller and slimmer than ever, and his face appeared to be even younger than when she had last seen it. Aglow with health and warm with the pleasure of this meeting, it had an air singularly boyish and innocent. The waxed blond moustache failed utterly to lend it severity, and the blue eyes sparkled with youth. Had Stainton been told of what Muriel had seen at L'Abbaye, he would have protested that her eyes deceived her: it was incredible that this young fellow, whose smile was so honest and whose blush was as ready as a schoolgirl's, as ready as Muriel's own, could ever have frequented Montmartre and danced there in public with a hired Spanish woman.

Nevertheless, Muriel was annoyed. She was annoyed lest they had fallen in with the servant, which they had not done, and been told that she was out. She was annoyed with Jim because he had brought to call upon her a man that, only a few days before, she had told him she disliked. And she was distinctly annoyed with von Klausen.

Yet the interview passed off pleasantly enough. Jim was never the man to observe under a woman's conventional politeness, even when that politeness was ominously intensified, the fires of her disapproval, and von Klausen, if indeed he saw more than the husband, at least appeared to see no more. He remained to tea.

"Why on earth did you bring _him_ here?" asked Muriel as soon as the door had closed on the Austrian.

"Why, did you mind?"

"I told you that I didn't like him."

"I know, but you didn't seem to mind."

"I managed not to be rude to your guest, that's all. Jim, you must have remembered that I said I didn't like him."

"Yes, I do remember," Stainton confessed; "but the fact is that I brought him because I couldn't very well get out of bringing him. He was so extremely glad to see me that I couldn't merely drop him in the lobby."

"How did he know that we were here?"

"I told him on the boat that we were to stop here."

"But we have been and gone and returned since then."

"Then I suppose he found us out in the same way that Boussingault did: in the hotel news of the _Daily Mail_."

"Well, you might have told him that I wasn't at home. That's what I told the servant when his card was sent up."

"Yes, Muriel, I might have tried that, and, as a matter of fact, I did think of it; but then he would have hung on to me downstairs, and I knew you would be lonely up here without me."

Muriel turned away to observe herself in a long mirror.

"You know I don't like him," she repeated.

"Yes, yes, dear, but what was I to do. Besides, he is really a very good fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you have for your prejudice?"

"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's generally good ground for it."

"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a mere boy."

"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than I am."

"Are you so very aged, my dear?"

"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."

Stainton kissed her.

"Well said," he declared; "your young husband has been so weather-beaten that he has been a pretty poor sort of spouse lately. We won't worry any more about von Klausen."

Yet to worry about von Klausen they were forced. They seemed, during the next ten days, to meet him everywhere, and he was always so polite that his invitations could not be contumeliously refused. He took them to the opera and to supper afterwards, and they, at last, had to ask him to dine.

It was in the midst of this dinner at Les Fleurs that Stainton, begging his guest's pardon, glanced at a letter that had been handed him as he and Muriel that evening left the hotel.

"Hello," he said, "these French business-men are not so slow, after all. They have drawn the final papers, and I am to sign them to-morrow."

He turned to Muriel.

"So," he said, "I shall have to break our agreement this once, Muriel, and leave you alone for the morning. Will you forgive me?"

Muriel smiled.

"I'll try," she said.

"You won't be bored?"

"Oh, I'll be bored, of course, but I shall make the best of it."

"Permit me," interposed von Klausen, "to offer my services to Mrs. Stainton."

"Your services?" asked Muriel.

"To occupy you during your husband's absence. It is unendurable to think of you as wholly deserted--is it not, sir?"

The Austrian was addressing Jim. Stainton and his wife exchanged a quick glance. Jim was thinking of her expression of dislike for the Captain; Muriel was annoyed because her husband had neglected to read his letter before they joined von Klausen: she was in the mood for revenge.

"Oh, she'll make out," said Stainton. "Won't you, Muriel?"

"I don't know," replied Muriel. "It will be very dull."

"Then I renew my offer," said von Klausen.

"But, Captain," protested Jim, apparently blind to everything but his wife's prejudice, "we couldn't think of imposing on you."

"An imposition--Mr. Stainton! How an imposition? A privilege, I assure you, sir."

"But your duties at the Embassy?"

"One can sacrifice much for one's friends, Mr. Stainton; as it fortunately happens, I shall be all at liberty to-morrow morning. The spring is come upon us early. It will, I am sure, be delightful weather. If Mrs. Stainton will permit me the pleasure of driving her through the Bois----"

"Thank you," said Muriel. "You are very kind. I'll go."

Stainton looked perplexedly at his wife.

He did not, however, again broach the matter until they were safely in their own rooms at the hotel and were ready for bed.

"I hope you'll forgive me," he at last said.

"For what?"

"For getting you into that confounded engagement with young von Klausen. It was stupid of me. I don't know how I ever blundered into it."

"It's of no consequence. I dare say I can stand him for once."

"Of course you can, dear. Still, I know how you dislike the Captain, and so I hope you'll pardon----"

"Nonsense," yawned Muriel. "Don't think about it any more. And do turn out the light. I'm awfully sleepy."

XVI

IN THE BOIS

That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the Foret de Rouvray and the Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets and the Champs Elysees, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.

"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.

Muriel hesitated.

"Why?" she enquired.

"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you have been good enough to visit."

His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to contradict him. She looked out at the Lac Inferieur, with its shaded banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in imitation of a Swiss _chalet_. She was resolved to prefer this to his Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the Austrian Tyrol as his own.

"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.

"Better? But--why?"

"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and inviting."

"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen, smiling.

He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain turned to the driver.

"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.