Chapter XXI: The Man and His God 333 (7)

There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.

"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."

Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."

"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after your return from your visit to my country."

"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have not been thinking much about you one way or the other."

"I am sorry," said von Klausen.

"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."

"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."

"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.

"Yes."

She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.

"How dared you?" she gasped.

"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."

"Well, you shan't know."

"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to plead in his own defence?"

"You are not accused--and you aren't judged."

"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how is that possible?"

"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"

"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none. Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in another of them."

Muriel bit her red under-lip.

"Let us go back," she said.

"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."

They walked a few steps forward.

"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.

"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are presumptuous."

"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."

"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."

"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."

"What nonsense!"

"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret, madame."

Muriel's eyes flashed.

"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."

Von Klausen bowed.

"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to the reference."

"I did not."

"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close acquaintanceship."

"I required nothing--and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was the merest trifle."

Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.

"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to your husband."

She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky cheeks were aflame.

"How low of you!" she cried.

But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.

"To mention the truth?" he murmured.

"To bring up such a trifle--to trade on such a confidence--to make of an impulsive action and of the consequences of that action--you know--I told you at the time, and you must know--that I didn't mention the circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you would not want your terror known."

"Ah--so you did think of me, then?"

"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."

They were now half-way along the Lac Inferieur. Under the arching trees in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.

"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always--think of me deeply. I cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must listen. I tell you now, once and forever--I tell you----"

Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly unloosed--the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite of all the hampering harness of convention--and she was undeniably curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something else--something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of elaborately conceived convention.

Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.

"Stop!" said Muriel.

Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.

"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and slowly; now----"

Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.

Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the moment before.

She raised a trembling hand.

"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe he would kill you."

Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.

"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no man that lives."

"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered: "afraid and ashamed."

"Not afraid."

"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way. Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."

It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result. Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was somehow inexplicably true.

Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him. His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.

Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.

"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry--very sorry. We will never speak of it again--not to ourselves--and not to anybody else."

"But we shall be friends?" he asked.

"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.

When one is young such promises are lightly made.

"Never," he vowed.

"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this affair to me?"

"Never again, dear lady."

"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in--in that way."

He pressed her hand ever so slightly.

"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."

"But the thoughts are wrong."

"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions. I shall remember always his words."

She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them to fall, upon trivial things.

"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the subject of her fevered trip with Jim.

"We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris."

"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"

"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came right back here."

"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it. It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafes, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebiere or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime--you and your husband."

"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I."

"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."

She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.

"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau--the particular point that I mean--a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelene spent, in penance, the last thirty years of her life."

He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.

Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.

"You have been there, then?" she asked.

"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot--the silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

XVII

THE CALL OF YOUTH

That evening there came the beginning of the end.

The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate any sort of fete of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von Klausen had promised his two American friends, the _grand boulevard_ would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the Madelaine.

"You must really see it," he said, for he had returned to the hotel with Muriel and had there met Stainton, who straightway invited him to luncheon in celebration of the concluding formalities of the sale. "The streets will be as deep as to the knee with confetti, and there will be masks. It is one of the annual things worth while."

He was eating a salad as unconcernedly as if his morning had been one of the dull routine of the Embassy.

Muriel looked at him in surprise at his ease of manner. For her own part, though she told herself religiously that she had done no wrong, she was singularly ill at ease. Her greeting, when Stainton had met and kissed her, was perfunctory, and, ever since, her bearing had been preoccupied. She gave but half an ear to her husband's long enthusiasm over the termination of his business with the syndicate, and now, as she glanced from von Klausen to Jim, she saw that the latter was tired.

"You look tired," she said. Another would have said that he looked old.

"Not at all," said Stainton. "I am feeling splendidly." His attention had been caught and his curiosity excited by von Klausen's description of the evening before the fete. If he felt somewhat worn from the now unaccustomed strain of business, he was all the more ready to welcome this chance for novel amusement.

"Good," he went on to the Austrian. "We shall see it. Won't you be our pilot, Captain?"

Von Klausen glanced at Muriel.

"If," he said, "you will do me the honour--you and Mrs. Stainton--to dine with me. We might early take a car across the river to the Foyot and then run back in plenty of time to make the promenade of the boulevards. That is to say," he added deferentially, but with no alteration of expression, "if Mrs. Stainton is not too weary because of her drive this morning?"

Jim, too, looked at Muriel.

"I am not tired," said she. Her tone was as conventional as the Austrian's.

Von Klausen turned to regard Stainton closely.

"But you, sir," he said, "are you sure that you are not tired? This juggle with fortunes is what you call heroic."

"Not at all, thanks. There was nothing but a great deal of talk and the signing of a few papers." Jim squared his broad shoulders, though the movement started a yawn that he was barely able to stifle. "Not at all." He began to resent this solicitude. "I am as fit as ever."

"Perhaps," persisted von Klausen, "should you take a brief rest during the remainder of the afternoon----"

"No, no." It was Muriel who interrupted. For a reason that she did not stop to analyse she was suddenly unwilling either to be left alone with her husband or to be deprived of his company. She did not yet wish to face Jim in their own rooms, and she did not wish to face her own thoughts. "No," she repeated, speaking rapidly and saying she scarcely knew what. "The day has begun so splendidly that it would be a shame to waste any of it by napping. I'm sure we should miss something glorious if we napped. I'm not a bit tired, and Jim is looking fresher every minute. You _are_ sure you're not tired, aren't you, Jim?"

Von Klausen shrugged his shoulders.

"As Mrs. Stainton wishes," he said, "We might pass the afternoon by motoring to Versailles and back."

So they spent the afternoon in an automobile and came back to town in time for dinner at the famous restaurant close by the Odeon and dined on _croute consomme_, _filet_ of cod, and _canard sauvage a la presse_. After von Klausen had paid the bill, Stainton, who felt more tired than he had expected to feel, ordered another bottle of burgundy.

When they crossed the river by the Pont de la Concorde and turned from the rue Royale into the boulevards, the crowd that von Klausen had predicted, already possessed the broad streets. It surged from house-wall to house-wall; it shouted and danced and blew tin horns and threw confetti; it stopped the crawling taxicabs and was altogether as riotously happy as only a fete-day crowd in Paris can be.

Von Klausen and his party dismissed their motor at the corner of the rue Vignon and plunged afoot into the midst of the swaying mass of merrymakers. Amid shrill whistles, loud laughter, and showers of confetti that almost blinded them, they made their way nearly to the rue Scribe. Then, suddenly, Muriel and von Klausen realised that Stainton was lost.

They called, but their voices merged in the general clatter. They stood on tiptoe and strained their eyes. They thought now that they saw him on this side, and again they saw him on that; but, though they shouldered their way, the Austrian vigorously making a path, hither and yon, and though they knew that somewhere, probably only a few yards away, Stainton was making corresponding efforts to discover their whereabouts, he eluded them as if he had been a will-o'-the-wisp.

Tired at last by the long day and its emotions, jostled by the fete-makers, and frightened by the disappearance of her husband, Muriel began quietly to cry. The Austrian at once noticed.

"Do not alarm yourself, dear lady," he said--and, as he had to bend to her to get the words to her ear among the tumult, his cheek brushed a loose strand of her dark hair--"pray do not alarm yourself. We shall find him soon, or he will await us when we return to your hotel."

"We can never find him here!" Muriel declared. She had been obliged, in order not to lose her fellow-searcher, to cling to his arm, and her fingers fastened as convulsively about it as the hands of a drowning man grasp the floating log for rescue. "He'll know that, and I'm sure he'll go at once to the hotel. Let's go there ourselves--at once--at once! Call a cab."

Not a cab, however, was in sight, and this von Klausen explained to her, bending to her ear.

"We must walk," he said. "It is not so far--if you are not too tired?"

"No, no, I'm not too tired--or I won't be if we can only hurry."

They started slowly, by necessity, on their way.

"But I am sorry," said von Klausen, "that you are afraid. You are afraid--of me?"

His tone was hurt. She looked up at him impulsively and saw genuine sorrow in his bright eyes. They were very young eyes.

"Oh, no," she said, "not of you. I know you wouldn't----"

"Yet," he interrupted, "you were a little afraid of me, I think, this morning."

"_Not afraid_--even then. And now--well, I remember the talk we had afterward. I hope you haven't forgotten it."

Again his lips were near her neck.

"I shall never forget it," he vowed.

Something in his voice made her sure that he had not interpreted her words as she had intended them to be interpreted. Nevertheless, she dared not resume a subject that could be safe only while it was closed. She said no more, and von Klausen was almost equally silent until they had reached the hotel.

"Has Mr. Stainton returned?" asked Muriel of the first servant that they met.

The servant thought not.

"Ask at the _bureau_."

Stainton had not yet come back.

"He will certainly follow us very shortly," said von Klausen. "It may be better that we await him in your sitting-room."

Muriel had been expecting either that Stainton would have reached the hotel before them or that her companion would leave her at the door. Now a new difficulty presented itself. It is one of the curses of our minor errors--perhaps the greatest--that they inspire us with the fear that the persons about us may be suspecting us of worse offences. Muriel had never before considered what the people of the hotel might think of her. She was conscious, moreover, of having done nothing further than withhold from her husband the narrative of what most women of the world would consider nothing more than an amusing flirtation; yet now, with the remembrance of that scene in the Bois vividly in her mind, she became immediately certain that the servants regarded with lifted eyebrows this wife who had returned without her husband at an hour not precisely early? To dismiss von Klausen in the hallway would, her method of logic twisted for her, confirm any suspicions that might have been roused.

"Yes," she agreed quietly, "we'll go upstairs." She turned to the servant at the door. "When my husband comes in," she told him, "you will say that Captain von Klausen and I are awaiting him in my--in the sitting-room of the suite that my husband and I occupy."

For a reason that neither could have explained they did not speak on their way to the room, and, after they had entered it, von Klausen shutting the door behind them and switching on the electric light, this silence continued until it became almost committal. Muriel laid off her wraps and sank into a wide chair at some distance from the window. It was she that was first to speak. She spoke, however, with an effort, and she sought refuge in platitude.

"I am tired," she said; and then, as von Klausen did not reply, she added: "Yes, after all, I find that I am very tired."

"It has been," said the Austrian, "a difficult day for you."

There was again silence. He stood before her, slim, erect, more boyish than ever, his face, none the less, rather pale and set, and his eyes narrowed.

"I wonder what can have happened to Jim," she at last managed to say.

"Only what has happened to us. He--I think he will be here soon."

Von Klausen was looking at her. She wished that he would not do that. She wished that there would be an end to these interruptions of silence. She wished devoutly that Jim would return.

"It--it is rather close here," she said.

"Do you think it close?" he responded. He did not take his narrowed eyes from her. He did not move.

"Yes," she answered. "Will you--will you be so good as to open the window?"

He bowed as gravely as if she had required of him a mighty sacrifice, and he turned to the window.

The long velvet curtains were pulled together, and he did not attempt to draw them from the glass. Instead, he simply slipped his arm between them. Then something went wrong with the knob that controls the bolt. He shook the knob. His hand slipped and went through the pane. There was a tinkle of falling glass.

Startled by the sound Muriel rose quickly to her feet.

"What is it?" she asked.

She took an involuntary step forward. Then she saw that von Klausen was trying to conceal from her his right hand, red with blood.

"You are hurt?" she cried.

Her swarthy cheek whitened. There was a swift catch in her throat.

"It is nothing," he answered. "The window is open."

The window was indeed open. The curtain, however, remained drawn.

"But you are hurt!" repeated Muriel.

She put out her hand and seized his own with a slight gash across the knuckles--a gash from which a little of the blood flowed over her white fingers and marked them with a bright stain.

That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature; the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things they had never seen before.

Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.

The circuit was complete.

"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.

From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:

"I love you!"

She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips, in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to the force in her own true being.

"But--but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.

Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.

"But Jim----You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is far, far too good for either of us."

Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost merry kiss.

"He need never know," said the Austrian.

She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.

"You--you----" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"

It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.

"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"

"Go!"

Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with hate and shame.

"Go!"

"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."

"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She passed her hand across her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"

"But, Muriel----"

"Go!" She moved to the call-button in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring for the servants."

"Muriel----"

"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again, I'll ring."

He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.

Drawing back from his passing figure as if his touch were contamination, Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the window.

Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the boulevards. He saw her nearly recumbent before him, limp and pale.

"Muriel!" he cried.

She opened her heavy eyes.

"Jim!"

He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father strokes the hair of his weary child.

"My poor little girl!" he said.

Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth, or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him while he did that.

"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought--I hardly know what I thought."

"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"

Muriel started.

"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's----" She laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It stuck--the window, I mean. He put his hand through the glass and cut his wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the pieces from the floor."

She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of marital ethics.

After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of deception. Truth became impossible.

She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen had misunderstood her attitude and had himself assumed an attitude far below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy against her lover and heightened her affection--call it love as she would, it would now be no more than affection--for Jim. She wanted to tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that barred her way.

She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.

"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."

At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.

"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is really no reason for you to worry."

She did not look up, but she shook her head.

"I am not," she repeated.

He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her cheek, which her hands left bare.

"There, there," he said.

At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.

"You don't understand me," she sobbed. "It is over. It is all over."

He withdrew his hand quickly; he caught his breath.

"What--what----" he stammered.

"O, Jim!" she cried.

"Muriel," he besought her, "tell me. What--how? When? You don't mean----"

"Yes, yes," she moaned, her hands still tight before her face.

Stainton stood erect. He clenched his fists in an effort to control himself. He pleaded to his ears that they had not heard correctly; his reason declared that, if his ears had heard aright, this was the fancy of an ailing woman; but his frame trembled, and his voice shook as he began again:

"You don't mean----"

"I do, I do. Oh, let me alone! Don't ask me any more!"

He had built for years upon his desire for physical immortality. Now the edifice that he had reared was shattered, and Stainton shook with its fall. He clutched the back of a frail chair that stood opposite Muriel's. Perceptibly he swayed.

"When?" he whispered out of dry lips. His mouth worked; his iron-grey brows fought their way to a meeting. "When?"

Her head sank lower in her hands.

"While you were at Lyons," she said. "The very day you left."

"Is that why you didn't go to the Boussingaults'?"

"I suppose so."

"You suppose?" Almost anger shot from his eyes. "Don't you know? You must know! How did this happen?"

Muriel's head nearly rested on her knees; her shoulders twitched. Her only reply was an inarticulate noise that seemed to tear itself from her breast.

"Answer me!" he demanded.

She rose and stumbled a few steps toward him. She held out her arms. Her face was like a sheet, and her eyes and mouth were like holes burnt into a sheet.

"I fell," she mumbled, and her words seemed to strike him. "I went for a drive. Coming back--here at the hotel--I fell from the cab--getting out. I got up to the bedroom. And it happened. I sent for a doctor--_not_ Boussingault. He treated me, and I paid him. The nurse, too. They said it was easy--They said I would be all right in a week.--I thought I was--But I have suffered--O, Jim, Jim! Don't look like that! Don't, please, think----"

She crashed to the floor at his feet.

Then Stainton realised something of the bodily agony that had been hers while he was absent and of the mental agony that had driven her on their mad dash through Switzerland to Austria and Italy, the mental agony that lashed her now. He put aside, for the moment, his own suffering. He stooped and took her up and held her in his arms and, pressing her head against his breast and holding her sobbing body tight to his, tried to murmur broken, unthought words of comfort.

Gradually, very gradually, she grew a little quieter.

"My dear, my dear," he said in a voice so hoarse that he scarcely knew it for his own, "why did you keep torturing yourself? You should have had rest, and instead----Why didn't you tell me? Why?"

"I was afraid," she said, simply.

"Dearie!" he cried. "Of me?"

Her words were a fresh stab.

"Yes. I knew how much you wanted----And I was afraid."

"You needn't have been. You see it now. You needn't have been. Tell me what I can do for you, dear. Only tell me."

"Take me away from Paris!" sobbed Muriel. "I have come to hate the place. I can't stand it another day. I can't stand it. Some other time, perhaps----Only now--oh, take me away!"

"We'll go home, Muriel," he said. "We'll sail by the first boat. Back to our own country. Back home."

But at that she shuddered.

"That would be worse," she said, rapidly. "It would be worse even than Paris. Don't you see? We left there happy, expecting----Not there. No, I couldn't bear that."

Stainton had put her on a chair and was kneeling beside her, stroking her hair and wrists. His fingers touched the dried blood on her hand, brown and horrible. But he kissed the blood.

She drew the hand from him.

"Your poor little hand!" said Jim. "Let me see the cut."

"It is--there is nothing to be seen. It was only a scratch. Let's talk about getting away."

"I thought," said Stainton, "that you wanted to come back here when we were in Italy."

"I did," she faltered. "It seemed there that it would be easier to tell you here, where it happened. But to-night scared me."

"To-night? Why to-night, dearest? Not what has just happened? Not anything I have said about it?"

"Not that. I don't know. Something before that----"

"Because you lost me in the crowd?"

"Yes, yes: because I lost you. Because I lost you for that hour on the boulevards. I don't like Paris any more. I'm afraid of Paris. I--I don't like the confetti. Let's go away, Jim. Please."

He wished that she would go back to New York. He argued for them both that the return would be wise. When something terrible has occurred in unfamiliar surroundings, if one reverts to surroundings that are familiar, it is often possible to forget the terror, or, if it must be remembered, to remember it with pangs that are less acute than those which one suffers on the scene of the occurrence.

New York, however, she would not hear of. Not yet, she said. They would do better, now, to go to some place that would be different from Paris and different from New York.

"We'll go to Marseilles," she said.

She spoke without much consideration. The name of Marseilles happened to be lying at the top of the names of cities in the back of her mind. It was merely readiest to hand. She did not care. She cared only that her effort to tell the truth had ended in more falsehood.

The next morning they left for Marseilles.

XVIII

OUR LADY OF PROTECTION

For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel, because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however, was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.

"Let's take it," said Muriel.

She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of hotels.

"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may want to be getting back home when--when all's well again."

"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease," Muriel serenely assured him.

Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at once.

They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she was heartily sorry for Jim.

It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to press once more the question of their return to New York. They were sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their villa, and were looking over the blue bay.

"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"

His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.

"Perhaps," she granted.

On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.

The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers answered or to the making of other prayers.

"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused, "that these people wanted."

Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.

"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."

His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.

"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."

"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in here."

"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze out there."

"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."

Muriel's lips tightened.

"Very well," she said.

She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled to the side overlooking the bay.

Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping in the _vieux port_, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the Cite Chabas and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point, where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue; the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of land where towers the Chateau d'If.

She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape--of a landscape of which she had only heard:

"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

"Muriel!"

It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner serious.

"How did you come here?"

The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her weapons of defence.

"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning after you departed--because I had to see you, whether you wished me or not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come here."

His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her poise.

"How dared you come?" she asked.

"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.

"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."

"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."

"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"

"You must." He came nearer to her.

"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."

"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that you have told him nothing."

She eyed him menacingly.

"Are you so sure of that?"

"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."

"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider me?--But of course you don't!"

"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have come to say--perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear that I should cause you annoyance----"

"You annoy me now."

"But if you have not told him----Well, what I have to say is my excuse. If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste in saying it."

He moved still nearer.

"I have told him," she said.

"No."

"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes, her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.

"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied. I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now--now, _ach_, I know I love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my punishment--for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still be hopeless."

She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the cold.

"Hopeless?" she repeated.

"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."

She remembered her teaching in the convent school.

"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.

"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact, you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."

She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning the corner of the promenade.

"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything. Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone with you before--before----"

"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our lives."

The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.

"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.

Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself altogether at the best.

"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been homesick for a long time without knowing."

"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"

"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."

"Then you are returning soon?"

"Three weeks from to-day."

Muriel looked at Jim.

"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.

"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed, didn't we, dear?"

She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She could only nod.

"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not mention it to me when we met to-day."

"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."

She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her were not the sense of her deception of him.

"I forgot," she said.

"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing, my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the Captain for a few minutes with his _dubonais_. We have an outside stateroom on the upper deck of the _Prinzess Wilhelmina_, and we sail from Genoa."

He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced another surprise.

"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."

This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.

"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."

"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you had to to run right off to dress, you know."

"Why must you go?"

"Those French purchasers again."

"I thought you were through with them."

"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I wrote to them and fixed a price on that."

"You don't mean that you tricked them?"

"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of doing business."

"You didn't say you had written them."

"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening and see that she is not too much depressed."

Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house. Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and the Austrian left without naming his hotel.