"I did not really come here to-day to paint," she said. "The picture is finished; my work in Delgratz is ended. You and Pauline are the only two people in the world whom I can trust, and I have brought you here, Felix, to tell you that I am leaving Delgratz to-night."
The hunchback slid down from the little scaffolding he had constructed to enable him to survey the large area covered by the frescoes. "I suppose I have understood what you said," he cried. "It is impossible to focus one"s thoughts properly on the spoken word when a huge dome adds vibrations of its own, and I admit that I am invariably irritated myself when I state a remarkable fact with the utmost plainness and people pretend to be either deaf or dull of comprehension."
That was Poluski"s way. He never would take one seriously; but Joan merely sighed and bent her head.
"You say you are leaving Delgratz to-night! May one ask why?" he went on, dropping his bantering manner at once.
"No," she said.
Felix ba.s.sooned a few deep notes between his lips. "You have some good reason for telling me that, I presume?" he muttered, uttering the first words that occurred to his perplexed brain.
"Yes, the very best of reasons, or at least the most convincing. I cannot remain here unless I marry Alec, and as I have absolutely determined not to marry him, it follows that I must go."
"Ah, you are willing to give some sort of reason, then," he said. "At present I am muddled. One grasps that unless you marry Alec you must go; but why not marry Alec? It sounds like a proposition of Euclid with the main clauses omitted."
"I am sorry, Felix, but I cannot explain myself further. You came to Delgratz with me; will you return with me to Paris? If not, will you at least promise to help me to get away and keep secret the fact that I am going?"
Felix grew round eyed with amazement; but he managed to control his tongue. "You are asking a good deal, dear," he said. "Do you know what you are doing? Do you realize what your action will mean to Alec? What has happened? Some lover"s tiff. That is unlike you, Joan. If you run off in this fashion, you will be trying most deliberately to break poor Alec"s heart."
Joan uttered a queer little choking sob, yet recovered her self control with a rapidity that disconcerted Felix far more than she imagined at the moment.
"He will suffer, I know," she murmured, "and it does not console me to feel that in the end I shall suffer far more; but I am going, Felix, whatsoever the cost, no matter whose heart may be broken. Heaven help me! I must go, and I look to you for a.s.sistance. Oh, my friend, my friend! I have only you in all the world. Do not desert me in my need!"
She had never before seen Felix really angry; but even in the extremity of her distress she could not fail to note a strange glitter in the gray eyes now fixed on her in a fiery underlook. The little man was deeply moved; for once in his life he did not care how much he showed his resentment.
"_Saperlotte!_" he growled. "What has come to you? Is it you who speak, or the devil? You are possessed of a fiend, Joan, a fiend that is tempting you to do this wrong!"
Joan rose, pale faced and resolute. Despite the flood of rage and despair that surged in Poluski"s quivering frame, she reminded him of a glimpse he caught of her in that last desperate moment when the door of the hotel was battered open by the insurgents and her mind was already fixed on death as a blessed relief from the horror of life.
"I only ask you to believe in my unalterable purpose," she said with a calmness that stupefied him. "If no other means presents itself, I should wander out of the palace in the darkness and endeavor to reach Austria by the ferry across the Danube. I believe there are difficulties for the stranger if one goes that way; but again I throw myself on your mercy, Felix, and appeal to you for guidance and help. This is my worst hour. If you fail me now, I shall indeed be wretched."
Felix leaned against an upright of the scaffolding and pa.s.sed a trembling hand over his forehead. "Forgive me, Joan, if I have spoken harshly!" he muttered in the dubious voice of a man who hardly knows what he is saying.
"There is nothing to forgive. It is I, rather, who should seek forgiveness from you for imposing this cruel test of friendship. But what can I do, Felix? I am a woman and alone, and, when I think of what lies before me, I am afraid."
With a great effort he steadied himself. Placing both hands on the girl"s shoulders, he turned her face to the light that fell from a small rose window in a side aisle. In silence he looked at her, seeking to wring the secret of this madness from her steadfast eyes.
"_Ma belle_," he cried suddenly, "I am beginning to believe that you are in earnest."
"No matter how many years it may please G.o.d to leave me on earth, I shall never be more resolved on anything than on my departure from Delgratz to-night."
"You place trust in me, you say in one breath, yet you deny it in another. Tell me then, Joan, what is the obstacle that has arisen to prevent you from marrying Alec? It all hinges on that. Who has been lying to you?"
She could not continue to meet his accusing eyes. It seemed to her that if he urged her more her heart would burst. Yielding to the impulse of the hunted animal, she wrenched herself free and turned to run somewhere, anywhere, so that she might avoid his merciless inquisition.
A harsh laugh fell on her ears, and nothing more effective to put a stop to her flight could have been devised.
"Name of a name!" he roared, "shall we not take our pictures? If we are false to all else, let us at least be true to our harmless daubs!"
The taunt was undeserved and glanced unheeded from the shield of the girl"s utter misery. Perhaps because that was so, the Pole"s next words were tender and soothing.
"Come, then, my Joan," he growled, "never shall it be said against me that I deserted a comrade in distress. I hoped to see you happily wedded. It was my fantasy that Alec and you would inaugurate a new line of monarchs and thus bring about the social revolution from an unexpected quarter. But I was mistaken. Holy blue! never was man so led astray since Eve strolled into the wrong orchard and brought Adam with her!"
By this time he had caught her. He held her arm, and began to stroke one of her hands softly as if she had shown symptoms of falling in a faint.
"We will go, _mignonne_," he soothed her, "you and I, and none here shall know till we have crossed the frontier. Not even then will they guess what has become of us, unless you find it in your heart to leave some little word for Alec. You will do that? You will save him from despair, from the torture of doubt----"
"Oh, Felix, spare me!" she sobbed convulsively.
"But one must look squarely at the facts, _mignonne_. If you run away and give no sign, it can only be supposed that you have met with some evil fate. There are others than Alec who will think that disaster has befallen you, and they will have uneasy souls, and Alec will look into their guilty faces with the eyes of a wrathful lover, which at such times can be superhuman, terrible, heart piercing. There is no knowing whose blood will stain his hands then; for he will accept from no one but yourself the a.s.surance that you have left him of your own free will."
"That, at least, is true," she said wearily. "I shall write a letter which must be given to him when I am gone."
"_Grand Dieu!_ what a resolute will is yours, Joan! Have you counted the cost? Leave Alec out of it; but do you think his hog of a father, his easily swayed mother, Stampoff, the short sighted and patriotic, or that scheming Greek and his puppet Marulitch, will gain the ends for which, between them, they have contrived your flight? Do you know Alec so little as to believe that he will leave the field clear to that crew?
Why, dear heart, he will sweep them aside like an angry G.o.d! They have bewitched your brain with some tale of the evil that will accrue to the King if he weds the woman he loves. If that is all, it is a fiction fit only to frighten a child. Hear me, Joan! You are not helping Alec by tearing yourself away from Delgratz; but condemning to the deepest h.e.l.l not him alone but some millions of people who have done no wrong. They gave their honest affections to this boy, because he strikes their imagination as a King sent straight from Heaven. It is a vile plot, dear heart, to drive Alec from Kosnovia. How can you, of all women, lend yourself to it?"
Felix could not guess how his words lacerated the unhappy girl"s soul; but she did not falter in her purpose, and again endeavored to rush from the church. Poluski uttered a queer click with his tongue. It testified that he had done his uttermost and failed.
"Be it so, then!" he muttered. "Help me to pack up these masterpieces. I can plan and scheme with any man living; but I cannot cope with heavy parcels of holiness."
Joan, distraught though she was, felt that he had given way. Without another word she a.s.sisted in packing the carriage with their canvases and other belongings. The old Greek caretaker hobbled after them when he saw that they were going without depositing their paraphernalia in the lodge as usual.
"You will come back some day and copy another picture, I hope, Excellency," he cried, doffing his cap to Joan.
She opened her purse, since she did not understand what the old man was saying.
"No, no, Excellency," he protested. "The King himself told me you were not to be pestered by beggars. I have threatened to crack the skulls of one or two who persisted in annoying you, and it would ill become me to take a reward for doing what the King ordered."
"He will not accept anything," said Felix. "I may not tell you what else he said, since he only put my arguments in simpler words."
He shot a quick look at her, hoping to find some slight sign of weakening; but her marble face wore the expression of one who has suffered so greatly that the capacity for suffering is exhausted. From that instant Felix urged her no more. He obeyed her without question or protest, contriving matters so that when she quitted the palace, deeply veiled, to walk to the station, the soldiers on guard imagined she was a serving maid going into the town.
Pauline, though prepared to be faithful at any hazard, wept when she was told that she must stay in Delgratz and face the storm that would rage when she delivered into the King"s own hand the letter Joan intrusted to her care. But even Pauline herself realized that if her mistress was to escape from Delgratz unnoticed, she, the maid, must remain there till the following day. By that time there would be no reason why Joan"s maid should not leave openly for the west, and the Frenchwoman was only too thankful at the prospect of a speedy exit from "this city of brigands"
to protest too strenuously against the role thrust upon her by Felix.
As events unrolled themselves, the two travelers encountered no difficulty in leaving Delgratz. It will be remembered that Beliani"s foresight had provided them with return tickets to Paris, and this circ.u.mstance aided them greatly. In those closely guarded lands where keen eyed scrutineers keep watch and ward over a frontier, the production of the return half of a ticket issued in the same city as a pa.s.sport at once lulls any doubt that might arise otherwise.
Moreover, Joan and Felix occupied separate carriages, and the Belgrade officials, concerned only with the examination of tickets, gave no heed to them, though one man seemed to recognize Felix and grinned in a friendly way. Pa.s.sport formalities did not trouble them till the train had crossed the Tave River and was already in Austrian territory. The frontier officers could not possibly know them. Their papers were in order, and received only a pa.s.sing glance. Even Joan, adrift in a sea of trouble, saw that it was a far easier matter to leave the Balkan area than to enter it.
They arranged to meet in the dining saloon, when all necessity for further precaution would have disappeared. Felix was astounded at the self possession Joan now displayed. She was pale but quite calm. Her eyes were clear and showed no traces of grief. Even her very manner was reverting to that good humored tone of frank camaraderie that the unavoidable ceremoniousness of the last fortnight had kept in subjection. Felix was secretly amazed at these things; but in the depths of his own complex nature were hidden away, wholly unknown to the little hunchback himself, certain feminine characteristics which enabled him dimly to understand that the woman who suffers most is she who has the strength and the courage to carry her head most proudly before the storm.
"Well," said he when the mail train had left Semlin far behind and they were speeding northward through the night to Budapest,--"well, Joan, now that the severance is complete, do you still refuse me your confidence?"
Her luminous eyes dwelt on his with a sad smile. She had closed the gates of her paradise, and there was to be no faint hearted looking backward.
"No," she said, "I have attained my end. It is due to you, my friend, that I should tell you why I have abandoned the only man I shall ever love. It lay with me to choose between his success or failure; perhaps there rested on my frail shoulders the more dreadful issues of life and death. If I had married Alec, I should have pulled him down to ruin, even to the grave. What else would you have me do but save him, no matter what the cost to myself?"
He propped his chin on his hands and surveyed her quizzically. Felix, despite his protests, was not enamoured of Delgratz, and his mercurial temperament rejoiced in the near approach of his beloved Paris.
"All this sounds heroic and therefore unconvincing," he said. "I do not want to condemn your motives before I know them, Joan; but I hope you will allow me to criticize false sentiment," he added, seeing the expression of pain that for an instant mastered her stoicism and threw its dull shadow across her face.