Lilian

"Now _you_"ve only got one thing to do," said Felix. "When I nudge you, say, "_Oui, monsieur le maire_.""

They were inducted into the sanctuary of celebration, and Lilian saw a fat gentleman wearing the French national flag for a waistband. It would have been very comical had it not been so impressive. The ceremony started, Lilian understanding not a word. Felix nudged her. She murmured: "_Oui, monsieur le maire_." ... The ceremony closed.

Immediately afterwards Felix handed her a sort of little tract in a yellowish-brown cover.

"You"re married now, and if anybody says you aren"t, show "em this."

The _avoue_ was tremendous with bows and smiles. They drove back to the hotel. They were in the bedroom. Lilian took Felix apprehensively by the shoulders.

"Oh, darling. You"re sure it hasn"t done you any harm?"

"And that"s not quite all. There"s my will," said he. "Ring the bell."

He spoke to Jacqueline, who after a few minutes brought in an English valet and an English lady"s maid. Felix was set upon having his will witnessed by people with English addresses. He silently gave Lilian the will to read. He had written it himself. In three lines it bestowed upon her all that was his. Not a syllable about his sister. Well, that was quite right, because Miss Grig had means of her own. Sitting in the easy chair, with a blotting-pad on his knees, Felix signed the will.

Then the valet and the lady"s maid signed, with much constraint and flourish. Felix gave them fifty francs apiece, and dismissed them.

"Put that with your marriage certificate," he said to Lilian, folding up the will and offering it to her. "I think I"ll get back to bed.

Exhausting work, being married!" He laughed shortly. "I"m going to sleep," he said later, after he had eaten and drunk. "You be off downstairs and have your lunch."

But, of course, she could not go downstairs. She dropped into her bed, staggered by the swift evolution of her career. Staggered by it! Lo!

She was a typewriting girl wearing wristlets, poor, hopeless, with no prospects. A little while, and lo! she was the wife of a rich and brilliant adorer, and an honest man in whom her trust was absolute. And she was pregnant. Strange fear invaded her mind, the ancient fear that too much happiness is a crime that destiny will punish.

IX

The Widow

"Felix seriously ill; double pneumonia; we are married.--Lilian Grig."

Ten words, plus Isabel"s address and her own! She wrote the telegram after several trials, in her bedroom, on half a sheet of the hotel notepaper, Kate O"Connor standing by her side, the next morning but one.

"Give it me," said the white nurse. "I"ll see to it for you, Mrs. Grig, as I go home."

She looked up at the nurse, and the nurse, eyes no longer laughing, looked down at her. The nurse knew everything, and, moreover, must have a.s.sisted at scores of tragedies; yet Lilian regarded her as an innocent who understood nothing essential in life. Her comforting kiss was like the kiss of a very capable child pretending to be grown up.

Voices in the other bedroom! The doctor had arrived and was talking to the second nurse. They went in together. Felix lay a changed man, horribly aged. He was a man who had suddenly learned that in order to live it was necessary to breathe, and that breathing may be an intensely difficult operation of mechanics. His lined, wrinkled face was drawn with the awful anxieties incident to breathing, and with the acute pain in both lungs. The enemy was growing in strength and Felix was losing strength, but he could not surrender. He must continue to struggle, despite the odds, and there was no referee to stop the fight, either on the ground that it had developed into an a.s.sa.s.sination or on any other ground. The brutality had to proceed. And the sun streamed through the window; and outside, from the promenade where the idlers were strolling and the band was playing, the window looked exactly the same as all the other windows of the enormous hotel.

After an examination, Dr. Samson injected morphia. The result was almost instantaneous. The victim, freed from the anxiety of the pain, could devote the whole of his energy to breathing. He sighed, and smiled as if he had entered paradise. He gave a few short, faint coughs, like the cough of a nervous veiled woman in church, and said in a hoa.r.s.e, feeble, whispering voice:

"You must understand, doctor, it was all my fault. I insisted, and what could she do?" The two nurses modestly bent their gaze.

"Yes, yes," the doctor concurred.

Felix had already made the same announcement several times.

"But I want everybody to know," he persisted.

"Yes, yes," said the doctor. "I shall give you some oxygen this morning. It will be here in a minute. That will do you a lot of good.

You"ll see."

Lilian was the calmest person in the room. She had decided that there was no hope, and had braced herself and become matter-of-fact. She was full of health, power, and magnificent youth, and the living seed of Felix was within her. She quietly kissed Felix on his damp cheek; no gold now glistened in his half-empty mouth. She returned to her own bedroom, and Dr. Samson followed.

"He"s much worse," she said firmly to the doctor.

"He is not better," said the doctor. "But there is always hope."

She glanced sadly at the soft and mournful face of the middle-aged doctor. Nurse Kate had told her the story of the doctor, who was a widower and solitary and possibly consumptive, and on account of his lungs practised on the Riviera during the winter. The vast tragedy of the world obsessed her; there was no joy nor pleasure in the whole world, and the ceaseless activities of gaiety that wearied the hotel and the Casino and the town and the neighbouring towns seemed to her monstrous, pathetic, and more tragic even than Felix"s bed.

For five days she cabled daily to Miss Grig, and got nothing in reply.

Felix"s strength consistently waned. And neither morphia nor oxygen could help him more than momentarily. Jacqueline, the nurses, the doctor, treated Lilian as a holy madonna. They all exclaimed at her marvellous stedfastness. The manager of the hotel paid a decorous call of inquiry--though it was apparent that he was already familiar with every detail--and he, too, treated Lilian as a holy madonna. Two days later, in the evening, just after Nurse Kate had come on duty, Felix held out his hand for his wife"s hand, and, casting off his frightful physical preoccupation, said in a normal voice:

"Everything"s in order. Don"t be an idle woman, my poor girl."

She dropped on her knees, and throwing her arms on his body, cried:

"Darling, I"ve killed you!" (The thought that she had brought about his death was her continual companion.) But Felix, utterly absorbed again in the ghastly effort to breathe, had no ears for the wild outburst. In the night he died. He had written a short note to his sister before the great relapse, and since then had not even mentioned her.

X

The Wreath

Dr. Samson sat late with Lilian in her bedroom the next night. It was the middle of the night. He was taller than Felix, and not so old; his face was more flat and milder, but there was something in his expression and about the wrinkles round his eyes that reminded her of Felix, and he had attached himself to her to serve her; his mournful gaze appealed to her. It was he who had made her understand that death in a hotel devoted to gaiety was an indiscretion, a lapse from good taste that must be carefully hidden. He stood faithfully between her and the world, the captive of her beauty, wanting no reward but the satisfaction of having helped her.

Not that much help was needed. The routine of such episodes was apparently fixed. Things moved of themselves. All requirements seemed to be met automatically. There was even an English cemetery in the region. Early on the morning after the death a young woman in black had called to present the card of a great Paris shop with a branch in the town, and by the evening Lilian was dressed in black. The layer-out had arrived earlier yet than the dressmaker. Dr. Samson had interviewed the manager of the hotel. An important part of the routine was that the whole of the furniture of Felix"s room should be removed, and the room refurnished at the cost of the representative of the dead. Dr. Samson settled the price. Lilian decided to give the old furniture to the Alexandra Hospital. The doctor had volunteered to finance Lilian till she should be back in London; but afterwards the equivalent of nearly four hundred pounds in French and English money was discovered in Felix"s dispatch-case, the inside of which Lilian had never seen. The doctor had also sent off the telegram to the mute Miss Grig: "Felix died in the night; am returning London immediately," and got the railway ticket, and accomplished the legal formalities preliminary to the burial, and warned the English chaplain, and ordered a gravestone in a suitable design and taken Lilian"s wishes as to the inscription thereon.

Nothing remained to be done but wait. Lilian was quietly packing; the doctor sat watchful to a.s.sist. They both heard a noise in the next room; and at the noise Lilian was at last startled from her calm. The moment, then, had come. Dr. Samson went first. The room, which ought to have been in darkness, was lighted, and not by electricity but by two candles, one on either side of the bed.

"Who has done this?" Lilian murmured, and gave a sob.

The door into the corridor was locked; to keep it locked had been part of the unalterable routine. Therefore the candles could only have been brought by somebody on the staff of the hotel. The next instant Jacqueline entered, through the bathroom. She was weeping.

"Pardon me, madam. I couldn"t go to bed. I couldn"t sleep. And I thought of the candles. It was too much for me. I had to bring them.

If I was wrong, pardon me.... _They_ will be here soon." She threw herself down on her knees at the foot of the bed. She had spoken in French. The doctor interpreted.

"Tell her I thank her very much," said Lilian, "and ask her to go to bed. She"ll have her work to do to-morrow, poor thing!"

Jacqueline rose. Lilian took her hand and turned away.

"And this came," Jacqueline added, pointing to a package in tissue-paper that lay on a chair. "The night porter has only just brought it up, and as I was coming in with the candles...."

Lilian removed the tissue-paper and saw a magnificent wreath of lilies, far finer than anything in her experience, a wreath for an imperial monarch. In the middle was a white envelope. She opened the envelope; it contained two French bank-notes for five hundred francs each. No signature! Not a word!

"She has got her money," thought Lilian. "How?" And, placing the wreath on Felix"s feet, she burst into tears.