""Because it was the only way to escape--it was the only way out. I never want him to think of me in any other light--I want to be dead to him forever! Nothing else would have done; I should have yielded, for I could no longer master my love for him. Look!"
"She was fumbling at her dress, loosening the top b.u.t.tons close under her chin; then she ripped it clear, exposing her neck and back.
""This is what was done to me when I was a child!"
"I leaned forward to see the closer. The poor child was one ma.s.s of hideous tattoo from her throat to her stays!
""Now you know the whole story," she sobbed, her eyes streaming tears; "my heart is broken but I am satisfied. I could have stood anything but his loathing."
"With this she fastened her dress and walked slowly out of the room, her head down, her whole figure one of abject misery."
Madame leaned forward, picked up her goblet of water, and remarking that walking in the wind always made her thirsty, drained its contents. Then she turned her head to hide her tears.
"A most extraordinary story, madame. Did the young fellow ever speak of the theft?" asked Herbert, the first of her listeners to speak.
"No," she answered slowly, in the effort to regain her composure, "he loved her too much to hear anything against her. He knew she had stolen it, for he had heard it from her own lips."
"And you never tried to clear her character?"
"How could I? It was her secret, not mine. To divulge it would have led to her other and more terrible secret, and that I was pledged to keep.
She is dead, poor girl, or I would not have told you now."
"And what did you do, may I ask?" inquired Brierley.
"Nothing, except tell fibs. After she had gone the following morning I excused her to him, of course, on every ground that I could think of. I argued that she had a peculiar nature; that owing to her captivity she had perhaps lost that fine sense of what was her own and what was another"s; that she had many splendid qualities; that she had only yielded to an impulse, just as a Bedouin does who steals an Arab horse and who, on second thought, returns it. That I had forgiven her, and had told her so, and as proof of it had tried, without avail, to make her keep the topaz. Only my husband knew the truth. "Let it stay as it is, my dear," he said to me; "that girl has more knowledge of human nature than I credited her with. Once that young lover of hers had learned the cruel truth he wouldn"t have lived with her another hour.""
"I think I should have told him," remarked Louis slowly; the story seemed to have strangely moved him. "If he really loved her he"d have worn green spectacles and taken her as she was--I would. Bad business, this separating lovers."
"No, you wouldn"t, Louis," remarked Herbert, "if you"d ever seen her neck. I know something of that tattoo, although mine was voluntary, and only covered a part of my arm. Madame did just right. There are times when one must tell anything but the truth."
Everybody looked at the speaker in astonishment. Of all men in the world he kept closest to the exact hair-line; indeed, one of Herbert"s peculiarities, as I have said, was his always understating rather than overstating a fact.
"Yes," he continued, "the only way out is to "lie like a gentleman," as the saying is, and be done with it. I"ve been through it myself and know. Your story, madame, has brought it all back to me."
"It"s about a girl, of course," remarked Louis, flashing a smile around the circle, "and your best girl, of course. Have a drop of cognac, old man," and he filled Herbert"s tiny gla.s.s. "It may help you tell the _whole_ truth before you get through."
"No," returned Herbert calmly, pushing the cognac from him, a peculiar tenderness in his voice; "not my best girl, Louis, but a gray-haired woman of sixty--one I shall never forget."
Madame laid her hand quickly on Herbert"s arm; she had caught the note in his voice.
"Oh! I"m so glad!" she said. "I love stories of old women; I always have. Please go on."
"If I could have made her young again, madame, you would perhaps have liked my story better."
"Why? Is it very sad?"
"Yes and no. It is not, I must say, exactly an after-dinner story, and but that it ill.u.s.trates precisely how difficult it is sometimes to speak the truth, I would not tell it at all. Shall I go on?"
"Yes, please do," she pleaded, a tremor now in her own voice. It was astonishing how simple and girlish she could be when her sympathies were aroused.
"My gray-haired woman had an only son, a man but a few years younger than myself, a member of my own party, who had died some miles from our camp at Bangala, and it accordingly devolved upon me not only to notify his people of his death, but to forward to them the few trinkets and things he had left behind. As I was so soon to return to London I wrote his people that I would bring them with me.
"He was a fine young fellow, cool-headed, afraid of nothing, and was a great help to me and very popular with every one in the camp. Having been sent out by the company to which I belonged, as were many others during the first years of our stay on the Congo, he had already mastered both the language and the ways of the natives. When a powwow was to be held I always sent him to conduct it if I could not go myself. I did so, too, when he had to teach the natives a lesson--lessons they needed and never forgot, for he was as plucky as he was politic.
"I knew nothing of his people except that he was a Belgian whose mother, Madame Brion, occupied a villa outside of Brussels, where she lived with a married daughter.
"On presenting my card I was shown into a small library where the young woman received me with tender cordiality, and, after closing the door so that we might not be overheard, she gave me an outline of the ordeal I was about to go through. With her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g tears she told me how her mother had only allowed her son to leave home because of the pressure brought to bear upon her by his uncle, who was interested in the company; how she daily, almost hourly, blamed herself for his death; how, during the years of his absence, she had lived on his letters, and when mine came, telling her of his end, she had sat dazed and paralyzed for hours, the open page in her lap--no word escaping her--no tears--only the dull pain of a grief which seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. Since that time she had counted the days to my coming, that she might hear the details of his last illness and suffering.
"You can imagine how I felt. I have never been able to face a woman when she is broken down with grief, and but that she was expecting me every minute, and had set her heart on my coming, I think I should have been cowardly enough to have left the house.
"When the servant returned, I was conducted up the broad staircase and into a small room hung with wonderful embroideries and pictures and filled with flowers. In one corner on an easel was Brion"s portrait in the uniform of an officer, while all about were other portraits--some taken when he was a child, others as a boy--a kind of sanctuary, really, in which the mother worshipped this one idol of her life."
Herbert stopped, drew the tiny gla.s.s of cognac toward him, sipped its contents slowly, the tenderness of tone increasing as he went on:
"She greeted me simply and kindly, and led me to a seat on the sofa beside her, where she thanked me for the trouble I had taken, her soft blue eyes fixed on mine, her gentle, high-bred features illumined with her grat.i.tude, her silver-gray hair forming an aureole in the light of the window behind her, as she poured out her heart. Then followed question after question; she wanting every incident, every word he had uttered; what his nursing had been--all the things a mother would want to know. Altogether it was the severest ordeal I had been through since I left home--and I have had some trying ones.
"For three hours I sat there, giving her minute accounts of his illness, his partial recovery, his relapse; what remedies I had used; how he failed after the fourth day; how his delirium had set in, and how at the last he had pa.s.sed peacefully away. Next I described the funeral, giving a succinct account of the preparations; how we buried him on a little hill near a spring, putting a fence around the grave to keep any one from walking over it. Then came up the question of a small head-stone.
This she insisted she would order cut at once and sent out to me--or perhaps one could be made ready so that I might take it with me. All this I promised, of course, even to taking it with me were there time, which, after all, I was able to do, for my steamer was delayed. And so I left her, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes fixed on mine in grat.i.tude for all I had done for her dead son."
"Oh!--the poor, dear lady!" cried madame la marquise, greatly moved, her hands tight clasped together. "Yes, I believe you--nothing in all your experience could have been as painful!"
Brierley raised his head and looked at Herbert:
"Rather a tight place, old man, awful tight place," and his voice trembled. "But where does the lie come in? You told her the truth, after all."
"Told her the truth! I thought you understood. Why I lied straight through! There _was_ no grave--there never had been! Her son and his three black carriers had been trapped by cannibals and eaten."
Madame started from her chair and clutched Herbert"s hand.
"Oh!--how terrible! No! you could not have told her!--I would never have liked you again if you had told her. Oh! I am so glad you didn"t!"
"There was nothing else to do, madame," said Herbert thoughtfully, his eyes gazing into s.p.a.ce as if the recital had again brought the scene before him.
"Pray G.o.d she never found out!" said the marquise under her breath.
"That has always been my consolation, madame. So far as I know she never did find out. She is dead now."
"And I wish we had never found out either!" groaned Louis. "Why in the world do you want to make goose-flesh crawl all over a fellow! An awful, frightful story. I say, Herbert, if you"ve got any more horrors keep "em for another night. I move we have a rest. Drag out that spinet, Brierley, and give us some music."
"No, please don"t!" cried the marquise. "Tell us another. I wish this one of Monsieur Herbert"s was in print, so that I could read it over and over. Think how ba.n.a.l is our fiction; how we are forever digging in the same dry ground, turning up the same trivialities--affairs of the heart, domestic difficulties--thin, tawdry romances of olden times, all the characters masquerading in modern thought--all false and stupid. Oh! how sick I am of it all! But this epic of Monsieur Herbert means the clash of races, the meeting of two civilizations, the world turning back, as it were, to measure swords with that from which it sprung. And think, too, how rare it is to meet a man who in his own life has lived them both--the savage and the civilized. So please, Monsieur Herbert, tell us another--something about the savage himself. You know so many things and you _are so human_."
"He doesn"t open his lips, madame, until I get some fresh air!" cried Louis. "Throw back that door, Lemois, and let these hobgoblins out! No more African horrors of any kind! Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the distinguished spinetist, Herr Brierley, of Pont du Sable, play one of his soul-stirring melodies! Up with you, Brierley, and take the taste out of our mouths!"
V