"I"ve seen her again."
"Yes, I know."
"She told me you knew it," he said, "--that she had told you."
"Yes."
"But that"s not all," he said, his voice rising a little. "I saw her again the day after she told you--"
"You did!" I murmured.
"Oh, I tell myself that it"s a dream," he cried, "that it CAN"T be true. For it has been EVERY day since then! That"s why I haven"t joined you in the woods. I have been with her, walking with her, listening to her, looking at her--always feeling that it must be unreal and that I must try not to wake up. She has been so kind--so wonderfully, beautifully kind to me!"
"She has met you?" I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.
"She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day--the whole day! You see"--he began to pace again--"you see I was right, and you were wrong. She wasn"t offended--she was glad--that I couldn"t help speaking to her; she has said so."
"Do you think," I interrupted, "that she would wish you to tell me this?"
"Ah, she likes you!" he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself. "What I wanted most to say to you," he went on, "is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her--and about her husband?"
"I remember."
"It"s different now. I don"t want you to," he said. "I want only to know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn"t hasten it. I wouldn"t have anything changed from just THIS!"
"You mean--"
"I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the sh.o.r.e--oh, I don"t want to know anything but that!"
"No doubt you have told her," I ventured, "a good deal about yourself,"
and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman"s strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady"s losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George--possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account. But I couldn"t have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.
It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him.
"I"ve told her all I know," he said readily, and the unconscious pathos of the answer smote me. "And all that Keredec has let me know. You see I haven"t--"
"But do you think," I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to divert him from that channel, "do you think Professor Keredec would approve, if he knew?"
"I think he would," he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. "I have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to tell him, afraid he might try to stop me--keep me from going to wait for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this, and--it"s very strange, but I--well, what WAS it that made him so glad?"
"The light is still burning in his room," I said quietly.
"You mean that I ought to tell him?" His voice rose a little.
"He"s done a good deal for you, hasn"t he?" I suggested. "And even if he does know he might like to hear it from you."
"You"re right; I"ll tell him to-night." This came with sudden decision, but with less than marked what followed. "But he can"t stop me, now. No one on earth shall do that, except Madame d"Armand herself. No one!"
"I won"t quarrel with that," I said drily, throwing away my cigar, which had gone out long before.
He hesitated, and then I saw his hand groping toward me in the darkness, and, rising, I gave him mine.
"Good night," he said, and shook my hand as the first sputterings of the coming rain began to patter on the roof of the pavilion. "I"m glad to tell him; I"m glad to have told you. Ah, but isn"t this," he cried, "a happy world!"
Turning, he ran to the gallery steps. "At last I"m glad," he called back over his shoulder, "I"m glad that I was born--"
A gust of wind blew furiously into the courtyard at that instant, and I heard his voice indistinctly, but I thought--though I might have been mistaken--that I caught a final word, and that it was "again."
CHAPTER XV
The rain of two nights and two days had freshened the woods, deepening the green of the tree-trunks and washing the dust from the leaves, and now, under the splendid sun of the third morning, we sat painting in a sylvan aisle that was like a hall of Aladdin"s palace, the filigreed arches of foliage above us glittering with pendulous rain-drops. But Arabian Nights" palaces are not to my fancy for painting; the air, rinsed of its colour, was too sparklingly clean; the interstices of sky and the roughly framed distances I prized, were brought too close. It was one of those days when Nature throws herself straight in your face and you are at a loss to know whether she has kissed you or slapped you, though you are conscious of the tingle;--a day, in brief, more for laughing than for painting, and the truth is that I suited its mood only too well, and laughed more than I painted, though I sat with my easel before me and a picture ready upon my palette to be painted.
No one could have understood better than I that this was setting a bad example to the acolyte who sat, likewise facing an easel, ten paces to my left; a very sportsmanlike figure of a painter indeed, in her short skirt and long coat of woodland brown, the fine brown of dead oak-leaves; a "devastating" selection of colour that!--being much the same shade as her hair--with brown for her hat too, and the veil encircling the small crown thereof, and brown again for the stout, high, laced boots which protected her from the wet tangle underfoot.
Who could have expected so dashing a young person as this to do any real work at painting? Yet she did, narrowing her eyes to the finest point of concentration, and applying herself to the task in hand with a persistence which I found, on that particular morning, far beyond my own powers.
As she leaned back critically, at the imminent risk of capsizing her camp-stool, and herself with it, in her absorption, some ill-suppressed token of amus.e.m.e.nt most have caught her ear, for she turned upon me with suspicion, and was instantly moved to moralize upon the reluctance I had shown to accept her as a companion for my excursions; taking as her theme, in contrast, her own present display of ambition; all in all a warm, if over-coloured, sketch of the idle master and the industrious apprentice. It made me laugh again, upon which she changed the subject.
"An indefinable something tells me," she announced coldly, "that henceforth you needn"t be so DRASTICALLY fearful of being dragged to the chateau for dinner, nor dejeuner either!"
"Did anything ever tell you that I had cause to fear it?"
"Yes," she said, but too simply. "Jean Ferret."
"Anglicise that ruffian"s name," I muttered, mirth immediately withering upon me, "and you"ll know him better. To save time: will you mention anything you can think of that he HASN"T told you?"
Miss Elliott c.o.c.ked her head upon one side to examine the work of art she was producing, while a slight smile, playing about her lips, seemed to indicate that she was appeased. "You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren"t you?" she asked absently.
"We are!" I answered between my teeth. "For years I have sent her costly jewels--"
She interrupted me by breaking outright into a peal of laughter, which rang with such childish delight that I retorted by offering several malevolent observations upon the babbling of French servants and the order of mind attributable to those who listened to them. Her defence was to affect inattention and paint busily until some time after I had concluded.
"I think she"s going to take Cressie Ingle," she said dreamily, with the air of one whose thoughts have been far, far away. "It looks preponderously like it. She"s been teetertottering these AGES and AGES between you--"
"Between whom?"
"You and Mr. Ingle," she replied, not altering her tone in the slightest. "But she"s all for her brother, of course, and though you"re his friend, Ingle is a personage in the world they court, and among the MULt.i.tUDINOUS things his father left him is an art magazine, or one that"s long on art or something of that sort--I don"t know just what--so altogether it will be a good thing for DEAREST Mr. Ward. She likes Cressie, of course, though I think she likes you better--"
I managed to find my voice and interrupt the thistle-brained creature.
"What put these fantasias into your head?"
"Not Jean Ferret," she responded promptly.
"It"s cruel of me to break it to you so coa.r.s.ely--I know--but if you are ever going to make up your mind to her building as glaring a success of you as she has of her brother, I think you must do it now.
She"s on the point of accepting Mr. Ingle, and what becomes of YOU will depend on your conduct in the most immediate future. She won"t ask you to Quesnay again, so you"d better go up there on your own accord.--And on your bended knees, too!" she added as an afterthought.