The fish arrived.
"The only fish," remarked Leighton, "that can properly be served without a sauce."
"And why?" said Le Brux, helping himself to the young trout fried in olive oil and simply garnished with lemon. "I will tell thee. Because G.o.d himself hath half prepared the dish, giving to this dainty creature a fragrance which a.s.sails the senses of man and adds to eating a vision of purling brooks and overhanging boughs." Suddenly, with his fork half-way to his mouth, he paused, and glared at Lewis, who was on the point of helping himself. "_Sacrilege_!"
Leighton looked up.
"My old one, you are perhaps right." He turned to Lewis. "Better skip the fish." At the next dish he remarked, "Following the theory that a dinner should progress as a child learning to walk, _Maitre_, I have at this point dared to introduce an entremets--_cepes francs a la tete noire_----"
"_a la bordelaise_," completed Le Brux, his nose above the dish. He helped Leighton to half of its contents and himself to the rest.
"Have patience, my old one," cried Leighton, "the boy may have an uneducated palate, but he is none the less possessed of a sublobular void that demands filling at stated intervals."
"Bah!" cried Le Brux, "order him a dish of tripe with onions--and _vin ordinaire_. But he"ll have to sit at another table."
"No," said Leighton, "that won"t do. We"ll let him sit here and watch us and when they come, we"ll give him all the sweets and we"ll watch him."
"Agreed," said Le Brux.
CHAPTER XX
If events had been moving rapidly with Lewis, they had by no means been at a standstill at Nadir since that troubled day on which he had rebelled, quarreled, and fled, leaving behind him wrath and tears and awakened hearts where all had been apathy and somnolence.
Many happenings at Nadir were dated from the day that Lewis went away.
Late that night mammy and Mrs. Leighton, aided by trembling Natalie, had had to carry the Reverend Orme from his chair in the school-room to his bed. The left side of his face was drawn grotesquely out of line, but despite the disfigurement, there was a look of peace in his ravaged countenance, as of one who welcomes night joyfully and calmly after a long battle.
Perhaps it was this look of peace that made Ann Leighton regard this latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back--nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,--all the discarded emotions,--returned to light up her withered face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside the Reverend Orme, reading aright his slightest movement.
To Natalie one need stood out above all others--the need for Lewis. At first she waited for news of him, but none came; then she sought out Dom Francisco. Word was pa.s.sed to the cattlemen. They said Lewis had been bound for Oeiras. A messenger was sent to Oeiras. He came back with the news that Lewis had never arrived there. He had been traced half-way.
After that no one on the long straight trail had seen the boy. The wilderness had swallowed him.
Dom Francisco came almost daily to see the Reverend Orme. "Behold him!"
he cried at his first visit, aghast at the havoc the stroke had played with the tall frame. "He is but a boy, he has fathered but two children--and yet--behold him! He is broken!" The sight of the Reverend Orme, suddenly grown pitifully old, seemed to work on the white-haired, but st.u.r.dy, cattle-king by reflection. He, too, grew old suddenly.
Natalie was the first to notice it. She began to nurse the old man as she nursed her father,--to treat him as she would a child. When one day he spoke almost tremulously of the marriage that was to be, she did not even answer him, contenting herself with the smile with which one humors extreme youth clamoring for the moon. Gradually, without any discussion or open refusal on the part of Natalie, it became understood not only to Dom Francisco, but to all the circle at Nadir, that she would never marry the old cattle-king.
The sudden departure of Lewis, the Reverend Orme"s breakdown, with its intimate worry displacing all lesser cares, the absorption of Ann Leighton as her husband"s constant attendant--these things made of Natalie a woman in a night. She a.s.sumed direction of the house, and calmly ordered mammy around in a way that warmed that old soul, born to cheerful servitude. She hired a goatherd and rigidly oversaw his handiwork. Then she approached Dom Francisco one evening as he sat at her father"s bedside and told him that he must find a purchaser for the goats--all of them.
The Reverend Orme, although he heard, took no interest in any temporal affair. Mrs. Leighton looked up and asked mildly:
"Why, dear?"
"Because we need money," said Natalie. "No doctor would come here. We must take father away."
No one recoiled from the idea; but it was new to them all except Natalie. It took days and days for it to sink in. It was on Dom Francisco that Natalie most exerted herself. He had aged, and age had made him weak. He fell a slow, but easy, prey to her youth, grown sweetly dominant. He himself would arrange to buy the enormous herd of goats, the greatest in the country-side. And, finally, with a great shrinking from the definite implication, he agreed to buy back Nadir as well.
No mere argument could have led the old man to such a concession. It was love--love for these strangers that he had cherished within his gates, love for the gloomy man whom he had seen young and then old, love for Ann and Natalie and mammy, with their quiet ways, love for the very way of life of all of them--a way distantly above anything he had ever dreamed before their coming, that drove him, almost against his will, to speed their parting. He sent for money. He himself spent long, wistful hours preparing the ox-wagon, the litter, and the horses that were to bear them away.
Then one night the Reverend Orme slept and awoke no more. In the morning Natalie went into the room and found her mother sitting very still beside the bed, one of the Reverend Orme"s hands in both of hers. Tears followed each other slowly down her cheeks. She did not brush them away.
"Mother!" cried Natalie, in the first grip of premonition.
"Hush, dear!" said Mrs. Leighton. "He is gone."
They buried him at the very top of the valley, where the eye, guided by the parallel hills, sought ever and again the great mountain thirty miles away. In that clear air the distant mountain seemed very near.
There were those who said they could see the holy cross upon its brow.
That night Mrs. Leighton and mammy sat idle and staring in the house.
Suddenly they had realized that for them the years of tears had pa.s.sed.
They looked at each other and wondered by what long road calm had come to them. Not so Natalie. Natalie was out in the night, out upon the hills.
She climbed the highest of them all. As she stumbled up the rise, she lifted her eyes to the stars. The stars were very high, very far, very cold. They struck at her sight like needles.
Natalie covered her eyes. She stood on the crest of the hill. Her glorious hair had fallen and wrapped her with its still mantle. Her slight breast was heaving. She could hear her struggling heart pounding at its cage. She drew a long breath. With all the strength: of her young lungs she called: "Lew, where are you? O, Lew, you _must_ come! O, Lew, I _need_ you!"
The low hills gave back no echo. It was not silence that swallowed her desperate cry, but distance, overwhelming distance. She stared wide-eyed across the plain. Suddenly faith left her. She knew that Lewis, could not hear. She knew that she was alone. She crumpled into a little heap on the top of the highest hill, buried her face in her soft hair, and sobbed.
The conviction that their wilderness held Lewis no longer brought a certain strength to Natalie"s sudden womanhood. It was as though Fate had cried to her, "The burden is all thine; take it up," and with the same breath had given her the sure courage that comes with renunciation.
She answered Dom Francisco"s wistful questioning before it could take shape in words.
"We cannot stay," she said. "We must go. You will still help us to go."
Nature"s long silences breed silence in man. Dom Francisco ceased to question even with his eyes. He made all ready, delivered them into the hands of trusted henchmen, and bade them G.o.d"s speed. They struck out for the sea, but not by the long road that Lewis and the stranger had followed. There was a nearer Northern port. Toward it they set their faces, Consolation Cottage their goal.
CHAPTER XXI
Three weeks to a day from the time he had left Lewis in Paris, as Nelton was serving him with breakfast, Leighton received a telegram that gave him no inconsiderable shock. The telegram was from Le Brux.
"Come at once," it said; "your son has killed me."
Leighton steadied himself with the thought that Le Brux was still alive enough to wire before he said:
"Nelton, I"m off for Paris at once. You have half an hour to pack and get me to Charing Cross."
Nine hours later he was taking the stairs at Le Brux"s two steps at a time. As he approached the atelier, he heard sighing groans. He threw open the door without knocking. Stretched on the couch was the giant frame, wallowing feebly like a harpooned whale at the last gasp.
"_Matre!_" cried Leighton.
The sculptor half raised himself, turned a worn face on Leighton, and then burst into a tremendous laugh--one of those laughs that is so violent as to be painful.
"Ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho! ho!" he roared, and fell back upon his side.