The Maids of Paradise
Page 15At seven o'clock that morning the men in the circus camp awoke,
worried, fatigued, vaguely resentful, unusually profane. Horan was
openly mutinous, and announced his instant departure.
By eight o'clock a miraculous change had taken place; the camp was
alive with scurrying people, galvanized into hopeful activity by my
possibly unwarranted optimism and a few judiciously veiled threats.
Clothed with temporary authority by Byram, I took the bit between my
teeth and ordered the instant erection of the main tents, the
construction of the ring, barriers, and benches, and the immediate
renovating of the portable tank in which poor little Miss Claridge had
met her doom.
I detailed Kelly Eyre to Quimperlé with orders for ten thousand
crimson hand-bills; I sent McCadger, with Dawley, the bass-drummer,
and Irwin, the cornettist, to plaster our posters from Pont Aven to
Belle Isle, and I gave them three days to get back, and promised them
a hundred dollars apiece if they succeeded in sticking our bills on
the fortifications of Lorient and Quimper, with or without
permission.
I sent Grigg and three exempt Bretons to beat up the country from
Gestel and Rosporden to Pontivy, clear across to Quiberon, and as far
east as St. Gildas Point.
By the standing-stones of Carnac, I swore that I'd have all Finistère
in that tent. "Governor," said I, "we are going to feature
Jacqueline all over Brittany, and, if the ladies object, it can't be
helped! By-the-way, do they object?"
The ladies did object, otherwise they would not have been human
ladies; but the battle was sharp and decisive, for I was desperate.
"It simply amounts to this," I said: "Jacqueline pulls us through or
the governor and I land in jail. As for you, Heaven knows what will
happen to you! Penal settlement, probably."
And I called Speed and pointed at Jacqueline, sitting on her satchel,
watching the proceedings with amiable curiosity.
"Speed, take that child and rehearse her. Begin as soon as the tent
is stretched and you can rig the flying trapeze. Use the net, of
course. Horan rehearsed Miss Claridge; he'll stand by. Miss Crystal,
your good-will and advice I depend upon. Will you help me?"
"With all my heart," said Miss Crystal.
That impulsive reply broke the sullen deadlock.
Pretty little Mrs. Grigg went over and shook the child's hand very
cordially and talked broken French to her; Miss Delany volunteered to
give her some "Christian clothes"; Mrs. Horan burst into tears,
complaining that everybody was conspiring to injure her and her
husband, but a few moments later she brought Jacqueline some toast,
tea, and fried eggs, an attention shyly appreciated by the puzzled
child, who never before had made such a stir in the world.
"Don't stuff her," said Speed, as Mrs. Horan enthusiastically trotted
past bearing more toast. "Here, Scarlett, the ladies are spoiling
her. Can I take her for the first lesson?"
Byram, who had shambled up, nodded. I was glad to see him reassert his
authority. Speed took the child by the hand, and together they entered
the big white tent, which now loomed up like a mammoth mushroom
against the blue sky.
"Governor," I said, "we're all a bit demoralized; a few of us are
mutinous. For Heaven's sake, let the men see you are game. This child
has got to win out for us. Don't worry, don't object; back me up and
let me put this thing through."
The old man shoved his hands into his trousers-pockets and looked at
me with heavy, hopeless eyes.
"Now here's the sketch for the hand-bill," I said, cheerfully, taking
a pencilled memorandum from my pocket. And I read:
"THE PATRIOTIC ANTI-PRUSSIAN REPUBLICAN CIRCUS,
MORE STUPENDOUS, MORE GIGANTIC, MORE
OVERPOWERING THAN EVER!
GLITTERING, MARVELLOUS, SOUL-COMPELLING!"
"What's 'soul-compelling'?" asked Byram.
"Anything you please, governor," I said, and read on rapidly until I
came to the paragraph concerning Jacqueline:
"THE WONDER OF EARTH AND HEAVEN!
THE UNUTTERABLY BEAUTIFUL FLYING
MERMAID! CAUGHT ON THE
COAST OF BRITTANY!
WHAT IS SHE?
FISH? BIRD? HUMAN? DIVINE?
WHO KNOWS?
THE SCIENTISTS OF FRANCE DO NOT KNOW!!
THE SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD
ARE CONFOUNDED!
IS SHE
A LOST SOUL
FROM THE SUNKEN CITY OF KER-YS?
50,000 FRANCS REWARD FOR THE BRETON WHO CAN
PROVE THAT SHE DID NOT COME STRAIGHT FROM
PARADISE!!!"
"That's a damn good bill," said Byram, suddenly.
He was so seldom profane that I stared at him, worried lest his
misfortunes had unbalanced him. But a faint, healthy color was already
replacing the pallor in his loose cheeks, a glint of animation came
into his sunken eyes. He lifted his battered silk hat, replaced it at
an angle almost defiant, and scowled at Horan, who passed us sullenly,
driving the camel tentwards with awful profanity.
"Don't talk such langwidge in my presence, Mr. Horan," he said,
sharply; "a camuel is a camuel, but remember: 'kind hearts is more
than cornets,' an' it's easier for that there camuel to pass through
the eye of a needle than for a cussin' cuss to cuss his way into
Kingdom Come!"
Horan, who had betrayed unmistakable symptoms of insubordination that
morning, quailed under the flowing rebuke. He was a man of muscular
strength and meagre intellect; words hit him like trip-hammers.
"Certainly, governor," he stammered, and spoke to the camel politely,
guiding that enraged and squealing quadruped to his manger with a
forced smile.
With mallet, hammer, saw, and screw-driver I worked until noon,
maturing my plans all the while. These plans would take the last penny
in the treasury and leave us in debt several thousand francs. But it
was win or go to smash now, and personally I have always preferred a
tremendous smash to a slow and oozy fizzle.
A big pot of fragrant soup was served to the company at luncheon; and
it amused me to see Jacqueline troop into the tent with the others and
sit down with her bit of bread and her bowl of broth.
She was flushed and excited, and she talked to her instructor, Speed,
all the while, chattering like a linnet between mouthfuls of bread and
broth.
"How is she getting on?" I called across to Speed.
"The child is simply startling," he said, in English. "She is not
afraid of anything. She and Miss Crystal have been doing that
hair-raising 'flying swing' without rehearsal!"
Jacqueline, hearing us talking in English, turned and stared at me,
then smiled and looked up sweetly at Speed.
"You seem to be popular with your pupil," I said, laughing.
"She's a fine girl--a fine, fearless, straight-up-and-down girl," he
said, with enthusiasm.
Everybody appeared to like her, though how much that liking might be
modified if prosperity returned I was unable to judge.
Now all our fortunes depended on her. She was not a ballon d'essai;
she was literally the whole show; and if she duplicated the
sensational success of poor little Miss Claridge, we had nothing to
fear. But her troubles would then begin. At present, however, we were
waiting for her to pull us out of the hole before we fell upon her and
rent her professionally. And I use that "we" not only professionally,
but with an attempt at chivalry.
Byram's buoyancy had returned in a measure. He sat in his
shirt-sleeves at the head of the table, vigorously sopping his tartine
in his soup, and, mouth full, leaned forward, chewing and listening to
the conversation around him.
Everybody knew it was life or death now, that each one must drop petty
jealousies and work for the common salvation. An artificial and almost
feverish animation reigned, which I adroitly fed with alarming
allusions to the rigor of the French law toward foreigners and other
malefactors who ran into debt to French subjects on the sacred soil of
France. And, having lived so long in France and in the French
possessions, I was regarded as an oracle of authority by these
ambulant professional people who were already deadly homesick, and
who, in eighteen months of Europe, had amassed scarcely a dozen French
phrases among them all.
"I'll say one thing," observed Byram, with dignity; "if ever I git
out of this darn continong with my circus, I'll recooperate in the
undulatin' medders an' j'yful vales of the United States. Hereafter
that country will continue to remain good enough for me."
All applauded--all except Jacqueline, who looked around in
astonishment at the proceedings, and only smiled when Speed explained
"Ask maddermoselle if she'll go home with us?" prompted Byram. "Tell
her there's millions in it."
Speed put the question; Jacqueline listened gravely, hesitated, then
whispered to Speed, who reddened a trifle and laughed.
Everybody waited for a moment. "What does she say?" inquired Byram.
"Oh, nothing; she talked nonsense."
But Jacqueline's dignity and serene face certainly contradicted
Speed's words.
Presently Byram arose, flourishing his napkin. "Time's up!" he said,
with decision, and we all trooped off to our appointed labors.
Now that I had stirred up this beehive and set it swarming again, I
had no inclination to turn drone. Yet I remembered my note to the
Countess de Vassart and her reply. So about four o'clock I made the
best toilet I could in my only other suit of clothes, and walked out
of the bustling camp into the square, where the mossy fountain
splashed under the oaks and the children of Paradise were playing.
Hands joined, they danced in a ring, singing:
"Barzig ha barzig a Goneri
Ari e mab roue gand daou pe dri"--
"Little minstrel-bard of Conéri
The son of the King has come with two or three--
Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,
Crimson, silver, and violet."
And the children, in their white coiffes and tiny wooden shoes, moved
round and round the circle, in the middle of which a little lad and a
little lass of Paradise stood motionless, hand clasping hand.
The couplet ended, the two children in the middle sprang forward and
dragged a third child out of the circle. Then the song began again,
the reduced circle dancing around the three children in the middle.
"--The son of the King has come with two or three--
Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,
Crimson, silver, and violet."
It was something like a game I had played long ago--in the age of
fable--and I lingered, touched with homesickness.
The three children in the middle took a fourth comrade from the
circle, crying, "Will you go to the moon or will you go to the
stars?"
"The moon," lisped the little maid, and she was led over to the
fountain.
"The stars," said the first prisoner, and was conducted to the stone
bridge.
Soon a small company was clustered on the bridge, another band at the
fountain. Then, as there were no more to dance in a circle, the lad
and lassie who had stood in the middle to choose candidates for the
moon and stars clasped hands and danced gayly across the square to the
group of expectant children at the fountain, crying:
"Baradoz! Baradoz!"
(Paradise! Paradise!)
and the whole band charged on the little group on the bridge, shouting
and laughing, while the unfortunate tenants of the supposed infernal
regions fled in every direction, screaming:
"Pater noster
Dibi doub!
Dibi doub!
Dibi doub!"
Their shouts and laughter still came faintly from the tree-shaded
square as I crossed the bridge and walked out into the moorland toward
the sea, where I could see the sun gilding the headland and the
spouting-rocks of Point Paradise.
Over the turning tide cormorants were flying, now wheeling like hawks,
now beating seaward in a duck-like flight. I passed little, lonely
pools on the moor, from which snipe rose with a startling squak!
squak! and darted away inland as though tempest blown.
Presently a blue-gray mass in mid-ocean caught my eye. It was the
island of Groix, and between it and Point Paradise lay an ugly, naked,
black shape, motionless, oozing smoke from two stubby funnels--the
cruiser Fer-de-Lance! So solidly inert lay the iron-clad that it did
not seem as if she had ever moved or ever could move; she looked like
an imbedded ledge cropping up out of the sea.
Far across the hilly moorland the white semaphore glistened like a
gull's wing--too far for me to see the balls and cones hoisted or the
bright signals glimmering along the halyards as I followed a trodden
path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid
the semaphore and at the same moment brought a house into full
view--a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque,
walled in by an ancient buttressed barrier, above which I could see
the tree-tops of a fruit-garden.
The Château de Trécourt was a fine example of the so called
"fortified farm"; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls,
pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A
walled and loop-holed passageway connected the house with another
stone enclosure in which stood stable, granary, cattle-house, and
sheepfold, all of stone, though the roofs of these buildings were
either turfed or thatched. And over them the weather-vane, a golden
Dorado, swam in the sunshine.
One thing I noticed as I crossed the unused moat on a permanent
bridge: the youthful Countess no longer denied herself the services of
servants, for I saw a cloaked shepherd and his two wolf-like and
tailless sheep-dogs watching the flock scattered over the downs; and
there were at least half a dozen farm servants pottering about from
stable to granary, and a toothless porter to answer the gate-bell and
pilot me past the tiny loop-holed lodge-turret to the house. There was
also a man, lying belly down in the bracken, watching me; and as I
walked into the court I tried to remember where I had seen his face
before.
The entire front of the house was covered with those splendid
orange-tinted tea-roses that I had noticed in Paradise; thicket on
thicket of clove-scented pinks choked the flower-beds; and a broad mat
of deep-tinted pansies lay on the lawn, spread out for all the world
like a glorious Eastern rug.
There was a soft whirring in the air like the sound of a humming-bird
close by; it came from a spinning-wheel, and grew louder as a servant
admitted me into the house and guided me to a sunny room facing the
fruit garden.
The spinner at the wheel was singing in an undertone--singing a Breton
"gwerz," centuries old, retained in memory from generation to
generation:
"Woe to the Maids of Paradise,
Yvonne!
Twice have the Saxons landed; twice!
Yvonne!
Yet must Paradise see them thrice!
Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik."
Old as were the words, the melody was older--so old and quaint and
sweet that it seemed a berceuse fashioned to soothe the drowsing
centuries, lest the memories of ancient wrongs awake and rouse the
very dead from their Gothic tombs.
All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor
note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of
Armorica.
And now the singer was intoning the "Gwerz Ar Baradoz"--the
"Complaint of Paradise"--a slow, thrilling miséréré, scarcely
dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.
Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the
doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: "How do you
do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you
please?"
The girl was Mademoiselle Sylvia Elven, the marvellously clever
actress from the Odéon, the same young woman who had played the
Alsacienne at La Trappe, as perfectly in voice and costume as she now
played the Bretonne.
"You need not be astonished at all," she said, calmly, "if you will
only reflect that my name is Elven, which is also the name of a Breton
town. Naturally, I am a Bretonne from Elven, and my own name is
Duhamel--Sylvenne Duhamel. I thought I ought to tell you, so that you
would not think me too clever and try to carry me off on your horse
again."
I laughed uncertainly; clever women who talk cleverly always disturb
me. Besides, somehow, I felt she was not speaking the truth, yet I
could not imagine why she should lie to me.
"You were more fluent to the helpless turkey-girl," she suggested,
maliciously.
I had absolutely nothing to say, which appeared to gratify her, for
she dimpled and smiled under her snowy-winged coiffe, from which a
thick gold strand of hair curled on her forehead--a sad bit of
coquetry in a Bretonne from Elven, if she told the truth.
"I only came to renew an old and deeply valued friendship," she said,
with mock sentimentality; "I am going back to my flax now."
However, she did not move.
intellectual circus company a young gentleman whose name is Eyre?"
"Kelly Eyre? Yes," I said, sulkily.
"Ah."
She strolled out of the room, hesitated, then turned in the doorway
with a charming smile.
"The Countess will return from her gallop at five."
She waited as though expecting an answer, but I only bowed.
"Would you take a message to Mistaire Kelly Eyre for me?" she asked,
sweetly.
I said that I would.
"Then please say that: 'On Sunday the book-stores are closed in
Paris.'"
"Is that what I am to say?"
"Exactly that."
"Very well, mademoiselle."
"Of course, if he asks who told you--you may say that it was a
Bretonne at Point Paradise."
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing, monsieur."
She courtesied and vanished.
"Little minx," I thought, "what mischief are you preparing now?" and
I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden,
where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds
of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and
saffron.
Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft
on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the
fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause
against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.
I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a
horse's hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly,
just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and
gave me her gloved hand.
Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed
girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave
young Countess whom I had known in Alsace--this incarnation of all
that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of
her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had
happened?
I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying
she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had
wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic
experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said
she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned, opened,
with a strange note from Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some
word from me, here in Paradise, since September; "waited
impatiently," she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows
for a moment--a moment only.
"But come out to my garden," she said, smiling, and stripping off her
little buff gauntlets. "There we will have tea a l'Anglaise, and
sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will," she
added, laughing and coloring up; "for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do
not believe I have given you one second to open your lips."
Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips and listen to
the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell
with my own.
She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a
sunny wall, a wall built of massive granite, deeply thatched with
fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny
lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-butterflies
flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.
Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense
of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man
long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and
loveliness--the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual
innocence on a tired, unstrung man?
"First of all," she said, impulsively, "I know your life--all of it
in minute particular. Are you astonished?"
"No, madame," I replied; "Mornac showed you my dossier."
"That is true," she said, with a troubled look of surprise.
I smiled. "As for Mornac," I began, but she interrupted me.
"Ah, Mornac! Do you suppose I believed him? Had I not proof on proof
of your loyalty, your honor, your courtesy, your chivalry--"
"Madame, your generosity--and, I fear, your pity--overpraises."
"No, it does not! I know what you are. Mornac cannot make white
black! I know what you have been. Mornac could not read you into
infamy, even with your dossier under my own eyes!"
"In my dossier you read a sorry history, madame."
"In your dossier I read the tragedy of a gentleman."
"Do you know," said I, "that I am now a performer in a third-rate
travelling circus?"
"I think that is very sad," she said, sweetly.
"Sad? Oh no. It is better than the disciplinary battalions of
Africa."
Which was simply acknowledging that I had served a term in prison.
The color faded in her face. "I thought you were pardoned."
"I was--from prison, not from the battalion of Biribi."
"I only know," she said, "that they say you were not guilty; that
they say you faced utter ruin, even the possibility of death, for the
sake of another man whose name even the police--even Monsieur de
Mornac--could never learn. Was there such a man?"
I hesitated. "Madame, there is such a man; I am the man who
was."
"With no hope?"
"Hope? With every hope," I said, smiling. "My name is not my own,
but it must serve me to my end, and I shall wear it threadbare and
leave it to no one."
"Is there no hope?" she asked, quietly.
"None for the man who was. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions
and general mountebank," I said, laughing down the rising tide of
bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned
myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had
forgotten--my dead self.
"No hope?" she repeated.
Suddenly the ghost of all I had lost rose before me with her
words--rose at last after all these years, towering, terrible, free
once more to fill the days with loathing and my nights with hell
eternal,... after all these years!
Overwhelmed, I fought down the spectre in silence. Kith and kin were
not all in the world; love of woman was not all; a chance for a home,
a wife, children, were not all; a name was not all. Raising my head, a
trifle faint with the struggle and the cost of the struggle, I saw the
distress in her eyes and strove to smile.
"There is every hope," I said, "save the hopes of youth--the hope of
a woman's love, and of that happiness which comes through love. I am a
man past thirty, madame--thirty-five, I believe my dossier makes it.
It has taken me fifteen years to bury my youth. Let us talk of
Mornac."
"Yes, we will talk of Mornac," she said, gently.
So with infinite pains I went back and traced for her the career of
Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the
scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in
its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in
which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness.
She sat motionless, her face like cold marble, as I carefully gathered
the threads of the plot and gently twitched that one which galvanized
the mask of Mornac.
"Mornac!" she stammered, aghast.
I showed her why Buckhurst desired to come to Paradise; I showed her
why Mornac had initiated her into the mysteries of my dossier, taking
that infernal precaution, although he had every reason to believe he
had me practically in prison, with the keys in his own pocket.
"Had it not been for my comrade, Speed," I said, "I should be in one
of Mornac's fortress cells. He overshot the mark when he left us
together and stepped into his cabinet to spread my dossier before you.
He counted on an innocent man going through hell itself to prove his
innocence; he counted on me, and left Speed out of his calculations.
He had your testimony, he had my dossier, he had the order for my
arrest in his pocket.... And then I stepped out of sight! I, the
honest fool, with my knowledge of his infamy, of Buckhurst's
complicity and purposes--I was gone.
"And now mark the irony of the whole thing: he had, criminally,
destroyed the only bureau that could ever have caught me. But he did
his best during the few weeks that were left him before the battle of
Sedan. After that it was too late; it was too late when the first
Uhlan appeared before the gates of Paris. And now Mornac, shorn of
authority, is shut up in a city surrounded by a wall of German steel,
through which not one single living creature has penetrated for two
months."
him as a dead rat since the ship of Empire went down at Sedan. I do
not know what has taken place in Paris--save what all now know that
the Empire is ended, the Republic proclaimed, and the Imperial police
a memory. Then let us strike out Mornac and turn to Buckhurst. Madame,
I am here to serve you."
The dazed horror in her face which had marked my revelations of
Buckhurst's villanies gave place to a mantling flush of pure anger.
Shame crimsoned her neck, too; shame for her credulous innocence, her
belief in this rogue who had betrayed her, only to receive pardon for
the purpose of baser and more murderous betrayal.
I said nothing for a long time, content to leave her to her own
thoughts. The bitter draught she was draining could not harm her,
could not but act as the most wholesome of tonics.
Hers was not a weak character to sink, embittered, under the weight of
knowledge--knowledge of evil, that all must learn to carry lightly
through life; I had once thought her weak, but I had revised that
opinion and substituted the words "pure in thought, inherently loyal,
essentially unsuspicious."
"Tell me about Buckhurst," I said, quietly. "I can help you, I
think."
The quick tears of humiliation glimmered for a second in her angry
eyes; then pride fell from her, like a stately mantle which a princess
puts aside, tired and content to rest.
This was a phase I had never before seen--a lovely, natural young
girl, perplexed, troubled, deeply wounded, ready to be guided, ready
for reproof, perhaps even for that sympathy without which reproof is
almost valueless.
She told me that Buckhurst came to her house here in Paradise early in
September; that while in Paris, pondering on what I had said, she had
determined to withdraw herself absolutely from all organized
socialistic associations during the war; that she believed she could
do the greatest good by living a natural and cheerful life, by
maintaining the position that birth and fortune had given her, and by
using that position and fortune for the benefit of those less
fortunate.
This she had told Buckhurst, and the rascal appeared to agree with her
so thoroughly that, when Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier arrived,
they also applauded the choice she made of Buckhurst as distributer of
money, food, and clothing to the provincial hospitals, now crowded to
suffocation with the wreck of battle.
Then a strange thing occurred. Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier
disappeared without any explanation. They had started for St. Nazaire
with a sum of money--twenty thousand francs, locked in the private
strong-box of the Countess--to be distributed among the soldiers of
Chanzy; and they had never returned.
In the light of what she had learned from me, she feared that
Buckhurst had won them over; perhaps not--she could not bear to
suspect evil of such men.
But she now believed that Buckhurst had used every penny he had
handled for his own purposes; that not one hospital had received what
she had sent.
"I am no longer wealthy," she said, anxiously, looking up at me. "I
did find time in Paris to have matters straightened; I sold La Trappe
and paid everything. It left me with this house in Paradise, and with
means to maintain it and still have a few thousand francs to give
every year. Now it is nearly gone--I don't know where. I am dreadfully
unhappy; I have such a horror of treachery that I cannot even
understand it, but this ignoble man, Buckhurst, is assuredly a
heartless rascal."
"But," I said, patiently, "you have not yet told me where he is."
"I don't know," she said. "A week ago a dreadful creature came here
to see Buckhurst; they went across the moor toward the semaphore and
stood for a long while looking at the cruiser which is anchored off
Groix. Then Buckhurst came back and prepared for a journey. He said
he was going to Tours to confer with the Red Cross. I don't know where
he went. He took all the money for the general Red Cross fund."
"When did he say he would return?"
"He said in two weeks. He has another week yet."
"Is he usually prompt?"
"Always so--to the minute."
"That is good news," I said, gayly. "But tell me one thing: do you
trust Mademoiselle Elven?"
"Yes, indeed!--indeed!" she cried, horrified.
"Very well," said I, smiling. "Only for the sake of caution--extra,
and even perhaps useless caution--say nothing of this matter to her,
nor to any living soul save me."
"I promise," she said, faintly.
"One thing more: this conspiracy against the state no longer concerns
me--officially. Both Speed and I did all we could to warn the Emperor
and the Empress; we sent letters through the police in London, we used
the English secret-service to get our letters into the Emperor's hand,
we tried every known method of denouncing Mornac. It was useless;
every letter must have gone through Mornac's hands before it reached
the throne. We did all we dared do; we were in disguise and in hiding
under assumed names; we could not do more.
"Now that Mornac is not even a pawn in the game--as, indeed, I begin
to believe he never really was, but has been from the first a dupe of
Buckhurst--it is the duty of every honest man to watch Buckhurst and
warn the authorities that he possibly has designs on the crown jewels
of France, which that cruiser yonder is all ready to bear away to
Saïgon.
"How he proposes to attempt such a robbery I can't imagine. I don't
want to denounce him to General Chanzy or Aurelles de Palladine,
because the conspiracy is too widely spread and too dangerous to be
defeated by the capture of one man, even though he be the head of it.
"What I want is to entrap the entire band; and that can only be done
by watching Buckhurst, not arresting him.
"Therefore, madame, I have written and despatched a telegram to
General Aurelles de Palladine, offering my services and the services
of Mr. Speed to the Republic without compensation. In the event of
acceptance, I shall send to London for two men who will do what is to
be done, leaving me free to amuse the public with my lions. Meanwhile,
as long as we stay in Paradise we both are your devoted servants, and
we beg the privilege of serving you."
During all this time the young Countess had never moved her eyes from
my face--perhaps I was flattered--perhaps for that reason I talked on
and on, pouring out wisdom from a somewhat attenuated supply.
And I now rose to take my leave, bowing my very best bow; but she sat
still, looking up quietly at me.
"You ask the privilege of serving me," she said. "You could serve me
best by giving me your friendship."
"You have my devotion, madame," I said.
"I did not ask it. I asked your friendship--in all frankness and
equality."
"Do you desire the friendship of a circus performer?" I asked,
smiling.
"I desire it, not only for what you are, but for what you have
been--have always been, let them say what they will!"
I was silent.
"Have you never given women your friendship?" she asked.
"Not in fifteen years--nor asked theirs."
"Will you not ask mine?"
I tried to speak steadily, but my voice was uncertain; I sat down,
crushed under a flood of memories, hopes accursed, ambitions damned
and consigned to oblivion.
"You are very kind," I said. "You are the Countess de Vassart. A man
is what he makes himself. I have made myself--with both eyes open; and
I am now an acrobat and a tamer of beasts. I understand your goodness,
your impulse to help those less fortunate than yourself. I also
understand that I have placed myself where I am, and that, having done
so deliberately, I cannot meet as friends and equals those who might
have been my equals if not friends. Besides that, I am a native of a
paradox--a Republic which, though caste-bound, knows no caste abroad.
I might, therefore, have been your friend if you had chosen to waive
the traditions of your continent and accept the traditions of mine.
But now, madame, I must beg permission to make my adieux."
She sprang up and caught both my hands in her ungloved hands. "Won't
you take my friendship--and give me yours--my friend?"
"Yes," I said, slowly. The blood beat in my temples, almost blinding
me; my heart hammered in my throat till I shivered.
As in a dream I bent forward; she abandoned her hands to me; and I
touched a woman's hands with my lips for the first time in fifteen
years.
"In all devotion and loyalty--and gratitude," I said.
"And in friendship--say it!"
"In friendship."
"Now you may go--if you desire to. When will you come again?"
"When may I?"
"When you will."