CHAPTER IX
I had started with the word, but I made no attempt to follow: the momentary impulse to do so was reflex and independent of my will. Resolutely I turned to the clearing away of my paraphernalia, whistling as I moved about—ostentatiously noisy. I was savage over having been betrayed even into that one exclamation, significant solely through its tone. It had been surprised out of me; but the warning it conveyed should be unconditional. That glimmer of a Gorgon head had turned me instantly into stone: adamant I would remain thenceforth.
The next day I put a suddenly formed resolve into execution. Telling Fifine through the door that I probably should not be home till late, and that she had better not sit up for me, I went out very early after breakfast, leaving her still half asleep in bed. I had no very definite purpose in my mind but a judicious absenteeism, which I might turn to the profit, or not, of some provisional reconnoitring; and I wished to be abroad betimes in order to avoid chance meetings with acquaintances.
I am ashamed to confess that I did not even know the exact spot of my step-sister’s ministrations; but a few enquiries guided me easily to a place so considerable. The Hôtel Beaurepaire stood, more or less about where I should have expected to find it, in the Avenue Henri-Martin. The actual building was pointed out to me by a precocious bebloused infant, shouldering, like a miniature Hercules, a club of bread. The Hôtel presented nothing more remarkable to the street than a huge white face of painted stucco, broken by innumerable tall windows having each its little white balcony and white jalousies, the latter mostly closed. In the middle, great wrought-iron gates, white, also, and as jealously shut, gave upon an inner quadrangle like an inn courtyard. A glimpse of enclosing buildings, of a welling fountain-basin, of oranges and oleanders in tubs, was to be caught through the foliated interstices of the gate. There was no sign of life anywhere visible; and if there had been, my concern with it was purely speculative. Yet I could not forbear lingering a minute or two in a sort of abstract curiosity, to consider the occasion which associated this august residence, unconsciously to itself, with my insignificant eyrie in the Rue de Fleurus. The sense of disproportion evoked by the thought tickled me: it was little Jack against all Blunderboreland—a thimbleful of mushroom self-assurance against the impregnable stronghold of ages. Could we conceivably defy to the end the forces represented in this place, hoodwink its astute councils, succeed in making our own terms before surrender? One thing did strike me as grotesque—my brief startled impulse of the evening before. That might seem possible in the Rue de Fleurus connexion; it was an incredible audacity here. And here was Fifine’s natural habitat; from such as this she drew her code, her sentiments, her living colour. It was only a marvel that, by whatever force of fear impelled, she could have adapted herself so easily to those changed conditions. But she had been oppressed and persecuted: I had been told so and must believe it, however monstrous it seemed to me that one so attractive and endearing could have been made the subject of a parent’s unnatural tyranny. Perhaps to be allowed to live herself, though in the humblest circumstances, was compensation enough for all the loss implied by what I looked on. Yet she had not been crushed; did the fact appear in her conduct, her speech, her imperturbable serenity? And what then?
O! leave all problems to mathematicians. With a laugh I turned away. Why had I come at all? I did not quite know, unless it were, in a sudden access of prudence, to learn something about the place and circumstances of the conspiracy in which I was involved. I had a restless impulse on me to jog the situation somehow, since it was getting congested beyond my management; and this had seemed a first vague step in the direction of movement and change.
What should I do with myself, decided as I was to break, anyhow temporarily, the spell of perilous inaction in which I had become entangled? I strolled aimlessly into the Bois de Boulogne, where the sweepers were at work with their long thin brooms, ruffling the untidy grass which Paris never learns to shave and trim. Loitering slowly on, I heard hurried footsteps behind me, and turned to encounter Marion.
She was mottled in the face—agitation always made her so—and she breathed noisily. Even in that surprised moment I could not help mentally criticising the figure she presented, and uttering a secret thanksgiving that she was my sister only by courtesy. A brother in fact had had reason to feel small pride in the connexion, though in this matter of family credit little allowance is usually made for that unnatural creature’s feelings. Yet I thought I could appreciate the hot anguish of gilded youth forced to chaperon, fraternally and shamefully, a figure so aggressively undesirable as this. She had, it is true, conceded to fashion a hat of the feminine swashbuckler type, which blinded one eye and aggravated the inflammatory defiance of the other; but the scornful plainness of her costume and her flat-heeled stride hopelessly discounted any half compromise with custom her head might display. If there is one thing I detest in women it is the long-skirted jacket, and Marion’s was so long that it left a quite inconsiderable fringe of dress between its end and her strong ankles.
“Walk on,” she said, panting for breath: “don’t stop, but walk on.”
We turned towards the lake; there were few people about, and the morning was still and misty. Presently she opened upon me in her authoritative way:—
“What are you doing here, Felix Dane?”
I glanced at her, amused, raising my eyebrows.
“You are not asking that seriously, Marion?”
“Yes,” she said, compressing her lips, “I am.”
“My dear Marion; I am doing nothing, then, but just pleasing myself.”
“I happened to be looking from a window,” she said, “and I saw you asking a boy to point you out the house.”
“My ignorance was inexcusable, I admit.”
“Why did you want to know?”
“The scene of your praiseworthy labours? What a question to ask of an admiring brother!”
“I will know, Felix.” She stopped and stamped her foot, then, warned perhaps by my face, checked herself, and resumed, with a strained attempt at a more conciliatory tone: “You might have consideration for others, if you have no apprehensions for yourself. You don’t seem to realise what a difficult tortuous part I am having to play.”
“Naturally, when I know nothing about it.”
She glanced at me, and away.
“Please come on, Felix. Will you not tell me what brought you?”
“That is better. Call it partly idleness, partly curiosity, partly the absence of any reason why I should not do exactly as I pleased.”
“Is there no reason? Can you really say so?”
“None whatever that I know. It was made no condition of an extraordinary situation forced upon me that my absolute liberty of action was to be restricted. I should not have accepted the situation if it had been.”
“I am not talking of your rights but of your good feelings.”
“Ah? Well, what about those?”
“Are you really so indifferent as to the safeguarding of a trust that you, after all, did accept?”
“Be a little more explicit.”
“Supposing by any chance Monseigneur himself had happened to be looking from a window just now. Would not his suspicions have been aroused?”
“By the fact of a casual stranger wishing to identify the residence of a family of such importance? What if I had had a Baedeker in my hand?”
“You had not, you know.”
“It would only have coloured the moral. I might have had it in my pocket. Anyhow I am sure the great man would have thought nothing unusual about such an everyday occurrence as a sightseer out hero-worshipping.”
“You don’t know him in the least; you don’t comprehend the situation. But of course you are only talking, after your way, for talking’s sake.”
“Is that my way? I should have thought I was a rather silent person as a rule. Do you know, Marion, I could almost imagine from your manner that you were not pleased to see me.”
My step-sister jerked up her elbows, uttering a hopeless exclamation. I think she could have thrown me into the pond with the fiercest satisfaction.
“You are quite welcome to imagine it,” she said. “Your turning up here is the very last thing I desired.”
I laughed.
“Well, it was your own choice, you know, to come and join me. I neither expected nor invited you; and it appears to me that whatever suspicion my movements may have aroused in an august bosom will hardly have been allayed by that rash step on your part.”
“I hope to heaven we were both unobserved; but to see you made me desperate. I thought something had happened; that you were bent on some folly which might betray the whole plot. Has anything occurred to disturb you, Felix? I think, seeing my distress, you might be candid with me.”
“To be sure I will, Marion, now you ask. Do you realise that three weeks and more have passed since I undertook a certain charge?”
“I know, Felix. I cannot help it.”
“And that during all that time I have received no word, no hint from you as to——”
“Yes, I know. I cannot help it, I say.” She looked away, as if momentarily disturbed or embarrassed, then faced me resolutely: “Do you want to get rid of her?”
I should have answered, “yes,” unequivocally. What motive for delicacy or hesitation could I have? Wisdom and policy alike clamoured for release from a position which, impossibly heroic at its outset, was daily growing more and more compromising in the sentiments it inevitably engendered. My professional interests, my personal honour were both concerned in the response; and how did I vindicate them? I stumbled a moment; and then temporised:—
“I want a term stated, that is all. I have no objection to the young lady, or any fault to find with her. We get on very well together on the whole. But don’t you think you are taking rather an unfair advantage of my good-nature, not to speak of my—of my not too impeccable human one?”
Rather to my surprise the challenge evoked no opprobrious response, nor indeed any response at all for a little. A student of physiognomy might even have fancied he detected in Marion’s expression a certain shiftiness, a desire to avoid straight issues.
“I think,” she said presently, “that, as to that, you will be guided by your own sense of fitness and propriety. I trusted to it at the first, Felix, and I trust to it now.”
“That is all very well, my good sister; but I never understood that the compact was to be an indefinite one.”
“It is not to be, of course; only—I tell you this candidly, Felix—the predicament which forced it upon us is not yet safely resolved.”
“Does the Marquis know that his daughter has fled from him, and is in hiding somewhere?”
“There is no reason why you should not be told that. Yes, he does.”
“And why does he not visit the knowledge upon you, her confidante and abettor?”
“I did not say he did not. But leave me out of the question; I can look after myself. It may be that he respects in me a certain force of character, which is not to be debarred from its duty by threats and bribery; it may be that heaven has granted me a certain power of exorcism over demons; it may be, as I told you before, that he sees in me the only possible clue to the secret of his child’s disappearance. That clue will remain safe, so long—so long as you are faithful, Felix.”
“H’mph!” I pondered the thing awhile, not satisfied, nor, it must be admitted, wholly discontent. “Then it seems,” I said, “that I have no choice in the matter.”
“I promise you, as I promised you before,” said Marion, “that I will communicate with you the very moment that a present difficulty has resolved itself. Only, for mercy’s sake, don’t again risk disaster through this sort of collusion. It will be bad for you, for us all, if his suspicions are once aroused. Felix, I will tell you one thing—it is for your companion’s sake. He knows—I have ascertained it—that we alighted near the Mont de Piété that night. That is enough to put his agents on the scent; and you must keep her close, if you would not imperil her safety. If she were once traced, and found to be——” She checked herself, gulped, and went on—“you would not like to have her innocent blood on your head, I am sure?”
I stared. It was not her persistent reassertion of that wild fable which surprised me; it was the curiously detached manner of her reference to my “companion.” Was it really Fifine’s salvation or her father’s which formed my sister’s leading consideration in this matter? The question was a novel and startling one. Really, if it had not been Marion, I should have suspected here some interest more than exorcismal in the morphiomaniac.
“By no means,” I answered—“nor the miscarriage of your plans either. Which means, I suppose, that I must resign myself to the inevitable.”
“If you will only have patience, Felix. It will not be for long now, I hope.”
“And in the meantime—h’m!” I stood considering. Then suddenly a whimsical thought occurred to me; and I uttered it, more for the humour of the shocked protest it would evoke, than from any least expectation of a favourable response.
“I suppose you wouldn’t at all approve of our going a trip together?”
“A trip!” She was obviously and naturally startled; but her tone, I thought, betrayed no particular moral alarm.
“She was born, she tells me, in Provence,” I said, “and her journey thence to Paris sums up her travelling experience. It is odd; but I suppose these exotics of the pur sang must be kept under cover. Anyhow it struck me that it might not only interest her to visit her birthplace, but that it would be a way for us both out of the killing confinement and monotony of our present existence.”
Marion was listening to me; yet I could see that some reflection beyond that engendered by my proposal was exercising her mind.
“She told you that, did she?” she said, staring me suddenly in the eyes.
“What is the matter?” I answered. “Yes, she told it me, but not with any reference to my suggestion, though I made that to her—quite in the elder-brotherly spirit, of course, and with an eye to Plato’s moral philosophy for our literary ballast. She might not consent to go, after all; I think that likely enough; only, supposing by any chance the venture appealed to her, would it have your sanction?”
We were strolling leisurely on, and Marion did not at once answer.
“It just occurred to me,” I continued, “as a possible resource, no more. It would take us, anyhow for the time being, out of the arena of contention, and if we did it cleverly, vanishing ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision,’ it might prove more baffling to the chase than our continuing to lie and sulk here under cover. You see, being hidden somewhere in Paris, as they would suppose us still to be——”
Marion interrupted me: “How long would you propose to stay away?”
“How long would you advise?” I said, my eyes beginning to open.
“I don’t think it matters.”
“Then you have no objection?”
“No; none at all.”
She fairly took my breath away. This astonishing acquiescence, where I had expected only obloquy and castigation! Yet I received, in appearance, the thunderbolt nonchalantly.
“Very well, then,” I said—“if the question should arise.”
“You will observe the last secrecy, in that event,” she said, “in the manner of your going? I can trust to you for that.” And then she went on, putting the case to herself, it seemed, rather than to me: “In the question of scandal, things would rest as they rest now, in neither better nor worse odour. It is for you a matter of conscience, and for her a period of self-obliteration, from which she will emerge, when she does, a restored individuality, having no responsibility to the interval—just, as it were, as if one had crossed from hill to hill by way of a deep sunless ravine.”
I did not answer—though that poetical flight from Marion was sufficiently startling—and we walked on for some little distance in silence—a fairly pregnant one on my part. “Certainly,” I was saying to myself, “her concern is for the morphiomaniac.” The idea promised to become an obsession with me. It might be held to explain some things hitherto inexplicable; it certainly, if true, made obscure the probable limits of my guardianship. That was a reflection carrying with it a sense not so much of mortification as of uneasiness. But, in the midst, the thought of that “furlough” so astonishingly conceded rose to encourage and exhilarate me. The free road would dissipate effectively all those drugging fumes generated by confinement. We could be frank comrades, once in the open air, unfettered by convention, responsible to ourselves alone, accountable to no man or woman for a definition of the right which found us wayfaring in company. The prospect pleased me; I foresaw only a single objection to it.
“One thing I must mention,” I said, “if there is to be any talk with your young Countess of this expedition. It is, to put it bluntly, funds.”
“Funds!” said Marion. She stopped, in some surprise.
“I should never get her to consent,” I continued, “unless on terms of sharing expenses. I may as well state the fact. She is out of cash, and already, in some inconsiderable measure, indebted to me. I refer to it only in the connexion of her natural pride—not from any personal motive. She has not confessed the fact to me, nor authorised me in any way to make her position known to you. It was revealed to me quite accidentally.”
For one moment I did hesitate as to the advisability of mentioning my suspicions anent the mysterious stranger; but the thought of some possible treachery towards Fifine implied thereby stayed me, and I resolved to keep my own counsel. Marion, after some frowning meditation, spoke plainly:—
“I am a little perplexed,” she said, “to understand how, under the circumstances, a fairly ample supply of money can already have exhausted itself. But of course you must not be allowed to suffer by her extravagances. Say nothing about it, and I will write to her in a day or two, enclosing a further remittance. Is that all?”
“That is all.”
She seemed to accept my assurance with a sigh of relief: and forthwith, with an air of unconstrained curiosity, put some questions to me about the manner of our life, its domestic incidents, the young lady’s demands upon my time and resources, and more especially my opinion of her and my feelings towards her—to all of which inquisition I responded as truth or policy dictated.
“She is a good girl,” she said at the end; “a trustworthy girl. Deal finely with her, Felix Dane—and with yourself.” She held out her hand. “Good-bye, now, and trust to my promise to release you at the first available moment. Only don’t again, for heaven’s sake, risk appearances by seeming to force my hand like this.”
Begging me to stay where I was, she left me—profoundly cogitative, you may be sure. That obsession had entered my mind to stay. It was gratifying to contemplate the trust of me implied in that leave to travel; and yet, and yet—I could have thought she had no more delusions about me than I had about myself. Really it almost seemed as if Fifine’s fate was to her a matter of quite secondary importance; she was willing to confide it to such fortuitous happenings.
I went a long walk into the country that day, tramping by way of Sèvres and Bas Chaville to the little Trianon, with its atmosphere of ghosts and piteous things sighing and whispering among the yellowing leaves. Returning to Paris, late and somewhat exhausted, I dined, cheaply but delectably, at a little Café in the Rue Vivienne, and thence, according to my promise to myself of a late evening, made my way to the Opera-House, where I paid my three francs for a fauteuil de quatrième amphithéâtre (and a very good one) to hear Romeo and Juliet sung.
Now I was scanning the audience from my lofty eyrie, when, my glance roving to the orchestra, whose members were at that moment tuning their instruments, I positively started and sat transfixed. For there, seated behind a violoncello, along whose strings his white fingers hopped and scampered like white mice, was my old plaintive macaroni of the Rue de Fleurus. He had no chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole now; but I knew him at once; my eyes, sufficiently penetrating at all times, could not be mistaken.
Well, for what he was worth he was identified; and what was he worth? Even were I to take the trouble to ascertain his name, how indeed would it bring me nearer a solution of the mystery of Fifine’s indebtedness to him? Besides, it was no affair of mine.
Fifine had gone obediently to bed when I returned home that night.