CHAPTER XIII
The round moon was white and at its smallest, high overhead, when I stepped out of the phaeton in which Miss Elizabeth sent me back to Madame Brossard’s; midnight was twanging from a rusty old clock indoors as I crossed the fragrant courtyard to my pavilion; but a lamp still burned in the salon of the “Grande Suite,” a light to my mind more suggestive of the patient watcher than of the scholar at his tome.
When my own lamp was extinguished, I set my door ajar, moved my bed out from the wall to catch whatever breeze might stir, “composed myself for the night,” as it used to be written, and lay looking out upon the quiet garden where a thin white haze was rising. If, in taking this coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath some immoderate weight, and the noble form of Keredec emerged upon my field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed him to be either barefooted or in his stockings. His visible costume consisted of a sleeping jacket tucked into a pair of trousers, while his tousled hair and beard and generally tossed and rumpled look were those of a man who had been lying down temporarily.
I heard him sigh—like one sighing for sleep—as he went noiselessly across the garden and out through the archway to the road. At that I sat straight up in bed to stare—and well I might, for here was a miracle! He had lifted his arms above his head to stretch himself comfortably, and he walked upright and at ease, whereas when I had last seen him, the night before, he had been able to do little more than crawl, bent far over and leaning painfully upon his friend. Never man beheld a more astonishing recovery from a bad case of rheumatism!
After a long look down the road, he retraced his steps; and the moonlight, striking across his great forehead as he came, revealed the furrows ploughed there by an anxiety of which I guessed the cause. The creaking of the wooden stairs and gallery and the whine of an old door announced that he had returned to his vigil.
I had, perhaps, a quarter of an hour to consider this performance, when it was repeated; now, however, he only glanced out into the road, retreating hastily, and I saw that he was smiling, while the speed he maintained in returning to his quarters was remarkable for one so newly convalescent.
The next moment Saffron came through the archway, ascended the steps in turn—but slowly and carefully, as if fearful of waking his guardian—and I heard his door closing, very gently. Long before his arrival, however, I had been certain of his identity with the figure I had seen gazing up at the terraces of Quesnay from the borders of the grove. Other questions remained to bother me: Why had Keredec not prevented this night-roving, and why, since he did permit it, should he conceal his knowledge of it from Oliver? And what, oh, what wondrous specific had the mighty man found for his disease?
Morning failed to clarify these mysteries; it brought, however, something rare and rich and strange. I allude to the manner of Amedee’s approach. The aged gossip-demoniac had to recognise the fact that he could not keep out of my way for ever; there was nothing for it but to put as good a face as possible upon a bad business, and get it over—and the face he selected was a marvel; not less, and in no hasty sense of the word.
It appeared at my door to announce that breakfast waited outside.
Primarily it displayed an expression of serenity, masterly in its assumption that not the least, remotest, dreamiest shadow of danger could possibly be conceived, by the most immoderately pessimistic and sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest, you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the first-born—that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous, diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles, beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my repast with an unconcealed fondness at once maternal and reverential.
I did not attempt to speak. I came out silently, uncannily fascinated, my eyes fixed upon him, while he moved gently backward, cooing pleasant words about the coffee, but just perceptibly keeping himself out of arm’s reach until I had taken my seat. When I had done that, he leaned over the table and began to set useless things nearer my plate with frankly affectionate care. It chanced that in “making a long arm” to reach something I did want, my hand (of which the fingers happened to be closed) passed rather impatiently beneath his nose. The madonna expression changed instantly to one of horror, he uttered a startled croak, and took a surprisingly long skip backward, landing in the screen of honeysuckle vines, which, he seemed to imagine, were some new form of hostility attacking him treacherously from the rear. They sagged, but did not break from their fastenings, and his behaviour, as he lay thus entangled, would have contrasted unfavourably in dignity with the actions of a panic-stricken hen in a hammock.
“And so conscience DOES make cowards of us all,” I said, with no hope of being understood.
Recovering some measure of mental equilibrium at the same time that he managed to find his feet, he burst into shrill laughter, to which he tried in vain to impart a ring of debonair carelessness.
“Eh, I stumble!” he cried with hollow merriment. “I fall about and faint with fatigue! Pah! But it is nothing: truly!”
“Fatigue!” I turned a bitter sneer upon him. “Fatigue! And you just out of bed!”
His fat hands went up palm outward; his heroic laughter was checked as with a sob; an expression of tragic incredulity shone from his eyes. Patently he doubted the evidence of his own ears; could not believe that such black ingratitude existed in the world. “Absalom, O my son Absalom!” was his unuttered cry. His hands fell to his sides; his chin sank wretchedly into its own folds; his shirt-bosom heaved and crinkled; arrows of unspeakable injustice had entered the defenceless breast.
“Just out of bed!” he repeated, with a pathos that would have brought the judge of any court in France down from the bench to kiss him—“And I had risen long, long before the dawn, in the cold and darkness of the night, to prepare the sandwiches of monsieur!”
It was too much for me, or rather, he was. I stalked off to the woods in a state of helpless indignation; mentally swearing that his day of punishment at my hands was only deferred, not abandoned, yet secretly fearing that this very oath might live for no purpose but to convict me of perjury. His talents were lost in the country; he should have sought his fortune in the metropolis. And his manner, as he summoned me that evening to dinner, and indeed throughout the courses, partook of the subtle condescension and careless assurance of one who has but faintly enjoyed some too easy triumph.
I found this so irksome that I might have been goaded into an outbreak of impotent fury, had my attention not been distracted by the curious turn of the professor’s malady, which had renewed its painful assault upon him. He came hobbling to table, leaning upon Saffren’s shoulder, and made no reference to his singular improvement of the night before—nor did I. His rheumatism was his own; he might do what he pleased with it! There was no reason why he should confide the cause of its vagaries to me.
Table-talk ran its normal course; a great Pole’s philosophy receiving flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. (“If he could understand,” exclaimed Keredec, “that the individual must be immortal before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some intelligence!”) On the surface everything was as usual with our trio, with nothing to show any turbulence of under-currents, unless it was a certain alertness in Oliver’s manner, a restrained excitement, and the questioning restlessness of his eyes as they sought mine from time to time. Whatever he wished to ask me, he was given no opportunity, for the professor carried him off to work when our coffee was finished. As they departed, the young man glanced back at me over his shoulder, with that same earnest look of interrogation, but it went unanswered by any token or gesture: for though I guessed that he wished to know if Mrs. Harman had spoken of him to me, it seemed part of my bargain with her to give him no sign that I understood.
A note lay beside my plate next morning, addressed in a writing strange to me, one of dashing and vigorous character.
“In the pursuit of thrillingly scientific research,” it read, “what with the tumult which possessed me, I forgot to mention the bond that links us; I, too, am a painter, though as yet unhonoured and unhung. It must be only because I lack a gentle hand to guide me. If I might sit beside you as you paint! The hours pass on leaden wings at Quesnay—I could shriek! Do not refuse me a few words of instruction, either in the wildwood, whither I could support your shrinking steps, or, from time to time, as you work in your studio, which (I glean from the instructive Mr. Ferret) is at Les Trois Pigeons. At any hour, at any moment, I will speed to you. I am, sir,
“Yours, if you will but breathe a ‘yes,’