“I!”
“Yes, you, poor man! I suppose I couldn’t have more thoroughly compromised you. Madame Brossard will never believe in your respectability again.”
“Oh, yes, she will,” said I.
“What? A lodger who has ladies calling upon him at five o’clock in the morning? But your bundle’s on your shoulder,” she rattled on, laughing, “though there’s many could be bolder, and perhaps you’ll let me walk a bit of the way with you, if you’re for the road.”
“Perhaps I will,” said I. She caught up her riding-skirt, fastening it by a clasp at her side, and we passed out through the archway and went slowly along the road bordering the forest, her horse following obediently at half-rein’s length.
“When did you hear that I was at Madame Brossard’s?” I asked.
“Ten minutes after I returned to Quesnay, late yesterday afternoon.”
“Who told you?”
“Louise.”
I repeated the name questioningly. “You mean Mrs. Larrabee Harman?”
“Louise Harman,” she corrected. “Didn’t you know she was staying at Quesnay?”
“I guessed it, though Amedee got the name confused.”
“Yes, she’s been kind enough to look after the place for us while we were away. George won’t be back for another ten days, and I’ve been overseeing an exhibition for him in London. Afterward I did a round of visits—tiresome enough, but among people it’s well to keep in touch with on George’s account.”
“I see,” I said, with a grimness which probably escaped her. “But how did Mrs. Harman know that I was at Les Trois Pigeons?”
“She met you once in the forest—”
“Twice,” I interrupted.
“She mentioned only once. Of course she’d often heard both George and me speak of you.”
“But how did she know it was I and where I was staying?”
“Oh, that?” Her smile changed to a laugh. “Your maitre d’hotel told Ferret, a gardener at Quesnay, that you were at the inn.”
“He did!”
“Oh, but you mustn’t be angry with him; he made it quite all right.”
“How did he do that?” I asked, trying to speak calmly, though there was that in my mind which might have blanched the parchment cheek of a grand inquisitor.
“He told Ferret that you were very anxious not to have it known—”
“You call that making it all right?”
“For himself, I mean. He asked Ferret not to mention who it was that told him.”
“The rascal!” I cried. “The treacherous, brazen—”
“Unfortunate man,” said Miss Elizabeth, “don’t you see how clear you’re making it that you really meant to hide from us?”
There seemed to be something in that, and my tirade broke up in confusion. “Oh, no,” I said lamely, “I hoped—I hoped—”
“Be careful!”
“No; I hoped to work down here,” I blurted. “And I thought if I saw too much of you—I might not.”
She looked at me with widening eyes. “And I can take my choice,” she cried, “of all the different things you may mean by that! It’s either the most outrageous speech I ever heard—or the most flattering.”
“But I meant simply—”
“No.” She lifted her hand and stopped me. “I’d rather believe that I have at least the choice—and let it go at that.” And as I began to laugh, she turned to me with a gravity apparently so genuine that for the moment I was fatuous enough to believe that she had said it seriously. Ensued a pause of some duration, which, for my part, I found disturbing. She broke it with a change of subject.
“You think Louise very lovely to look at, don’t you?”
“Exquisite,” I answered.
“Every one does.”
“I suppose she told you—” and now I felt myself growing red—“that I behaved like a drunken acrobat when she came upon me in the path.”
“No. Did you?” cried Miss Elizabeth, with a ready credulity which I thought by no means pretty; indeed, she seemed amused and, to my surprise (for she is not an unkind woman), rather heartlessly pleased. “Louise only said she knew it must be you, and that she wished she could have had a better look at what you were painting.”
“Heaven bless her!” I exclaimed. “Her reticence was angelic.”
“Yes, she has reticence,” said my companion, with enough of the same quality to make me look at her quickly. A thin line had been drawn across her forehead.
“You mean she’s still reticent with George?” I ventured.
“Yes,” she answered sadly. “Poor George always hopes, of course, in the silent way of his kind when they suffer from such unfortunate passions—and he waits.”
“I suppose that former husband of hers recovered?”
“I believe he’s still alive somewhere. Locked up, I hope!” she finished crisply.
“She retained his name,” I observed.
“Harman? Yes, she retained it,” said my companion rather shortly.
“At all events, she’s rid of him, isn’t she?”
“Oh, she’s RID of him!” Her tone implied an enigmatic reservation of some kind.
“It’s hard,” I reflected aloud, “hard to understand her making that mistake, young as she was. Even in the glimpses of her I’ve had, it was easy to see something of what she’s like: a fine, rare, high type—”
“But you didn’t know HIM, did you?” Miss Elizabeth asked with some dryness.
“No,” I answered. “I saw him twice; once at the time of his accident—that was only a nightmare, his face covered with—” I shivered. “But I had caught a glimpse of him on the boulevard, and of all the dreadful—”
“Oh, but he wasn’t always dreadful,” she interposed quickly. “He was a fascinating sort of person, quite charming and good-looking, when she ran away with him, though he was horribly dissipated even then. He always had been THAT. Of course she thought she’d be able to straighten him out—poor girl! She tried, for three years—three years it hurts one to think of! You see it must have been something very like a ‘grand passion’ to hold her through a pain three years long.”
“Or tremendous pride,” said I. “Women make an odd world of it for the rest of us. There was good old George, as true and straight a man as ever lived—”
“And she took the other! Yes.” George’s sister laughed sorrowfully.
“But George and she have both survived the mistake,” I went on with confidence. “Her tragedy must have taught her some important differences. Haven’t you a notion she’ll be tremendously glad to see him when he comes back from America?”
“Ah, I do hope so!” she cried. “You see, I’m fearing that he hopes so too—to the degree of counting on it.”
“You don’t count on it yourself?”
She shook her head. “With any other woman I should.”
“Why not with Mrs. Harman?”
“Cousin Louise has her ways,” said Miss Elizabeth slowly, and, whether she could not further explain her doubts, or whether she would not, that was all I got out of her on the subject at the time. I asked one or two more questions, but my companion merely shook her head again, alluding vaguely to her cousin’s “ways.” Then she brightened suddenly, and inquired when I would have my things sent up to the chateau from the inn.
At the risk of a misunderstanding which I felt I could ill afford, I resisted her kind hospitality, and the outcome of it was that there should be a kind of armistice, to begin with my dining at the chateau that evening. Thereupon she mounted to the saddle, a bit of gymnastics for which she declined my assistance, and looked down upon me from a great height.
“Did anybody ever tell you,” was her surprising inquiry, “that you are the queerest man of these times?”
“No,” I answered. “Don’t you think you’re a queerer woman?”
“FOOTLE!” she cried scornfully. “Be off to your woods and your woodscaping!”
The bay horse departed at a smart gait, not, I was glad to see, a parkish trot—Miss Elizabeth wisely set limits to her sacrifices to Mode—and she was far down the road before I had passed the outer fringe of trees.
My work was accomplished after a fashion more or less desultory that day; I had many absent moments, was restless, and walked more than I painted. Oliver Saffron did not join me in the late afternoon; nor did the echo of distant yodelling bespeak any effort on his part to find me. So I gave him up, and returned to the inn earlier than usual.
While dressing I sent word to Professor Keredec that I should not be able to join him at dinner that evening; and it is to be recorded that Glouglou carried the message for me. Amedee did not appear, from which it may be inferred that our maitre d’hotel was subject to lucid intervals. Certainly his present shyness indicated an intelligence of no low order.