"If you didn't I wouldn't dare to ask you."
By ten o'clock Hermia was hungry again and when they came to a small village she vowed that without food she would walk no more.
"Very well then," said Markham. "We must earn the right to do it."
They found a small auberge before which Hermia unpacked her orchestra and played. A crowd of women and children soon surrounded them, and the sounds of the drum brought the curious from the fields and more distant houses. The patronne came out and Philidor offered to do her portrait for ten sous.
They were lucky. When the hat was passed they found the total returns upon their venture, including the portrait, were one franc and thirty centimes. This paid for their share of the ragoût, some cheese, bread and a liter of wine. When they got up to go, such was the immediate fame of Philidor's portrait, that two other persons came with the money in their hands to sit to him. But he shook his head. He would be back this way, perhaps—but now—no—they must be upon their way. And so amid the farewells of their latest friends, the cries of children and the barking of dogs they took to the road again.
CHAPTER XVI
MANET CICATRIX
Olga Tcherny sat at a long window in the villa of the Duchesse d'Orsay and looked out over the sparkling sands upon the gleaming sea. Trouville was gay. The strand was flecked with the bright colors of fashionable pilgrims who sat or strolled along the margin of the waves, basking in the warm sun, recuperating from the rigors of the Parisian spring. White sails moved to and fro upon the horizon and a mild air stirred the lace curtains in Olga's window, which undulated lightly, their borders flapping joyously with a frivolous disregard for the somber mood of the guest of the house.
Olga's gaze was afar, quite beyond the visible. Her horizon was inward and limitless, and though she looked outward she saw nothing. Her brows were tangled, the scarlet of her lips was drawn in a thin line slightly depressed at the outer corners and the toe of her small slipper tapped noiselessly upon the rug. It was nothing, of course, to be bored, for when she was not gay she was always bored; but there was a deeper discontent in her whole attitude that that which comes from mere ennui, an aggressive discontent, sentient rather than passive, a kind of feline alertness which needed only an immediate incentive to become dangerous. Upon the dressing-table beside her was Hermia Challoner's telegram, explaining her failure to reach Trouville; in her fingers a letter from a friend in Rouen telling her of John Markham's visit to that city and of his departure. Both the telegram and the letter were much crumpled, showing that they had been taken out and read before. There seemed no doubt about it now. John Markham had received her letters announcing her arrival in Normandy and had in spite of them fled from Havre, from Rouen, to parts unknown, where neither Olga's rosily tinted notes nor Olga's rosily tinted person could reach him. She had hoped that Hermia's arrival from Paris would have made existence at Trouville at least bearable, but Hermia's change of mind explained by the belated telegram had made it evident that Fate was conspiring to her discomfort and inconvenience. To make matters the worse the Duchesse had taken upon herself an attack of the gout which made her insupportable, and Pierre de Folligny, Olga's usual refuse in hours like these, had gone off for a week of shooting at the Château of a cousin of the Duchesse's, the Comte de Cahors.
Hermia's change of plans had disappointed her; for, jealous as she was of the years between them, Hermia always added a definite note of color to her surroundings, or a leaven of madness—which made even sanity endurable. There seemed just now nothing in her prospect but a dreary waste of the usual—the beach, the inevitable sea, the Casino, tea, more beach, with intervals of fretful piquet with the Duchesse, an outlook both gloomy and disheartening. Indeed it had been some weeks now since things had gone quite to her liking, and her patience, never proof against continued disappointment, was almost at the point of exhaustion. The letters she had written John Markham, one from New York telling of her immediate departure, another from Paris hoping to see him at her hotel, a third from Trouville, assuming the miscarriage of the other two—cool, friendly notes, tinetured with a nonchalance she was far from feeling, had failed of their purpose, and save for a brief letter telling of his departure form Rouen, he had not given the slightest evidence of his appreciation of her efforts toward a platonic reconciliation. She had not despaired of him and did not despair of him now, for it was one of her maxims that a clever woman—a woman as clever as she was—could have any man in the world if she set her cap for him.