CHAPTER XV.
"AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE."
The two men separated at the Porte Maillot, Radwalader strolling away in the direction of the Métropolitain entrance with a readily fabricated excuse about a card engagement. He understood to perfection the action of moral leaven—that, once introduced as an ingredient, it must not be unduly stirred, but left, with the fair white cloth of unconcern drawn smoothly over it, to work its will at ease. To a greater extent even than Mrs. Carnby, he possessed the instinct for not saying too much. He left Andrew to reflect upon what had passed between them, confident of its effect.
Andrew paused at the junction of the Avenues de Malakoff and de la Grande Armée, the confusion and glare of the great thoroughfares smiting fretfully upon his instant need of reflection, and then returned upon his tracks, seeking the cool quiet of the Bois. After a short walk past the brightly lighted Chalet du Touring Club, a by-path tempted him, and he turned aside. At once the forest closed in upon him, and the scene of a half-hour before became more than ever like a phase in some fantastic and uneasy dream. At Armenonville there had been a blaze of light and a ripple of laughter, which barred out the stars of heaven as if they had never been: here was a world of stillness and of shadow, broken only by the distant music of the tziganes, and, through the interstices of tree-trunks and foliage, the intermittent gleam of bicycle and automobile lanterns on the Route de la Porte des Sablons. The faintly pungent odour of moss rose to his nostrils, as in some deep, undiscovered retreat in a provincial preserve. The small, sweet twitter of a restless bird pricked the delicious silence like the sound of a rip in thin linen. The tziganes at Armenonville were playing the "Valse Bleue." The air, pulsing softly through the gloom, seemed almost to speak the words:
"Pourquoi ne pas m'aimer, p'isqu' tu sais que je t'ai—ai—me?"
"Margery!" said Andrew slowly, to himself. "Margery—Margery!"
In the three weeks just past, he had been building a new world, a world from which his former ideals had been deliberately banished, and wherein new standards of conduct had been set. Pride, recklessness, and resentment had been the triumvirate by which this moral state was governed, and he had obeyed their dictates blindly, without caring, as he had told Radwalader, to think. Left to itself, this might have endured indefinitely, even as the larger world, with all its codes and creeds, established by the limited experience of the men inhabiting it. But what would be effected by the abrupt entrance into society of a messenger from another planet, infinitely wiser, infinitely more advanced, was brought to pass by Radwalader's words. The status quod reeled on its foundations. The alternative which Andrew had accepted, and which had dulled, if not actually done away with, the acuteness of his disappointment, now appeared in its true light as the veriest sham, a sedative worse than useless—enervating—stupefying—poisonous. The bare suggestion was enough. Not for a moment did he doubt the significance of this message which had never reached him. It could mean but one thing—forgiveness and recall. All there had been to say upon the other count, had been said in that half-hour in the arbour. Her hand had been stretched out to stay him from the precipice down which he had plunged—stretched out too late! The knowledge tore in an instant the mask from his vanity, and he stood confessed—a coward. What was it she had said? "A fancy so trivial and so idle that it could not even hold you back from transgression." And he had resented that, resented it only to furnish proof, when the actual temptation came, that it was true!
He knew himself now for what he was. How scornful he had been of these accusations, how certain of himself, how small in that great loyalty of his which stood for nothing, how ready to believe himself infallible! The merest profligate of those whose follies he had despised in other days, was no weaker, in the end, than he. He looked up blindly to where the stars winked faintly through the lace-like foliage, and cursed the distant roar of Paris which came dully to his ears. Paris—Circe! and he no better than the transformed comrades of Ulysses! He was a coward—a fraud—a sham; he found himself, in this moment of bitter self-reproach, untrue even to the flimsy conception of duty which, when it put him to the test, he had debauched. He thought of Mirabelle, and in thinking hated her! With all her beauty, all her perfect mimicry of breeding, all the little significant hints of colour and perfume with which she so skilfully clothed with charm whatever pertained to her, she had never struck below his ready appreciation of whatever was suggestive of refinement and eloquent of femininity. It was her novelty which had principally charmed him, but novelty is the butterfly of the sensations—the most brilliant, the shortest-lived of these emotional ephemera. Mrs. Carnby had struck the key-note in her cool analysis of the demi-monde: "These women don't wear. They seem to be only plated with fascination, and in time the plating wears off, and you come back to the kind with the hall-mark."
Now the scales fell from Andrew's eyes, and he knew that what she had said was true. Compared to Margery—the Margery he had loved and lost, what was this Mirabelle to whom he had yielded her place? Beautiful, yes! But the perception of beauty, like beauty's self, lies only skin-deep. Now, with Radwalader's suggestion that the way of retreat lay open, came the reaction, inevitable in such a nature as Andrew Vane's, from an emotion purely extrinsic. He was tired of her. The plating had worn off.