The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

"Just now you kissed me, thinking of another woman!" exclaimed Mirabelle. "Did you suppose I didn't know? Why, I've loved you—that's how I knew! Do you realize what all this meant? You could have made me good again. I would have left all this—forgotten it—blotted it out! I could have gone away quietly into the country, and lived my life out, without a regret. I could almost have been content never to see you again—never to hear from you, if I could have remembered—what once was true—that you respected me! Forgive what I said just now. It was coarse—unworthy of all that has been. But you don't understand. I wish I'd not said what I did; and yet, at times, I feel that way—I mean, as if it were all the same—at the Moulin Rouge or here—they for an hour, I for a month, but each flung away presently, like the dregs of wine. I've laughed at the knowledge that that is how it is; always laughed—until the shadow of the thought fell on you!"

She slid her cool fingers into the hand he started to raise in protest, and held it close against her cheek.

"Then it maddened me. You see, everything has been different with you from what it was with the others. I'd never have believed that I could care for any man as I have for you—and perhaps I shouldn't have cared for you as I have, if you'd come into my life in any other way. But you asked to be presented to me, and waited for Radwalader to get my permission; you talked to me as to a young girl of your own monde; and if at first I didn't understand what that meant, I soon saw that it was because you didn't know! Is it any wonder that I came to love you?—you who alone of all men yielded me the exquisite homage of respect? I dreaded the moment when the change must come—when that deference which intoxicated me like a new wine should be touched with a growing spirit of license, which from you would have been intolerable! From day to day I watched you, but even when I knew that you suspected what I was, my eyes—mon Dieu, how keen they were!—could see no change in you—and that was the greatest surprise of all. And when, in that moment of madness, I as much as told you, and you were gentle with me, what had been love for your treatment of me became, all at once, love for just—you!"

With an almost imperceptible pressure she drew him closer to her. As she went on speaking, her fingers touched his temples and his hair in a succession of tiny, soft caresses which were like the embryos of spoken endearments.

"Mon bien aimé! Never will you be able to comprehend what you thus came to mean to me. I have always been vain, lazy, passionately desirous of all that is softest, sweetest, most palatable in life; and these things I have had—but at what a price! Then you came, and with you a flash of hope! I made myself believe, I don't know what! Marriage? Yes, there was even that in my mind; and there was, as well, the idea of going away, as I've said, into the country, and letting the four winds and the sunlight of heaven wash and wash and wash me, through all the years of my life, until I should go out of this world as white as I came in! Ah! I don't know what it was, that little flash of hope, except that it seemed to say that escape was possible, and it was to your hand I clung, seeking the outlet. But that was only for one night—for just that one night! With the next day, with all the sights and sounds to which I am accustomed—the Allée at noon, Armenonville at tea-time, Paillard's at midnight—I saw what the end must be; and, since then, I've watched, as only a woman watches, for that first little hint of its coming which only a woman sees! Ah, mon cheri, it has come, it has come indeed! For a moment I cried out in my agony against the fate which is separating us. You must forgive me that. Six weeks—a little slice of spring—and already you are tired of me. Mon amour—mon amour!"

Andrew turned, and, with his forehead on her knees and his lips against her fingers, battled silently against the swelling in his throat and the hot moisture stinging his inner lids. In the warm, perfume-laden silence, both the man and the girl went back in thought to their individual as well as their associated past. For the end of each successive stage of life has this in common with the concluding moments of the whole: as with a drowning person, all preceding incidents and emotions start up in orderly array, intensified and in their proper light.

So Andrew, reviewing the past three weeks, was prey to a passionate regret. In this there was censure, not so much of his own weakness, as of the test which had laid it bare. In youth, reaction carries with a merciless arraignment of all which has made possible disloyalty to standard; with age, men learn to blame themselves, their own folly and frailty. In his heart of hearts, Andrew impugned the girl; and when, under the impetus of her resentment, she had voiced that scathing sneer, he had almost welcomed it, as an excuse for the course he was determined to pursue. For an instant, pity and regret were swallowed up in a profound sense of indignity. In its essentials, her speech seemed no better than a touch of the brutal vulgarity which, with deliberation, he had avoided all his life. It had that very element of the sordid which had held him aloof from the student excursions from Cambridge into Boston—excursions so apt to end in brawls, drunken clamour, tears, and maudlin reconciliations. It was of a piece with a dispute over the finish of a game of cards, with the recriminations of an aggrieved supper companion, with the abuse of an exasperated bartender. It cut him to the quick, and, for the moment, seemed to place Mirabelle on a level with the women with whom she desperately classed herself. "It is like the Moulin!" As she said the words, it was as if the wand of a harlequin had touched the scene. The faint perfume of the Gloire de Dijon roses which he himself had sent her turned suddenly to the stale smell of the tobacco smoke which hung densely over the dancers in the Red Mill of Montmartre; and Mirabelle herself, with her angry eyes, was at one with the painted, powdered, and bedizened monstrosity whom Radwalader had snubbed one evening as she paused at the table where he and Andrew were sampling an atrocious liqueur and watching an unlovely quadrille. But the impression passed as it had come. She was herself again, supremely beautiful, and supremely appealing in her avowal of devotion; and the element of romance which, in his mind, had always characterized their relation was intensified rather than diminished by this touch of tragedy.

Mirabelle rose suddenly, looking down upon him.

"I understand," she said; "but there is one thing I would like to ask you. This other woman—do you love her? Will all this procure you what you want?"

"I don't know," faltered Andrew. "Perhaps not."