Gloria Mundi

by Harold Frederic

Some latent strain of temerity amazed the young man by rising to the surface of his mind, under the provocation of this rebuff, and shaping his purpose for him.

“It is only fair to myself, first, however,” he with surprise heard himself declaring, “that I should finish my explanation. You can satisfy yourself readily at Dieppe that your ticket is for only one seat. It is very, easy to make errors of that kind when one does not—that is to say, is not—well, entirely familiar with the language of the country. As to my own part, you will remember that I came only at the last moment. I took my coupé seat a half hour before, because I also wished to be alone, and then I went out to see Jeanne d’Arc’s tower again, and I was nearly too late. If there had been time, I would have found a seat elsewhere—but you yourself saw—”

“Really, I think no more need be said,” broke in his companion. She looked him frankly, coldly in the face as she spoke, and her words seemed in his ears to have metallic edges. “It is plain enough that there was a mistake. As you have suggested, my French is very faulty indeed, and no doubt the misunderstanding is entirely my own. So, since it is unavoidable, there surely need be no more words about it.”

She opened a book at this, put her feet out to the stool in front and ostentatiously disposed herself for deep abstraction in literature.

The young man in turn got out some pamphlets and papers from the pockets of his great-coat, and pretended to divide his attention between these and the scenery outside. In truth, he did not for a moment get the face of this girl out of his thoughts. More than ever now, since she had looked him fully in the eye, it was not a face to be pictured in the brain as other faces of women had been. The luminous substance of the individuality behind the face shone out at him from the pages he stared at, and from the passing vistas of lowland meadows, streams and mill-towns that met his gaze through the window.

He knew so little of women that his mind was quite devoid of materials for any comparative analysis of the effect she produced upon him. He evolved for himself, indeed, the conviction that really this was the first woman, in the genuine and higher meaning of the word, that he had ever met. The recognition of this brought with it an excitement as novel to him as the fact itself. Before ever he had seen her, clinging to the coupé door with her gloved hands and so bravely doing hopeless and tongue-tied battle with the guard, there had been things which had made this the greatest day of his life. He was in truth finishing the last stage of a journey into the unknown, the strange possibilities of which had for a week kept his nerves on the rack. The curtain of only one more night hung now between him and the revealed lineaments of destiny. To be alone with his perturbed thoughts, on this culminating day of anxious hopes and dreads, had been his controlling idea at Rouen. It was for this that he had bought the coupé seat, upon the rumor of the station that solitude was thus to be commanded. And now how extraordinary was the chance!

There had stepped into this eventful day, as from the clouds, a stranger whose mysterious appeal to his imagination seemed more remarkable than all else combined.

He worked this out, painstakingly, with little sidelong glances from time to time toward where she sat buried in her book, to check the progression of his reasoning. When he reached the conclusion that she was really playing this predominant part in the drama of the day, its suggestion of hysterical folly rather frightened him. He looked with earnestness out of the window, and even be gan to count the chimneys of the landscape as an overture to returning sanity. Then he looked less furtively at her and said to himself with labored plausibility that she was but an ordinary traveling Englishwoman, scarcely to be differentiated from the Cook’s-tourist type that he knew so well; she had not even a governess’ knowledge of French, and there had been nothing in her words and tone with him to indicate either mental distinction or kindliness of temper. Why should he bestow so much as another thought upon her? He squared his slender shoulders, and turned with resolution to his book.

A minute later the impossibility of the situation had mastered every fiber of his brain. He put down the volume, feeling himself to be a fool for doing so, yet suffering himself with an unheard-of gladness.

“If I anger you, I shall be much pained,” he said, with a set face turned not quite toward her, and a voice that he kept from breaking by constant effort, “but I am going to England for the first time, and there are some things that I am very anxious to ask about.”