Jason: A Romance

by Justus Miles Forman

She stood at the head of the stairs while he went down them. And she came after him to the landing, half-way, where the stairs turned in the opposite direction for their lower flight. When he went out of the front door he looked back, and she was standing there above him, a straight, still figure, dark against the light of the windows behind her.

He went straight to the rue d'Assas. He found that while he sat still in the comfortable tonneau of the motor his head was fairly normal, and the world did not swing and whirl about in that sickening fashion. But when the car lurched or bumped over an obstruction it made him giddy, and he would have fallen had he been standing.

The familiar streets of the Montparnasse and Luxembourg quarters had for his eyes all the charm and delight of home things to the returned traveller. He felt as if he had been away for months, and he caught himself looking for changes, and it made him laugh. He was much relieved when he found that his concierge was not on watch, and that he could slip unobserved up the stairs and into his rooms. The rooms were fresh and clean, for they had been aired and tended daily.

Arrived there, he wrote a little note to a friend of his who was a doctor and lived in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, asking this man to call as soon as it might be convenient. He sent the note by the chauffeur and then lay down, dressed as he was, to wait, for he could not stand or move about without a painful dizziness. The doctor came within a half-hour, examined Ste. Marie's bruised head, and bound it up. He gave him a dose of something with a vile taste which he said would take away the worst of the pain in a few hours, and he also gave him a sleeping-potion, and made him go to bed.

"You'll be fairly fit by evening," he said. "But don't stir until then. I'll leave word below that you're not to be disturbed."

So it happened that when Richard Hartley came dashing up an hour or two later he was not allowed to see his friend, and Ste. Marie slept a dreamless sleep until dark.

He awoke then, refreshed but ravenous with hunger, and found that there was only a dull ache in his battered head. The dizziness and the vertigo were almost completely gone. He made lights and dressed with care. He felt like a little girl making ready for a party, it was so long--or seemed so long;--since he had put on evening clothes. Then he went out, leaving at the loge of the concierge a note for Hartley, to say where he might be found. He went to Lavenue's and dined in solitary pomp, for it was after nine o'clock. Again it seemed to him that it was months since he had done the like--sat down to a real table for a real dinner. At ten he got into a fiacre and drove to the rue de l'Université.

The man who admitted him said that Mademoiselle was alone in the drawing-room, and he went there at once. He was dully conscious that something was very wrong, but he had suffered too much within the past few hours to be analytical, and he did not know what it was that was wrong. He should have entered that room with a swift and eager step, with shining eyes, with a high-beating heart. He went into it slowly, wrapped in a mantle of strange apathy.

Helen Benham came forward to meet him, and took both his hands in hers. Ste. Marie was amazed to see that she seemed not to have altered at all--in spite of this enormous lapse of time, in spite of all that had happened in it. And yet, unaltered, she seemed to him a stranger, a charming and gracious stranger with an icily beautiful face. He wondered at her and at himself, and he was a little alarmed because he thought that he must be ill. That blow upon the head must, after all, have done something terrible to him.

"Ah, Ste. Marie!" she said, in her well-remembered voice--and again he wondered that the voice should be so high-pitched and so without color or feeling. "How glad I am," she said, "that you are safely out of it all! How you have suffered for us, Ste. Marie! You look white and ill. Sit down, please! Don't stand!"