“Ah, Louis, you are welcome. Do not go yet,” to Pembroke.
Pembroke did not take the hint. He went immediately.
CHAPTER X.
The sudden pang which wrenched poor Mr. Cole’s heart when he heard that Madame Koller would soon leave the county, and the country as well, was vain suffering. For Madame Koller did not go. Old Madame Schmidt for the first time became restless. Ahlberg protested that he could not stay any longer. Pembroke had become entirely at ease about Ahlberg. Apparently Ahlberg was in no hurry to carry out that rash engagement to fight, which Pembroke regarded on his own part as a piece of consummate folly, and was heartily ashamed of. He did not feel the slightest apprehension that, if the truth got out, his personal courage would be suspected, because that had been tested during the war, but he was perfectly willing to let Ahlberg’s arm take as long to recover as it chose, and called himself a fool every time he thought about the roadside quarrel.
The ennui was nearly killing to Madame Koller, yet she stayed on under a variety of pretexts which deceived everybody, including herself.
She was not well adapted for solitude, yet most of the people about bored her. Mrs. Peyton, she considered as her bête noir, and quite hated to see the Peyton family carriage turning into the carriage drive before the door. But for her singing she would have died. But just as long as the wheezy old grand piano in the drawing-room would hold together, she would not be quite friendless. Pembroke had not been to see her since that afternoon when she had wept so. But she conveyed to him one day when she met him at Isleham, that he need not be afraid to come to see her. Man like, Pembroke could not resist this challenge, and went—and found Madame Koller received him more like an ordinary visitor than ever before. Consequently he went again. Another motive which impelled him was the talk that would arise in the county if he ceased going to The Beeches at all. Everybody would imagine there had been a breach, and if a breach, a former friendship.
Cave, one day, met Madame Koller at Isleham. When she told him of her loneliness he was stricken with pity for not having been to see her. Like Colonel Berkeley, he thought her presence in Virginia was explained by money troubles, and asked permission to visit her mother and herself, Madame Schmidt being invariably brought in by Madame Koller as if she were a real person instead of a mere breathing automaton. And so he went.
“What a strange, fascinating man is your friend Cave,” she said afterward to Pembroke upon one of his occasional formal visits, when their conversation was always upon perfectly safe and general subjects.
“I never discovered any strange fascination about him,” laughed Pembroke with masculine practicality.
“He lives in the woods. Yet he understands art better than any man I know.”