In his tramp across the war zone, the vision of Joyce as she was when he first knew her, and dreamed of her, here in France, came back to him—her flower-like beauty, her grace, her elegance, her courage, her vitality. He wiped out all his quarrel with her. He believed, with increasing certainty, that after this separation, and his change in character—he felt that he had both changed and strengthened and become better balanced—a meeting between them would end in reconciliation and understanding.
He regretted his answers to her letters, so harsh and humourless. He would go to her in Paris, and say, “My dear, I want your love again. I have dedicated my life to love—and peace, which is the fruit of love. I am your faithful serving-man. What stands between our happiness together?”
At night, lying on a truckle bed in the “Fleur des Champs” or the “Estaminet des Poilus,” he yearned for Joyce with the home-sickness of a boy away in a cheerless school. Her physical presence seemed to be with him. He was aware sometimes of the perfume of her hair, he could almost feel the silky touch of those “bobbed” curls. He spoke her name, waking in the morning, in day-dreams, and saw her walking with bare feet across the grass that grew so green now over the battlefields.
Even his jealousy of Kenneth Murless abated, and died out, extinguished by this larger sense that had come to him. Kenneth had been her playmate as a child. His comradeship had been above suspicion, except in the mind of that other Bertram, with nerves on edge, and petty egotism all alarmed.
It was in this mood of exalted emotion that Bertram stepped out of the Gare du Nord and drove in a rattle-bone taxi down the dreary length of the rue Lafayette to the heart of Paris and the Hotel Meurice.
Bertram made his way through a group of Americans with a quickening pulse. His eyes roved about this entrance hall, expecting to see Joyce at once, waiting for his coming, as it were. It was one of the tall American girls who gave him a start and made him take a pace forward with the word “Joyce!” on his lips, though unuttered. She was a tall, slim girl, with glistening gold hair, in a cream-coloured French frock, such as Joyce would wear in a Paris June. She turned round to say a word to a friend, and he had a sense of disappointment.
At the desk he enquired for Lady Joyce Pollard, and as an afterthought, for the Countess of Ottery. The clerk glanced at him doubtfully—he was wearing an old grey suit and a soft hat—and then informed him that both ladies had left Paris the day before.
“Where have they gone?” asked Bertram.
He was profoundly disappointed now, and cursed himself for not having written or telegraphed from Amiens to announce his coming. His hopes had been so high and soaring about his meeting with Joyce that this check was intolerable.
The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smiled.