“Come away!” I gasped, and turned to move out. But the words stuck in my throat. My uncle had caught the delirium, and was cheering and bravoing like a maniac. “Glorious! Grand, by Jove! Encore! Splendid!” He was shouting like a madman, whirling his hat and stamping. His brown face was young again. I never beheld such a transformation in any human countenance.
“Are you mad, sir?” I shrieked into his ear, while I clutched his arm.
I suppose he was mad; I know he kept on the same frantic shouts and clappings for several minutes, not paying any more heed to me than to the floor he was so vigorously stamping. I was frightened at last. I thought anguish and shame for me had driven him out of his mind; so, taking him gently by the arm, I said I wanted to speak to him. He let me push him on before me, and we got out. He was still much excited, and neither of us spoke till we were in the open air.
“My dear boy,” he said suddenly, with a shamefaced look, “I couldn't help it for the life of me! By Jove, but it was the grandest thing I ever heard in my life. The house reeled round you. I would stake my head there wasn't a sane man in it but yourself!”
I laughed bitterly. The irony of the words was dreadful. “Sane?” I cried. “You think I was sane? I thank heaven I behaved like a sane man; but if I had been within reach of that ruffian's throat, I'd have dashed his brains out as ruthlessly as any escaped maniac from Bedlam. I would do it now, if I had him!”
My uncle stopped and looked at me. He was thoroughly sobered, and I could see that he was terrified. He told me long afterwards that he never could have believed passion could transfigure a face as it did mine; he said I had murder written in my eyes as plainly as ever it was written on a printed page. And I believe him. I felt I could have committed murder at that moment. I would have killed that man, if I had held him, if the gallows had been there to hang me the next hour. I have never felt the same towards murderers since that moment. It was an awful revelation to me of the hidden springs of crime that may lie deep down in a man's heart, and never be suspected even by himself, until the touch that can wake them into deadly life has come. I can never think of that evening without an humbling sense of my own innate wickedness, of the benign mercy that overruled that frightful impulse. Given the immediate opportunity and the absence of the supreme, supervening goodness that stood between me and myself, and I should have been a murderer. The gulf that separates each one of us from crime is narrower than we imagine. The discovery of this truth is humbling, but perhaps none the less salutary for that.
“Come along, Clide; come along with me,” my uncle said in the soothing tone one uses to a fractious child. “It's all my fault. I ought to have known better than to let you go there at all; I ought to have gone by myself. I'm no better than a blubbering old idiot to you, my boy.”
I went with him passively; we walked to our lodgings without speaking. I shall never forget the kindness of my uncle all through that night. He was as patient and as gentle with me as a woman, bearing with me as tenderly as a mother could have done. I could not rest, and I would not let him rest. I called for café noir, and I kept drinking cup after cup of it until, added to the stronger stimulant that was setting my blood on fire, I almost worked myself into a brain fever, bursting out into paroxysms of childish rebellion, and then lapsing into fits of dumb despair. I had first insisted on rushing off to the hotel and lying in wait for Isabel, and compelling her there and then either to return to me or to part from me for ever; but my uncle was inexorable in opposing this, and I knew by his tone that he was not to be trifled with. There was a something about him in certain moods that made resistance to his will as impossible as wrestling with an elephant. I gave in, and allowed him to give his reasons for preventing my taking a step which, result how it might, was sure to be a most humiliating one for me; not only or chiefly as a husband, but as a De Winton. My uncle's anxiety lest the old name should suffer by the event threw his sympathy for my individual sorrow comparatively into the shade. While my wife's flight was known only to my immediate household, my step-mother—whose pride and touchiness about the honor of a De Winton was almost as morbid as his own—and the three tried friends of my dear father's youth, it was just possible that it might remain a secret beyond that small circle, and he clung to this hope as tenaciously as I did to the hope of recovering my wife. The De Wintons were a proud race, and justly so. We had nobler things to be proud of than the primary one of ancient, and I may venture to say illustrious, lineage: we could boast with truth that there was no bar sinister on the old escutcheon; [pg 755] our men had never known cowardice, nor our women shame; no maiden of our house had dishonored a father's white hairs, or wife brought a blot upon her husband's name. I was the last of our line so far, and the thought that it should die out under a cloud of shame with me was bitter with the bitterness of death to the admiral; for he was at heart as proud as a Plantagenet, with all his free and easy talk, and his jovial, jolly-tar manner to everybody, especially to his inferiors. Noblesse oblige was engraven on the inmost core of his honest heart; and he could not conceive a De Winton feeling less acutely on the point than he did himself. He had never been married; this partially accounted, perhaps, for his inability to merge the De Winton in the husband. It is possible that, if I had never been married, I should have comprehended his stern abstract view of the case, and have felt with him that the husband's misery was as nothing compared to the blow dealt at the pride of a De Winton. As it was, I could not feel this. I could have seen the whole clan of the De Wintons and their escutcheon in the bottom of the Red Sea, if I could have rescued myself from the anguish of renouncing for ever the young wife who had so cruelly charmed and blighted my life. I was driven to make this unworthy avowal on my uncle's suggesting that, assuming it were still possible for me to forgive her, she might lay it down as a condition of our reunion that she was to pursue her career on the stage. He merely threw out the idea as a wild notion that crossed his thoughts for a moment; but when I hinted at the possibility of yielding to this painful and humiliating condition rather than renounce Isabel for ever, he flew into such a frenzy of indignation that to calm him I believe I was cowardly enough to swallow my words, and declare that they had not been spoken in earnest. It was some time, however, before he subsided from the agitation they caused him. The idea of alluding, even in jest, to the possibility of a play-actress flaunting our name upon the boards of the theatre was too dreadful to be contemplated without unmitigated horror. If I let her go her mad career alone, the chances were that this disgrace would be spared us. Isabel had proved clearly enough so far that she desired secrecy to the full as much as we did; but if she continued on the stage as my wife, secrecy became impossible. She might play under the assumed name she now bore, but the true one would soon be blazoned abroad, do what we all might to conceal it. The managers who speculated on her voice would be quick to discover it, and make capital out of it. The admiral was so strong in his denunciation of the madness of the whole thing that he convinced me he was right. This little incident left him more than ever determined to keep me as much as possible in the background, and I so far acknowledged the wisdom of his views as to consent to let him go by himself to try and see Isabel in the morning.
It proved a fruitless mission. The concierge said that the signorina had not left her room yet; but the servant, in answer to my uncle's ring at her door, informed him that she had gone out for an early drive—it was not eight o'clock—and that she would not be in until dinner-hour. Would monsieur take the trouble to call later? Monsieur said he would, and he did; but he was then informed that the signorina had taken a chill in her drive, and had gone to bed. My uncle came home in great wrath; he believed no more in the chill than [pg 756] he had believed in the drive, and he was for writing there and then to Isabel, telling her so, and demanding an interview without more ado, using firm language and hinting at sterner measures if she refused. I entreated him not to do this. I don't know whether in the bottom of my heart I believed the servant's story, but I persuaded myself and then him that I did; that it was only natural that a tender, delicate-fibred creature like her should have been done up after the excitement of last evening; and that we had better leave her in peace for a day. He pooh-poohed this contemptuously: the excitement was just what she liked in the business; it was what play-actors, men and women, all alike lived on. He humored me, however, and consented to put off the letter till the next day. Meantime, something might turn up. I might meet her uncle myself, and button-hole the scoundrel on the spot. He must walk out some time or other, and I was determined to be on the watch. I paced up and down before the hotel for three weary hours, glancing up continually at the windows. I knew from my uncle what floor Isabel occupied. Once I fancied I caught sight of the fellow's face looking out for a moment, and then hurriedly withdrawn. Was it only fancy, or had he really seen me, and drawn back to escape my seeing him? I lounged into the coffee-room, and adroitly elicited from one of the waiters that the signorina was keeping very quiet, so as to avoid any disappointment for the forthcoming representation; she was to sing again in two nights, and no one was to be admitted to see her in the interval. Orders to this effect had been given to the concierge, who was to deny all visitors on the plea of the signorina's state of nervous debility, which made the slightest excitement off the stage fatal to her. When I repeated this to the admiral, he set his brown face in a scowl, and we very nearly quarrelled outright before he again yielded to my resistance, and agreed to wait two days more, and see whether she kept her engagement for the next performance. On the morning of the second day we both went out together to the baths. As we were passing through the Etablissement gardens, a young man came up to a group of people walking ahead of us, and gave some news that provoked sudden surprise, apparently of no pleasant nature; for we heard the words, “Abominable sell!” “What an extraordinary affair!” repeated with angry emphasis. We had not heard a word of what the young man had said, but the broken comments that reached us seemed, as if by some magnetic influence, to inform us of their meaning. The admiral, in his off-hand, sailor way, walked up to the party, and asked if any accident had happened on the coast. “Oh! no; no accident,” the bearer of the news said, “but a most disagreeable thing for everybody. Graziella has bolted, no one knows when or how; her rooms were found vacant an hour ago, and there was not a trace of her or the fellow who was with her. The Hôtel Royal was in a tremendous commotion about it; the landlord had been down to the station and to the quay, but there was no trace of them at either place. The landlord believed they had eloped during the night, by some highway or by-way, so as to avoid detection; but why or wherefore was the mystery. They had paid their bill. It was a horrible sell, for the little creature was the trump-card of the season—a second Malibran.”
I knew as well as if I had followed my uncle, and heard the intelligence [pg 757] with my own ears, what he had to tell me when he turned back, and came up to me, intending to break it gently. It seemed utterly useless after this to go to the hotel with the hope of gaining further particulars, but I urged at the same time that it was possible the landlord himself might be a party to the affair, and that, if he had been bought over to hold his tongue, he might be bought to loosen it. I could not count on the necessary command over myself to speak or to listen to others speaking of the event at this stage, so I yielded to my uncle's wish, and went home; he accompanied me to the door, for he judged by my looks that I was not fit to be left to go back alone. He then started off to the Rue Aguado. He found the place in an uproar about the flight, but no one could throw a particle of light on the time, the manner, or the motive of it. The concierge remembered seeing a lady, small and slight, and with a very elastic step, walk rapidly out of the house late on the previous evening, dressed in the deepest mourning, with a widow's crape veil, and holding her handkerchief to her eyes, as if crying bitterly; he had remarked her at the time, and thought she had been visiting some one in the hotel, and that she was in fresh mourning for her husband, poor thing! Everybody agreed that this must have been La Graziella in disguise. But beyond this not the smallest clew was found that could direct the pursuit of the fugitives. Their luggage had been carried off as mysteriously as themselves; no one had seen it removed. This induced the suspicion that they must have had an accomplice on the premises. The landlord, however, had a precedent to fall back on—a swindler who had lived at his expense for three weeks, and then decamped one fine morning, bag and baggage, having carried them all off himself, disguised as a porter, while several travellers were under way in the courtyard with their separate lots of luggage, and porters were hurrying in and out with them.