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The Guest of Quesnay, a novel by Booth Tarkington |
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Chapter 17 |
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_ CHAPTER XVII Keredec was alone in his salon, extended at ease upon a long chair, an ottoman and a stool, when I burst in upon him; a portentous volume was in his lap, and a prolific pipe, smoking up from his great cloud of beard, gave the final reality to the likeness he thus presented of a range of hills ending in a volcano. But he rolled the book cavalierly to the floor, limbered up by sections to receive me, and offered me a hearty welcome. "Ha, my dear sir," he cried, "you take pity on the lonely Keredec; you make him a visit. I could not wish better for myself. We shall have a good smoke and a good talk." "You are improved to-day?" I asked, it may be a little slyly. "Improve?" he repeated inquiringly. "Your rheumatism, I mean." "Ha, yes; that rheumatism!" he shouted, and throwing back his head, rocked the room with sudden laughter. "Hew! But it is gone--almost! Oh, I am much better, and soon I shall be able to go in the woods again with my boy." He pushed a chair toward me. "Come, light your cigar; he will not return for an hour perhaps, and there is plenty of time for the smoke to blow away. So! It is better. Now we shall talk." "Yes," I said, "I wanted to talk with you." "That is a--what you call?--ha, yes, a coincidence," he returned, stretching himself again in the long chair, "a happy coincidence; for I have wished a talk with you; but you are away so early for all day, and in the evening Oliver, he is always here." "I think what I wanted to talk about concerns him particularly." "Yes?" The professor leaned forward, looking at me gravely. "That is another coincidence. But you shall speak first. Commence then." "I feel that you know me at least well enough," I began rather hesitatingly, "to be sure that I would not, for the world, make any effort to intrude in your affairs, or Mr. Saffren's, and that I would not force your confidence in the remotest--" "No, no, no!" he interrupted. "Please do not fear I shall misinterpretate whatever you will say. You are our friend. We know it." "Very well," I pursued; "then I speak with no fear of offending. When you first came to the inn I couldn't help seeing that you took a great many precautions for secrecy; and when you afterward explained these precautions to me on the ground that you feared somebody might think Mr. Saffren not quite sane, and that such an impression might injure him later--well, I could not help seeing that your explanation did not cover all the ground." "It is true--it did not." He ran his huge hand through the heavy white waves of his hair, and shook his head vigorously. "No; I knew it, my dear sir, I knew it well. But, what could I do? I would not have telled my own mother! This much I can say to you: we came here at a risk, but I thought that with great care it might be made little. And I thought a great good thing might be accomplish if we should come here, something so fine, so wonderful, that even if the danger had been great I would have risked it. I will tell you a little more: I think that great thing is BEING accomplish!" Here he rose to his feet excitedly and began to pace the room as he talked, the ancient floor shaking with his tread. "I think it is DONE! And ha! my dear sir, if it SHOULD be, this big Keredec will not have lived in vain! It was a great task I undertake with my young man, and the glory to see it finish is almost here. Even if the danger should come, the THING is done, for all that is real and has true meaning is inside the soul!" "It was in connection with the risk you have mentioned that I came to talk," I returned with some emphasis, for I was convinced of the reality of Mr. Earl Percy and also very certain that he had no existence inside or outside a soul. "I think it necessary that you should know--" But the professor was launched. I might as well have swept the rising tide with a broom. He talked with magnificent vehemence for twenty minutes, his theme being some theory of his own that the individuality of a soul is immortal, and that even in perfection, the soul cannot possibly merge into any Nirvana. Meantime, I wondered how Mr. Percy was employing his time, but after one or two ineffectual attempts to interrupt, I gave myself to silence until the oration should be concluded. "And so it is with my boy," he proclaimed, coming at last to the case in hand. "The spirit of him, the real Oliver Saffren, THAT has NEVER change! The outside of him, those thing that BELONG to him, like his memory, THEY have change, but not himself, for himself is eternal and unchangeable. I have taught him, yes; I have helped him get the small things we can add to our possession--a little knowledge, maybe, a little power of judgment. But, my dear sir, I tell you that such things are ONLY possessions of a man. They are not the MAN! All that a man IS or ever shall be, he is when he is a baby. So with Oliver; he had lived a little while, twenty-six years, perhaps, when pft--like that!--he became almost as a baby again. He could remember how to talk, but not much more. He had lost his belongings--they were gone from the lobe of the brain where he had stored them; but HE was not gone, no part of the real HIMSELF was lacking. Then presently they send him to me to make new his belongings, to restore his possessions. Ha, what a task! To take him with nothing in the world of his own and see that he get only GOOD possessions, GOOD knowledge, GOOD experience! I took him to the mountains of the Tyrol--two years--and there his body became strong and splendid while his brain was taking in the stores. It was quick, for his brain had retained some habits; it was not a baby's brain, and some small part of its old stores had not been lost. But if anything useless or bad remain, we empty it out--I and those mountain' with their pure air. Now, I say he is all good and the work was good; I am proud! But I wish to restore ALL that was good in his life; your Keredec is something of a poet.--You may put it: much the old fool! And for that greates' restoration of all I have brought my boy back to France; since it was necessary. It was a madness, and I thank the good God I was mad enough to do it. I cannot tell you yet, my dear sir: but you shall see, you shall see what the folly of that old Keredec has done! You shall see, you shall--and I promise it--what a Paradise, when the good God helps, an old fool's dream can make!" A half-light had broken upon me as he talked, pacing the floor, thundering his paean of triumph, his Titanic gestures bruising the harmless air. Only one explanation, incredible, but possible, sufficed. Anything was possible, I thought--anything was probable--with this dreamer whom the trump of Fame, executing a whimsical fantasia, proclaimed a man of science! "By the wildest chance," I gasped, "you don't mean that you wanted him to fall in love--" He had reached the other end of the room, but at this he whirled about on me, his laughter rolling out again, till it might have been heard at Pere Baudry's. "Ha, my dear sir, you have said it! But you knew it; you told him to come to me and tell me." "But I mean that you--unless I utterly misunderstand--you seem to imply that you had selected some one now in France whom you planned that he should care for--that you had selected the lady whom you know as Madame d'Armand." "Again," he shouted, "you have said it!" "Professor Keredec," I returned, with asperity, "I have no idea how you came to conceive such a preposterous scheme, but I agree heartily that the word for it is madness. In the first place, I must tell you that her name is not even d'Armand--" "My dear sir, I know. It was the mistake of that absurd Amedee. She is Mrs. Harman." "You knew it?" I cried, hopelessly confused. "But Oliver still speaks of her as Madame d'Armand." "He does not know. She has not told him." "But why haven't you told him?" "Ha, that is a story, a poem," he cried, beginning to pace the floor again--"a ballad as old as the oldest of Provence! There is a reason, my dear sir, which I cannot tell you, but it lies within the romance of what you agree is my madness. Some day, I hope, you shall understand and applaud! In the meantime--" "In the meantime," I said sharply, as he paused for breath, "there is a keen-faced young man who took a room in the inn this morning and who has come to spy upon you, I believe." "What is it you say?" He came to a sudden stop. I had not meant to deliver my information quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now, and I repeated the statement, giving him a terse account of my two encounters with the rattish youth, and adding: "He seemed to be certain that 'Oliver Saffren' is an assumed name, and he made a threatening reference to the laws of France." The effect upon Keredec was a very distinct pallor. He faced me silently until I had finished, then in a voice grown suddenly husky, asked: "Do you think he came back to the inn? Is he here now?" "I do not know." "We must learn; I must know that, at once." And he went to the door. "Let me go instead," I suggested. "It can't make little difference if he see me," said the professor, swallowing with difficulty and displaying, as he turned to me, a look of such profound anxiety that I was as sorry for him now as I had been irritated a few minutes earlier by his galliard air-castles. "I do not know this man, nor does he know me, but I have fear"--his beard moved as though his chin were trembling--"I have fear that I know his employers. Still, it may be better if you go. Bring somebody here that we can ask." "Shall I find Amedee?" "No, no, no! That babbler? Find Madame Brossard." I stepped out to the gallery, to discover Madame Brossard emerging from a door on the opposite side of the courtyard; Amedee, Glouglou, and a couple of carters deploying before her with some light trunks and bags, which they were carrying into the passage she had just quitted. I summoned her quietly; she came briskly up the steps and into the room, and I closed the door. "Madame Brossard," said the professor, "you have a new client to-day." "That monsieur who arrived this morning," I suggested. "He was an American," said the hostess, knitting her dark brows--"but I do not think that he was exactly a monsieur." "Bravo!" I murmured. "That sketches a likeness. It is this 'Percy' without a doubt." "That is it," she returned. "Monsieur Poissy is the name he gave." "Is he at the inn now?" "No, monsieur, but two friends for whom he engaged apartments have just arrived." "Who are they?" asked Keredec quickly. "It is a lady and a monsieur from Paris. But not married: they have taken separate apartments and she has a domestic with her, a negress, Algerian." "What are their names?" "It is not ten minutes that they are installed. They have not given me their names." "What is the lady's appearance?" "Monsieur the Professor," replied the hostess demurely, "she is not beautiful." "But what is she?" demanded Keredec impatiently; and it could be seen that he was striving to control a rising agitation. "Is she blonde? Is she brunette? Is she young? Is she old? Is she French, English, Spanish--" "I think," said Madame Brossard, "I think one would call her Spanish, but she is very fat, not young, and with a great deal too much rouge--" She stopped with an audible intake of breath, staring at my friend's white face. "Eh! it is bad news?" she cried. "And when one has been so ill--" Keredec checked her with an imperious gesture. "Monsieur Saffren and I leave at once," he said. "I shall meet him on the road; he will not return to the inn. We go to--to Trouville. See that no one knows that we have gone until to-morrow, if possible; I shall leave fees for the servants with you. Go now, prepare your bill, and bring it to me at once. I shall write you where to send our trunks. Quick! And you, my friend"--he turned to me as Madame Brossard, obviously distressed and frightened, but none the less intelligent for that, skurried away to do his bidding--"my friend, will you help us? For we need it!" "Anything in the world!" "Go to Pere Baudry's; have him put the least tired of his three horses to his lightest cart and wait in the road beyond the cottage. Stand in the road yourself while that is being done. Oliver will come that way; detain him. I will join you there; I have only to see to my papers--at the most, twenty minutes. Go quickly, my friend!" I strode to the door and out to the gallery. I was half-way down the steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren was already in the courtyard, coming toward me from the archway with a light and buoyant step. He looked up, waving his hat to me, his face lighted with a happiness most remarkable, and brighter, even, than the strong, midsummer sunshine flaming over him. Dressed in white as he was, and with the air of victory he wore, he might have been, at that moment, a figure from some marble triumph; youthful, conquering--crowned with the laurel. I had time only to glance at him, to "take" him, as it were, between two shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard flooded with sunshine, the figure of Madame Brossard emerging from her little office, Amedee coming from the kitchen bearing a white-covered tray, and, entering from the road, upon the trail of Saffren but still in the shadow of the archway, the discordant fineries and hatchet-face of the ex-pedestrian and tourist, my antagonist of the forest. I had opened my mouth to call a warning. "Hurry" was the word I would have said, but it stopped at "hur--." The second syllable was never uttered. There came a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a captured hen, and out of the passage across the courtyard floundered a woman, fantastically dressed in green and gold. Her coarse blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from which her gown hung precariously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double-chinned, coarse, greasy, smeared with blue pencillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge. At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly: "Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari--c'est moi! C'est ta femme, mon coeur!" She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical ferocity that was a very paroxysm of triumph. "Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried. Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, he flung her off with a violence surpassing her own, and with loathing unspeakable. She screamed that he was killing her, calling him "husband," and tried to fasten herself upon him again. But he leaped backward beyond the reach of her clutching hands, and, turning, plunged to the steps and staggered up them, the woman following. From above me leaned the stricken face of Keredec; he caught Saffren under the arm and half lifted him to the gallery, while she strove to hold him by the knees. "O Christ!" gasped Saffren. "Is THIS the woman?" The giant swung him across the gallery and into the open door with one great sweep of the arm, strode in after him, and closed and bolted the door. The woman fell in a heap at the foot of the steps, uttered a cracked simulation of the cry of a broken heart. "Name of a name of God!" she wailed. "After all these years! And my husband strikes me!" Then it was that what had been in my mind as a monstrous suspicion became a certainty. For I recognised the woman; she was Mariana--la bella Mariana la Mursiana. If I had ever known Larrabee Harman, if, instead of the two strange glimpses I had caught of him, I had been familiar with his gesture, walk, intonation--even, perhaps, if I had ever heard his voice--the truth might have come to me long ago. Larrabee Harman! "Oliver Saffren" was Larrabee Harman. _ |
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