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The Guest of Quesnay, a novel by Booth Tarkington |
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Chapter 20 |
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_ CHAPTER XX It is impossible to say what Mariana would have done had there been no interference, for she had worked herself into one of those furies which women of her type can attain when they feel the occasion demands it, a paroxysm none the less dangerous because its foundation is histrionic. But Rameau threw his arms about her; Mr. Percy came hastily to his assistance, and Ward and I sprang in between her and the too-fearless lady she strove to reach. Even at that, the finger-nails of Mariana's right hand touched the pretty white hat--but only touched it and no more. Rameau and the little spy managed to get their vociferating burden across the courtyard and into her own door, where she suddenly subsided, disappearing within the passage to her apartment in unexpected silence-- indubitably a disappointment to the interested Amedee, to Glouglou, Francois, and the whole personnel of the inn, who hastened to group themselves about the door in attentive attitudes. "In heaven's name," gasped Miss Elizabeth, seizing her cousin by the arm, "come into the pavilion. Here's the whole world looking at us!" "Professor Keredec--" Mrs. Harman began, resisting, and turning to the professor appealingly. "Oh, let him come too!" said Miss Elizabeth desperately. "Nothing could be worse than this!" She led the way back to the pavilion, and, refusing to consider a proposal on the part of Mr. Ingle and myself to remain outside, entered the room last, herself, producing an effect of "shooing" the rest of us in; closed the door with surprising force, relapsed in a chair, and burst into tears. "Not a soul at Quesnay," sobbed the mortified chatelaine--"not one but will know this before dinner! They'll hear the whole thing within two hours." "Isn't there any way of stopping that, at least?" Ward said to me. "None on earth, unless you go home at once and turn your visitors and THEIR servants out of the house," I answered. "There is nothing they shouldn't know," said Mrs. Harman. George turned to her with a smile so bravely managed that I was proud of him. "Oh, yes, there is," he said. "We're going to get you out of all this." "All this?" she repeated. "All this MIRE!" he answered. "We're going to get you out of it and keep you out of it, now, for good. I don't know whether your revelation to the Spanish woman will make that easier or harder, but I do know that it makes the mire deeper." "For whom?" "For Harman. But you sha'n't share it!" Her anxious eyes grew wider. "How have I made it deeper for him? Wasn't it necessary that the poor woman should be told the truth?" "Professor Keredec seemed to think it important that she shouldn't." She turned to Keredec with a frightened gesture and an unintelligible word of appeal, as if entreating him to deny what George had said. The professor's beard was trembling; he looked haggard; an almost pitiable apprehension hung upon his eyelids; but he came forward manfully. "Madame," he said, "you could never in your life do anything that would make harm. You were right to speak, and I had short sight to fear, since it was the truth." "But why did you fear it?" "It was because--" he began, and hesitated. "I must know the reason," she urged. "I must know just what I've done." "It was because," he repeated, running a nervous hand through his beard, "because the knowledge would put us so utterly in this people's power. Already they demand more than we could give them; now they can--" "They can do what?" she asked tremulously. His eyes rested gently on her blanched and stricken face. "Nothing, my dear lady," he answered, swallowing painfully. "Nothing that will last. I am an old man. I have seen and I have--I have thought. And I tell you that only the real survives; evil actions are some phantoms that disappear. They must not trouble us." "That is a high plane," George intervened, and he spoke without sarcasm. "To put it roughly, these people have been asking more than the Harman estate is worth; that was on the strength of the woman's claim as a wife; but now they know she is not one, her position is immensely strengthened, for she has only to go before the nearest Commissaire de Police--" "Oh, no!" Mrs. Harman cried passionately. "I haven't done THAT! You mustn't tell me I have. You MUSTN'T!" "Never!" he answered. "There could not be a greater lie than to say you have done it. The responsibility is with the wretched and vicious boy who brought the catastrophe upon himself. But don't you see that you've got to keep out of it, that we've got to take you out of it?" "You can't! I'm part of it; better or worse, it's as much mine as his." "No, no!" cried Miss Elizabeth. "YOU mustn't tell us THAT!" Still weeping, she sprang up and threw her arms about her brother. "It's too horrible of you--" "It is what I must tell you," Mrs. Harman said. "My separation from my husband is over. I shall be with him now for--" "I won't listen to you!" Miss Elizabeth lifted her wet face from George's shoulder, and there was a note of deep anger in her voice. "You don't know what you're talking about; you haven't the faintest idea of what a hideous situation that creature has made for himself. Don't you know that that awful woman was right, and there are laws in France? When she finds she can't get out of him all she wants, do you think she's going to let him off? I suppose she struck you as being quite the sort who'd prove nobly magnanimous! Are you so blind you don't see exactly what's going to happen? She'll ask twice as much now as she did before; and the moment it's clear that she isn't going to get it, she'll call in an agent of police. She'll get her money in a separate suit and send him to prison to do it. The case against him is positive; there isn't a shadow of hope for him. You talk of being with him; don't you see how preposterous that is? Do you imagine they encourage family housekeeping in French prisons?" "Oh, come, this won't do!" The speaker was Cresson Ingle, who stepped forward, to my surprise; for he had been hovering in the background wearing an expression of thorough discomfort. "You're going much too far," he said, touching his betrothed upon the arm. "My dear Elizabeth, there is no use exaggerating; the case is unpleasant enough just as it is." "In what have I exaggerated?" she demanded. "Why, I KNEW Larrabee Harman," he returned. "I knew him fairly well. I went as far as Honolulu with him, when he and some of his heelers started round the world; and I remember that papers were served on him in San Francisco. Mrs. Harman had made her application; it was just before he sailed. About a year and a half or two years later I met him again, in Paris. He was in pretty bad shape; seemed hypnotised by this Mariana and afraid as death of her; she could go into a tantrum that would frighten him into anything. It was a joke--down along the line of the all-night dancers and cafes--that she was going to marry him; and some one told me afterward that she claimed to have brought it about. I suppose it's true; but there is no question of his having married her in good faith. He believed that the divorce had been granted; he'd offered no opposition to it whatever. He was travelling continually, and I don't think he knew much of what was going on, even right around him, most of the time. He began with cognac and absinthe in the morning, you know. For myself, I always supposed the suit had been carried through; so did people generally, I think. He'll probably have to stand trial, and of course he's technically guilty, but I don't believe he'd be convicted-- though I must say it would have been a most devilish good thing for him if he could have been got out of France before la Mursiana heard the truth. Then he could have made terms with her safely at a distance-- she'd have been powerless to injure him and would have precious soon come to time and been glad to take whatever he'd give her. NOW, I suppose, that's impossible, and they'll arrest him if he tries to budge. But this talk of prison and all that is nonsense, my dear Elizabeth!" "You admit there is a chance of it!" she retorted. "I've said all I had to say," returned Mr. Ingle with a dubious laugh. "And if you don't mind, I believe I'll wait for you outside, in the machine. I want to look at the gear-box." He paused, as if in deference to possible opposition, and, none being manifested, went hastily from the room with a sigh of relief, giving me, as he carefully closed the door, a glance of profound commiseration over his shoulder. Miss Elizabeth had taken her brother's hand, not with the effect of clinging for sympathy; nor had her throwing her arms about him produced that effect; one could as easily have imagined Brunhilda hiding her face in a man's coat-lapels. George's sister wept, not weakly: she was on the defensive, but not for herself. "Does the fact that he may possibly escape going to prison"--she addressed her cousin--"make his position less scandalous, or can it make the man himself less detestable?" Mrs. Harman looked at her steadily. There was a long and sorrowful pause. "Nothing is changed," she said finally; her eyes still fixed gravely on Miss Elizabeth's. At that, the other's face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked exclamation. "Oh," she cried--"you've fallen in love with playing the martyr; it's SELF-love! You SEE yourself in the role! No one on earth could make me believe you're in LOVE with this degraded imbecile--all that's left of the wreck of a vicious life! It isn't that! It's because you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on your knees and wash off the vileness from this befouled creature; you want--" "Madame!" Keredec interrupted tremendously, "you speak out of no knowledge!" He leaned toward her across the table, which shook under the weight of his arms. "There is no vileness; no one who is clean remains befouled because of the things that are gone." "They do not?" She laughed hysterically, and for my part, I sighed in despair--for there was no stopping him. "They do not, indeed! Do you know the relation of TIME to this little life of ours? We have only the present moment; your consciousness of that is your existence. Your knowledge of each present moment as it passes--and it passes so swiftly that each word I speak now overlaps it-- yet it is all we have. For all the rest, for what has gone by and what is yet coming--THAT has no real existence; it is all a dream. It is not ALIVE. It IS not! It IS--nothing! So the soul that stands clean and pure to-day IS clean and pure--and that is all there is to say about that soul!" "But a soul with evil tendencies," Ward began impatiently, "if one must meet you on your own ground--" "Ha! my dear sir, those evil tendencies would be in the soiling memories, and my boy is free from them." "He went toward all that was soiling before. Surely you can't pretend he may not take that direction again?" "That," returned the professor quickly, "is his to choose. If this lady can be with him now, he will choose right." "So!" cried Miss Elizabeth, "you offer her the role of a guide, do you? First she is to be his companion through a trial for bigamy in a French court, and, if he is acquitted, his nurse, teacher, and moral preceptor?" She turned swiftly to her cousin. "That's YOUR conception of a woman's mission?" "I haven't any mission," Mrs. Harman answered quietly. "I've never thought about missions; I only know I belong to him; that's all I EVER thought about it. I don't pretend to explain it, or make it seem reasonable. And when I met him again, here, it was--it was--it was proved to me." "Proved?" echoed Miss Elizabeth incredulously. "Yes; proved as certainly as the sun shining proves that it's day." "Will you tell us?" It was I who asked the question: I spoke involuntarily, but she did not seem to think it strange that I should ask. "Oh, when I first met him," she said tremulously, "I was frightened; but it was not he who frightened me--it was the rush of my own feeling. I did not know what I felt, but I thought I might die, and he was so like himself as I had first known him--but so changed, too; there was something so wonderful about him, something that must make any stranger feel sorry for him, and yet it is beautiful--" She stopped for a moment and wiped her eyes, then went on bravely: "And the next day he came, and waited for me--I should have come here for him if he hadn't--and I fell in with the mistake he had made about my name. You see, he'd heard I was called 'Madame d'Armand,' and I wanted him to keep on thinking that, for I thought if he knew I was Mrs. Harman he might find out--" She paused, her lip beginning to tremble. "Oh, don't you see why I didn't want him to know? I didn't want him to suffer as he would--as he does now, poor child!--but most of all I wanted--I wanted to see if he would fall in love with me again! I kept him from knowing, because, if he thought I was a stranger, and the same thing happened again--his caring for me, I mean--" She had begun to weep now, freely and openly, but not from grief. "Oh!" she cried, "don't you SEE how it's all proven to me?" "I see how it has deluded you!" said Miss Elizabeth vehemently. "I see what a rose-light it has thrown about this creature; but it won't last, thank God! any more than it did the other time. The thing is for you to come to your senses before--" "Ah, my dear, I have come to them at last and for ever!" The words rang full and strong, though she was white and shaking, and heavy tears filled her eyes. "I know what I am doing now, if I never knew before!" "You never did know--" Miss Ward began, but George stopped her. "Elizabeth!" he said quickly. "We mustn't go on like this; it's more than any of us can bear. Come, let's get out into the air; let's get back to Quesnay. We'll have Ingle drive us around the longer way, by the sea." He turned to his cousin. "Louise, you'll come now? If not, we'll have to stay here with you." "I'll come," she answered, trying bravely to stop the tears that kept rising in spite of her; "if you'll wait till"--and suddenly she flashed through them a smile so charming that my heart ached the harder for George--"till I can stop crying!" _ |
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