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The Mischief Maker, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book 2 - Chapter 14. Sanctuary |
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_ BOOK TWO CHAPTER XIV. SANCTUARY "This afternoon," Madame Christophor declared, looking thoughtfully at Julien, "I am going to send you a new secretary." He turned a little eagerly in his easy-chair. "Lady Anne!" he exclaimed. "Are you glad?" she asked. Julien hesitated. His eyes sought his companion's face. She was seated at the small writing-table drawn up close to his side, her head resting upon her left hand, the pen in her right fingers sketching idle figures at the bottom of the sheet which she had just written. She was wearing a dress of strange-colored muslin, a shade between gray and silver, but from underneath came a shimmer of blue, and there were turquoises about her neck. Her large, soft eyes were fixed steadfastly upon his. There was a sort of question in them which he seemed to have surprised there more than once during the last few days. A sudden uneasiness seized him. His brain was crowded with unwilling fancies. There were, without doubt, symptoms of coquetry in her appearance. He had spoken of blue as the one sublime color. As she leaned a little back in her chair, resting from her labors, he could scarcely help noticing the blue silk stockings and suede shoes which matched the hidden color of her skirt, the ribbon which gleamed from the dusky masses of her hair. Madame Christophor was always a very beautiful and a very elegant woman, and it seemed to have pleased her during these last few days to appear at her best. Julien gripped for a moment at his bandaged arm. "You are in pain? You would like me to change the bandage?" she suggested almost eagerly. "Not yet," he replied. "It is still quite comfortable." She looked at him thoughtfully. "You have the air of wanting something," she remarked. "Is there anything that displeases you?" "Displeases me! If you knew how strange that sounded!" he exclaimed. "I do not think that any one ever lived with such luxury, or was treated with so much kindness, as I during the last few days. You make every second perfect." Madame Christophor sighed. Almost as Julien finished his speech he regretted its conclusion. Madame Christophor, on the other hand, although she sighed, seemed vaguely content. "You see, the fates against whom you have so great a grievance have done something to atone," she declared. "No doubt you hated to leave your work to come and speak to me in the street that afternoon. No doubt your red-headed journalist friend hated me also. Yet if you had not come, if my automobile had been detained a few minutes on the way--ah! it is terrible indeed to think what might not have happened!" She shivered. A moment later she raised her eyes and continued. "I think," she said, "you must abandon a little of your hostility against my sex. It was a woman who worked this mischief in your life and a woman who was fortunate enough to save it. I think you can almost cry quits with us, Sir Julien." He smiled. He was struggling to lead back their conversation to a lighter level. A certain change in this woman's tone and manner, a change which was reflected even in her appearance, disturbed him painfully. "The balance is already on my side, dear hostess," he assured her. "You have left me an eternal debtor to your sex. I shall never again indulge in generalities or wholesale condemnation. It is, after all, foolish. But tell me why you are sending Lady Anne to help me to-day?" She watched for any trace of disappointment in his tone. There was none. On the contrary, his mention of Lady Anne was accompanied by a slight eagerness which puzzled her. "I have a few social duties to attend to," she explained a little vaguely. "Lady Anne is quite efficient. I like her handwriting, too. It is like herself--clean-cut, legible. There are no hidden pools about Lady Anne." "Yet," he said, "a woman always keeps some part of herself concealed." "You think that Lady Anne, too, has her secret?" Madame Christophor asked, raising her eyes. "I think that if she has, she is quite capable of keeping it," he replied. There was a knock at the door. Lady Anne entered. She came a few yards into the room with a slight smile upon her lips, and nodded pleasantly to Julien. In her slim stateliness, the untroubled serenity of youth reflected in her smiling face, she represented perfectly the other type of womanhood. Madame Christophor rose deliberately to her feet. For one swift moment she measured the things between them. She herself was conscious of a greater intellectual maturity, a more subtle quality in her looks, a beauty less describable, more exotic, perhaps, but also more provocative. The arts of her sex were at her finger-tips, the small arts disdained by this well-looking and perfectly healthy young woman. She turned her head quickly towards Sir Julien. It was the idle impulse of the man or woman who plucks the petals from a flower. Julien was gazing steadfastly at Lady Anne.... Madame Christophor picked up her belongings and moved towards the door. "Be merciless today, my friend!" she exclaimed, pausing upon the threshold,--"virulent, if you will! _Le Jour_ was screaming at you last night. Jesen has lost his head a little; or is it the lash of his master which he feels? How can one tell?" "After tonight," Julien remarked, with a smile, "who will read _Le Jour_? I shall tell the story of the purchase of that paper by Herr Freudenberg. French people will not love to think that the pen of Jesen has been guided by the hand of Germany." Madame Christophor made a little grimace. "My friend," she declared, "my house is, I believe, the safest spot in Paris, yet there are limits. Remember that you have become a celebrity. There is an agitation in England to have you back at the Foreign Office. All Paris is divided upon the subject of your life or death. And there are men here in the city who seek for you night and day with death in their hands. My house is sanctuary, but no one can write such things as you are writing and deem himself secure against any risk." He smiled at her confidently. "Yet you would not have me leave out one single line, you would not have me lower the torch for one second! You suggest caution!--you, who haven't the word 'fear' in your vocabulary! It is your house, not mine. There are more bombs to be bought in Paris. Yet tell me, would you have me spare a single word of the truth?" She flashed back her answer across the room. For the moment she forgot Lady Anne. They two were on another plane. "Not one word," she assured him, with soft yet vibrant earnestness. "I would have you write the truth in letters of fire upon the clouds, for all Paris to see. You have a message. See that it goes out." Madame Christophor closed the door softly behind her. Julien remained looking at the spot from which she had disappeared. Then he drew a little breath. "She is wonderful!" he muttered. Lady Anne took up her pen. She avoided looking at him. "Let us begin," she said.... They wrote for hours. Julien was in the mood for this final and fierce attack upon _Le Jour_ and all the powers that stood behind it. He held up Falkenberg to derision--the charlatan of modern politics, the Puck of Berlin, whose one sincerity was his hatred for England, and one capacity, the giant capacity for mischief! He wound up his article with a scathing and personal denunciation of Falkenberg, and a splendidly worded appeal to the French nation not for one moment to be deceived as to the character of this tireless and ambitious schemer after his country's welfare. All the time Anne took down his words in fluent and flowing writing. When at last he had finished, he looked at the sheets which surrounded her with something like amazement. "Why, what a pig I've been, Anne!" he exclaimed, glancing from the table to the clock. "You must have been writing for nearly three hours!" She was busy picking up the sheets. "Quite, I should say," she answered, "but I loved it. Now I am going to ring for tea, and afterwards you must read it through. We might get the manuscript down to the office to-night." "I shall need you when I read it through," he reminded her. "There will be corrections." "Either Madame Christophor or I will be here," she replied. "Madame Christophor may have some other work for me." He looked at her curiously. "Even you are different," he murmured. "Tell me at once what you mean?" she begged. "I wish I knew," he confessed. "To tell you the truth, Anne, a curious feeling of detachment seems to have come over me--during the last few days especially. It is such a short time since I was living the ordinary sort of mechanical life in London, engaged to be married to you, and my doings day by day all mapped out--a life interesting, of course, but without any real variation. And now here I am, hanging on to life by the thin edge of nothing, writing such things as I should never have dared to have said from my seat in the House, practically an adventurer. Do you wonder that sometimes I am not quite sure that it isn't all a nightmare? I am actually hiding here in Paris from assassins--in Paris, the most civilized city in the world--the guest of a woman whose acquaintance I made only because a little manicurist in Soho insisted upon it. And you, Anne, are here by my side, a professional secretary, the friend of a milliner, more intimate and on better terms with me than you were in the days when we were engaged to be married! What has happened to us, Anne? How did we get here?" She laughed at him tolerantly. "We've come a little into our own, I suppose," she remarked. "As for me, I feel a different woman since I stepped out of the made-to-order world. And you--well, don't be angry, but you're not nearly so much of a prig, are you, Julien? You're less starched and more human. Of course we are more companionable. We are both more human." He nodded. "I suppose that so far as I am concerned Kendricks had something to do with it--he was always trying to make me look at things differently. But it seems such a short time for such an absolute change." She was balancing her pen upon the inkpot--keeping her eyes turned from him. "It isn't always a matter of time, you know, Julien," she said thoughtfully. "You were never really a prig--I was never really a machine for wearing a ready-made smile and a few smart frocks. It took a shock to make us see things, but neither of us remained wilfully blind. You'll be back in your world before long and a better man than ever." "And you?" "I have hopes some day of becoming a perfect secretary," she confessed. "If I fail, I will at least make more bows than any one else in a day." He leaned towards her, showing a sudden and dangerous forgetfulness of his bandaged arm. "Anne," he said firmly, "if I go back, you go back. Sometimes I think that I shall never regret anything that has happened if--" The door was softly opened. It was Madame Christophor who entered with a little pile of letters in her hand. Lady Anne, with slightly heightened color, rose to her feet. There was something in Madame Christophor's eyes which was almost fiercely questioning. "I am not disturbing you, I trust?" she asked slowly. "I bring Sir Julien some letters." He caught up the sheets which lay by his side. "I will not even look at them until I have corrected my article," he declared. Madame Christophor settled herself composedly in an easy-chair. "Lady Anne shall read it aloud," she proposed calmly, "and I will assist in the corrections. For the French edition I may be able to suggest. The papers today are most amusing," she continued. "The German press is almost unreadable. No wonder that there is a price upon your head, my friend!" Julien moved restlessly in his place. "I have had the most extraordinary luck," he remarked. "No other man, naturally, knew so much of Anglo-German and Anglo-French relations. And instead of being at home in Downing Street, and muzzled, I happened to be here on the spot, to run up against Falkenberg, discover his little schemes, and with my own special knowledge to see through them at once. No one else ever had such an opportunity." Madame Christophor smiled enigmatically. She was looking thoughtfully across at her guest. "It is not every opportunity in life," she murmured, "which a man knows how to embrace!" _ |
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