Chapter XI

[Henry Gastonard informs Paddy O’Connell of his probable return to London.]

July 21st, 1905.

Dear Paddy,--I have received your letter dated July 18th, but I cannot say that I have hastened to reply to it. This is very fit and proper, for who would dare to reply in haste to a document which contains so formidable an indictment.

I am going to the devil, you say, and going, in motor parlance, upon my fourth speed. The writing is upon the wall, but I have no eyes to read it. A few brief months shall roll and then my inheritance pass to the amiable parson at Beldon, and I become a beggar upon the streets--or in the poorhouse, as the case may be. So be it, my dear Paddy--for what is written is written, nor shall all the tears blot out a single line.

Consider the irony of it. I am to earn five hundred pounds a year by my own labours. The fortune bequeathed to me by my dear father is not to help that undertaking. Useless for me to go into the city, to choose a Hebrew at hazard and to say to him, pay me five hundred per annum and I will lend you twenty thousand. The Will forbids the trick. The money must be earned by me, by my own labour and industry, or my cousin must have my fortune. Poor devil, he wants it badly. I have not the heart to begrudge him a single penny of it.

But, Paddy, imagine your friend Henry Gastonard upon an office stool or seeking half commissions in the purlieus of Throgmorton-street! Of talents I have none. I could not earn a shilling by writing for the newspapers, or persuade even an enthusiastic friend to set up a bust of mine in any hall or cellar in Europe. The world has been to me a pleasant place. I have drunk of the fountains of Bimini and quaffed draughts of perpetual youth. To dress and drive, to dine, to dance, to sing, to sleep--behold my curriculum! I can no more imagine life without its music, its laughter, its love than I can depict the Châtelet without its Zulema or the Athénée robbed of the art of Mademoiselle Yalone. If I have lived in Paris among the Bohemians, it is because they stand to me for the fullest impersonation of the _joie de vivre_. I may sink to poverty, pass into the shadows of obscurity--but to the degradation of the servile state, never, dear Paddy, upon my honour.

So your letter leaves behind it but the gratitude of a man who bends to the truth but is obstinate to the fact. I am answering it by a confession--and one which will not be very welcome to you. Yesterday I saw our old friend Lea d’Alençon again and spent many hours in her company. She is to be divorced, I understand, and Paris amused by a pretty scandal. You know how little this concerns me. You will be very sure that my meeting with her was accidental and that I forbore to seek her out of my own volition--even as I promised you.

Let me say that it began with a wild dinner given at Charine’s by that mad voluptuary, Willy Martin, the American. I accepted his invitation because Paris has bored me very much since Mimi went away, and there are not enough decent people left in the whole city to keep a reasonable man from suicide.

We dined in a room set out to represent a cabin in the mountains. There were back cloths of perpetual snow and cooling glaciers, distant views of mountain peaks and wonderful pictures of impossible valleys. The table was supposed to be a bank of the driven snow, above which a cascade suspended its frozen waters. For partners of the feast, there were handmaidens in dominoes--beautiful of course, because Willy Martin declared them to be so. When I drew a paper from the basin and discovered that my particular lot was to be cast with a green domino of some magnificence, then I thought of St. Patrick and of you and declared myself in luck. Alas, Paddy, I had not been two minutes at the table when, despite her domino and a most excellent disguise, I discovered that I had the amorous Lea for a companion and that the drawing was entirely to her satisfaction.

It is some weeks, as you know, since I have seen this adorable creature. To judge by her conversation, she has been on the verge of a decline because of my neglect. Almost her first words destroyed that fond illusion of her poverty which helped her to win my sympathies when she visited me at Poissy.

I no longer believe her story that d’Alençon left her without a shilling, although it would appear to be true that his patience is exhausted and that he is about to take a quite unusual step for a Frenchman, and to divorce her. This, if the tongue of gossip has not done her an injury (which is possible), he appears to have the right to do; and yet it is delightful to hear her protesting her innocence and declaring that all her fault is a love of the light and a positive aversion from social darkness.

“I shall go and live in the East,” she said to me in a languorous outburst, when the dinner was still young. “I must have sunshine and music, Harry--all the sober things are hateful to me; I could never be an obedient wife to any man. Of course, I am sorry for my husband. It is the privilege of a woman to be sorry for the man she cannot love. He married me--I did not marry him. What child in a convent ever marries any man, or is to be held responsible for the womanhood which comes to her afterwards. Marriage to me was a release from routine and the lives of the Saints. I had learned to hate the Saints; I would have kissed the feet of any man who closed that dreadful book to me. And all the world was opening to my eyes, the great world, immense to the childish imagination as the heavens, and as full of golden stars. Do you wonder that I leaped for joy when they told me I was to be married.”

I had never heard Lea serious before; but I do believe she was serious upon this occasion. My promise that if she went to the East she would hear little even of the “tom-tom” in a harem, and find the prophet’s limitations trying did not move her a hair’s-breadth. Had she not seen “The Belle of Teheran” as they staged it at the Bouffes, and did not that glittering spectacle of sequins and seraphs stand to her for the whole glory of the Asiatic world?

“You would be one of four, Lea,” I said to her, “an adorable quarter of a gloomy _ménage_. It is true that you would be permitted to sleep upon cushions, and to wash your hands in a fountain, but, my dear lady, consider the _dernier cri_ in turbans, and reflect. There is no glamour of the East except in the West. Go to the Bouffes when the floats are dark, and see what the scenery looks like. Does it remind you of anything on earth which is not the apotheosis of the mean and the shabby. To me the East stands for a kind of opera comique, which is to be suffered only by those who view it from afar. I like to read of pashas and pagodas, of temple bells and little Burmese maidens; but when I am among them I think of the fleas. You, Lea, would be calling for sweet scents and a passage home before you had been in the place twenty-four hours. As for the aged Vizier who owned you, I doubt if he would have a whisker left in a week. My compassion would go out to him.”

Well, Paddy, she refused to see it, and I perceived that for the moment some wild scheme of romance is in her head, and may lead her to new extravagances sufficiently wild and sufficiently foolish to astonish this Paris which loves the bizarre and the daring. She is not without rich relatives, and, as she told me to-night, there is an uncle at Marseilles who is always ready to befriend her. Men are sometimes very gentle toward a woman whose chief enemy is her own beauty. Lea will find defenders, whatever may be charged against her; and it would not astonish me in the least to hear that she had become a queen of the colony at Cairo or a novice among the Benedictine nuns at Subiacum. Nothing, indeed, would be too outrageous for the changing dispositions of a woman who has drunk of the cup of satiety, and already has found it bitter.

Willy Martin’s dinner came to an end, I should tell you, in a blaze of glory, which nearly set the restaurant on fire. A nymph, supposed to be imprisoned in the ice, but really shut up in a glass case, danced a wild _pas seul_ upon the table, and overturned the candlesticks into the lap of little Jane Merlot, from the Opera Comique. When her robe caught fire--and she could ill spare it--the soda water was employed to extinguish the flames--a bright idea, and one which set this rollicking company to other notions not less brilliant. From this moment, a battle of the corks took the place of that polite talk so dear to our forefathers.

I found myself at five o’clock of the morning upon the road to Versailles in a forty-horse car driven by Lecallo, of the Opera. Lea, in a green domino, soaked to the hems in aerated waters, was at my side, and heaven alone knew whither we were going! As for Lecallo, he drove like the devil possessed; and before I had quite realised the absurdity of the venture, we stood at the door of the Hôtel de France, at Chartres, and a pretty crowd of early birds were cheering us to the echo.

Such, my dear Paddy, was the first stage of an adventure as ludicrous as it was lamentable. I give you my word that I would have paid a hundred sovereigns at any moment of it to have been quit of the predicament and safely back in my own room at the Hôtel St. Paul. This sum I would have doubled when Lecallo, with intentions of the loftiest kind, chose to drive his car on to Tours, and left me in the Hôtel with one green domino and a crushed opera hat. Now, for a truth, was my own position both perilous and impossible. It became infinitely worse when Lea, disdaining all other arts, threw herself upon her genius for romance and suggested an immediate journey to a desert island where none should discover us.

“What has Paris done for us?” she asked me dramatically.

I answered that it had just given us an excellent dinner and a nymph in a block of ice.

“Be serious, my dear Harry,” she said; “did you not tell me last night that you never wished to see Paris again?”

“Not until the morning, Lea. At night I never wish to see Paris again until the morning.”

“Ah, you jest when I am so much in earnest. Take me away, Harry, take me from all temptation--to the sea, to the woods--anywhere, if I may forget what has been, and learn to hope.”

“But, my dear Lea, does a pretty woman ever cease to hope?”

“She ceases to hope when the man who should be her friend ceases to remember. I have been telling myself for the last ten days that the luckiest day of my life was the one which determined my husband to divorce me. The supreme injustice demands the supreme sacrifice. I am now going to blot out ten years of my life and start again from my girlhood. I shall leave Paris, perhaps leave France. As I do not intend to deceive myself, there will be no part for religion in this reformation of a soul. I shall live as all the other good women about me. Reputation will be nothing to me, for I shall have nothing to win by reputation. Even my name will not betray me, for I shall be Madame d’Alençon no more. This is my settled resolution. I am waiting to hear how far you, the oldest of my friends, approve it.”

This, my dear Paddy, was the astounding confession this romantic woman now poured into my amazed ears. Whether to take it seriously, or to believe it to be the natural sequel to a night of frivolity, I know no more than the dead.

For the moment I appeared to be confronted by a sudden purpose, and to become aware of an aftermath to the harvests of folly. Lea, I said, had wearied at last of all that Paris had to give her. Love, light, laughter, music--these revolted her, and she would turn from them. It might be possible that the tongue of slander had wholly maligned her, and that at heart she was a virtuous woman, seeking something as yet lacking to her life. Upon this I felt able to pronounce no settled opinion. Has not old Georges Oleander written that the one riddle man may never solve is the riddle of a woman’s confidence?

“What do you want me to do, Lea?” I asked her baldly. “How can I help this wonderful scheme of yours? Do you suggest that I buy a desert island and a camping outfit for two? Or shall it be a caravan and a month in the forests of Amboise? You have only to say the word.”

Well, this pleased her immensely. She clapped her hands at the novelty of the idea, and I could see that the “reformation of the soul” had gone to the wall for the time being, at any rate.

“I should like nothing so well,” she said. “A caravan in the forest--how absolutely delightful. Did not the Chevalier Leblanc have one last year? You remember--it was in all the papers. A motor caravan--a little bedroom, a salon, and a kitchen behind it. My dear Harry, you could not suggest anything I would like half so well. Let us go back to Paris immediately, that I may order my dresses.”

“But, Lea, I don’t happen to own a caravan, and it would take some months to build one. Besides, I made no promise to go with you--certainly not alone.”

She looked at me amazed. Here was a thing that Lea d’Alençon could not for a moment understand.

“My dear Harry, what do you mean? Shall we take a _sergent de ville_ with us, then?”

“But, Lea, consider our reputations. I grant you that this appearance at Chartres is little to our credit, but, at the worst, we can blame the car. I don’t think your friends would accept a similar excuse in the case of a caravan. We could not say that we burst a tyre and were detained for a whole month in the Forest of Amboise.”

She was much piqued. Of course, she did not take my words literally, but they were understood in some way as an anticipation of all she had been leading up to, and a ready repudiation of it. Her reply intimated this in plain terms, and also was very far from that flippant response I had expected.

“Are my friends’ opinions anything to me, Harry? Will they be anything when I am a divorced woman? Is it really of no concern to you whatever, what happens to me afterwards? I do not believe it. Honour gives a woman claims which love may deny to her. Are you insensible to them?”

“You know that I am not, Lea. My friendship for you would do much, but it would not do it upon a false compulsion of honour. The story of your life is your own. It would be no kindness to make it mine, nor should I permit you to do so.”

“You have never loved me, Harry.”

“I have often said so, Lea.”

“Then why do you not go away from me?”

“Perhaps I shall take you at your word--in a caravan.”

She laughed a little angrily. I could see that she was greatly chagrined by our brief talk, but by no means ready to accept it as final.

“Would you leave me without a friend in Paris, Harry--must I think that of you?”

“You know me better than to think it, Lea.”

“But you are telling me that you mean to go?”

“I am answering you as you asked to be answered.”

“And that is the man--always--always--when the flower is cut from the tree, it is already a dead flower to him.”

“Not always, Lea. I have known him to keep it quite a long time--in a book. But, of course, the particular man was very young. Now, here is our breakfast coming. Is not that a subject more agreeable to you?”

She shook her head, and would not admit the fact. The repast was the dullest I have ever shared with the stately Lea, and even the purchase of a respectable frock--the best that the city of Chartres could discover--did not allay her gloom. In truth, my dear Paddy, she has determined to marry me when her husband divorces her, and is dismayed to discover that I am not as determined to marry her. For my part, I know not what to think, and I am wondering if honour may not have something to say to me after all. Certain it is that her husband’s jealousy chose me before others for its subject, and chose me without a shred of justice or reason. They say in Paris that there would have been a reconciliation but for that mad journey of hers to Poissy and the inn. You know how little I was responsible for that--you do not need to be reminded of its circumstances.

All that has happened to Lea d’Alençon has been of her own seeking. For this reason my mood impels me to decline to respond to her sentiment or to be deceived by it. Nor am I yet wholly convinced that it is real. When we returned to Paris to-night, Lecallo having called for us unexpectedly at five o’clock of the afternoon, the first decent person we met, upon quitting the Bois de Boulogne, was the Count of Marcy, just returned from Dieppe, and upon his way to the Engadine. He greeted Lea rapturously, and immediately spoke of a little dinner at the Ritz, and of another couple who were to dine there with him. She accepted the invitation instantly, and quitted me to go and dress. It is true that I promised to meet her to-morrow and to give her a “man’s opinion” upon the whole situation; but that promise will not be fulfilled. And it will not be fulfilled, Paddy, because Farman has just brought me the precious news that Mimi has been traced to England and is now engaged with a troupe of ragamuffins playing in the barns and booths of my own country.

So I go to London immediately. The decision is irrevocable. And it may be that I have seen Lea d’Alençon for the last time.

I will not say I wish it so, for I have called her my friend; but the event might be better in the end for her and for--Yours in great good hope,

Harry Gastonard.