CHAPTER XXIV
THE JOINT IN THE ARMOUR
Ste. Marie put down a book as O'Hara came into the room and rose to meet his visitor.
"I'm compelled," said the Irishman, "to put you on your honour to-day if you are to go out as usual. Michel has been sent on an errand, and I am busy with letters. I shall have to put you on your honour not to make any effort to escape. Is that agreed to? I shall trust you altogether. You could manage to scramble over the wall somehow, I suppose, and get clean away; but I think you won't try it if you give your word."
"I give my word gladly," said Ste. Marie. "And thanks very much. You've been uncommonly kind to me here. I – regret more than I can say that we – that we find ourselves on opposite sides, as it were. I wish we were fighting for the same cause."
The Irishman looked at the younger man sharply for an instant, and he made as if he would speak, but seemed to think better of it. In the end he said —
"Yes, quite so! Quite so! Of course you understand that any consideration I have used towards you has been by way of making amends for – for an unfortunate occurrence."
Ste. Marie laughed.
"The poison!" said he. "Yes, I know. And, of course, I know who was at the bottom of that. By the way, I met Stewart in the garden the other day. Did he tell you? He was rather nervous and tried to shoot me, but he had left his revolver at the house – at least, it wasn't in his pocket when he reached for it."
O'Hara's hard face twitched suddenly, as if in anger, and he gave an exclamation under his breath, so the younger man inferred that "old Charlie" had not spoken of their encounter. And after that the Irishman once more turned a sharp, frowning glance upon his prisoner as if he were puzzled about something. But, as before, he stopped short of speech and at last turned away.
"Just a moment!" said the younger man. He asked —
"Is it fair to inquire how long I may expect to be confined here? I don't want to presume upon your good nature too far, but if you could tell me I should be glad to know."
The Irishman hesitated a moment, and then said —
"I don't know why I shouldn't answer that. It can't help you, so far as I can see, to do anything which would hinder us. You'll stay until Arthur Benham comes of age, which will be in about two months from now."
"Yes," said the other. "Thanks! I thought so. Until young Arthur comes of age and receives his patrimony, or until old David Stewart dies. Of course, that might happen at any hour."
The Irishman said —
"I don't quite see what – Ah, yes, to be sure! Yes, I see. Well, I should count upon eight weeks, if I were you. In eight weeks the boy will be independent of them all, and we shall go to England for the wedding."
"The wedding?" cried Ste. Marie. "What wedding? – Ah!"
"Arthur Benham and my daughter are to be married," said O'Hara, "so soon as he reaches his majority. I thought you knew that."
In a very vague fashion he realised that he had expected it. And still the definite words came to him with a shock which was like a physical blow, and he turned his back with a man's natural instinct to hide his feeling. Certainly that was the logical conclusion to be drawn from known premises. That was to be the O'Haras' reward for their labour. To Stewart the great fortune, to the O'Haras a good marriage for the girl and an assured future. That was reward enough surely for a few weeks of angling and decoying and luring and lying. That was what she had meant, on the day before, by saying that she could see all the to-morrows. He realised that he must have been expecting something like this, but the thought turned him sick nevertheless. He could not forget the girl as he had come to know her during the past week. He could not face with any calmness the thought of her as the adventuress who had lured poor Arthur Benham on to destruction. It was an impossible thought. He could have laughed at it in scornful anger, and yet – What else was she?
He began to realise that his action in turning his back upon the other man in the middle of a conversation must look very odd, and he faced round again trying to drive from his expression the pain and distress which he knew must be there plain to see. But he need not have troubled himself, for the other man was standing before the sext window and looking out into the morning sunlight, and his hard bony face had so altered that Ste. Marie stared at him with open amazement. He thought O'Hara must be ill.
"I want to see her married!" cried the Irishman suddenly. And it was a new voice, a voice Ste. Marie did not know. It shook a little with an emotion that sat uncouthly upon this grim stern man.
"I want to see her married and safe!" he said. "I want her to be rid of this damnable, roving, cheap existence. I want her to be rid of me and my rotten friends and my rotten life." He chafed his hands together before him, and his tired eyes fixed themselves upon something that he seemed to see out of the window, and glared at it fiercely.
"I should like," said he, "to die on the day after her wedding, and so be out of her way for ever. I don't want her to have any shadows cast over her from the past. I don't want her to open closet doors and find skeletons there. I want her to be free – free to live the sort of life she was born to and has a right to."
He turned sharply upon the younger man.
"You've seen her!" he cried. "You've talked to her, you know her! Think of that girl dragged about Europe with me ever since she was a little child! Think of the people she's had to know, the things she's had to see! Do you wonder that I want to have her free of it all, married and safe and comfortable and in peace? Do you? I tell you it has driven me as nearly mad as a man can be. But I couldn't go mad because I had to take care of her. I couldn't even die because she'd have been left alone, without any one to look out for her.
"She wouldn't leave me! I could have settled her somewhere in some quiet place where she'd have been quit at least of shady rotten people, but she wouldn't have it. She's stuck to me always through good times and bad. She's kept my heart up when I'd have been ready to cut my throat if I'd been alone. She's been the – bravest and faithfullest – Well I – And look at her! Look at her now! Think of what she's had to see and know – the people she's had to live with – and look at her! Has any of it stuck to her? Has it cheapened her in any littlest way? No, by God! She has come through it all like a – like a Sister of Charity through a city slum – like an angel through the dark!"
The Irishman broke off speaking, for his voice was beyond control, but after a moment he went on again more calmly —
"This boy, this young Benham, is a fool, but he's not a mean fool. She'll make a man of him. And, married to him, she'll have the comforts that she ought to have and the care and – freedom. She'll have a chance to live the life that she had a right to, among the sort of people she has a right to know. I'm not afraid for her. She'll do her part and more. She'll hold up her head among duchesses, that girl. I'm not afraid for her."
He said this last sentence over several times, standing before the window and staring out at the sun upon the treetops. "I'm not afraid for her… I'm not afraid for her." He seemed to have forgotten that the younger man was in the room, for he did not look towards him again or pay him any attention for a long while. He only gazed out of the window into the fresh morning sunlight, and his face worked and quivered and his lean hands chafed restlessly together before him.
But at last he seemed to realise where he was, for he turned with a sudden start, and he stared at Ste. Marie frowning as if the younger man were some one he had never seen before. He said —
"Ah, yes, yes! You were wanting to go out into the garden. Yes, quite so! I – I was thinking of something else. I seem to be absent-minded of late. Don't let me keep you here!" He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said —
"Oh, thanks! There's no hurry. However, I'll go, I think. It's after eleven. I understand that I'm on my honour not to climb over the wall or burrow under it or batter it down. That's understood. I – "
He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O'Hara's long speech about his daughter; but he could think of nothing to say, and besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his strange outburst. So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the room without further ceremony.
He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and unlooked-for breakdown of the other man's impregnable reserve, and dimly he realised that it must have come out of some very extraordinary nervous strain; but he himself had been in no state to give the Irishman's words the attention and thought that he would have given them at another time. His mind, his whole field of mental vision had been full of one great fact —the girl was to be married to young Arthur Benham. The thing loomed gigantic before him, and, in some strange way, terrifying. He could neither see nor think beyond it. O'Hara's burst of confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great distance – poignant but only half comprehended words, to be reflected upon later in their own time.
He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes, and he said one sentence over and over aloud – as the Irishman standing beside the window had said another.
"She is going to be married! She is going to be married!"
It would seem that he must have forgotten his previous half knowledge of the fact. It would seem to have remained, as at the first hearing, a great and appalling shock – thunderous out of a blue sky.
Below in the open his feet led him mechanically straight down under the trees, through the tangle of shrubbery beyond, and so to the wall under the cedar. Arrived there he awoke all at once to his task, and with a sort of frowning anger shook off the dream which enveloped him. His eyes sharpened and grew keen and eager. He said —
"The last arrow! God send it reached home!" And so went in under the lilac shrubs.
He was there longer than usual: unhampered now he may have made a larger search, but when at last he emerged Ste. Marie's hands were over his face, and his feet dragged slowly like an old man's feet.
Without knowing that he had stirred he found himself some distance away, standing still beside a chestnut tree. A great wave of depression and fear and hopelessness swept him, and he shivered under it. He had an instant's wild panic, and mad, desperate thoughts surged upon him. He saw utter failure confronting him. He saw himself as helpless as a little child, his feeble efforts already spent for naught, and, like a little child, he was afraid. He would have rushed at that grim encircling wall and fought his way up and over it, but even as the impulse raced to his feet the momentary madness left him and he turned away. He could not do a dishonourable thing even for all he held dearest.
He walked on in the direction which lay before him, but he took no heed of where he went; and Mlle. Coira O'Hara spoke to him twice before he heard or saw her.
CHAPTER XXV
COIRA GOES OVER TO THE ENEMY
They were near the east end of the rond point, in a space where fir trees stood and the ground underfoot was covered with dry needles.
"I was just on my way to – our bench beyond the fountain," said she, and Ste. Marie nodded, looking upon her sombrely. It seemed to him that he looked with new eyes, and after a little time when he did not speak but only gazed in that strange manner the girl said —
"What is it? Something has happened. Please tell me what it is!" Something like the pale foreshadow of fear came over her beautiful face, and shrouded her golden voice as if it had been a veil.
"Your father," said Ste. Marie heavily, "has just been telling me – that you are to marry young Arthur Benham. He has been telling me."
She drew a quick breath, looking at him, but, after a moment, she said —
"Yes, it is true. You knew it before, though. Didn't you? Do you mean that you didn't know it before? I don't quite understand. You must have known that.
"What in Heaven's name did you think?" she cried, as if with a sort of anger at his dulness.
The man rubbed one hand wearily across his eyes.
"I – don't quite know," said he. "Yes, I suppose I had thought of it. I don't know. It came to me with such a – shock! Yes. Oh, I don't know. I expect I didn't think at all. I – just didn't think." Abruptly his eyes sharpened upon her and he moved a step forward.
"Tell me the truth!" he said. "Do you love this boy?"
The girl's cheeks burned with a swift crimson and she set her lips together. She was on the verge of extreme anger just then, but after a little the flush died down again and the dark fire went out of her eyes. She made an odd little gesture with her two hands. It seemed to express fatigue as much as anything – a great weariness.
"I like him," she said. "I like him – enough, I suppose. He is good – and kind – and gentle. He will be good to me. And I shall try very, very hard to make him happy." Quite suddenly and without warning the fire of her anger burnt up again. She flamed defiance in the man's face.
"How dare you question me?" she cried. "What right have you to ask me questions about such a thing? You, what you are!"
Ste. Marie bent his head.
"No right, mademoiselle," said he in a low voice. "I have no right to ask you anything – not even forgiveness. I think I am a little mad to-day. It – this news came to me suddenly. Yes, I think I am a little mad." The girl stared at him and he looked back with sombre eyes. Once more he was stabbed with intolerable pain to think what she was. Yet in an inexplicable fashion it pleased him that she should carry out her trickery to the end with a high head. It was a little less base done proudly. He could not have borne it otherwise.
"Who are you," the girl cried in a bitter resentment, "that you should understand? What do you know of the sort of life I have led – we have led together, my father and I? – Oh, I don't mean that I'm ashamed of it! We have nothing to feel shame for, but you simply do not know what such a life is."
Though he writhed with pain, the man nodded over her. He was so glad that she could carry it through proudly, with a high hand, an erect head.
She spread out her arms before him, a splendid and tragic figure.
"What chance have I ever had?" she demanded. "No, I am not blaming him. I am not blaming my father! I chose to follow him. I chose it! But what chance have I had? Think of the people I have lived among! Would you have me marry one of them – one of those men? I'd rather die! And yet I cannot go on – forever. I am twenty now. What if my father – You yourself said yesterday – Oh, I am afraid! I tell you I have lain awake at night a hundred times and shivered with cold, terrible fear of what would become of me if – if anything should happen – to my father.
"And so," she said, "when I met Arthur Benham last winter and he – began to – he said – when he begged me to marry him… Ah, can't you see? It meant safety – safety – safety! And I liked him. I like him now – very, very much. He is a sweet boy. I – shall be happy with him – in a peaceful fashion. And my father —
"Oh, I'll be honest with you," said she. "It was my father who decided me. He was – he is – so pathetically pleased with it! He so wants me to be safe! It's all he lives for now. I – couldn't fight against them both. Arthur and my father.
"So I gave in. And then when Arthur had to be hidden we came here with him – to wait."
She became aware that the man was staring at her with something strange and terrible in his gaze, and she broke off in wonder. The air of that warm summer morning turned all at once keen and sharp about them – charged with moment.
"Mademoiselle!" cried Ste. Marie. "Mademoiselle, are you telling me the truth?"
For some obscure reason she was not angry. Again she spread out her hands in that gesture of weariness. She said —
"Oh, why should I lie to you?" And the man began to tremble exceedingly. He stretched out an unsteady hand.
"You – knew Arthur Benham last winter?" he said. "Long before his – before he left his home? Before that?"
"He asked me to marry him last winter," said the girl. "For a long, long time I – wouldn't… But he never let me alone. He followed me everywhere. And my father – "
Ste. Marie clapped his two hands over his face, and a groan came to her through the straining fingers. He cried in an agony —
"Mademoiselle! mademoiselle!"
"Fool! Fool!" the man cried, groaning. "Oh, fool that I have been! worm, animal! Oh, fool not to see – not to know! Madman; imbecile; thing without a name!"
She stood white-faced, smitten with great fear over this abasement. Not the least and faintest glimmer reached her of what it meant. She stretched down a hand of protest and it touched the man's head. As if the touch were a stroke of magic he sprang upright before her.
"Now at last, mademoiselle," said he, "we two must speak plainly together. Now at last I think I see clear, but I must know beyond doubt or question. Oh, mademoiselle, now I think I know you for what you are, and it seems to me that nothing in this world is of consequence beside that. I have been blind, blind, blind! … Tell me one thing! Why did Arthur Benham leave his home two months ago?"
"He had to leave it!" she said, wondering. She did not understand yet, but she was aware that her heart was beating in loud and fast throbs, and she knew that some great mystery was to be made plain before her. Her face was very white.
"He had to leave it!" she said again. "You know as well as I. Why do you ask me that? He quarrelled with his grandfather. They had often quarrelled before – over money – always over money! His grandfather is a miser, almost a madman. He tried to make Arthur sign a paper releasing his inheritance – the fortune he is to inherit from his father – and when Arthur wouldn't he drove him away. Arthur went to his uncle – Captain Stewart – and Captain Stewart helped him to hide. He didn't dare go back because they're all against him, all his family. They'd make him give in."
Ste. Marie gave a loud exclamation of amazement. The thing was incredible – childish! It was beyond the maddest possibilities. But even as he said the words to himself a face came before him – Captain Stewart's smiling and benignant face – and he understood everything. As clearly as if he had been present he saw the angry bewildered boy, fresh from David Stewart's berating, mystified over some commonplace legal matter requiring a signature. He saw him appeal for sympathy and counsel to "old Charlie," and he heard "old Charlie's" reply. It was easy enough to understand now. It must have been easy enough to bring about. What absurdities could not such a man as Captain Stewart instil into the already prejudiced mind of that foolish lad?
His thoughts turned from Arthur Benham to the girl before him, and that part of the mystery was clear also. She would believe whatever she was told in the absence of any reason to doubt. What did she know of old David Stewart or of the Benham family? It seemed to Ste. Marie all at once incredible that he could ever have believed ill of her – ever have doubted her honesty. It seemed to him so incredible that he could have laughed aloud in bitterness and self-disdain. But as he looked at the girl's white face and her shadowy, wondering eyes all laughter, all bitterness, all cruel misunderstandings were swallowed up in the golden light of his joy at knowing her, in the end, for what she was.
"Coira! Coira!" he cried, and neither of the two knew that he called her for the first time by her name. "Oh, child," said he, "how they have lied to you and tricked you! I might have known, I might have seen it, but I was a blind fool. I thought – intolerable things. I might have known! They have lied to you most damnably, Coira."
She stared at him in a breathless silence without movement of any sort. Only her face seemed to have turned a little whiter, and her great eyes darker so that they looked almost black, and enormous in that still face.
He told her, briefly, the truth, how young Arthur had had frequent quarrels with his grandfather over his waste of money, how after one of them, not at all unlike the others, he had disappeared, and how Captain Stewart, in desperate need, had set afoot his plot to get the lad's greater inheritance for himself. He described for her old David Stewart and the man's bitter grief, and he told her about the will, about how he had begun to suspect Captain Stewart and of how he had traced the lost boy to La Lierre. He told her all that he knew of the whole matter and he knew almost all there was to know, and he did not spare himself even his misconception of the part she had played, though he softened that as best he could.
Midway of his story Mlle. O'Hara bent her head and covered her face with her hands. She did not cry out or protest or speak at all. She made no more than that one movement, and after it she stood quite still, but the sight of her, bowed and shamed, stripped of pride, as it had been of garments, was more than the man could bear. He cried her name —
"Coira!" And when she did not look up, he called once more upon her. He said —
"Coira, I cannot bear to see you stand so! Look at me! Ah, child, look at me!
"Can you realise," he cried, "can you even begin to think what a great joy it is to me to know at last that you have had no part in all this? Can't you see what it means to me? I can think of nothing else. Coira, look up!"
She raised her white face and there were no tears upon it, but a still anguish too great to be told. It would seem never to have occurred to her to doubt the truth of his words. She said —
"It is I who might have known. Knowing what you have told me now it seems impossible that I could have believed. – And Captain Stewart – I always hated him – loathed him – distrusted him.
"And yet," she cried, wringing her hands, "how could I know? How could I know?"
The girl's face writhed suddenly with her grief and she stared up at Ste. Marie with terror in her eyes. She whispered —
"My father! Oh, Ste. Marie, my father! It is not possible. I will not believe – He cannot have done this, knowing. My father, Ste. Marie!"
The man turned his eyes away, and she gave a sobbing cry.
"Has he," she said slowly, "done even this for me? Has he given – his honour also – when everything else was – gone? Has he given me his honour too?
"Oh!" she said, "why could I not have died when I was a little child? Why could I not have done that? To think that I should have lived to – bring my father to this! I wish I had died.
"Ste. Marie!" she said, pleading with him. "Ste. Marie, do you think – my father – knew?"
"Let me think!" said he. "Let me think! Is it possible that Stewart has lied to you all – to one as to another? Let me think!" His mind ran back over the matter and he began to remember instances which had seemed to him odd but to which he had attached no importance. He remembered O'Hara's puzzled and uncomprehending face when he, Ste. Marie, had spoken of Stewart's villainy. He remembered the man's indignation over the affair of the poison, and his fairness in trying to make amends. He remembered other things, and his face grew lighter and he drew a great breath of relief. He said —
"Coira, I do not believe he knew. Stewart has lied equally to you all – tricked each one of you!" And at that the girl gave a cry of gladness, and began to weep.
As long as men and women continue to stand upon opposite sides of a great gulf – and that will be as long as they exist together in this world – just so long will men continue to be unhappy and ill at ease in the face of women's tears, even though they know vaguely that tears may mean just anything at all, and by no means always grief.
Ste. Marie stood first upon one foot and then upon the other. He looked anxiously about him for succour. He said: "There! there!" or words to that effect, and once he touched the shoulder of the girl who stood weeping before him, and he was very miserable indeed.
But quite suddenly, in the midst of his discomfort, she looked up to him, and she was smiling and flushed, so that Ste. Marie stared at her in utter amazement.
"So now at last," said she, "I have back my Bayard. And I think the rest – doesn't matter very much."
"Bayard?" said he, wondering. "I don't understand," he said.
"Then," said she, "you must just go without understanding. For I shall never, never explain."
The bright flush went from her face and she turned grave once more.
"What is to be done?" she asked. "What must we do now, Ste. Marie? – I mean about Arthur Benham. I suppose he must be told."
"Either he must be told," said the man, "or he must be taken back to his home by force." He told her about the four letters which in four days he had thrown over the wall into the Clamart road.
"It was on the chance," he said, "that some one would pick one of them up and post it, thinking it had been dropped there by accident. What has become of them I don't know. I know only that they never reached Hartley."
The girl nodded thoughtfully.
"Yes," said she, "that was the best thing you could have done. It ought to have succeeded. Of course – " She paused a moment and then nodded again. "Of course," said she, "I can manage to get a letter in the post now. We'll send it to-day if you like. But I was wondering – Would it be better or not to tell Arthur the truth? It all depends upon how he may take it – whether or not he will believe you. He's very stubborn, and he's frightened about this break with his family, and he is quite sure that he has been badly treated. Will he believe you? Of course if he does believe he could escape from here quite easily at any time and there'd be no necessity for a rescue. What do you think?"
"I think he ought to be told," said Ste. Marie. "If we try to carry him away by force there'll be a fight, of course, and – who knows what might happen? That we must leave for a last resort – a last desperate resort. First we must tell the boy."
Abruptly he gave a cry of dismay, and the girl looked up to him, staring.
"But – but you, Coira!" said he, stammering. "But you! I hadn't realised – I hadn't thought – it never occurred to me what this means to you." The full enormity of the thing came upon him slowly. He was asking this girl to help him in robbing her of her lover.
She shook her head with a little wry smile.
"Do you think," said she, "that knowing what I know now I would go on with that until after he has made his peace with his family? Before, it was different. I thought him alone and ill-treated and hunted down. I could help him then, comfort him. Now I should be – all you ever thought me, if I did not send him to his grandfather." She smiled again, a little mirthlessly.
"If his love for me is worth anything," she said, "he will come back – but openly, this time, not in hiding. Then I shall know that he is – what I would have him be. Otherwise – "
Ste. Marie looked away.
"But you must remember, Coira," said he, "that the lad is very young, and that his family – They may try – It may be hard for him. They may say that he is too young to know – Ah, child, I should have thought of this!"
"Ste. Marie!" said the girl, and after a moment he turned to face her.
"What will you say to Arthur's family, Ste. Marie," she demanded very soberly, "when they ask you if I – if Arthur should be allowed to – come back to me?"
A wave of colour flooded the man's face and his eyes shone. He cried —
"I shall tell them, Coira, that if that wretched half-baked lad should search this wide world round, from Paris on to Paris again, and if he should spend a lifetime searching, he would never find the beauty and the sweetness and the tenderness and the true faith that he left behind at La Lierre – nor the hundredth part of them. I should say that you are so much above him that he ought to creep to you on his knees from the Rue de l'Université to this garden, thanking God that you were here at the journey's end, and kissing the ground that he dragged himself over for sheer joy and gratitude. I should tell them – Oh, I have no words! I could tell them so pitifully little of you! I think I should only say: 'Go to her and see!' I think I should just say that."
The girl turned her head away with a little sob, but afterwards she faced him once more, and she looked up to him with sweet, half-shut eyes for a long time. At last she said —
"For love of whom, Ste. Marie, did you undertake this quest – this search for Arthur Benham? It was not in idleness or by way of a whim. It was for love. For love of whom?"
For some strange and inexplicable reason the words struck him like a blow, and he stared whitely.
"I came," he said at last, and his voice was oddly flat, "for his sister's sake. For love of her." Coira O'Hara dropped her eyes. But presently she looked up again with a smile. She said —
"God make you happy, my friend!" And she turned and moved away from him up among the trees. At a little distance she turned, saying —
"Wait where you are! I will fetch Arthur or send him to you. He must be told at once." Then she went on and was lost to sight.
Ste. Marie followed a few steps after her and halted. His face was turned, by chance, towards the east wall, and suddenly he gave a great cry and smothered it with his hands over his mouth. His knees bent under him and he was weak and trembling. Then he began to run. He ran with awkward steps for his leg was not yet entirely recovered, but he ran fast, and his heart beat within him until he thought it must burst.
He was making for that spot which was overhung by the half dead cedar tree.