CHAPTER XV
That night the patchwork dress was finished, and it was really very beautiful. It just cleared the ground very gracefully, and it was so plain that it showed every line of Marigold’s exquisite figure off to perfection. Alice laughed when she saw it on, and shook her head and said:
“Well, I never!” and “On my word!”--but got no further.
That night also the High Priest and St Armand sat after dinner, all alone once more, St Armand smoking.
“Your dream was true enough, Alphonso,” said he presently.
“You mean in connection with Barringcourt?”
“Yes. He has certainly not altered in the least--or, if at all, much for the better.”
“And I----”
“Am older. When you stand together as this morning, the difference shows at once. I marvel that you never felt it.”
“I did at first--when first he came to us. But afterwards, our conversation took me back to the days when I was young.”
“In memory only, not reality. And to be young in memory is to be old in years. Youth lives in the present, not the past. To-night you look older than ever I remember seeing you. Do you think it wise, this friendship with so young, so well-preserved a man?”
“Why not? If only to discover his great secret that brings redoubled youth when the first wear and tear of age begins to creep out from its sad resting-place.”
“_He_ will never give you the secret, you may depend upon it. Mr Barringcourt is not your friend; remember you parted quarrelling twenty-five years since.”
“But he’s forgotten that, and so have I.”
“Oh no, he has not forgotten. You hunted down, in bigotry and high-handedness, a girl who was peculiarly his property. He is not so easy-going as to forgive you that.”
“Then why should he appear so pleased to see me?”
“Because, being your worst, your subtlest enemy, he perceives you are nothing but a wreck of what you used to be.”
The deep, dull colour of anger rose in the High Priest’s face.
“He may be mistaken in that, as he has been in other things.”
“How will you prove it to him?”
“Advise me.”
“Then you remember the girl we met this morning?”
“Sacred Serpent! how you do harp on women!”
“Sacred Serpent! were you born a man or a stone?”
“Go on. Go on with your advice.”
“You remember the girl this morning?”
“I remember her, and I must say I felt her--her fascination--till--till she showed such unmannerly temper before us all. Passion of any sort in a woman is fatal to beauty both of mind and body.”
Now St Armand, as a rule, had great patience with his--his followers until they were well disciplined and broken in to obedience. But occasionally he was known to laugh long and heartily, especially when they passed some wise remark.
And he laughed now. He laughed so long and so genuinely, that the High Priest began to feel uncomfortable, and thought over what he had said once more, but could find no fault with it.
“Be careful, Alphonso! Soon they’ll be christening you the great High Hypocrite, or, worse still, ‘the sleeping mole.’ Women have been developing all kinds of things since you last looked out upon Lucifram with fleshly eyes. However, if you object to temper, Barringcourt doesn’t. He admires the little beggar girl.”
The stray shot hit.
“Pardon me, you’re wrong. He spoke to her with absolutely no respect.”
“Will you get it out of your head once and for all?” said St Armand abruptly; “you’re looking for a _wife_? Meek temper and respectability are insufferable in any other woman. But you’ve given up the beggar girl, and he will step in to gather the plum you’ve let slip so easily through your palsied fingers.”
“I have not let her slip.”
“Indeed you have. Did you not walk away this morning without one look, one word of farewell? Did he do so? No. His last look was to her, his last smile.”
“He does not know her.”
“Oh! he is young. He makes friends easily. He has not got the ice of age clinging round him as you. He does not love her, but he will win her, whilst you grow cold--shivering on the brink of passion.”
“He shall _not_ win her. She is mine, since I looked into her eyes in the Temple close this morning. He has robbed me of many things--now I look back on it, he has robbed me of many, many things--but he shall not take this last. She shall belong to me--to me alone!”
“Are you going now?”
He looked up involuntarily at the timepiece.
“It--it is after ten o’clock. It is too late.”
“Yes. Now the respectable community is making ready for sleep, and the other half is only just awaking. I, too, am respectable. I go to bed. Life in a monastery is dull at times, and deathly fatiguing.”
And so he left the room, and went to his own bed-chamber.
And there alone, with no borrowed, artificial light but that subdued from his own presence and the signet-ring, he sat and wrote a letter to his wife--in the surrounding darkness. Often he laughed--sometimes he frowned whilst writing--and of the great High Priest he said, with other things:
“He is worse to drive than a young calf, and worse to lead than an old bull--so that, even with the ring in his nose, I can never be quite sure of him. I have taken so much pains with him, that at last I have become impatient, and I find it does not answer badly. But these simpletons are really too much trouble. He is insolent enough to take anything I give him, without so much as ‘Thank you’--but in that they’re all alike. He forced my hand the other night into giving him some of my own power of feeling, but that hasn’t answered--it rarely does unless, of course, the girl were present--which she was not. And this familiarity--this living with an awkward brute who fancies himself infallible, and who, I am beginning to find, has only the one weak spot, vanity, like his less cooped-up neighbours--is beginning to tell upon my temper. Had I not you to fall back upon in reverie, I should throw him up and be quit of him; for breathing the same air with these mortals for any length of time is insufferable--they contaminate everything. But when I think of you----”
Was it not Merriman--so lately dead; by some, perhaps, soon forgotten--who, in that last, sad book with its prophetic, mournful ending, even in light, spoke of the sacredness of certain letters--even mortal?