CHAPTER IV

ON THE HEIGHTS

Adrian stood on the edge of the pavement beside his well-appointed, blue-black automobile, the door of which the chauffeur held open. The hinged top of the limousine was folded back, and the sunshine, slanting down over the roofs of the high, white houses on the right, brought the pale, gray-clad figure of its occupant into charming relief as against the oatmeal-colored upholstering of the inside of the car in tones at once blending and standing finely apart. An itinerant flower-seller, bareheaded, short-skirted, trimly shod, her flat, wicker tray heaped up with vivid blossoms, held out a graceful bunch of crimson and yellow roses, with the smiling suggestion that--"Monsieur should assuredly present them to Madame, who could not fail to revel in their ravishing odor." Monsieur, however, showed himself unflatteringly ignorant of her presence, while Martin, the chauffeur, dissembling his natural inclination toward every member of the sex, motioned her away with, so to speak, a front of adamant.

Adrian put one foot on the step of the car, and there paused, hesitating. At last, with a point of eagerness piercing his constraint, he said:

"Instead of going directly to the _Quai Malaquais_, will you permit me to take you for a short, a quiet drive, Madame? The air may refresh you."

"I shall be grateful," Gabrielle replied, briefly and hoarsely.

Adrian delivered himself of rapid, emphatic directions to his chauffeur, swung into the car, and placed himself beside her, arranging the thin dust-rug carefully over the skirt of her dress. Then, his nostrils quivering slightly, his face noticeably drawn and set, he leaned back in his corner of the luxurious vehicle. Martin slipped in behind the steering-wheel; and with a preliminary snarl and rattling vibration, gaining silence and smoothness as it made the pace, the car headed up the glittering perspective of the wide, tree-bordered street.

Somewhere in the back of his consciousness, when he had bought this car a few weeks prior to his last visit to Stourmouth, there floated entrancing visions of circumstances such as the present. At that time his affair of the heart promised lamentably ill, and realization of such visions appeared both highly improbable and most wearifully distant. Now a wholly unexpected turn of events had converted them into actual fact. Through the delight of the brilliant summer afternoon, the caressing wind, and clear, brave sunlight he bore Gabrielle St. Leger away whither he would. Verily he had his desire, but leanness withal in his soul. For, God in heaven! what a question squatted there upon the biscuit-colored seat, interposing its hateful presence between them, poisoning his mind with an anguish of suspense and doubt!

He was still, even physically, under the dominion of the almost incredible scene in which he had recently taken part. He had carried rather than led Madame St. Leger down the five flights of stairs from René Dax's flat, and had just only not required the help of the chauffeur to lift her into the waiting car. His heart still thumped, sledge-hammer fashion, against his ribs. Every muscle was strained and taut. Not his eyes only, but the whole temper and spirit of him, were still hot with desire of vengeance. That loud, hardly human cry of Gabrielle's as, lost to all dignity, lost almost to all modesty, she flung herself upon him still rang in his ears. The primitive savagery of it coming from the lips of so fastidious, elusive, quick-witted a creature, from those of so artistic a product of our complicated modern civilization, at once horrified and filled him with vicarious shame. In that wild moment of impact the dormant violence of the young man's passion had been aroused. Yet a gross and cynical query was scrawled across his remembrance of it all. For what could, in point of fact, have happened previous to his arrival to produce so amazing a result?

And to Adrian not the least cruel part of this business was the duty, so clearly laid upon him, of rigid self-restraint, of maintaining, for her protection, as sparing and shielding her, his ordinary air of courteous, unaccentuated and friendly intercourse. Good breeding and fine feeling alike condemned him to behave just as usual, not assuming by so much as a hair's breadth that closer intimacy which the events of the last half-hour might very reasonably justify. Unless she herself chose to speak, this whole astounding episode must remain as though it never had been and was not.--And here his lover's and artist's imagination crimped him, projecting torments of unsatisfied conjecture extending throughout the unending cycles of eternity. Yet in uncomplaining endurance of such torment, as he perceived, must the perfection of his attitude toward her declare itself, must the perfection of his loyalty come in.

Meanwhile as the car hummed along the upward-trending avenues toward the southern heights, leaving the more fashionable and populous districts of the city behind, the air grew lighter and the breeze more lively. Adrian, still sitting tight in his corner, trusted himself to look at his companion. Through the fluttering gray veil, as through some tenuous, drifting mist, he saw her proud, delicate profile. Saw also that though she remained apparently passive and strove to hold all outward signs of emotion in check, the tears ran slowly down her cheek, while the rounded corner of her usually enigmatic, smiling mouth trembled nervously and drooped.

Presently, as he still watched, she slipped the chain of her gold and gray vanity-bag off her wrist and essayed to open it. But her fingers fumbled ineffectually with the gilt snap. The beautiful, capable hands he so fondly loved shook, having suddenly grown weak. Tears came into Adrian's eyes also. To him the helplessness of those dear hands stood for so very much. Silently he took the little bag, opened and held it, while she pulled out a lace-bordered handkerchief, and, pushing it beneath the fluttering veil, wiped her wet eyes and wet cheeks. He kept the bag open, waiting for her to put the handkerchief back. But, without speaking, Gabrielle shook her head slightly, in token that further drying operations might not improbably shortly be required. Adrian obediently snapped to the gold catch; yet, since he really shut up such a very big slice of his own heart within it, was it not, after all, but natural and legitimate that he should retain possession of the little bag?

This trifle of service rendered and accepted bore fruit, bringing the two into a more normal relation and lessening the tension of their mutual constraint. After a while Gabrielle spoke, but low and hoarsely, her throat still strained by those hardly human cries. Adrian found himself obliged to draw nearer to her if he would catch her words amid the clatter of the street and humming of the engines of the car.

"There is that, I feel, I should without delay make you know," she said, speaking in English; for it comes easier, sometimes, to clothe the telling of ugly and difficult things with the circumscriptions of a foreign language.

"Yes?" Adrian put in, as she paused.

"You should know that he is insane. Possibly my visiting him contributed to precipitate the crisis. I do not know. But he is now no longer responsible. Therefore truly I commiserate rather than feel anger toward him."

Again the handkerchief went up under the fluttering veil. Again, when it was withdrawn, Adrian saw, as through thin, drifting mist, the proud, delicate profile.

"I should make you know," she went on, resolutely, "it was my life--yes, my life--but my honor, no--never--which was in jeopardy."

"Thank God! thank God for that!" the young man almost groaned, bowing himself together, while his grasp tightened upon the pretty little gold and gray bag almost mercilessly.

He sat upright, took a deep breath, staring with unseeing eyes at the bright, variegated prospect of shops, houses, trees, traffic, people scampering past on either side the rushing car. Only now did he begin to gauge the vital character of his recent misery, and the tremendous force of the love which in so happily constituted and circumstanced a man as himself could render such a misery possible. Until to-day, until, indeed, this thrice-blessed minute when he learned from her own lips that no shame sullied her, he had never really gauged the depth of his love for Gabrielle St. Leger, or quite realized how all the many ambitions, interests, satisfactions of his very agreeable existence were as so much dust, froth, garbage, burnt-out cinder in comparison to that love. He had told Anastasia Beauchamp, in the course of a certain memorable conversation, he would devote his life to that love. But, he now discovered, it was quite unnecessary that he should take active steps toward the production or maintenance of it, since his life was already almost alarmingly devoted, leaving room, in truth, as he now perceived, for nothing outside that same love. And thereupon--the balance essaying to right itself, as in sane, healthy natures it instinctively must and will--poor Joanna Smyrthwaite's face, and its expression of semi-idiot ecstasy, as he had seen it only two nights ago at the Tower House on the gallery in the checkered moonlight, arose before him. Adrian was conscious of pulling himself together sharply.--Love--if you will--and with all the strength, all the vigor of his nature. But to dote? Devil take the notion--no thank you! Never, if he knew it, would he dote.

Wherefore, it followed that his wits were very thoroughly, if very tenderly, about him when next Gabrielle St. Leger spoke.

"I see now," she said, "the method by which he proposed we--he and myself--should die amounted to an absurdity, since it involved the concurrence of his servant."

Covered by the noise of the car, Adrian permitted himself the relief of cursing a little quietly under his breath.

"But at the time I could not reason. I found myself too confused and terrified by the extraordinary and horrible things he told me--things in themselves demented, extravagant, yet as he told them so apparently sensible. His poor, disordered brain was so fertile in expedients that from moment to moment I could not foresee what fresh unnatural demand he might make on me, what new scheme he might not devise for my destruction."

"Alone with a maniac no degree of fear can be excessive," Adrian asserted, warmly.

For he perceived her pride was touched, so that her self-esteem called for support and encouragement. To his hearing her words conveyed a rather pathetic hint of apology, both to herself and to him, for that moment of wild self-abandonment.

"It doesn't require much imagination," he went on, "to understand the danger you ran was appalling--in every way appalling--simply that. And, good heavens! why didn't I know?" he broke out, slapping his two hands down on his knees in sudden fury. "Why didn't my instinct warn me, thick-headed fool that I am? Why didn't I get to that hateful carrion-bird's roost of a studio an hour, half an hour earlier? Pardon me, dear Madame," he added, moderating his transports, "if I shock you by my violence. But when I consider what you must have endured, when I picture what might have happened, I confess I am almost beside myself with rage and distress."

_La belle Gabrielle_ had turned her head. She looked straight at him. The timid ghost of her mysterious, finely malicious smile visited her lips. Yet seen through the mist of her fluttering veil her eyes were singularly soft and lovely, wistful--so, at least, it seemed to Adrian--with the dawning of a sentiment other than that of bare friendship. Whereupon the young man's heart began to thump against his ribs again, while the engines of the car broke into a most marvelous sweet singing.

"I am not sure," she commenced, speaking with engaging hesitation, "whether, perhaps, since I am, thanks to _le bon Dieu_, here in safety and about to return unhurt to my child and my mother, it is not well I should have had this trial. For you did come in time--yes, mercifully in time. I doubt if I could have endured much longer. There were other things," she went on, hurriedly, "besides those which I consciously heard or saw which combined to disgust and terrify me. You, too, believe, do you not, that thoughts may acquire a separate existence--thoughts, purposes, imaginations--and that they may inhabit

## particular places? I cannot explain, but by such things I believe

myself to be surrounded. I felt they might break through whatever restraining medium withheld them, and become visible. A little longer and my reason, too, might have given way--" She paused. "But you came--you came--"

"Yes, I came," Adrian repeated quietly.

"And, that being so--I being mercifully spared the worst, being unhurt, I mean--"

"Yes, precisely--unhurt," he repeated with praiseworthy docility.

"This experience may be of value. It may help to make me revise some mistaken ideas"--she turned away, and, though her head was held high, tears, as Adrian noted, were again somewhat in evidence--"some perhaps foolishly self-willed and--how shall I say?--conceited opinions."

In the last few minutes the car had traversed one of those unkempt and, in a sense, nomadic districts common to the fringe of all great cities. Spaces of waste land, littered with nondescript rubbish and materials for new buildings in course of noisy construction, alternated with rows of low-class houses, off the walls of which the plaster cracked and scaled; with long lines of hoardings displaying liberal assortment of flaming posters; wine-shops at once shabby and showy, crude reds, greens, and yellows adorning their wooden balconies and striped, flapping awnings; gaudy-fronted dancing-booths and shooting-galleries tailing away at the back into neglected weed-grown gardens. All these, with a sparse population, male and female, very much to match; while here and there some solitary shuttered dwelling standing back from the wide avenue in an inclosed plot of ground betrayed a countenance suggestive of disquieting adventures.

As Madame St. Leger finished making her, to Adrian, very touching confession, the automobile, quitting these doubtful purlieus--which, however, thanks to a charm of early summer foliage and generous breadth of sunshine, took on an air of jovial devil-may-care vagabondage, inspiriting rather than objectionable--headed eastward, along the boulevard skirting the grass-grown slopes and mounds of the dismantled fortifications, and drew up opposite the entrance to the _Parc de Montsouris_. Here, Adrian proposed they should alight and stroll in the tree-shaded alleys, as a relief from the dust and noise of the streets.

But once on her feet, Gabrielle discovered how very tired she still was, weak-kneed and tremulous to the point of gladly accepting the support of her companion's arm. This renewed contact, though of a comparatively perfunctory and unofficial character, proved by no means displeasing to Adrian. In truth it gave him such a lively sense of happiness, that to his dying day he will cherish a romantic affection for those remote and unfashionable pleasure-grounds upon the southern heights. Happiness is really the simplest of God's creatures--easily gratified, large in charity, hospitable to all the minor poetry of life. Whence it came about that this critical, traveled, shrewd, and smart young gentleman had never, surely, beheld trees so green, flower-borders so radiant, walks so smooth and well-swept, statues so noble, cascades so musical, lakes so limpid and so truthfully mirroring the limpid heavens above. Even the rococo and slightly ridiculous reproduction of the Palace of the Bey of Tunis, now used as an observatory, which crowns the highest ground, its domes, cupolas, somberly painted mural surfaces, peacock-blue encaustic tiles, and rows of horseshoe-headed Moorish arches--looking in its modern Western surroundings about as congruous as a camel in a cabbage-patch--presented itself to his happy eyes with all the allurements of some genii-and-gem-built palace from out the immortal pages of the _Arabian Nights_. Gabrielle St. Leger's hand rested upon his arm, her feet kept step with his feet. The folds of her dainty gown swept lightly against him as he walked. Past and future fell out of the reckoning. Nothing obtained save the beatified present, while his heart and his senses were, at once, sharply hungry and exquisitely at peace.

The grounds were practically deserted. Only a few employees from the observatory, blue-habited gardeners, a batch of Cook's tourists--English and American--weary with sight-seeing, and some respectable French fathers of families, imparting, _al fresco_, instruction in local natural science, topography and art, to their progeny, were at hand to greet the passing couple with starings, sympathetic, self-consicous, or envious, as the case might be. Among the first ranked the French fathers of families, who paused in frank admiration and interest.

"For was not the lady arrestingly elegant?--_Sapristi!_ if ever a young man had luck! Yet, after all, why not? For he, too, repaid observation. Truly a handsome fellow, and of a type of male beauty eminently Gallic--refined yet virile; perfectly distinguished, moreover, in manner and in dress. She appeared languid. Well, what more easily comprehensible, since--a marriage of inclination, without doubt--"

Whereupon, in the intervals of anxiously retrieving some strayed all too adventurous Mimi or Toto, the fond parental being beheld, in prophetic vision, Adrian the Magnificent also shepherding a delicious little human flock.

"How did you know, or was it by chance that you came?" Gabrielle presently inquired.

And, in reply, Adrian explained that, the affairs of the Smyrthwaite inheritance being completed sooner than he anticipated, he had advanced his return--Ah! shade, accusing shade, of Joanna! But with _la belle Gabrielle's_ hand resting confidingly upon his arm, he could hardly be expected to turn aside to appease that unhappy phantom.

"Unfortunately I missed the connection in London, and failed to catch the midday Channel boat. Consequently I only reached Paris early this morning. I had passed two practically sleepless nights"--again accusing shade of Joanna, sound of footsteps, and dragging of draperies upon the corridor outside his bedroom door!--"To my shame," he continued, "I made up for my broken rest to-day. It was already past three o'clock when I went to my office. I had omitted to warn my people there of my return. Picture then, _chère Madame_, my emotion when my secretary handed me a letter from our friend Miss Beauchamp!"

"So it was Anastasia," Madame St. Leger murmured; but whether resentfully or gratefully her hearer failed to determine.

"I flung myself into the automobile--and--_enfin_--you know the rest."

"Yes," she agreed, "I know the rest."

And, thereupon, she gave a little cry of astonishment.

For, turning the eastern side of the would-be Moorish palace and passing on to the terrace in front of it, the whole of Paris was disclosed to view outspread below along the valley of the Seine. In intermingling, finely gradated tones, blond and silver, the immense panorama presented itself; squares, gardens, monuments, world-famous streets and world-famous buildings seen in the splendid clarity of the sun-penetrated atmosphere, purple-stained here and there by the shadows of detached high-sailing clouds. Upon the opposite height, crowning Montmartre, the Church of the _Sacré Coeur_ rose ivory-white, its dome and clock-tower seeming strangely adjacent to the vast blue arch of the summer sky; while, in the extreme distance both to right and left, beyond the precincts of the laughing city, a gray, angular grimness of outlying forts struck the vibrant and masculine note of the peril of war.

For quite a sensible period of time Gabrielle St. Leger gazed at the

## scene in silence. Then she took her hand from Adrian's arm and moved a

step away. But he could not quarrel with this, since she put up her veil and looked frankly yet wistfully at him, a great sweetness in her charming face.

"Ah!" she said, stretching out her hand with a gesture of welcome to the noble view, "this is a thing to do one good, to renew one's courage, one's sanity and hope. I am grateful to you. It was both wise and kind of you to bring me here and show me this. By so doing you have washed my mind of dark and sinister impressions. You have made me once more in love with the goodness of God, in love with life. But come," she added, quickly, almost shyly, "I must ask you to take me home to the _Quai Malaquais_. I can meet my mother and child now without betraying emotion--without letting them suspect the grave and terrible trial through which I have passed."

And upon this speech Adrian Savage, being an astute and politic lover, offered no comment. He had gained so much to-day that he could afford to be patient, making no attempt to press his point. Restraining his natural impetuosity, he rested in the happiness of the present and spoke no word of love. Only his eyes, perhaps, gave him away just a little; and, undoubtedly, on the return journey in the merrily singing car he permitted himself to sit a little closer to _la belle Gabrielle_ than on the journey out.

At the foot of the shining, waxed, wooden staircase within the doorway at the corner of the courtyard, where, backed by her bodyguard of spindly planes and poplars, the lichen-stained nymph still poured the contents of her tilted pitcher into the shell-shaped basin below, Adrian left Madame St. Leger.

"No, I will not come farther, _chère Madame et amie_," he said, his air at once gallant and tender, standing before her, hat in hand. "It will perhaps be easier, in face of the pious fraud you propose to practise upon Madame, your mother, that you should meet her alone."

He backed away. It was safer. Farewells are treacherous. All had been perfect so far. He would give himself no chance of occasion for regret.

"Mount the stairs slowly, though, dear Madame," he called after her, moved by sudden anxiety. "Remember your recent fatigue--they are steep."

Then, the beloved gray gown and floating gray veil having passed upward out of sight, he turned and went.

"And now for that poor, unhappy little devil of a Tadpole," he said.

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