CHAPTER IV

"COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS"

"A thousand times welcome, my dear Savage!" Anastasia Beauchamp cried, taking Adrian's hand in both hers and looking up at him affectionately from beneath a broad-brimmed brown hat crowned by a positive vineyard of purple and white glass grapes and autumn foliage, the whole inwrapped cloudily in a streaming blue gauze veil. "You have played the good Samaritan quite long enough in my opinion, and it's high time you bestowed some attention upon the rest of us, though we are neither insane nor conspicuously immoral. And here we all are, that's to say, all of us who matter, in this really quite tidy, comfortable hotel, plus the amiable family Bernard, my devoted, despised little Byewater and his compatriot Lenty B. Stacpole--note the inevitable transatlantic initial, I beseech you! Clever, excellent fellows both of them, though a trifle slight temperamentally. And here, to complete our circle, you arrive as the God in the Car."

Anastasia's smile bore effective testimony to her appreciation of Adrian's handsome looks and gallant bearing.

"Yes, very much the God in the Car, my dear boy," she repeated. "You are the picture of health. Playing the good Samaritan, it must be conceded, hasn't damaged you.--And I honestly believe, though I won't swear to it for fear of committing an indiscretion, that every one, every one, mind you--save possibly our excellent Americans, to whom your near neighborhood may reveal their own temperamental deficiencies--will be as genuinely happy to see you as I am myself."

"Kindest and most sympathetic of friends," Adrian returned, touched both by her words and warmth of manner, "how inexpressibly good you are to me!"

"I only pay an old debt. Your mother was good to me once--well--" She caught at an end of her streaming veil and brought it to anchor under her chin. "Well--when I stood in need of a wise and sweet counselor very badly. And I never forget. Gratitude can be--mind, I don't say it always is, but it can be--a very delightful sentiment to entertain.--But now you are expiring for a detailed account of a certain dear lady. At this moment she is down on the beach with the rest of our company. They will be back shortly for tea. So come here with me on to the piazza, while we wait for them, and I'll give you all the news I can."

Adrian, the brave song of the engines still in his ears, his eyes still dazzled by the seventy-mile rush along the white roads of the rich and pleasant Norman country, followed Miss Beauchamp and her somewhat Bacchanalian headgear from the large, light-colored hotel saloon into the arcade, found her a comfortable seat, and stationed himself beside her.

From thence he commanded a comprehensive view of the opposite side of the shallow valley, dotted with modest green-shuttered villas and rustic chalets set in ledges of roughly terraced garden. Of the rutted road, bordered by elms and sycamores, leading down from the fertile uplands through the straggling gray village of Ste. Marie to the shore. Of the high chalk cliffs forming the headland, which closed the view westward, and the quarter-mile-wide sweep of grass running up the back of it, stunted, bronzed oak and thorn thickets filling in the rounded hollows. Of the curving beach, its rows of gaily painted wooden bathing-cabins, and chairs arranged in friendly groups along the fore-shore occupied by women in airy summer costumes,--their docile men-kind, assisted in some cases by white-capped nurses, dealing meanwhile with a slightly turbulent infant population upon the near shingle and the dark mussel and seaweed covered reef of rocks just below.

Upon that same friendly grouping of chairs Adrian's glance directed itself eagerly, seeking a feminine presence acutely interesting to him, but without result. Open parasols and hats of brobdingnagian proportions rendered their charming owners practically invisible. Wistfully he relinquished the search. Then, looking at the scene as a whole, his poetic sense was fired by the spaciousness and freedom of the expanse of gleaming sands for which Ste. Marie is celebrated. Furrowed in places and edged by rare traceries of blue shadow, traversed by sparkling blue-green waterways, interspersed with broad, smooth lagoons--where the rather overdefined forms of pink-armed, pink-legged bathers, clad in abbreviated garments, swam, splashed, and floated--the sands ranged out under a translucent clearness of early afternoon sunshine to the first glinting ripples of the gently inflowing tide. Farther still, along the horizon, the solid blue of the intervening belt of deep sea melted, by imperceptible gradations, into low-lying tracts of furrowed, semi-transparent opaline cloud.

Those gold and silver shimmering levels, washed by and rimmed with heavenly blue, commanded Adrian's imagination. He found the strong air sweet to breathe, the keen scent of the brine pleasant to his nostrils. Disease, age, death, and kindred ugly concomitants of human experience lost their vraisemblance and meaning. Only glad and gracious things were credible. These in multitude innumerable; and along with them, making audible the note of pathos without which even perfect beauty still lacks perfection, the haunting solicitation of the Beyond and of the Unattained, forever beckoning the feet of man onward with the promise of stranger and more noble joys hidden from him as yet within the womb of the coming years.

Whereupon Anastasia Beauchamp, divining in some sort the trend of her companion's meditations, proceeded to pat him genially upon the arm.

"My dear young god, 'come down off that roof right away,' as little Byewater would put it, and listen to my recital of sordid domestic woes recently suffered by our _belle Gabrielle_."

Adrian became practical, his nose at once pugnacious and furiously busy, on the instant.

"Great heavens!" he exclaimed, "who has dared to offer her annoyance?"

"Mice, my dear Savage, beetles, and, to be quite plain with you, drains. Yes, you may well make a grimace. That mild-looking little chalet yonder across the valley--the one with the parterre of marigolds--which she had rented without preliminary inspection, proved a veritable pest-house. When I arrived in July--mainly with a view to safeguarding your interests, since frankly I hold most seaside places in abhorrence--"

"How can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you!" the young man murmured fervently.

"I have no child--and--perhaps, at my age, even the ghost, even the fiction, of motherhood is better than nothing.--But this is a digression--sentimental or scientific, which? To return. I found Madame Vernois nervous and debilitated, little Bette with a temperature and sore throat, the indispensable maid Henriette drowned in tears and sulks, and our poor, beautiful Gabrielle in a most admired distraction."

Harrowed by which description, her hearer gave way to smothered imprecations.

"Exactly. At the time I too made little remarks. Then I sniffed once--twice. Twice was quite sufficient. Better sacrifice a month's rent than be poisoned. Without ceremony I bundled them over here, bag and baggage, since when, dear creatures, they flourish. The Bernards, who had taken the villa next door to the pest-house, also had cause for dissatisfaction. They joined us. This addition to our party I could have dispensed with. I entertain the highest respect for M. Bernard's acquirements, only I could wish he had learned early in life that imparting information and making conversation are by no means synonymous. Never am I alone with him for over five minutes but he positively lapidates me with the remains of the architectural past. Conversation should be interchange of opinions, ideas, experiences, not a bombardment with facts which one is perfectly competent to read up for oneself if one's a mind to. Should you ever be tempted to start a hobby--we none of us know what we may come to!--avoid archæology, my dear Savage, I implore you, out of retrospective tenderness for my sufferings during the last few weeks! Yes--and then I must record one truly alarming episode. The great Zélie and a horde of her nauseating adherents threatened a descent upon Madame St. Leger. Promptly I engaged all the vacant rooms in the hotel--fortunately they weren't very numerous--until the peril was over-past."

"You are not only the kindest and the most superb of friends, but you are a great general. You should command armies," Adrian declared. "Forever shall archæology be anathema to me!"

"Saving the proposed raid of the objectionable Zélie, our history has been of the simplest," Anastasia continued. "People, pleasant and unpleasant, have come and gone; we remain--and there's the sum total of it. Now tell me about yourself. How long do we keep you?"

"Alas, only until this evening. I must go back to Rouen, where my letters await me. We have been moving daily from place to place, as inclination suggested. To-morrow I must rejoin René Dax--for a few days, a week probably, to observe how the new treatment prospers. It is decided that he shall remain in the country-house, near Caen, of an intelligent young doctor who has been in attendance upon him during our touring. His man-servant, of course, is with him. And there he can also have his pet animals."

"Will he recover?"

Adrian raised his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"God knows!" he answered. "He is quite gentle, quite tractable. At moments he is irresistibly entertaining. On his good days he composes little poems of an exquisite fancifulness and fragility--iridescent flowers as of spun glass. But whether he will ever draw or paint again is an open question."

"It is pathetic," Miss Beauchamp put in musingly. "What a sequel to his extravagant popularity!"

And both lapsed into silence, looking out across the immense expanse of gleaming sands. Adrian was the first to speak. He did so with uncertain hesitation.

"You said it was high time I came, _tres chère Mademoiselle_. Does that imply that I have stayed away too long? I feared to be precipitate, lest I might appear to take unfair advantage of the--"

"The studio escapade--precisely."

"And employ it to further my own interests. On that account I have resolutely effaced myself. To do so has constituted a severe penance; but to do otherwise would, in my opinion, have shown an odious lack of imagination and of delicacy."

"I venture to doubt whether in affairs of the heart delicacy has not more miscarriages of happiness to answer for than precipitancy! The word too much, as between man and woman, is more easily forgiven than the word too little."

"It is inconceivable," Adrian broke out hotly, all of a fume and a fluster, "that Madame St. Leger should mistake my motives."

"Take it from me, my dear Savage," Anastasia replied, with a finely humorous smile, "that exactly in proportion as a woman is indifferent is she just and clear-sighted. Let her care for one of you tiresome male creatures ever, yes, ever so little, and those praiseworthy qualities suffer instant suspension. Reason and probability pick up their petticoats and scuttle. She develops a positively inordinate ingenuity in misconstruction and mistake."

Adrian turned an eagerly inquiring countenance upon the speaker, his whole soul in his eyes.

"But, dearest, most deeply valued friend, tell me, tell me, may I believe that she does then care?"

And asking it he bared his head, instinctively doing homage to that most lovely idea. Miss Beauchamp's smile changed in character, softening to a sweetness which held something of relinquishment and farewell.

"Ah! the good years, the good years," she said, "when love and all the world is young!--May you believe that she cares, my dear boy? Well, without its being the least unnatural, she very well might care, I fancy. But you really must find that out for yourself. Listen--the chirruping of the children. Here they all come."

She rose and went forward; and Adrian, an odd tingling sensation in his blood, went forward too and stood beside her under the central arch of the arcade watching the little procession winding its way by the rough path up the broken grass slope from the beach.

First, slender-legged, short-kilted, fresh as flowers, frisking lambkin-like and chattering in high-pitched, clear little voices, came Bette and her two little friends. Next M. Bernard, dignified, serious, robust, wearing light-brown tweeds, Panama in hand, decidedly warm, expounding, recounting, archæologically dilating to Madame Vernois--refined, fragile, dressed in black--who leaned upon his arm. At a little distance Madame Bernard, small, fair-haired, neat-featured, pretty, inclining to stoutness, her person rigorously controlled by the last word in corsets and clothed in the last word of mauve linen costumes and mauve and white hats. She was not an ardent pedestrian, and mounted laboriously with the help of a long-handled parasol, uttering reproachful little ejaculations and complaints the while for the benefit of the two young Americans, who, good-naturedly loaded up with the ladies' folding chairs, rugs and cushions, followed close behind.

And there, apparently, was an end of the procession. Whereupon Adrian turned to Anastasia with a deeply injured countenance and a quite lamentably orphaned look in his handsome eyes.

"Madame St. Leger is not with them? What can have occurred? Where then can she be?" he demanded, in tones of child-like disappointment and distress.

"There--there!" Anastasia returned, merrily. "See, no ill-chance has befallen your goddess, my dear distracted young god. Look--look--near the cliff edge, to the right."

Then noting the change which came over Adrian's expression and bearing as his eyes followed her pointing hand, Miss Beauchamp's broadly amused smile faded. She shook her head, sighed, turned away, while the witty, large-featured face grew gray, aged, sibylline beneath the shadow of her broad-brimmed, vine-crowned, slightly rampageous hat.

"Like to like," she murmured. "However, others before now have gone through that enchanted and perilous gate! Only may the Almighty permit these two not to cram their romance into one flimsy, purple-patched, paper-bound yellow-back, but print it openly and honestly in three good, stout volumes, of which all save the first twenty or thirty pages deal with the married state."

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