Part 13

“I’m going to give you this, Anne,” he went on, speaking gaily to avert an uneasy fear. “I hope you appreciate the compliment. I lay my masterpiece at your feet, and you can pick it up and hang it in your salon, between the two long windows. That’s the place for it.”

She turned slowly from the picture, and her eyes met his, while she shook her head.

“No,” said she in a low voice. “I can’t take it, François.”

“Why not?”

She leant back in her chair, and a smile so sad that involuntarily he turned away, came creeping round her lips.

“Because I’m a woman,” she replied.

He made no reply. The meaning of her words did not escape him, but in a moment she translated them.

“You’ve painted me at the end of my _beaux jours_,” she said. “Before they are quite over--but at the end. I’m very grateful. But I couldn’t live with that picture, it would be too----”

She did not finish the sentence.

“Besides,--there’s another reason,” she added after a further pause.

“What’s this?” asked François, suddenly taking a book from the table. With a sort of blind haste, he strove to hinder her next words by snatching at any pretext to arrest them.

“It’s a book you lent me, nearly three years ago, I’m ashamed to say. When I first came to Paris. I’ve always forgotten to return it. But to-day,” she paused as though her mind were wandering away from the present. “To-day I remembered it.”

François took it up.

“_Mademoiselle de Maupin._ I forgot I’d ever lent it to you.”

“You remember the story?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

“It’s very different from my story, isn’t it? But the way she found, I had already discovered for myself before I read the book. It’s the right way. In my case, the only way.”

François had just lighted a cigarette. He threw it away with a sudden jerk, and looked at her without speaking.

“I’m going to-morrow.”

Her voice was steady, but quite colourless.

“René,” stammered her friend, “René is going to-morrow?”

“Yes. Into the country for a few days, for the background of his new picture.”

François drew up a chair, and sat down close to her.

“Anne,” he began gently, “There hasn’t been anything? Any...?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. But it’s coming. This has been in my mind for weeks. It was there though I scarcely knew it, before you wanted me to sit to you. When you asked me, I knew certainly.”

The spring twilight lingered in the studio, and he could still see her face, white against the cushion he had put into the chair.

As he listened to her quiet low voice, all she was saying seemed to him like the illusion of a dream.

_Anne_ to be talking of leaving René! It was an absurd hallucination on his part--a trick of his imagination.

“But René?” he asked nevertheless. “He doesn’t know? Why, I saw him early this morning, and he spoke of you----”

For the first time, her voice trembled, and he watched her slim hands travelling aimlessly over the frills on her dress.

“He doesn’t know,” she said. “That’s why I’m telling you.” There was a long silence, and he saw her fighting for composure.

“François,” she began at last in a whisper. “He won’t understand at first. He’ll think me cruel, and wicked and inexplicable.” She caught her breath, but went on bravely. “You are far sighted too. You know as well as I do, the woman who will--who will----

“He doesn’t know it yet himself. He still loves me. Now, to-day. And that’s why I’m going. I couldn’t bear.... He must be quite free. It was only on those terms I agreed with myself to--to----” She was shivering now from head to foot, and the words came in gasps like the words of a dying woman. “It has lasted for three years, and I thought it might only be three months. I have had quite ... quite a long life, François.”

He turned away so that he should not see her smile.

“I’m not going to be coward enough to spoil it--for both of us,” she went on after minutes which seemed like hours. François had been mechanically counting the strokes of the clock which ticked maddeningly in the gloom. He had never noticed it before, and was seized with a sudden mad desire to smash it into fragments.

“But I want you,--will you, François?--in a little while, when he will listen, to say what you can for me?”

He got up, and began to walk about the room, stumbling against the chairs in the way.

At last he turned abruptly, and stood before her.

“Must you, Anne?” His voice was an entreaty. It shook almost as much as her own.

She got up slowly, and gave him both hands.

“Good-bye, François.”

He held them close, without speaking.

“I shall write to you,” she said, “--later on. I’m going to be a great traveller. You will hear of me from--from all sorts of wonderful places. And I shall see you again, my dear friend. But I don’t think I shall ever see----” she stopped, and he felt her hands shaking in his.

“Anne!” he implored. “Don’t go.”

“Don’t say anything more,” she implored. “I have to get through the evening. It’s our--last. So you see it must be quite--It must be quite a happy----”

She stretched out a trembling hand for her cloak, and he wrapped it round her, fastening it for her as though she were a child. Then he took her downstairs, and called a closed _fiacre_.

In the darkness of the courtyard, by the door, he put his arm round her shoulders, and taking both her hands in one of his, he kissed them.

They were wet with the tears she had tried to brush aside.

XIX

Two or three mornings before the conversation between Dr. Dakin and François Fontenelle, Anne, the peaceful Anne of to-day, received by the same post, three letters which interested her.

She knew the handwriting on the envelopes of each, and hastened first to learn what her brother had to say. Hugh, as she had known for some months, was returning to England.

His farm had prospered, and anxious to launch his sons, boys of sixteen and eighteen, in the professions they had chosen, he had determined to retire, and end his days in the old country.

The letter, an affectionate one, stated that he was already in London where he had taken a furnished house, to give him and his wife time to look round, and decide upon their future home.

Anne must come to see them the moment she returned. They were all looking forward to her visit.

She put down the closely written pages with an air of content, and turned smiling to the envelope inscribed in the large childish characters which recalled Sylvia Carfax.

“MY DEAREST DEAR MISS PAGE,

“I _must_ write to you because I’m so happy and excited. I’ve got _splendid_ plans. Just yet, I can’t tell even _you_ what they are, because it’s a secret for the present. But it means a simply magnificent chance for me, and of course it has something to do with my work. Mother and father will be very angry, I’m afraid, but I can’t help it. It’s too good to lose, and one can’t sacrifice the whole of one’s future because of one’s parents. Besides later on, they will see how wise I’ve been. Oh dear Miss Page, _when_ are you coming back? I want to see you so much, because by that time everything will be settled, and I can tell you all about it. I’m too excited to write any more. Only I want you very badly. Do, _do_ come home soon.

“Your ever loving “SYLVIA.”

Anne returned the note to its envelope with a slightly worried look.

What folly was the child considering? She must write to her at once, and insist upon a full explanation.

In the meantime she opened the other letter, which bore the Paris stamp-mark, and was evidently from Madge Dakin. It was very short, and very incoherent, but when Anne raised her head and let the lilac-tinted paper slip from her hand, her face was rather white.

She was at breakfast in her sitting-room, whose window overlooked Rome.

The sunshine flooded the room, and the anemones, purple, white and scarlet, in a bowl placed on the snowy cloth, glowed with the colour of jewels.

The air was sweet with the scent of violets which almost covered a small table near the open window, and outside, over-arching the city, the Roman sky was gloriously, passionately blue.

Anne sat with her elbows on the table, her chin resting on her open palms, lost in thought.

Suddenly she rose, and rang the bell.

“Burks,” she said when the maid appeared, “can you pack, and be ready to start for Paris to-day?”

Burks stared. “But I thought we weren’t leaving for another month, ma’am,” she gasped.

“I know. But I find it’s necessary to go at once. Can you manage it?”

The maid beamed with satisfaction. “It’ll be a rush, but I’ll do it, ma’am, and be thankful. I’m about tired of foreigners,” she added, alluding thus with a sniff of scorn to the Italian cook with whom she lived on terms of ill-concealed warfare.

Anne smiled absently.

“Yes. You’ll be glad to get home, I dare say Burks, and Paris is on the way. Please give me my writing things. I must put off all my engagements, and write a hundred letters, so I don’t want to be disturbed this morning.”

Left alone, Anne re-read the letter which had prompted her decision to leave Rome at once. Short, hurried as it was, it conveyed the misery of the writer better than pages of outpouring, and Anne did not need the supplication contained in the last lines to lead her to any creature in distress.

“Poor little soul! Poor wretched little thing!” she thought, before she forced herself to attend to the lengthy correspondence which in view of her large circle of Roman friends, such a hurried leave-taking entailed.

Unwilling to hinder Burks in her work of packing, she went herself to post her letters, and to dispatch the telegram which warned Madge Dakin of her arrival in Paris next day.

While she walked to the post-office, while she mingled with the crowds in the street, and vaguely heard the cries of the flower vendors, the cracking of whips, the babel of tongues, her thoughts were far away. Her friend’s letter had told her nothing definite, but Anne guessed the nature of her trouble.

Imperceptibly, from sadness and perplexity her expression became stern. A passionate anger such as for years she had not experienced, grew momentarily stronger.

“Always the same,” she repeated to herself. “Cruel, cynical. Too light-minded to desire anything strongly. Selfish enough to gratify every passing whim----” And then her thoughts received a sudden disconcerting check.

What of the years of loyal friendship he had given her? How could she forget his tenderness and sympathy at the bitterest moment of her life? How ignore either, the many kindnesses difficult for a man wholly cynical, impossible for one wholly selfish, which he had shown to the down-trodden, the beaten, the unsuccessful in life’s struggle?

Once again, for the thousandth time she recognized the complexity of every human being. The baffling contradictions; good interwoven with evil, nobility with meanness, honour with disloyalty. It was the great intricate puzzle of human nature she was once more considering; a tangle which nothing but the cloak of infinite charity can cover. The only cloak which glorifies and reveals what is good and strong, while in pity, in despairing tenderness it hides under its ample folds, the shame, the weakness, the ugly scars of the form it both shelters, and defines.

Anne sighed as she reached the top of the Spanish steps, and leant on the wall to take a last look at the city she loved.

Overhead, that “great inverted bowl we call the sky,” here, deeply blue, surpassingly beautiful. Beneath it, the dancing sunshine playing alike on dome and pinnacle, roof and tree, and on the thousands of men and women in the busy streets. Men and women hiding within their breasts incalculable heights and depths of virtue and vice, actual or potential. Men and women soon to be covered by the earth on which they walked, to make place for another, yet essentially the same swarm of human beings between the same earth and sky, still asking the same questions under the same sunshine, which laughed, and never replied.

It was the eternal puzzle, the old riddle to which through the ages no solution has been found.

Anne sighed once more, and then smiled at the futility of considering it again just now, when there was packing to be done.

_He maketh His sun to shine upon the just and upon the unjust._

The words slipped into her mind before she turned away, with a momentary sensation of reassurance. At least the sunshine fell upon every one alike. Perhaps it symbolized a cloak of charity wider and larger than any woven by human minds.

* * * * *

“Will Madame come upstairs?”

The maid re-entered the room in which Anne had been waiting, and then preceded her up the staircase to a door which she threw open.

A little figure huddled over the fire, rose hastily as she entered, and with incoherent words that sounded like a cry, threw herself into her arms.

“Oh! You are good! You are good!” Madge repeated, hiding her eyes like a child against the elder woman’s arm. “I should have _died_ if you hadn’t come.”

When at last she drew herself away, and looked at her visitor, Anne had to suppress a start of dismay.

She scarcely recognized Madge Dakin.

Her cheeks were white and sunken, and swollen with much crying. She was pitifully thin, and her nervous hands strayed constantly about her face. Her pretty hair, generally so carefully waved and tended, was screwed into an untidy knot at the back of her head. She had evidently not troubled to dress all day, for she wore a bedroom wrapper, whose pink ribbons she had forgotten to tie and arrange.

“My dear child,” declared Anne, “you must give me some tea. I’m dying for it, and I shall be speechless till I get it.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. I make it myself generally. I--forgot it this afternoon.”

Anne sat down in an armchair near the fire, and purposely allowed her to put on the kettle, and make all the preparations alone.

A glance at the room, a fairly large one, from which a bedroom opened, showed that her friend had probably done nothing but cry over the fire for several days.

It was dusty, and littered with papers, books, working materials. It looked untidy, and uncared for.

There were dead flowers in the vases, and the curtains half drawn, obscured the already dying light of a dull day.

When the kettle began to boil, she rose, and gently pushed Madge into a chair.

She made the tea herself, while in a sort of stupor of wretchedness, Mrs. Dakin watched the movements of her white fingers.

“Now drink that, my child,” she said, putting the cup and saucer into her hand.

“Have you had any lunch?”

Madge shook her head.

“Then you must eat a plateful of these excellent biscuits, and you must begin at once.”

She proceeded to drink her own tea, talking about her journey, and the slowness of the trains, till watching the face opposite to her she saw a trace of colour in the cheeks.

“And now what is it, my dear?” she asked very gently, as Mrs. Dakin pushed the cup away from her.

For answer, Madge burst into a flood of hopeless tears.

Anne leant forward and took her hand. “It’s François Fontenelle, isn’t it?” she inquired.

Mrs. Dakin raised her head, her lips parted like a baby’s.

“How did you guess?” she whispered.

“Because I’ve known him for a great many years--very well.”

There was the faintest trace of bitterness in Anne’s tone. The sight of the miserable bowed figure had revived some of her resentment.

With a quick movement, Madge left her chair, and knelt beside her, hiding her face, with a childish gesture, while Anne’s arm went round her as tenderly as a mother’s.

“I’m going to tell you everything,” she began in a half-choked voice. “I’ve been so wicked, Miss Page, that I--I can’t believe it. Every now and then I think it’s a dream.” She shivered in Anne’s grasp, and sobbed a moment.

“It was my fault. I thought I was so bored. I thought I was tired of Harry--of Harry who has always been a thousand times too good for me. And so I--I flirted with him. Helen Didier says I threw myself at his head. She’s a hateful woman, and I loathe her, but that’s true, I did. He never cared for me. In my heart I knew he didn’t, even when I led him on to make love to me. It was nothing but my wretched wicked vanity. Just because I was bored. Just because----” Her voice sank, and for a moment Anne heard nothing but the painful catching of her breath in exhausted sobs.

“And the awful part was,” she stammered at last, “that _I_ didn’t care either. I never meant it to be more than a flirtation. At least I think I didn’t,” she added with a pitiful attempt at perfect honesty. “But----” She stopped short.

“But it became more than that. He was your lover?”

She nodded her head, and then suddenly clasped Anne with convulsive strength.

“And Harry’s coming to-morrow. And I’m a vile woman!”

She cried the words aloud in a panic of horror.

“Oh, Miss Page, what shall I do. What will become of me? what shall I say to Harry? I shall go mad!”

Anne laid her cheek on the head that rested against her shoulder, and was silent.

She understood what was passing in the soul of the weak, terror-struck little woman. The horror of outraged conventions, the nightmare conviction that she, the descendant of generations of respectable, honest women, she who had never heard of the sin she had committed, except in accents of disdain or horror, had become an abandoned creature, unfit for decent society, branded, defiled, eternally lost.

Anne’s heart went out to her in passionate pity.

“Oh help me! Tell me what to do,” Madge wailed. “You’re the only woman in the world I dared to tell, because----”

The abrupt pause, and a nervous gesture betrayed her, and Anne started a little, overcome by a sudden conviction.

“Yes. Why did you tell me, my dear?” she asked quietly.

“Because,” began Madge hurriedly, “you are so kind, so sweet, I felt----”

“That wasn’t the only reason.”

“No!” she cried with sudden recklessness. “It wasn’t. It’s because I heard that you--that you--Helen Didier found it out. She never rested. And then I asked--_him_, and he said I was never to mention your name to her. But she found out all about it, on the pretence that it was _you_ who had corrupted my mind, and made me what she calls fast. And so----”

“And so you thought you might confess to a fellow sinner?”

Anne’s cheek still rested on Madge’s hair, and over her head, her eyes smiled very quietly into the fire.

Madge was silent.

“I knew you wouldn’t utterly despise me,” she murmured at last, in a low voice.

“He has gone?” asked Anne after a moment. “You sent him away?”

“He came on Monday--two or three days ago. I’ve forgotten when.” She made a distracted gesture. “Until--until just lately, it was all right. We were not--not----”

“Not lovers,” said Anne, finishing the sentence for her in an even voice.

“Well, he came. And by that time I’d come to my senses, and to all this awful misery. He’s very kind,” she went on with a sort of surprise, as a child might speak of the unexpected clemency of some grown-up person. “He said he didn’t want to make me unhappy, and if I pleased it should all be at an end, and he would go away. So he went. But Harry’s coming to-morrow, and I daren’t meet him. I daren’t look at him. It’s awful--_awful_! I would kill myself,--but I daren’t do that either.”

She rose from her knees, and sank back in her chair, exhausted and shaking; her eyes fixed on Anne were the eyes of a little hunted animal.

All the terror of the gulf she had put between herself and respectable women, all the horror of feeling herself _déclassée_ outside the pale of moral virtue, filled her conventional little soul. It outweighed the sense of her personal disloyalty; it was greater than her sense of wanton treachery towards her husband. She was no longer a respectable woman, and in that fact lay the sting.

Anne leant towards her. “You haven’t told Harry?”

She shook her head.

“Then don’t.”

Madge stared at her incredulously. “But--but look at me!” she stammered. “He’ll see. He’d guess, even if I don’t tell him. I can’t stop crying. I can’t--help it.”

While she spoke the tears were running down her cheeks.

“Yes, you can. You can pull yourself together. He expects to find you ill, but you can meet him with a bright face--for his sake.”

“For his sake?” repeated Madge.

“Yes. Think of him a little, my dear, and forget yourself.”

“You mean he would never forgive me? Never take me back?”

“On the contrary, I know he would. He loves you. You would never hear a word of reproach from his lips. Your husband is a fine man, Madge, and a generous one--and a gentleman.”

“Yes, he is! He is!” she returned eagerly. “He _would_ forgive me, and I ought to tell him. I should never have a happy moment if I didn’t. My life would be spoilt.”

“And what about his?” asked Anne quietly.

Madge gazed at her. “You mean he--he wouldn’t forget it?”

Anne answered with a curious smile.

“You don’t understand much about men, my little Madge,” she said. “When they love, their instinct of possession is stronger than anything you can guess. It’s bound up with a thousand forces from primitive barbarous times. It may be unreasonable and savage, but it’s there. A generous man forgives, and even tries to understand. But the wound remains, and it rankles in spite of him. Have you the right to inflict such a wound? The wrong is yours. _You_ should be the only one to suffer.”

“But I _shall_ suffer,” broke in Madge. “And much more, if I feel I’m deceiving him.”

“Then accept the extra suffering, and bear it alone,” returned Anne quickly. “One pays for everything, Madge. Is it fair to call upon some one else to share the expenses?”

There was silence for a moment.

“If _you_ had married--afterwards, I mean,” said Madge hesitatingly, “wouldn’t you have told your husband?”

“There was no question of my marriage,” answered Anne rather painfully. “But if your circumstances were mine,” she added after a moment, “I should act as I advise you to act.”

Madge’s grasp on her hand tightened, but she did not speak.