Chapter XIX

An Act of Justice

No trace of storm remained next morning; it was, on the contrary, a day of brilliant and cloudless calm, a lotus-eating day, made for basking in sunshine and rejoicing only to be alive.

But Miss Boundrish was not content with merely being alive, she wished to be very comfortable as well; and to that end selected the pleasantest spot in the grounds, outside that same shelter of rye-straw whence Ermengarde had overheard scraps of conversation between two strangers on her first day there. Miss Dorris was quite aware of the acoustic properties of the place, whence she had on many occasions derived entertainment and information that she was not unwilling to impart. This little plateau, which was reached by a flight of marble steps, was not always well supplied with seats; on the present occasion, besides some iron chairs only fit to do penance in, there were only two very cosy cushioned wicker arm-chairs with deep low seats to be had. These the young lady arranged along the edge of the little platform immediately over the mule-path, and, sitting in one, put up her feet cosily on the other in such a way that she appropriated nearly the whole front, commanding the fair and extensive prospect seaward and across the mountain gorges. Thus extended at full length, holding up a huge white sunshade, she made an interesting foreground etched upon the purple bloom of distance, and considerately blotted out most of the sunshine and nearly all the view from the shelter. Provided with a novel, a packet of letters, a box of chocolates and the prospect of revelations of human character from people passing on the mule-path, she felt herself securely fortified against attacks of dulness, and surrendered herself with a gentle sigh to the voluptuous charm of a long morning of _dolce far niente_.

She had not long enjoyed the amenities of this position, when her solitude was invaded by the sound of a slow and dragging step accompanied by faint gasps, and turning with a slight frown on her velvet brow, she perceived the figure of an elderly invalid emerging slowly from under the olive-boughs shading the steps. Encumbered with shawls, cushions, and writing and working materials, this poor lady made slow and panting progress, and was obliged to rest a minute on the wooden seat surrounding the olive-trunk; and upon perceiving a youthful form stretched on chairs along the foreground, of the aerial prospect before her, she was not without hope that the graceful figure in full bloom of health would get up and help her. In this she was disappointed, since the face of the fair damsel in question, after the first frowning glance, continued to be bent in studious absorption upon her book, as if undisturbed by or unaware of her presence. Observing this, the new-comer, in the habit of occupying one of the chairs now supporting the fairy figure, for whole mornings together, her infirmities not permitting her to walk or be carried in the ambulant arm-chairs known to common minds as donkeys, and supposing her approach to have been both unseen and unheard, rose, and gathering up her burdens, dragged herself across the platform to Dorris, with some friendly words.

At this the fair student raised her eyes languidly to the frail and bent figure standing at her side, and, having favoured her with a cool and contemptuous stare, observed in a patronizing tone that the morning was warm, and went back to her work without another word, to the poor lady's speechless amazement. A passing thought of asking her young friend if she could spare one of the easy-chairs and take a plain one for her feet was abandoned in sudden indignation at this heartless piece of impudence, and, being unable to accommodate herself to the hard iron bars and high seats of the straight chairs without actual pain, and seeing no one near to fetch her a less penitential seat, the invalid was obliged to beat a retreat with as little loss of dignity as possible, resting once more under the olive on her way, and then very slowly climbing down the marble steps.

There she met M. Isidore, fury firing his eyes and bristling his moustache, but gentleness in his voice when he spoke to her, relieving her of her encumbrances and giving her an arm to a less desirable shelter in the sun, where he surrounded her with every available comfort.

"I go now," he said with a very sweet smile, before vanishing, "to settle the other lady. She will have some fun, that one."

With this he sped across the grounds in all directions and thence into the house, whispering a word of power into the ears of those he met, and then sped back to the rear of the rye-straw shelter, where he had been sorting seeds, while the invalid, lulled by the warmth and beauty, and occupied with her needle, soon forgot her annoyance, and commented to a neighbouring lotus-eater on the pleasantness of that young man's manner, and the great addition he made to the charm and convenience of the house. "And I don't believe a word of what they say about him," she added indignantly; "he's just as nice to the old ladies as to the young ones--and a great deal nicer, too."

Meanwhile, the fair Dorris, munching chocolates, and nestling in her two easy-chairs, grew drowsy with warmth and comfort; her novel slipped from her fingers and her eyes closed; her flower-like head drooped on the slender stalk, her neck; she would soon have been in the land of dreams but for the sound of a cheery whistle on the mule-path, at which her blue eyes opened wide, and she started up, alert and listening, under her huge sunshade. Only a careless whistling of that catchy tune played at the Carnival. It broke off in the middle, but soon began again in a cheery tenor, brokenly still, and she recognized the voice of young Trevor, the Oxonian, staying in these parts to recover from something, whether from too much work, or too much play, was not clearly understood.

"No," she heard him say, in intervals of switching a juniper-bush on the brink with his stick, "I can't say I admire that black-a-vized style. I like 'em fresh and fair, curds and cream mixed with roses--like Miss Boundrish--_she's_ a ripper and no mistake."

A sweet smile illumined the curds and cream features of the ripper at this; she looked pensively at her hands, and wondered at the round whiteness of her wrists, and thought regretfully of the loveliness of her present pose, wasted upon empty air, and held her breath to listen and sniff more incense.

A female voice with an American accent rebuked the youth for levity in commenting upon feminine beauty in the concrete; he was told that he should confine his observations to the abstract.

"Well, but you can't say she isn't ripping," he remonstrated, "and why on earth shouldn't you mention a girl's name among her friends? You wouldn't discuss her in public, and you couldn't tell it to her face; but I bet anything she wouldn't mind the way I spoke of her, if she could only hear it."

Something unintelligible followed in a low voice, that Dorris recognized as the thin man's, and a light gush of laughter ensued.

"Well, and whose character is being thrown to the lions now? Oh, don't tell me, I know from the sound of that laugh that scandal's about. Is it poor me?" cried the cheerful voice of Mrs. Allonby at this juncture. She was rather breathless, as if she had just climbed up from somewhere.

"You scented the battle from afar, Mrs. Allonby. Well, you shall have your share of the spoil," said the Oxonian. "Here's a nice soft stone for a seat. It's only the beauty of Miss Boundrish that's on toast. I say she's ripping, and they say I'm rude to say it."

"I think her perfectly lovely. Those coral lips, that velvet brow----"

"Ah, you're charring now, Mrs. Allonby----"

"No, I really do admire the girl's face immensely if only----"

"Ah!" interjected the thin man piously, "that fatal 'if,' that always qualifies the admiration of ladies for each other!"

"Well, anyhow I guess it's a pretty big if this time, ain't it, Mrs. Allonby?" Mrs. Dinwiddie asked.

"Beasts," reflected the fair being above them. "Of course, all the men are for me and all the women against!"

"I was only about to regret," Ermengarde replied meekly, "that manners in that quarter scarcely match the beauty of the face."

"Manners?" cried the thin man enigmatically. "Ah, if you want manners!"

"Oh! manners," echoed the boy, "that's another matter. I was talking of beauty, and if that girl isn't a clinker----"

"'Manners makyth man,' as I trust all Wykehamists know----"

"Well, now, Mr. Welbourne, if manners makyth woman too," Mrs. Dinwiddie put in, "I judge that poor Boundrish gell wants making some. The way she'll take the only comfortable chairs."

"I'll poor-Boundrish-girl her as soon as I get the chance!" reflected the fair object of the discussion, her eyes winking with wrath.

"My dear lady," expostulated the boy, "we were speaking of beauty. You, who come from the country _par excellence_ of fair women, can you, even in comparison with your peerless countrywomen, deny that Miss Boundrish is a clinker?"

"Ah!" sighed poor Dorris, "I always thought Bertie Trevor as nice as they make them."

"Land's sake, Mr. Trevor, she clinks fast enough; she goes solid for beauty, if that's what you mean, and I guess she'd go for me if I darst deny it. But what, did Solomon say, is a beautiful woman without discretion?"

"Surely his was a somewhat jaundiced view of the sex, Mrs. Dinwiddie----"

"Anyhow, 'twas pretty extensive. He'd ought to know 'em if anybody did. He'd sampled 'em pretty well all round. King Solomon's reckoned about the most married man in history."

"But _is_ the poor girl wanting in discretion?" asked Ermengarde's most dulcet tones.

"Not," replied Agatha, who had silently stolen into the circle, "if it is discreet to shout exaggerated scandal in public places"--in some occult way Agatha knew of Dorris's misadventure at Turbia--"or to make mischief between friends and breed dissension in families, by the most odious misrepresentations and insinuations. Not if it is discreet to catch up half a misunderstood tale and repeat it with a twist--

"I say, Miss Somers, hadn't you better hold up. The lady might be coming round the corner," remonstrated Bertie in an anxious voice.

"She can't. She's gone to Nice to see her aunt. So she told me at breakfast----"

"Gone to Nice!" came in a chorus of irrepressible ecstasy. "If she would only _stay_ at Nice."

"Too good to be true!" complained a male voice, that Dorris conjectured to be that of a certain Major Norris, whom she had more than once publicly appropriated as lawful spoil of her charms, and inveigled into winding and solitary walks alone with her.

"Couldn't somebody persuade her that Nice is the only spot on earth for the complexion?" asked one.

"She'd swallow any rot. That story of the frogs--feeding the conscripts with frogs to give them courage! Too bad to stuff her like that," said another.

"Surely you must acknowledge that the presence of our young friend at least makes for mirth at table," reproved the thin man's plaintive tones.

"You hypocritical old owl, you!" muttered Dorris, clenching her small fists and twisting them as if a gentle fancy had involved them in Mr. Welbourne's hair, which was artistically grown.

"Say," cried Mrs. Dinwiddie with sudden inspiration, "what was M. Isidore's _mot_ on the Boundrish gell?"

"Ah! M. Isidore's _mot_," echoed Ermengarde, "how did it run?"

"To be sure, M. Isidore's _mot_," went from mouth to mouth, ending in a general shout of laughter and ejaculations of ecstasy; but what the _mot_ was poor Dorris never heard, for the simple and sufficient reason that M. Isidore was entirely innocent of having so much as imagined one, and was at that moment bending over the rose-covered rail above the path, with gesticulations expressive of mingled delight and resentment at the liberty taken with his name, to the great joy of Bertie Trevor, who made gestures of defiance at him in return. At this, M. Isidore, shaking his head as if in despair of the group below, turned his attention to Dorris--whom he could see through a chink in the rye-straw partition, and whose reception of public incense he had watched with tender, if spasmodic, interest from time to time--and was rewarded by perceiving symptoms of severe internal perturbation in the fair lady's demeanour.

The good-hearted little man had substantial and most bitter cause to dislike Dorris and all her ways; few things would have given him greater satisfaction than her instant and final disappearance from Les Oliviers, from France, from any and every place in which he might henceforth walk all his life long; but he had a heart and a soft one; he had also a French tenderness for the smaller woes of women, and what he saw through the chink smote him with such compunction that he left his seeds, leapt lightly down from the platform and ran round to the path, where the group of traducers were loitering, holding out his hands in appeal.

"Mais, mais, mesdames, messieurs! c'est un peu fort!" he cried; "does one talk so of ladies?"

"We were only admiring the dear girl's little ways," Ermengarde explained, "and her beauty."

"I do love her little way of listening to people talking among themselves, and picking their brains and passing their things off as her own," Major Norris said. "And that of patronizing her betters and flatly contradicting people on subjects she hasn't had the chance of understanding--even if she had the brains."

"The way she explained to me how we run elections in the States," added Mrs. Dinwiddie's husband, a humble, unconsidered dependent, occasionally found handy to fetch and carry for his liege lady. "She'd just as soon tell the Almighty the way to run the Universe, you bet----"

"But that charming laugh, Mr. Dinwiddie, surely that atones for much," murmured Lady Seaton, arriving from the convent to the Carnival tune that Bertie Trevor was whistling, as he had done at intervals during the whole interview, to the deep disgust and irritation of Dorris, who was more impatient than most people of tiresome tricks like humming and whistling--tricks she arrogated to herself as the peculiar privilege of one too lovely and attractive not to be always sure to please whatever she did. Dorris was, of course, not aware that whenever anyone came down the path or up the path or from the convent steep, Bertie, standing out on a little jut of rock, looking idly about, instantly began that Carnival tune, unless it was a stranger. In that case he whistled the Marseillaise and the talk paused.

"O Lord, that everlasting gurgle," growled the Major; "it's all over the place from morning till night. What the dickens does she do it for?"

Dorris's fists clenched themselves; she remembered bare-faced admiration of that charming laugh, and other tributes to her fascination, bold almost to impudence not a week old, from this false man.

"Well," replied Mrs. Dinwiddie, "I judge the poor gell can't so much as go to sleep without acting. She's just made up of affectations right through, top skirt and lining, inside and out. I should be surprised if her mother _didn't_ get headache and her father the hump."

"I don't care," Bertie began doggedly, "if she has got the voice of a screech-owl----"

"Oh, come now, Mr. Trevor, her voice is well enough, poor girl, if she wouldn't always yell at the top of it."

"Beauty is beauty, however soulless," he continued stolidly. "And if she does strut like a peacock----"

"Et tu, Bertie!" the poor peacock sighed metaphorically.

"--She's got the peacock's justification. Her hair is perfectly stunning."

"So is her voice," muttered the Major.

"Assez, assez! cette pauvre demoiselle," M. Isidore remonstrated, as he had continued to do at intervals.

"And she can't help it," added the chivalrous Bertie.

"Very true," returned Mr. Welbourne, solemnly misunderstanding him. "Our young friend should not be judged harshly for what is misfortune rather than fault. What is to be expected of an ignorant and entirely brainless girl, vain and thoughtless, who has evidently never been in any decent society? She is too young and too inexperienced to be aware of her own defects, to which her kind and indulgent parents are affectionately blind----"

"I've seen her momma squirm at her antics more than once," Mrs. Dinwiddie put in.

"If some kind and judicious friend could but tell her----"

"But who'll bell the cat? Nobody wants to be clawed."

"--She would doubtless correct herself--she is young."

"Not she; she's a heartless little cat. So spiteful," cried a female voice.

"If somebody would only lock her up while she's correcting herself," sighed Ermengarde, eliciting variously expressed but unanimous agreement in her suggestion.

In the meantime M. Isidore had stolen one more glance at the victim on the block, discovering the mournful spectacle of Dorris on her knees between the two nefariously appropriated chairs, her arms on the seat of one, her face in her hands, trying to stifle bitter sobs.

Her position was truly unfortunate. A comfortable matron had appropriated a seat at the foot of the steps, and was tranquilly perusing a paper through the glasses she held, occasionally looking up and expressing mild wonder to a daughter a little way off at the continuous talk and merriment going on outside on the path--this lady even audibly entertained the idea of going out to see for herself what was forward--and, besides not being able to leave her now distasteful eminence without passing her, poor Dorris feared she would come up to her, little knowing that the good lady was purposely stationed there to cut off her retreat and ensure her sufficient castigation.

The sight was more than the kind-hearted little Frenchman could bear. Once more he sprang down and ran into the midst of the gossipers, whispering to one after the other, "Mais elle pleure, elle pleure à chaudes larmes."

"After all," commented the thin man with unconscious cruelty, in the sudden silence that followed these words: "vulgarity is not vice. It is involuntary and unconscious."

That was the last, worst stripe of all, that and M. Isidore's knowledge and compassionate betrayal of her sufferings. "Vulgarity." The word blistered her ears; she caught up a scarf, threw it over her face, and fled down the marble steps, past the comfortable matron, nearly upsetting her, and through the grounds, dashing in her wild career against some one, she neither knew nor cared whom.

Mr. Welbourne himself felt the vitriol of his ill-considered speech the moment it was spoken, but knew it to be past mending, and groaned audibly, while every member of the group, with the exception of Major Norris, who was a disciplinarian and a thoroughly good hater when once he began, was more or less visited by compunction.

"After all, it was beastly mean of us," Bertie Trevor said, turning away with a sullen face, when the flight of the victim was known.

"'Twas the way she acted to the lame lady set up my back," Mrs. Dinwiddie confessed.

"And quite right too," the Major rejoined; "the girl was a positive pest to everybody in the house."

"But at least," came in French, in a deep contralto voice from the spot whence the sufferer had fled, causing every eye to be raised to that eminence, to perceive the majestic figure of Madame Bontemps, a large cauliflower tucked under each arm, an apron full of fresh-gathered lemons and oranges, and a sharp bright knife threateningly flourished in her hand. "At least, this demoiselle was not chased from the house for inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an innocent young girl."

Having thus spoken, Madame turned and receded majestically from sight, leaving the conspirators petrified with amazement.

"What on earth is she driving at?" asked Ermengarde, looking straight at M. Isidore, a sudden flood of enlightenment rushing in crimson over her face and throat even as she spoke, and leaving her death-pale and trembling.

M. Isidore's face, from which she quickly withdrew her gaze, was marble in its rigid impenetrability. He made no reply, beyond a faint shrug of ignorance, but turned and offered some slight service to the lady standing next him. Then the group, which had been shifting the whole time, soon melted quietly away, each member with a feeling of having done an indifferent morning's work in this long-threatened and carefully planned conspiracy of rough justice.

That morning's _déjeuner_ was singularly devoid of gaiety. The conspirators looked guiltily at poor Dorris's empty place. Those of her father and mother were expected to be empty, else the execution could not have taken place. The lame lady innocently wondered what had become of Miss Boundrish, and mentioned having seen her in the grounds that morning. Even Major Norris enjoyed the absence of the strident voice and gurgling laugh less than he expected, and found fault with the weather, which was perfect, and the salad, which was not, characterizing both as rotten. The thin man, openly but dejectedly, laid a bunch of roses by the woman of mystery's plate, and observed plaintively to Ermengarde more than once upon the undesirability of lynch law, and the mistaken estimate by average Britons of the salutary effect of ragging on immature character.

"It is often unjust," he said, "and always goes too far. Though I don't know what we should have done at Winchester without it--even without the injustice and occasional savagery. Yes, Mrs. Allonby, the savagery. But that, I hear, is now very rare. You need not shrink from sending your boy to Winchester. It will make a man of him; though he will be let down very gently to what we were."

It was during this discourse that Ermengarde discovered what she had been too much preoccupied while assisting at the execution of Miss Boundrish to think out before, though all the time she had been conscious of a subtle change in the thin man's appearance--a change so great that every one who saw him that morning was so much struck by it as to look twice, even three times at him--his beard was gone. Now why, she pondered, had Mr. Welbourne's beard taken sudden flight? Had he foreboded a personal encounter with Miss Boundrish, and thought it well to give as little hold to her vengeance as possible?

"Ah!" she said, suddenly divining another cause, "I see that you are no longer afraid of sore throat, Mr. Welbourne. That is good. First, because it means that your health is restored, secondly, because it is a portent of spring."

"Sore throat?" he murmured, bewildered. "The Riviera throat only comes in the first weeks. But----" his hand suddenly went up to the newly reaped chin, when crimson of the deepest dye suffused and betrayed him. "Quite so," he added vaguely--"yes; it--it was a protection--oh!--the _mistral_--ah--invalid ways--indolence----"

"I congratulate you on all counts," she said in a kind voice, wondering who was the object of Mr. Welbourne's passion, a sudden paralyzing fear suggesting herself. But no; that would be too terrible; M. Isidore, the Anarchist and the thin man, in those few, short weeks--Fate could hardly be so cruel as all that! And at his age! But he looked horribly young without the beard, and there was a certain gallant and knightly suggestion in the elegantly trimmed moustache left. There was no doubt that the thin man--no longer so thin and not at all so lame--was going forth in that moustache, conquering and to conquer. He had been heard to condemn the present clean-shaven mode as womanish. She had perhaps been too filial, too confiding with him, under the shadow of that venerable beard, and he had mistaken her. Then her eyes fell on the roses by Agatha's plate; she remembered that those two had often been elaborately unconscious of each other's presence lately; she remembered a long succession of gentle judgments on the woman of mystery's vagaries, and many delicate allusions to her beauty and charm, and in a flash she knew. Poor Mr. Welbourne! This was indeed tragedy.

After a sketchy and unsatisfactory _déjeuner_, during which appetite and peace were alike annihilated by that dread pronouncement of Madame Bontemps "inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an innocent young girl," ringing through her brain, Ermengarde, renouncing her intention of looking for quarters in Mentone, and thinking that San Remo would now be the nearest place in which she could venture to hide her diminished head and reflect upon the spitefulness of perverse fate, fled upstairs to her room to take counsel of solitude.

But in this she was balked before reaching her sanctuary by the encounter of Mrs. Boundrish, round-eyed and in very unfinished toilet, hurrying along the corridor in the greatest perturbation.

"Oh dear, Mrs. Allonby!" she cried in agitated _accellerando_ that admitted of no stops, "what _shall_ I do? Dorris is in _such_ a state. I can't make anything of her. She was never taken like this before and this dreadful spotted fever about nobody knows how it begins but of course their poor brains and foreign doctors and chiefly the young and they go off so soon and so infectious and Boundrish at Nice oh dear! She won't speak."

"But _is_ she spotted?" Ermengarde asked solemnly.

"She won't say; she won't speak," the poor woman sobbed, and Agatha, arriving then, bore her back to her room, while Ermengarde, hastily upsetting eau-de-Cologne in every direction, and holding a handkerchief soaked in it to her face to keep off infection, stole into the chamber of the unfortunate Dorris, trying to remember when and where and how the spots characterizing this terrible disease were to be expected.

Dorris had flung herself face downwards on her bed, and was sobbing faintly; the room was in great disorder, drawers open and clothing tossed recklessly about. Some scraps of torn paper, an open blotting-book, and pens and ink on the table, pointed to the writing and tearing up of letters.

At the sound of Ermengarde's cautious entrance the poor girl turned quickly, showing a tear-washed, wild-eyed and miserable, but quite spotless, face.

"Go away, go away! Oh, why can't I die?" she cried wildly, turning back to her original posture, while Ermengarde, carefully keeping the handkerchief to her face, felt her pulse and touched her brow softly, and asked where the pain was and what was the matter.

"And you can ask?" she moaned, "when you were there, and as bad as any of them. Somebody might have told me--privately--I didn't know. They all hate and despise me. I can never--never--nev-nev--never----"

"Dear Miss Boundrish, I _am_ so sorry," cried Ermengarde, suddenly dropping her handkerchief, her terrors, and her precautions, and putting a caressing arm round the sobbing figure on the bed. "We didn't mean it--at least, not more than a quarter of it. It was more than half in joke. And if you hadn't been rude to poor Mrs. Lamb--that put us up--and then we were carried away--forgot ourselves--everybody went one better than everybody else--you know how it is in a game like that. Think no more about it."

"But you do-do-do-don't--think me quite--such a--bib-bib-bibby--beast?"

"Certainly not," firmly and decisively.

"A scrik-scrik-screech-owl?" she sobbed; "a bun-bun-bun-bundle of aff-fec-fec-fectation? So-so-so-soulless----"

"Not in the least, dear child. It was all put on--at least, half was--just our fun. We knew you were a spoilt child, and wanted to give you a lesson, that was all. You are very young, my dear."

Then poor Dorris, touched more by the voice than the words, threw herself into Ermengarde's arms, confessed some of her sins, and acknowledged herself--after consenting to a cup of tea, made on the spot and administered by Ermengarde, and much petting, rose-water and eau-de-Cologne--a sadder, a humbler, and a wiser girl.

But her place at table knew her no more, and the familiar gurgle and strident voice never again troubled the air of Les Oliviers. A few days later her parents followed her to Cannes; Dorris, they said, required younger and gayer society.