Chapter XXI

Connexions by Marriage

Ermengarde always maintained afterwards that she had suspected the Anarchist's identity from the first, though this assertion scarcely agreed with the descriptions she had written of that baleful person in letters still extant.

She would have been more accurate in saying that the sudden exclamation of "Stop that!" in a perfectly undisguised and familiar voice had first conveyed a suspicion of the awful truth to her mind in a paroxysm of terror and bewilderment, and that not until the Anarchist's sarcastic assertion that she was only a connexion by marriage had the terrified suspicion become a dread certainty, and moved her to tear off his disguise.

"Well," said Arthur, standing grim and gaunt before her in his proper person, after the considerate departure of M. Isidore had left the connexions by marriage in possession of the field, dropping his cloak and looking some inches taller in consequence. "Well, Ermengarde?"

He was looking straight and stern in her face, with eyes coldly blazing and full of reproof, indignation and condemnation, but no relenting. Ermengarde's spirit rose at the injustice of the implied condemnation; she returned his gaze steadily, unflinchingly, and silently, bracing herself to face the situation and on no account give in.

"Well?" she returned coolly, at the end of a long, searching, unblenching gaze.

"You little fool!" he said, withdrawing his eyes after a time, with a curious little laugh.

"I certainly have been a fool--in more ways than one," she returned calmly. "And how about yourself?"

"I find you in a nice predicament," he replied. "I hear casually yesterday that you are turned out of your hotel, treating the matter as a joke, and relating it as an amusing story to absolute strangers--turned out--how can I say it, Ermengarde? for silly--for compromising intimacy--ugh!--with the hotel-keeper's daughter's fiancé----"

"Really? Much obliged for your kind interest in my affairs. Slater's detectives? Most ingenious. And, of course, you believed all you were told by your Sherlock Holmes's and Paul Prys."

"And," he continued, ignoring these sarcasms, "to-day I come personally to see for myself----"

"In the disguise of a Polish Anarchist----"

"And find you with that accursed young French idiot at your feet----"

"Young French idiots fall at people's feet on very small provocation."

"Making violent love to you--apparently."

"Ah! It's just as well you put in that 'apparently'," she commented quite tranquilly, though all the time she was saying to herself, "Bluff, Ermengarde, bluff! it's your only chance."

"You were crying----"

"Probably; I've had a good deal to cry about of late----" She looked down as she spoke to arrange the set of her blouse, and gave her drapery a few careful little pats.

"--Agitated. Perhaps you will offer some explanation of this?"

"Perhaps. In the meantime, perhaps you will offer some explanation of your conduct." She looked up, quite satisfied now with the set of the blouse belt.

"My dear child, this folly must end; this is a serious matter and not an amateur farce. You have landed yourself in a most compromising situation, made yourself the cause, the patent, acknowledged, loudly proclaimed cause, of an engagement being broken off; and you simply laugh at the whole thing."

"And if I have, as you say, brought myself into such a situation, pray, whose fault was it?"

"Whose should it be but your own, your own folly and wilfulness and insane disregard of common proprieties and decent conventions."

She had always understood that the Socratic method of conducting an argument consisted in asking, and never answering, perpetual questions, and being under the impression that Socrates was a person of quite remarkable sagacity, resolved to employ it. As on this wise.

"Who refused to take me abroad for my health when I needed it, and then followed me secretly in disguise to spy out and magnify every mistake I might make? Who employed spies about me to report and distort every incident of my life here? Who had grown so cold and cruel and faithless to me at home that it was no home any more, and I felt I could endure it no longer? Who was too busy and too poor to send his wife to the South after illness, when he had just made a great success and was planning a tour of his own to the very place he actually followed her to, disguised as a spy? Who kept all his good fortune from his wife's knowledge?" A faint sob, disguised as a cough, interrupted this interrogatory.

"Good Heavens! Ermengarde," cried Arthur, the expression of whose face had undergone a variety of changes, mostly merging into one of stupefaction, during this address, "what can you mean? What can you have taken into your head? What on earth do you mean by faithless?"

"What," she cried, losing her head suddenly, and throwing prudence and pride to the winds, though still adhering to the Socratic method--"what did you mean by that scene in your study, the night I came home early with a headache from my mother's, and looked in?"

"Scene in my study? There was never any scene in my study. What night are you talking of? Look into my study whenever you like, and you'll see nothing there but a man working or smoking, or both."

At this the Socratic method went by the board as well as pride and prudence.

"The night--after--after--you had been so unkik-kik-kind about my ha-ha-hats and gug-gug-gug-going abroad," she gasped, "the night the--the woman was there--cry-crying--and being com-com-comforted?"

"Woman crying?" he muttered, puzzled. "Women don't come and cry in my study. What on earth have you been imagining? Women don't come--except, of course, the secretary--at all. You can't mean Miss Scott? By George, now I come to think of it, she did come and cry there once, poor girl. And of course, I tried to comfort her."

"Oh, _of course_!"

"Ermengarde! How can you?"

"How coo-coo-coo-could _you_?"

"Really one might almost suppose you had lowered yourself to some vulgar suspicions----"

They had now arrived by slow degrees, and after various stops and turns to emphasize rhetoric, at a place where the top of the ridge widened, and the path ran between pine-woods clothing the side of the ravine, that here sloped steeply instead of falling perpendicularly.

"You were, at any rate, landed in a most _compromising situation_," she broke in, recovering her calm, "_a nice predicament_," she added, stepping from the path into the wood among aromatic undergrowth and tall white heath. "And when that predicament is satisfactorily explained, it will be time----"

"You poor little fool!" he cried, suddenly turning, taking both her hands and looking straight into her eyes, "you must have been off your head----"

"Arthur, how dare you!"

"Regularly off your head to stoop to such miserable suspicions----"

She wrenched her hands away. "I, at least, never spied on you. I had no wish to verify any suspicions--I had seen more than enough," she said scornfully.

"You could have falsified them at once with one question?"

"I--I couldn't--stoop--to that," she wept.

"My child, you must have had hysteria rather badly. I must have been brutally impatient; I was so rushed just then. Poor Miss Scott brought some typing that night and wrote shorthand notes until she was tired out. Then I just happened to ask her a question about a family trouble I knew was worrying her--you remember I engaged her on a family recommendation; her people are old friends of mine--my question was an unlucky one, and the poor girl broke down; she was so thoroughly tired out. You must have chosen that exact moment to open the door----"

"I didn't at least go up on purpose, and come suddenly round a corner in disguise," she protested.

"Most unfortunately you did not. But--Ermengarde----"

"And if I had stooped to ask explanations," she interrupted; "I ask none; I wish none now; I merely suggest that before you demand explanations of what you must know can have been nothing you could possibly complain of, certain little eccentricities on your own part require to be cleared up. What, for instance, took place under the olives yonder only yesterday morning? Why all those secret meetings and communications in cipher with a young woman of doubtful antecedents, of mysteries, of evasions, of perpetual assignations and private interviews with notorious usurers and pretended cousins? I don't wish to know--but--I resent the imputations you cast upon my intercourse with a young man who is half secretary and half waiter at this house, and at the beck and call of all here alike. I might," she added, "go further, and ask why you chose to follow me about in a ridiculous disguise, and worry and frighten me to death by spying on me and posing as an Anarchist and conspirator?"

"Because I was an ass, probably. And when did I pose as anything but a foreigner? Except at the Carnival, which is all masquerade"--"The Carnival?" she murmured, puzzled--"We have both been infernal idiots, Ermengarde. We quarrelled about nothing in particular to begin with----"

"If you call sarcasm, neglect, unkindness, coldness--nothing----"

"I certainly was a beast. Such a rush of work had come all at once, and I hadn't time to consider that that infernal Flu had made you hysterical. And you did cut into me about going abroad on your own finance. But look here, Ermengarde, how could I have let you go alone, weak as you were? First I got Miss Scott to go and look after you as your companion----"

"Miss Scott? Why, I never saw the woman in my life--except her back in the study that night--if it was she--and as for a companion, I never had such a thing in my life----"

"My dear child, Miss Somers _is_ Miss Scott----"

"Oh-o-o-o-oh! The woman of mystery?--my companion?"

"She doesn't care to typewrite and do secretary under her own name, but, coming here with you, and having relations she was bound to meet all over the place----"

"Ah--a-a-a-ah! Aunts? Step-cousins? Ivor Paul?"

"Yes; her cousin, her uncle's stepson--she had to go back to her own name. And then, that blessed book coming out and at once promising a boom, unexpectedly put me in funds to come and look after you myself. I was a good deal used-up, and ordered a rest-cure. As intelligence officer and paper correspondent I've done disguises before--the only way to get information--and incidentally I've picked up a lot of copy and been able to help Agatha Somers in that family trouble, too. I didn't mean to keep up the disguise more than to see you safe here at first. But it turned out to be so useful. And, I say, look here, you little silly; don't let's quarrel any more."

It was pleasant on the wooded steep; myrtle-bushes gave out a delicious aroma; innumerable bees made an organ-bourdon in grey masses of rosemary-bloom; grasshoppers chirped in shrill pleasure; loveliest tints and shadows were tangled in drooping olive-foliage; rugged peaks, soaring far above gorge and ridge, ran up into a velvety blue sky; and, looking far down the ravine's course, the connexions by marriage caught the deep warm bloom of a peacock-blue sea, glowing in full sunshine and crossed by silvery sails and long black hulls of steam vessels.

After all, a good hard shoulder is a pleasanter thing to lean one's head upon than a cold, sharp rock or a rough and turpentiny tree-trunk; and any more comfortable place to have a really good cry on has never yet been imagined. Besides, however perverse and exasperating they may be, husbands occasionally come in handy, when things suited to their obtuse intellects have to be done--bills paid--insolent landladies tackled--hotel accommodation provided.

So it was in a very light-hearted mood that Mrs. Allonby stepped out into the olive-grove and walked along the mule-path, when the sun was declining and western valleys were filling with purple shadow, and the light pad-pad of a patient, soft-eyed mule warned them to step aside, on pain of being jostled by his laden panniers, giving opportunity of answering a dark-eyed peasant woman's "Buon sera," and admiring her pleasant smile and white teeth, as she passed on, bearing her own burden behind her four-legged slave's.

"I always wanted to show you this bit," Ermengarde said, when the woods parted and sank at the top of the ridge and a sudden burst of broad purple sea glowed to the east, where the gorge opened, and a smaller bay disclosed itself on the west, all golden shimmer under a rose-gold sun. "And you had been seeing it all the time. What a fraud you are!"

"I tell you what, Ermengarde; let's have the boy out when your mother comes later on. She can bring him. Easter falls early; and, after all, the little chap might as well miss the fag-end of the term. That'll set the old lady up, eh? Italian lakes on the way home, or a look at Florence, or what?"

When they reached the hotel-gate, a woman with a tired, but serene and sweet, face came down the twisted pine-root steps from the convent, with a little start and flush of surprise at seeing them--the ex-anarchist now a respectable, clean-shaven Briton, with a stable-cap in place of the broad felt hat, and the cloak rolled in a neatly strapped bundle.

"Aha, my dear woman of mystery!" cried Ermengarde gaily, with open hands. "Found out at last! All your machinations unmasked and exposed! How are you? My best respects to you. I hear that you have been looking after a certain Mrs. Allonby--connected with _the_ Allonby, don't you know--kind of dry-nursing the poor thing! If I'm not mistaken, you found her a pretty good handful, didn't you?"

"Well, pretty fair at times," she admitted, observing that Mrs. Allonby wore a diamond and pearl chain, closely resembling that flung to her by the Spaniard at the Carnival, and afterwards exposed for sale in a Monte Carlo window.

"Dear Miss Somers, I was a beast about the necklace. I am so sorry."

"Thought you'd sneaked the thing," Arthur blurted out with a grin, in that exasperating way of his.

"I didn't," she stoutly contradicted; "I thought he had sneaked it and made _you_ the cat's paw to sell it. And, oh, my goodness, Miss Somers!" she laughed out suddenly, "if I didn't think at one time that you were this man's wife! And didn't I pity you, just! But we are not going to act charades any longer. Nobody is to be anybody else any more; no, not even that wretched young Isidore, the fraud! Ah! I wonder if Mr. Welbourne will turn out to be some discontented duke in disguise," she cried, suddenly becoming aware of the mystified countenance of the thin man, who had come by the mule-path round the convent; "I'm not cracked, Mr. Welbourne, only a little crazy. Let me introduce my husband--just arrived."

The thin man congratulated and opined that the arrival was singularly opportune under the circumstances, while Arthur confessed that Mr. Welbourne's virtues had long been familiar to him through correspondence.

And then, after proper comments on the weather, Arthur, with no outward sign of terror, whatever he felt, sought the awful presence of Madame Bontemps, while Ermengarde, with her heart in her mouth, and cold chills running all over her, tried to be admitted to private conference with Mlle. Geneviève, the woman of mystery acting as intermediary in this difficult piece of diplomacy.

"The chain was from Spink's, after all," Mrs. Allonby admitted with a blush, observing Agatha's glance upon it, "and people with glass houses shouldn't throw stones. My husband saw the thing for sale at Poupart's, and went in and redeemed it. He knew it by a flaw in a pearl. And you may imagine I've had to sing pretty small, smaller than even the poor Boundrish this afternoon--and with better reason, I'm afraid."

"You have sung very sweetly to me, dear Mrs. Allonby, and, after all, I must have been a horrid nuisance----"

"You certainly were. But my husband, poor man, has to reckon with me for that."

"Mine was not the easiest position; to act companion anonymously----"

"And be taken for a spy, a conspirator----"

"And thief----"

"No, no; but that miserable man of mine pays the bill for _all_. And when you marry, dear Miss Somers, take my advice; keep him well in hand, but never let it come to a long sulk. Whatever it is, have it out with him at once and have done with it."

In the meantime, Madame Bontemps, all unsuspicious of what was coming, was sitting peacefully in the office, casting up the columns of the weekly bills with one part of her sane and practical mind, and gloating in memory over her powerful remarks of the morning in the garden with another; while with a third she threw out staccato commands and observations to M. Bontemps, who was placidly smoking a cigarette over his _Petit Niçois_ on the sofa, when a tall, clean-shaven, respectable Briton, with a keen, unflinching eye, and the usual British air of holding a subject universe in fee, walked in and bid her good evening in excellent French.

"This is without doubt Madame Bontemps," he said, introducing himself as the husband of a lady staying in the house, a Mrs. Arthur Allonby, and handing her his card, on reading which all Madame's bristles rose, and she prepared herself for the battle she felt to be imminent and also pregnant with victory to her side. Politely, but sadly, she desired her guest to be seated in a chair handed him at a sign from her by M. Bontemps, who smiled pleasantly to himself, expecting to be agreeably diverted by the forthcoming combat.

But Mr. Allonby, declining the chair, much to Madame's regret, as she found it easier to heckle opponents sitting than standing, began to address her sternly but gently, more in sorrow than anger, and always with that air of surprised dignity and unabated command. He had been led to suppose, he said very politely, that Les Oliviers was an exceptionally well-managed and high-class hotel, else, as Madame might easily surmise, he would never have selected it for the temporary sojourn of his wife while waiting till he would be able to join her. What, then, was his astonishment on learning that Mrs. Allonby had actually been requested to leave the house? Such a thing was outrageous, unheard-of, and must be apologized for without delay.

"Now for the fun!" reflected Monsieur, languidly adjusting a fresh cigarette, while Madame promptly seized her chance of returning fire, and turning about with expansive gestures and fluent delivery, poured in a steady and powerful broadside calculated to silence the Englishman's guns and shatter his forces beyond recovery.

What Monsieur had observed concerning Les Oliviers was absolutely correct, she replied. The proceeding alluded to was undoubtedly unheard-of, unparalleled, without precedent in the annals of that house--to which only persons of absolutely irreproachable character and assured position were admitted. Madame was filled with the profoundest compassion for Monsieur; her bosom was torn for him; she regretted from the profoundest depths of her being the necessity of inflicting upon him an immeasurable pain. But she was woman; more than that, she asserted brokenly and with deep sobs, she was _mother_. One's children were one's life. What mother could view the silent, corroding anguish, could witness the perfidious betrayal of a child, a guileless, a trusting, an adored child, unmoved? What fiend in human shape could stand by in icy indifference and look upon the gradual, irreparable blighting of a cherished daughter's life, the slow destruction of her every hope, the corrosive agony perpetually gnawing at her breaking heart, the withering, in short, of the pure and maidenly flower of her youth, and raise no hand, utter no word, in her defence? Madame Bontemps was the unfortunate possessor neither of a bosom of adamant nor of a heart of granite; she possessed, on the contrary, those of a mother; with a sacred fury and a noble indignation she chased from her hearth the serpent whose envenomed tooth had poisoned the happiness of her child and ruined the tranquillity of a cheerful and affectionate family circle. That the serpent in question, whose wiles had been daily employed before her very eyes in beguiling the youthful and pardonably sensitive affections of M. Isidore from their lawful and pledged object, should be in effect the wife of Monsieur, was for him, she admitted, a circumstance of supreme misfortune and profoundly to be deplored, and upon which, from the depths of her woman's breast, she offered him condolences of the deepest and most sincere nature.

Here M. Bontemps, profoundly touched by his wife's eloquence, dashed his cigarette despairingly to the floor, threw out his arms with gestures of despair, and groaned aloud, while Madame sought relief in tears. "Ma fille, ma Geneviève," she wailed, wildly smiting her breast, "mon enfant!"

But the stolid Englishman, surveying the afflicted parents with that direct, undauntable soldier-look of his, appeared to be entirely unmoved and awaiting further remarks from Madame Bontemps; and as these were not after some seconds forthcoming, he ventured to represent to Madame with infinite courtesy that she appeared to be the victim of an absurd misapprehension, which, in a woman of her intellect and capacity, paralyzed him with amazement. She had possibly taken some exaggerated statements uttered in the course of a lover's quarrel literally. Madame's words almost pointed to some vague suspicion that his wife--"my little wife," he repeated, smiling--had perturbed the relations between those young people, such a very droll supposition. If--as Madame here hastened to assert--M. le Vicomte de Vieuxbois, whose father had been a friend of his own, had been observed to converse in an agitated manner with Mrs. Allonby, to whom, as to other pensionnaires, the Vicomte had obligingly given Italian lessons, what more natural--Mrs. Allonby was herself a mother, the wife of the Vicomte's father's friend; she was older than she appeared, while M. de Vieuxbois was younger--what more natural than for a young man, suffering from the apparent coldness and misunderstandings of his betrothed, and far from his own mother, to seek counsel and comfort of a lady by her age and experience eminently calculated to give them? As a simple matter of fact, he was aware of all that had occurred; he had been deeply interested in the course of the young man's love, which had met with unusual, but not unnatural, obstacles, triumphantly and happily surmounted, until this unfortunate, but truly absurd, little misunderstanding arose. Madame probably knew that _English_ wives had no secrets from their husbands, so that for M. de Vieuxbois to confide in Mrs. Allonby the depth of his passion and the misfortune of the various obstacles to its fulfilment, was in effect to confide in himself. What a pity to let suspicions so absurd divide two young and loving hearts! Mademoiselle's ear had doubtless been abused by mischievous, misunderstood tittle-tattle. Girls were like that, he knew from experience, and, having had the good fortune to win the best and most charming of wives himself, it hurt him to think of M. de Vieuxbois missing such a blessing--merely because of a little misconception of his conduct--a misconception absolutely incredible in a person of Madame's sagacity and knowledge of the world. In his anxiety for the young people's happiness, he actually found himself forgetting the necessity for extracting an apology for an unwarrantable act of incivility to his wife, the necessity of which both Monsieur and Madame Bontemps would at once admit.

They did at once admit it, and with a celerity and sudden change of front that not only took Mr. Allonby's breath away, but also that of M. Isidore, who happened--no doubt by the merest chance--to be lounging outside the ever open office door, intently studying the _Figaro_, and who also happened to have dispatched Heinrich, the porter, on an errand, by the latter deemed trivial and unnecessary to the last degree.

What M. Allonby had had the complaisance to observe, Madame Bontemps blandly stated in reply, put an entirely different complexion on the whole matter. She deeply regretted having, even in thought, wronged Madame or M. Isidore, whom she embraced as a son--he made a grimace over his _Figaro_ outside at this remark--she deplored the inconvenience suffered by Madame Allonby, and she should for the rest of her life cherish the memory of M. Allonby as that of a valued, a beloved, an inestimable, friend of the whole of her family.

M. Bontemps corroborated these assertions with tears of a noble and profound emotion; Mlle. Geneviève (just then at the climax of an explanatory and embarrassing interview with Mrs. Allonby) was promptly summoned from the depths of the back premises at the very moment when M. le Vicomte Isidore Augustin René Joseph Marie de Beauregard de Vieuxbois was making a dramatic entrance from the front hall; and all was joy, reconciliation, effusion, tears, transport, intoxication.

"It was all that little cat, Dorris," Ermengarde confided afterwards to those fellow-conspirators, the ex-Anarchist and the woman of mystery; "so that what she got this morning was perhaps not altogether wasted. Only I wish she hadn't had it quite so hot."

"My conscience pricks me about de Vieuxbois' people," Arthur confessed, when gratuitous champagne unexpectedly crowned the banquet in the evening, and the visitors were asked by Madame Bontemps to drink to the betrothal of M. Isidore and Mlle. Geneviève. "They won't thank me for this afternoon's work. Just fancy a man in de Vieuxbois' position falling in love with a girl like Mlle. Bontemps, and taking a post as general utility person in a small hotel for her sake. Romantic young ass! The girl showed her sense in refusing him. His mother is distracted. The whole family have been at him about it! But the little chap would have her--Madame la Vicomtesse!"

And when next day pack-mules waited by the place of Dorris's execution, laden with Ermengarde's belongings, and she herself stood by the lemon-laden trees and took a last view of the magnificent sweep of sea below, and the splendid amphitheatre of encircling mountains above, grasping a huge presentation bunch of roses, carnations, and heliotrope, with a last lingering bough of mimosa bloom and one of lemon flower, and receiving the farewells of the visitors, the salutations of the family and the betrothed pair, and dazzling smiles from the well-tipped Heinrich, waiters and chambermaids at windows, Ermengarde's heart rose in her throat; she squeezed the thin man's hand to agony point; kissed Mrs. Dinwiddie, Lady Seaton, and Miss Boundrish's mother; nodded to the young lady's father, Major Norris and Bertie Trevor, turned and fled through the lemon-orchard path so that Arthur could not overtake her till she came out upon the rock-hewn road far below, where she was discovered gazing over the clean red roofs and dark-leaved groves of Mentone out to sea, and unobtrusively restoring a handkerchief to its pocket.

"It--it really was such a very lovely place--such a unique charm about it," she said in apology.

"Tell you what, old lady, we'll come again next year if the boom keeps up," Arthur replied, lighting his pipe in the shelter of a rocky scarp. "But I bar squabbles first."

Before them the slender tower of St. Michel, just topping the mountain spur that hides the Old Town, gleamed white on a clear blue sea; it had rained during the night, and some cloud-wreaths still floated round the craggy summits, leaving light veinings of snow on the amethystine peaks; cheery voices and sounds rose from the saw-mill niched in the bottom of a little gorge across the torrent; the plane avenue was alive with passing wheels and steps and people of every sort and kind, but all gay as if they had never known a care; the sea had richer and deeper hues, the sun a warmer gold, the soaring mountains a more majestic outline, vegetation a more varied luxuriance and colouring; and Ermengarde, listening to Arthur's familiar, intermittent growl, and imparting pleasant secrets to him, was lighter of heart than ever before. The full magic and splendour of the azure shore was at last upon her, and the exhilaration and the pure joy of living went to her head, sparkled in her eyes, glowed in her cheeks, and thrilled her to the very finger-tips.

And yet she was at heart, if not a sadder, at least a wiser, and hoped to be a better, woman than before those joyous adventures on the Côte d'Azur.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD