Chapter VII

The Convent Steps

The band had long stopped playing; the afternoon sunshine was growing soft, and the Jardins Publics were empty of all but a few stragglers--_bourgeois_ babies playing round mothers basking on sunny benches and among beds of carnations and cyclamen, and people crossing the paths on their way home. Agatha turned at the top of the long series of parterres bordered by orange-trees, palms, eucalyptus and pepper trees, that lay between street and street, and was bounded by the band of glowing purple sea, whence on either hand long hill-spurs ran up into the mountain amphitheatre just behind the town, and wondered at all the sunny beauty. Especially at the palms, which sprang up, straight and sturdy, everywhere closing street vistas, lending charm to featureless buildings and romance to ugly ones, and sometimes spreading their broad tops above a knot of dark-faced Arabs, lounging picturesque in burnous and fez.

"It was lovely once," the man at her side granted. "The torrent bed ran down in wild, broken beauty all the way to the sea a few years since. There's your house yonder on the ridge. Do you walk up? Well, take time. The way's straight enough. Report as often as you can. Be very careful. I thought the whole thing was exploded more than once yesterday--especially----"

"Oh! There was not the faintest suspicion. You were quite out in that. But I will be careful. Good-bye."

He went up the road to the station; she passed under the viaduct by the torrent bed and paused, watching women stepping down under the oleanders from the other side to beat linen in the stream, and then turned and went on with a lagging step, that meant dejection more than fatigue. Winding along under the grey ghostliness of arching plane-tops was a string of pack-mules, leisurely plodding under bales and panniers; fine, strong, patient beasts, in curious contrast to the long, smoke-snorting dragon of a train that roared and rattled out of sight over the railway bridge at the avenue's end in about two hoof-beats. Were people unhappy up there in those mountain villages, where life was simple and close to Nature? There was a restfulness and an air of cheerful romance about this little procession of plodding mules and bright-eyed peasants, a feeling of the picturesque, of leisurely labour in sunshine and sweet air, very comforting to a torn heart, wasted by anxiety. If one could but vanish and fade away into those mountain fastnesses and forget, working peacefully by some quiet hearth, under one of those sunlit church towers cresting the pine ridges.

But sorrow is heavy and hard to bear in youth, when fullness of life throbs in every heart-beat, rebelling at every denial and refusing every pang; and there are moments when all that should console and soften suffering contributes to deepen and intensify it. As the graceful solitary figure walked wearily along the torrent bed in a network of shadows woven by the plane-tops, all the sunny beauty of gorge and peak, of lemon orchard and glowing pine-top and dream-soft olive haze, and all the purple splendour of sea and sky and blue bloom of distance wrought upon her with such power that every sense and faculty, uplifted and expanded, helped to put an edge on the anguish within her. The higher the rocky path turning from the level bed was, the greater the beauty grew, and the pain; every hanging wreath of geranium and scented myrtle, every blaze of cactus trailing down the rock walls, through which the steep, stair-like path climbed, impressed itself sharply upon her. She turned with a movement of impatience, and looked back, and every sunlit sail and turquoise shade on the purple sea and every shadow of the hills made itself acutely felt. And when the path led under the solemn shadow of olives, and the light misty foliage parted here and there to give glimpses of sea and red-roofed town and far headland, her heart was like to break; and yet the majesty of far-stretching mountains, the glory and beauty of land and sea, had never been more vividly sweet to her.

For this is a strange thing, that the whole weight and power, the whole magic and mystery of beauty in Nature and Art, can only be felt in supreme moments of gladness or sorrow, when the mind and heart are full and every faculty is tense. The beauty deepens the pain with the very balm it brings, it magnifies the gladness with the very awe that chastens it.

Now she knew what olive-trees meant; and they mean so much, in loveliness so subtle, so manifold in suggestion; they cannot be read through and taken in at a glance, except in emotional crises, when veils are lifted and faculties quickened.

Yet there was comfort in those endless steps, that were in reality vine-terraces made on south-fronting declivities, and in the thought of the human patience and long labour of centuries, that had carried up and enriched every strip of soil on these hand-hewn ledges, and buttressed them solidly with rock till they glowed with the gladness of purple vintage and glory of emerald leaves. And here, in the olive shade, and there, backed by a rock terrace tangled in myrtle and white-blooming heath and the goblin foliage of prickly pear, were little red-roofed shrines, with frescoes telling the Seven Sorrows, blotched and dim, with scanty votive flowers withering in coarse earthen pots. The pathos of these humble, deserted shrines touched her; they seemed friendly in their silent desolation. Yet Mrs. Allonby, in her wild ascent the day before, had hardly seen them.

But this tall, clear-eyed young woman was so drawn by the fascination of the forlorn shrines that she followed the path they lined, and it led her astray. She laid a spray of flowering rosemary on the Seventh--"for remembrance"--and sighed. For she who bore that sevenfold sword of sorrow in her heart could never have borne this of looking on, helpless, and baffled in every wild effort to save, at the gradual ruin and degradation of any she loved; that barren and bitter sorrow at least was spared her.

But what if she, whose pain had been so fruitful to man, could hear, and from her place of peace give balm to crushed and broken hearts? Human sympathy may not be confined to this brief passage through time and space, she mused.

The path led with a sudden turn through garden ground, unfenced, then past a pink house with a pergola, and ended at an abrupt fall of narrow vine terraces down the ravine. Thence was seen a fuller, broader prospect facing south, bounded by a sea of purple and gold shot with crimson. There she turned, and climbing a broad flight of steps leading to the low-walled summit of the ridge, became aware of a large wooden cross standing against the pure sky on the top, as if with open arms of welcome.

Above and around it were quivering spires of cypress and plumy tops of eucalyptus, and, between black cypress boughs, the white gleam of convent walls.

The weight of silent, secret grief grew to a physical burden on those weary steps; her heart sank and died when she reached the top, and stood in rich sunshine at the foot of the great bare cross, its arms uplifted in witness and welcome for many and many a mile round, and listlessly spelt out the words cut round the centre:

Ave, crux, spes unica!

Then something gave way in her aching breast, the four healing words echoed and found response in her heart.

"Ave, ave!" she faltered, her slender figure bowed in the golden light, the healing scent of eucalyptus blossom floating down to her, and the majesty of those soaring mountain peaks and buttressed hill-flanks spreading far above in the hush and glow of the passing day. There, with her face pressed to the sun-warmed wood and her arms clasping it, a huge weight--"the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world"--fell away from her heart, and the great prayer that has no words filled it with peace beyond understanding--the _spes unica_--the only road to solution of all the tangled mystery of life.

When she rose the world was changed. On either side of the cross stood a tall eucalyptus tree; long tresses of pale fragrant blossom hung among their scimitar-shaped leaves; their cinnamon-coloured trunks, whence rolls of scented bark peeled, were so forked that the branched stems made a comfortable seat; there the tired girl rested in the ruddy glow, silently absorbing the same tranquil pageant of vesper splendour that light-hearted Ermengarde was watching from the hotel garden above. Sea murmurs were faintly audible in the deep stillness, the incense curling bluely from hill-altars was sweet, glorious were the grandly-grouped peaks and mountain masses changing and glowing with life-like motion in the sliding lights, silent, majestic witnesses to the everlasting beauty that underlies and transfuses all things. God was speaking through all that beauty; doubt and fear vanished; in spite of misery, care, and sin, all must be well at last.

Lightened at heart, she leant on the low convent wall and looked down the ravine, that was rapidly filling with shadow, and across it at the white village poised on a hill, its slender tower uplifted like a standard under the purple-shadowed mountain peak.

Suddenly a harsh high laugh broke upon the charmed stillness, and was followed by strident voices and a confused hurry of footsteps, as the whole rout of pleasure-seekers from the hotel gate clattered round the corner under the convent walls unseen, while a polyglot cackle, playing round the words systems, hotels, Monte, tables, winnings, losings, dinners, poured out in passing crescendo and died gradually away in the distance.

But before they were quite out of hearing, as they filed out upon a part of the path visible from the convent wall, the young woman's gaze was startled and arrested by the same lady and attendant youths whose talk had already been overheard from the hotel gardens, and her heart stood still and her colour went at the sight.

These two? Was it these two really beyond doubt? Then what she had heard and what had been feared was true, much too true. And for such as they, of what avail to wrestle, to agonize, to beat at the gate of heavenly mercy with fastings and tears and inward silent heart-bleeding? Even now the boy's mother must be praying at home for him. And of what avail? Yet was not yonder vast cathedral reared to the lucid sky telling in superb and solemn beauty of the infinite power and love and pity of the divine poet and artificer of all? And even if that calm majesty had no power to rebuke fretting or silence despair, there was the _spes unica_ shining in the deepening after-glow, a beacon to storm-driven hearts.

A little withered old woman passed along under the rock wall, leading a self-willed goat, and briskly knitting. She sent up a shrill and cheerful "_Buon sera_," laughed, and nodded, and went on her tranquil way. Then the lay brother in charge of the deserted garden, passing the eucalyptus on his way home from work, told her she had taken the longest way, and put her on the shorter, and she went down the steps as the first few stars trembled into the sky, and so round through olives and pines to the hotel. And there, in the glowing twilight above the lemon-tops, was the face of her fellow-traveller, brightening at the sight of her with smiles of welcome.

"My dear woman of mystery, where did you spring from?" she cried. "I thought you had gone on to Italy. And how on earth did you climb up this terrific hill? And where is your luggage? And how very glad I am to see you again!"

That Italy was just round the corner, that the parting had been but yesterday, and that it was possible for an able-bodied woman to climb a mile of mountain-path without utter destruction, filled Ermengarde with a wonder only less than her wonder at her own unfeigned delight in unexpectedly meeting this woman, who appeared to be somewhat overpowered by her effusive reception.

"Dear Mrs. Allonby," she protested faintly, while being carried off to the house, "indeed, I am not at all hungry, and not so very tired."

"Oh, but you are!" she insisted. "Dreadfully tired. And you must have some tea at once--in my room. I had mine long ago, out of doors. I will make tea for you in my own Etna--the one that upset in my dress-basket. Are you expected? Have you engaged rooms? Let me take you in to Madame Bontemps, proprietress and manager. Most civil and obliging; will make you very comfortable. We shall find her in the office. Heinrich? What's become of the porter? Madame Bontemps? What on earth's the matter?"

The inner door, which had been closed at sunset, yielded to pressure, and let a torrent of strident voices and sounds of discord pour out upon the startled air, disclosing a spectacle that caused both ladies to retreat in momentary terror, and despair of all peaceful and safe passage through the hall.

Madame Bontemps had, as it were, taken the stage--that is, the middle of the hall--and with blazing eyes and murderous gestures, was calling down what sounded the most terrific maledictions upon the devoted head of the stalwart Swiss porter, Heinrich, who, with bristling moustache and hair and balled fists, thundered back denunciations even more terrific with gestures of even greater violence.

"And not a policeman to be had!" Ermengarde lamented. "What on earth is to be done? She will be killed, and so will he. Heinrich! Madame! Monsieur Bontemps! Feu--au secours!" she cried, heedless of the new arrival's suggestion to wait till the storm was over. But of this there appeared to be little chance. Madame Bontemps, her features distorted with fury, shrieked fiercer and fiercer maledictions at the retreating Heinrich, springing across the hall at him, when he fled from her onset, soon to return to the charge, before which she in her turn retreated, with denunciations and gestures that put Madame Bontemps' life at a pin's fee.

"If there was only a fire-bell," murmured Ermengarde, looking round, deaf to her companion's reassurance that the contest would be bloodless, "or a police-whistle, or even a cab-stand!"

But Madame, undismayed and active, her rolled back hair quivering, her tall form dilating, her hands on her hips, repulsed the charge of Heinrich with such a torrent of abuse as drove him back once more to the middle of the hall. There both stood, still shouting and misunderstanding each other in three languages for a measurable space, during which Monsieur Bontemps lounged in an easy attitude, cigarette in mouth, at the office door, softly stroking his beard, and contemplating the engagement with indifference, tinged with approval and admiration of the majesty and fury of Madame.

"It is just this," he explained, with gentle condescension, when the storm lulled, "the French of Madame is incomplete; she supplements it with the Italian of the country--a tongue entirely unknown to Heinrich. The French of Heinrich, on the contrary, is absolutely vile. He supplements it with German, of which both he and Madame are partly ignorant, and with Swiss-German, a tongue known to none but those mountaineers. Hence misunderstandings. Myself, I ignore all. Que voulez-vous?"

Yielding to pressure, however, he at length drew the infuriated lady's attention from the combat to the claims of her guests. In a moment her looks of fury were replaced by smiles of courteous welcome; her blazing eyes shed light of soft inquiry, and she came forward with a stately bow and a genial, "Bon soir, mesdames," while Heinrich as quickly forgot his wrongs and his wrath, and, dissolving into cheerful smiles, took his usual station by the door. Finally, the tumult being succeeded by perfect calm, he blandly picked up a few of the woman of mystery's parcels, which had arrived beforehand, and carried them to her room, whither they were preceded by the stately presence of Madame Bontemps herself.

The new arrival never forgot the tea brewed for her that evening. To that she attributed every digestive disturbance that afflicted her all her life after.

Nor did Ermengarde lightly dismiss from memory her own joy and fatigue in making that tea with her own hands, and for the first time, over a complicated and expensive new patent spirit-lamp, expressly devised to boil a minimum of water with a maximum of peril, inconvenience, and delay. A serious initial difficulty in lighting the lamp was presently overcome by the discovery that there was no spirit in it. A little of this, after some deliberation and delay, was borrowed of Miss Boundrish's mother. "But on no account tell Dorris," the latter implored; "she don't like lending things." The second difficulty of the kettle not boiling was surmounted after finding that it had no water--a circumstance which nearly resulted in burning a hole in it--by ringing the bell not more than five times for water of unimpeachable purity. The kettle at last having been filled, boiled over during a long and futile search for the tea, several parcels of which had been artfully mislaid in improbable portions of wearing apparel with the guileful purpose of evading douaniers and defrauding the French Republic of revenue. At last the brilliant idea of following up the trail of those packets, that had burst and peppered priceless raiment with black dust and broken stalks, resulted in their discovery. No matter how widely friends at home had differed in their advice to those about to travel, all had agreed that as much tea as the regulations by utmost stretching permitted, besides as much again as that, must be carried in every separate parcel and trunk, with the result that Ermengarde, finding little use during her travels for the tea upon which she had squandered so much substance, and incidentally making all her things smell like a grocer's shop, furtively shed small packets of it all across the Continent on her return home, in vague terror of incurring mysterious pains and penalties by secreting so much contraband.

"Is it refreshing?" she asked, when at last, flushed with triumph and heat, and smudged with lamp-black, besides having burnt her hand in a spirit-flare, she handed the precious beverage in an enamelled tin mug without a saucer. She would not have had a saucer for the world; it would have spoilt the whole thing.

"It's--very--hot," gasped the recipient, with watering eyes and a look of deep anguish.

"It's a very special tea," Ermengarde said impressively, watching the sufferer's agonies with complacence.

"Very special," sighed the victim; "most special."

"I got it myself, from a woman whose cousin married a tea-planter. He sends her a chest every now and then to sell to intimate friends to pay for Church work," Ermengarde continued, with intense satisfaction. "That accounts for the remarkable flavour."

"No doubt it does," murmured the sufferer, recovering breath, and correctly attributing the mingled taste of old boots and public-houses, that characterized the special tea, to the probability of the kettle having had no lid on and a strong spirit flare under it.

"Poor dear; you must have been dying for a cup!" her tormentor murmured, with relentless benignity.

"From a cup," the victim thought; but by degrees she gallantly swallowed the whole dose, finding it impossible to evade the pleased and compassionate eyes bent so persistently upon her.

"How odd that we should have been coming to the very same house all the time!" Ermengarde said, wearily drawing a lamp-blacked hand across her still aching forehead, and sinking upon the nearest seat, when the tea-drinking was over.

"Ah, yes," with a little hesitation.

"And chance upon rooms adjoining, too!"

"Very odd."

"How glad I am it's you, and not that dreadful Anarchist, Miss--ah----"

"My name is Somers--Agatha Somers," she said quickly, with a flush, not unnoticed.

"Only think, if the wretch were to come back? Do you think he will?" suddenly, with a keen look.

"How can I possibly guess?" she replied, with the stone blank expression noticed in the train.

"Strange that he should have come up here for a single night, instead of going to one of the hotels in the town."

"Did he? Perhaps he thought this dull. It is a little--secluded."

"If ever I saw guilt written on a human face," thought Ermengarde, her suspicions all awake again, in a moment of sudden repulsion. "Well," she added, rising to go, "au revoir till dinner. But I must give you one piece of advice, Miss Somers," she added, turning back and sitting on the edge of the bed, her eye chancing to fall on an open letter that had slipped from a hand-bag on the bed--a strange letter, written in what was no doubt cipher, all dots and dashes and lines and bars, with little explosions here and there. "Don't say anything not meant to meet the ear of the public on the path outside the straw shelter. I'll tell you what I heard this afternoon. As you can't possibly know the people, it can't matter; it is not tale-telling. And I dare say that poor boy has a mother," she sighed, at the close of her tale, "who little knows what harpies are preying upon him. By the way," she added, "do you remember seeing a tall, cheery-looking English lad at Monte Carlo Station yesterday? It was that very boy."

The woman of mystery, in the act of raising the lid of a trunk before which she was kneeling, let it fall with a crash that drew a faint sudden sound of pain from her.

"It was the lock," she faltered, rising to her feet, and leaning against the tall French window frame, rather pale and holding her hand. "Oh, not really hurt; it only smarts for the moment. But what were you saying? I beg pardon. You recognized a friend at Monte Carlo Station yesterday? How observant you are, dear Mrs. Allonby! And one English boy is so like another."

"But this one has such a happy laugh, so infectious, so jolly, so devil-may-care. And that painted foreign thing was such a cat. She'd got her claws so deep in him. Such a Countess as poor Yvette's mother, I should say--a Countess in her own--wrong. I suspect there are tons of that sort at Monte Carlo."

"No doubt," Agatha returned, absently looking out of the window at the lights lying along the torrent-bed like a thin river of light, broadening into an estuary where the roofs of the town were crowded together by the darkened sea. "I think I will take your advice, dear Mrs. Allonby, and lie down till dinner. I'm more tired than I thought."