Books: The Guest of Quesnay
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"Anything in the world!"
"Go to Pere Baudry's; have him put the least tired of his three horses
to his lightest cart and wait in the road beyond the cottage. Stand in
the road yourself while that is being done. Oliver will come that way;
detain him. I will join you there; I have only to see to my papers--at
the most, twenty minutes. Go quickly, my friend!"
I strode to the door and out to the gallery. I was half-way down the
steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren was already in the courtyard,
coming toward me from the archway with a light and buoyant step.
He looked up, waving his hat to me, his face lighted with a happiness
most remarkable, and brighter, even, than the strong, midsummer sunshine
flaming over him. Dressed in white as he was, and with the air of
victory he wore, he might have been, at that moment, a figure from some
marble triumph; youthful, conquering--crowned with the laurel.
I had time only to glance at him, to "take" him, as it were, between two
shutter-flicks of the instantaneous eyelid, and with him, the courtyard
flooded with sunshine, the figure of Madame Brossard emerging from her
little office, Amedee coming from the kitchen bearing a white-covered
tray, and, entering from the road, upon the trail of Saffren but still
in the shadow of the archway, the discordant fineries and hatchet-face
of the ex-pedestrian and tourist, my antagonist of the forest.
I had opened my mouth to call a warning.
"Hurry" was the word I would have said, but it stopped at "hur--." The
second syllable was never uttered.
There came a violent outcry, raucous and shrill as the wail of a
captured hen, and out of the passage across the courtyard floundered a
woman, fantastically dressed in green and gold.
Her coarse blue-black hair fell dishevelled upon her shoulders, from
which her gown hung precariously unfastened, as if she had abandoned her
toilet half-way. She was abundantly fat, double-chinned, coarse, greasy,
smeared with blue pencillings, carmine, enamel, and rouge.
At the scream Saffren turned. She made straight at him, crying wildly:
"Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari--c'est moi! C'est ta femme, mon coeur!"
She threw herself upon him, her arms about his neck, with a tropical
ferocity that was a very paroxysm of triumph.
"Embrasse moi, Larrabi! Embrasse moi!" she cried.
Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, he flung her off with a violence
surpassing her own, and with loathing unspeakable. She screamed that he
was killing her, calling him "husband," and tried to fasten herself upon
him again. But he leaped backward beyond the reach of her clutching
hands, and, turning, plunged to the steps and staggered up them, the
woman following.
From above me leaned the stricken face of Keredec; he caught Saffren
under the arm and half lifted him to the gallery, while she strove to
hold him by the knees.
"O Christ!" gasped Saffren. "Is THIS the woman?"
The giant swung him across the gallery and into the open door with one
great sweep of the arm, strode in after him, and closed and bolted the
door. The woman fell in a heap at the foot of the steps, uttered a
cracked simulation of the cry of a broken heart.
"Name of a name of God!" she wailed. "After all these years! And my
husband strikes me!"
Then it was that what had been in my mind as a monstrous suspicion
became a certainty. For I recognised the woman; she was Mariana--la
bella Mariana la Mursiana.
If I had ever known Larrabee Harman, if, instead of the two strange
glimpses I had caught of him, I had been familiar with his gesture,
walk, intonation--even, perhaps, if I had ever heard his voice--the
truth might have come to me long ago.
Larrabee Harman!
"Oliver Saffren" was Larrabee Harman.
CHAPTER XVIII
I do not like to read those poets who write of pain as if they loved it;
the study of suffering is for the cold analyst, for the vivisectionist,
for those who may transfuse their knowledge of it to the ultimate good
of mankind. And although I am so heavily endowed with curiosity
concerning the people I find about me, my gift (or curse, whichever it
be) knows pause at the gates of the house of calamity. So, if it were
possible, I would not speak of the agony of which I was a witness that
night in the apartment of my friends at Madame Brossard's. I went with
reluctance, but there was no choice. Keredec had sent for me.
... When I was about fifteen, a boy cousin of mine, several years
younger, terribly injured himself on the Fourth of July; and I sat all
night in the room with him, helping his mother. Somehow he had learned
that there was no hope of saving his sight; he was an imaginative child
and realised the whole meaning of the catastrophe; the eternal
darkness.... And he understood that the thing had been done, that there
was no going back of it. This very certainty increased the intensity of
his rebellion a thousandfold. "I WILL have my eyes!" he screamed. "I
WILL! I WILL!"
Keredec had told his tragic ward too little. The latter had understood
but vaguely the nature of the catastrophe which overhung his return to
France, and now that it was indeed concrete and definite, the guardian
was forced into fuller disclosures, every word making the anguish of the
listener more intolerable. It was the horizonless despair of a child;
and that profound protest I had so often seen smouldering in his eyes
culminated, at its crisis, in a wild flame of revolt. The shame of the
revelation passed over him; there was nothing of the disastrous
drunkard, sober, learning what he had done. To him, it seemed that he
was being forced to suffer for the sins of another man.
"Do you think that you can make me believe _I_ did this?" he cried.
"That I made life unbearable for HER, drove HER from me, and took this
hideous, painted old woman in HER place? It's a lie. You can't make me
believe such a monstrous lie as that! You CAN'T! You CAN'T!"
He threw himself violently upon the couch, face downward, shuddering
from head to foot.
"My poor boy, it is the truth," said Keredec, kneeling beside him and
putting a great arm across his shoulders. "It is what a thousand men are
doing this night. Nothing is more common, or more unexplainable--or more
simple. Of all the nations it is the same, wherever life has become
artificial and the poor, foolish young men have too much money and
nothing to do. You do not understand it, but our friend here, and I, we
understand because we remember what we have been seeing all our life.
You say it is not you who did such crazy, horrible things, and you are
right. When this poor woman who is so painted and greasy first caught
you, when you began to give your money and your time and your life to
her, when she got you into this horrible marriage with her, you were
blind--you went staggering, in a bad dream; your soul hid away, far down
inside you, with its hands over its face. If it could have once stood
straight, if the eyes of your body could have once been clean for it to
look through, if you could have once been as you are to-day, or as you
were when you were a little child, you would have cry out with horror
both of her and of yourself, as you do now; and you would have run away
from her and from everything you had put in your life. But, in your
suffering you must rejoice: the triumph is that your mind hates that old
life as greatly as your soul hates it. You are as good as if you had
never been the wild fellow--yes, the wicked fellow--that you were. For a
man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had
never sinned. But though his emancipation can be so perfect, there is a
law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish
things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal,
and each has a consequence that is never ending. And so, now, though you
are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must
abide it. Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing!--that suffering--
compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!"
The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a
broken-hearted child.
I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I
lay upon my bed until dawn. Then I went for a long, hard walk,
breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard's in a
peasant's cart which was going that way.
I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the
pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and
distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever--as
I told him.
"I have some news for you," he said after the hearty greeting--"an
announcement, in fact."
"Wait!" I glanced at the interested attitude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was
breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led
the way into the pavilion. "You may as well not tell it in the hearing
of that young man," I said, when the door was closed. "He is eccentric."
"So I gathered," returned Ward, smiling, "from his attire. But it really
wouldn't matter who heard it. Elizabeth's going to marry Cresson Ingle."
"That is the news--the announcement--you spoke of?"
"Yes, that is it."
To save my life I could not have told at that moment what else I had
expected, or feared, that he might say, but certainly I took a deep
breath of relief. "I am very glad," I said. "It should be a happy
alliance."
"On the whole, I think it will be," he returned thoughtfully. "Ingle's
done his share of hard living, and I once had a notion"--he glanced
smiling at me--"well, I dare say you know my notion. But it is a good
match for Elizabeth and not without advantages on many counts. You see,
it's time I married, myself; she feels that very strongly and I think
her decision to accept Ingle is partly due to her wish to make all clear
for a new mistress of my household,--though that's putting it in a
rather grandiloquent way." He laughed. "And as you probably guess, I
have an idea that some such arrangement might be somewhere on the wings
of the wind on its way to me, before long."
He laughed again, but I did not, and noting my silence he turned upon me
a more scrutinising look than he had yet given me, and said:
"My dear fellow, is something the matter? You look quite haggard. You
haven't been ill?"
"No, I've had a bad night. That's all."
"Oh, I heard something of a riotous scene taking place over here," he
said. "One of the gardeners was talking about it to Elizabeth. Your bad
night wouldn't be connected with that, would it? You haven't been
playing Samaritan?"
"What was it you heard?" I asked quickly.
"I didn't pay much attention. He said that there was great excitement at
Madame Brossard's, because a strange woman had turned up and claimed an
insane young man at the inn for her husband, and that they had a fight
of some sort--"
"Damnation!" I started from my chair. "Did Mrs. Harman hear this story?"
"Not last night, I'm certain. Elizabeth said the gardener told her as
she came down to the chateau gates to meet me when I arrived--it was
late, and Louise had already gone to her room. In fact, I have not seen
her yet. But what difference could it possibly make whether she heard it
or not? She doesn't know these people, surely?"
"She knows the man."
"This insane--"
"He is not insane," I interrupted. "He has lost the memory of his
earlier life--lost it through an accident. You and I saw the accident."
"That's impossible," said George, frowning. "I never saw but one
accident that you--"
"That was the one: the man is Larrabee Harman."
George had struck a match to light a cigar; but the operation remained
incomplete: he dropped the match upon the floor and set his foot upon
it. "Well, tell me about it," he said.
"You haven't heard anything about him since the accident?"
"Only that he did eventually recover and was taken away from the
hospital. I heard that his mind was impaired. Does Louise--" he began;
stopped, and cleared his throat. "Has Mrs. Harman heard that he is
here?"
"Yes; she has seen him."
"Do you mean the scoundrel has been bothering her? Elizabeth didn't tell
me of this--"
"Your sister doesn't know," I said, lifting my hand to check him. "I
think you ought to understand the whole case--if you'll let me tell you
what I know about it."
"Go ahead," he bade me. "I'll try to listen patiently, though the very
thought of the fellow has always set my teeth on edge."
"He's not at all what you think," I said. "There's an enormous
difference, almost impossible to explain to you, but something you'd
understand at once if you saw him. It's such a difference, in fact, that
when I found that he was Larrabee Harman the revelation was
inexpressibly shocking and distressing to me. He came here under another
name; I had no suspicion that he was any one I'd ever heard of, much
less that I'd actually seen him twice, two years ago, and I've grown to--
well, in truth, to be fond of him."
"What is the change?" asked Ward, and his voice showed that he was
greatly disquieted. "What is he like?"
"As well as I can tell you, he's like an odd but very engaging boy, with
something pathetic about him; quite splendidly handsome--"
"Oh, he had good looks to spare when I first knew him," George said
bitterly. "I dare say he's got them back if he's taken care of himself,
or been taken care OF, rather! But go on; I won't interrupt you again.
Why did he come here? Hoping to see--"
"No. When he came here he did not know of her existence except in the
vaguest way. But to go back to that, I'd better tell you first that the
woman we saw with him, one day on the boulevard, and who was in the
accident with him--"
"La Mursiana, the dancer; I know."
"She had got him to go through a marriage with her--"
"WHAT?" Ward's eyes flashed as he shouted the word.
"It seems inexplicable; but as I understand it, he was never quite sober
at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half-
stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased
with him. There's no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what
makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she's taken
good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for
Harman. She means to hang on."
"I'm glad of that!" said George, striking his knee with his open palm.
"That will go a great way toward--"
He paused, and asked suddenly: "Did this marriage take place in France?"
"Yes. You'd better hear me through," I remonstrated. "When he was taken
from the hospital, he was placed in charge of a Professor Keredec, a
madman of whom you've probably heard."
"Madman? Why, no; he's a member of the Institute; a psychologist or
metaphysician, isn't he?--at any rate of considerable celebrity."
"Nevertheless," I insisted grimly, "as misty a vapourer as I ever saw; a
poetic, self-contradicting and inconsistent orator, a blower of bubbles,
a seer of visions, a mystic, and a dreamer--about as scientific as
Alice's White Knight! Harman's aunt, who lived in London, the only
relative he had left, I believe--and she has died since--put him in
Keredec's charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually
hidden for two years, the idea being literally to give him something
like an education--Keredec's phrase is 'restore mind to his soul'! What
must have been quite as vital was to get him out of his horrible wife's
clutches. And they did it, for she could not find him. But she picked up
that rat in the garden out yonder--he'd been some sort of stable-manager
for Harman once--and set him on the track. He ran the poor boy down, and
yesterday she followed him. Now it amounts to a species of sordid
siege."
"She wants money, of course."
"Yes, MORE money; a fair allowance has always been sent to her. Keredec
has interviewed her notary and she wants a settlement, naming a sum
actually larger than the whole estate amounts to. There were colossal
expenditures and equally large shrinkages; what he has left is invested
in English securities and is not a fortune, but of course she won't
believe that and refuses to budge until this impossible settlement is
made. You can imagine about how competent such a man as Keredec would be
to deal with the situation. In the mean time, his ward is in so dreadful
a state of horror and grief I am afraid it is possible that his mind may
really give way, for it was not in a normal condition, of course, though
he's perfectly sane, as I tell you. If it should," I concluded, with
some bitterness, "I suppose Keredec will be still prating upliftingly on
the saving of his soul!"
"When was it that Louise saw him?"
"Ah, that," I said, "is where Keredec has been a poet and a dreamer
indeed. It was his PLAN that they should meet."
"You mean he brought this wreck of Harman, these husks and shreds of a
man, down here for Louise to see?" Ward cried incredulously. "Oh,
monstrous!"
"No," I answered. "Only insane. Not because there is anything lacking in
Oliver--in Harman, I mean--for I think that will be righted in time, but
because the second marriage makes it a useless cruelty that he should
have been allowed to fall in love with his first wife again. Yet that
was Keredec's idea of a 'beautiful restoration,' as he calls it!"
"There is something behind all this that you don't know," said Ward
slowly. "I'll tell you after I've seen this Keredec. When did the man
make you his confidant?"
"Last night. Most of what I learned was as much a revelation to his
victim as it was to me. Harman did not know till then that the lady he
had been meeting had been his wife, or that he had ever seen her before
he came here. He had mistaken her name and she did not enlighten him."
"Meeting?" said Ward harshly. "You speak as if--"
"They have been meeting every day, George."
"I won't believe it of her!" he cried. "She couldn't--"
"It's true. He spoke to her in the woods one day; I was there and saw
it. I know now that she knew him at once; and she ran away, but--not in
anger. I shouldn't be a very good friend of yours," I went on gently,
"if I didn't give you the truth. They've been together every day since
then, and I'm afraid--miserably afraid, Ward--that her old feeling for
him has been revived."
I have heard Ward use an oath only two or three times in my life, and
this was one of them.
"Oh, by God!" he cried, starting to his feet; "I SHOULD like to meet
Professor Keredec!"
"I am at your service, my dear sir," said a deep voice from the veranda.
And opening the door, the professor walked into the room.
CHAPTER XIX
He looked old and tired and sad; it was plain that he expected attack
and equally plain that he would meet it with fanatic serenity. And yet,
the magnificent blunderer presented so fine an aspect of the tortured
Olympian, he confronted us with so vast a dignity--the driven snow of
his hair tousled upon his head and shoulders, like a storm in the higher
altitudes--that he regained, in my eyes, something of his mountain
grandeur before he had spoken a word in defence. But sympathy is not
what one should be entertaining for an antagonist; therefore I said
cavalierly:
"This is Mr. Ward, Professor Keredec. He is Mrs. Harman's cousin and
close friend."
"I had divined it." The professor made a French bow, and George
responded with as slight a salutation as it has been my lot to see.
"We were speaking of your reasons," I continued, "for bringing Mr.
Harman to this place. Frankly, we were questioning your motive."
"My motives? I have wished to restore to two young people the paradise
which they had lost".
Ward uttered an exclamation none the less violent because it was half-
suppressed, while, for my part, I laughed outright; and as Keredec
turned his eyes questioningly upon me, I said:
"Professor Keredec, you'd better understand at once that I mean to help
undo the harm you've done. I couldn't tell you last night, in Harman's
presence, but I think you're responsible for the whole ghastly tragi-
comedy--as hopeless a tangle as ever was made on this earth!"
This was even more roughly spoken than I had intended, but it did not
cause him to look less mildly upon me, nor was there the faintest shadow
of resentment in his big voice when he replied:
"In this world things may be tangled, they may be sad, yet they may be
good."
"I'm afraid that seems rather a trite generality. I beg you to remember
that plain-speaking is of some importance just now."
"I shall remember."
"Then we should be glad of the explanation," said Ward, resting his arms
on my table and leaning across it toward Keredec.
"We should, indeed," I echoed.
"It is simple," began the professor. "I learned my poor boy's history
well, from those who could tell me, from his papers--yes, and from the
bundles of old-time letters which were given me--since it was necessary
that I should know everything. From all these I learned what a strong
and beautiful soul was that lady who loved him so much that she ran away
from her home for his sake. Helas! he was already the slave of what was
bad and foolish, he had gone too far from himself, was overlaid with the
habit of evil, and she could not save him then. The spirit was dying in
him, although it was there, and IT was good--"
Ward's acrid laughter rang out in the room, and my admiration went
unwillingly to Keredec for the way he took it, which was to bow gravely,
as if acknowledging the other's right to his own point of view.
"If you will study the antique busts," he said, "you will find that
Socrates is Silenus dignified. I choose to believe in the infinite
capacities of all men--and in the spirit in all. And so I try to restore
my poor boy his capacities and his spirit. But that was not all. The
time was coming when I could do no more for him, when the little
education of books would be finish' and he must go out in the world
again to learn--all newly--how to make of himself a man of use. That is
the time of danger, and the thought was troubling me when I learned that
Madame Harman was here, near this inn, of which I knew. So I brought
him."
"The inconceivable selfishness, the devilish brutality of it!" Ward's
face was scarlet. "You didn't care how you sacrificed her--"
"Sacrificed!" The professor suddenly released the huge volume of his
voice. "Sacrificed!" he thundered. "If I could give him back to her as
he is now, it would be restoring to her all that she had loved in him,
the real SELF of him! It would be the greatest gift in her life."
"You speak for her?" demanded Ward, the question coming like a lawyer's.
It failed to disturb Keredec, who replied quietly:
"It is a quibble. I speak for her, yes, my dear sir. Her action in
defiance of her family and her friends proved the strength of what she
felt for the man she married; that she have remained with him three
years--until it was impossible--proved its persistence; her letters,
which I read with reverence, proved its beauty--to me. It was a living
passion, one that could not die. To let them see each other again; that
was all I intended. To give them their new chance--and then, for myself,
to keep out of the way. That was why--" he turned to me--"that was why I
have been guilty of pretending to have that bad rheumatism, and I hope
you will not think it an ugly trick of me! It was to give him his chance
freely; and though at first I had much anxiety, it was done. In spite of
all his wicked follies theirs had been a true love, and nothing in this
world could be more inevitable than that they should come together again
if the chance could be given. And they HAVE, my dear sirs! It has so
happened. To him it has been a wooing as if for the first time; so she
has preferred it, keeping him to his mistake of her name. She feared
that if he knew that it was the same as his own he might ask questions
of me, and, you see, she did not know that I had made this little plan,
and was afraid--"
"We are not questioning Mrs. Harman's motives," George interrupted
hotly, "but YOURS!"
"Very well, my dear sir; that is all. I have explained them."
"You have?" I interjected. "Then, my dear Keredec, either you are really
insane or I am! You knew that this poor, unfortunate devil of a Harman
was tied to that hyenic prowler yonder who means to fatten on him, and
will never release him; you knew that. Then why did you bring him down
here to fall in love with a woman he can never have? In pity's name, if
you didn't hope to half kill them both, what DID you mean?"
"My dear fellow," interposed George quickly, "you underrate Professor
Keredec's shrewdness. His plans are not so simple as you think. He knows
that my cousin Louise never obtained a divorce from her husband."
"What?" I said, not immediately comprehending his meaning.
"I say, Mrs. Harman never obtained a divorce."
"Are you delirious?" I gasped.
"It's the truth; she never did."
"I saw a notice of it at the time. 'A notice?' I saw a hundred!"
"No. What you saw was that she had made an application for divorce. Her
family got her that far and then she revolted. The suit was dropped."
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