Books: Maurice Guest

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"I will go now," she said, "and see if I can persuade Sister Martha to
come back. If you haven't mortally offended her, that is."

Louise started up from her chair, and put her cup, only half emptied,
on the table.

"Madeleine!--please--please, don't! I can't have her back again. I am
quite well now. There was nothing more she could do for me. I shall
sleep a thousand times better at night if she is not here. Oh, don't
bring her back again! Her voice cut like a knife, and her hands were
so hard."

She trembled with excitement, and was on the brink of tears.

"Hush!--don't excite yourself like that," said Madeleine, and tried to
soothe her. "There's no need for it. If you are really determined not
to have her, then she shall not come and that's the end of it. Not but
what I think it foolish of you all the same," she could not refrain
from adding. "You are still weak. However, if you prefer it, I'll do
my best to run up this evening to see that you have everything for the
night."

"I don't want you either."

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders, and her pity became tinged
with impatience.

"The doctor says you must go away somewhere, for a change," she said
as she beat up the pillows and smoothed out the crumpled sheets,
preparatory to coaxing her patient back to bed.

Louise shook her head, but did not speak.

"A few weeks' change of air is what you need to set you up again."

"I cannot go away."

"Nonsense! Of course you can. You don't want to be ill all the winter?"

"I don't want to be well."

Madeleine sniffed audibly. "There's no reasoning with you. When you
hear on all sides that it's for your own good----"

"Oh, stop tormenting me!" cried Louise, raising a drawn face with
disordered hair. "I won't go away! Nothing will make me. I shall stay
here--though I never get well again."

"But why? Give me one sensible reason for not going.--You can't!"

"Yes . . . if . . . if Eugen should come back."

The words could only just be caught. Madeleine stood, holding a sheet
with both hands, as though she could not believe her ears.

"Louise!" she said at last, in a tone which meant many things.

Louise began to cry, and was shaken by hard, dry sobs. Madeleine did
not look at her again, but went severely on with her bedmaking. When
she had finished, she crossed to the washstand, and poured out a glass
of water.

Louise took it, humbled and submissive, and gradually her sobs abated.
But now Madeleine, in place of getting ready to leave, as she had
intended, sat down at the centre table, and revolved what she felt it
to be her duty to say. When all sound of crying had ceased, she began
to speak, persuasively, in a quiet voice.

"You have brought the matter up yourself, Louise," she said, "and, now
the ice is broken, there are one or two things I should like to say to
you. First then, you have been very ill, far worse than you know--the
immediate danger is over now, so I can speak of it. But who can tell
what may happen if you persist in remaining on here by yourself, in
the state you are in?"

Louise did not stir; her face was hidden.

"The reason you give for staying is not a serious one, I hope,"
Madeleine proceeded cautiously choosing her words. "After all
the . . . the precautions that were taken to ensure the . . . break,
it is not all likely . . . he would think of returning. And Louise,"
she added with warmth, "even though he did--suppose he did--after the
way he has behaved, and his disgraceful treatment of you----"

Louise looked up for an instant. "That is not true," she said.

"Not true?" echoed Madeleine. "Well, if you are able to admire his
behaviour--if you don't consider it disgraceful--no, more than
that--infamous----" She stopped, not being able to find a stronger
epithet.

"It is not true," said Louise in the same expressionless voice. But
now she lifted her head, and pressed the palms of her hands together.

Madeleine pushed back her chair, as if she were about to rise. "Then I
have nothing more to say," she said; and went on: "If you are ready to
defend a man who has acted towards you as he has--in a way that makes a
respectable person's blood boil--there is indeed nothing more to be
said." She reddened with indignation. "As if it were not bad enough
for him to go, after all you have done for him, but that he must do it
in such a mean, underhand way--it's enough to make one sick. The only
thing to compare with it is his conduct on the night before he left.
Do you know, pray, that on the last evening, at a KNEIPE in the
GOLDENE HIRSCH, he boasted of what you had done for him--boasted about
everything that had happened between you--to a rowdy, tipsy crew? More
than that, he gave shameless details, about you going to his room that
afternoon----"

"It's not true, it's not true," repeated Louise, as if she had got
these few words by heart. She rose from her chair, and leaned on it,
half turning her back to Madeleine, and holding her handkerchief to
her lips.

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. "Do you think I should say it, if it
weren't?" she asked. "I don't invent scandal. And you are bound to
hear it when you go out again. He did this, and worse than I choose to
tell you, and if you felt as you ought to about it, you would never
give him another thought. He's not worth it. He's not worth any
respectable person's----"

"Respectable!" burst in Louise, and raised two blazing eyes to her
companion's face. "That's the second time. Why do you come
here, Madeleine, and talk like that to me? He did what he was obliged
to--that's all: for I should never have let him go. Can't you see how
preposterous it is to think that by talking of respectability, and
unworthiness, you can make me leave off caring for him?--when for
months I have lived for nothing else? Do you think one can change
one's feelings so easily? Don't you understand that to love a person
once is to love him always and altogether?--his faults as
well--everything he does, good or bad, no matter what other people
think of it? Oh, you have never really cared for anyone yourself, or
you would know it."

"It's not preposterous at all," retorted Madeleine. "Yes--if he had
deserved all the affection you wasted on him, or if unhappy
circumstances had separated you. But that's not the case. He has
behaved scandalously, without the least attempt at shielding you. He
has made you the talk of the place. And you may consider me narrow and
prejudiced, but this I must say--I am boundlessly astonished at you.
When he has shown you as plainly as he can that he's tired of you,
that you should still be ready to defend him, and have so little
proper pride that you even say you would take him back!----"

Louise turned on her. "You would never do that, Madeleine, would
you?--never so far forget yourself as to crawl to a man's feet and
ask--ask?--no, implore forgiveness, for faults you were not conscious of
having committed. You would never beg him to go on loving you, after
he had ceased to care, or think nothing on earth worth having if he
would not--or could not. As I would; as I have done." But chancing to
look at Madeleine, she grew quieter. "You would never do that, would
you?" she repeated. "And do you know why?" Her words came quickly
again; her voice shook with excitement. "Because you will never care
for anyone more than yourself--it isn't in you to do it. You will go
through life, tight on to the end, without knowing what it is to care
for some one--oh, but I mean absolutely, unthinkingly----"

She broke down, and hid her face again. Madeleine had carried the cups
and saucers to a side-table, and now put on her hat.

"And I hope I never shall," she said, forcing herself to speak calmly.
"If I thought it likely, I should never look at a man again."

But Louise had not finished. Coming round to the front of the
rocking-chair, and leaning on the table, she gazed at Madeleine
with wild eyes, while her pale lips poured forth a kind of
revenge for the suffering, real and imaginary, that she had undergone
at the hands of this cooler nature.

"And I'll tell you why. You are doubly safe; for you will never be
able to make a man care so much that--that you are forced to love him
like this in return. It isn't in you to do it. I don't mean because
you're plain. There are plenty of plainer women than you, who can make
men follow them. No, it's your nature--your cold, narrow, egotistic
nature--which only lets you care for things outside yourself in a cold,
narrow way. You will never know what it is to be taken out of yourself,
taken and shaken, till everything you are familiar with falls away."

She laughed; but tears were near at hand. Madeleine had turned her
back on her, and stood buttoning her jacket, with a red, exasperated face.

"I shall not answer you," she said. "You have worked yourself into
such a state that you don't know what you're saying. All the same, I
think you might try to curb your tongue. I have done nothing to
you--but be kind to you."

"Kind to me? Do you call it kind to come here and try to set me
against the man I love best in the world? And who loves me best, too.
Yes; he does. He would never have gone, if he hadn't been forced to--if
I hadn't been a hindrance to him--a drag on him."

"It makes me ashamed of my sex to hear you say such things. That a
woman can so far lose her pride as to----"

"Oh, other women do it in other ways. Do you think I haven't seen how
you have been trying to make some one here like you?--doing your
utmost, without any thoughts of pride or self-respect.--And how you
have failed? Yes, failed. And if you don't believe me, ask him
yourself--ask him who it is that could bring him to her, just by
raising her finger. It's to me he would come, not to you--to me who
have never given him look or thought."

Madeleine paled, then went scarlet. "That's a direct untruth. You!--and
not to egg a man on, if you see he admires you! You know every time a
passer-by looks at you in the street. You feed on such looks--yes, and
return them, too. I have seen you, my lady, looking and being looked
at, by a stranger, in a way no decent woman allows.--For the rest, I'll
trouble you to mind your own business. Whatever I do or don't do,
trust me, I shall at least take care not to make myself the
laughing-stock of the place. Yes, you have only succeeded in making
yourself ridiculous. For while you were cringing before him, and aspiring
to die for his sake, he was making love behind your back to another girl.
For the last six months. Every one knew it, it seems, but you."

She had spoken with unconcealed anger, and now turned to leave the
room. But Louise was at the door before her, and spread herself across
it.

"That's a lie, Madeleine! Of your own making. You shall prove it to me
before you go out of this room. How dare you say such a thing !--how
dare you!"

Madeleine looked at her with cold aversion, and drew back to avoid
touching her.

"Prove it?" she echoed. "Are his own words not proof enough! He told
the whole story that night, just as he had first told all about you.
It had been going on for months. Sometimes, you were hardly out of his
room, before the other was in. And if you don't believe me, ask the
person you're so proud of having attracted, without raising your
finger."

Louise moved away from the door, and went back to the table, on which
she leaned heavily. All the blood had left her face and the dark rings
below her eyes stood out with alarming distinctness. Madeleine felt a
sudden compunction at what she had done.

"It's entirely your own fault that I told you anything whatever about
it," she said, heartily annoyed with herself. "You had no right to
provoke me by saying what you did. I declare, Louise, to be with you
makes one just like you. If it's any consolation to you to know it, he
was drunk at the time, and there's a possibility it may not be true."

"Go away--go out of my room!" cried Louise. And Madeleine went, without
delay, having almost a physical sensation about her throat of the
slender hands stretched so threateningly towards her.--And this
unpleasant feeling remained with her until she turned the corner of
the street.

II.

On the afternoon when Maurice found that Madeleine had kept her word
he went home and paced his room in perplexity. He pictured Louise
lying helpless, too weak to raise her hand. His brain went stupidly
over the few people to whom he might turn for aid. Avery Hill?--Johanna
Cayhill? But Avery was occupied with her own troubles; and Johanna's
relationship to Ephie put her out of the question. He was thinking
fantastic thoughts of somehow offering his own services, or of even
throwing himself on the goodness of a person like Miss Jensen, whose
motherly form must surely imply a corresponding motherliness of heart,
when Frau. Krause entered the room, bearing a letter which she said
had been left for him an hour or two previously. She carried a lamp in
her hand, and eyed her restless lodger with suspicion.

"Why, in the name of goodness, didn't you bring this in when it came?"
he demanded. He held the unopened letter at arm's length, as if he
were afraid of it.

Frau Krause bridled instantly. Did he think she had nothing else to do
than to carry things in and out of his room? The letter had lain on
the chest of drawers in the passage; he could have seen it for
himself, had he troubled to look.

Maurice waved her away. He was staring at the envelope; he believed he
knew the handwriting. His heart beat with precise hammerings. He laid
the letter on the table, and took a few turns in the room before he
picked it up again. On examining it anew, it seemed to him that the
lightly gummed envelope had been tampered with, and he made a
threatening movement towards the door, then checked himself,
remembering that if the letter were what he believed, it would be
written in English. He tore it open, destroying the envelope in his
nervousness. There was no heading, and it was only a few lines long.

I MUST SPEAK TO YOU. WILL YOU COME TO ME THIS EVENING? LOUISE
DUFRAYER.

His heart was thumping now. He was to go to her, she said so
herself; to go this moment, for it was evening already. As it was, she
was perhaps waiting for him, wondering why he did not come. He had not
shaved that day, and his first impulse was to call for hot water. In
the same breath he gave up the idea: it was out of the question by the
poor light of the lamp, and the extraordinary position of the
looking-glass. He made, however, a hasty toilet in his best, only to
colour at himself when finished. Was there ever such a fool as he? His
act contained the germ of an insult: and he rapidly changed back to
his workaday wear.

All this took time, and it was eight o'clock before he rang the
door-bell in the BRUDERSTRASSE. Now, the landlady did not mistake him
for a possible thief. But she looked at him in an unfriendly way, and
said grumblingly that Fraulein had been expecting him for an hour or
more. Then she pointed to the door of the room, and left him to make
his way in alone.

He knocked gently, but no one answered. The old woman, who stood
watching his movements, signed to him to enter, and he turned the
handle. The large room was dark, except for the light shed by a small
lamp, which stood on the table before the sofa. From somewhere out of
the dusk that lay beyond, a white figure rose and came towards him.

Louise was in a crumpled dressing-gown, and her hair was loosened from
its coil on her neck. Maurice saw so much, before she was close beside
him, her eyes searching his face.

"Oh, you have come," she said with a sigh, as if a load had been
lifted from her mind. "I thought you were not coming."

"I only got your note a few minutes ago. I . . . I came at once," he
said, and stammered, as he saw how greatly illness had changed her.

"I knew you would."

She did not give him her hand, but stood gazing at him; and her look
was so helpless and forlorn that he grew uncomfortable.

"You have been ill?" he said, to render the pause that followed less
embarrassing.

"Yes; but I'm better now." She supported herself on the table; her
indecision seemed to increase, and several seconds passed before she
said: "Won't you sit down?"

He took one of the stuffed arm-chairs she indicated; and she went back
to the sofa. Again there was silence. With her elbows on her knees,
her chin on her two hands, Louise stared hard at the pattern of the
tablecloth. Maurice sat stiff and erect, waiting for her to tell him
why she had summoned him.

"You will think it strange that I should send for you like
this . . . when I know you so slightly," she began at length.
"But . . .since I saw you last . . . I have been in trouble,"--her voice
broke, but her eyes remained fixed on the cloth. "And I am quite alone. I
have no one to help me. Then I thought of you; you were kind to me
once; you offered to help me." She paused, and wound her handkerchief
to a ball.

"Anything!--anything that lies in my power," said Maurice fervently. He
fidgeted his hands round the brim of his hat, which he was holding to him.

"Won't you tell me what it is?" he asked, after another long break. "I
should be so glad, and grateful--yes, indeed, grateful--if there were
anything I could do for you."

She met his eyes, and tried to say something, but no sound came over
her lips. She was trying to fasten her thoughts on what she had to
say, but, in spite of her efforts, they eluded her. For more than
twenty-four hours she had brooded over one idea; the strain had been
too great; and, now that the moment had come, her strength deserted
her. She would have liked to lay her head on her arms and sleep; it
almost seemed to her now, in the indifference of sheer fatigue, that
it did not matter whether she spoke or not. But as she looked at the
young man, she became conscious of an expression in his face, which
made her own grow hard.

"I won't be pitied."

Maurice turned very red. His heart had gone out to her in her
distress; and his feelings were painted on his face. His discomfiture
at her discovery was so palpable that it gave her courage to go on.

"You were one of those, were you not, who were present at a certain
cafe in the BRUHL, one evening, three weeks ago." It was more of a
statement than a question. Her eyes held him fast. His retreating
colour rose again; he had a presentiment of what was coming.

"Then you must have heard----" she began quickly, but left the
sentence unended.

His suspicions took shape, and he made a large, vague gesture of
dissent. "You heard all that was said," she continued, without paying
any heed to him. "You heard how . . . how some one--no, how the man I
loved and trusted . . . how he boasted about my caring for him; and
not only that, but how, before that drunken crowd, he told how
I had been to him ... to his room . . . that afternoon----" She could
not finish, and pressed her knotted handkerchief to her lips.

Maurice looked round him for assistance. "You are mistaken," he
declared. "I heard nothing of the kind. Remember, I, too, was among
those . . . in the state you mention," he added as an afterthought,
lowering his voice.

"That is not it." Leaning forward, she opened her eyes so wide that he
saw a rim of white round the brown of the pupils. "You must also have
heard . . . how, all this time, behind my back, there was some one
else . . . someone he cared for . . . when I thought it was only me."

The young man coloured, with her and for her. "It is not true; you
have been misled," he said with vehemence. And, again, a flash of
intuition suggested an afterthought to him. "Can you really believe
it? Don't you think better of him than that?"

For the first time since she had known him, Louise gave him a personal
look, a look that belonged to him alone, and held a warm ray of
gratitude. Then, however, she went on unsparingly: "I want you to tell
me who it was."

He laid his hat on a chair, and used his hands. "But if I assure you
it is not true? If I give you my word that you have been misinformed?"

"Who was it? What is her name?"

He rose, and went away from the table.

"I knew him better than you," she said slowly, as he did not speak:
"you or anyone else--a hundred thousand times better--and I KNOW it is
true."

Still he did not answer. "Then you won't tell me?"

"Tell you? How can I? There's nothing to tell."

"I was wrong then. You have no pity for me?"

"Pity!--I no pity?" he cried, forgetting how, a minute ago, she had
resented his feeling it. "But all the same I can't tell you what you
ask me. You don't realise what it means: putting a slur on a young
girl's name . . . which has never been touched."

Directly he had said this, he was aware of his foolishness; but she
let the admission contained in the words pass unnoticed.

"Then she is not with him?" she cried, springing to her feet, and
there was a jubilation in her voice, which she did not attempt
to suppress. Maurice made no answer, but in his face was such a
mixture of surprise and disconcertion that it was answer enough.

She remained standing, with her head bowed; and Maurice, who, in his
nervousness, had gripped the back of his chair, held it so tightly
that it left a furrow in his hand. He was looking into the lamp, and
did not at first see that Louise had raised her head again and was
contemplating him. When she had succeeded in making him look at her,
she sat down on the sofa and drew the folds of her dressing-gown to
her.

"Come and sit here. I want to speak to you."

But Maurice only shot a quick glance at her, and did not move.

She leaned forward, in her old position. She had pushed the heavy
wings of hair up from her forehead, and this, together with her
extreme pallor, gave her face a look of febrile intensity.

"Maurice Guest," she said slowly, "do you remember a night last
summer, when, by chance, you happened to walk with me, coming home
from the theatre?--Or have you perhaps forgotten?"

He shook his head.

"Then do you remember, too, what you said to me? How, since the first
time you had seen me--you even knew where that was, I believe--you had
thought about me . . . thought too much, or words to that effect. Do
you remember?"

"Do you think when a man says a thing like that he forgets it? "asked
Maurice in a gruff voice. He turned, as he spoke, and looked down on
her with a kind of pitying wisdom. "If you knew how often I have
reproached myself for it!" he added.

"There was no need for that," she answered, and even smiled a little.
"We women never resent having such things said to us--never--though it
is supposed we do, and though we must pretend to. But I remember, too,
I was in a bad mood that night, and was angry with you, after all.
Everything seemed to have gone against me. In the theatre--in . . . Oh,
no, no!" she cried, as she remembrance of that past night, with its
alternations of pain and pleasure, broke over her. "My God!"

Maurice hardly breathed, for fear he should remind her of his
presence. When the paroxysm had passed, she crossed to the window; the
blinds had not been drawn, and leaning her forehead on the glass, she
looked out into the darkness. In spite of his trouble of mind,
the young man could not but comment on the ironic fashion in which
fate was treating him: not once, in all the hours he had spent on the
pavement below, had Louise come, like this, to the window; now that
she did so, he was in the room beside her, wishing himself away.

Then, with a swift movement, she came back to him, and stood at his
side.

"Then it was not true?--what you said that night."

"True?" echoed Maurice. He instinctively moved a step away from her,
and threw a quick glance at the pale face so near his own. "If I were
to tell you how much more than that is true, you wouldn't have
anything more to do with me."

For the second time, she seemed to see him and consider him. But he
kept his head turned stubbornly away.

"You feel like that," she began in slow surprise, to continue
hurriedly: "You care for me like that, and yet, when I ask the first
and only thing I shall ever ask of you, you won't do it? It is a
lesson to me, I suppose, not to come to you for help again.--Oh, I
can't understand you men! You are all--all alike."

"I would do anything in the world for you. Anything but this."

She repeated his last words after him. "But I want nothing else."

"This I can't tell you."

"Then you don't really care. You only think you do. If you can't do
this one small thing for me! Oh, there is no one else I can turn to,
or I would. Oh, please tell me!--you who make-believe to care for me.
You won't? When it comes to the point, a man will do nothing--nothing
at all."

"I would cut off my hands for you. But you are asking me to do
something I think wrong."

"Wrong! What is wrong?--and what is right? They are only words. Is it
right that I should be left like this?--thrown away like a broken
plate? Oh, I shall not rest till I know who it was that took him from
me. And you are the only person who can help me. Are you not a little
sorry for me? Is there nothing I can do to make you sorry?"