Books: Maurice Guest

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Johanna was silent. But after this, she did not venture to mention
Maurice's name; and she had turned to leave the room when she
remembered her meeting with Mrs. Tully.

"I would rather you did not go to tea, Ephie," she ended, and then
regretted having said it.

"That's another of your silly prejudices, Joan. I want to know
why you feel so about Mrs. Tully. I think she's lovely. Not that I'd
have gone anyway. I promised Maurice to go for a walk with him at
five. I know what her 'few friends' means, too--just Boehmer, and she
asks me along so people will think he comes to see me, and not her. He
sits there, and twirls his moustache, and makes eyes at her, and she
makes them back. I'm only for show. No, I shouldn't have gone. I can't
bear Boehmer. He's such a goat."

"You didn't think that as long as he came to see us," expostulated
Johanna.

"No, of course not. But so he only comes to see her, I do.--And
sometimes, Joan, why it's just embarrassing. The last afternoon, why,
he had a headache or something, and she made him lie on the sofa, with
a rug over him, so she could bathe his head with eau-de-cologne. I
guess she's going to marry him. And I'm not the only one. The other
day I heard Frau Walter and Frau von Baerle talking in the dining-room
after dinner, and they said the little English widow was very
HEIRATSLUSTIG."

"Ephie, I don't like to hear you repeat such foolish gossip," said
Johanna in real distress. "And if you can understand and remember a
word like that, you might really take more pains with your German. It
is not impossible for you to learn, you see."

"Joan the preacher, and Joan the teacher, and Joan the wise old bird,"
sang Ephie, and laughed. "I think Mrs. Tully is real kind. She's going
to show me a new way to do my hair. This style is quite out in London,
she says."

"Don't let her touch your hair. It couldn't be better than it is,"
said Johanna quickly. But Ephie turned her head this way and that, and
considered herself in the looking-glass.

Now that she knew Maurice was expected that afternoon, Johanna awaited
his arrival with impatience. Meanwhile, she believed she was not wrong
in thinking Ephie unusually excited. At dinner, where, as always, the
elderly boarders made a great fuss over her, her laughter was so loud
as to grate on Johanna's ear; but afterwards, in their own
sitting-room, a trifle sufficed to put her out of temper. A new hat
had been sent home, a hat which Johanna had not yet seen. Now that it
had come, Ephie was not sure whether she liked it or not; and all the
cries of admiration her mother and Mrs. Tully uttered, when she put it
on, were necessary to reassure her. Johanna was silent, and this
unspoken disapproval irritated Ephie.

"Why don't you say something, Joan?" she cried crossly. "I suppose you
think it's homely?"

"Frankly, I don't care for it much, dear. To my mind, it's overtrimmed."

This was so precisely Ephie's own feeling that she was more annoyed
than ever; she taunted Johanna with old-fashioned, countrified tastes;
and, in spite of her mother's comforting assurances, retired in a pet
to her own room.

That afternoon, as they sat together at tea, Mrs. Cayhill, who for
some time had considered Ephie fondly, said: "I can't understand you
thinking she isn't well, Joan. I never saw her look better."

Ephie went crimson. "Now what has Joan been saying about me?" she
asked angrily.

Johanna had left the table, and was reading on the sofa.

"I only said what I repeated to yourself, Ephie. That I didn't think
you were looking well."

"Just fancy," said Mrs. Cayhill, laughing good-humouredly, "she was
saying we ought to leave Leipzig and go to some strange place. Even
back home to America. You don't want to go away, darling, do you?"

"No, really, Joan is too bad," cried Ephie, with a voice in which
tears and exasperation struggled for the mastery. "She always has some
new fad in her head. She can't leave us alone--never! Let her go away,
so she wants to. I won't. I'm happy here. I love being here. Even if
you both go away, I shall stop."

She got up from the table, and went to a window, where she stood
biting her lips, and paying small attention to her mother's elaborate
protests that she, too, had no intention of being moved.

Johanna did not raise her eyes from her book. She could have wept: not
only at the spirit of rebellious dislike, which was beginning to show
more and more clearly in everything Ephie said. But was no one but
herself awake to the change that was taking place in the child, day by
day? She would write to her father, without delay, and make him insist
on their returning to America.

From the moment Maurice entered the room, she did not take her eyes
off him; and, under her scrutiny, the young man soon grew nervous. He
sat and fidgeted, and found nothing to say.

Ephie was wayward: she did not think she wanted to go out; it
looked like rain. Johanna refrained from interfering; but Maurice was
most persistent: he begged Ephie not to disappoint him, and, when this
failed, said angrily that she had no business to bring him there for
such capricious whims. This treatment cowed Ephie; and she went at
once to put on her hat and jacket.

"He wants to speak to her; and she knows it; and is trying to avoid
it," said Johanna to herself; and her heart beat fast for both of
them. But she was alone with Maurice; she must not lose the chance of
sounding him a little.

"Where do you think of going for a walk?" she asked, and her voice had
an odd tone to her ears.

"Where? Oh, to the ROSENTAL--or the SCHEIBENHOLZ--or along the river.
Anywhere. I don't know."

She coughed. "Have you noticed anything strange about Ephie lately?
She is not herself. I'm afraid she is not well."

He had noticed nothing. But he did not face Johanna; and he held the
photograph he was looking at upside down.

She leaned out of the window to watch them walk along the street. At
this moment, she was fully convinced of the correctness of her
mother's assumption; and by the thought of what might take place
within the next hour, she was much disturbed. During the rest of the
afternoon, she found it impossible to settle to anything; and she
wandered from one room to another, unable even to read. But it struck
six, seven, eight o'clock; it was supper-time; and still Ephie had not
come home. Mrs. Cayhill grew anxious, too, and Johanna strained her
eyes, watching the dark street. At nine and at ten, she was pacing the
room, and at eleven, after a messenger had been sent to Maurice's
lodging and had found no one there she buttoned on her rain-cloak, to
accompany one of the servants to the police-station.

"Why did I let her go?--Oh, why did I let her go!"

IV.

Maurice and Ephie walked along the LESSINGSTRASSE without speaking--it
was a dull, mild day, threatening to rain, as it had rained the whole
of the preceding night. But Ephie was not accustomed to be silent; she
found the stillness disconcerting, and before they had gone far, shot
a furtive look at her companion. She did not intend him to see it; but
he did, and turned to her. He cleared his throat, and seemed about to
speak, then changed his mind. Something in his face, as she observed
it more nearly, made Ephie change colour and give an awkward laugh.

"I asked you before how you liked my hat," she said, with another
attempt at the airiness which, to-day, she could not command. "And you
didn't say. I guess you haven't looked at it. You're in such a hurry."

Maurice turned his head; but he did not see the hat. Instead, he
mentally answered a question Louise had put to him the day before, and
which he had then not known how to meet. Yes, Ephie was pretty,
radiantly pretty, with the fresh, unsullied charm of a flower just
blown.

"Joan was so stupid about it," she went on at random; her face still
wore its uncertain smile. "She said it was overtrimmed, and top-heavy,
and didn't become me. As if she ever wore anything that suited her!
But Joan is an old maid. She hasn't a scrap of taste. And as for you,
Maurice, why I just don't believe you know one hat from another. Men
are so stupid."

Again they went forward in silence.

"You are tiresome to-day," she said at length, and looked at him with
a touch of defiance, as a schoolgirl looks at the master with whom she
ventures to remonstrate.

"Yes, I'm a dull companion."

"Knowing it doesn't make it any better."

But she was not really cross; all other feelings were swallowed up by
the uneasiness she felt at his manner of treating her.

"Where are we going?" she suddenly demanded of him, with a
little quick upward note in her voice. "This is not the way to the
SCHEIBENHOLZ."

"No." He had been waiting for the question. "Ephie,"--he cleared his
throat anew. "I am taking you to see a friend--of mine."

"Is that what you brought me out for? Then you didn't want to speak to
me, as you said? Then we're not going for a walk?"

"Afterwards, perhaps. It's like this. Some one I know has been very
ill. Now that she is getting better, she needs rousing and cheering
up, and that kind of thing; and I said I would bring you to call on
her. She knows you by sight--and would like to know you personally," he
added, with a lame effort at explanation.

"Is that so?" said Ephie with sudden indifference; and her heart,
which had begun to thump at the mention of a friend, quieted down at
once. In fancy, she saw an elderly lady with shawls and a footstool,
who had been attracted by her fresh young face; the same thing had
happened to her before.

Now, however, that she knew the object of their walk, she was greatly
relieved, as if a near danger had been averted; but she had not taken
many steps forward before she was telling herself that another hope
was gone. The only thing to do was to take the matter into her own
hands; it was now or never; and simply a question of courage.

"Maurice, say, do many people go away from here in the fall?--leave
the Con., I would say?" she asked abruptly. "I mean is this a time
more people leave than in spring?"

Maurice started; he had been lost in his own thoughts, which all
centred round this meeting he had weakly agreed to arrange. Again and
again he had tried to imagine how it would fall out. But he did not
know Louise well enough to foresee how she would act; and the nearer
the time came, the stronger grew his presentiment of trouble. His
chief remaining hope was that there would be no open speaking, that
Schilsky's name would not be mentioned; and plump into the midst of
this hope fell Ephie's question. He turned on her; she coloured
furiously, and walked into a pool of water; and, at this moment,
everything was as clear to Maurice as though she had said: "Where is
be? Why has he gone?"

"Why do you ask?" he queried with unconscious sharpness. "No, Easter
is the general time for leaving. But people who play in the
PRUFUNGEN then, sometimes stay for the summer term. Why do you ask?"

"Gracious, Maurice, how tiresome you are! Must one always say why? I
only wanted to know. I missed people I used to see about, that's all."

"Yes, a number have not come back."

He was so occupied with what they were saying that he, in his turn,
stepped into a puddle, splashing the water up over her shoe. Ephie was
extremely annoyed.

"Look!--look what you've done!" she cried, showing him her spikey
little shoe. "Why don't you look where you're going? How clumsy you
are!" and, in a sudden burst of illhumour: "I don't know why you're
bringing me here. It's a horrid part of the city anyway. I didn't have
any desire to come. I guess I'll turn back and go home."

"We're almost there now."

"I don't care. I don't want to go."

"But you shall, all the same. What's the matter with you to-day that
you don't know your own mind for two minutes together?"

"You didn't inquire if I wanted to come. You're just horrid, Maurice."

"And you're a capricious child."

He quickened his pace, afraid she might still escape him; and Ephie
had hard work to keep up with him. As she trotted along, a few steps
behind, there arose in her a strong feeling of resentment against
Maurice, which was all the stronger because she suspected that she was
on the brink of hearing her worst suspicions confirmed. But she could
not afford to yield to the feeling, when the last chance she had of
getting definite information was passing from her. Knitting both hands
firmly inside her muff, she asked, with an earnestness which, to one
who knew, was fatally tale-telling: "Did anyone you were acquainted
with leave, Maurice?"

"Yes," said the young man at her side, with brusque determination. He
remained untouched by the tone of appeal in which Ephie put the
question; for he himself suffered under her continued hedging. "Yes,"
he said, "some one did, and that was a man called Schilsky--a tall,
red-haired fellow, a violinist. But he has only just gone. He came
back after the vacation to settle his affairs, and say good-bye to his
friends. Is there anything else you want to know?"

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
After all, Ephie was such a child. He could not see her face, which
was hidden by the brim of the big hat, but there was something
pathetic in the line of her chin, and the droop of her arms and
shoulders. She seemed to shrink under his words--to grow smaller. As he
stood aside to let her pass before him, through the house-door in the
BRUDERSTRASSE, he had a quick revulsion of feeling. Instead of being
rough and cruel to her, he should have tried to win her confidence
with brotherly kindness. But he had had room in his mind for nothing
but the meeting with Louise, and now there was no more time; they were
going up the stairs. All he could do was to say gently: "I ought to
tell you, Ephie, that the person we are going to see has been very,
very ill--and needs treating with the utmost consideration. I rely on
your tact and good-feeling."

But Ephie did not reply; the colour had left her face, and for once,
the short upper-lip closed firmly on the lower one. For some minutes
amazed anger with Maurice was all she felt. Then, however, came the
knowledge of what his words meant: he knew--Maurice knew; he had seen
through her fictions; he would tell on her; there would be dreadful
scenes with Joan; there would be reproaches and recriminations; she
would be locked up, or taken away. As for what lay beyond, his
assertion that Schilsky had been there--had been and gone, without a
word to her--that was a sickening possibility, which, at present, her
mind could not grasp. She grew dizzy under these blows that rained
down on her, one after the other. And meanwhile, she had to keep up
appearances, to go on as though nothing had happened, when it seemed
impossible even to drag herself to the top of the winding flight of
stairs. She held her head down; there was a peculiar clicking in her
throat, which she could not master; she felt at every step as if she
would have to burst out crying.

At the glass of the door, and at the wizened old face that appeared
behind it, she looked with unseeing eyes; and she followed Maurice
mechanically along the passage to a door at the end.

In his agitation the young man forgot to knock; and as they entered, a
figure sprang up from the sofa-corner, and made a few impulsive steps
towards them.

Maurice went over to Louise and took her hand.

"I've brought her," he said in a low tone, and with a kind of appeal
in voice and eyes, which he was not himself aware of. Louise
answered the look, and went on looking at him, as if she were fearful
of letting her eyes stray. Both turned at an exclamation from Ephie.
She was still standing where Maurice had left her, close beside the
door; but her face was flaming, and her right hand fumbled with the
doorhandle.

"Ephie!" said Maurice warningly. He was afraid she would turn the
handle, and, going over to her, took her by the arm.

"Say, Maurice, I'm going home," she said under her breath. "I can't
stop here. Oh, why did you bring me?"

"Ssh!--be a good girl, Ephie," he replied as though speaking to a
child. "Come with me."

An inborn politeness struggled with Ephie's dread. "I can't. I don't
know her name," she whispered. But she let him draw her forward to
where Louise was standing; and she held out her hand.

"Miss--?" she said in a small voice, and waited for the name to be
filled in.

Louise had watched them whispering, with a stony fare, but, at Ephie's
gesture, life came into it. Her eyes opened wide; and drawing back
from the girl's outstretched hand, yet without seeming to see it, she
turned with a hasty movement, and went over to the window, where she
stood with her back to them.

This was the last straw; Ephie dropped on a chair, and hiding her face
in her hands, burst into the tears she had hitherto restrained. Her
previous trouble was increased a hundredfold. For she had recognised
Louise at once; she felt that she was in a trap; and the person who
had entrapped her was Maurice. Holding a tiny lace handkerchief to her
eyes, she sobbed as though her heart would break.

"Don't cry, dear, don't cry," said the young man. "It's all right."
But his thoughts were with Louise. He was apprehensive of what she
might do next.

As if in answer to his fear, she crossed the room.

"Ask her to take her hands down. I want to see her face."

Maurice bent over Ephie, and touched her shoulder.

"Ephie, dear, do you hear? Look up, like a good girl, and speak to
Miss Dufrayer."

But Ephie shook off his hand.

Over her bowed head, their eyes met; and the look Louise gave the
young man was cold and questioning. He shrugged his shoulders:
he could do nothing; and retreating behind the writing-table, he left
the two girls to themselves.

"Stand up, please," said Louise in an unfriendly voice; and as Ephie
did not obey, she made a movement to take her by the wrists.

"No, no!--don't touch me," cried Ephie, and rose in spite of herself.
"What right have you to speak to me like this?"

She could say no more, for, with a quick, unforeseen movement, Louise
took the young girl's face in both hands, and turned it up. And after
her first instinctive effort to draw back, Ephie kept still, like a
fascinated rabbit, her eyes fixed on the dark face that looked down at
her.

Seconds passed into minutes; and the minutes seemed hours. Maurice
watched, on the alert to intervene, if necessary.

At the entrance of her visitors, Louise had been unable to see
distinctly, so stupefied was she by the thought that the person on
whom her thoughts had run, with a kind of madness, for more than
forty-eight hours, was actually in the room beside her--it was just as
though a nightmare phantom had taken bodily form. And then, too,
though she had spent each of these hours in picturing to herself what
this girl would be like, the reality was so opposed to her imagining
that, at first, she could not reconcile the differences.

Now she forced herself to see every line of the face. Nothing escaped
her. She saw how loosened tendrils of hair on neck and forehead became
little curls; saw the finely marked brows, and the dark blue veins at
the temples; the pink and white colouring of the cheeks; the small
nose, modelled as if in wax; the fascinating baby mouth, with its
short upper-lip. Like most dark, sallow women, whose own brief
freshness is past, the elder girl passionately admired such
may-blossom beauty, as something belonging to a different race from
herself. And this was not all: as she continued to look into Ephie's
face, she ceased to be herself; she became the man whose tastes she
knew better than her own; she saw with his eyes, felt with his senses.
She pictured Ephie's face, arch and smiling, lifted to his; and she
understood and excused his weakness. He had not been able to help what
had happened: this was the prettiness that drew him in, the kind he
had invariably turned to look back at, in the street--something fair
and round, adorably small and young, something to be petted and
protected, that clung, and was childishly subordinate. For her dark
sallowness, for her wilful mastery, he had only had a passing fancy.
She was not his type, and she knew it. But to have known it
vaguely, when it did not matter, and to know it at a moment like the
present, were two different things.

In a burst of despair she let her arms fall to her sides; but her
insatiable eyes gazed on; and Ephie, though she was now free, did not
stir, but remained standing, with her face raised, in a silly
fascination. And the eyes, having taken in the curves of cheeks and
chin, and the soft white throat, passed to the rounded, drooping
shoulders, to the plumpness of the girlish figure, embracing the whole
body in their devouring gaze. Ephie went hot and cold beneath them;
she felt as if her clothes were being stripped from her, and she left
standing naked. Louise saw the changing colour, and interpreted it in
her own way. His--all his! He was not the mortal--she knew it only too
well--to have this flower within his reach, and not clutch at it,
instinctively, as a child clutches at sunbeams. It would riot have
been in nature for him to do otherwise than take, greedily, without
reflection. At the thought of it, a spasm of jealousy caught her by
the throat; her hanging hands trembled to hurt this infantile
prettiness, to spoil these lips that had been kissed by his.

Maurice was at her side. "Don't hurt her," he said, and did not know
how the words came to his lips.

The spell was broken. The unnatural expression died out of her face;
she was tired and apathetic.

"Hurt her?" she repeated faintly. "No, don't be afraid. I shall not
hurt her. But if I beat her with ropes till all my strength was gone,
I couldn't hurt her as she has hurt me."

"Hush! Don't say such things."

"I? I hurt you?" said Ephie, and began to cry afresh. "How could I? I
don't even know you."

"No, you don't know me; and yet you have done me the cruellest wrong."

"Oh, no, no," sobbed Ephic. "No, indeed!"

"He was all I had--all I cared for. And you plotted, and planned, and
stole him from me--with your silly baby face."

"It's not true," wept Ephie. "How could I? I didn't know anything
about you. He . . . he never spoke of you."

Louise laughed. "Oh, I can believe that! And you thought, didn't you,
you poor little fool, that he only cared for you? That was why my name
was never mentioned. He didn't need to scheme, and contrive, and lie,
lie abominably, for fear I should come to hear what he was doing!"

"No, indeed," sobbed Ephie. "Never! And you've no right to say
such things of him."

"I no right?" Louise drew herself up. "No right to say what I like of
him? Are you going to tell me what I shall say and what I shan't of
the man I loved?--yes, and who loved me, too, but in a way you couldn't
understandyou who think all you have to do is to smile your silly
smile, and spoil another person's life. You didn't know, no, of course
not!--didn't know this was his room as well as mine. Look, his music is
still lying on the piano; that's the chair he sat in, not many days
ago; here," she took Ephie by the shoulder and drew her behind the
screen, where a small door, papered like the wall, gave, direct from
the stair-head, a second entrance to the room--" here's the door he
came in at.--For he came as he liked, whenever he chose."

"It's not true; it can't be true," said Ephie, and raised her
tear-stained face defiantly. "We are engaged--since the summer. He's
coming back to marry me soon."

"He's coming back to marry you!" echoed Louise in a blank voice. "He's
coming back to marry you!"

She moved a few steps away, and stood by the writing-table, looking
dazed, as if she did not understand. Then she laughed.

Ephie cried with renewed bitterness. "I want to go home."

But Maurice did not pay any attention to her. He was watching Louise,
with a growing dismay. For she continued to laugh, in a breathless
way, with a catch in the throat, which made the laughter sound like
sobbing. On his approaching her, she tried to check herself, but
without success. She wiped her lips, and pressed her handkerchief to
them, then took the handkerchief between her teeth and bit it. She
crossed to the window, and stood with her back to the others; but she
could not stop laughing. She went behind the low, broad screen that
divided the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed; but still she
had to laugh on. She came out again into the other part of the room,
and saw Maurice pale and concerned, and Ephie's tears dried through
pure fear; but the sight of these two made her laugh more violently
than before. She held her face in her hands, and pressed her jaws
together as though she would break them; for they shook with a nervous
convulsion. Her whole body began to shake, with the efforts she made
at repression.

Ephie cowered in her seat. "Oh, Maurice, let us go. I'm so afraid,"
she implored him.

"Don't be frightened! It's all right." But he was following
Louise about the room, entreating her to regain the mastery of
herself. When he did happen to notice Ephie more closely, he said: "Go
downstairs, and wait for me there. I'll come soon."