Chapter Twenty-Three I
A sedan drove up to M. St. Hilaire’s house in the Quartier Leopold. The young lady who got out was met at the door by a girl of fourteen who enfolded her in affectionate embraces.
“Oh, what a slow poke!” cried the girl reproachfully. “You were gone for ever and ever, Jeanette!”
“Two hours and ten minutes, Henrietta,” said Janet looking at her wrist watch, “is pretty short measure for eternity. I’m glad you’re not my butcher or baker.”
Henriette grimaced. They went upstairs together, the girl’s arm tightly clasping her companion’s waist.
Henriette St. Hilaire was a lovely girl, lithe and slender. Her fair hair was bobbed and her eyes were the soft blue eyes of the North.
She complained again of the dull time she had had.
“Serve you right for having a headache when I left,” said Janet. “According to Herbert Spencer, if I went out for a drive by myself every time you had one, your headaches would soon disappear.”
“Mine has gone already. Show me all you bought, Janski. May I open the parcels?”
“Yes, one by one.”
For Henriette was recklessly attacking strings and wrappers, to the great peril of the contents.
Among the parcels undid was one containing a book.
She read out the title: “Tom, Dick and Harry.”
“What’s this?”
“That’s a book of light reading for a young lady well advanced in the English language.”
Henriette had taken to English as a duck takes to water. After a year of continuous practice, she spoke it well; and read or wrote it passably.
“Oh, it isn’t a girl’s book, is it?” she said, dubiously, and scanning the title again in the light of Janet’s words.
“No, it’s a boy’s book. Boys’ books are the only ones I know about because they were the only ones I used to read. They were much jollier than the girls’ books.”
“Did your mother let you read boys’ books? My mother wouldn’t.”
“Nor mine either. But I read them on the sly. That’s what made them so enticing, I suppose.”
“I can’t imagine that you ever did anything on the sly, Janski,” said the child, who still took idioms somewhat too literally.
“Oh, can’t you? Then I’m not half such a fool as I look.”
Henriette laid the book down and went over to make a demonstration of tenderness by way of intimating that she believed Janet to be the best and cleverest person in the whole world.
Janet skillfully cut this demonstration short. She believed that a child’s affections, like its disaffections, should be kept well within bounds.
“Your enthusiasm for ‘Tom, Dick and Harry,’” she said, in her musical voice, “leaves much to be desired. Let me tell you that it is not a book for study, but a book for light reading. If you really mean to make English your ‘adopted tongue,’ as you sometimes tell me, you must get used to light reading. The English-speaking nations read very little else.”
Henriette gave her a look full of adoration.
“Oh, I don’t need light reading while I have you. To be with you is like—it’s as exciting as watching the loop-the-loop!”
“Look here, Miss, do you imply that I’m a sort of three-ringed circus or professional jumping-jack?”
“No. I don’t mean anything horrid and jumpy like that. I mean you are never like other people. That’s why it’s such fun to try and guess what you will do or say next. And I hardly ever guess right.”
“I see. I’m more like a Christmas stocking, full of surprises.”
“There, you see what funny things you say! It’s far more absorbing than a hundred books of light reading.”
“Henriette, you are becoming highly skilled at flattery. It’s a very useful accomplishment. If my absence brings out virtues like this, I think I shall make a point of deserting you for two hours every morning. You will become a paragon, and I shall be famous for my absent teaching.”
“Oh, no, no, most dearest Jeanette. If need be, I’ll say the most awful things about you. I’ll do anything to keep you.”
She gave a great sigh.
“You don’t know how I worry about losing you. It’s terrible! Why weren’t you my sister or my aunt? Then I’d be sure of keeping you always!”
“Don’t be too sure of that, darling. If we were close relations, everybody would expect us to be fond of each other. And this expectation would probably destroy most of the fondness, unless our attraction for each other happened to be overwhelming.”
“Oh, it is overwhelming, isn’t it? It must be, Jeanette. Why, I wouldn’t mind even if you were my mother!”
“That’s what I call crushing proof.”
“Yes. And it’s taking chances, too. I don’t really want another mother, you know. Mothers are only truly nice to their sons. Now do you see how much I love you?”
“I do, you little philosopher. And I conclude, from so much undeserved affection, that, as a teacher, I have probably been far too easy-going. In future, I shall have to be much more severe.”
“Oh, that has nothing to do with it,” said Henriette, laughing. “It isn’t the way you treat me. It’s—well, I don’t know what. Perhaps it’s the deep, deep mystery about you. Papa has noticed it, too.”
“Has he, indeed?”
“Yes. And speaking of mysteries, I forgot to tell you that some one called to see you while you were out. A gentleman—”
“A gentleman! Who could it be?”
“Well, he was a great big mountain of a man. Ugly, oh, like the ogre in a fairy tale. I didn’t like him a bit.”
“Oh, you saw him?”
“Yes. I peeked over the banisters. What a monster! Papa wasn’t home. Berthe let him in because he said he was an old friend of yours. Here’s his card.”
Janet read the name of Hutchins Burley, and needed all her self-control not to show her dismay.
“Did he leave a message?”
Henriette prattled on, unaware of Janet’s emotion.
“He asked Berthe to tell you that he would call again about five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. He said he especially wanted to see you. If you couldn’t be in, he would be sure to see papa.”
“Five o’clock, did he say?”
“Yes. Just when my riding lesson comes. I suppose we shall have to give up our ride,” she added mournfully.
“Let’s wait and see, dear.”
II
Had Burley chanced upon her in the street and followed her home, or had he seen her in one of the shops or at one of the English tea rooms in Brussels? Janet did not pursue this fruitless inquiry. The question was how to meet the fact, the perilous fact. For she could hardly doubt that Hutchins Burley’s visit boded her no good.
She passed the events of the last nine months in quick review. M. St. Hilaire had engaged her without references. True to his agreement, moreover, he had given her a free hand with Henriette’s education and had been well pleased when a growing attachment between Janet and his daughter relieved him almost entirely of routine parental cares.
As the virtual guardian of Henriette, Janet had had little to complain of and much to be thankful for. Her pupil and her pupil’s father had treated her from the first as one of themselves, so that she enjoyed all the advantages of membership in a family of wealth and refinement. These advantages were not to be scoffed at. M. St. Hilaire was not only a man of cultivated tastes; he possessed the means (derived from extensive realty holdings in Alsace and Switzerland) which permitted him to indulge his tastes on a very liberal scale.
All in all, Janet thanked her lucky stars, especially as the pose of chivalry, which M. St. Hilaire had contributed to their first meeting, had worn very well. True, at the outset, he had made a few advances ranging from the demonstrative to the amorous. But she had set these experiments down to the incorrigible habit of continental gallantry. He had not gone beyond them, had accepted her gentle rebuffs with a very good grace, and had not thenceforth encroached upon her intimacy further than she wished.
Of late, she had not been able to close her eyes to the fact that her employer was engaged in a mental debate as to whether or no he should propose marriage to her. She regretted this fact and dreaded its sequel. For reasons that seemed good and sufficient to her instincts if not to her intellect, she had no desire to marry M. St. Hilaire. Her present berth was very comfortable and altogether to her liking. It gave her the rest she needed after the strain of her adventure with Claude; it also gave her an opportunity to reflect on the past and get her bearings in the present, before she took another leap.
It was in the light of these relations with M. St. Hilaire and with Henriette that she wondered what she ought to do.
As regards Hutchins Burley, she was sure that he meant to play the heavy villain. Why not? Nature had cut him out for the part, patterning him magnificently upon the “heavies” that trod on the blood-and-thunder stage. After all, one had to give this stage its due. If the literary drama could create characters which nature copied (and sometimes improved on), so could melodrama. And certainly, in Hutchins Burley, melodrama had prompted nature to make her masterpiece.
Janet had rather settled it, then, that Hutchins would have the audacity to approach her with a repugnant offer (the same old offer), hoping that her recent experience might have left her less squeamish than in the days of the model tenements when she had repeatedly repulsed him with scorn. On being repulsed anew, he would proceed to inform M. St. Hilaire of her affair with Claude Fontaine in the expectation that the news would bring about her discharge. For it was unlikely that a father would wish his child to continue in the care of a young woman who had “gone wrong.”
The mischief done, Hutchins would live in hopes of snatching from her weakness the gratification he had vainly striven to beg, borrow or steal from her strength.
Should she now, like a movie heroine, try to head Hutchins off, temporize with his expected offer, pay him blackmail, or what not? She laughed heartily at this idea, its execution was so foreign to her nature.
What would Robert advise her to do? At this point she repeated an act that had lately been a favorite part of her daydreams. She called up Robert, as Saul called up the Witch of Endor, and had a long, sensible talk with him one of those long, sensible talks so frequent in the days of Barr & Lloyd in the Lorillard tenements.
Robert advised her to obey her common sense unless her instinct kicked over the traces, in which case let her feel no compunction about obeying her instinct. She had better have as little direct dealing with Hutchins Burley as possible. You could no more put off a scoundrel than you could buy up a gentleman. The basest as well as the best of men were incorruptible. If Hutchins had it in mind to do something nasty, he would do it, no matter what course she took.
Of course, she might throw herself on M. St. Hilaire’s mercy. But then, though M. St. Hilaire was a decent sort of man, was he not, like most cultivated men, a classicist? That is, were not his reactions towards matters of sex thoroughly traditional? If so, the only attitude of Janet’s that he would comprehend would be that of a penitent Magdalene with uplifted hands and tearful eyes. Was she prepared to assume this role?
“Decidedly not,” was Janet’s hot reply to Robert’s shade. “I may have been rash or worldly-unwise, but I won’t admit that I was wicked. If I am asked to pay up for my folly, I shall not try to evade payment. But if I am asked to pay up for my wickedness (which I do not acknowledge), I shall fight payment to the last ditch.
“No doubt, M. St. Hilaire will think me wicked, but do you?”
“There are three kinds of people,” solemnly responded Robert’s astral spirit. “And they correspond roughly to three kinds of existence we recognize: animal, vegetable and mineral. The mineral people are the dead people. Not more dead than the so-called minerals. But, like rocks and stones, they are incarnations of law and custom petrified. Then there are the vegetable people, the people who fold their hands and piously accept such crumbs of life as are showered upon them from the lap of High Heaven. Lastly there are the animal people, the people who go out to find life instead of waiting for life to find them. If you intend to remain in the last-named class, you must cheerfully assume the risks of adventure.”
“Dear me,” ejaculated Janet, “if his very shade isn’t lecturing me for old times’ sake!”
It was a little humiliating to be so dependent on Robert, even in the spirit. She wouldn’t have minded it so much if his terrestrial self hadn’t, with desolating coldness, washed his hands of her fate.
Still, take it all in all, he had done what all sagacious ghostly advisers should do, he had told her to do exactly what she wanted to do.
Consequently, Henriette’s riding lesson should not be interfered with tomorrow. When Hutchins Burley came at five o’clock, he would find her out. Tableau of a raging ogre! His fury would know no bounds, and he would surely embellish Janet’s life history so that M. St. Hilaire should put the worst interpretation on everything. Well, let him do his vilest. Come what may, time and the hour would run through the roughest day.
Losing Henriette!—Ah, that would be a bitter pill to swallow. Still, it wasn’t the first bitter pill and it wouldn’t be the last.
In every other way, she felt ready for a change.
III
“Can I see you for a few minutes?” said M. St. Hilaire to Janet, intercepting her outside his study, a little after six o’clock next day.
She and Henriette were on their way upstairs to take off their riding clothes and to dress for dinner.
“If you two are going to chatterbox, I shall take a little nap,” said Henriette, climbing drowsily up another flight of stairs to her room.
“Don’t be too long, mon pere,” she added, stopping half-way and looking down over the banisters. “I’m even more hungry than sleepy. Jeanette, please wake me when you come up.”
Janet, from within the study, promised to do so.
Neither her voice nor her manner betrayed her apprehensiveness. Her sailor hat was set rather jauntily on her head. Her light-brown riding coat and breeches made a most becoming costume, one that showed the undulating grace of her movements to excellent advantage.
M. St. Hilaire followed her into the study and closed the door a shade too circumspectly.
His glances and the vibrant tones of his voice puzzled her considerably. She could guess the substance of what he meant to convey but not the form in which he meant to convey it.
“That man—” he began in a hesitant manner.
“Mr. Burley, the man I said was coming today?”
“He came. You didn’t tell me what he was coming for.”
“I knew he’d do it so much better.”
“He treated me to a long, long story about you.”
“Yes, I rather thought he would.”
“Oh, so you knew that, too?”
“I had no cause to suspect him of amiable intentions,” she said, swinging her sailor hat by the elastic band. “I suppose he told you that I lived with Claude Fontaine?”
“Yes, but of course, I—”
“Oh, it’s quite true.”
M. St. Hilaire, nonplused by her candor, stroked his auburn beard and feasted on the sight of her as she sat in an armchair not far away. The indefinable suggestion of a devil-may-care mood enhanced her vital charm until it stirred, thrilled, intoxicated him.
“Perhaps—at one time—you have loved this Burley?” he asked, nursing the suspicion.
“A beast like that? Never!”
He moved his chair very closely to hers.
“Just Monsieur Fontaine?”
“You don’t expect me to go into details?” she said, coloring deeply.
“No, no, my dear. But—what has been, can be. Is it not so?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He didn’t quite know himself. Being in no condition to reason clearly, he had leaped rashly to the conclusion that she had wished him to learn of her love affair as an indirect way of encouraging him.
Janet could not know his thoughts precisely, but she had an inkling. She wondered that she could have been so blind as not to have seen that his studied chivalry towards women covered a strongly sensual nature.
Even then, she was not insensible to the fact that Anton St. Hilaire was a pleasing man to look upon. His bright blue eyes and clear, ruddy complexion testified to a sound physique. Perhaps he was a trifle too robust. But there was a feminine comeliness about him which was a foil to his surging virility. In many women, the first quality calmed the piquant fears which the second quality excited.
“Burley naturally told all sorts of lies about you,” he added, for want of a better line to take.
“I expected he would.”
“And of course I sent him about his business.”
“I rather expected that, too,” she said, smiling in spite of a growing sense of alarm.
For he had abruptly approached her and advanced as fast as she involuntarily withdrew. She retreated around the desk towards the closed door, on one side of which stood a wide leather couch. Against this she stumbled slightly, and he caught up with her.
“Janet,” he said, in a low voice, thick with excitement, “the way he dared to talk about you, you—so sweet, so clean, so adorable. I could have strangled the brute.”
“I wish you had.”
“You must let me protect you—”
They were at cross-purposes. She thought she could still reach the door and make a dignified escape. He felt her withdrawal as an added incitement. He had so long dispensed with the anticipating, insinuating maneuvers in the technique of love-making that he had lost the knack of using them. Moreover, his muscular strength, a sanguine temperament, and past successes in sexual experiments had primed him with the belief that direct action was the shortest way with all women.
“You must let me protect you—”
With the words still on his lips, he took her violently in his arms.
The touch of his hand against her body filled her with an enormous, sexless anger. Making an almost superhuman effort, she struck back his head and succeeded in wrenching herself from his grasp.
He stumbled, but instantly picked himself up. As he tried to back her away from the door, she again raised her hand.
“I can protect myself,” she said, with a passionate repugnance that chilled him to the soul.
“Don’t go like that,” he cried, springing forward and clutching at her arm.
She dragged it away, rang for the maid, and rapidly turned the door knob.
“Berthe,” she called down the hall, in clear ringing tones, “please open the storeroom. I want to get at my trunk.”
Then she turned and looked at him, cold, distinguished, unapproachable.
St. Hilaire plumped into the nearest seat.
“I meant no harm,” he muttered, numb, and crestfallen as a dried pear.