Chapter IX
Mr. Glynn had sailed away again, and preparations for the wedding had already begun to absorb Miss Winstanley. She had been gone for a week in Paris with Lady Campstown when Mr. Carstairs’ yacht, the “Sans Peur,” made its appearance in the harbor. Previous to this, it may be told, Miss Bleecker had privately received and cashed a draft upon her bankers that had put the chaperon in unprecedented funds and spirits. She had received also a telegram of instructions from Mrs. Carstairs, at Gibraltar, directing her to engage for their party a suite of costly apartments at the Grand Hotel. Full of importance, she swelled here, there and everywhere, detailing to all ears the grandeur and importance of her employers, and basking in the rays of glory they sent before them. She needed a little cheering at this time, since Mr. Winstanley had remained inflexible, declining her offers to bear him company on his terrace, and treating her persistently as a worthy elderly person, beyond the pale of pleasures that do not belong to the late afternoon of life.
For Helen the days preceding the arrival of the “Sans Peur” were profoundly sad ones. Putting aside her feelings upon another theme, her dread of reunion with Mrs. Carstairs robbed her of all joy in her dear father’s coming. In vain Miss Bleecker drummed into her ears how nobler far it is to give than to receive, how a self-sacrifice like hers would bring its own reward, how Helen was destined to be the blessed medium through whom joy and harmony would descend upon the Carstairs family for evermore.
If a faint—ever so faint—hope survived in Helen’s mind that her stepmother’s specious assurances of good-will to her and devotion to her father were to be credited, this faded upon her first visit to the yacht. In the cabin where she herself had once reigned as queen she found Mrs. Carstairs, coarsened, indefinably repellant, although still superb in bloom and with a Rubens lady’s plenitude of physique. Around her were grouped two or three men, making up the party of which Helen was expected to be the bulwark of respectability. One of them, a Mr. Danielson, Helen disliked promptly and instinctively; none would she have admitted into the circle of her acquaintances at home. When Mr. Carstairs, after some delay, made his appearance, Helen was shocked beyond measure to behold in him a mere weary wraith, beside whom his wife seemed to flaunt her beauty and splendid health with insolence. His greeting of his daughter was indifferent, abstracted. She found it impossible to have a word alone with him. The thought of the cruise before her lay like ice on Helen’s heart.
Before Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs had spent a week in Cannes the lady declared it to be a poky hole and wished she had gone to Nice. To Nice they accordingly repaired, and in due course of time sailed for Naples. While Mrs. Carstairs rattled and joked noisily with her other guests, she reserved for the handsome cad at whom Helen had taken special umbrage a reserve of manner more suspicious to an interested looker-on. To Helen, a petty agony of the cruise was that Mr. Danielson should conceive himself obliged to devote most of his leisure hours to attendance upon the owner’s daughter, refusing with fatuous persistency to be shaken off. A few brief scornful words of remonstrance on this subject, addressed to her stepmother, were met by the laughing assurance that there was really nothing for Helen to apprehend, and that a man so universally run after as was Mr. Danielson, by what Mrs. Carstairs called the “fair sex,” must meet the risk of having his casual attentions misinterpreted at times.
Proud, wounded, scornful, feeling that her standard of life had dropped to an unendurable point, Helen got into the habit of keeping to herself as much as practicable. At Naples she would take her own maid and absent herself for hours from the yacht and its dubious company. To her father there was actually no chance of being what she had hoped. He was mostly captious, preferring to be left alone when his wife did not vouchsafe him her companionship—which was now a rare event. The great Mr. Carstairs was, indeed, socially a cipher among these half-breeds, who drank his wines and allowed him to pay their expenses of travel.
Miss Bleecker, under the infatuation of Mrs. Carstairs’ liberal money-spending, of their luxurious living and continual seeking of pleasure and excitement in which she was included when, as usual, Helen refused to go—became as a broken reed in support of her charge’s movements. Poor old Eulalie, with some sense of the loss of refined surroundings they had sustained, and a hearty dislike of the imperative chaperon, ranged herself exclusively upon the side of her young lady—refusing to fraternize with Mrs. Carstairs’ maid, whom she regarded as a second-rate creature in every way, and going through the routine of life in general with a dogged determination to endure unto the end.
A day came at last when Miss Carstairs went out to Pompeii with her maid, instead of to the museum in Naples, where she had announced her intention of spending the afternoon.
She left Eulalie sitting upon an immemorial stone and wandered off alone through the beautiful sad place. To the guardian, who would fain have followed her, she gave a piece of money and a gracious smile, explaining that she knew it all by heart, and wanted only to gain a general impression of the dead city on that day of radiant spring. She had been standing for some time near the tomb of Mamia, looking out over the bay and mountains of Castellamare melting together in sunshine, and, recalled to the present by the lateness of the hour, started to walk back to where she had left the monumental Eulalie.
Her resolution to leave the yacht, to abandon the party, and if needs be to forfeit all that her acquiescence had secured for her, was now definitely taken. To avoid discussion, she would simply ask her father to allow Miss Bleecker and herself to go up to Rome, where Mr. Carstairs could never abide visiting, on the ground that he did not like living over catacombs and being face to face with so many things already done for. He knew Helen’s tender passion for the Imperial City, and might excuse her from going on with them to Sicily.
From Miss Bleecker she felt sure of meeting fierce and stubborn resistance to her plan. The dream of Miss Bleecker’s life had been a cruise in the “Sans Peur,” and it was hardly to be supposed she would easily relinquish it. But Helen felt that upon occasion she could be stubborn too. Any clash of wills, and subsequent victory for her, was worth undertaking, to rid her of the offensive companionship of Mrs. Carstairs—and one other.
She could not be sure of what she suspected between them. She scorned to make herself assured. She could not stoop to the miserable method necessary to the acquirement of dread certainty. And yet “she was walking every day with bare feet on a burning pavement without feeling the burn.”
Passing with noiseless step before a house-wall arising like a screen before her path, she paused for a moment to enjoy one last gaze at the pageant of sea and sky in the light of waning day. In this brief time the sound of her own name spoken by low voices behind the ruined wall forced themselves upon her hearing. They were those of her stepmother and the man Danielson.
Two phrases interchanged, but they told Helen all. She could never again indulge in the misery of doubt.
She stood for an instant as if overtaken by the lava flow that had devastated the homes of seventeen centuries ago surrounding her. The one despairing, driving impulse was to steal away unseen by the woman who dishonored her dear father’s name. Helen thought she had rather fall down and die and become embedded with the dust of ages than go back to face Mrs. Carstairs and let her know she had found her out.
As the couple, without discovering her neighborhood, moved in an opposite direction, Mr. Carstairs’ daughter took wings to her feet and flew to pick up Eulalie and find the cab they had left before the Hotel Diomed. The maid, sluggish though were the workings of her mental part, saw that her mistress had had a fright, and blamed herself for losing sight of her. Helen’s cheeks were white, her hands shook as though palsied, as she sprang into the cab and bade the man drive fast, fast, back toward the town. She wished, at all events, to avoid being caught up with or passed by the pair, who could not at that hour linger much longer within the enclosure.
During the long joggling drive through interminable stony streets, encumbered by the populace of the Neapolitan suburbs, performing their domestic avocations out of doors, she came to a desperate conclusion. She was of age sufficiently mature to act for herself. She could not, would not, give her reasons to her father. But she would carry out her recent determination to leave the yacht at once, forfeit the price that had been paid her to be an infamous blind, and, at any risk, sever her present connection with Mrs. Carstairs.
Helen possessed the American woman’s promptitude in action. She drove with Eulalie to an hotel formerly frequented with her father, engaged a room for the night, and sent the maid to the yacht with a note requesting Miss Bleecker to come to her. The interview resulting with her estimable chaperon was perhaps one of the most painful of her experience. The lady, to whom she gave in explanation of her resolve a bare statement that she could no longer endure the trial of life with her stepmother, exhausted herself in remonstrance and reproach. She pointed out to Helen that the money from her father could still be, and no doubt would be, withdrawn upon announcement of Miss Carstairs’ extraordinary move. Helen declared that, well aware of this fact, she was prepared to live on the small income coming to her from her mother’s estate. Miss Bleecker reminded her that her father was in evidently wretched health, and that no whim or temper should stand between him and his daughter’s attendance at his side. Helen, blushing scarlet, with tears in her eyes, recalled to Miss Bleecker that she had not been allowed access to her father’s own cabin since they had been together on the cruise, and that, furthermore, he did not appear to want her. Miss Bleecker called Heaven to witness that she had no patience with family jars, had no axe to grind on her own account, but that if Helen persisted in her wilful determination she should feel it her bounden duty not to forsake poor Mrs. Carstairs if wanted to remain.
That evening, between nine and ten, Mrs. Carstairs called upon Miss Carstairs, but was not received. Helen sent back, in a hotel envelope, her stepmother’s card, across which she had written these words:
“I happened to be at Pompeii this afternoon, but no other than myself shall know under what circumstances you also were there. It is enough that we must part.”
Next day Mrs. Carstairs announced to her guests that they were sailing for Sicily, and as Miss Carstairs did not desire to go farther South, she had decided to return by train to the Riviera, to visit her friend, Miss Winstanley, at Cannes, and would rejoin the “Sans Peur” later, somewhere in the Mediterranean. Then the “Sans Peur” steamed gallantly away, bearing Miss Bleecker, now installed as companion to the owner’s lady, and Mr. Carstairs, keeping his cabin, it was said, with a bad attack of some trouble undeclared.
The same evening, as Helen was about taking her train for Genoa and the Riviera at the Stazione Centrale, she met, face to face on the platform, Lord Clandonald and M. de Mariol, returning by way of Corfu, Brindisi and Naples from the Peloponnesus, where they had finally brought up after their ramble in Eastern Europe. The two men greeted her with cordial courtesy, receiving in sum the explanation of her presence made public by Mrs. Carstairs. Mariol, from whom she shrank a little, in the fear that he might remember against her with rancor the refusal of his addresses, showed no consciousness that this episode had occurred between them. He was his old self, gentle, sympathetic, with an exquisite intelligence in dealing with her such as no other man had exhibited. He saw her into her own compartment with her maid, and before bedtime returned there several times, to take the seat vacated by Mlle. Eulalie, who had carried her accustomed headache to an open window in the corridor.
Before they had talked ten minutes Helen realized that her great crisis was understood and felt by him. In her overstrained and overburdened state the relief of finding a soul in tune with her desolate one was infinite. She let him know just as much as was necessary of the impelling cause of her action, and also that in accepting Miss Winstanley’s invitation in a recent letter to return to Cannes, “if only to see the spring flowers,” she was doing so until she could make up her mind just how to readjust her life to altered circumstances.
M. de Mariol said little, but thought much, after he had left Miss Carstairs for the night. Clandonald had come once to look after both of them, and their talk had turned into cheerful channels. Both men were brown and healthy and in good spirits, Mariol on his way to Paris, Clandonald to Cannes, to visit his good aunt. They touched upon the subject of the Winstanleys’ rise into fortune and worldly vogue, Clandonald saying that Lady Campstown had written him of Miss Winstanley’s approaching marriage with Mr. Glynn. In his frank, untroubled face Helen failed to discern any symptom of corroding care, and once more she registered an experience of the brevity of men’s attachments when their object is removed.
During the day’s journey that followed, dashing in and out of tunnels, catching glimpses of Paradise cut short by the blackness of the Inferno—or, as some one has aptly said, “Travelling through a flute and seeing daylight through its stops”—M. de Mariol absorbed the chief part of Miss Carstairs’ society, putting forth for her the best of his rare powers of charm and companionship. When Clandonald and herself finally left the train at Cannes, and Mariol went on his way Paris-wards, Helen breathed a genuine sigh of regret for a void not to be filled.
The welcome she received from the Winstanleys went far toward reconciling Miss Carstairs to the necessity for a continuance of interest in human existence. Those warm and simple-hearted people, refusing to allow her to stop at an hotel alone with her maid, opened their home to her with rejoicing hospitality. Nothing that she had ever seen of a kindred nature seemed to her as broad and warm as their delight in offering her a shelter. Posey’s quick wit divined that a terrible break had occurred between Helen and her father’s party; her delicacy withheld all questions as to its cause. It was enough that Helen Carstairs, to whom she had looked up with the veneration of a devotée on his knees before his shrine, had come upon a time of sorrow, of disillusion, of deep and lasting despondency, and that it was Posey’s privilege to afford her protection and sympathy until the dark hour was past. It never entered into her generous nature to draw the contrast between the days, not so long past, when Helen had kept her at arm’s-length, and she was the outsider. Nothing that she could do was too much to cheer Helen, to make her feel one of their innermost circle of home, more than a welcome, a cherished guest.
In this atmosphere of tender prévenance Helen’s bruised spirit quickly recuperated. She did not relax in her intention to make a small independent home for herself somewhere, a condition of things her father’s continued silence seemed to bring ominously near. She had no illusions as to the fact that Mrs. Carstairs had represented her conduct to her father in the most unfavorable, unpardonable light. A little while she would remain as the Winstanleys’ guest, then would tell Posey that she had found it obligatory to shift for herself and to live upon far less than she had ever done before.
The means of escape from her impasse came to Miss Carstairs from an unexpected quarter. Three days after her arrival at Reine des Fées, while sitting with Posey in the orange walk, a letter was handed her addressed in M. de Mariol’s handwriting.
Helen blushed violently, then grew pale, as she laid it aside to read in private. She felt that it must contain a renewal of his former offer of marriage, and this time the old feeling of unfitness was lacking. She was conscious only of the great unselfishness and generosity which this man of intellectual distinction and wide renown had always shown to her. She could see now that life is possible without either the thrills of young passion or the costly material pleasures that wealth provides. Her future, as the wife of M. de Mariol, would be assured of certain elements of happiness quite apart from the demands of her past, but on the whole as satisfying to a reasonable being. He had told her that his means enabled him to be independent of the charge of fortune-hunting. He knew that she was now, by her own act, almost impoverished, and yet he still wanted her. He was well-born, admirably bred, in a social surrounding that would continually interest her, and was, as always, a true and loyal gentleman. Above all, her future home would be far removed from the unspeakable black cloud that must hang over it in America. And yet——
Posey’s happy voice sounded in her ear. “You aren’t going to read your letter, now? Then you’ll let me talk? You haven’t forgotten that we’re dining to-night at Villa Julia? Do you think I had better wear my rose chiffon, or the little white crêpe de chine with silver embroideries that came from the bazaar in Cairo? It was so strange Lord Clandonald should have taken the hour to call yesterday, when we were sure to be at the Golf Club with all the world. You say he looks well, Helen? Bigger, browner, stronger? I have been thinking all yesterday and to-day of dear Lady Campstown’s joy in his return. When she heard he was coming she quite forgot me, and my poor diminished shade crept into insignificance. With her own dear little thin hands she smoothed his bed-linen, and put flowers on his dressing-table. Ah, how much love means, Helen! It’s been growing on me every day, that all the rest is poor flimsy stuff.... I think Lady Campstown has made me over, and my breast swells in gratitude to her. I even love daddy better for loving her.... If I can only end by loving John as much as I love them!”
“Posey!” said her friend, shivering.
“Don’t say you feel the mistral, Helen. It simply can’t get to us in this sheltered spot. Dear, I wish you’d be happy, too. For some reason that I can’t tell, I’m simply bubbling over to-day. One of my wild fits, I reckon. It began when I got your wire saying you were actually going to be good enough to come and stay with me, without that hateful old Bleecker—there, I feel better. ‘Celà soulage!’ as the woman in that play at the Gallia said when she had boxed her husband’s ears—and then, and then——”
“Posey!” repeated Helen, with a sort of awe in her voice.
She had noted, with astonishment and pain, the girl’s uncontrollable delight at the knowledge of Clandonald’s actual vicinity to her. She had watched her, all the day before, fluttering with excitement and expectation, dropping for a while into bitter disappointment when they had returned home, to find only his cards!
“Helen, you think I’m impatient for this evening to come, but I’m not. I can wait perfectly well to see Lady Campstown with her ‘boy.’ But you know how the person somebody you love is always talking about and waiting for, seems the one you want most to see. Not a day this winter that the old darling hasn’t talked to me of ‘Clan.’ I believe I know about every incident of his life, except the gloomy ones connected with his marriage—his first pony, his scarlet fever, all the rest of it——”
Helen’s anxious brow cleared.
“I suppose it’s natural, but you mustn’t forget, my dear, that he’s very handsome and charming, and your fancy took a little turn that way on shipboard—and that you are soon to be married to John Glynn.”
Posey heaved a long, genuine sigh.
“I don’t forget. I’m all right for John, only I wish I could be free a little longer. I should think you’d know nothing would tempt me to be in love with a man whose wife isn’t dead. Anyhow, I told John every single thing that ever passed between Clandonald and me, not the tiniest thing hidden. Of course John saw I couldn’t help being more interested, in a certain way, in Clandonald than in any man I ever saw before.”
“Not of course, Posey,” said Helen, half smiling. “There are even some people who might consider the man you have more ‘interesting’ than the man you might have had.”
“Oh! John is a darling. Everybody knows that, but their looks are not to be compared—why, Helen, he’s not as tall as Clandonald by several inches—he hasn’t that beautiful set of the head upon the shoulders, just such as I should think a king would have—and that rich, thick brown hair—Helen, it’s really dreadful how thin John’s hair is getting on the top.”
Helen dropped her book upon the ground.
“Don’t, Posey,” she exclaimed, almost sharply. “It isn’t worthy of you to talk such nonsense.”
“Ah, well,” said the girl, mischievously, “I feel like saying those little things sometimes, it seems to relieve the tension.... Helen, don’t look at me with such a face,” she added, with sudden gravity. “It almost makes me think that though John is going to marry me, you haven’t entirely stopped caring for him.... How pale you are! You frighten me!... You know you do, you know you do, and he—? How could he love me when he had you near? I see it all now. He would like to get you back; he has never really wanted me, and I’m only to be taken because of his duty to my father.”
The April mood had changed. Great drops of crystal welled into her blue eyes and dropped upon her cheeks. Impelled by desperate resolve, Helen sprang upon her feet.
“Don’t cry, dear. Don’t cry, my darling Posey. You are over-nervous, and it isn’t wise for us to prolong a talk like this. I will leave you for a little while alone, to go in and read my letter, and when we meet again at luncheon, I may have something to tell you about myself that will take away all fear of my ever coming between you and your John Glynn.”