Chapter XII
There was no little dinner at Villa Julia that evening. Clandonald, wretched and feverish, tossed upon his bed. Posey’s white face and strained expression of anxiety kept the other villa in a state of suspended animation while Glynn, in the motor car, was running over to Nice on business not stated.
Helen Carstairs met him early next morning upon the terrace, at his request.
“How has she slept?” he asked eagerly.
“Like a tired baby. Toward morning she awoke sobbing, and I soothed her till she fell asleep again. Just now, when I went into her room with the news that Lord Clandonald also had passed a good night, she was very much more like herself—gentle, yet plucky, and determined to keep up.”
“I hate a nervous shock for an impressionable woman. Thank God, it is all no worse! Suppose you and I had happened not to be with her—it makes me sick to think of it! Helen, this isn’t the time to beat about the bush to find phrases. Tell me the honest truth. Does Posey love Clandonald?”
“I think so. But she has fought against it from the first. Don’t let your sympathy with her at this moment lead you to any rash act of renunciation. She is so young. She will get over it. Besides, she has told me most positively that she could never bring herself to marry a man whose divorced wife is living.”
“If that is the only obstacle, it need not count,” said Glynn gravely. “The woman who called herself Mrs. Darien died last night—and a blessed solution it is to a miserable snarl. She went back with the housemaid to her hotel in Nice, and they got her into bed. By the time I reached the place the woman, crying bitterly, came down to tell me ‘her ladyship’ was dead. It was apoplexy—the second attack—precipitated by her insane passion of jealousy of Posey.”
“Thank Heaven, it wasn’t a murder she had to carry with her into eternity! Our poor darling, Posey—if that horrid flint had struck her in the head where the woman aimed to hit—I can’t bear to think of it——”
“Don’t. We have shaved the narrow edge, but have escaped. Helen, one of the strangest things that ever happened to me was that Mrs. Darien left in the blotter on her table a sealed letter addressed to me. I took possession of it by showing the landlord and the doctor my visiting card. I don’t know what they thought of me. I don’t much care. In it she asked my pardon for breaking her pledge to me. Said she was tempted beyond resistance to return to Villa Reine des Fées, that she was dead broke, desperate, expected to die suddenly some day, and wanted me to know that if she ever could have gone straight again it was because of the way I had trusted her.”
“But your trust was in vain,” said Helen, with the hardness of most good women toward bad ones. “Therefore I can feel no sentiment for her but one of thankfulness that she is out of your hands, in Higher ones.”
They walked back and forth for a few moments in the crisp morning air, Nature smiling as she always does after the poignant scenes enacted in her sight. Mr. Winstanley, who was having his breakfast in the rose-wreathed loggia upstairs, and from whom the incident of the attack on Posey had been kept, saw them and waved his kind hand cordially.
Glynn stopped.
“It’s no use, Helen. All the things I long for upon earth would lose their flavor at the cost of ingratitude to him. Even if Posey does believe that she cares most for Clandonald—and if you had heard the words the poor child spoke when she held him, without life, bleeding, against her heart, you would not doubt it—it is not I who can withdraw from my pledge to her.”
Helen could not speak. She was thinking of that letter to Mariol, not yet sent. Although she felt now that Glynn meant to keep to his engagement at all costs, she was sure she could never send it; that Mariol’s brief mirage of winning her must fade into the desert sands of friendship, if he would be content with that.
During the days that ensued she kept almost altogether with Posey, who was not allowed by her physician to leave her room. And as Helen was in the act of making up her mind to go to Paris to enter as a boarder in the family of a governess of former days, who now gave shelter to art students and girls whose voices were in training for the stage, she received a startling telegram.
It was from her father at Taormina, requiring her presence there without delay. “I am alone and ill,” were the magic words that sent her speeding back to him, to find the hapless gentleman deserted by his wife, whose affair with Danielson had ended in guilty flight! Aged, mortified, broken, clinging to Helen in his humiliation, Mr. Carstairs had yet made short work of ridding himself of the unwelcome visitors who had preyed upon his money, while deriding him for a blind old fool not to have seen before the condition of affairs. In the flotsam of the wreck Miss Bleecker, too, floated off, Helen refusing to see her or listen to explanations, and Mr. Carstairs making short work of her prayer to be allowed to remain with poor darling Helen in this awful time.
At last, then, she was again alone with her father, free to cheer and comfort his life with her best endeavors, a new object given to her for daily care and sacred ministration. Mr. Carstairs would not hear of dallying in the hateful spot where his shame had come to him. He insisted that the “Sans Peur” should take them to an English port, whence they might embark immediately for home. And Helen had reluctantly to acknowledge that the only medicine for a wrong and grief like his was a return to the life of great affairs, in which he was signally a leader.
At Liverpool, where she had landed so listlessly the previous autumn, Miss Carstairs received a letter of loving farewell and God-speed from Posey Winstanley at Cannes. The girl could not keep out of her phrases of affection the note of common sense, which made Helen’s humiliating experience a subject of ultimate rejoicing by her friends. She was sure that Helen was going home to new happiness, new occupation, a generally broadening horizon. In the continual circling of moderns around this little globe the friends were sure to meet again, “early and often,” Posey prayed. She had entirely regained her health, the weather was getting piping hot, Reine des Fées was too dreadfully dull now that dear John Glynn had gone back “for good” to his office in New York; even Lady Campstown had been taken off by Lord Clandonald for a visit to Beaumanoir; and lastly—it was on the cards that Mr. Winstanley and Posey might also soon go to make acquaintance with England in the Spring.
No word of her marriage. While Helen was pondering upon this theme a steward brought her another letter that had been taken out of a later mail-bag. It was a mot d’adieu from Lady Campstown, containing, among other items of information, a statement that Posey’s wedding was “indefinitely postponed.”
The perennial Miss Bleecker, although smarting still under the contemptuous dismissal given her by Mr. Carstairs at Taormina, was next seen that Spring at Cadenabbia, hanging on, rather miserably, to the skirts of Mrs. Vereker. The two ladies, waiting there for Mr. Vereker (who had been walking barefoot at Brixen, in wet grass), were heard to bicker continually, to the discomfort of all within earshot. In due time they were joined by and accompanied Mr. Vereker to a new cure he had heard of, at a place in Switzerland, where the régime consisted of skim milk and electricity.
The hotel which sheltered the party proved to be situated upon a sylvan hill-top, surrounded by a park stocked with tame deer, with “Verboten” placarded over every spot where one most desired to go. A merry Swiss lad was hired by the management to jodel in an adjacent grove, but there were no visible cows. One beheld, instead, a flock of theatrical sheep, perpetually conducted up and down verdant slopes by a shepherd and a dog. Also, a band of native singers, the men in tweeds and Derby hats, the women in custom-made blouses and gored skirts, who came often to warble disconsolately upon the terrace. There was even a cuckoo sequestered in the woods, of which Miss Bleecker snappishly complained, as a horrid clock, striking all out of order to wake people up at 5 A.M., until some one told her it was the genuine bird of Shakespeare, when she called it a darling little thing.
For a long, long time it rained at this resort, and the guests sat on damp iron chairs in the veranda and looked at where the view had been some weeks before. After that it was grilling hot, and as Mrs. Vereker and Miss Bleecker were obliged to stay on for the completion of Mr. Vereker’s treatment, the temper of the party became something too awful for words.
The chief solace of the two ladies was to read French novels and English weekly newspapers. When the “Queen” published, among “Americans in London,” a picture of the beautiful Miss Winstanley in her presentation gown, describing the glories of its “white and silver, with lilies-of-the-valley bunched around the train,” together with details of the young lady’s success in the fashionable world under the sponsorship of Lady Campstown, Miss Bleecker may have been said to have received her punishment for many follies in the past.
A perfect day of early July saw the visit of Miss Winstanley and her father to Beaumanoir, so long projected and so rudely interrupted, at last an accomplished fact. Lady Campstown, who had taken up her residence with her nephew under the supposition that he still needed her care, sat outside, after luncheon, with Mr. Winstanley, between whom and herself an excellent comradeship had sprung up. She saw nothing odd in the old fellow’s quaint manners, his homely exterior, his shyness and reverence toward women. She had always liked his having come out of the Southern rather than the Northern portion of the States, feeling, somehow, more in touch with people from below the fabled line of Mason and Dixon than with their aggressively prosperous neighbors. She liked his showing nothing of his wealth and potentiality, and enjoyed his shrewd talk. Above all, it must be said she liked him for being the progenitor of Posey, who had finally wound herself and tangled herself in the dowager’s heart-strings, not to be dislodged.
They had been talking of the girl, and the fact that despite her brilliant little sortie into London society, she did not look quite happy—quite herself.
“It will be as well for her when it is all over,” said Lady Campstown, plying her knitting-pins. “But I don’t think it’s done her real harm to have seen things the way we do them. And another year, perhaps—who knows? There are always changes.” She ended with a sigh.
“If you are alluding to my daughter’s marriage, ma’am,” said Herbert Winstanley, speaking with authority and swallowing a lump of final disappointment, “I was wanting a chance to tell you that she’s about concluded that John Glynn and she will be better friends than lovers. I had been suspecting something of the kind when she told me—on the Fourth it was, and I had to laugh when she said she chose that day on account of George Washington and the cherry tree, because she couldn’t tell a lie. That’s Posey, Lady Campstown. Always a laugh on her lip when a tear is in her eye. I saw how hard it went with her to have to rob me of a dear hope. But I reckoned if her mother’d been living it’d not have been let go so far. It’s a hard thing for a man of my age to play on a little delicate musical instrument like a girl’s heart. It’s over, anyhow, and she’s written giving Glynn his freedom. I think Posey would like you to know these circumstances, ma’am, seeing you’re the best substitute for a mother the little girl has had. She doesn’t want you to think her light or triflin’ in such things; she tried hard to be loyal to him and me.... But even if she’d loved John well enough to be his wife, there was an obstacle. He had kept company with another young lady first, and they’d been separated by his being poor.... I presume you’ll agree that a young fellow who’d once been in love with Miss Helen Carstairs couldn’t find giving her up as easy as it seemed.”
“So that’s the meaning of it all?” cried her ladyship, dropping her knitting, which the Schipperke proceeded to guard as if it were a Dutch baby asleep in a canal-boat. “I often wondered, but could not be sure. I almost thought it was M. de Mariol.”
“Well, I shouldn’t think that would suit, exactly,” said the old man, cautiously nodding his Anglo-Saxon head. “Not but what he’s a nice man, the Monseer. But, as things look now, my boy is a better match for Mr. Carstairs’ daughter, and John’ll feel more sure of himself to ask her again. She’s had a hard time, that sweet lady, and I wish her many years of happiness to forget it in. You see, ma’am, my Posey thinks John will ask her again.”
Lady Campstown, who had long since resigned herself to see the vision of Helen at Beaumanoir fade from her imagination, here felt a great new jet of hope spring up in her heart and water everything around it. Her withered cheek glowed rosy red, her eyes had a girlish lustre. She hardly presumed to put her thoughts into words, and yet the mild blue orbs of old Mr. Winstanley had fixed themselves upon hers with a singular significance.
“Mr. Winstanley! You have another idea?” she exclaimed, nervously trembling.
“Several, ma’am,” said Herbert Winstanley. “You know by this time, I reckon, that your nephew got that bad hurt on the cheek and just missed losing his eyesight, to save Posey from a mad woman. Girls set store by such experiences, I suppose. But long ago, on the steamer, I saw she fancied him mightily.... I won’t conceal from you, ma ‘am, it isn’t what I’d have picked out for Posey. Doesn’t seem suitable for such a Hail Columbia sort of girl, now, does it? But Clandonald’s a white man, I’ll say that for him.... And m’ wife set a great store by English people and their homes.... They’re staying away a good long time, those young folks.... The doctors threaten I’ll have to spend my winters in Cannes, the years that are left to me, but I reckon Villa Rain des Fays is big enough for us all.”
When Clandonald and Posey came back at last from seeing the white peacocks they were walking hand in hand, and a great peace had settled upon their faces.
The End
Other Works by Mrs Burton Harrison
A BACHELOR MAID
SWEET BELLS OUT OF TUNE
CROWS NEST AND BELLHAVEN TALES
A VIRGINIA COUSIN AND BAR HARBOR TALES
AN EDELWEISS OF THE SIERRAS
THEOPHANO
HELEN TROY
A TRIPLE ENTANGLEMENT
THE UNWELCOME MRS. HATCH
SYLVIA’S HUSBAND
THE CARLYLES
THE CIRCLE OF A CENTURY
THE ANGLOMANIACS
GOOD AMERICANS
AN ERRANT WOOING
FLOWER DE HUNDRED
A DAUGHTER OF THE SOUTH