The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter XV
- Chapter XV. “As it was in the Beginnning, is now, and ever shall be”.
The two men separated at the Porte Maillot, Radwalader strolling away in the direction of the Métropolitain entrance with a readily fabricated excuse about a card engagement. He understood to perfection the action of moral leaven — that, once introduced as an ingredient, it must not be unduly stirred, but left, with the fair white cloth of unconcern drawn smoothly over it, to work its will at ease. To a greater extent even than Mrs. Carnby, he possessed the instinct for not saying too much. He left Andrew to reflect upon what had passed between them, confident of its effect.
Andrew paused at the junction of the Avenues de Malakoff and de la Grande Armée, the confusion and glare of the great thoroughfares smiting fretfully upon his instant need of reflection, and then returned upon his tracks, seeking the cool quiet of the Bois. After a short walk past the brightly lighted Chalet du Touring Club, a by-path tempted him, and he turned aside. At once the forest closed in upon him, and the scene of a half-hour before became more than ever like a phase in some fantastic and uneasy dream. At Armenonville there had been a blaze of light and a ripple of laughter, which barred out the stars of heaven as if they had never been: here was a world of stillness and of shadow, broken only by the distant music of the tziganes, and, through the interstices of tree-trunks and foliage, the intermittent gleam of bicycle and automobile lanterns on the Route de la Porte des Sablons. The faintly pungent odour of moss rose to his nostrils, as in some deep, undiscovered retreat in a provincial preserve. The small, sweet twitter of a restless bird pricked the delicious silence like the sound of a rip in thin linen. The tziganes at Armenonville were playing the “Valse Bleue.” The air, pulsing softly through the gloom, seemed almost to speak the words:
“Pourquoi ne pas m’aimer, p’isqu’ tu sais que je t’ai — ai — me?”
“Margery!” said Andrew slowly, to himself. “Margery — Margery!”
In the three weeks just past, he had been building a new world, a world from which his former ideals had been deliberately banished, and wherein new standards of conduct had been set. Pride, recklessness, and resentment had been the triumvirate by which this moral state was governed, and he had obeyed their dictates blindly, without caring, as he had told Radwalader, to think. Left to itself, this might have endured indefinitely, even as the larger world, with all its codes and creeds, established by the limited experience of the men inhabiting it. But what would be effected by the abrupt entrance into society of a messenger from another planet, infinitely wiser, infinitely more advanced, was brought to pass by Radwalader’s words. The status quod reeled on its foundations. The alternative which Andrew had accepted, and which had dulled, if not actually done away with, the acuteness of his disappointment, now appeared in its true light as the veriest sham, a sedative worse than useless — enervating — stupefying — poisonous. The bare suggestion was enough. Not for a moment did he doubt the significance of this message which had never reached him. It could mean but one thing — forgiveness and recall. All there had been to say upon the other count, had been said in that half-hour in the arbour. Her hand had been stretched out to stay him from the precipice down which he had plunged — stretched out too late! The knowledge tore in an instant the mask from his vanity, and he stood confessed — a coward. What was it she had said? “A fancy so trivial and so idle that it could not even hold you back from transgression.” And he had resented that, resented it only to furnish proof, when the actual temptation came, that it was true!
He knew himself now for what he was. How scornful he had been of these accusations, how certain of himself, how small in that great loyalty of his which stood for nothing, how ready to believe himself infallible! The merest profligate of those whose follies he had despised in other days, was no weaker, in the end, than he. He looked up blindly to where the stars winked faintly through the lace-like foliage, and cursed the distant roar of Paris which came dully to his ears. Paris — Circe! and he no better than the transformed comrades of Ulysses! He was a coward — a fraud — a sham; he found himself, in this moment of bitter self-reproach, untrue even to the flimsy conception of duty which, when it put him to the test, he had debauched. He thought of Mirabelle, and in thinking hated her! With all her beauty, all her perfect mimicry of breeding, all the little significant hints of colour and perfume with which she so skilfully clothed with charm whatever pertained to her, she had never struck below his ready appreciation of whatever was suggestive of refinement and eloquent of femininity. It was her novelty which had principally charmed him, but novelty is the butterfly of the sensations — the most brilliant, the shortest-lived of these emotional ephemera. Mrs. Carnby had struck the key-note in her cool analysis of the demi-monde: “These women don’t wear. They seem to be only plated with fascination, and in time the plating wears off, and you come back to the kind with the hall-mark.”
Now the scales fell from Andrew’s eyes, and he knew that what she had said was true. Compared to Margery — the Margery he had loved and lost, what was this Mirabelle to whom he had yielded her place? Beautiful, yes! But the perception of beauty, like beauty’s self, lies only skin-deep. Now, with Radwalader’s suggestion that the way of retreat lay open, came the reaction, inevitable in such a nature as Andrew Vane’s, from an emotion purely extrinsic. He was tired of her. The plating had worn off.
Suddenly he remembered that he had promised to see her that night, and, with an abrupt perception of the opportunity thus offered, he pulled himself together, and swung off rapidly toward the Porte Dauphine. As he walked, inhaling the fragrance of the evening air, a new sanity seemed to descend on him. He promised himself that this should be the end. However the effect was to be accomplished, he was determined to break the relation, kindly but firmly, and at whatever risk to regain, if not his self-esteem, at least his freedom. As to what should follow, he did not care — or dare — to ask. The unknown significance of the lost message soothed him like an irrational caress. Was it too late? Is it ever “too late to mend”? He neither knew nor cared. Given his freedom, he would chance the rest. Fate was hard. A thought checked him. “Fate is hard — cash!”
“Whatever I believe,” he told himself, “I don’t believe that.” And then, in the illogical manner of man, added: “I don’t care what it costs me — this is the end!”
He found Mirabelle in a corner of her great divan, and the room softly illumined. She wore a bewitchingly dainty lounging-gown of iridescent silk, in the folds of which peacock-blues and greens played and rippled into each other in constant comminglings.
“Embrasse-moi,” she said, looking up at him.
She glanced at him curiously as he straightened himself again and dropped upon the cushions at her feet. In a woman, the manner of a kiss performs the midwife’s office to the beginnings of clairvoyance.
“I wonder,” said Andrew presently, “if you know that people are talking about us, ma chère?”
Mirabelle commented upon this intelligence with a tilt of her eyebrows.
“Yes,” continued Andrew, “it seems that our doings are become public property, and our reputations are in jeopardy.”
“Yours, perhaps,” remarked the girl. “As for mine, mon ami, ça n’existe pas.”
“Don’t!” said Andrew suddenly. “Please don’t!”
“After all,” said Mirabelle, “what difference? They talk, these good people, whether things are so or not. It’s the women, of course. If my clothes were not d’un chic, they would pass me over as unworthy of consideration.”
“This time,” said Andrew, “it seems the ground of complaint is not clothes alone. I’m told that I’m affiché.”
“So you are, I suppose. You were that from the moment I took your arm at Auteuil, that first afternoon. Do you object? There are many who would be glad to say as much.”
Andrew bit his lip. It was going to be harder than he had thought. He had come to say — he could not have told exactly what. His whole relation with Mirabelle had come so stealthily into being, and had been distinguished by a novelty, a goût piquant so subtle and alluring, that he had hardly been conscious of its development into something definite and established, until the thing was done. His thoughts went back to that afternoon, in his own apartment, three weeks before, when first he had kissed her. That had been the turning-point — the crisis when the whole wide world tipped upside down. His entire point of view had undergone an instantaneous readjustment as his lips met hers, and before him had opened the gate of a new world — a garden lavish of unfamiliar fruits and strange flowers, breathing a heavy, languid, deadening sweetness. He had entered, as one turns aside from the beaten road to explore some little vista of unprecedented beauty, with a vague convincement at the back of his brain, that the divergence was for a moment only, and that, so soon as his curiosity should be satisfied, he would turn back to the highway and go forward again, richer by an experience which it was not necessary to mention, and which would be as immaterial in its bearing upon the main issues of life, as a flower plucked and tossed aside in passing, or a tune whistled in a moment of light-heartededness.
Now — it was singularly hard to cut to the pith of the sensation — the gate which had opened so invitingly seemed to have closed behind him. What was still more curious, he found, of a sudden, that these fruits and flowers which had tempted him by reason of their novelty, were now as familiar, as seemingly essential, as if they had always been features of his environment. The garden itself was no longer a place wherein he walked as a transient visitor, idly inspecting, but one in which he stood as proprietor. The tendrils had climbed and clung about his feet. The moment for retreat had come, and lo! he could not move!
As they talked, he grew still more conscious of the fact that this task of disentanglement which he had planned, was one beset with unexpected difficulties. Mirabelle had practically disregarded the inclined plane of suggestion by which he had sought to lead up to the main issue, and, with a little air of proprietorship, had begun to map out her plans for the coming week — plans in which Andrew figured as naturally, as much as a matter of course, as did her carriage or her meals or her gowns. For the first time, he realized to what an extent she had a claim upon him. For the first time, the curb replaced the snaffle. For the first time, the bit made its presence fully felt. Andrew stirred uneasily.
“M’amie,” he said, “we’ve been much in each other’s company of late — more, perhaps, than is best for either of us.”
“How can that be?” asked Mirabelle, with a little laugh. “We love each other — ça suffit. It’s impossible to be too much together.”
Her voice was quite even, but that was not to say that she did not scent the approaching issue.
“But people say—” began Andrew.
“Oh, lalà! People say! What don’t they say, my poor friend? What won’t they continue to say, however you choose to live, and whatever you choose to do? That’s Paris, and that’s the smallest village in Brittany, and everything in between, into the bargain. Nowadays, one must do as one sees fit, and have the courage of one’s convictions. We’ve chosen our way. It’s too late to think of what people say. After all, it’s gossip, all this, and gossip is a snake. One kills it if one can; but, in the long run, it’s better to step over it and forget. What does gossip amount to? If you’re seen always with your wife, it’s because you can’t trust her alone; if you’re never seen with her, it’s because you’ve interests elsewhere. If you spend your nights in public, you’re a profligate; and if you spend them at home, you’re a secret drinker. ‘People say’! Let them say, Andrew. It can’t make any difference.”
“Our — our friendship is the talk of the American Colony,” said Andrew, almost savagely.
Mirabelle looked at him suddenly, with a curious crinkling of her forehead. The issue now lay clear before her.
“And you are ashamed of that?” she asked.
She leaned back wearily, closing her eyes.
“Yes, of course you are,” she added. “I wonder why it is that we — nous autres — never seem to realize what it means, all this. A little laughter, a kiss or two, and the rest, a ‘je t’aime’ which means something less than nothing, and then — They speak of the women whom men abuse! What is that to being used — and flung aside?”
“Mirabelle!”
“Ah, don’t speak to me! I know all that you’re going to say — I’ve heard it all before! I knew it, back there a minute, when you kissed me, thinking of another woman! It’s the old story — a little harder to bear this time, perhaps, because I’ve cared very much for you. Somehow, you seemed different from other men. You were young, you were gentle, you were respectful, mon Dieu! — respectful! I thought that it was for me you cared — me, as you saw me here, loving and needing to be loved — not the Mirabelle Tremonceau who is dressed like a doll by Paquin and Louise — the Mirabelle Tremonceau of the Acacias, and the Palais de Glace, and the Café de Paris. I said to myself that it had not all been in vain — the training, the care, the painstaking which have made me what I am. Long since, I’d come to loathe all these, my surroundings, but, for the first time, it seemed to me that perhaps they were not a sham and an imitation and a mockery. You were a gentleman — not a rasta, like the others. I thought your instincts couldn’t play you false, and that I saw that they prompted you to regard me, here in my own home, as a woman and a friend, not merely as a mistress and a toy. From the first, you never presumed, you never let the thought of what, at worst, I might have been to you, come forward to shame the thought of what I was, at best! I said to myself that you cared for me — for my mind — my heart — and that what was most to others was nothing to you. When you kissed me first — that afternoon — ah, mon Dieu! I thought it was not the kiss of passion, but the kiss of love! At that moment you knew fully what I was — if you’d not guessed it before, but you asked for — nothing! Instead you played, and your soul was in the music. I’ve never heard such playing. It was pure — pure — pure! Ah!—”
She opened her eyes slowly, without looking at him.
“And I was happy — happier than I’ve ever been: because, I said, there must still be a little something in me of all I thought I’d lost. I’d not loved you before that day. It was while we were there together that it came. I would to God you’d let me go then — let me go with the memory of a look which I’d never seen in a man’s eyes before — the look which said ‘Respect.’”
For a moment there was silence, and then Mirabelle laughed shortly.
“That was what I was fool enough to think — all that! Quelle idiote! Nous voilà, cher ami, at the end of the chapter. Your glove is worn: you must replace it. Your flower is wilted: you must have another for your lapel!”
Now she looked full at him, her lip curling.
“It is like the Moulin,” she added. “Combien est-ce que tu me donnes, beau brun?”
Andrew swung himself to a kneeling posture.
“What are you saying?” he demanded hotly. “My God! Does what has been between us mean nothing to you? Have I ever suggested — have I ever said a word to justify such a monstrous thing? I—”
“Just now you kissed me, thinking of another woman!” exclaimed Mirabelle. “Did you suppose I didn’t know? Why, I’ve loved you — that’s how I knew! Do you realize what all this meant? You could have made me good again. I would have left all this — forgotten it — blotted it out! I could have gone away quietly into the country, and lived my life out, without a regret. I could almost have been content never to see you again — never to hear from you, if I could have remembered — what once was true — that you respected me! Forgive what I said just now. It was coarse — unworthy of all that has been. But you don’t understand. I wish I’d not said what I did; and yet, at times, I feel that way — I mean, as if it were all the same — at the Moulin Rouge or here — they for an hour, I for a month, but each flung away presently, like the dregs of wine. I’ve laughed at the knowledge that that is how it is; always laughed — until the shadow of the thought fell on you!”
She slid her cool fingers into the hand he started to raise in protest, and held it close against her cheek.
“Then it maddened me. You see, everything has been different with you from what it was with the others. I’d never have believed that I could care for any man as I have for you — and perhaps I shouldn’t have cared for you as I have, if you’d come into my life in any other way. But you asked to be presented to me, and waited for Radwalader to get my permission; you talked to me as to a young girl of your own monde; and if at first I didn’t understand what that meant, I soon saw that it was because you didn’t know! Is it any wonder that I came to love you? — you who alone of all men yielded me the exquisite homage of respect? I dreaded the moment when the change must come — when that deference which intoxicated me like a new wine should be touched with a growing spirit of license, which from you would have been intolerable! From day to day I watched you, but even when I knew that you suspected what I was, my eyes — mon Dieu, how keen they were! — could see no change in you — and that was the greatest surprise of all. And when, in that moment of madness, I as much as told you, and you were gentle with me, what had been love for your treatment of me became, all at once, love for just — you!”
With an almost imperceptible pressure she drew him closer to her. As she went on speaking, her fingers touched his temples and his hair in a succession of tiny, soft caresses which were like the embryos of spoken endearments.
“Mon bien aimé! Never will you be able to comprehend what you thus came to mean to me. I have always been vain, lazy, passionately desirous of all that is softest, sweetest, most palatable in life; and these things I have had — but at what a price! Then you came, and with you a flash of hope! I made myself believe, I don’t know what! Marriage? Yes, there was even that in my mind; and there was, as well, the idea of going away, as I’ve said, into the country, and letting the four winds and the sunlight of heaven wash and wash and wash me, through all the years of my life, until I should go out of this world as white as I came in! Ah! I don’t know what it was, that little flash of hope, except that it seemed to say that escape was possible, and it was to your hand I clung, seeking the outlet. But that was only for one night — for just that one night! With the next day, with all the sights and sounds to which I am accustomed — the Allée at noon, Armenonville at tea-time, Paillard’s at midnight — I saw what the end must be; and, since then, I’ve watched, as only a woman watches, for that first little hint of its coming which only a woman sees! Ah, mon cheri, it has come, it has come indeed! For a moment I cried out in my agony against the fate which is separating us. You must forgive me that. Six weeks — a little slice of spring — and already you are tired of me. Mon amour — mon amour!”
Andrew turned, and, with his forehead on her knees and his lips against her fingers, battled silently against the swelling in his throat and the hot moisture stinging his inner lids. In the warm, perfume-laden silence, both the man and the girl went back in thought to their individual as well as their associated past. For the end of each successive stage of life has this in common with the concluding moments of the whole: as with a drowning person, all preceding incidents and emotions start up in orderly array, intensified and in their proper light.
So Andrew, reviewing the past three weeks, was prey to a passionate regret. In this there was censure, not so much of his own weakness, as of the test which had laid it bare. In youth, reaction carries with a merciless arraignment of all which has made possible disloyalty to standard; with age, men learn to blame themselves, their own folly and frailty. In his heart of hearts, Andrew impugned the girl; and when, under the impetus of her resentment, she had voiced that scathing sneer, he had almost welcomed it, as an excuse for the course he was determined to pursue. For an instant, pity and regret were swallowed up in a profound sense of indignity. In its essentials, her speech seemed no better than a touch of the brutal vulgarity which, with deliberation, he had avoided all his life. It had that very element of the sordid which had held him aloof from the student excursions from Cambridge into Boston — excursions so apt to end in brawls, drunken clamour, tears, and maudlin reconciliations. It was of a piece with a dispute over the finish of a game of cards, with the recriminations of an aggrieved supper companion, with the abuse of an exasperated bartender. It cut him to the quick, and, for the moment, seemed to place Mirabelle on a level with the women with whom she desperately classed herself. “It is like the Moulin!” As she said the words, it was as if the wand of a harlequin had touched the scene. The faint perfume of the Gloire de Dijon roses which he himself had sent her turned suddenly to the stale smell of the tobacco-smoke which hung densely over the dancers in the Red Mill of Montmartre; and Mirabelle herself, with her angry eyes, was at one with the painted, powdered, and bedizened monstrosity whom Radwalader had snubbed one evening as she paused at the table where he and Andrew were sampling an atrocious liqueur and watching an unlovely quadrille. But the impression passed as it had come. She was herself again, supremely beautiful, and supremely appealing in her avowal of devotion; and the element of romance which, in his mind, had always characterized their relation was intensified rather than diminished by this touch of tragedy.
Mirabelle rose suddenly, looking down upon him.
“I understand,” she said; “but there is one thing I would like to ask you. This other woman — do you love her? Will all this procure you what you want?”
“I don’t know,” faltered Andrew. “Perhaps not.”
“Then why—”
“Oh, how can I explain to you?” he exclaimed, rising in his turn. “It’s just this — I must make another try, and to do that I must be free! You have the right to ask — what haven’t you the right to ask! I’ll tell you the truth — that’s all I can do now. The girl I asked to marry me flung me off because — because—”
“Because of me?”
She bent forward, staring at him, as if she would wring the truth from his hesitation.
“Yes — because of you.”
“And when was this? When was it, I ask you? Was it — before?”
“Yes.”
“Then she had no grounds for what she said? She was wrong — she misjudged you — and then you came back to me!”
“Yes.”
“Why — why?”
“I don’t know,” said Andrew miserably. “I owed you something. I couldn’t hear you accused like that when there was no reason. You were my friend.”
“And so — you gave up the woman you — loved? Ah, mon Dieu!”
She paused, and then her eyes blazed suddenly with such a light as he had never seen in them, and her hands went to her temples with a bewildered flutter.
“It was for me,” she said, “for me! And to-morrow it is to be adieu?”
“To-morrow?”
Briefly they searched each other’s eyes.
“I mean to-night, of course,” said Mirabelle evenly. “Andrew — there is one thing I would like to ask of you, before you go. Will you — will you kiss me once — not as you have ever kissed me?” Her fingers touched her forehead. “Will you kiss me — here?”
He advanced a step and did as she had asked, then fell back.
“Mirabelle — Mirabelle!”
“Ah, don’t think of me, my friend. I don’t mean to be cruel — but I have — other interests. Let us say good-by, and part — friends. I trust you may be happy.”
“Mirabelle!”
Andrew’s voice broke suddenly.
“Then it’s good-by?”
“Yes,” said Mirabelle; and, with a little sob, he bent and kissed her hand.
When he had gone, she stood irresolutely, her lips parted and her eyes very bright. Then she wheeled and walked slowly toward the mantel. A photograph of Thomas Radwalader leaned there against a slender vase. As it met her eyes, she snatched abruptly at it, tore it into twenty pieces, and scattered the fragments in the air.