Traitors (Kinross)

by Albert Kinross

For works with similar titles, see Traitor.

 

Traitors

By Albert Kinross
(Author of "Eve Damer," etc.)

I

THE cemetery was outside the city bounds and stood amid fields that overlooked the lake and halted at the foothills. A great range, always snow-covered, closed that view, but they who came here seldom had eyes to see it. They came for funerals or on anniversaries, and there was one day in the year that was set apart. On such days Constance avoided the cemetery. She would go as far as the gate, look in, and if there were too many people, she would turn away. She went as she had come; across the cinder-path, then on to the road, and next downhill as far as the tramway station. She would ride back to her lonely villa, unconsoled and unconsolable. Perhaps the next day she would try again.

Most often the cemetery was empty, save for the gardeners and men who worked there. They did not count. Like the monuments and funeral shrubs, they belonged to the place; like the stones they set, the graves they dug, the paths they cleared and kept in order. Most of them knew her and raised their caps to her; for she was become as much a part of the cemetery as they. She went always to an upright slab of gray marble. On the upper half was engraved,

Richard Chaumont
1883-1917

The lower half was left a blank for her. Sometimes she thought that she would like to fill it now with all but the final date. Above her husband's name, in a larger lettering, the stonemason had carved the words which she had written down for him. "Love is unending," she had written; and that was enough.

She would busy herself here, changing his faded flowers for fresh ones and carrying the old ones to a rubbish heap. The jars had to be emptied and filled again with water. Always there was a wreath of evergreens, which often lasted a whole month. When she was finished, the tears would come into her eyes, and there were some days on which she denied God passionately.

"What had she done and what had Richard done," she asked, "that he should be cut off thus early?"

On such days the sight of old or even of elderly men annoyed her; but what enraged her most was to meet married couples, indifferent, habituated, or wearied and careless as to who knew of it. Why should these be spared, when Richard and she had been all in all to one another!

Nobody seemed to understand this. Eva, her married sister, was patient, but reasonable and chilling.

"You ought to go away," she said, "you ought to travel; you ought to get out of yourself and think new thoughts."

Her bachelor brother was crueller still.

"You are young," he said; "some day you will marry again. Why not come with me for a month to Paris?"

"I should only be in your way," she answered bitterly. And to herself she said, "Never will I betray the dead—never!"

That phrase pleased her. She often repeated it at night when she wept in her loneliness and held out empty arms.

"You are a woman; some day you will get over it," persisted that incorrigible brother; and then they almost quarrelled.

She said he knew no women but his mistresses; and he did not deny it.

More than a year had gone by when the men put up another monument close to hers. She would hardly have noticed it but for the inscription. "Love is unending," it also said; and that made her look again.

By the name and the dates she discovered that here reposed a young woman—as young as herself—and a newly born child. To the centre of the stone was affixed a medallion portrait in bronze, and the name carved below was Alice Molineux, She knew the Molineuxs for one of the best families in the district, but that was all. The slab was headed with their shield and crest. She went her way downhill to the tram-station.

One day as she came here a gentleman joined her. She was annoyed at first, but he was neither old nor elderly. He was tall and elegant and of about the same age as her husband. He had gone to the new grave that was so close to the one she haunted. He too had brought fresh flowers and thrown away the old ones and emptied and refilled the vases with water. He too was standing there with no eye for the mountains, nor the lake, nor for any living thing. This time he outstayed her, but the next time he left first, and one day they left together. They knew each other by sight quite well now. He held the gate for her and raised his hat.

There was no more than that between them for several weeks; and then he stayed away for a while, till one day he reappeared. His flowers were all hideous and faded; but he had brought new ones, a great bunch, as if to make up for his neglect.

Constance watched him arrange them. She had all these later days thought him faithless.

"He is forgetting," she had said, "like the others."

When she turned to go he followed her that day; and he did not feel the need to apologize.

"I have been ill," he said, quite simply at her elbow; "a grippe—I had to keep to my room."

He still looked pale and fragile.

"I understand," she answered, just as simply. "If I had known, I would have changed your flowers."

"That is what I have permitted myself to speak to you about. Should I fail at any time, will you do this for—for her?" he asked. "I would gladly do the same—for him."

So they came to make their bargain: and, "Here," thought Constance, "is a human being who understands."

She was less lonely now with those two graves to care for, with a fresh thought or two to think, and the knowledge that she was not so extraordinary as her brother and sister had declared. This Mr. Molineux was acting very much as she was acting; he was feeling as she was feeling; he was not likely to betray his dead. On one point only did they differ. In spite of his inexplicable loss, Victor Molineux still believed in God.

He told her so with his customary simplicity; and added, "If I had not that faith, I could not live."

"But why—," she began; "and to us—to us," she continued; "we who loved one another!"

"One believes," he answered quietly, "or one does not. I believe. Something tells me."

And then he looked up suddenly and saw the lake, and the mountains, and sky and cloud above the plain and foothills.

"Perhaps it is that," he said, with a gesture. "She too loved Nature and was moved by it—taken outside herself and lifted."

"I too was like that once," said Constance; "but now—"

"It will return to you," he answered.

He could think of nothing else and stood immersed in his own sorrow.

II

One day when it rained they took the tram together, and he descended where she did. He lived not for away.

He saw her to her door and she asked him to come inside and take his tea with her.

"It is better than being alone," she murmured.

They entered the house. It was not a large house, but everything was very complete and perfect; as though she tended it lovingly; as though it were all that remained of a great passion.

A maid, spoiled and inquisitive, brought them tea in the salon. Constance had removed her outdoor things, leaving Molineux for an instant to himself. There were three portraits of Richard Chaumont, a serious-looking man with thin hair and eye-glasses. They could be of nobody else. He locked at these till she came back and at her other pictures.

"You have a real Mauve," he said.

"It was Richard's choice. I have no taste," she added; "but he—"; and there she ended.

Over the tea-things they fell to talking of his books and his engravings.

"It is a pity he was a business man," she said.

Before Molineux left she took him into the dead man's own sitting-room, his den, his library; it stood exactly as he had left it, as though he had just gone out.

There was a half-burned cigar in his ash-tray; a book, laid open and face downward was awaiting his return; his slippers stood in their corner, a smoking-jacket hung behind the door. Only the fireplace had been touched, the fire relaid, so that he might put a match to it. Above it hung his pipes, and on the mantelboard stood photographs and cards of invitation. The date of the calendar which rested on his writing-table was the date on which he had left this room.

Molineux read off some of the titles of the long rows of books that stood in the cases which covered an entire wall.

"A catholic mind," he said.

"He was interested in everything," she answered. "He carried me along with him; and now—"

"You do not care to study alone?"

She shook her head.

He paused over the engravings and prints that hung here, views of the ancient city that spread about its corner of the lake and of buildings and places that had disappeared.

"We found these on our walks in the town," she said; "he was always looking for old things."

They left the room, closing the door quietly, and Molineux took leave of her.

"Another time you must see my home," he said.

"Willingly," she answered; and then he was gone and she was left to her memories, her occupations.

A week later she accompanied him to the large apartment he occupied in a fine building that faced the lake.

He was rich, apparently, judging by the size of the rooms, their number, and their elegance. They opened out, one from another, and each was beautiful but empty.

"She created all this," he said; "but now she is gone it feels like a desert."

Constance sighed and nodded. She knew.

The portrait of the dead woman was everywhere. Cold, stately, distinguished, she looked out upon them. She had been a Parisienne whom Molineux had met upon his travels.

"She was beautiful," whispered Constance.

"How beautiful no one knows," he answered. "It grew upon me."

Her own sitting-room was carefully guarded, just as Richard Chaumont's had been. Molineux produced the key. He drew back the curtains, he flung the windows wide. The servants were not allowed to enter, he explained.

On the open piano stood a piece of music, the last piece she had played. On the walls were the flags of the Allies: she had been passionately interested in the war. Her easel stood here with an unfinished picture; and there was a work-basket and a little chest which arrested the visitor's attention. Half open, it was full of tiny garments, and others, complete or in the making, were in that sunny corner of the room. Constance paused here and looked at Molineux.

"Your husband was wise," he said, "you had no children."

"Ah, now I wish I had!" she cried. "I could have lived again in them, or even in one."

"Yes, you are right," he answered slowly; "but sometimes one rebels."

They left that room and he locked the door again. They drank their tea by a window from which they could look out on the everlasting snows.

"She loved this view, the lake and the mountains," he said. "It was that which made life here endurable, she used to say; for she was accustomed to great cities."

Constance b[an to dislike this woman who, in her portraits, looked so cold, so distant, so unapproachable.

"People thought her proud," the bereaved husband ran on; "but it was only to protect herself from those who wearied her."

"I would have wearied her," said Constance to herself; but aloud she said, "It was quite natural."

"I hope you will honor me again."

They were taking leave of one another now and were standing at his open door on the first landing.

"It is your turn next time," she answered.

He went down the stairs with her as far as the gateway of the house.

These were the first of many solemn visits, during which they sat and talked of their misfortunes, surrounded by portraits of the man and woman whose early going had brought them into each others lives.

Molineux, looking round him in her little drawing-room, and, whichever way he turned, meeting that set face with its thin hair and eye-glasses, began positively to dislike it. And she, spied on constantly by that cold woman with the disdainful yet serene countenance, felt often like turning those portraits to the wall, or she wished that he would remove them. But neither of them made a change. The man with the thin hair and eye-glasses was ever present during Molineux's visits, and when Constance came to the large apartment-house which faced the lake, there was that impassive woman looking out on her from every corner of the room. Otherwise, they enjoyed the comfort of each other's sympathy, the understanding which in all that city they two alone seemed to possess amid a world, coarse in fibre, materialistic, and unfaithful.

The spring had gone, the summer, the autumn. In December she told him that after the New Year she was going abroad for a change of scene. Her sister and brother-in-law had pressed her; they had almost forced her. They were going to Egypt for a two months' holiday and they had insisted that she must come with them.

He and she were walking back from the cemetery that day. They often walked now. The air was moist, misty, and so far there had been no proper winter. The lake was gray and cheerless, the mountains hidden by a fog.

At her gate they separated.

"I am glad," he said; "perhaps the African sun will burn away your sorrow."

She shook her head sadly. There was no hope of that, she answered.

Before the day of her departure he called with flowers and chocolates to pay her a farewell visit.

"I will miss you," he said; "I will count the days till you come back again."

"I will only be trailing my griefs and my miseries in a new country," she answered. "It is foolish of me to go."

She said this and at the same time, inwardly, she saw the innumerable likenesses of the woman she so heartily detested. It had come to that now. He would be sitting with her.

"We were there on our honeymoon," said Molineux; "I shall never visit Egypt again."

And he was trying to escape the steady glare of those portraits that followed him around the room. He was beginning to hate this man with the thin hair and eye-glasses. Why hadn't he eyes without glasses like other people?

"I have white dresses to wear there," she answered; "it will feel strange to be dressed in white."

"She had white dresses," said Molineux. "You will ride on donkeys," he added, "and carry a parasol. You are fortunate to escape this soft winter. Perhaps the sun will heal you, or, at least, make life more endurable."

He had said something like that before; and, as before, she shook her head. It was time for him to be leaving.

"Bon voyage," he murmured, and took her hand and would have raised it to his lips; but in that instant the floor creaked; or it may have been the dryness of the furniture in that room heated by a porcelain stove.

The sound checked him; a ridiculous idea had seized upon him that this was a protest, a signal of remonstrance from the dead; and looking out now upon those portraits, he seemed to read a note of anger behind the eye-glasses, a hatred, an animosity, exceeding that which he had fought against within himself.

Of course it was ridiculous, and his hostess had noticed nothing. He still held her hand, and he raised it to his lips and repeated his wish that she should have a pleasant holiday. This time there was no protest, no creaking of furniture. It was foolish of him to have imagined it.

III

A few days later Constance was at Marseilles. She had never been to sea before; and here were all these people. She had avoided people, happy people, careless people, like the ones that had come on board. She was dazed and shy and frightened, and felt like flying home again.

Her sister and her brother-in-law smiled. They too were happy. They coaxed her and they argued with her; and when they were alone, "She will get over it," they said.

To them this holiday was an event. It was good to see new faces and to live among surroundings quite different from those to which they were accustomed. But if she liked to keep apart and look on at life, they could not prevent her. It was at least better than being imprisoned in her villa and taking her walks and rides to the cemetery that stood outside the town.

She was ill for a day or two and kept to her cabin. But when she revived, the sun was on the sea and there was a craggy, romantic coastline before her and the water was of a blue she had never known. She looked out upon that scene. And then the beauty of it smote her. Why was he not there to enjoy it? He would have loved it. Her eyes filled with tears, and as she turned, she met the gaze of a young man who was standing solitary as she. He too wore mourning, and he looked out now across the waters with an infinitude of suffering upon his face. For a moment she lingered, and it seemed to her that here was another of the few who understood.

In the evening, watching the sunset, she found herself beside him again. Perhaps he had sought her out, perhaps not. He looked at her, and her eyes gave him confidence.

"You too have suffered," he said; and she felt that she had found a companion.

"It is always the best who get taken," he added. And then he would have apologized; but she checked him and answered, "You are right."

The young man fetched a chair for her, and she noticed that he limped.

"Permit me?" she said, pitying him.

"Why?" he asked.

She had already guessed that he was French, and now she said, "You have been wounded in the war?"

"It is nothing," he answered.

They sat down side by side and looked out upon the sea; but each saw a sorrow difficult to escape.

"Yon have lost your fiancée, or a mistress?" she said quietly.

"No, it is my two brothers; there were three of us."

"And you also were nearly lost?"

"For France—why not?" said he. And this illogical answer charmed her. He was very young.

Within a day she had his history. Though he was traveling so finely, he was poor.

"I have an unmarried aunt," he said; "she insisted. Before I began my life again, I must spend her savings. In any case, they would have come to me, she says."

He had only lately been demobilized after five years. Previously he had studied law; but now it was over. His father's investments were worth so little and much of the money had been placed in Russia. And there were his two brothers, whose widows and families came first.

She had heard little of the war from so acute an angle. In her neutral country she had barely gathered that it was like this; indeed, if anything, she was the richer for it. Her husband's fortune had been mostly invested in chocolate, and chocolate had done well.

The young man was going into the glass and china trade; a friend had given him the opportunity. It would be better than the law, after losing all these years. He had to make his life over again, like so many others. But there was this aunt who had said, "Before you begin, you must take a long holiday. That will give you strength." It was kind of her. He could not refuse it.

Such was his story; and as they chatted together, he of his friends and comrades, his brothers, his relatives, she of her home and the husband she had lost, Constance realized that, of the people he described to her, the half were dead or widowed or mutilated, or had suffered material losses which left them impoverished or face to face with an uncertain future; and for the first time it occurred to her that her own sufferings were not unexampled, that they could be matched, and might even be exceeded. She looked out now on this young man with a new interest and unbent toward several of her fellow-passengers.

Eva, her sister, was pleased to mark the change. So was her brother-in-law. Each had predicted it; and now it was coming true.

IV

At Alexandria the young man went on alone and Constance had a relapse. They stayed there for a day or two while her brother-in-law transacted some business connected with cotton. Mechanically she resumed her journey, arrived at Cairo, and visited the Pyramids and the bazaars. She was not unhappy, but she was not happy.

From Cairo she sent a real letter to Victor Molineux, who had already written to say how much he missed her. He was tending both graves now. He mentioned it casually, as though he had no wish to disturb her on this voyage that should bring healing. She need have no fear while he was at his post. His long letter was intimate and faithful and gave her a wider picture of the man. On paper he was less controlled, less reticent, than he had been over the tea-table or on their walks together. It was snowing at home: "Like you, the country is dressed in white," he ended.

In return she told him of her own doings and tried her hardest not to reopen the memories of his honeymoon visit to this place. She was in white now—it was he who had spoken of it—and she hardly knew herself again; for it made her look younger. It was like meeting an old self that was half forgotten. And away from the town and riding out in the desert on camels or on donkeys and visiting the tombs and monuments, she was almost happy.

She had not understood before how full the world was of tombs and tears. The sun was giving her a color, a faint bronze; that African sun of which he had spoken. She liked the Arab guides and donkey-drivers; they paid her such delicious compliments. It was vain of her. She had seen something of the young Frenchman who had so interested her on board the ship. But he was more energetic than she. Every day he went to some new place, and she was tied to her sister and brother-in-law who were not so enterprising. Perhaps this was not quite just, she added, for they wished her to find every distraction. There were dances at the hotel, which was full of nouveaux riches; she went to her room on these evenings. The sun was always shining and at night the skies were clear. It was strange to be in a country where it never seemed to rain.... With ease, she had filled four pages.

From Cairo, Constance and her relatives sailed up the Nile to Luxor, where the young Frenchman, Henri Derville, was already installed at the same hotel. He had more leisure now; be was not so indefatigable. In Cairo he had followed the Arab civilization as well as that of the ancient Egyptians, and had concluded that, of the two, the latter was the more advanced. He told Constance of his excursions and how they had filled his time. But this was an opportunity; and he had no more maiden aunts. They laughed when he said that; first Constance, then Derville.

Here, in this leisured and more easy place, so open and so spacious, so strewn with scattered wonders and discoveries, he was content to ride with her and speculate upon the ruins, tombs, and temples; upon the collossal figures that had been hewn and carved and set upright, as if to oppress a simple people with the monstrous size of them.

Constance loved to listen to his theories.

"These ancient Egyptians were much like the Boche," he said; "everything must be kolossal." And next he imagined the wandering hordes of savages, coming up from the swamps and forests of the Sudan, along the Nile and its deserts to the edge of a new world. Suddenly they would stand face to face with these enormous images.

"They must have thought it magic; they must have been afraid. The moral effect must have been prodigious. That is what they were intended for, I suppose—to frighten people."

She followed his alignments. She had the receptive genius of her sex; she was so utterly receptive. Perhaps it was one of the reasons why she had felt her loss so greatly, the emptiness, the vacancy.

At the tombs of the Kings and Queens he had speculated further.

Had these passages and chambers cut deep within the rock been lighted for the artists who had decorated their walls with such brilliant colors; or had the paintings been done outside in the sunlight and then carried in and placed in their positions? He could find no answer to either question.

"What does it matter?" he cried.

He was gay now; from the sun, from the exercise, from the abundant air and space of these wild places.

They rode their donkeys out together and ate their meals from baskets. They crossed the river, the near irrigated fields, and then away into the wilderness. It was not like living at a hotel; it was not much like sight-seeing. One took the sights as one found them. The African sun was overhead, and perhaps it was burning away their sorrows; filling them too with some of the serene animalism, the careless languor of this ancient country whose mysteries and profundities were so other, so different, from their own.

The sister and brother-in-law marked the change in Constance.

"It was what she needed," they both said. "Always to bury herself and haunt that cemetery!"

They noticed that her looks were coming back to her, the old ripeness and beauty that had won her so much admiration. She shrank no longer from their fellow-guests, but, dressed in a transparent white, moved easily. Grief had but lent her dignity, a new distinction.

The weeks passed and young Derville was leaving. His train went in the late afternoon, and he had packed in his room in an annex of the hotel, a long, low wing with numbered doors that lay in a garden full of violent flowers, colored bright scarlets and oranges and purples. Her room was here as well, and, after their luncheon and a last ride to Karnak in the morning, she had taken a siesta.

"You will come and say good-bye to me?" she had asked; and he had promised.

He knocked now at her door. She called and he entered.

She was dressed, fresh from her toilet, yet with the sleep still lingering. Her movements were languorous, as of a woman neither in this world nor the world of dream.

He thanked her for her kindness.

"You have made it a real holiday," he said; "these weeks have given me courage. I will not be afraid to begin with my new life."

"You will succeed," she answered; "I am sure of that. And me too, you have made happy—I, who had thought never to find happiness again?"

She gave him a soft hand.

"Write to me; I would love to hear from you," she said. "My name and the town I live in is enough."

He held her hand, placed it to his lips, and then, "Good-bye." He was firm; he was resolute. With just such eyes must he have gone out into battle. And next he limped away, stopping once to take a last look at her. She was brown, burnt and splendid; awakened, fully awakened, from the semi-trance wherein he had found her.

She stood on the veranda and watched him go. She had a wild impulse to fly after him and to hold him.

"You are mad!" she said to herself; but, in her heart, she knew that all her youth had returned to her.

V

Two months later she was in her little drawing-room. She had written to Victor Molineux, inviting him for tea. She had not met him at the cemetery. So far she had not been out there.

He found her altered and strangely beautiful, the sun still upon her face; and she was no longer in black, nor with any sign of mourning. It was one of those first radiant days of spring when one could wear soft colors. He looked round the room for his ever-watchful enemy; but the portraits were gone. Only one remained, inconspicuous on a side-table. He need not look at it. The man with the thin hair and eye-glasses could follow him no longer.

"Has she forgotten him?" he asked himself. Aloud, he said, "You did not come directly home; you were in Italy? I was glad when you wrote that you would go there."

"It was my proposal," she answered. "My sister and I were there; my brother-in-law had to leave us. I had never been in Italy before."

The maid, more spoiled after so much freedom and more inquisitive, came in with the tea-things. She had a certain contempt for Victor Molineux, in spite of his distinction.

They drank their tea and spoke of other matters; of her travels, his interests. He discovered that she had been to a ball at one of the hotels, and, when he questioned her, she confessed to several, and, treating him like a friend, an intimate, she told him that she had received an offer of marriage. "An Italian doctor," she said; "he was very vain and very stupid."

He pressed her for particulars; but it only made her smile.

"You too ought to go away," she said, looking up at him.

"And be unfaithful?" he asked.

He glanced round the room now to the places where once had hung those missing portraits.

She understood him.

"It is not we who are unfaithful," she answered; "it is the dead who betray the living."

She spoke slowly; she seemed to like that phrase, just as she had liked its predecessor.

"You have not been to the cemetery yet? It is spring there," he said.

"Not yet." And then. "I fear it," she added; "I, who have escaped!"

"You are sure?" he asked her.

Foolishly, involuntarily, she told him now of the young Frenchman at Luxor and of the impulse which had shaken her as she watched him leaving.

"It was stronger than I. But, no; it was life," she ended. "Life is too strong for us; when we refuse it, we are dead!"

"You love this young man?" he asked; and for the first time she caught in his voice a note of jealousy.

"It is difficult to explain. Perhaps it was the sun, that 'African sun,'" she said, quoting him. "But, no; you remember what both of us have written?"

He looked at her, puzzled.

"'Love is unending'," she quoted again. "Does it not mean that men and women may die, but Love goes on?"

He had grasped her meaning.

"No, you did not love that young man," he answered; and drawing closer, alive and masterful, he seized her hand, held it; and she did not resist.

"I too have been unfaithful. I have longed for you, Constance; I have longed for you!" he whispered.

***

"We will not live in your home," she said, a half-hour later; "there are always those portraits. I could not live with them."

"They are gone," said he; and though he was lying, he knew that they would go, and perhaps but one or two remain, modestly, and in its proper place.