Chambers Robert William
The Maids of Paradise

The Château de Trécourt was a fine example of the so called “fortified farm”; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls, pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A walled and loop-holed passageway connected the house with another stone enclosure in which stood stable, granary, cattle-house, and sheepfold, all of stone, though the roofs of these buildings were either turfed or thatched. And over them the weather-vane, a golden Dorado, swam in the sunshine.

One thing I noticed as I crossed the unused moat on a permanent bridge: the youthful Countess no longer denied herself the services of servants, for I saw a cloaked shepherd and his two wolf-like and tailless sheep-dogs watching the flock scattered over the downs; and there were at least half a dozen farm servants pottering about from stable to granary, and a toothless porter to answer the gate-bell and pilot me past the tiny loop-holed lodge-turret to the house. There was also a man, lying belly down in the bracken, watching me; and as I walked into the court I tried to remember where I had seen his face before.

The entire front of the house was covered with those splendid orange-tinted tea-roses that I had noticed in Paradise; thicket on thicket of clove-scented pinks choked the flower-beds; and a broad mat of deep-tinted pansies lay on the lawn, spread out for all the world like a glorious Eastern rug.

There was a soft whirring in the air like the sound of a humming-bird close by; it came from a spinning-wheel, and grew louder as a servant admitted me into the house and guided me to a sunny room facing the fruit garden.

The spinner at the wheel was singing in an undertone – singing a Breton “gwerz,” centuries old, retained in memory from generation to generation:

 
“Woe to the Maids of Paradise,
Yvonne!
Twice have the Saxons landed; twice!
Yvonne!
Yet must Paradise see them thrice!
Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik.”
 

Old as were the words, the melody was older – so old and quaint and sweet that it seemed a berceuse fashioned to soothe the drowsing centuries, lest the memories of ancient wrongs awake and rouse the very dead from their Gothic tombs.

All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of Armorica.

And now the singer was intoning the “Gwerz Ar Baradoz” – the “Complaint of Paradise” – a slow, thrilling miséréré, scarcely dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.

Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: “How do you do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you please?”

The girl was Mademoiselle Sylvia Elven, the marvellously clever actress from the Odéon, the same young woman who had played the Alsacienne at La Trappe, as perfectly in voice and costume as she now played the Bretonne.

“You need not be astonished at all,” she said, calmly, “if you will only reflect that my name is Elven, which is also the name of a Breton town. Naturally, I am a Bretonne from Elven, and my own name is Duhamel – Sylvenne Duhamel. I thought I ought to tell you, so that you would not think me too clever and try to carry me off on your horse again.”

I laughed uncertainly; clever women who talk cleverly always disturb me. Besides, somehow, I felt she was not speaking the truth, yet I could not imagine why she should lie to me.

“You were more fluent to the helpless turkey-girl,” she suggested, maliciously.

I had absolutely nothing to say, which appeared to gratify her, for she dimpled and smiled under her snowy-winged coiffe, from which a thick gold strand of hair curled on her forehead – a sad bit of coquetry in a Bretonne from Elven, if she told the truth.

“I only came to renew an old and deeply valued friendship,” she said, with mock sentimentality; “I am going back to my flax now.”

However, she did not move.

“And, by-the-way,” she said, languidly, “is there in your intellectual circus company a young gentleman whose name is Eyre?”

“Kelly Eyre? Yes,” I said, sulkily.

“Ah.”

She strolled out of the room, hesitated, then turned in the doorway with a charming smile.

“The Countess will return from her gallop at five.”

She waited as though expecting an answer, but I only bowed.

“Would you take a message to Mistaire Kelly Eyre for me?” she asked, sweetly.

I said that I would.

“Then please say that: ‘On Sunday the book-stores are closed in Paris.’”

“Is that what I am to say?”

“Exactly that.”

“Very well, mademoiselle.”

“Of course, if he asks who told you – you may say that it was a Bretonne at Point Paradise.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing, monsieur.”

She courtesied and vanished.

“Little minx,” I thought, “what mischief are you preparing now?” and I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden, where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and saffron.

Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.

I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a horse’s hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly, just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and gave me her gloved hand.

Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave young Countess whom I had known in Alsace – this incarnation of all that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had happened?

I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned, opened, with a strange note from Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some word from me, here in Paradise, since September; “waited impatiently,” she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows for a moment – a moment only.

“But come out to my garden,” she said, smiling, and stripping off her little buff gauntlets. “There we will have tea a l’Anglaise, and sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will,” she added, laughing and coloring up; “for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do not believe I have given you one second to open your lips.”

Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips and listen to the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell with my own.

She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a sunny wall, a wall built of massive granite, deeply thatched with fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-butterflies flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.

Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and loveliness – the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual innocence on a tired, unstrung man?

“First of all,” she said, impulsively, “I know your life – all of it in minute particular. Are you astonished?”

“No, madame,” I replied; “Mornac showed you my dossier.”

“That is true,” she said, with a troubled look of surprise.

I smiled. “As for Mornac,” I began, but she interrupted me.

“Ah, Mornac! Do you suppose I believed him? Had I not proof on proof of your loyalty, your honor, your courtesy, your chivalry – ”

“Madame, your generosity – and, I fear, your pity – overpraises.”

“No, it does not! I know what you are. Mornac cannot make white black! I know what you have been. Mornac could not read you into infamy, even with your dossier under my own eyes!”

“In my dossier you read a sorry history, madame.”

“In your dossier I read the tragedy of a gentleman.”

“Do you know,” said I, “that I am now a performer in a third-rate travelling circus?”

“I think that is very sad,” she said, sweetly.

“Sad? Oh no. It is better than the disciplinary battalions of Africa.”

Which was simply acknowledging that I had served a term in prison.

The color faded in her face. “I thought you were pardoned.”

“I was – from prison, not from the battalion of Biribi.”

“I only know,” she said, “that they say you were not guilty; that they say you faced utter ruin, even the possibility of death, for the sake of another man whose name even the police – even Monsieur de Mornac – could never learn. Was there such a man?”

I hesitated. “Madame, there is such a man; I am the man who was.”

“With no hope?”

“Hope? With every hope,” I said, smiling. “My name is not my own, but it must serve me to my end, and I shall wear it threadbare and leave it to no one.”

“Is there no hope?” she asked, quietly.

“None for the man who was. Much for James Scarlett, tamer of lions and general mountebank,” I said, laughing down the rising tide of bitterness. Why had she stirred those dark waters? I had drowned myself in them long since. Under them lay the corpse of a man I had forgotten – my dead self.

“No hope?” she repeated.

Suddenly the ghost of all I had lost rose before me with her words – rose at last after all these years, towering, terrible, free once more to fill the days with loathing and my nights with hell eternal… after all these years!

Overwhelmed, I fought down the spectre in silence. Kith and kin were not all in the world; love of woman was not all; a chance for a home, a wife, children, were not all; a name was not all. Raising my head, a trifle faint with the struggle and the cost of the struggle, I saw the distress in her eyes and strove to smile.

“There is every hope,” I said, “save the hopes of youth – the hope of a woman’s love, and of that happiness which comes through love. I am a man past thirty, madame – thirty-five, I believe my dossier makes it. It has taken me fifteen years to bury my youth. Let us talk of Mornac.”

“Yes, we will talk of Mornac,” she said, gently.

So with infinite pains I went back and traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness.

She sat motionless, her face like cold marble, as I carefully gathered the threads of the plot and gently twitched that one which galvanized the mask of Mornac.

“Mornac!” she stammered, aghast.

I showed her why Buckhurst desired to come to Paradise; I showed her why Mornac had initiated her into the mysteries of my dossier, taking that infernal precaution, although he had every reason to believe he had me practically in prison, with the keys in his own pocket.

“Had it not been for my comrade, Speed,” I said, “I should be in one of Mornac’s fortress cells. He overshot the mark when he left us together and stepped into his cabinet to spread my dossier before you. He counted on an innocent man going through hell itself to prove his innocence; he counted on me, and left Speed out of his calculations. He had your testimony, he had my dossier, he had the order for my arrest in his pocket… And then I stepped out of sight! I, the honest fool, with my knowledge of his infamy, of Buckhurst’s complicity and purposes – I was gone.

“And now mark the irony of the whole thing: he had, criminally, destroyed the only bureau that could ever have caught me. But he did his best during the few weeks that were left him before the battle of Sedan. After that it was too late; it was too late when the first Uhlan appeared before the gates of Paris. And now Mornac, shorn of authority, is shut up in a city surrounded by a wall of German steel, through which not one single living creature has penetrated for two months.”

I looked at her steadily. “Eliminate Mornac as a trapped rat; cancel him as a dead rat since the ship of Empire went down at Sedan. I do not know what has taken place in Paris – save what all now know that the Empire is ended, the Republic proclaimed, and the Imperial police a memory. Then let us strike out Mornac and turn to Buckhurst. Madame, I am here to serve you.”

The dazed horror in her face which had marked my revelations of Buckhurst’s villanies gave place to a mantling flush of pure anger. Shame crimsoned her neck, too; shame for her credulous innocence, her belief in this rogue who had betrayed her, only to receive pardon for the purpose of baser and more murderous betrayal.

I said nothing for a long time, content to leave her to her own thoughts. The bitter draught she was draining could not harm her, could not but act as the most wholesome of tonics.

Hers was not a weak character to sink, embittered, under the weight of knowledge – knowledge of evil, that all must learn to carry lightly through life; I had once thought her weak, but I had revised that opinion and substituted the words “pure in thought, inherently loyal, essentially unsuspicious.”

“Tell me about Buckhurst,” I said, quietly. “I can help you, I think.”

The quick tears of humiliation glimmered for a second in her angry eyes; then pride fell from her, like a stately mantle which a princess puts aside, tired and content to rest.

This was a phase I had never before seen – a lovely, natural young girl, perplexed, troubled, deeply wounded, ready to be guided, ready for reproof, perhaps even for that sympathy without which reproof is almost valueless.

She told me that Buckhurst came to her house here in Paradise early in September; that while in Paris, pondering on what I had said, she had determined to withdraw herself absolutely from all organized socialistic associations during the war; that she believed she could do the greatest good by living a natural and cheerful life, by maintaining the position that birth and fortune had given her, and by using that position and fortune for the benefit of those less fortunate.

This she had told Buckhurst, and the rascal appeared to agree with her so thoroughly that, when Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier arrived, they also applauded the choice she made of Buckhurst as distributer of money, food, and clothing to the provincial hospitals, now crowded to suffocation with the wreck of battle.

Then a strange thing occurred. Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier disappeared without any explanation. They had started for St. Nazaire with a sum of money – twenty thousand francs, locked in the private strong-box of the Countess – to be distributed among the soldiers of Chanzy; and they had never returned.

In the light of what she had learned from me, she feared that Buckhurst had won them over; perhaps not – she could not bear to suspect evil of such men.

But she now believed that Buckhurst had used every penny he had handled for his own purposes; that not one hospital had received what she had sent.

“I am no longer wealthy,” she said, anxiously, looking up at me. “I did find time in Paris to have matters straightened; I sold La Trappe and paid everything. It left me with this house in Paradise, and with means to maintain it and still have a few thousand francs to give every year. Now it is nearly gone – I don’t know where. I am dreadfully unhappy; I have such a horror of treachery that I cannot even understand it, but this ignoble man, Buckhurst, is assuredly a heartless rascal.”

“But,” I said, patiently, “you have not yet told me where he is.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “A week ago a dreadful creature came here to see Buckhurst; they went across the moor toward the semaphore and stood for a long while looking at the cruiser which is anchored off Groix. Then Buckhurst came back and prepared for a journey. He said he was going to Tours to confer with the Red Cross. I don’t know where he went. He took all the money for the general Red Cross fund.”

“When did he say he would return?”

“He said in two weeks. He has another week yet.”

“Is he usually prompt?”

“Always so – to the minute.”

“That is good news,” I said, gayly. “But tell me one thing: do you trust Mademoiselle Elven?”

“Yes, indeed! – indeed!” she cried, horrified.

“Very well,” said I, smiling. “Only for the sake of caution – extra, and even perhaps useless caution – say nothing of this matter to her, nor to any living soul save me.”

“I promise,” she said, faintly.

“One thing more: this conspiracy against the state no longer concerns me – officially. Both Speed and I did all we could to warn the Emperor and the Empress; we sent letters through the police in London, we used the English secret-service to get our letters into the Emperor’s hand, we tried every known method of denouncing Mornac. It was useless; every letter must have gone through Mornac’s hands before it reached the throne. We did all we dared do; we were in disguise and in hiding under assumed names; we could not do more.

“Now that Mornac is not even a pawn in the game – as, indeed, I begin to believe he never really was, but has been from the first a dupe of Buckhurst – it is the duty of every honest man to watch Buckhurst and warn the authorities that he possibly has designs on the crown jewels of France, which that cruiser yonder is all ready to bear away to Saïgon.

“How he proposes to attempt such a robbery I can’t imagine. I don’t want to denounce him to General Chanzy or Aurelles de Palladine, because the conspiracy is too widely spread and too dangerous to be defeated by the capture of one man, even though he be the head of it.

“What I want is to entrap the entire band; and that can only be done by watching Buckhurst, not arresting him.

“Therefore, madame, I have written and despatched a telegram to General Aurelles de Palladine, offering my services and the services of Mr. Speed to the Republic without compensation. In the event of acceptance, I shall send to London for two men who will do what is to be done, leaving me free to amuse the public with my lions. Meanwhile, as long as we stay in Paradise we both are your devoted servants, and we beg the privilege of serving you.”

During all this time the young Countess had never moved her eyes from my face – perhaps I was flattered – perhaps for that reason I talked on and on, pouring out wisdom from a somewhat attenuated supply.

And I now rose to take my leave, bowing my very best bow; but she sat still, looking up quietly at me.

“You ask the privilege of serving me,” she said. “You could serve me best by giving me your friendship.”

“You have my devotion, madame,” I said.

“I did not ask it. I asked your friendship – in all frankness and equality.”

“Do you desire the friendship of a circus performer?” I asked, smiling.

“I desire it, not only for what you are, but for what you have been – have always been, let them say what they will!”

I was silent.

“Have you never given women your friendship?” she asked.

“Not in fifteen years – nor asked theirs.”

“Will you not ask mine?”

I tried to speak steadily, but my voice was uncertain; I sat down, crushed under a flood of memories, hopes accursed, ambitions damned and consigned to oblivion.

“You are very kind,” I said. “You are the Countess de Vassart. A man is what he makes himself. I have made myself – with both eyes open; and I am now an acrobat and a tamer of beasts. I understand your goodness, your impulse to help those less fortunate than yourself. I also understand that I have placed myself where I am, and that, having done so deliberately, I cannot meet as friends and equals those who might have been my equals if not friends. Besides that, I am a native of a paradox – a Republic which, though caste-bound, knows no caste abroad. I might, therefore, have been your friend if you had chosen to waive the traditions of your continent and accept the traditions of mine. But now, madame, I must beg permission to make my adieux.”

She sprang up and caught both my hands in her ungloved hands. “Won’t you take my friendship – and give me yours – my friend?”

“Yes,” I said, slowly. The blood beat in my temples, almost blinding me; my heart hammered in my throat till I shivered.

As in a dream I bent forward; she abandoned her hands to me; and I touched a woman’s hands with my lips for the first time in fifteen years.

“In all devotion and loyalty – and gratitude,” I said.

“And in friendship – say it!”

“In friendship.”

“Now you may go – if you desire to. When will you come again?”

“When may I?”

“When you will.”