upset by your compassion and sympathy. Yet stay; is there not another similitude? Assuredly, for you love me much as Ysoude loved Palomides. What the deuce is all this lamentation to you? You do not value it the beard of an onion,—while of course grieving that your friendship should have been so utterly misconstrued, and wrongly interpreted,—and—trusting that nothing you have said or done has misled me—Oh, but I know you women!'
'Indeed, I sometimes wonder,' she reflected, 'what sort of women you have been friends with hitherto? They must have been very patient of nonsense.'
'Ah, do you think so?—At all events, you interrupt my peroration. For we have fought, you and I, a—battle which is over, so far as I am concerned. And the other side has won. Well! Pompey was reckoned a very pretty fellow in his day, but he took to his heels at Pharsalia, for all that; and Hannibal, I have heard, did not have matters entirely his own way at Zama. Good men have been beaten before this. So, without stopping to cry over spilt milk, —heyho!' he interpolated, with a grimace, 'it was uncommonly sweet milk, though,—let's back to our tents and reckon up our wounds.'
'I am decidedly of the opinion,' she said, 'that for all your talk you will find your heart unscratched.' Irony bewildered Claire, though she invariably recognized it, and gave it a polite smile.
John Bulmer said: 'Faith, I do not intend to flatter your vanity by going into a decline on the spot. For in perfect frankness, I find no mortal wounds anywhere. No, we have it on the best authority that, while many men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, it was never for love. I am inclined to agree with Rosalind: an aneurism may be fatal, but a broken heart kills nobody. Lovers have died in divers manners since the antique world was made, but not the most luckless of them was slain by love. Even Palomides, as my book informs me, went abroad with Launcelot and probably died an old man here in France,—peaceably, in his bed, with the family physician in attendance, and every other circumstance becoming to a genteel demise. And I dare assert that long before this he had learned to chuckle over his youthful follies, and had protested to his wife that La Beale Ysoude squinted, or was freckled, or the like; and had insisted, laughingly, that the best of us must sow our wild oats. And at the last it was his wife who mixed his gruel and smoothed his pillow and sat up with him at night; so that if he died thinking of Madame Palomides rather than of La Beale Ysoude, who shall blame him? Not I, for one,' said John Bulmer, stoutly; 'If it was not heroic, it was at least respectable, and, above all, natural; and I expect some day to gasp out a similar valedictory. No, not to-morrow at noon, I think: I shall probably get out of this, somehow. And when, in any event, I set about the process of dying, I may be thinking of you, O fair lost lady! and again I may not be thinking of you. Who can say? A fly, for instance, may have lighted upon my nose and his tickling may have distracted my ultimate thoughts. Meanwhile, I love you consumedly, and you do not care a snap of your fingers for me.'
'I—I am sorry,' she said, inadequately.
'You are the more gracious.' And his face sank down into his hands, and Claire was forgotten, for he was remembering Alison Pleydell and that ancient bankruptcy of his heart in youth, and this preposterous old John Bulmer (he reflected) was simply revelling in pity for himself.
A hand, feather-soft, fell upon, his shoulder, 'And who was your Ysoude, Jean Bulmer?'
'A woman who died twenty years ago,—a woman dead before you were born, my dear.'
Claire gave a little stifled moan, 'Oh—oh, I loathe her!' she cried.
But when he raised his head Claire was gone.
XII
He sat long in the twilight, now; rising insensibly about him. The garden had become a grave, yet not unfriendly, place; the white straining Nereids were taking on a tinge of violet, the verdure was of a deeper hue, that was all; and the fountain plashed unhurriedly, as though measuring a reasonable interval (he whimsically imagined) between the asking of a riddle and its solution given gratis by the asker.
He loved the woman; granted: but did not love rise the higher above a corner-stone of delusion? And this he could never afford. He considered Claire to be not extravagantly clever, he could have improved upon her ears (to cite one instance), which were rather clumsily modelled; her finger-tips were a thought too thick, a shade too practical, and in fine she was no more the most beautiful woman in the world than she was the tallest: and yet he loved her as certainly he had loved none of his recent mistresses. Even so, here was no infatuation, no roseate and kindly haze surrounding a goddess, such as that which had by ordinary accompanied Alison Pleydell….
'I am grown older, perhaps. Perhaps it is merely that I am fashioned of baser stuff than—-say, Achille Cazaio or de Soyecourt. Or perhaps it is that this overmastering, all-engulfing love is a mere figment of the poet, an age- long superstition as zealously preserved as that of the inscrutability of women, by men who don't believe a syllable of the nonsense they are transmitting. Ysoude is dead; and I love my young French wife as thoroughly as Palomides did, with as great a passion as was possible to either of us oldsters. Well! all life is a compromise; I compromise with tradition by loving her unselfishly, by loving her with the very best that remains in John Bulmer.
'And yet, I wish—
'True, I may be hanged at noon to-morrow, which would somewhat disconcert my plan. I shall not bother about that. Always there remains the chance that, somehow, Gaston may arrive in time: otherwise—why, otherwise I shall be hanged, and as to what will happen afterward I decline to enter into any discussion even with myself. I have my belief, but it is bolstered by no iota of knowledge. Faith, let us live this life as a gentleman should, and keep our hands and our consciences as clean as may be possible, and for the outcome trust to God's common- sense. There are people who must divert Him vastly by their frantic efforts to keep out of hell. For my own part, I would not think of wearing a pelisse in the Desert of Sahara merely because I happened to be sailing for Greenland during the ensuing week. I shall trust to His common-sense.
'And yet, I wish—
'I wish Reinault would hurry with the supper-trays. I am growing very hungry.'
XIII
That night he was roused by a tapping at his door. 'Jean Bulmer, Jean Bulmer! I have bribed Reinault. I have the keys. Come, and I will set you free.'
'Free to do what?' said John Bulmer.
'To escape—to flee to your foggy England,' said the voice without,—'and to your hideous Englishwomen.'
'Do you go with me?' said John Bulmer.
'I do not.' This was spoken from the turrets of decision.
'In that event,' said John Bulmer, 'I shall return to my dreams, which I infinitely prefer to the realities of a hollow existence. And, besides, now one thinks of it, I have given my parole.'
An infuriate voice came through the key-hole. 'You are undoubtedly a bully,' it stated. 'I loathe you.' Followed silence.
Presently the voice said, 'Because if you really loved her you were no better than she was, and so I hate you both.'
''Beautiful as an angel, and headstrong as a devil,'' was John Bulmer's meditation. Afterward John Bulmer turned over and went back to sleep.
For after all, as he reflected, he had given his parole.
XIV
