Seabury stayed much longer with Madame de Couçy than he had intended. The ice once broken, he felt he might never find her so much herself again. They sat talking about people who were no longer in this world. She knew much more about them than he. Knew so much that her talk brought back not only the men, but their period; its security, the solid exterior, the exotic contradictions behind the screen; the deep, claret-coloured closing years of Victoria’s reign. Nobody ever recognizes a period until it has gone by, he reflected: until it lies behind one it is merely everyday life.
VII
The next evening the Thompsons, all four of them, were to dine with Mr. Seabury at the Maison des Fleurs. Their holiday was over, and they would be leaving on the following afternoon. They would stop once more at that spot in the north, to place fresh wreaths, before they took the Channel boat.
When Seabury and his guests were seated and the dinner had been ordered, he was aware that the mother was looking at him rather wistfully. He felt he owed her some confidence, since it was she, really, who had enlightened him. He told her that he had called upon Gabrielle Longstreet last evening.
“And how is she, dear Mr. Seabury? Is she less—less forbidding than when we see her in the Square?”
“She was on her guard at first, but that soon passed. I stayed later than I should have done, but I had a delightful evening. I gather that she is a little antagonistic to the present order—indifferent, at least. But when she talks about her old friends she is quite herself.”
Mrs. Thompson listened eagerly. She hesitated and then asked: “Does she find life pleasant at all, do you think?”
Seabury told her how the lady was surrounded by the photographs and memoirs of her old friends; how she never travelled without them. It had struck him that she was living her life over again,—more understandingly than she lived it the first time.
Mrs. Thompson breathed a little sigh. “Then I know that all is well with her. You have done so much to make our stay here pleasant, Mr. Seabury, but your telling us this is the best of all. Even Father will be interested to know that.”
The stout man, who wore an ancient tail coat made for him when he was much thinner, came out indignantly. “Even Father! I like that! One of the great beauties of our time, and very popular before the divorce.”
His daughter laughed and patted his sleeve. Seabury went on to tell Mrs. Thompson that she had been quite right in surmising the companion to be a friend, not a paid attendant. “And a very charming person, too. She was one of your cleverest music-hall stars. Cherry Beamish.”
Here Father dropped his spoon into his soup. “What’s that? Cherry Beamish? But we haven’t had such another since! Remember her in that coster song, Mother? It went round the world, that did. We were all crazy about her, the boys called her Cherish Beamy. No monkeyshines for her, never got herself mixed up in anything shady.”
“Such a womanly woman in private life,” Mrs. Thompson murmured. “My Dorothy went to school with two of her nieces. An excellent school, and quite dear. Their Aunt Chetty does everything for them. And now she is with Lady Longstreet! One wouldn’t have supposed they’d ever meet, those two. But then things are strange now.”
There was no lull in conversation at that dinner. After the father had enjoyed several glasses of champagne he delighted his daughters with an account of how Cherry Beamish used to do the tipsy schoolboy coming in at four in the morning and meeting his tutor in the garden.
VIII
Mr. Seabury sat waiting before the hotel in a comfortable car which he now hired by the week. Gabrielle and Chetty drove out with him every day. This afternoon they were to go to Annecy by the wild road along the Echelles. Presently Mrs. Allison came down alone. Gabrille was staying in bed, she said. Last night Seabury had dined with them in their apartment, and Gabrielle had talked too much, she was afraid. “She didn’t sleep afterward, but I think she will make it up today if she is quite alone.”
Seabury handed her into the car. In a few minutes they were running past the lake of Bourget.
“This gives me an opportunity, Mrs. Allison, to ask you how it came about that you’ve become Lady Longstreet’s protector. It’s a beautiful friendship.”
She laughed. “And an amazing one? But I think you must call me Chetty, as she does, if we are to be confidential. Yes, I suppose it must seem to you the queerest partnership that war and desolation have made. But you see, she was so strangely left. When I first began to look after her a little, two years ago, she was ill in an hotel in Paris (we have taken a flat since), and there was no one, positively no one but the hotel people, the French doctor, and an English nurse who had chanced to be within call. It was the nurse, really, who gave me my cue. I had sent flowers, with no name, of course. (What would a bygone music-hall name mean to Gabrielle Longstreet?) And I called often to inquire. One morning I met Nurse Ames just as she was going out into the Champs-Élysées for her exercise, and she asked me to accompany her. She was an experienced woman, not young. She remembered when Gabrielle Longstreet’s name and photographs were known all over the Continent, and when people at home were keen enough upon meeting her. And here she was, dangerously ill in a foreign hotel, and there was no one, simply no one. To be sure, she was registered under the name of her second husband.”
Seabury interrupted. “And who was he, this de Couçy? I have heard nothing about him.”
“I know very little myself, I never met him. They had been friends a long while, I believe. He was killed in action—less than a year after they were married. His name was a disguise for her, even then. She came from Martinique, you remember, and she had no relatives in England. Longstreet’s people had never liked her. So, you see, she was quite alone.”
Seabury took her plump little hand. “And that was where you came in, Chetty?”
She gave his fingers a squeeze. “Thank you! That’s nice. It was Nurse Ames who did it. The war made a lot of wise nurses. After Gabrielle was well enough to see people, there was no one for her to see! The same thing that had happened to her friends in England had happened over here. The old men had paid the debt of nature, and the young ones were killed or disabled or had lost touch with her. She once had many friends in Paris. Nurse Ames told me that an old French officer, blinded in the war, sometimes came to see her, guided by his little granddaughter. She said her patient had expressed curiosity about the English woman who had sent so many flowers. I wrote a note, asking whether I could be of any service, and signed my professional name. She might recognize it, she might not. We had been on a committee together during the war. She told the nurse to admit me, and that’s how it began.”
Seabury took her hand again. “Now I want you to be frank with me. Had she then, or has she now, money worries at all?”
Cherry Beamish chuckled. “Not she, you may believe! But I have had a few for her. On the whole, she’s behaved very well. She sold her place in Devonshire to advantage, before the war. Her capital is in British bonds. She seems to you harassed?”
“Sometimes.”
Mrs. Allison looked grave and was silent for a little. “Yes,” with a sight, “she gets very low at times. She suffers from strange regrets. She broods on the things she might have done for her friends and didn’t—thinks she was cold to them. Was she, in those days, so indifferent as she makes herself believe?”
Seabury reflected. “Not exactly indifferent. She wouldn’t have been so attractive if she’d been that. She didn’t take things very hard, perhaps. She used to strike me as … well, we might call it unawakened.”
“But wasn’t she the most beautiful creature then! I used to see her at the races, and at charity bazaars, in my early professional days. After the war broke out and everybody was all mixed up, I was put on an entertainment committee with her. She wasn’t quite the Lady Longstreet of my youth, but she still had that grand style. It was the illness in Paris that broke her. She’s changed very fast ever since. You see she thought, once the war was over, the world would
be just as it used to be. Of course it isn’t.”
By this time the car had reached Annecy, and they stopped for tea. The shore of the lake was crowded with young people taking their last dip for the day; sunbrowned backs and shoulders, naked arms and legs. As Mrs. Allison was having her tea on the terrace, she watched the bathers. Presently she twinkled a sly smile at her host. “Do you know, I’m rather glad we didn’t bring Gabrielle! It puts her out terribly to see young people bathing naked. She makes comments that are indecent, really! If only she had a swarm of young nieces and nephews, as I have, she’d see things quite differently, and she’d be much happier. Legs were never wicked to us stage people, and now all the young things know they are not wicked.”
IX
When Madame de Couçy went out with Seabury alone, he missed the companionship of Cherry Beamish. With Cherry the old beauty always softened a little; seemed amused by the other’s interest in whatever the day produced: the countryside, the weather, the number of cakes she permitted herself for tea. The imagination which made this strange friendship possible was certainly on the side of Cherry Beamish. For her, he could see, there was something in it; to be the anchor, the refuge, indeed, of one so out of her natural orbit—selected by her long ago as an object of special admiration.
One afernoon when he called, the maid, answering his ring, said that Madame would not go out this afternoon, but hoped he would stay and have tea with her in her salon. He told the lift boy to dismiss the car and went in to Madame de Couçy. She received him with unusual warmth.
“Chetty is out for the afternoon, with some friends from home. Oh, she still has a great many! She is much younger than I, in every sense. Today I particularly wanted to see you alone. It’s curious how the world runs away from one, slips by without one’s realizing it.”
He reminded her that the circumstances had been unusual. “We have lived through a storm to which the French Revolution, which used to be our standard of horrors, was merely a breeze. A rather gentlemanly affair, as one looks back on it … As for me, I am grateful to be alive, sitting here with you in a comfortable hotel (I might be in a prison full of rats), in a France still undestroyed.”
The old lady looked into his eyes with the calm, level gaze so rare with her now. “Are you grateful? I am not. I think one should go out with one’s time. I particularly wished to see you alone this afternoon. I want to thank you for your tact and gentleness with me one hideous evening long ago; in my house in New York. You were a darling boy to me that night. If you hadn’t come along, I don’t know how I would have got over it—out of it, even. One can’t call the servants.”
“But, Gabrielle, why recall a disagreeable incident when you have so many agreeable ones to remember?”
She seemed not to hear him, but went on, speaking deliberately, as if she were reflecting aloud. “It was strange, your coming in just when you did: that night it seemed to me like a miracle. Afterward, I remembered you had been expected at eight. But I had forgotten all that, forgotten everything. Never before or since have I been so frightened. It was something worse than fear.”
There was a knock at the door. Madame de Couçy called: “Entrez!” without turning round. While the tea was brought she sat looking out of the window, frowning. When the waiter had gone she turned abruptly to Seabury:
“After that night I never saw you again until you walked into the dining-room of this hotel a few weeks ago. I had gone into the country somewhere, hiding with friends, and when I came back to New York, you were already on your way to China. I never had a chance to explain.”
“There was certainly no need for that.”
“Not for you, perhaps. But for me. You may have thought such scenes were frequent in my life. Hear me out, please,” as he protested. “That man had come to my house at seven o’clock that evening and sent up a message begging me to see him about some business matters. (I had been stupid enough to let him make investments for me.) I finished dressing and hurried down to the drawing-room.” Here she stopped and slowly drank a cup of tea. “Do you know, after you came in I did not see you at all, not for some time, I think. I was mired down in something … the power of the dog, the English Prayer Book calls it. But the moment I heard your voice, I knew that I was safe … I felt the leech drop off. I have never forgot the sound of your voice that night; so calm, with all a man’s strength behind it,—and you were only a boy. You merely asked if you had come too early. I felt the leech drop off. After that I remember nothing. I didn’t see you, with my eyes, until you gave me your handkerchief. You stayed with me and looked after me all evening.
“You see, I had let the beast come to my house, oh, a number of times! I had asked his advice and allowed him to make investments for me. I had done the same thing at home with men who knew about such matters; they were men like yourself and Hardwick. In a strange country one goes astray in one’s reckonings. I had met that man again and again at the houses of my friends,—your friends! Of course his personality was repulsive to me. One knew at once that under his smoothness he was a vulgar person. I supposed that was not unusual in great bankers in the States.”
“You simply chose the wrong banker, Gabrielle. The man’s accent must have told you that he belonged to a country you did not admire.”
“But I tell you I met him at the houses of decent people.”
Seabury shook his head. “Yes, I am afraid you must blame us for that. Americans, even those whom you call the decent ones, do ask people to their houses who shouldn’t be there. They are often asked because they are outrageous,—and therefore considered amusing. Besides, that fellow had a very clever way of pushing himself. If a man is generous in his contributions to good causes, and is useful on committees and commissions, he is asked to the houses of the people who have these good causes at heart.”
“And perhaps I, too, was asked because I was considered notorious? A divorcée, known to have more friends among men than among women at home? I think I see what you mean. There are not many shades in your society. I left the States soon after you sailed for China. I gave up my New York house at a loss to be rid of it. The instant I recognized you in the dining-room downstairs, that miserable evening came back to me. In so far as our acquaintance was concerned, all that had happened only the night before.”
“Then I am reaping a reward I didn’t deserve, some thirty years afterward! If I had not happened to call that evening when you were so—so unpleasantly surprised, you would never have remembered me at all! We shouldn’t be sitting together at this moment. Now may I ring for some fresh tea, dear? Let us be comfortable. This afternoon had brought us closer together. And this little spot in Savoie is a nice place to renew old friendships, don’t you think?”
X
Some hours later, when Mr. Seabury was dressing for dinner, he was thinking of that strange evening in Gabrielle Longstreet’s house on Fifty-third Street, New York.
He was then twenty-four years old. She had been very gracious to him all the winter.
On that particular evening he was to take her to dine at Delmonico’s. Her cook and butler were excused to attend a wedding. The maid who answered his ring asked him to go up to the drawing-room on the second floor, where Madame was awaiting him. She followed him as far as the turn of the stairway, then, hearing another ring at the door, she excused herself.
He went on alone. As he approached the wide doorway leading into the drawing-room, he was conscious of something unusual; a sound, or perhaps an unnatural stillness. From the doorway he beheld something quite terrible. At the far end of the room Gabrielle Long-street was seated on a little French sofa—not seated, but silently struggling. Behind the sofa stood a stout, dark man leaning over her. His left arm, about her waist, pinioned her against the flowered silk upholstery. His right hand was thrust deep into the low-cut bodice of her dinner gown. In her struggle she had turned a little on her side; her right arm was in the grip of his left hand, and she was trying to free the other, which was held down b
y the pressure of his elbow. Neither of those two made a sound. Her face was averted, half hidden against the blue silk back of the sofa. Young Seabury stood still just long enough to see what the situation really was. Then he stepped across the threshold and said with such coolness as he could command: “Am I too early, Madame Longstreet?”
The man behind her started from his crouching position, darted away from the sofa, and disappeared down the stairway. To reach the stairs he passed Seabury, without lifting his eyes, but his face was glistening wet.
The lady lay without stirring, her face now completely hidden. She looked so crushed and helpless, he thought she must be hurt physically. He spoke to her softly: “Madame Longstreet, shall I call—”
“Oh, don’t call! Don’t call anyone.” She began shuddering violently, her face still turned away. “Some brandy, please. Downstairs, in the dining-room.”
He ran down the stairs, had to tell the solicitous maid that Madame wished to be alone for the present. When he came back Gabrielle had caught up the shoulder straps of her gown. Her right arm bore red finger marks. She was shivering and sobbing. He slipped his handkerchief into her hand, and she held it over her mouth. She took a little brandy. Then another fit of weeping came on. He begged her to come nearer to the fire. She put her hand on his arm, but seemed unable to rise. He lifted her from that seat of humiliation and took her, wavering between his supporting hands, to a low chair beside the coal grate. She sank into it, and he put a cushion under her feet. He persuaded her to drink the rest of the brandy. She stopped crying and leaned back, her eyes closed, her hands lying nerveless on the arms of the chair. Seabury thought he had never seen her when she was more beautiful … probably that was because she was helpless and he was young.