"Yes, yes," she interrupted me quickly, "I have thought and thought till I can think no more. There must be some sacrifice; it must be as little as need be, that is all. He does not love me; he is marrying me for my money--I know that, and I am glad of it. You do not know me, Paul. I must have rank, position. What am I? The daughter of rich old Hasluck, who began life as a butcher in the Mile End Road.
As the Princess Huescar, society will forget, as Mrs."--it seemed to me she checked herself abruptly--"Jones or Brown it would remember, however rich I might be. I am vain, Paul, caring for power--ambition.
I have my father's blood in me. All his nights and days he has spent in gaining wealth; he can do no more. We upstarts have our pride of race. He has done his share, I must do mine."
"But you need not be mere Mrs. anybody commonplace," I argued. "Why not wait? You will meet someone who can give you position and whom at the same time you can love. Would that not be better?"
"He will never come, the man I could love," she answered. "Because, my little Paul, he has come already. Hush, Paul, the queen can do no wrong."
"Who is he?" I asked. "May I not know?"
"Yes, Paul," she answered, "you shall know; I want you to know, then you shall tell me that I have acted rightly. Do you hear me, Paul?--quite rightly--that you still respect me and honour me. He could not help me. As his wife, I should be less even than I am, a mere rich nobody, giving long dinner-parties to other rich nobodies, living amongst City men, retired trades-people; envied only by their fat, vulgarly dressed wives, courted by seedy Bohemians for the sake of my cook; with perhaps an opera singer or an impecunious nobleman or two out of Dad's City list for my show-guests. Is that the court, Paul, where you would have your queen reign?"
"Is he so commonplace a man," I answered, "the man you love? I cannot believe it."
"He is not commonplace," she answered. "It is I who am commonplace.
The things I desire, they are beneath him; he will never trouble himself to secure them."
"Not even for love of you?"
"I would not have him do so even were he willing. He is great, with a greatness I cannot even understand. He is not the man for these times. In old days, I should have married him, knowing he would climb to greatness by sheer strength of manhood. But now men do not climb; they crawl to greatness. He could not do that. I have done right, Paul."
"What does be say?" I asked.
"Shall I tell you?" She laughed a little bitterly. "I can give you his exact words, 'You are half a woman and half a fool, so woman-like you will follow your folly. But let your folly see to it that your woman makes no fool of herself.'"
The words were what I could imagine his saying. I heard the strong ring of his voice through her mocking mimicry.
"Hal!" I cried. "It is he."
"So you never guessed even that, Paul. I thought at times it would be sweet to cry it out aloud, that it could have made no difference, that everyone who knew me must have read it in my eyes."
"But he never seemed to take much notice of you," I said.
She laughed. "You needn't be so unkind, Paul. What did I ever do for you much more than snub you? We boys and girls; there is not so much difference between us: we love our masters. Yet you must not think so poorly of me. I was only a child to him then, but we were locked up in Paris together during the entire siege. Have not you heard? He did take a little notice of me there, Paul, I assure you."
Would it have been better, I wonder, had she followed the woman and not the fool? It sounds an easy question to answer; but I am thinking of years later, one winter's night at Tiefenkasten in the Julier Pass.
I was on my way from San Moritz to Chur. The sole passenger, I had just climbed, half frozen, from the sledge, and was thawing myself before the stove in the common room of the hotel when the waiter put a pencilled note into my hand:
"Come up and see me. I am a prisoner in this damned hole till the weather breaks. Hal."
I hardly recognised him at first. Only the poor ghost he seemed of the Hal I had known as a boy. His long privations endured during the Paris siege, added to the superhuman work he had there put upon himself, had commenced the ruin of even his magnificent physique--a ruin the wild, loose life he was now leading was soon to complete. It was a gloomy, vaulted room that once had been a chapel, lighted dimly by a cheap, evil-smelling lamp, heated to suffocation by one of those great green-tiled German ovens now only to be met with in rare out-of-the-way world corners. He was sitting propped up by pillows on the bed, placed close to one of the high windows, his deep eyes flaring like two gleaming caverns out of his drawn, haggard face.
"I saw you from the window," he explained. "It is the only excitement I get, twice a day when the sledges come in. I broke down coming across the Pass a fortnight ago, on my way from Davos. We were stuck in a drift for eighteen hours; it nearly finished my last lung. And I haven't even a book to read. By God! lad, I was glad to see your frosted face ten minutes ago in the light of the lantern."
He grasped me with his long bony hand. "Sit down, and let me hear my voice using again its mother tongue--you were always a good listener--for the last eight years I have hardly spoken it. Can you stand the room? The windows ought to be open, but what does it matter? I may as well get accustomed to the heat before I die."
I drew my chair close to the bed, and for awhile, between his fits of coughing, we talked of things that were outside our thoughts, or, rather, Hal talked, continuously, boisterously, meeting my remonstrances with shouts of laughter, ending in wild struggles for breath, so that I deemed it better to let him work his mad mood out.
Then suddenly: "What is she doing?" he asked. "Do you ever see her?"
"She is playing in--" I mentioned the name of a comic opera then running in Paris. "No; I have not seen her for some time."
