Madame De Mauves eBook

base concessions—­such extremities may always somehow be dodged or indefinitely postponed.  I should be willing to buy myself off, from having ever to be overwhelmed, by giving up—­well, any amusement you like.”  She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally convinced—­of seeing to the end of her deception.  Longmore, when he thought of this, felt the force of his desire to offer her something of which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.

IV

His friend Webster meanwhile lost no time in accusing him of the basest infidelity and in asking him what he found at suburban Saint-Germain to prefer to Van Eyck and Memling, Rubens and Rembrandt.  A day or two after the receipt of this friend’s letter he took a walk with Madame de Mauves in the forest.  They sat down on a fallen log and she began to arrange into a bouquet the anemones and violets she had gathered.  “I’ve a word here,” he said at last, “from a friend whom I some time ago promised to join in Brussels.  The time has come—­it has passed.  It finds me terribly unwilling to leave Saint-Germain.”

She looked up with the immediate interest she always showed in his affairs, but with no hint of a disposition to make a personal application of his words.  “Saint-Germain is pleasant enough, but are you doing yourself justice?  Shan’t you regret in future days that instead of travelling and seeing cities and monuments and museums and improving your mind you simply sat here—­for instance—­on a log and pulled my flowers to pieces?”

“What I shall regret in future days,” he answered after some hesitation, “is that I should have sat here—­sat here so much—­and never have shown what’s the matter with me.  I’m fond of museums and monuments and of improving my mind, and I’m particularly fond of my friend Webster.  But I can’t bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without asking you a question.  You must forgive me if it’s indiscreet and be assured that curiosity was never more respectful.  Are you really as unhappy as I imagine you to be?”

She had evidently not expected his appeal, and, making her change colour, it took her unprepared.  “If I strike you as unhappy,” she none the less simply said, “I’ve been a poorer friend to you than I wished to be.”

“I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than you’ve supposed,” he returned.  “I’ve admired your reserve, your courage, your studied gaiety.  But I’ve felt the existence of something beneath them that was more you—­more you as I wished to know you—­than they were; some trouble in you that I’ve permitted myself to hate and resent.”