The de Bercy Affair

"But seriously," she heard Osborne say, "what is your opinion of a love so apparently fickle and flighty as this of Osborne's?"

"Let me alone with your Osborne," Rosalind retorted with another little laugh. "A person of such a mood is merely uninteresting, and below being a topic. Let the dead lady's father or somebody horsewhip him – I cannot care, I'm afraid. Let us talk about – "

"Ourselves?"

"'Ourselves and our king.'"

"I have so much to say about ourselves! Where should I begin? And now that I have a few minutes, I am throwing them away. Do you know, I never seem to secure you free from interruption. Either yourself or someone else intervenes every time, and reduces me to silence and despair – "

Their words passed beyond earshot again in the other direction; and, as the lawn was wide between house and screen of shrubbery on the road front, it was some time before they were again heard. At last, though, they came, and then Rosalind's low tone of earnestness showed that this time, at least, Osborne had been listened to.

"I will, since you ask, since you wish" – her voice faltered – "to please you. You will be at the Abbey to-morrow evening. And, since you say that you so – desire it, I may then hear what you have to say. Now I'll go."

"But when – where – ?"

"If the night is fine, I will stroll into the gardens during the evening. You will see me when I go. On the south terrace of the Abbey there is a sun-dial in the middle of a paved Italian garden. I'll pass that way, and give you half an hour."

"Rosalind!"

"Ah, no – not yet."

Her lips sighed. She looked at him with a lingering tenderness languishing in her eyes.

"Can I help it?" he murmured, and his voice quivered with passion.

"Are you glad now?"

"Glad!"

"Good-by."

She left him hurriedly and sped with inimitable grace of motion across the lawn toward the house, and, while he looked after her, with the rapt vision of a man who has communed with a spirit, the two listeners crept to the little gate, slipped out when a laughing couple turned their heads, and walked back to the hotel.

The lady said never a word. Mr. Pugh was full of chat and merriment, but no syllable fell from her tight-pressed lips.

The next day the lady was reported to have a headache – at any rate she kept to her room, and saw no one save the "boots" of the establishment, with whom during the afternoon she had a lengthy interview upstairs. At about seven in the evening she was writing these words:

Miss Marsh: – Are you aware that the "Mr. Glyn" whom you know here is no other than Mr. Rupert Osborne, who is in everyone's mouth in connection with the Feldisham Mansions Murder? You may take this as a positive fact from

"One Who Knows."

She wrote it in a handwriting that was very different from her own, inclosed and directed it, and then, about half-past seven, sent for "boots" again.

Her instructions were quite explicit:

"Wait in the paved rose garden at the Abbey, the square sunken place with a sun-dial in the center," she said. "It is on the south terrace, and the lady I have described will surely come. The moment she appears hand the note to her, and be off – above all else, answer no questions."

So the youth, with a sovereign in his pocket, hurried away to do Hylda Prout's will – or was it Furneaux's? Who might tell?

CHAPTER VIII

AT THE SUN-DIAL

The messenger of evil had waited twenty minutes by the side of the sun-dial, when he saw a lady come round the corner from the front of the house, and saunter towards him. Moonlight lay weltering on the white walks of the terrace, on the whiter slabs of stone, on the water of the basin, on the surface of the lake eastward where the lowest of the terraces curved into the parkland that the wavelets lapped on. It weltered, too, on the lady's hair, deftly coiled and twisted into the coiffure of a Greek statue. It shimmered on the powdered blue of her gown that made her coming a little ghostly in that light, on the rows of pearls around her throat, and on the satin gloss of her shoes. She made straight for the dial; and then, all at once, finding some unknown man keeping the tryst, half halted.

He ran out to her, touched his cap, saying "Miss Marsh," handed her the note, touched his cap again, and was going.

"From whom?" she called after him in some astonishment.

"Lady at the Swan, miss" – and he hurried off even more swiftly, for this was a question which he had answered against orders.

She stood a little, looking at the envelope, her breathing labored, an apprehension in her heart. Then, hearing the coming of footsteps which she knew, she broke it open, and ran her eye over the few words.

Bending slightly, with the flood of the moon on the paper, she could easily read the plainly written, message.

… The Mr. Glyn whom you know is no other than the Mr. Rupert Osborne who is in everyone's mouth in connection with the Feldisham Mansions Murder…

Now she laughed with a sudden catch of the breath, gasping "Oh!" with a sharp impatience of all anonymous scandalizers. But as her head rather swam and span, she walked on quickly to the basin, and there found it necessary to sit down on the marble. The stab of pain passed in a few seconds, and again she sprang up and laughed as lightly as one of the little fountains in the basin that tossed its tinted drops to the moonbeams.

Not twenty yards away was Osborne coming to her.

She looked at him steadily – her marvelous eyes self-searching for sure remembrance of the earnestness with which he had pleaded in favor of the lover of Rose de Bercy – how he had said that Osborne had already loved again; and how she, Rosalind – oh, how blind and deaf! – heedlessly had brushed aside his words, saying that a man of that mood was below being a topic…

"Is it half an hour?" Osborne came whispering, with a bending of the body that was like an act of worship.

She smiled. In the moonlight he could not perceive how ethereally white was her face.

"It is one half-minute!.. It was rather quixotic of you to have proposed, and of me to have accepted, such a meeting. But I felt sure that by this hour others would be strolling about the terraces. As it is, you see, we are pioneers without followers. So, till we meet again – "

She seemed to be about to hurry away without another word; he stood aghast.

"But, Rosalind – "

"What? How dare you call me Rosalind?"

Now her eyes flashed upon him like sudden lightning from a dark blue sky, and the scorn in her voice blighted him.

"I – I – don't understand," he stammered, trying to come nearer. She drew her skirts aside with a disdain that was terrifying.

Then she laughed softly again; and was gone.

He looked after her as after treasure that one sees sinking into the sea, flashing in its descent to the depths. For one mad instant he had an impulse to run in vain pursuit, but instead he gave way, sank down upon the edge of the marble basin, just where she had dropped a few brief seconds earlier, covered his face, and a groan that was half a sob broke so loudly from his throat that she heard it. She hesitated, nearly stopped, did not look round, scourged herself into resolution, and in another moment had turned the corner of the house and was lost to sight.

What had happened to change his Rosalind into this unapproachable empress Osborne was too stunned to ask himself explicitly. He knew he was banned, and that was enough. Deep in his subconsciousness he understood that somehow she had found out his wretched secret – found out that he was not the happy Glyn reeling through an insecure dream in fairyland, but the unhappy Osborne, heavily tangled in the sordid and the commonplace.

And, because he was unhappy and troubled, she left him without pity, turned her back eternally upon him. That hurt. As he stood up to walk away toward Tormouth, a fierce anger and a gush of self-pity battled in his eyes.

He had no more hope. He wandered on through the night, unseeing, stricken as never before. At last he reached the hotel, and, as soon as he could summon the energy, began to pack his portmanteau to go back to London. The day of the postponed inquest now loomed near, and he cared not a jot what became of him, only asking dumbly to be taken far from Tormouth.