FORTINBRAS paced the deck of the homeward bound steamer deep in thought. He still wore the costume of the elderly cabinet minister; but his air was that of the cabinet minister returning to a wrecked ministry. His broad shoulders were rounded and bent; his face had fallen from its benevolent folds into fleshy haggardness. He felt old; he felt inexpressibly lonely. He had not repeated the social experiment of the voyage out. Save to his Dutch and Russian table neighbours he had not the heart to speak to any one. A deep melancholy enwrapped him. After his philosophical communion with the sage Abu Mohammed he shrank from platitudinous commerce with the profane. It was for the heart and not for the mind that he craved companionship. He was travelling (second-class, for economy’s sake) back to the old half-charlatan life. For all one’s learning and wisdom, one cannot easily embark on a new career in the middle-fifties. He must be Marchand de Bonheur to the end. He wondered whether he would miss Cécile. Such things had happened. No matter how degraded, she had been a human thing to greet him on his return from his preposterous toil. Also, her needs had been an incentive; they had sharpened the hawk’s vision during the daily round of cafés and restaurants, and quickened his pounce upon the divined five-franc piece. Would he have the nerve, the unwearied patience, the bitter sense of martyrdom, wherewith to carry on his trade? Again, in days past his heavy heart had been uplifted by the love of a child like the wild flowers from which Alpine honey is made, away in the depths of old-world France. But now he had forfeited her love. She had written to him, all these weeks in Egypt, dutifully, irreproachably; had given him the news, such as it was, of Brant?me. She had told him of the state of her uncle’s health—invariably robust; of the arrivals and departures of elegant motorists; of the march through the town decorated for the occasion of a host of petits soldats, amid the enthusiasm and Marseillaise singing of the inhabitants; of the sudden death by apoplexy of the good Madame Chauvet, and the sudden development of business on the part of her daughters, who almost immediately had taken the next shop and launched out into iron wreaths and crosses, and artificial flowers and funeral inscriptions, touching and pious; of the purchases of geese; of the infatuation of the elderly Euphémie for the youthful waiter, erstwhile plongeur of the Café de l’Univers; of all sorts and conditions of unimportant happenings; finally of the betrothal of Monsieur Lucien Viriot and Estelle Mazabois, the daughter of the famous Mazabois who kept a great drapery establishment of Périgueux—“she has the dowry of a princess and the head of a rocking-horse, so they are sure to be happy,” wrote Félise. The manner of this last announcement shocked him. Félise had changed. She had given him all the news, but her letters had grown self-conscious and artificial. To avoid the old, artless expressions of endearment, she rushed into sprightly narrative, and signed herself “his affectionate daughter.” He had lost Félise.
Yes, he felt old and lonely, unnerved for the struggle. Even Martin had forsaken him.
He had encountered a stony-faced, wrong-headed young man on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel the noon before he sailed, and found all his nostrums for happiness high-handedly rejected. Martin had been an idle woman’s toy, a fiery toy as it turned out; and when she burned her fingers, she had dropped him. So much was obvious; most of it he had foreseen. He had counted on eventual declaration and summary dismissal; but he had not reckoned on a prelude of reciprocated sentiment. Contrary to habit, Martin gave him but a confused view of his state of mind. The unhappy lover would hear not a word against his peerless lady. On the other hand, his love for her had blasted his existence. This appalling fact, though he did not proclaim it so heroically, he allowed Fortinbras to apprehend. He neither reproached him for past advice nor asked for new. To the suggestion that he should return to Brant?me and accept Bigourdin’s offer, he turned a deaf ear. He had cut himself adrift; he must go whithersoever winds and tides should carry him, and they were carrying him far from Périgord.
“In what direction?” Fortinbras had enquired.
“Thank Heaven, I don’t know myself,” he had answered. “Anyhow, I am going to seek my fortune. I must have money and power so that I can snap my fingers at the world. That’s what I’m going to live for.”
And soon after that declaration he had wrung Fortinbras by the hand, and hailing an arabeah had driven off into the unknown. Fortinbras had felt like the hen who sees her duckling brood sail away down the brook. He had lost control of his disciple; he mattered nothing to the young man setting forth on his wild-goose chase after fortune. His charming little scheme had failed. He anticipated the reproaches of Bigourdin, the accusation in the eyes of Félise. “Why did you side with the enemy? Why did you drive Martin away?” . . .
He felt old and lonely, a pathetic failure; so he walked the second-class deck with listless shoulders and bowed head, his hands in his pockets.
“Tiens! Monsieur Fortinbras! who would have thought it?” cried a fresh voice.
He looked up and saw a dark-eyed girl, her head enveloped in a motor-veil, who extended a friendly hand.
“Mademoiselle . . .” he began uncertainly.
“Mais oui! Eugénie Dubois. You must remember me. There was also le grand Jules—Jules Massart.”
“Yes, I remember,” he said courteously, with a wan smile.
“You saved us both from a pretty mess.”
“I remember the saving; but I forget the mess. It is my rule always to forget such things.”
She laughed gaily, burst into an account of herself. She was a modiste in the great Paris firm of Odille et Compagnie, which had a branch at Cairo. Now she was recalled for the Paris and London season.
“Et justement”—she plucked at his sleeve and led him to a seat—“I am in a tangle of an affair which keeps me awake of nights. You fall upon me from the skies like an angel. Be good and give me a consultation.”
She fished out her purse and extracted a twenty-five piastre piece. He motioned her hand away.
“Mon enfant” said he. “You are an honourable little soul. But I don’t do business on a holiday. Raconte-moi ton affaire.”
But she protested. She would not abuse his kindness. Either a consultation at the regulation price or no consultation at all. At last he said:
“Eh bien! give me your five francs.”
She obeyed. He rose. “Come,” said he, and led the way to the stairhead by the saloon where was fixed the collecting box in aid of the Fund for Shipwrecked Mariners. He slipped the coin down the slot.
“Now,” said he, “honour is satisfied.”
But listening to her artless and complicated tale, he wondered, while a shiver ran over his frame, whether he would ever be able again to slip a five-franc piece into his waistcoat pocket. He felt yet older than before, incapable of piercing to the root of youth’s perplexities. He counselled with oracular vagueness, conscious of not having earned his fee. He paced the deck again.
“Were it not for Abu Mohammed,” he said, “I should call it a disastrous journey.”
Meanwhile Martin, lonelier even than he, sat in the bows of a great Eastward bound steamer, his eyes opened to the staring facts of life. No longer must he masquerade as the man of fashion—never again until he had bought the right. The remains of his small capital he must keep intact for the day of need. No more the luxury of first-class travel. This voyage in the steerage was but a means of transit to the new lands where he would win his way to fortune. He needed no advice. He had spiritually and morally outgrown his tutelage. No longer, so he told himself, would he nourish his soul on dreams. It could feed if it liked on memories. The madness had passed. He drew the breath of an honest man. If he had taken Lucilla at her word and married her, what would have been his existence? Trailing about the idle world in the wake of a rich wife, dependent on her bounty even for a pair of shoe-laces; eating out his heart for the love she could not give; at last, perhaps, quarrelling desperately, or else with sapped will-power sunk in sloth, accepting from her an allowance on condition that they should live apart. He had heard of such marriages since he had mingled with the wealthy. Even had she met him with a love as passionate as his own, would the happiness have lasted? In his grim mood he thought not. He reasoned himself into the conviction that his loss had been his gain. Far better that he should be among these few poor folk who sat down to table in their shirt-sleeves, than that he should be eating the flesh-pots of dishonour in the land of Egypt. He himself dined in his shirt-sleeves, as he had done many a time before in the kitchen of the H?tel des Grottes.
Yet he hungered for her. It seemed impossible that he should never see her again, never again watch the sweep of the adorable brown eyelashes, the subtle play of laugh............