When they reached the wide doorway they slipped out onto the balcony. It was cool here and quiet and there was no light except that which came from the Bar. They sat down at a table apart from the others and close to the garden. A waiter followed them out quickly and looked at Marguerite for an order. “May I have a citronade?” she asked of Paul, and he replied:
“Let me order for you, will you? A little supper and some red wine. You are hungry.”
Marguerite looked at him swiftly and dropped her eyes.
“Yes, I am hungry,” she said, and a smile slowly trembled about her lips and then lit up her whole face. “I have never admitted it before.”
The hollows of her shoulders, the unnaturally bright, large eyes burning in her thin face, and an air of lassitude she had, told a story of starvation clearly enough. But the visitors at the Villa Iris had not the compassion nor the interest to read it, and Marguerite, for her own reasons, had always been at pains that it should not be read at all. Now, however, she smiled, glad of Paul’s care, glad that he had seen at once with such keen, sure eyes one of the things which were amiss with her. Paul ordered some chicken and a salad.
“But the waiter will be quick, won’t he?” she urged. “Madame is not very content if we are idle.”
Paul laughed.
“I’ll speak to her,” he said lightly. “I’ll tell her that she is not to worry you to-night.”
He rose half out of his chair, meaning to buy an evening of rest for Marguerite Lambert from the old harridan behind the Bar. A bottle of champagne would no doubt be the price and there was no compulsion upon them to drink it. But he was not yet upon his feet when the girl reached out her hand and caught his sleeve.
“No! Please!” she cried with a vehemence which quite startled him. “If she sends for me, I have got to go and you mustn’t say a word! Promise me!”
She was in terror. Even now her eyes glanced affrightedly towards the open doorway, already expecting the appearance of her mistress. To the enigma which the girl’s presence at all in the Villa Iris proposed to Paul Ravenel, here was another added. Why should she be so terrified of that red-faced, bustling woman behind the Bar? After all, Marguerite Lambert—the only delicate and fresh and young girl who had danced there for a living—must mean custom to Madame Delagrange; must be therefore a personage to be considered, not a mere slave to be terrified and driven! Why, then—? How, then—? And his blood was hot at the mere thought of Marguerite’s terror and subjection.
But he showed nothing of his anger, nothing of his perplexity in his face. He was at pains to reassure her. Let him not add to her fears and troubles.
“I promise, Marguerite,” he said. “But let’s hope she doesn’t notice your absence.”
Once more she smiled, her face a flame of tenderness.
“You called me by my name.”
He repeated it, dwelling upon its syllables.
“It’s a beautiful name,” he said.
“Perhaps, as you speak it,” she answered with a laugh. “But wait till you hear how harsh a word Madame can make of it.”
The waiter brought the supper and laid it on the table between them.
“Eat and drink first,” said Paul Ravenel, as he poured the red wine into her glass. “Then we will talk.”
“You shall tell me your name before I begin.”
“Paul—Paul Ravenel,” said he, and she repeated the name once with her big, serious eyes fixed upon him and a second time with a little grimace which wrinkled up her nose and gave to her whole face a flash of gaiety. She drew her chair to the table with an anticipation and relish which filled Paul with pity and tugged sharply at the strings of his heart. She ate her supper with enjoyment and daintiness.
“A cigarette?” said Paul, offering her his case as soon as she had finished.
“Thank you! Oh, but I was hungry!”
She lit it and leaning back in her chair smoked whilst the waiter cleared the supper away and set the bottle and the glasses between them on the table. Then Marguerite leaned forward, her face between her hands, her elbows on the table.
“Paul!” she said with a smile, as if the name was a fruit and delightful to taste.
“I saw you,” she continued in a low voice, “when you first came into the room, you and your friend. I thought at once that you would come for me as you did. I called to you—yes, even then—oh, with all my strength—quietly—to myself. But I called so earnestly that I was afraid that I had cried my little prayer out loud. And then when I lost sight of you out here in the dark I was afraid. I didn’t see you come in again. I only knew suddenly that you were standing behind me.”
Paul Ravenel watched her as she spoke, her great eyes shining, her face delicately white in that dim light. He had no doubt that she spoke in all frankness and simplicity the truth. Were they not once more alone, shut off by a wall of dreams from all the world? Paul leaned forward and took her hand.
“I did not need to hear you call, Marguerite. I saw you, too, at once. My friend had heard of you, was looking for you. I saw you. I told him where you were”; and for a moment the girl’s face clouded over and the spell was broken.
So far Paul Ravenel had spoken in French. Now he asked in English:
“Why do they call you the American?”
Marguerite Lambert stared at him with her eyes opened wide.
“You, too?”
“Yes. We are of the same race.”
She looked at his uniform.
“My mother was French, my father English. He took my mother’s nationality,” he said.
Marguerite suddenly stretched both her hands across the table to him in a swift abandonment.
“I am glad,” she said. “I come from Devonshire.”
“I from Sussex.”
“I from the county of broad moors and little valleys. You from—”; and some look upon his face checked her suddenly. “I have said something that hurts?” she asked remorsefully.
“No,” answered Paul, and for a few moments they were silent. To both of them this revelation that they were of the same race was no longer so much of a surprise as a portent. They were like travellers not quite sure that their feet were on their due appointed road, who come upon a sign post and know that they have made no mistake. These two had no doubt that they were upon their road of destiny, that this swift, unexpected friendship would lead them together into new countries where their lives would be fulfilled.
“Just to imagine if I had never come to the Villa Iris!” Paul exclaimed with a gasp of fear; so near he had been to not coming. But Marguerite’s eyelids drooped over her eyes and a look of doubt and sadness shadowed her face. Exaltations and hopes—here were bright things she dared hardly look upon, for if she once looked and took them to her heart, and found them false, what was merely grievous would no longer be endurable.
“It is a long way from Devonshire to Casablanca,” cried Paul, and Marguerite smiled.
“There’s a question very prettily put,” said she.
Her story was ordinary enough in its essentials. “Some families go up,” she said simply. “Others seem doomed to go right down and bring every member of them down too. Most English villages have an example, I think. Once and not so long ago they were well off and lived in their farm house. Now every descendant is a labourer in a cottage, except one or two perhaps who have emigrated and fared no better abroad. The Lamberts were like that.”
Marguerite had been born when the family were more than half way down the hill, although outwardly it still showed prosperous. Her father, a widower, spent more of his time upon race-courses than upon his farm and made it a point of pride to educate his children in the fashionable and expensive schools.
“He was the most happy-go-lucky man that ever lived,” said Marguerite. “We knew nothing of the debts or the mortgages. He was all for being a gentleman and to be a gentleman in his definition was to spend money. He came down to breakfast one morning—there were the four of us at home, my brother, my two sisters and myself, and said cheerily, ‘Well, girls, all the money’s gone and the farm, too.’ Then he ate his breakfast cheerily, went upstairs and blew out his brains with his shot-gun, I suppose quite cheerily, too.”
The catastrophe had happened a little more than two years before, when Marguerite was between seventeen and eighteen. Misfortune scatters a family as a wind autumn leaves. The brother, a small replica of his father, departed for the Argentine, cheerily confident of rebuilding by an opportune speculation the Lambert fortune; the eldest of the sisters married an unsuccessful farmer in the neighbourhood with whom she was in love; the second became a private secretary, lost her job within the week, and discovered her proper sphere of work, as a pretty waitress in a tea-shop. Marguerite herself secured an engagement in the chorus of a Musical Comedy company which was touring the provinces.
“We were just ordinary girls,” Marguerite continued, “rather fecklessly brought up, fairly good-looking, decent manners, but nothing outstanding. There wasn’t any Edna May amongst us. We just did what we could, not very well.” Marguerite suddenly broke into a delicious laugh. “You heard me sing, didn’t you? Pathetic, wasn’t it? At least it would have been if I hadn’t felt the humour of it all the while. Well, we got stranded in Wigan—I am speaking of my Musical Comedy company. I pawned a few things and travelled to London. Three of the chorus girls and I clubbed together and got lodgings in Bloomsbury. But it was October when the most of the touring companies had already gone out and fresh engagements were only probable for the Christmas pantomime. One after another of my companions dropped away. Finally I was offered an opening in a concert party which was to tour the music halls in France. I was to dance between the songs.”
“A concert party!” said Paul. “That sounds doubtful.”
Marguerite nodded.
“I was warned against it. The White Slave traffic! But I had to take my risk. And as it happened there wasn’t any roguery of that kind. Our concert party was genuine. Only it didn’t attract and at Avignon it came to an end. There seems to me to be a curse on families going down hill. Misfortunes centre upon them. It is as though a decent world wanted to hurry them right down and comfortably out of sight as soon as possible, so that it might no longer feel the shame of them.” Marguerite laughed, not so much in bitterness as in submission to a law. “Perhaps it is simply that we who belong to those families don’t will hard enough that things should go right.”
Paul Ravenel looked sharply at his companion. He had instances within his own knowledge to bear out the shrewdness of her remark. His father and Colonel Vanderfelt! What difference was there between them, except that one willed hard enough to atone for a crime and the other did not?
“Yes. I expect that’s the truth, if you are started down hill,” he said slowly. “And then what did you do?”
There was a great fear in his heart as to what her answer might be. He was already making excuses—already arguing why should there be one law for the man and another for the woman—and rebelling against the argument. Marguerite did not resolve his fears in her account of her miserable little Odyssey; nor, on the other hand, did she increase them.
“I had enough money to take me to Marseilles. . . . I danced at a café there for a little while. I was told that if I crossed the Mediterranean to Oran . . . I managed to do that and I danced at Oran for a little while. Then I came on to Casablanca,” and she caught her breath and clasped her hands convulsively under the sting of some ever-present terror. “And I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of what?” asked Paul.
“That I shall not stay here long, either,” she cried in a dreadful note of despair, with her great eyes suddenly full of tears. “Then what shall I do?”
Even as she spoke that question her face changed. Some one was coming out from the Bar through the doorway. A smile of convention upon her lips masked her misery.
“I shall have to go now, Paul,” she said in a low voice, caressing his name. “I am sorry. And you will let me go, as you promised?”
“Yes,” said Paul regretfully.
“And you will come here again, some evening, soon, Paul!” she whispered with a wistful little smile upon her lips.
“I shall wait now.”
The smile disappeared at once.
“No. I must dance now. I told you Madame did not like to see me idle. I shall not be able to sit with you again this evening, and we do not close until two or three in the morning, if there is any one to stay. So to-morrow, perhaps, Paul?”
“To-morrow, Marguerite.”
She stood up as a man approached the table. He was a thick-set, stoutish man with a heavy black moustache and a yellowish, shiny face. He was one of those who had been seated at the table in the saloon with Marguerite when Ravenel and Gerard de Montignac had entered the room. He came up with a frown upon his face and spoke surlily in French, with a harsh, metallic accent.
“We wait a long time for you.”
Marguerite Lambert made no rejoinder. “You wish me to dance with you,” she said. “I am very happy,” and with a smile of convention upon her lips she said good-night carelessly to Paul Ravenel. But the appeal and softness of her eyes took the convention out of her smile and the carelessness from her farewell.
Paul, left alone at the table, watched her through the doorway as she danced. Her little plain pink frock was as neat as attention could make it, her shoes and stockings were spotless, her hair, brown with a flicker of copper, parted at the side and with a curiously attractive little peak in the centre of her forehead, was waved smoothly about her small head. His hands had been tingling to stroke it, to feel its silk and warmth rippling beneath his fingers, whilst they had been sitting together on the balcony. There was a slovenliness in the aspect of the other women. Marguerite was orderly as though even amidst the squalor of her environment she kept on respecting herself. She wore no ornaments at all. She was fairly tall, with slim legs and beautiful hands and feet. As he watched her Paul fell into a cold and bitter rage against the oily-mustachioed creature with whom she danced.
“Gerard was right,” he said to himself. “We go out and fight, we get ourselves killed and mutilated, so that such fellows may make money and keep it up all night in the Bars. The Profiteers! We who are about to die salute you!”
Thus he apostrophised the man who had taken Marguerite Lambert away from him, raging furiously. The old prudent Paul Ravenel counting his steps and avoiding emotions, had for the moment quite disappeared. He was a boy of nineteen, ardent and unreasonable, and a little ridiculous in the magniloquence of his thoughts. The only comfort he drew was from an aloofness in Marguerite of which she had shown nothing whilst she sat with him, but which was now very evident. She did not speak whilst she danced, her eyelids were lowered, her face had lost all its expression. Paul had a fancy that she had just left her body to revolve and glide delicately in the dance, whilst her spirit had withdrawn itself into some untarnished home of its own. The piano suddenly was dumb; the dancers stopped: Marguerite and her partner were standing face to face in front of the doorway. Paul had promised not to interfere. Very well then, he would go. He rose abruptly to his feet, his eyes fixed upon the couple; and at once, though Marguerite never looked his way, she moved sharply. It was a quick little start, hardly perceptible. Paul felt a wave of joy sweep over him. She was conscious of him, as he was conscious of her, so that if he moved abruptly she at a distance was startled. He turned with a smile upon his lips, but after all he did not go, as he had intended to do. For Henriette came out of the Bar towards him.
“Won’t you stay for a minute,” she said, “and give me something to drink! I am dying of thirst!”
“Of course,” he said, and he called to the waiter. He had a great goodwill towards all women that night, but above all to the women of the Villa Iris.