SHE stood near a window, where she had been watching the fantastic life of the roadway below; and neither Diana of Poitiers nor Mlle. de L'Enclos, nearest and most famous rivals of Aurélie Momoro, could have looked more imposingly and mysteriously beautiful in a brown travelling suit made by a modern tailor. Travelling bags, packed and locked, were upon a table, and the two fur coats she had with her during the excursion by motor hung over the backs of two chairs.
She gave Ogle a smile somewhat inscrutable, though there seemed to be a wistfulness about it. "Come to the window for a moment," she said. "A long caravan is just passing; shaggy old camels and worn-out donkeys and lean goats and dogs—Nomads coming in from far down in the Desert. You must see them."
"No, I thank you," he said, and, after looking at him quickly, she turned from the window to face him; but she no longer smiled.
She waved a hand already gloved toward the travelling bags and fur coats. "I am leaving you, my friend, you see."
"Are you? Do you think your other friend will be able to get away?"
She looked at him again, longer this time. "Let us sit down, if you please," she said; and they sat, facing each other. "What 'other friend' do you speak of?"
At that the pale young man laughed harshly. "How absurd! I met him downstairs not five minutes ago and he told me he might be leaving this afternoon—'in about an hour,' he said. He was waiting to be told. Haven't you sent him word of his good fortune yet?"
"What good fortune?" she asked, and she frowned. "Upon my word, I understand you no more than if you were speaking in Magyar, a language I haven't acquired. What do you mean to be saying to me? Who is it you saw downstairs?"
"Merely the man you came all this distance to meet."
At that, the faintest pinkness in the world overspread her composed features. "Why do you say such things? You are angry, my dear."
"Please don't call me that!"
"Very well," she said, with a little agitation. "It hurts me that you are angry with me. You have meant to be kind to me; I have wished to be kind to you. But, no! At the last moment you are in a fury. Yes: anyone could see it; you are white with fury. Do you know how pale you are? Why should you be in a rage with me?"
"I don't know that I'm in a rage with you," he answered heavily. "It seems to me that my rage is with myself."
She shook her head. "I think not. Women have those rages with themselves sometimes, I think it is true; but men possess a great talent for pardoning themselves everything. What you wish to say, I think, is that you complain of me and that you hate me. What for? What have I done to you?"
"You ask that?" he said with bitterest meaning.
"Why should I not ask it? Ah, I know well enough what you wish to say, Mr. Ogle; but because you feel that a gentleman wouldn't say it, you will not put it into spoken words from your mouth." She had begun to show greater agitation; her long hands clasped themselves tightly together in her lap, and her voice became louder. "What is the difference between saying it and thinking it? Are you a better gentleman if you have such things in your heart to charge me with, but do not speak them?"
"I charge you with nothing."
"No, not with your spoken words," she said. "But to me, isn't it the same? Wait! Don't speak! I will say them for you. You are telling me in your heart that I have accepted everything and given nothing, that you have done all for me and I nothing for you. Well, I tell you that is not true. You even think that I have borne nothing from you; and I tell you that is another thing that is not true."
"What have you 'borne' from me?"
"You ask me that!" she exclaimed, thus turning his own reproach upon him; and she sprang to her feet, looking so tall, as she stood before him, that her head seemed almost as high above him as had the golden head in his uncomfortable dream. "What haven't I!" she cried. "What haven't I borne!" And she began to walk up and down the room with her hands pressed against her temples. "What haven't I!"
Nothing could have surprised him more completely; he had not come to be put upon the defensive; but already he found himself inexplicably in that unfortunate posture. "Didn't you just tell me I had been kind to you?"
"I said you had meant to be. There is a difference. You were kind in your own intention, and I would have liked to part with you letting you think that your intention made a real kindness. But you wouldn't have it like that; you are come to me hatefully, full of accusations in your mind, and so I am willing to tell you that some kindnesses can be torture."
"My kindness to you, I suppose you mean?"
"A thousand times I mean it!"
He had risen, too, and stood beside his chair, looking at her as she paced swiftly up and down the room. "I suppose you'll tell me why."
"Indeed I will." She came and faced him. "From the moment we began to go up into the mountains of Kabyle you assumed the attitude of an unwilling person who has been tricked into doing what he doesn't wish to do. Day after day you have kept that attitude. You would sit saying nothing at all, and always with that peevishness upon your face. Ah, yes, it was! Peevishness! And I was your guest; but you made me earn my way! I must entertain you; I must be always charming! I must get that peevishness out of your face! Do you know how a woman feels when she must sit all day beside a peevish man, trying and trying and trying to make a pleasanter expression show itself upon his face? No, of course not; no man can know such things! But I tell you when we have arrived here in Biskra I was exhausted with the struggle. Not with the days of driving—that could have been a delight—but with the effort to earn my way as your guest by making you cheerful. One more day of that, and I would be ready to cut my throat! I had enough of it, my friend, before we began this journey: I had enough of it in the house of Mademoiselle Daurel, and it is what I would give my life to escape from. And what right had you to be peevish with me?"
"See here," he began huskily. "I asked nothing of you"
"Ah! Didn't you?" She interrupted him with a sharp and bitter outcry. "All you asked was a complete supervision of my affairs, and on what ground?"
"What?" he said; for she confused him.
"You were jealous of me, just as that old woman was jealous. Do you deny it?"
"I do, emphatically. When was I"
"What?" she cried. "Even that absurd old Englishman with his little round wife at his elbow every second; you couldn't endure that I should spend a moment with them. At Bougie and when we left there you were unbearable. You think I presume too much in calling it jealousy; but that is what you showed me. I should know jealousy when I see it, by this time."
"Yes," he said. "I should think so, Madame Momoro."
She took his full meaning, and her colour still deepened. "You are kinder than ever, since you imply that I've seen it so often. Well, if I have, it is somesing I comprehend very well, and I will tell you that nothing is commoner than jealousy without love. You have felt it for me, and I think you feel it now; but you were never in love with me, my friend."
"How do you know?"
"Because that is another thing I have unfortunately seen often enough to comprehend a little. You had jealousy, but no more. You had"
"Let me tell you what I had," he interrupted roughly. "I had jealousy, yes; but it was not of you."
"No?" She laughed aloud. "It wasn't? You were not in love with me; but wasn't I to pay you for this journey by never thinking of anybody but you? You were to have all of me that is worth anything; you were to have all of my thoughts. If I thought of anything else you were enraged. You don't call that jealousy?"
"Not of you, I said."
"Then of what?"
"It was of" His voice began to tremble; he bit his lip, and sank down in his chair, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "It was of my ideal of you!" he groaned.
She was far from being mollified by this definition;—on the contrary, she spoke with repressed but sharpened hostility. "Of your 'ideal' of me? Will you condescend to explain yourself?"
"I thought—I thought you were above every human sordidness," he said miserably. "I thought you were—I thought you were the highest and brightest—well, if I must talk like a schoolboy to make it clear, I thought you were the most goddess-like creature I'd ever seen. But what I found"
"Pooh!" she said, startling him with abrupt laughter. "You know nothing of yourself and nothing of what you thought; but I am a woman of some experience and I can tell you what you thought and what your 'ideal' of me is worth. Your 'ideal' was a woman who appreciated Mr. Laurence Ogle. What you thought was that such a 'goddess-like' creature could never prefer a man like Mr. Tinker to a man like Mr. Laurence Ogle! In that is all your trouble, all your peevishness and all your disappointed emotion now, my friend, all of it!"
"What?" He looked up, staring at her. "You tell me"
"I tell you the truth. It is time! Don't you think so?"
He rose again. "Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose it must be a luxury, now that you feel you've no more use for me."
At that she drew a deep breath, and her eyes concentrated upon him dangerously. "I must ask you to explain yourself again."
"I'm only making it clear that I understand the situation."
"What 'situation'?"
"You came here to find him, and now that you have found him indeed, you can dispense with me; I was only a convenience by the way. He's preparing to leave and you're preparing to leave."
"You think," she inquired, "we are preparing to leave together—Mr. Tinker and I?"
"I don't know. Possibly not. But wherever he goes, I think"
"You think he'll find me in Tunis, perhaps, at the end of his automobile journey?"
"I should think it very probable, Madame Momoro."
"And if he did, that is your affair?"
"Not at all!"
To his astonishment tears appeared in her eyes; but they were tears of anger. "You see you have the power to incense me," she said. "I must use a harsh word: it is your stupidity that does it—that unbelievable stupidity women ought to expect from jealous men, but never do, because it is unbelievable. You say it is not your affair what I do, and at the same time you make it your affair by accusing me. You are not in love with me; you say all that angers you is my destruction of your 'ideal' of me, and you stand here looking at me like Death, furious with me because you comprehend no more what is in your own heart than you do what is in mine."
"What is that?"
"What is in mine, at least, is my own affair," she said. "What is in yours—well, I must use another harsh expression: it is nothing in the world but a vanity that has been damaged."
"Because you prefer"
"Yes," she said bravely. "Because you see that anybody would prefer him to you."
But at that, Ogle broke into helpless and painful laughter. "You call me stupid, and you think I'm all injured egoism—I see you really do think it—and I don't know why I still care to try to make you understand what I feel. You think I'm piqued merely because you've made me a convenience and because you preferred to ask him to help you out with your plan for Hyacinthe instead of asking me. By the way, why didn't you? I'd have given it to you."
"You'd have given me what?"
"What you needed to set Hyacinthe up in that impresario's office. Why didn't you ask me?"
"Ask you for money?" she said, and her stare at him was as blank as the tone in which she made that inquiry. "Why didn't I?"
"Yes. Why didn't you? I'd have given it to you."
For a moment she was silent; then she said: "You think—you think I have asked Mr. Tinker to give me the money for Hyacinthe?"
"I don't know about your asking. I think you may have mentioned the need for it."
"As I did to you," she said quietly. "But I did not dream of such a thing from you—nor did you."
"But from him"
"You think he has given it to me?"
"Either that, or he will," Ogle answered. "Yes, I think it extremely probable. I think that's why you're following him."
"Following!" she echoed; and she looked down on him from her fine height. "You use such words, Mr. Ogle!"
"I'm using only what words seem true to me," he said unhappily. "I've been trying to make you understand that a man can suffer more from a damaged ideal than from a damaged vanity."
"How has your 'ideal' of me been so damaged?"
"How? Why, upon my soul!" he cried. "To have thought of you as I did think of you, and then to see that you had just one sordid idea in the world! To see"
But she interrupted him fiercely. "Sordid? Is it sordid to wish to escape from hell? Is it sordid for a mother to do anything—anything in the world—to try to get her child out of that same hell? Is it sordid"
"You admit it then."
"I admit what?"
"That you have followed this man, this gross"
"Who is that?" she asked coldly. "Who is 'gross'?" Then she sat down, folding her arms and looking at him from beneath half-lowered eyelids. "You needn't say any more, my friend. You make what you feel about him perfectly clear."
"'What I feel about him'!" Laurence echoed in sharpest scorn. "What do you feel about him, yourself? What does anybody feel about him? You know what he is as well as I do."
"What is that?"
"A great barbarian."
"Yes," she said quietly. "That is what I thought of him when I first saw him on the steamer. I saw him in that light—a great barbarian, precisely. I saw him in the most amusing contrast to you and your two little friends."
"What?"
"Wait!" she said, speaking louder, and she opened her eyes widely, looking at him steadily. "You must listen now. He is a great barbarian, not caring a sou what anybody in the world says of him, not thinking about himself at all. He is a great barbarian with great power. Power? That is money, my friend, and nothing else. Money has always been power; and people who don't know that, understand neither power nor money. He is as careless of his power as he is of everything else. Do you remember how he won that money on the ship and threw it away, and how he bought all the fruit in the boats at Gibraltar, and tossed it to those poor people in the steerage? And in Algiers, you don't know how many people talked of what he had given; and here in the Desert he has been raining money like some great careless thunder-cloud charged with silver and gold and pouring them down. Wherever he goes the people are on their knees to him, and there is a rain of money. He"
But Ogle could endure no more. "Yes, they are on their knees to him indeed—for money!"
She sprang to her feet. "You see nothing!" she cried. "They respect him! They look up to him!"
"Yes—for his money! As you do!"
She leaned down, so that her face was near his, and she answered him fiercely. "As I do? You say that bitterly, because your vanity is in ruins, not because you had any right to make some silly 'ideal' of me. You say that of him so bitterly because you began by thinking him a nothing, and ever since then you have seen yourself growing smaller and smaller while he grew larger and larger until now you know he is a colossus. You accuse me of following what any woman would be proud to follow and what no woman could make follow her! You say we respect him and get on our knees to him for his money. What have you to offer? Anything? As an American you are absurd. Don't you know what we really think of you? What else have you to offer us that we can go down on our knees before? What do we respect any of you for except for your money?"
She overwhelmed the wretched young man who had so strangely misunderstood her until now; she daunted and dismayed him. He stepped back from her, staring incredulously. "What?" he gasped. "You say it! You say"
"Yes!" she cried. "Once! I say it once, but not again." She followed him as he stepped backward from her. "I want you to go now; the porters will be here for my luggage, and you will be in the way. If you think of me after this, regretting the expense of our excursion together, please remember I have done my best. In return, I have given you at least part of an education."
He came back a step toward her. "And I'd like you to remember"
"No! No!" she cried. "Not another word! The last is said." And as he persisted, trying to speak, she took him by the shoulders, pushing him toward the door. "No! No! No! The last is said, I tell you! If you don't go" She began to laugh loudly, and, as she opened the door and pushed him into the corridor, "You dear little fool!" she cried. "If you don't go, I'll tell you how old I am!"
Then the door closed sharply upon her continuing laughter.