Tales of Trail and Town - Bret Harte (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

but charming figure, and if he then noticed that the shoulders were pretty, and the curves of the slim waist symmetrical, it was rather with a feeling of timidity and a half-consciousness of unchivalrous thought. Yet why should he not try to keep the brave and honest girl near him always? Why should he not claim the right to protect her? Why should they not—they who were alone in a strange land— join their two lonely lives for mutual help and happiness?

A sudden perception of delicacy, the thought that he should have spoken before her failure at the Conservatoire had made her feel her helplessness, brought a slight color to his cheek. Would it not seem to her that he was taking an unfair advantage of her misfortune? Yet it would be so easy now to slip a loving arm around her waist, while he could work for her and protect her with the other. THE OTHER! His eye fell on his empty sleeve. Ah, he had forgotten that! He had but ONE arm!

He rose up abruptly,—so abruptly that Helen, rising too, almost touched the arm that was hurriedly withdrawn. Yet in that accidental contact, which sent a vague tremor through the young girl’s frame, there was still time for him to have spoken. But he only said:—

“Perhaps we had better dine.”

She assented quickly,—she knew not why,—with a feeling of relief. They walked very quietly and slowly towards the restaurant. Not a word of love had been spoken; not even a glance of understanding had passed between them. Yet they both knew by some mysterious instinct that a crisis of their lives had come and gone, and that they never again could be to each other as they were but a brief moment ago. They talked very sensibly and gravely during their frugal meal; the previous spectator of their confidences would have now thought them only simple friends and have been as mistaken as before. They talked freely of their hopes and prospects,—all save one! They even spoke pleasantly of repeating their little expedition after his return from the country, while in their secret hearts they had both resolved never to see each other again. Yet by that sign each knew that this was love, and were proud of each other’s pride, which kept it a secret.

The train was late, and it was past ten o’clock when they at last appeared before the concierge of Helen’s home. During their journey, and while passing though the crowds at the station and in the streets, Ostrander had exhibited a new and grave guardianship over the young girl, and, on the first landing, after a scrutinizing and an almost fierce glance at one or two of Helen’s odd fellow lodgers, he had extended his protection so far as to accompany her up the four flights to the landing of her apartment. Here he took leave of her with a grave courtesy that half pained, half pleased her. She watched his broad shoulders and dangling sleeve as he went down the stairs, and then quickly turned, entered her room, and locked the door. The smile had faded from her lips. Going to the window, she pressed her hot forehead against the cool glass and looked out upon the stars nearly level with the black roofs around her. She stood there some moments until another star appeared higher up against the roof ridge, the star she was looking for. But here the glass pane before her eyes became presently dim with moisture; she was obliged to rub it out with her handkerchief; yet, somehow, it soon became clouded, at which she turned sharply away and went to bed.

But Miss Helen did not know that when she had looked after the retreating figure of her protector as he descended the stairs that night that he was really carrying away on those broad shoulders the character she had so laboriously gained during her four years’ solitude. For when she came down the next morning the concierge bowed to her with an air of easy, cynical abstraction, the result of a long conversation with his wife the night before. He had taken Helen’s part with a kindly cynicism. “Ah! what would you—it was bound to come. The affair of the Conservatoire had settled that. The poor child could not starve; penniless, she could not marry. Only why consort with other swallows under the eaves when she could have had a gilded cage on the first etage?” But girls were so foolish—in their first affair; then it was always LOVE! The second time they were wiser. And this maimed warrior and painter was as poor as she. A compatriot, too; well, perhaps that saved some scandal; one could never know what the Americans were accustomed to do. The first floor, which had been inclined to be civil to the young teacher, was more so, but less respectful; one or two young men were tentatively familiar until they looked in her gray eyes and remembered the broad shoulders of the painter. Oddly enough, only Mademoiselle Fifine, of her own landing, exhibited any sympathy with her, and for the first time Helen was frightened. She did not show it, however, only she changed her lodgings the next day. But before she left she had a few moments’ conversation with the concierge and an exchange of a word or two with some of her fellow lodgers. I have already hinted that the young lady had great precision of statement; she had a pretty turn for handling colloquial French and an incisive knowledge of French character. She left No. 34, Rue de Frivole, working itself into a white rage, but utterly undecided as to her real character.

But all this and much more was presently blown away in the hot breath that swept the boulevards at the outburst of the Franco-German War, and Miss Helen Maynard disappeared from Paris with many of her fellow countrymen. The excitement reached even a quaint old chateau in Brittany where Major Ostrander was painting. The woman who was standing by his side as he sat before his easel on the broad terrace observed that he looked disturbed.

“What matters?” she said gently. “You have progressed so well in your work that you can finish it elsewhere. I have no great desire to stay in France with a frontier garrisoned by troops while I have a villa in Switzerland where you could still be my guest. Paris can teach you nothing more, my friend; you have only to create now— and be famous.”

“I must go to Paris,” he said quietly. “I have friends— countrymen—there, who may want me now.”

“If you mean the young singer of the Rue de Frivole, you have compromised her already. You can do her no good.”

“Madame!”

The pretty face which he had been familiar with for the past six weeks somehow seemed to change its character. Under the mask of dazzling skin he fancied he saw the high cheek-bones and square Tartar angle; the brilliant eyes were even brighter than before, but they showed more of the white than he had ever seen in them.

Nevertheless she smiled, with an equally stony revelation of her white teeth, yet said, still gently, “Forgive me if I thought our friendship justified me in being frank,—perhaps too frank for my own good.”

She stopped as if half expecting an interruption; but as he remained looking wonderingly at her, she bit her lip, and went on: “You have a great career before you. Those who help you must do so without entangling you; a chain of roses may be as impeding as lead. Until you are independent, you—who may in time compass everything yourself—will need to be helped. You know,” she added with a smile, “you have but one arm.”

“In your kindness and appreciation you have made me forget it,” he stammered. Yet he had a swift vision of the little bench at Versailles where he had NOT forgotten it, and as he glanced around the empty terrace where they stood he was struck with a fateful resemblance to it.

“And I should not remind you now of it,” she went on, “except to say that money can always take its place. As in the fairy story, the prince must have a new arm made of gold.” She stopped, and then suddenly coming closer to him said, hurriedly and almost fiercely, “Can you not see that I am advising you against my interests,—against myself? Go, then, to Paris, and go quickly, before I change my mind. Only if you do not find your friends there, remember you have always ONE here.” Before he could reply, or even understand that white face, she was gone.

He left for Paris that afternoon. He went directly to the Rue de Frivole; his old resolution to avoid Helen was blown to the winds in the prospect of losing her utterly. But the concierge only knew that mademoiselle had left a day or two after monsieur had accompanied her home. And, pointedly, there was another gentleman who had inquired eagerly—and bountifully as far as money went—for any trace of the young lady. It was a Russe. The concierge smiled to himself at Ostrander’s flushed cheek. It served this one-armed, conceited American poseur right. Mademoiselle was wiser in this SECOND affair.

Ostrander did not finish his picture. The princess sent him a cheque, which he coldly returned. Nevertheless he had acquired through his Russian patronage a local fame which stood him well with the picture dealers,—in spite of the excitement of the war. But his heart was no longer in his work; a fever of unrest seized him, which at another time might have wasted itself in mere dissipation. Some of his fellow artists had already gone into the army. After the first great reverses he offered his one arm and his military experience to that Paris which had given him a home. The old fighting instinct returned to him with a certain desperation he had never known before. In the sorties from Paris the one-armed American became famous, until a few days before the capitulation, when he was struck down by a bullet through the lung, and left in a temporary hospital. Here in the whirl and terror of Commune days he was forgotten, and when Paris revived under the republic he had disappeared as completely as his compatriot Helen.

But Miss Helen Maynard had been only obscured and not extinguished. At the first outbreak of hostilities a few Americans had still kept giddy state among the ruins of the tottering empire. A day or two after she left the Rue de Frivole she was invited by one of her wealthy former schoolmates to assist with her voice and talent at one of their extravagant entertainments. “You will understand, dear,” said Miss de Laine, with ingenious delicacy, as she eyed her old comrade’s well-worn dress, “that Poppa expects to pay you professional prices, and it may be an opening for you among our other friends.”

“I should not come otherwise, dear,” said Miss Helen with equal frankness. But she played and sang very charmingly to the fashionable assembly in the Champs Elysees,—so charmingly, indeed, that Miss de Laine patronizingly expatiated upon her worth and her better days in confidence to some of the guests.

“A most deserving creature,” said Miss de Laine to the dowager duchess of Soho, who was passing through Paris on her way to England; “you would hardly believe that Poppa knew her father when he was one of the richest men in South Carolina.”

“Your father seems to have been very fortunate,” said the duchess quietly, “and so are YOU. Introduce me.”

This not being exactly the reply that Miss de Laine expected, she momentarily hesitated: but the duchess profited by it to walk over to the piano and introduce herself. When she rose to go she invited Helen