High Noon Part 10

He was standing by the road-side bargaining with one of that tribe and had nearly exhausted his stock of dignified French when he happened to glance over his shoulder as a carriage pa.s.sed close by him. Beneath a parasol a lady's face stood out clearly from the moving maze around him--her face again.

The smile in her eyes made Paul mad.

He thrust a twenty-franc note into the hand of the astonished _cocher_, and springing into the cab directed the man to hurry on.

And then the impossibility of the situation dawned upon him. A fine sight he was! to go das.h.i.+ng off the Lord knew where after a lady he did not know! Such an adventure attempted by as bedraggled a cavalier as he, might easily land him in a police station. He had no relish for being dragged off by a _gendarme_, he reflected, and even if that should not occur, the best he could possibly manage would be to make an a.s.s of himself. And he had been far too successful in that line once before.

With the thought, his customary sober judgment returned.

"_L'Hotel du Rhin!_" he shouted savagely to his _cocher_, and with one last glance at the back of the carriage ahead (if it were only an automobile!--then there'd be a number on it! he thought) Paul was turned sharply around and carried toward the main entrance to the _Bois_.

Even some hours later, when he was ready to start for the Dalmatian Emba.s.sy, his rage had not cooled greatly; it was therefore in a tone strangely at variance with his unruffled evening dress that he directed his chauffeur. As for Baxter, he had never seen his master in so villainous a humour. Indeed, had it not been for an uncommonly pretty _femme de chambre_ in the hotel, whose acquaintance he had made the evening before, he would have been tempted to give his employer notice.

"His langwidge was somethink dreadful!" he confided to her after Paul had gone.

The pleasant ride through the _Faubourg St. Germain_ served to mollify Paul somewhat; and when he walked up to the brilliantly lighted entrance, where a resplendent flunky opened the ma.s.sive doors for him, he was more himself again. He was soon greeting his host and hostess, whose genuine pleasure at seeing him once more was so evident that the last vestige of Paul's ill-humour vanished before their welcoming smiles.

Presently the Countess turned to Paul and said:

"Come! I want to present you to a young Russian friend of mine whom you are to take in to dinner," and taking his arm she led him into an adjoining room.

And there Paul met his vision, face to face; the lady of his quest.

CHAPTER XV

At first Paul could hardly believe his senses. He was conscious, as he gazed into the depths of two marvellous eyes, of a tall supple figure all in black, a crimson rose in her dark hair lending a touch of color--that, and her red lips.

This was the face that had burned its lineaments into the tablets of his memory--the face so sweetly known at Lake Lucerne.

The babble of the arriving guests--the strains of the orchestra--became as the faint murmurs of a far off sea.

For Paul, one fact, and only one, existed--it was she--his Lady of the Beauteous Countenance; no vision, but a bewitching creature of flesh and blood whose gloved hand rested for a moment in his own.

As in a dream Paul heard the lady's name--the same that he had learned at Lucerne--and he felt himself murmuring something--what the words were he scarcely knew.

Not by so much as the quiver of an eyelash did Mademoiselle give sign of recognition, or memory of any previous meeting. She merely smiled as she told Paul that her old friend the Countess had often spoken of him.

His heart was athrob with curious emotions, when he heard the Countess' voice:

"Come! we are going in. You two can become better acquainted at table." And he felt his partner's arm rest lightly within his; its merest touch electrified him.

"d.a.m.n the dinner!" Paul swore softly to himself, for he had no wish to share his good fortune with a roomful of people.

To his great disgust, a silly a.s.s of a young German _attache_, who sat on the other side of Mademoiselle Vseslavitch, began talking with her as soon as they had reached their places.

When Paul did have her to himself occasionally, she talked to him of England, the last subject he was interested in then. Not for a minute did she allow him an opportunity to lead her in the direction of Langres or Lucerne.

"I have never been across the Channel," she told him. "But I have long wished to go. You English are such a remarkable people--you are all so sane and sensible compared with my own countrymen. What Russian can talk with a woman for five minutes without making violent love to her?--but you cold-blooded Anglo-Saxons are so refres.h.i.+ngly different."

Paul did not see the mischievous merriment in the lady's eyes. And his gallant answer was interrupted by some inanity from Herr von Mark.

If ever the Anglo-German diplomatic relations were in danger, an observer would have promptly decided that they were at that instant.

That the conceited young German did not immediately expire was only due to the fact that dagger glances cannot cause a fatal wound.

Paul tried to learn more about the lady. Was she to be long in Paris?

Really, she could not say. She liked the country so much more than the town that it was always hard for her to stay many days away from the open. She never knew when the whim might seize her to go--to get aboard a train and hurry to some distant spot which she felt impelled to visit. Who knew? To-morrow, perhaps, might find her on her way to the chateau of a friend who lived in the Bukowina, near the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.

"Ah!"--and she turned to Paul with a radiant face that made him long to catch her in his arms--"do you know that wonderful country? Those fissured peaks, with their precipitous and inaccessible crests--their rock-c.u.mbered valleys, concealing deep and lovely lakes? And the beautiful pine-woods creeping down to the foot of the mountains? I could spend all my life in that wonderful place, living in some peasant's hut, if need be."

"Tell me more!" Paul leaned toward her, forgetful now of all else but this divine and fascinating being.

"Ah!" she breathed, "you are a devotee of Nature, too, I know. You are a great traveller,--the Countess has said it," she continued quaintly.

"You have been around the whole world. While as for me, I know Europe only, and of course Russia best of all countries. I have seen much of her--those wonderful rolling _steppes_, and rugged mountains. The North Sea, too, for I love the sea as my own soul.

"Often do I feel as though the sea were really in my soul itself. And as in the sea there are hidden water-plants, which only come to the surface at the moment they bloom, and sink again as soon as they fade, so at times do wondrous flower-pictures form in the depths of my soul, and rise up, shed perfume around, and gleam and vanish.... Then the s.h.i.+ps that sail by! As you walk along the sh.o.r.e, is it not a pretty sight to see them--their great white sails look like stately swans.

And still more beautiful is the sight when the setting sun throws great rays of glory round a pa.s.sing bark."

In silence Paul gazed at her. He hardly breathed, lest some ba.n.a.l word should frighten this wonderful nymph away.

"And then at night,"--she went on dreamily--"what a strange and mysterious sensation the meeting with strange s.h.i.+ps at sea produces.

You fancy that perhaps your best friends, whom you have not seen for years, are sailing silently by, and that you are losing them forevermore."

Paul was strangely moved. He loved the sea himself, as well as the mountains--his Queen had taught him its call years ago--and he often wandered about the sh.o.r.e, pondering over the strange old legends with which centuries have wreathed it.

"You are wonderful!" he whispered to the lady. "You're like some water-maiden--and I believe your eyes are a bit of the sea itself!"

"Ah! Now you are like all the rest--French and Russians and Germans!

Why spoil my rhapsody with personalities?"

"Forgive me!" Paul looked sufficiently penitent, and Mademoiselle with a playful gesture of absolution spoke again.

"It puts me in a strange and curious mood when I ramble along the sh.o.r.e in the twilight. Behind me are the flat dunes, before me the vast, heaving, immeasurable ocean, and above me the sky like an infinite crystal dome. Then I seem to be a very insect; and yet my soul expands to the size of the world. The high simplicity of Nature which surrounds me, elevates and oppresses me at the same time, more so than any other scene, however sublime. There never was any cathedral dome vast enough for me."

She stopped short, as if suddenly realizing she had stumbled upon dangerous ground.

And at that moment the Countess picked up the ladies with her eyes and they rose, to leave the men over their cigars. So Paul was left, to be drawn, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, into a discussion of an international alliance, which did not interest him in the least.

Later when the men joined the ladies in the _salon_, Paul sought his sprite, but she was careful, or so it seemed, not to be left alone with him. And it was not until he said good-night that he could express to her the wish to see her again.

"You are such an uncertain lady," he said to her, smiling, "so restless within the confines of a town-house, that I hope you will let me call to-morrow--before you suddenly go das.h.i.+ng off to climb some peak, or to visit some foreign coast."

"Come for tea, to-morrow, if you wish." She looked up at him quickly--searchingly, Paul thought--and his blood raced madly through his veins.