Swirling Waters Part 8

Presently the clerk returned. "I am sorry, sir, but there doesn't seem to be any message left for you."

"Tell him I called," said Riviere, and went back to his cab. In it he was driven to the Gare de Lyon. At the booking-office he asked for a ticket for Arles. His intention was to travel amongst the old cities of Provence, and then make his way to the Pyrenees and into Spain. There was no definite plan of journey; he wanted only some atmosphere which would help him to clear his mind for the work to come. In the Midi the early Spring would be breathing new life over the earth.

About midnight the southern express stopped at some big station. The rhythmic sway and clatter of a moving train had given place to a comparative stillness that awoke John Riviere from sleep. He murmured "Dijon," and composed himself to a fresh position for rest. Some hours later there was again a stoppage, and instinctively he murmured "Lyon-Perrache." The phases of the journey along the main P.L.M. route had been burnt into him from the visits with Olive to Monte Carlo.

In the morning the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him--quaint, treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low balsam shrubs. Now and again they pa.s.sed a straggling white village roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there would be a few trees, and on these the early Spring of the Midi had laid her fingers in tender caress.

The air was keen and yet strangely soft; to Riviere it was wine of life.

He drew it in thirstily; let the wind of the train blow his hair as it listed; watched greedily the ever-changing landscape. The strange bare beauty of this land of suns.h.i.+ne and romance brought him a keen thrill of happiness.

It was as though he had loosed himself from prison chains and had emerged into a new life of freedom.

In full morning they reached Arles, the old Roman city in the delta of the Rhone. It cl.u.s.ters, huddles around the stately Roman arena on the hill in the centre of the town--a place of narrow, tortuous _ruelles_ where every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the strange dark beauty of the district--the "belles Arlesiennes" famous in prose and verse.

Yet chiefly it was the arena that fascinated him. All through the afternoon he wandered about the great stone tiers, flooded in sunlight, and reconstructed for himself a picture of the days when gladiators down below had striven with one another for success--or death. The arena was the archetype of civilized life.

Now he was a spectator, one of the mult.i.tude who look on. It was good to sit in the flooding sunlight and know that he was no longer a gladiator in the arena. There was higher work for him to do, away from the merciless stabbing sword and the cunning of net and trident.

At intervals during the afternoon a few tourists--mostly Americans--rushed up in high-powered, panting cars to the gateway of the arena; gave a hurried ten minutes to the interior; and then whirled away across the white roads of the Rhone delta in a scurry of dust.

Only one visitor seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable, sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved on to a fresh vantage-point. She wore a short tailored skirt which ignored the ugly, skin-tight convention of the current fas.h.i.+on. Her cheeks were fresh with a healthy English colour; her eyes were deep blue, toning almost to violet; her hair was burnished chestnut under the soft felt hat curled upwards in front; a faint odour of healthy womanhood formed as it were an aura around her.

All this John Riviere had noticed subconsciously as she pa.s.sed close by him on the ledge where he sat, walking with her firm, confident step.

Though he noted it appreciatively, yet it disturbed him. He did not want to notice any woman. He had big work to do, and on that he wanted to concentrate all his faculties. He had had no thought of a woman in his life when he broke the chains that shackled him to the Clifford Matheson existence. He purposed to have no call of s.e.x to divert him from the realization of his big idea.

Presently she had climbed to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, and stood out against the sky-line of the sunset-to-be, deep-chested, straight, clean-limbed, a very perfect figure of a modern Diana.

It is a dangerous place on which to stand, that topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, with no parapet and a sheer drop to the street below.

Almost against his will, Riviere mounted there.

But there was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of the ghostly past.

Twice she looked towards him as though she must speak out the thoughts conjured up by this splendid scene. It wanted only some tiny excuse of convention to bridge over the silence between them, but Riviere on his side would not seek it, and the woman hesitated to ask him to take up the thread that lay waiting to his hand.

A cold wind sprang up, and she descended and made her way to her hotel on the Place du Forum.

At dinner in the deserted dining-room of his hotel, Riviere found himself seated at the next table to her. There are only two hotels worthy of the name in Arles, and the coincidence of meeting again was of the very slightest. Yet somehow he felt subconsciously that the arm of Fate was bringing their two lives together, and he resented it.

The silence between them remained unbroken.

In the evening he wrapped himself in a cloak against the bitter wind rus.h.i.+ng down the valley of the Rhone and spreading itself as an invisible fan across the delta, and wandered about the dark alleys of the town, twisting like rabbit-burrows, lighted only here and there with a stray lamp socketed to a stone wall. Now he had left the big-thoughted age of the Romans, and was carried forward to the crafty, treacherous Middle Ages. In such an alley as this, bravos had lurked with daggers ready to thrust between the shoulder-blades of their victims. Now he was in a wider lane through which an army had swept pell-mell to slay and sack, while from the overhanging windows above desperate men and women shot wildly in fruitless resistance. Now he was in another of the lightless rabbit-burrows....

A sudden sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness.

A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Riviere made swiftly to the aid of that woman who cried out in fear.

Stumbling round a corner of the twisting alley, he came to where a gleam from a shuttered window showed a slatted glimpse of a woman struggling in the arms of a lean, wiry peasant of the Camargue. Riviere seized him by the collar and shook him off as one shakes a dog from the midst of a fray. The man loosed his grip of the woman, and snarling like a dog, writhed himself free of Riviere. Then, whipping out a knife from his belt, he struck again and again. Riviere tried to ward with his left arm, but one blow of the knife went past the guard and ripped his cheek from forehead to jawbone.

At that moment a shutter thrown open shot as it were a search-light into the blackness of the alley, full on to the man with the knife, and Riviere, putting his whole strength into the blow, sent a smas.h.i.+ng right-hander straight into the face of his adversary. Thrown back against the alley-wall, the man rebounded forward, and fell, a huddled, nerveless ma.s.s, on the ground.

From doorways near men came out with lights ... there was a hubbub of noise ... excited questions eddied around Riviere.

But the latter made no answer. He turned to find the woman who had been attacked.

"Mr Riviere!"

It was the woman who had stood by him on the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, drinking in that glorious fiery sunset over the grey Camargue. She was flushed, but very straight and erect.

"That brute was attacking me. Oh, if only I had had some weapon!" Then she noticed the blood dripping from the gash in his forehead, and cried out: "You're hurt! Take this."

Her handkerchief was pressed into his hand. He answered as he took it: "It's nothing. Fortunately it missed the eye. And you?"

"I'm not hurt, thanks. Oh, you were splendid! It makes one feel proud to be an Englishwoman."

"Come to the hotel," he said, and ignoring the excited questioning of the knot of men, took her arm and led her rapidly to their hotel on the Place du Forum.

"Let me dress your wound until the doctor can come."

"I don't want a doctor," he replied coldly. A sudden aloofness had come into his voice.

Her eye sought his with a piqued curiosity. For a moment, forgetting that here was a man who had rescued her from insult at considerable bodily risk, she saw him only as a man of curious, almost boorish brusqueness. Why this sudden cold reserve?

Then, with a reddening of cheek at her momentary lapse from grat.i.tude, she began to thank him for his timely help.

Riviere cut her short. "There is nothing to thank me for. I didn't even know it was you. I heard a woman's cry--that was all. You ought not to go about these dark _ruelles_ alone at night-time."

They were at the door of their hotel by now.

"Can't I dress the wound for you?" she asked. "I've had practice in first aid, Mr Riviere."

He paused suddenly in the doorway and asked her abruptly: "How do you know my name?"

"I know more than your name. When your cut has been dressed, I'll explain in full."

"Thank you, but I can manage quite well myself. Let us meet again in the _salon_ in, say, half an hour's time."

They parted in the corridor and went to their respective rooms.

When they met again, he had his head bound up with swathes of linen. His face was white with the loss of blood, and she gave a little cry of alarm.

"You were badly hurt!"

"No; merely a surface cut. But please tell me what you know about me."

There was a quick change in her to a smiling gaiety. The man was human again--he had at all events a very human curiosity.

"The name was from the hotel register, naturally," she answered. "But I know also that you are on your way to Monte Carlo, which certainly can't come from the register."

Riviere's face became coldly impa.s.sive as he waited for her to explain further.