The Price She Paid Part 13

"No matter," interrupted Mildred. The man's expression--the normally pleasant and agreeable countenance turned to repulsive by craft and lying--made her eager to be gone. "What is the most you will give me?"

"I shall have to consider--"

"I've only a few minutes. Please do not irritate me."

The man was studying her countenance with a desperate look. Why was she, the bride of the monstrously rich American, why was she trying to sell the bag? Did it mean the end of her resources? Or, were there still huge orders to be got from her? His shrewdness, trained by thirty years of dealing with all kinds of luxurious human beings, went exploring in vain. He was alarmed by her frown. He began hesitatingly:

"The jewels and the gold are only a small part of the value. The chief value is the unique design, so elegant yet so simple. For the jewels and the gold, perhaps two thousand francs--"

"The purse was twelve thousand francs," interrupted she.

"Perfectly, madame. But--" "I am in great haste. How much will you give me?"

"The most would be four thousand, I fear. I shall count up more carefully, if madame will--"

"No, four thousand will do."

"I will send the money to madame at her hotel. The Continental, is it not?"

"No, I must have it at once."

The jeweler hesitated. Mildred, flus.h.i.+ng scarlet with shame--but he luckily thought it anger--took up the bag and moved toward the door.

"Pardon, madame, but certainly. Do you wish some gold or all notes?"

"Notes," answered she. "Fifty and hundred-franc notes."

A moment later she was in the street with the notes in a small bundle in the bosom of her wrap. She went hurriedly up the street. As she was about to turn the corner into the boulevard she on impulse glanced back. An automobile had just drawn up at the jeweler's door and General Siddall--top-hat, sable-lined overcoat, waxed mustache and imperial, high-heeled boots, gold-mounted cane--was descending. And she knew that he had awakened to his one oversight, and was on his way to repair it. But she did not know that the jeweler--old and wise in human ways--would hastily vanish with the bag and that an a.s.sistant would come forward with a.s.surances that madame had not been in the shop and that, if she should come in, no business would be negotiated without the general's express consent. She all but fainted at the narrowness of her escape and fled round into the boulevard. She entered a taxi and told the man to drive to Foyot's restaurant on the left bank--where the general would never think of looking for her.

When she had breakfasted she strolled in the Luxembourg Gardens, in even better humor with herself and with the world. There was still that horrid-faced future, but it was not leering into her very face. It was nearly four thousand francs away--"and if I hadn't been so stupid, I'd have got eight thousand, I'm sure," she said. But she was rather proud of a stupidity about money matters. And four thousand francs, eight hundred dollars--that was quite a good sum.

She had an instinct that the general would do something disagreeable about the French and English ports of departure for America. But perhaps he would not think of the Italian ports. That night she set out for Genoa, and three days later, in a different dress and with her hair done as she never wore it, sailed as Miss Mary Stevens for America on a German Mediterranean boat.

She had taken the whole of a cabin on the quieter deck below the promenade, paying for it nearly half of what was left of the four thousand francs. The first three days she kept to her cabin except at the dinner-hour, when she ventured to the deck just outside and walked up and down for exercise. Then followed four days of nasty weather during which she did not leave her bed. As the sea calmed, she, wretched and reckless, had a chair put for herself under her window and sat there, veiled and swathed and turning her face away whenever a rare wandering pa.s.senger happened to pa.s.s along. Toward noon a man paused before her to light a cigarette. She, forgetting for the moment her precautions, looked at him. It chanced that he looked at her at exactly the same instant. Their glances met. He started nervously, moved on a few steps, returned. Said she mockingly:

"You know you needn't speak if you don't want to, Stanley."

"There isn't a soul on board that anybody ever knew or that ever knew anybody," said he. "So why not?"

"And you look horribly bored."

"Unspeakably," replied Baird. "I've spoken to no one since I left Paris."

"What are you doing on this s.h.i.+p?" inquired she.

"To be perfectly honest," said he, "I came this way to avoid you. I was afraid you'd take pa.s.sage on my steamer just to amuse yourself with my nervousness. And--here you are!"

"Amusing myself with your nervousness."

"But I'm not nervous. There's no danger. Will you let me have a chair put beside yours?"

"It will be a charity on your part," said she.

When he was comfortably settled, he explained his uneasiness. "I see I've got to tell you," said he, "for I don't want you to think me a shouting a.s.s. The fact is my wife wants to get a divorce from me and to soak me for big alimony. She's a woman who'll do anything to gain her end, and--well, for some reason she's always been jealous of you. I didn't care to get into trouble, or to get you into trouble."

"I'm traveling as Mary Stevens," said Mildred. "No one knows I'm aboard."

"Oh, I'm sure we're quite safe. We can enjoy the rest of this voyage."

A sea voyage not merely induces but compels a feeling of absolute detachment from the world. To both Stanley and Mildred their affairs--the difficulties in which they were involved on terra firma--ceased for the time to have any reality. The universe was nothing but a vast stretch of water under a vast stretch of sky; the earth and the things thereof were a retrospect and a foreboding.

Without a.n.a.lyzing it, both he and she felt that they were free--free from cares, from responsibilities--free to amuse themselves. And they proceeded to enjoy themselves in the necessarily quiet and limited way imposed by the littleness of their present world and the meagerness of the resources.

As neither had the kind of mind that expands in abstractions, they were soon talking in the most intimate and personal way about themselves--were confessing things which neither would have breathed to anyone on land. It was the man who set the example of breaking through the barriers of conventional restraint--perhaps of delicacy, though it must be said that human beings are rarely so fine in their reticences as the theory of refinement would have us believe. Said Stanley, after the preliminaries of partial confidence and halting avowal that could not be omitted, even at sea, by a man of "gentlemanly instinct":

"I don't know why I shouldn't own up. I know you'll never tell anybody. Fact is, I and my wife were never in love with each other for a second. We married because we were in the same set and because our incomes together gave us enough to do the thing rather well." After a solemn pause. "I was in love with another woman--one I couldn't marry.

But I'll not go into that. As for my wife, I don't think she was in love with anyone. She's as cold as a stone."

Mildred smiled ironically.

Baird saw and flushed. "At least, she was to me. I was ready to make a sort of bluff. You see, a man feels guilty in those circ.u.mstances and doesn't want to humiliate a woman. But she--" he laughed unpleasantly--"she wasn't bothering about MY feelings. That's a nice, selfish little way you ladies have."

"She probably saw through you and hated you for playing the hypocrite to her," said Mildred.

"You may be right, I never thought of that," confessed he. "She certainly had a vicious way of hammering the other woman indirectly.

Not that she ever admitted being jealous. I guess she knew. Everybody usually knows everything."

"And there was a great deal of talk about you and me," said Mildred placidly.

"I didn't say it was you," protested Stanley, reddening.

"No matter," said Mildred. "Don't bother about that. It's all past and gone."

"Well, at any rate, my marriage was the mistake of my life. I'm determined that she shan't trip me up and trim me for any alimony. And as matters stand, she can't. She left me of her own accord."

"Then," said Mildred thoughtfully, "if the wife leaves of her own accord, she can't get alimony?"

"Certainly not--not a cent."

"I supposed so," said she. "I'm not sure I'd take it if I could get it. Still, I suppose I would." She laughed. "What's the use of being a hypocrite with oneself? I know I would. All I could get."

"Then you had no LEGAL excuse for leaving?"

"No," said she. "I--just bolted. I don't know what's to become of me.

I seem not to care, at present, but no doubt I shall as soon as we see land again."

"You'll go back to him," said Stanley.

"No," replied she, without emphasis or any accent whatever.