The Truants Part 22

"And when you had repeated it, she turned a little pale, perhaps was disconcerted, perhaps a little--afraid."

"Yes, it is that which troubles me," Pamela cried, in a low voice.

"She was afraid. I would have given much to have doubted it. I could not; her eyes betrayed it, her face, her whole att.i.tude. She was afraid."

Mr. Mudge nodded his head, and went quietly on--

"And when she had recovered a little from her fear she questioned you closely as to the time when you first saw Stretton outside the house, and the time when he went away."

He spoke with so much cert.i.tude that he might have been present at the interview.

"I told her that it was some little time after eleven when he came, and that he only stayed a few minutes," answered Pamela.

"And at that," rejoined Mr. Mudge, "Lady Stretton's anxiety diminished."

"Yes, that is true, too," Pamela admitted; and she turned her face to him with its troubled appeal. "Why was she afraid? For, since you have guessed that she was, you must know the reason which she had for fear.

Why was it so fortunate that Tony Stretton did not mount the steps of the house and ring the bell?"

Mr. Mudge answered her immediately, and very quietly.

"Because Lionel Callon was inside the house."

A great sympathy made his voice gentle--sympathy for Pamela. None the less the words hurt her cruelly. She turned away from him so that he might not see her face, and stood gazing down the course through a mist. Bitter disappointment was hers at that moment. She was by nature a partisan. The thing which she did crept closer to her heart by the mere act of doing it. She knew it, and it was just her knowledge which had so long kept her to inaction. Now her thoughts were pa.s.sionately set on saving Millie, and here came news to her which brought her to the brink of despair. She blamed Tony. "Why did he ever go away?" she cried. "Why, when he had come back, did he not stay?" And at once she saw the futility of her outcry. Tony, Millie, Lionel Callon--what was the use of blaming them? They acted as their characters impelled them.

She had to do her best to remedy the evil which the clash of these three characters had produced. "What can be done?" she asked of herself. There was one course open certainly. She could summon Warrisden again, send him out a second time in search of Tony Stretton, and make him the bearer, not of an excuse, but of the whole truth. Only she dreaded the outcome; she shrank from telling Tony the truth, fearing that he would exaggerate it. "Can nothing be done?" she asked, again in despair, and this time she asked the question aloud, and turned to Mr. Mudge.

Mudge had been quietly waiting for it.

"Yes," he answered, "something can be done. I should not have told you, Miss Mardale, what I knew unless I had already hit upon a means to avert the peril; for I am aware how much my news must grieve you."

Pamela looked at Mr. Mudge in surprise. It had not occurred to her at all that he could have solved the problem.

"What can I do?" she asked.

"You can leave the whole trouble in my hands for a few days."

Pamela was silent for a little while; then she answered doubtfully--

"It is most kind of you to offer me your help."

Mr. Mudge shook his head at Pamela with a certain sadness.

"There's no kindness in it at all," he said; "but I quite understand your hesitation, Miss Mardale. You were surprised that I should offer you help, just as you were surprised to see me here. Although I move in your world I am not of it. Its traditions, its instincts, even its methods of thought--to all of these I am a stranger. I am just a pa.s.sing visitor who, for the time of his stay, is made an honorary member of your club. He meets with every civility, every kindness; but he is not inside, so that when he suddenly comes forward and offers you help in a matter where other members of your club are concerned, you naturally pause."

Pamela made a gesture of dissent; but Mr. Mudge gently insisted--

"Let me finish. I want you to understand equally well why I offer you help which may very likely seem to you an impertinence."

"No, indeed," said Pamela; "on the contrary, I am very grateful."

Others were approaching the spot where they stood. They turned and walked slowly over the gra.s.s away from the paddock.

"There is no need that you should be," Mudge continued; "you will see that, if you listen." And in a few words he told her at last something of his own career. "I sprang from a Deptford gutter, with one thought--to get on, and get on, and get on. I moved from Deptford to Peckham. There I married. I moved from Peckham to a residential suburb in the south-west. There my wife died. Looking back now, I am afraid that in my haste to get on I rather neglected my wife's happiness. You see I am frank with you. From the residential suburb I moved into the Cromwell Road, from the Cromwell Road to Grosvenor Square. I do not think that I was just a sn.o.b; but I wanted to have the very best of what was going. There is a difference. A few years ago I found myself at the point which I had aimed to reach, and, as I have told you, it is a position of many acquaintances and much loneliness. You might say that I could give it up and retire into the country. But I have too many undertakings on my hands; besides, I am too tired to start again, so I remain. But I think you will understand that it will be a real pleasure to me to help you. I have not so many friends that I can afford to lose the opportunity of doing one of them a service."

Pamela heard him to the end without any interruption; but when he had finished she said, with a smile--

"You are quite wrong about the reason for my hesitation. I asked a friend of mine a few weeks ago to help me, and he gave me the best of help at once. Even the best of help fails at times, and my friend did.

I was wondering merely whether it would not be a little disloyal to him if I now accepted yours, for I know he would be grieved if I went to any one but him."

"I see," said Mr. Mudge; "but I think that I can give you help which no one else can."

It was clear from his quiet persistence that he had a definite plan.

Pamela stopped and faced him.

"Very well," she said. "I leave the whole matter for a little while in your hands."

"Thank you," said Mr. Mudge; and he looked up towards the course.

"There are the horses going down."

A sudden thought occurred to Pamela. She opened the purse she carried on her wrist, and took out a couple of pounds.

"Put this on Semiramis for me, please," she said, with a laugh. "Be quick, if you will, and come back."

Though she laughed she was still most urgent he should go. Mr. Mudge hurried across the course, made the bet, and returned. Pamela watched the race with an eagerness which astonished Mr. Mudge, so completely did she seem to have forgotten all that had troubled her a minute ago.

But he did not understand Pamela. She was, after her custom, seeking for a sign, and when Semiramis galloped in a winner by a neck, she turned with a hopeful smile to her companion--

"We shall win too."

"I think so," Mudge replied, and he laughed. "Do you know what I think of Lionel Callon, Miss Mardale? The words are not mine, but the sentiment is unexceptionable. A little may be a good thing, but too much is enough."

CHAPTER XVI

THE FOREIGN LEGION

It was midday at Sidi Bel-Abbes in Algeria. Two French officers were sitting in front of a cafe at the wide cross-roads in the centre of the town. One of them was Captain Tavernay, a man of forty-seven, tall, thin, with a brown face worn and tired by the campaigns of thirty years, the other a young lieutenant, M. Laurent, fresh and pink, who seemed to hare been pa.s.sed out but yesterday from the school of St. Cyr. Captain Tavernay picked up his cap from the iron table in front of him and settled it upon his grizzled head. Outside the town trees cl.u.s.tered thickly, farms were half-hidden amongst groves of fig-trees and hedges of aloes. Here there was no foliage. The streets were very quiet, the sunlight lay in dazzling pools of gold upon the sand of the roads, the white houses glittered under a blue, cloudless sky. In front of the two officers, some miles away, the bare cone of Jebel Tessalah sprang upwards from a range of hills dominating the town, and a speck of white upon its shoulder showed where a village perched. Captain Tavernay sat looking out towards the mountain with the lids half-closed upon his eyes. Then he rose deliberately from his chair.

"If we walk to the station," he said, "we shall just meet the train from Oran. A batch of thirty recruits is coming in by it. Let us walk to the station, Laurent."

Lieutenant Laurent dropped the end of his cigarette on to the ground and stood up reluctantly.

"As you will, Captain," he answered. "But we should see the animals soon enough at the barracks."

The words were spoken in a voice which was almost, and with a shrug of the shoulders which was quite, contemptuous. The day was hot, and Lieutenant Laurent unwilling to move from his coffee and the shade into that burning sunlight. Captain Tavernay gazed mildly at his youthful junior. Long experience had taught him to leave much to time and little to argument. For himself he loved his legionaries. He had a smile of indulgence for their faults even while he punished them; and though his face seldom showed the smile, and his punishments were not unjustly light, the culprits none the less knew it was there, hidden somewhere close to his heart. But then he had seen his men in action, and Lieutenant Laurent had not. That made all the difference. The Foreign Legion certainly did not show at its best in a cantonment.

Amongst that motley a.s.semblage--twelve thousand men, distinct in nationality as in character, flung together pell-mell, negroes and whites, criminals, adventurers, silent unknown men, haunted by memories of other days or tortured by remorse--a garrison town with its monotony and its absinthe played havoc. An Abyssinian rubbed shoulders in the ranks with a scholar who spoke nine languages; a tenor from the Theatre de la Monnaie at Brussels with an unfrocked priest. Often enough Captain Tavernay had seen one of his legionaries sitting alone hour after hour at his little table outside a cafe, steadily drinking gla.s.s after gla.s.s of absinthe, rising mechanically to salute his officer, and sinking back among his impenetrable secrets. Was he dreaming of the other days, the laughter and the flowers, the white shoulders of women? Was he again placing that last stake upon the red which had sent him straight from the table to the nearest French depot? Was he living again some tragic crisis of love in which all at once he had learned that he had been befooled and derided? Captain Tavernay never pa.s.sed such a man but he longed to sit down by his side and say, "My friend, share your secret with me; so will it be easier to bear." But the etiquette of the Foreign Legion forbade. Captain Tavernay merely returned the salute and pa.s.sed on, knowing that very likely his legionary would pa.s.s the night in the guard-room and the next week in the cells. No; the town of Sidi Bel-Abbes was not the place wherein to learn the mettle of the legionary. Away to the south there, beyond the forest of trees on the horizon's line, things were different. Let Lieutenant Laurent see the men in their bivouacs at night under the stars, and witness their prowess under arms, _ces animaux_ would soon become _mes enfants_.

Therefore he answered Lieutenant Laurent in the mildest voice.