CHAPTER XXVII

Our neighbours on the other side of the Channel are blessed with many qualities which were not given to us who reside in these islands, and amongst them is one which most Englishmen would not pay a penny for if it were on sale in market overt. This is the quality of sentiment—a thing which we others strive to choke at its birth, and to which at any time we give but an outside corner of the hearth of life. It is a quality of which one may have too much, but in its place it is an excellent and a desirable quality, for it tends to the establishment of a fitting sense of proportion, and makes people polite and considerate at the right moment. Had the tragedy of Haidee and Darlington occurred in England, there would have been much vulgar curiosity manifested, for amongst us we often fail to gauge the niceties of a situation. In Paris, sentiment fixed the affaire Damerel at its right value in a few hours. It was a veritable tragedy—one to be spoken of with bated breath—one of those terrible dramas of real life which far transcend anything that can be placed upon the stage. The situations were pathetic, the figures of the chief actors of a veritable notability. The young husband, great as a poet and handsome as a Greek god; the young wife, beautiful and charming; the plutocrat lover, of whom death forbade to speak—they were all of a type to attract. Then the intense tragedy of the final situation! Who could tell what had occurred between the lover and the wife in that last supreme scene, since he was dead and she bereft of reason? It had all the elements of greatness, and greatness demands respect. Therefore, instead of being vulgarised, as it would have been in unsentimental England, the affaire Damerel was spoken of with a tender respect and with few words. It was an event too deplorable to merit common discussion.{224}

Lucian had swept through London to Paris intent on killing Darlington with his own hands. His mental balance had been destroyed, and he himself rendered incapable of hearing or seeing reason long before he reached the French capital. The courteous manager who replied to Lucian’s calm inquiries for Mrs. Damerel did not realise that the composure of the distinguished-looking young gentleman was that of the cunning madman. Inside Lucian’s breast nestled a revolver—his fingers were itching to get at it as he followed his guide up the stairs, for he had made up his mind to shoot his faithless wife and his treacherous enemy on sight.

The sight of Haidee, mopping and mowing in her corner, the sound of her awful laughter, brought Lucian back to sanity. Living and moving as if he were in some fearful dream, he gave orders and issued directions. The people of the hotel, half paralysed by the strangeness of the tragedy, wondered at his calmness; the police were astonished by the lucidity of the statement which he gave to them. His one great desire was to shield his wife’s name. The fierce resentment which he had felt during his pursuit of her had completely disappeared in presence of the tragedy. Before the end of the afternoon some curious mental process in him had completely rehabilitated Haidee in his estimation: he believed her to have been deeply wronged, and declared with emphasis that she must have killed Darlington in a fit of desperation following upon some wickedness of his own. Her incriminating letter he swept aside contemptuously—it was a sure proof, he said, that the poor child’s mind was already unhinged when it was written. He turned a blind eye to undoubted facts. Out of a prodigal imagination and an exuberant fancy he quickly built up a theory which presently assumed for him the colours of absolute truth. Haidee had been tempted in secret by this devil who had posed as friend; he had used his insidious arts to corrupt her, and the temptation had fallen upon her at the very moment when he, Lucian,{225} was worrying her with his projects of retrenchment. She had taken flight, the poor Haidee who had lived in rose-leaf luxury all her days, and had fled from her exaggerated fears to the man she believed her friend and Lucian’s. Then, when she had found out his true character, she—in a moment of awful fear or fright, most probably—had killed him. That was the real story, the poor, helpless truth. He put it before Sprats and Saxonstowe with a childlike belief in its plausibility and veracity that made at least one of them like to weep—he had shown them the letter which Haidee had written to Lucian before leaving town, and they knew the real truth of the whole sorry business. It seemed best, after all, thought Sprats, and said so to Saxonstowe when she got the chance, that Lucian should cherish a fiction rather than believe the real truth. And that he did believe his fiction was soon made evident.

‘It is all my fault—all!’ he said to Sprats, with bitter self-reproach. ‘I never took care of her as I should have done, as I had vowed to do. You were right, Sprats, in everything that you said to me. I wonder what it is that makes me so blind to things that other people see so clearly? I ought not to have let the poor child be exposed to the temptations of that arch-devil; but I trusted him implicitly. He always made the most sincere professions of his friendship for both of us. Then again, how is it, why is it, that people so constantly deceive me? I believe every man as I expect every man to believe me. Do you think I ever dreamt of all this, ever dreamt of what was in that scoundrel’s mind? Yet I ought to have foreseen—I ought to have been guided by you. It is all my fault, all my fault!’

It was useless to argue with him or to condole with him. He had persuaded himself without an effort that such and such things were, and the only thing to be done with him was to acquiesce in his conclusions and help him as judiciously as possible. The two faithful friends who had hurried to his side remained with him until the troubled waters grew calm again. That was now{226} an affair of time. Haidee was certainly insane, and the physicians held out little hope of her recovery. By their advice she was removed to a private institution within easy distance of Paris, and Lucian announced his intention of settling down in the gay city in order to be near her. He talked of her now as if she had been a girl-bride, snatched away from him by ruthless fate, and it was plain to see that he had obliterated the angry thoughts that had filled him during his frenzy of resentment, and now cherished nothing but feelings of chastened and tender regret. For Haidee, indeed, frailest of frail mortals, became apotheosised into something very different. Lucian, who never did anything by halves and could not avoid extremes, exalted her into a sort of much-wronged saint; she became his dream, and nobody had the heart to wake him.

Sprats and Saxonstowe worked hard for him at this time, one relieving him of much trouble in making the necessary arrangements for Haidee, the other of a large part of the business affairs brought into active operation by the recent tragedy. Saxonstowe, working untiringly on his behalf, was soon able to place Lucian’s affairs in order. Lucian gave him full power to act, and ere long had the satisfaction of knowing that the liability to Darlington and Darlington had been discharged, that Miss Pepperdine’s mind had been set at rest as to the preservation of the family honour, and that he owed money to no one. He would be able to surround the stricken Haidee with every comfort and luxury that one in her condition could enjoy, and he himself need never feel a moment’s anxiety. For the affaire Damerel had had its uses. Lucian came again in the market. Mr. Robertson began to sell the thin green-clad volumes more rapidly than ever before; even the portly epic moved, and finally began racing its sister competitors for the favour of the fickle public. Mr. Harcourt, with a rare sense of fitness, revived Lucian’s first play to crowded houses; an enterprising Frenchman went over to London and witnessed a performance, and within a few weeks{227} presented a version of it at one of the Parisian theatres. French translations of Lucian’s works followed, and sold like hot cakes; the Italian translations received a fillip, and people in the United States became interested. Nothing, said Mr. Robertson, could have been better, from a trade point of view.

Lucian accepted all this with indifference and equanimity. All his thoughts were centred on the quiet house in the little village outside Paris, where Haidee laughed at her own fingers or played with dolls. Every afternoon he left his appartement and travelled into the country to inquire after his wife’s health. He always carried some little gift with him—flowers, fruit, a child’s picture-book, a child’s toy, and the nurse to whom these things were given used to weep over them, being young and sentimental, and very much in love with Lucian’s face and hair, which was now turning a pretty and becoming grey at the temples. Sometimes he saw the doctor, who was sympathetic, and guarded in his answers, and sometimes he walked in the garden with an old abbé who used to visit the place, and exchanged pious sentiments with him. But he never saw Haidee, for the doctors feared it, and thus his conception of her was not of the madwoman, but of the young beauty with whom he had made an impetuous runaway marriage. He used to walk about Paris in those days with eyes that wore a far-away expression, and the women would speak of his beauty with tears in their eyes and shake their heads over the sadness of his story, which was well known to everybody, and in pecuniary value was worth a gold-mine.