The Mystery Road

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 269, 13 November 1928, Page 21

The Mystery Road

By E. PHILUPS OPPENHEIM

CHAPTER XXXIV.

The Tangle.

The telegram was brought in to Lady Mary as she sat alone in her little sittingroom, in the hours between tea time and the dressing bell; hours which, so far as possible, especially during the last few months, she tried to keep to herself. It had been handed in at a branch office in the north of London, and contained the news for which she had been waiting: — Elected. Majority two thousand. Heartiest thanks for good wishes. "Christopher."

1 Her first impulse was one of genuine ! pleasure. She half rose to her feet, meaning to take it to her father, who was with Myrtile in the library. Then she stopped short, and slowly resumed her seat. That little orange-coloured form might have meant so much more, so much food for her ambitions, her natural and proper ambitions for the man she loved. It might have been such a pledge for the interest of their life together, such a wonderful life, brimful of the movement and colour in which she, too, might well hope to take a part. In her quiet way she had for years looked upon her marriage with Christopher, sooner or later, as a certainty. Without the slightest idea to mislead her, Christopher had subconsciously encouraged the idea. She knew perfectly well that, as soon as his position was a little more assured, he had intended to ask her to be his wife. It was one of those pleasant yet wonderful arrangements which seemed to develop automatically. Christopher was well born, his friends were her friends, his disposition accorded with ■ hers. She could never have married an idle man. Christopher had many a worthy ambition. She was precisely the wife to further them. Her money and her social influence would save him years of fruitless labour. ' He could leave the Bar whenever he liked, and turn his whole attention to politics. And now the dream had crumbled. This slip of paper was nothing but a friendly message, telling her of thj success of a friend with whose career she had no intimate concern.

She wae too kind not to feel a certain amount of pleasure at hie success, but that very pleasure at his success, brought its shadow of personal grief. She eat looking into the fire, twisting the little slip of paper in her hands. She knew-very well that she was cursed with that one terrible and eelf-mortify-ing virtue, the unalterable fidelity of the woman who permits into her life the thought of one man and can never replace him. The very thought of marriage with anyone but Christopher was revolting. It eeemed to her, as she sat there, that she was doomed to a career of loneliness and inutility. She might labour in good works till her hair was streaked with grey and her face lined, and she fully realised the fruit leanness of that she would accomplish.:,. The 'best work of a woman ie the work done for the man she loves-.

It wae perhaps natural- that her thoughts should turn to Myrtile. She wondered for a moment, elowly and painfully, at the instinct which had warned her of coming trouble when the two young men had told her of their adventure. She had felt it when first she had eeen the frightened child, whose half-unspoken appeal for protection had met with so cold a response from her. She had been conscious of a cruelty wholly foreign to her nature, in those days at Monte Carlo, whenever the name of MyrtUe wae mentioned. She had puzzled Ohrietopher and her brother aHke by her lack of sympathy. Well, ehe wae punished now. The child bad justified all that she had felt. She had- robbed her, unconsciously and unwillingly, of the greatest thing in life. Aβ she sat there, that old hardness came back to her. It seemed to her a bitter thing that thie unknown child should have been brougiht into the august household in which her own eerene days had been epent to rob her, the benefactress, of the crown of her life, to draw the sunshine from her daye and send her down to a joyless grave. For a moment sihe wae on the verge of a passion. She hated Myrtile, hated the sight of her gentle movements, the thought of her and all to do with her. She rose to her feet with an unaccustomed fire in her eyee, swung round— to find that the slight noiee which had disturbed her meditations had been caused by the entrance of Myrtile herself.

There are moments when revelation ie self-iluiminative. This was one of them. Myrtile, gazing almost in terror into the face of her benefactress, knew that ehe was hated, and, witfi" an extraordinary insight, ehe knew why. She saw the crumple4-up telegraph form, she guessed at everything which had lain unspoken between them. She closed the door firmly behind her, came across to Lady Mary's chair, fell on her knees, and struggled with her sobs. "I know! I knowl" she cried. "I am very miserable!"

Mary looked at her coldly and critically. All the natural impukee of her heart seemed dried up. "I was a fool not to realise what bringing you here meant," she said. "It is too late now. Here is the telegram. Christopher ifl elected." Myrtilft brushed it away. It was a thing of no account. "I care nothing for Christopher, and you know it," she declared, passionately. "I do not care whether he ie elected or not. Nothing about him makes any difference to me, or ever wilL" Myrtile was speaking the truth. To Mary it seemed amazing, but she knew that it was the truth. "It is only a fancy which Christopher hae for me," MyrtUe went on. "It will paee—oh, I am sure that it will pase. Deep down in his heart I know that there is another feeling." "There was," Mary agree*".. "But for your coming he would have known it himself before now."

Myrtile shook with the pain of it. "But for my coining J" she repeated. "And I have prayed that I might bring a little happiness to you who have been so good to me!" Het anguish was apparent. There wae something almost unearthly in the Borrow which shone but' of Her eyes. Mary's heart began to fail her. Her fingers rested on the top of the other girl'« head. A glean of coming kindness ©hone mistily in her eyes. "It wasn't your fault," she eaid. "It is my fault that I am alive," Myrtile moaned. "But listen, pleaee. 1 tore mj plane. I am going away."

"What good would that do?" Mary asked, doubtfully.

'It would do a great good," Myrtile declared. "I s'hall remove myself altoget her. Christopher's fancy will pass. And, besides, I must go."

"My father would never epare you," Mary said, ashamed of the joy with which the tihought filled her.

"I have thought of everything," Myrtile insisted. "Lord Hinterleys has been very kind to me, but he will forget. If he chooses to see me sometimes, it will be possible. Let me tell you, please. I have a plan. Only yesterday I heard from the cure. He is back again in the valley. He ie at the church there now. He eays, if I need ever to go back, I can teach at the school. All my people have gone away many, many miles. My stepfather has a larger farm. I shall go back. I should never have come away." Mary looked at her eearchingly. All the suffering in the world seemed to be quivering in Myrtile's sensitive face. She leaned a little forward towards the kneeling girl.

"Myrtile," she whispered, "there is pain in your heart, too.*

"Oh, God knows it!" Myrtile sobbed. "There will be for ever and ever. It is for my own eake that I must leave. I thought that love v wae a toy, and I laughed to find it in my heart. And now I know that it is a torment. I want to go back along the road I have come, and hide."

"Wβ have been a little f ooUsh," Mary said, kindly. "You looked out into life expecting to find happiness, just as children go into the meadows to pick flowers. And I, too, forgot that happiness only comes when it is earned. Now let us try and be sensible. I think that yours is a very good idea. We shall raise you very much here, but perhaps it will be best for you to go away for a little time."

"I must go," Myrtile insisted, fervently.

"But teaching?"

"There is no need for me to teach," Myrtile declared. "This letter that I have from the cure, it was written to tell me that my mother's brother, who went to Geneva many years ago, has died and left me some money. An avocat at Toulon has it for me. It is quite a great deal. I thought that I would buy a' small farm and work in the fields there, work and work until I got brown and hard and grew like those other peasant girls there, lumps of the earth to which they stoop all the time. In a way I used to love the farm," she went on, "when I was alone—those first few mornings when the fields began to show purple with the budding violets, and the still evenings when the cypress trees looked as thought they had come out of a box of children's toys—and the colours the sunset ueed to draw out of the mountains, the roagnetas and purples, and the pink glqw coming in such unexpected places." "Why, you're positively homesick!" Mary exclaimed. "No, I am not homesick," Myrtile assured her, gravely, "but I am like an animal that has been burt and wants to limp back to its home. A little time ago it was different. Every fibre of me longer for escape, to be where iite was. Now I would like to go where I can forget It." Mary sighed.

"Fortunately," she said, "you are very young. You will learn soon that there are many men of Gerald's type, and that they are not to be taken very seriously. They have the trick of making you believe what they want you to believe, and they use it because they must. They are never quite honest. They are never quite bad. They certainly are not worth a broken heart. Now, we must take this message down to my father and send a reply. He does not altogether approve of Christopher's politics, but he will be glad to know that he is elected. Afterwards I will talk to him about you. I shall have to be very eloquent, for I know he will hate your going."

"If it could be before Gerald comes back," Myrtile pleaded. Mary had even more trouble with her father than she had expected. At the first mention of Gerald's name in connection with Myrtile's desire to return to France, he stiffened. "Mary," he insisted, "I shall require you to tell me the exact truth as to this matter."* "I will do so," Mary promised. "How much blame is to be attached to Gerald, and precisely what are his relations with Myrtile ?" Lord Hinterleys asked, sternly. "Gerald is to blame only for thoughtlessness," she assured him. "He is a born philanderer, just as Myrtile was born to be a ready victim. Myrtile loves him, and I am afraid she will never care for anyone else. Other women have to bear their hurts, though, and I dare say she will get over it." "Gerald is a fool," his father declared. "Marrying in one's own class is well enough in an ordinary way, but—well, there isn't another woman like Myrtile in the world. Gerald is an ass not to realise it instead of going to Russia, risking his life and liberty for the sake of this Russian girl. I don't like Russiane^—never did. You are a person of common sense, Mary. If you aay Myrtile must go, go she must, but I'd much rather Gerald came to his senses and married her." "Men are rather difficult in that way," Mary rejoined, a little bitterly. (To be continued daily.)