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_Title:_ Marionette
_Date of first publication:_ 1941
_Author:_ Louis Arthur Cunningham (1900-1954)
_Date first posted:_ October 20, 2026
_Date last updated:_ October 20, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20261039

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                          [Cover Illustration]

                               MARIONETTE

                      _By_ LOUIS ARTHUR CUNNINGHAM

                 _Author of “Sign of the Burning Ship”_

To her family, beautiful Bionde Lacasse, of Acadia, was a marionette, to
do their bidding, to marry herself to the highest bidder, and recoup the
family fortunes. When she met De Varin she knew that the puppet had the
warm heart of a woman, and that heart was his. But De Varin was a poor
artist and the stern Lacasses tore Bionde from him.

There seemed no escape from that parental will until the flashing steel
of Bionde’s miraculous ice skates brought her to the attention of the
world—and of Hollywood. Happiness was within her grasp now, but then a
strange mood seemed to come over De Varin, and he turned from her in
coldness.

The girl went to Hollywood, and the world that saw her on the screen
never knew that the glorious beauty of her skating concealed a broken
heart. At last, in a moment of supreme drama, Bionde learned the meaning
of De Varin’s strange actions, and there was happiness in two hearts
once more.

                 *        *        *        *        *

_A beautiful romance of the North._




                                BOOKS BY

                        LOUIS ARTHUR CUNNINGHAM


                               Marionette
                      The Sign of the Burning Ship
                         Tides of the Tantramar
                             Fog Over Fundy
                            Moon Over Acadie
                          Valley of the Stars
                          Of These Three Loves




                               Marionette

                                   by

                              LOUIS ARTHUR
                               CUNNINGHAM



                          THE PENN PUBLISHING
                         COMPANY • PHILADELPHIA




                            COPYRIGHT, 1941
                     BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY

                                 _NOTE_

                All rights reserved, including the right
               to reproduce this book or parts thereof in
                                any form

     COMPOSED, PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
             THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC., CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY




                                   To
                           MRS. FRANK PETERS

                               Marionette




                               CHAPTER I


Bionde had just come from a long walk over the marshes. She had followed
the footpaths worn deep into the top of the Shepody dikes that barred
the ever-waiting tides of Fundy from the fertile meadows. The sea-wind
had ruffled her yellow hair even as its cool breath toyed with the light
grass, bending it in long light green swathes; the sea-wind and the sun
had flushed her tanned cheeks and brought a lovelier brightness into her
blue eyes. The pungent scent of the dark woods of spruce and pine in the
uplands met and mingled with the salty zest of the sea, and it was a
fresh world, a clean world, a young world and bright—until she passed
through the gap in the leaf-bare lilac hedge, crossed the neglected lawn
and paused by the tangled shrubbery outside the library window.

It became an old world then, a grim world and gray. The brightness of
the late Autumn sunlight dimmed for Bionde Lacasse when she heard Tante
Adrienne’s dry words: “Bionde may consider herself very fortunate that
Mathieu Bernard wants her. He is wealthy. He has been long in
parliament——”

“And he will be the next to be appointed to the senate,” rumbled Uncle
Hormidas.

“It is a good thing for the family of Lacasse,” growled a new voice that
Bionde knew in a moment: the Colonel Hubert Lacasse, of the Ninth
Grenadiers regiment, all the way from barracks in Quebec, and with
him—“It will enable her to take her rightful place in society”—his
wife, Tante Aimée, once Aimée Dorion, daughter of a Quebec
ship-chandler.

“It will mean an end to skimping and scraping,” said Tante Adrienne.
“Mathieu has intimated that he will settle on Hormidas and me an income
sufficient to enable us to maintain our house——”

Bionde let go the twig her fingers had closed upon, and found, only
then, that it was a thorn and that her finger bled. She hurried
away—away across the lawn, through the break in the hedge, away over
the stretching endless marshland that went to meet the sea.

So that was why Uncle Hubert and his wife had come! A family conference.
When all else failed, one simply married off the daughter of the house
to the most eligible man one could find—in this case, Mathieu Bernard,
the Honorable Mathieu Bernard, fortyish, fat, filled with sounding
periods, so that a simple “Good day” uttered by him sounded like a
flourish of Gabriel’s trumpet.

Bionde shuddered. The October day was chill now, the sunlight was cold,
glaring, impersonal. It shone on everyone and everything alike, the sun.
It cared for no one. It did its work impartially and shed its radiance
anywhere it listed. So they were going to marry her off to Mathieu
Bernard! Then all their worries would be over; the house, it was her
house, for it had been her father’s, would become proud and splendid
again; the neglected gardens, the tumbledown buildings, the farm that
had gone to seed—all would come back again to their former splendor.
And she would have a great house at Cap Brulé in summer and in winter an
apartment in Ottawa at the Château Laurier; mink coats, motors, trips to
London and Paris—and Mathieu, who was white and doughy, who looked like
something made by an eccentric baker who forgot to put it in the oven.

Bionde crossed the great marsh and walked up the winding road into the
hills. She had walked miles, her brown brogues were white with dust, but
she felt no fatigue. She could keep on forever, happy in the thought
that each step took her further away from her guardians, further away
from Mathieu Bernard. She was eighteen; only a year out of the Convent
of the Gray Nuns. She had been once to Montreal, once to New York, but
the Acadian marsh-country was the only land she knew, the only land she
could ever love. Once the family of Lacasse had been proud and wealthy;
now they were bargainers, selling their girls to the highest bidders.

Time had been, no doubt, when the women of her name would obey,
unquestioning, the mandates of their elders; when, however much in their
hearts they might rebel and however much their souls be torn, they would
go to him who was chosen for them. But not now; certainly not with her.
She was no puppet to dance when others pulled the strings, no marionette
to move at another’s bidding. She had her own life to live and no other
should say how she was to live it.

She stopped before a broken-down iron gateway that gave on a park even
more neglected and forlorn than the one surrounding her own home. This
place belonged to the De Varins, once prouder, once richer and mightier
than her own family—once when along the Fundy Shore strong men built
great ships and in them made voyages that garnered vast wealth.

She entered the park by swinging nimbly over the sagging gate and walked
up the drive carpeted with the fallen leaves of oak and maple and elm,
under the over-arching branches of the trees. This was a pilgrimage, of
sorts; the visit of the last hope of one fallen house to another equally
fallen.

The long drive came suddenly upon a grand sweep of lawn that was now a
tangle of weeds, rank and wanton, upon a great old house that still,
despite its cracked and falling shingles, its one-hinged shutters, its
crumbling chimneys and rot and ruin, kept some of its pride and beauty
and, like a very ancient man, toothless and almost blind, brooded upon
the past that had been bright with love and laughter.

Bionde gazed upon it to-day more sadly than ever she had before. To-day
its history, its sorrows, seemed more vivid to her. And she thought, it
is too bad that you, old house, have not someone, as the House of
Lacasse has Bionde, who can put paint upon your clapboards, glass in
your windows, mortar between your bricks. But you are all forsaken, you
old house of De Varins, and one will let you molder away to dust; one
will never disturb the rats and the spiders that are your only tenants
now——

She stopped thinking; she stopped breathing for a moment—a moment in
which she could hear her heart’s quickened beat. She felt like a
butterfly that has been transfixed, held down by a thumb. She forced
herself to look around and her startled gaze met a pair of brown eyes in
a brown face that belonged to a brown youth with jet black hair—a gypsy
youth who sat on a crooked marble bench with a sketching block on his
knee and who used his pencil busily, not stopping even when she
discovered him.

He looked up, only briefly, with earnest eyes, then bent again to his
work.

“Do not move! Do not speak! Do not do anything, dryad!”

Dryad! Her full red lips were parted in sudden, swift resentment. Her
eyes darkened and her shoulders grew stiff, defiant. “What do you mean!
Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

“I mean dryad—nymph, fairy! I’m an artist. I’m making a sketch of you.”

“You startled me!”

“_You_ startled _me_—the contrast, you see—one so young, so
lovely—and this—” He waved a brown hand at the ancient home of the De
Varins. “But then, once it too, this house, was young, gay and bright,
and there was love in it and laughter and music and the prattle of
little children and the barking of dogs and—won’t you come and sit
beside me and see the sketch I made of you?”

She hesitated. She looked at his old tweed jacket, his creaseless
flannels, his dusty shoes, the rucksack on the bench beside him, the
stick of hornbeam that leaned against a tree. But his teeth were a white
crescent when he smiled and the smile was more real in his eyes than on
his lips and she felt tired now and somehow very sad—oh, not because of
Tante Adrienne or Uncle Hormidas or Uncle Hubert or Tante Aimée or
Mathieu Bernard—but just because things grow old and fall down and
decay, because laughter dies and even tears pass away.

She came over and sat beside him where he made room for her by pushing
the rucksack to the ground. She looked at the sketch and liked it. The
likeness was good. He had caught, with swift cunning, the expression of
youth when it feels sadness, a wondering, baffled look as of one who
cannot understand that life, with all its beauty, can have so much of
ugliness and pain, as of one who fails to see why, amid such growth of
loveliness, there should be so much decay.

“Did I seem so sad?”

“You did. And what made you sad?”

“This.” She looked at the dilapidated manor of the De Varins. “Doesn’t
it sadden you?”

“Not so much as it should, perhaps.” He gazed pensively at the ruined
façade. “In fact, I rather like it. Suppose you do put new paint on it,
give it a new roof, furbish it all up—it won’t have the character it
has now. It can never have back the things and people that made it what
it was. You can’t give it a new spirit and the spirit it has now is old
and weary. Better to let it go.”

Bionde looked gravely at his dark, strong profile. He turned his head
quickly, smiled at her. “Does that make you think?”

“Do you believe that—it is true of all old houses; that Youth shouldn’t
be sacrificed to prolong their age—houses and families?”

“Youth must never be sacrificed,” he said sternly. “Not for old houses,
old causes, old loves or old hates. Age tries too often to batten off
Youth, to feed off it, to use it for its selfish ends.”

“You speak with the voice of prophecy,” smiled Bionde. “Are you
Jeremiah, Daniel, Joshua?”

“No. I’m only a painter. And what are you?”

“I,” said Bionde, rising, “am one who is about to be a sacrifice to
Age.”

“Oh! But you’re not!”

“It’s hard to fight old things,” she said with young bitterness. “I must
go now. Good-by.”

“But—” He stretched out a hand to stay her. “Please don’t——”

“I must.” She almost ran over the sodden yellow carpet of the leaves.
The sun was lower in the sky now, the shadows lengthening on the shaggy
lawns and all but vanished parterres of the once proud house of De
Varin. But she went away happier than she had come. And it was thanks to
him—to that brown-faced, gypsy fellow, that she could go home now with
a free heart and brave, with the armor of Youth strong and shining about
her and Youth’s straight, gleaming sword in her hand, to face the powers
of Age, to defy them.

                 *        *        *        *        *

They were marshaled in the living-room, sitting, gray and faded, in the
dusk, when Bionde returned. She stood in the doorway and greeted them
without fear, without tremor. She walked over to kiss Tante Aimée’s cold
cheek, to let her hand rest in the dry old paw of Uncle Hubert.

“Wherever have you been, Bionde?” demanded Tante Adrienne, and Uncle
Hormidas grunted his question. “We expected you home hours ago.”

And I was home, she thought, and I heard what you said, how neatly you
had planned my life for your own benefit, for the glory of our house.
But you don’t know that.

She said, “I have been walking along the dikes and over the marshes and
into the upland. I strolled through the park of the De Varins——”

“Ah!” Uncle Hormidas shook his head. It was bald and shone in the
twilight as if there were a halo growing about it. “A sad ruin, that. A
lesson to be read there, Bionde—of what can happen to a house, to a
family if—if it is let go to seed, if it is—ah—not nurtured, given
new blood and——”

“Our own house is in danger of failing, child,” said Uncle Hubert, his
hand touching the place where he wore his war-medals and not seeming to
note their absence. “We were discussing that. It is for you, the—I may
say the flower of the Lacasses, to keep our family strong. It rests with
you, I think, whether we stand or fall.”

“But how with me?” She sat on the arm of a chair and looked from one
glimmering shapeless visage to the other, aware that their old eyes
could never see the defiance, the calm sureness in her own.

“By marrying—by bringing some new strong blood into the veins of our
family.”

“But—but I have often heard you say, all of you, that there is no blood
in Acadia now fit to mingle with ours.”

“Eh!” Uncle Hormidas stirred uneasily. “That perhaps, was a bit extreme.
Times change, says the poet Horace, and we with them. There are worthy
families, strong stock. To be specific: there is Mathieu Bernard, who
has distinguished himself in the service of his country, and who,
moreover——”

“But his family were peasants, fishermen—” Bionde’s impish smile was
lost in the gloom. “You would not have a Lacasse”—she stopped
impressively—“marry a peasant’s son and breed peasants!”

“Hmm!” Uncle Hubert rather agreed with that part of it. An ancestor of
the Lacasses’ had been governor of Isle Saint-Jean during the French
régime: the Bernards had been building dikes at Grand Pré then.

“Eh! Yes, pride of family is a good thing, a splendid thing,” said Tante
Adrienne. “But pride cannot live on itself, you know. And since you are
never likely to meet one who is your equal in birth and breeding—why,
then——”

Sophie, the housemaid, spoke from the dim doorway. “Monsieur Guy de
Varin.”

“De Varin!” It was a whisper that echoed from lip to lip; even Bionde
found herself shaping the name, a name even more hallowed than her own.

There had been no De Varins at the old house in her memory. The last of
them had gone away before she was born. For a while, she knew, some
effort had been made to keep the family dwelling in decent repair, but
for years now it had been neglected, left a prey to the spiders, the
worms, the beetles and things that creep and crawl and batten on old
houses. De Varin! She had heard so many stories of men and women who
bore that name. Even the sound of it had a proud ring, a haughty
over-tone. It spoke of rapiers with hilts be-diamonded, of fine silks
and lacy ruffles, of minuets and moonlight.

“Please show him in, Sophie.” Tante Adrienne stood up with a lavender
rustle and Uncle Hormidas switched on the dim lights so that they
greeted his entry. Bionde gasped and moved back into the shadows. Guy de
Varin stood tall and upright in the doorway, a smile on his brown face,
grace in his posture, that marked him for what he was, let him wear
baggy flannels or breeches of splendid satin. He bowed low over Tante
Adrienne’s soft white hand. He greeted each of them gallantly and when
he stood before Bionde, he said, “I behold the flower of your house,
Mesdames et Messieurs Lacasse,” and, bending, kissed her fingers.

There was constraint, wonderment, perhaps consternation among the
Lacasses. Certainly there was utter amazement in Bionde’s fast-beating
heart. Guy de Varin seemed in no way disturbed. He talked of France, of
Algiers, of Indo-China, of many strange and glamorous places whither his
adventurous kinsmen had penetrated, and whither he had followed.

“I am the last of the De Varins, as you know,” he said easily. “Last of
that illustrious family”—only Bionde saw the smile that was gone as
swiftly as the grass, bent by a vagrant breeze, straightens again—“who
came to Acadia two centuries ago and founded le baronnie de Menville.”

“It adjoined that of the Lacasses,” said Uncle Hormidas, “which was le
baronnie de Valcour. It is a good thing to remember those ancient days,
those great men.” He shook his head. “A proud thing to recall.”

“The first Baron de Menville, Paul de Varin,” said Guy most gravely,
“was a pirate. A pretty high-handed fellow, too, from what I know of
him. Did he not carry off his bride from her family that opposed their
union? I seem to have heard——”

The gray and white heads of the Lacasses moved in concert as old eyes
stared at him harder. Truly a rash young man, this. But perhaps he did
not know. These young ones cared little for tradition; this that he
spoke of was never mentioned, for the girl who had been carried off was
a Lacasse and at that time there was bad blood between her house and the
De Varins.

“It is a long time ago,” said Tante Adrienne primly.

“I heard of it when I was a small boy.” He was very much at ease, this
young De Varin. Bionde, watching him sitting so carelessly, so
gracefully on the faded fauteuil, could fancy claret velvet and yellow
lace and gleaming buckles on his shoes, and a sword, its hilt all
jeweled. “It fascinated me at the time and has always stayed with me.
Her family wanted her to marry a man of many possessions and Paul de
Varin turned pirate so he could acquire gold to match his rival’s. Even
then they objected—so he took her—and she was very happy with him.”

“Sir,” said Uncle Hubert, “that—that girl, though you may not know it,
and I sincerely trust you do not—was one of our house. It is an
incident that we——”

De Varin stood up, bowed humbly. “Pardon! I have made a mistake that I
regret very much. You will be more likely to forgive me when I tell you
that the respect I have for your house is such that it would never occur
to me that one of your daughters—” He stopped. Bionde saw the devil’s
imps dancing in his eyes—just as they came to dance in hers as she
finished for him:

“—would be put up at auction, and then not knocked down to the highest
bidder.”

“Bionde!” Tante Adrienne glowered menacingly. “Enough of this family
history, Monsieur de Varin. Will you honor us by staying to dine?” She
asked it coldly, but to her chagrin, he said, “I shall be delighted,
madame.”

There was nothing for it but to have Hervey, who was butler, handyman
and about everything else around the place, show him to a room. Bionde
got away too before anything could be said to her. She lingered in her
own room until after the bell had rung, until she heard De Varin’s quick
footsteps pass her door. Then she went down.

Mathieu Bernard was there—Mathieu, smug and soapy in black frock-coat
and striped trousers. He had been addressing a meeting of the Tantramar
Farmers’ Co-operative. He was still talking in sounding periods.
Bionde’s entry interrupted at the Great Lakes one that had started in
the Rockies, swept across the prairies, demolishing Social Credit on the
way, and that had been destined to end in the coal mines of Cape Breton.

“You look very pretty to-night, Bionde,” he said. She colored. Her eyes
met De Varin’s. He was very quiet in a corner, studying some old faded
prints showing the early days of Port Royal. Why, she wondered, had he
come here. Just because of the family or—The other possibility made her
heart beat faster, brought to her eyes a sheen that was new, to her
cheeks a deeper flush.

Tante Adrienne carefully placed her as far as possible away from Guy de
Varin, with Mathieu overflowing the chair next to hers and attacking his
soup with real country relish. It was a quiet meal, Mathieu doing most
of the talking and enjoying himself thoroughly, firing a few patronizing
questions at young De Varin, and not listening for the answers. The
household of Lacasse was very silent. To them all the presence of this
stranger, this De Varin, was disquieting. He was a specter—a ghost from
that past that they loved—but not enough to like overmuch its menace to
the present.

And he looked like a vagabond and doubtless was one. He looked like a
re-incarnation of François Villon. There was in his eyes a mocking
light; a pride in his aquiline face, a grace in his manner, that made
everybody there, save Mathieu, very conscious of Mathieu’s pudginess,
his bumptiousness, the platform-manner that would not be off. Even
Bionde was glad when the coffee and the brandy came and she, with her
aunts, withdrew.

She took her coat from the hall, flung it cape-fashion over her
shoulders and went out onto the terrace, out where there was a cool
lovely night and stars calm and bright in a sky that had not all
darkened, that still in the west showed a dying glow over the black
undulating silhouette of the coastal hills. The bay was calm, mirroring
the stars, and the tide was rising, creeping up on the land as if fed
from below by a million little springs, creeping up to the dikes, the
same eternal enemy, but with a flag of truce to-night.

Guy de Varin came down the steps and across the gravel and the lawn to
where she stood by the hedge. He came close to her and stood, saying
nothing, looking with her at the sky and the water and the hills, then
looking from them at her, steadily, until she turned to him.

“Perhaps even so,” he said, “in this same garden, on such a night, stood
that other De Varin and that other daughter of the Lacasses.”

She could not speak. She tried to answer him lightly, but words would
not come. It was as if the vanished centuries held her in thrall, as if
that past were all about her. She trembled.

“It is not as if you and I had just met, Bionde.” His voice was earnest,
low-pitched, close to her ear. “This meeting was written in the stars
many, many years ago. Perhaps you are the spirit of that one—her name
was Diane; perhaps I am Paul de Varin, who loved and won her.”

“You are full of strange fancies, monsieur.” She kept her uneasy hands
hidden beneath the folds of her coat; tried to slow the too swift and
noisy beating of her heart. She felt half-angry at him, that his mere
presence could do these things to her; yet there was in his nearness
some wondrous magic, some charm more potent than she could ever have
believed.

“You have brought these fancies to me—and the dreams that accompany
them.”

“A while ago you did not know that I existed. How could all this come to
you so quickly?” She tried to speak calmly, rationally, knowing that
this moment was pregnant with things that could be treated neither with
calm nor reason.

“To me it is as if I had always known you. As if I had been for a long
time asleep, had wakened and resumed my life where it left off. Yet this
too is a dream—even fairer than a dream.”

“Sometimes to-night I thought that,” she said. “I mean that I thought,
what if you weren’t you, what if I just imagined you, sitting there
to-day in the faded garden——”

His arms went about her gently and drew her to him and his lips found
her hair, her wide brow, her lips, and lingered there——

“That is real,” he said.

She opened her eyes, came slowly out of that realm of ecstasy, of beauty
lovelier than sunlight and flowers and stars. She looked at him and
murmured, “Is it?”

He kissed her again. He said, “I cannot bid for you, Bionde; perhaps I
can turn pirate and bring back gold to over-balance his.”

“I am not up for auction,” she said quietly. “I will not sacrifice
myself for—them. You taught me that. You told me that Youth must not be
sacrificed for old things.”

“And you have taken my teaching? Ah, Bionde, I love you—love you. It
seems as if I came across the world, drawn by that love, to this spot,
on this night. It is as if this were ordained long ago, that you and I
should meet and love.”

She was quiet, passive in his arms, her hair against his cheek. “The
world is all different now,” she whispered. “The stars, the sea, the
wind. The dawn will be different, and all the days to come.”

“For me, too,” he said, gazing down into her eyes as if he would never
weary of gazing, as if he must drink his fill of her beauty now. “But I
am nothing, have nothing. There was some money left to me. It lasted
until a little while ago. I did not need much. When it was all gone I
decided to come home—to the old house that is all that remains of
former glories.”

“But what will you do?” She released herself from his arms, her hands
lingering on his shoulders.

He shrugged. “I can do only one thing—paint. So I shall stay here and
paint my pictures.”

“But here—it is so far away from the places where people buy pictures.
Here you would be lost, ignored, forgotten——”

“I would be near you,” he countered stubbornly. “That alone would make
up for being ignored. It would make up for everything.”

He touched reverently the light whorls of her hair, luminous in the dusk
where the hawks swooped and the gulls’ far off bleating came with a
sound plaintive and eery. She caught his hand and held it to her breast.
She thought, she too, that just to be near him would be enough, that
nothing else could matter greatly then.

Tante Adrienne came down the garden walk with Mathieu Bernard, whose
cigar profaned the night. “It is cold to stay out here, Bionde.” She
looked disapproval at Guy de Varin. “Had you better not go in?”

“Presently, _ma tante_.”

“You are staying in Sainte-Barbe, Monsieur de Varin?” Bionde could see
Tante Adrienne’s lifted brows, so used was she to the way they went up
with any pertinent question.

“I am staying at the inn of Ludger Laflamme, the Three Pigeons, is it
not? I shall return there now, madame. I bid you good evening; and you,
monsieur.”

“I suppose,” said Mathieu Bernard, “you won’t linger long in a dull
place like Sainte-Barbe. Not much after Paris and New York and great
cities like those.”

“There is more of beauty here,” said De Varin audaciously. “I may spend
the rest of my days here.”

“And turn farmer!” Mathieu Bernard laughed raucously. “Those fine hands
of yours wouldn’t fit the handles of a plow, that’s sure.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” De Varin was not ruffled. “The men of our family all
had such hands—some held the sword, some the crozier, some the plow. We
shall see. _Bon soir._”

Bionde walked beside him. They went into the house so he could say
good-by to Uncle Hubert and Uncle Hormidas and Tante Aimée, who were
playing a solemn game of cribbage. They bade him a grave good night. At
the door, he took her hand and carried it to his lips. His dark eyes
shone. She felt strength like steel in his fingers, and was proud. His
lips brushed hers lightly.

“Good night, Bionde. I love you. I shall dream of you. I am in a new
world now, life is new, even the sun, for you are my sun—and moon and
stars.”

He went down the wide, sagging stone steps, with a backward look, a wave
of the hand. She heard the clash of his iron-plated heels on the gravel,
heard him whistling as he strode down the drive. She lifted her face to
the stars, so remote, so calm, so timeless, in the pale blue sky. She
closed her eyes and felt the breeze from Fundy cool on her lids, on her
cheek, and felt new life, new ecstasy, new powers awaken in her young
breast and stir, like roses in the dawn.




                               CHAPTER II


From the ice-bound places of Belle Isle and the Labrador and Canada’s
frozen frontiers, the wild winter winds came rushing, sweeping the
Westmoreland marshes clear of all life save that which moved muffled and
swaddled warmly against the blast. Guy de Varin lived in a few rooms of
the old house, an object of deepest curiosity and speculation to the
marsh-dwellers, an object of great unease to the Household of Lacasse,
an object of love to Bionde and uncertainty to himself. But in Bionde’s
heart was revolt that had come out into the open. Flatly she said, “I
will not marry Mathieu Bernard.”

She said that the day Tante Adrienne brought out the wedding-gown, a
delicate web-like thing of silk and exquisite lace that Bionde’s
grandmother, Meridel Melanson, had worn and had passed to her daughter,
who had married Etienne Lacasse, Bionde’s father. Reverently Bionde
touched the wondrous point d’Alençon and felt, as her fingertips
caressed its beauty, a strange, nostalgic thrill. She thought of her
mother, her grandmother, as they were on the day they dressed in this
lovely thing and went to meet the men they had chosen.

Or had they chosen? Had it not perhaps been with them as the family
would have it for her? Had not the men been selected for them? She would
never know that. But she said, looking into Tante Adrienne’s chill gray
eyes, slowly drawing her hand away from the web of lace, “Ah, yes, it is
lovely. It is like a dream, so fine and delicate and lovely. It would
make any girl’s heart glad. But if she is not wearing it for the man she
loves, why then she might as well dress herself in some potato-sacks. Is
it not so, _ma tante_?”

Tante Adrienne looked at her as if she had uttered some awful blasphemy.
Here was something unheard of; here was revolt. Love—what had love to
do with it? Mathieu Bernard was rich. He could provide everything a wife
needed. The child was mad. All girls of eighteen were mad.

“What do you say?” Her mouth was set, hard. She had little white
bristles at her lip corners and they stood out straight. “How can you
talk this way! Here is this lovely wedding-gown handed down to you from
your own grandmother. It is for you to wear when you marry Mathieu
Bernard. You do not seem to understand.”

“It is you, I fear, who do not understand.” The blue eyes were calm, but
behind their calm a storm was lurking. “I do not intend to marry M.
Bernard.”

“You do not intend—” Tante Adrienne’s shoulders, stiff as a grenadier’s
at all times, were simply rigid now. “You dare to tell me that you—that
you refuse to—to——”

“I do not love him.”

“Bah! Love! What has love to do with a good home and plenty of money, an
assured position and——”

The storm raged on and on. The others came, old, gray and dim, like
figures out of a faint dream, but all able to add their quota of
persuasions, recriminations, threats, cajoleries. Uncle Hormidas,
sputtering, his eyes popping out like those of an astonished frog; Tante
Aimée, her hand over her heart, that had been weak for almost sixty
years; Colonel Hubert, fuming and swearing. Their faces circled around
her, old and void of warmth, of understanding, of love. Their fingers,
long and gnarled, pointed at her, their words were a thousand little
scourges flagellating her, making her soft soul quiver. Better, better
perhaps to do as they bade her, to cease fighting against the weight of
their old desires, the massive load of their selfishness. Let her be
sacrificed to their peace of mind. Perhaps—who knew?—they were right.
It might be that they knew best. Would she have resisted them, had the
strength to meet their onslaught and defy them if one had not said to
her: “Youth must never be sacrificed. Not for old causes, old houses,
old loves or old hates. Age tries too often to batten off Youth, to feed
off it, to use it for its selfish ends.”

She ran from them, ran blindly, left those gray shapes in the grayness
of the old room. She hurried through the house and through the kitchen.
In the back porch she snatched up her skates and slung them over her
shoulder. In the hall she had picked up in passing her white sweater and
gray fur jacket and blue beret. One could always skate, and in freedom
of motion, in flying over the frozen ponds on the marsh, one could find
relief. She ran almost all the way under a sky the color of lead. She
could not think to-day, could not straighten out the confusion in her
mind.

She had seen Guy only twice since the day of his coming. They had met in
the winding, straggling street of Sainte-Barbe and he had walked with
her. And he had spoken no more of love. He did not talk much. She felt
in her heart that he had said all that she need ever hear. She knew he
was poor, that he had nothing. And that would hold him back. But there
was love between them. It had come between them even before he kissed
her. And there was misery in his soul. She knew that: he was so quiet,
so withdrawn. What did he do there in that old tumbledown mansion? How
could one paint amid such surroundings? How could one so young, so
strong as he, go on hoping, go on seeing a splendid future, when he was
lost, tucked away in a forgotten village on the rim of the great
marshes, lost in their endless monotony, their awful loneliness, dwarfed
by their immensity?

She thought of him as she put on her skates, sitting on a log at the
edge of the pond below the great dike. What if he had not come here?
Would she have let herself be persecuted into this marriage with Mathieu
Bernard? Perhaps yes. And what difference could his presence make? There
was nothing for him and her—nothing. No hope of any kind. Oh, perhaps
he might sell some of his pictures for a great price and then he would
come to her and tell her again of his love, and they would be
married——

She stood up, stepped lightly onto the mirror surface of the pond and
almost at once forgot the misery in her heart, the troubled thing her
life had become. She could skate. Like all the children in Sainte-Barbe,
she had learned to skate as soon as she could walk. Her strokes were
strong and sure and free, her movements like an exquisite poem, a marvel
of rhythm and coördination. She had not learned in Sainte-Barbe all the
complicated figures, the dazzling pirouettes and lightning-swift
maneuvers that she went through now. There was a Danish farmer, Tor
Gustavssen, who had settled in Sainte-Barbe. He had seen her skate one
day and some joy that had all but died was born again in his blue eyes.
And he had taught her to skate. He had told her a little, a very little,
of his own daughter whom he had taught before her, who had died when she
was very young. And it was Tor who had given her, shyly, the silvery
skates with their high-laced white boots that she wore now.

She was lost in the ecstasy of movement, in the swiftness of passage,
the glorious symmetry of motion, as the true musician or artist loses
himself in the work of creation. She was composing a symphony, writing a
poem, painting a picture in the motions of her strong, slender, youthful
body. All else was forgotten. Free and happy, intoxicated with the
satisfaction that came to her, she moved over the ice with a speed, a
grace, a rapt sureness that seemed to Guy, who watched her, a little
more than human.

When finally she stopped, poised on the toe of one skate, her arms
outflung, her yellow hair flying, he came down to the rim of the pond
and stared at her. She seemed to awaken then. She came to him in one
long curving stroke of tremendous power, and smiled up into his eyes.

“I did not see you,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“A long time,” he replied. “You saw no one. Where in the name of heaven
did you learn to skate like that? And what were you trying to say in
those wild, wonderful motions of your body? I—I have never seen
anything like it.”

She laughed. “I wasn’t trying to say anything—not anything that I can
name. It’s just that I love to skate. If I feel unhappy or upset, if
things are dark for me, I can put on my skates and in a little while
forget everything except how lovely it is to be free—free to move
unhampered and unchecked. Tor Gustavssen taught me the figures and most
of what I know. He is a Dane who lives on the edge of the marsh near
Sainte-Barbe.”

“He taught you well, Bionde.” De Varin looked thin and tired. “Were you
unhappy to-day that you needed to skate like that? As I watched you it
came to me that you fled at that terrific speed from some ugly, hateful
thing.”

She nodded. “That must be it. I didn’t think of it that way, but I see
now that it was flight. And for a while I found relief in that running
away. But here I am”—she shrugged sadly—“right back where I started.
Perhaps I shall never get away.”

He stared at the frozen ground. “Is it—the same thing?”

“Yes. Only more so. To-day Tante Adrienne brought out the wedding-gown
that my grandmother and my mother wore. It is, she told me, the one I
shall wear when I——”

“You don’t want to wear it. You can’t—” She saw misery in his brown
eyes when he looked up at her, misery and defeat.

“No—no, I don’t want to wear it. I told her I wouldn’t wear it—I told
them all. As they stood about me, all of them—it was like an awful
dream. And they argued and scolded and threatened, until I could stand
it no longer. Then I came here. When I go back it will begin again. They
are too much for me, too strong, too quick with the answers to all my
objections. And they have forgotten what love is, if they ever knew.”

“You know what it is then?”

She looked down at the white toe-cap of her boot. Her face was grave,
her voice soft: “I know what it is not.”

“Bionde—” He came close to her and took her gloved hand in both his
own. She looked up at him then with something shy and almost frightened
in her eyes, and at once looked away. “I spoke to you of love,” he said,
“the first day, almost the first hour, I saw you. I could not help it.”

“I listened.”

“I could not help myself. It—it all seemed so easy then. Now that I am
with you again, close to you, it again seems easy, and not the
impossible thing that cold reflection made it look like.”

“You were afraid?”

“Not for myself; for you and for what life can do to such a love as mine
for you. There are so many things.”

“Are any of them greater than love?”

“Not greater. But many are so much stronger, so much more cruel. I love
you; I think you know that. And you care for me too.”

“I haven’t denied it—even to myself.”

“And I cannot ask you even to wait. I dare not.” His mouth had a bitter
twist to it and he looked gloweringly at the sullen sky, at the drab
world of the marshland where the brown grass held, here and there,
patches of grayish snow. “I brought new heart and courage to my painting
after the day I met you. There were worlds to conquer and I felt that I
could conquer them.”

“Can you not go on feeling like that?”

“The way seems so long. And it is so hard to wait.”

“But if you go on believing, go on trying——”

“Always with the knowledge of what failure will mean.”

She looked squarely at him then and saw how young he was, how boyish,
how uncertain and in her lived that ancient wisdom that is woman, who in
her weakest moments knows that she is the strong one; that, in her, life
seats deeper than in man the warrior and the hero: for she has mothered
man.

“You will not fail,” she said softly. “You cannot leave the battle
before it’s begun; you can’t admit that you are beaten before you
start.”

He listened to her raptly, as if he had hungered for these things she
said, as if they resolved all his doubts, answered all those questions
that had come to plague him in moments of despair. Her faith and courage
made the long road seem so much easier and its roughness was smoothed by
what he saw so clearly waited for him at its end.

He said, “I have painted some things in the time I have been here, some
studies of life in Acadia. An old woman at her loom, a fisherman coming
up from the sea. I’ve sent them to an art dealer I know in Montreal,
Peter Crosley. He believes in my work. Perhaps they will sell. And he
has others that I sent him before.”

“You believe in yourself, Guy—you must believe.”

“You believe in me, don’t you, Bionde?”

She nodded. He drew her to him slowly and kissed her cold lips and
touched with his cheek her hair that flowed in little cascades of pale
gold from under the beret she had hastily donned at the end of her
skating. He was afraid, awed, by the faint glimpse he had now of what
her love might mean to him. In her, something told him, was fire and
passion, all that man could ask; in that slender, supple body, so
deceptively frail and delicate, was the strength of the world’s
creation. It was being offered to him. If he took it, if he had the
courage and power to take it, he must look upon it as a trust sacred and
inviolate.

He was trembling when he loosed her from his arms. The swift dusk was
darkening the marshes, the distant houses of the village were vague in
the grayness, the church spire looked small and its cross could not be
seen. All about them was the vast, brooding stillness, almost palpable,
of these flat regions of the earth. No bird soared above them, the wind,
unresisted, sang past with a steady, monotonous rush that never varied.
Their voices sounded small and lost and it seemed as if the words they
spoke stayed here in this spot forever, engulfed in the hunger of its
silence.

He did not go home with her. He watched her as she walked quickly toward
the lights that had begun to glimmer in the winter dusk. Small and brave
and gallant, she seemed to him. And he thought, standing there long
after she had gone: She is stronger than I am. She is surer of her love
and does not question it or fear that anything could hurt it. She would
put it to the test now, to-night, if I asked her. But what do I see?
Uncertainty, poverty, failure—can love ever survive these things and
still keep its freshness, its beauty? And would I dare to risk her
happiness, to ask her to share the nothing I have? I love her too much
for that.

In Bionde’s heart there was no doubt, no fear. She loved this man, this
stranger, who had come out of nowhere. It was because of his coming that
she had fought so hard against the plans her family had made for her. If
he had never come, if she had not read of the wonder and beauty that
love might bring to her, had not seen her hope of happiness in his dark,
laughing eyes, she might in time have gone to Mathieu Bernard, she might
even have been, in a bovine way, content with him, never knowing, save
as some vague and formless yearning, the glory she had missed. For this
love was a glory, a fair and shining thing whose light transformed the
whole world even as it had changed the very life within her.

They must have seen that she had found some new ally, some great
resource, the old ones who waited for her return. They did not resume
the attack that night nor the next day nor the next, but then they
smoothly suggested that it was a long time since she had taken a
holiday, that Quebec City was a lovely place in winter, that Uncle
Hubert and Tante Aimée, that childless pair, were lonely and would love
to show off their pretty niece. Oh, it would be just for a little while,
a few weeks, a month; and it would do her so much good. She was so fond
of skating, of skiing, of all winter sports: where better enjoy them
than in Quebec, which was bound in a short time to outdo Chamounix or
St. Moritz or any of the vaunted winter playgrounds of the world that
was being destroyed?

She could not refuse. She was not sure that she wanted to, though often
she had dreamed of Quebec in wintertime, picturing it as a city of light
with gleaming towers and battlements looking down on a world all white.
Yet something warned her not to go, that that was a trap, that they were
scheming to separate her and Guy, and that this, so subtly broached, was
the opening of the campaign.

They had even bought her ticket. Uncle Hubert and Tante Aimée had to
return at once. They would take no refusal. She must go. It was a veiled
command. “And, _mon Dieu_,” said the old soldier, “how my officers have
need to look on such a pretty face as yours, Bionde! It is true the
women of Quebec have not the same loveliness of you Acadians. You will
be the toast of the garrison, my child.”

I would rather, she thought, be the wife of Guy, there in his few cold
rooms, I would rather starve with him, freeze with him, if he would only
ask me. Where he is, I can find all I’ll ever want.

But Guy said, “By all means go, Bionde.” He was adept at hiding the
things that gnawed at his deep heart. “It will be good for you. This
place is so dull and you are so young. Here your youth would be quickly
stifled. There’s no light laughter here. Surely you do not hesitate——”

“But you—” The hurt, the bewilderment, showed in the deep blue of her
eyes, in the tremor of her voice. “What will you do? Will you not——”

“Miss you? Yes, as I’d miss the sun and the stars. But I shall work
harder, I shall never rest. And you—you will not forget me?”

She came into his arms and cried a little against his shoulder. “I would
not go, if I thought that anything there could make me different, could
make me forget even a moment of the time I have had with you. Do you
believe me? You must believe me. You must tell me that it’s the same
with you and me, that our love does not suffer, that it will always be
the same.”

“I can tell you that,” he said earnestly. “And I will always believe.”

He was skating with her on the pond that day. She was like some feathery
thing on his arm, so airy light, so swift, so elusive. He marveled that
such speed and grace could dwell in one small body. He said, “You will
not skate away from me, there in Quebec? I think that I should put
shackles of gold, heavy ones, on those winged feet of yours. I seem
clumsy and helpless to hold you. It is as if you soared away from me, as
if I tried to hold a bird in my hand, a bird whose wings are strong,
whose heart is stronger.”

“But love too has wings,” she said slowly, with that sweet grave way of
hers that he had come to worship, “and you could fly after, could you
not? And you would be swift to overtake me.”

There was fear, a deep anxiety, in her heart. She knew she had here a
precious thing and life would not offer it again, were she to lose it
now.

He laughed then. “Yes, it is so. Swiftly as you might fly my love should
go after you and catch up with you. It would not let you escape me
ever.”

But he was not at the little station that day of snow and roaring wind
when the sleigh drew up to the platform and she and Uncle Hubert and
Tante Aimée were assisted by Hervey from the heap of buffalo robes. He
had said his good-by. He could not bear to come there. Indeed, it would
be hard for him to find his way through that shifting world of fine
white stinging powder. Always after she remembered the bitterness of the
day, the jingle of the bells clear in the icy air, the creak of the
harness, the steam that rose from the sweating horses, the acrid smell
of it. Then the long train, snow-covered, its mighty engine hissing
angrily, drew in, cutting off her view of the marshes with their awful
lonely fascination. Then she was in the warmth and privacy of the
drawing-room and the train was slowly, surely, gathering speed.

She felt a wild desire to get off, to go back, to lose herself in the
storm that raged across the Westmoreland fenlands, knowing surely that
somewhere in that storm she would find him, would find her love and all
her hope of happiness. Too late for that now, perhaps forever too late.
The long frozen miles lengthened between her and him and it seemed too
that with the augmenting distance their lives drew apart. And she was
afraid and lost and wanted to cry.

She heard Colonel Lacasse say as he shrugged out of his fur-lined coat
and let the porter hang it with his jaunty cap of black Persian lamb.
“_Seigneur!_ It is good to get away from that accursed marshland. Yes, I
know I was born there and it may sound like treason to you, Bionde, for
me to say this. But it always got me down. It depressed me in summer and
frightened me in winter. A sort of melancholy madness seems to hang over
it and to affect the people who dwell there.”

She seemed only then to awaken, to realize what he had said. She looked
up into his great ruddy face and protruding eyes. She shook her head. “I
love it,” she said softly. “Always when I’ve been away from it, I’ve
wanted to go back. It’s lonely, yes, and awful, but it gives you room to
breathe, a place to think, to dream your dreams.”

“Oh, child!” Tante Aimée’s cold fingers touched her cheek. “What way is
that for you to talk! You are too young to be so serious, so morbid. You
should be laughing most of the time, not mooning over a lot of bogs.
What is there for you?”

All that I’ll ever love, thought Bionde—all the happiness I may ever
know. But she made no answer.

“After a few of the gay parties, the splendid balls in Quebec, you will
forget all about that abomination of desolation. It has always puzzled
me why people stick in gloomy places in this world that has so many
bright ones unoccupied.”

Bionde could not argue with her. She knew that all joy, all true
happiness resided within one, deep in the heart of one. Place and time
had little to do with it. She thought of Guy in the bare old rooms of
the De Varin place, trying to keep warm by the huge open hearth, trying
to paint with fingers made numb by the cold. She felt the tears flooding
to her eyes. She fought them back; tears would help neither of them.
Hope and courage and trust—these were the things they must have. Only
with these aids would their love survive.

“And I will hope,” she told herself. “And I’ll have courage, and faith
in him. But it is cruel, this going away. I hate myself now for ever
having yielded to them. I will soon go back—soon.”

So she promised herself, young Bionde of the yellow gold hair and eyes
of the blue of the summer sky above her beloved marshland. So she
assured herself as the long train roared through the winter day and the
bitter night, across the frozen reaches of Eastern Canada toward the
gloomy rock that is Quebec; but many long days and weeks and months,
many thousands of miles still lay between her and the day of her
returning. She whispered his name that night as she prayed before she
slept, and she wondered if that faint whisper would live in the howling
winds long enough to reach his ears where he sat lonely and discouraged
in the ruined house of his fathers.

                 *        *        *        *        *

She saw Quebec next morning, its towers and pinnacles, its high-flung
bastions and strong old walls touched with beauty by the brassy
glintings of the winter sun. Her loneliness still persisted, yet she
loved the life about her here, the narrow tortuous streets, the ancient
houses, the forgotten echoes of gay laughter lingering down the
centuries. Not hard for her to picture the notorious Intendant, François
Bigot, and his wild companions, the Sieur de Cadet and Hugues de Péan;
the lovely Angélique de Meloises, who was De Péan’s wife, the beloved of
many, called La Pompadour of New France; not hard, as she walked that
night under the stars, cut so cleanly in the blue black sky, to fancy
that she heard the strains of some stately minuet of Lully, to which
danced lovely women with gorgeous hair and gowns of gleamy silk, and men
in knee-breeches and white-powdered perukes. The old city put its spell
upon her, the spell of its ancient glories, and for a while she could
forget the wild, wind-swept land of her birth, where thundered the
mighty tides of Fundy.

Here was gay life and laughter light and airy. Here the mad toboggan
shot with terrific speed down the icy slopes and the hills re-echoed
with the shouts of the skiers and snow-shoers. She had brought her
skates but she had no heart for skating; and for a while no time. It
seemed that one, at least in the circle where her aunt and uncle moved,
had very little time for anything.

The day after her arrival Tante Aimée took her shopping. There were
gowns and shoes to buy. For members of a house whose fortunes were
failing, the Hubert Lacasses, it struck Bionde, did not seem to care how
much money they spent or, at least, put themselves in for. Tante Aimée
insisted on buying for her a rose-velvet evening-gown which was lovelier
than anything she had ever dreamed of. When she protested, Tante Aimée
said, “It is the wish of Hormidas and Adrienne, as well as Hubert’s and
my own, that you shall have lovely things to wear and that you shall
have a good time and learn thus how fine a thing life can be. You must
get away from the insane idea of burying yourself in the mud of the
marshes when your birthright entitles you to know the high places.”

She was frank about it all. Bionde saw the deep-laid plan now in all its
cunning detail. They were going to teach her new lessons, give her a
taste for caviar and champagne so that she would learn to despise the
_poutine râpée_ and good strong tea of her own people. They were going
to make her need the things that money alone could buy—and need them so
much that she would even marry Mathieu Bernard in order to get them.

It was easy, too, she soon discovered, to learn to like these
things—elegant apartments, fine motors, rich furs and dresses from _la
rue de la Paix_. It was lovely to dance in the magnificence of the
Château Frontenac with some handsome young soldier who made you feel as
if death were a mere bagatelle and the only thing precious in life was
to have the privilege of gazing in your eyes. Good to have maids to wait
upon you, to have your every wish anticipated.

Weeks of this, enough of gayety and music and luxury to turn the head
and eat into the heart of most young girls, yet no night passed, no
matter how late the hour, that she did not go to the window of her room
after she had put out the lights, and gaze off at the distant stars and
think, They shine over him to-night. He sees them, even as I can see
them. Perhaps he looks at them and thinks that they shine on me. And the
stars were a link between her and Guy. Those far, far stars seemed the
only thing in all the world that brought them closer together.

And she could see the white vastness of the marshes under the moon and
stars and, holding her breath, almost feel the great stillness of the
nights in her own beloved land. She felt like a stranger here, among
these people of her own race and tongue; she knew she never could be one
of them.

There was no letter from Guy, though she had written to him the day she
arrived. Letters from Tante Adrienne did not mention his name and Uncle
Hubert and Tante Aimée pretended to have forgotten that there ever was
such a person and to be utterly ignorant of the fact that she had been
interested in him. So they pretended, but she knew better. She knew it
was because of Guy more than her refusal to marry Mathieu Bernard, that
they had brought her here.

She began to talk of returning home, feeling as she spoke how ungrateful
she must seem, but knowing too that she could not go much longer without
seeing Guy. She wrote again, but no answer came. Perhaps, she thought,
wild panic and sick fear in her heart, he has gone away from
Sainte-Barbe, left the place as suddenly as he came. Perhaps he is the
gypsy I took him for the first day I saw him when he was drawing my
picture. Perhaps I shall never see him again.

And she knew that if that were so something would die in her. Some part
of her that had been warm and living would grow cold and perish.

But the days that had moved so swiftly at first dragged now and offered
nothing that appealed to her. She knew that she was the subject of
anxious conferences between her aunt and uncle, and probably, too, of a
voluminous correspondence between them and her guardians in
Sainte-Barbe.

She did not care. She was sorry for them, knowing how they would feel
when they realized their plan had fallen flat. But they had
underestimated her strength—rather, the strength of her love. Not all
that they could give was powerful enough to vanquish that; not all the
gorgeous colors in the world could make her forget the honest brown of
his eyes, nor all the symphonies drown out the deep tone of his voice,
nor anything take from her the love she had for him.

Lonely and heartsick she would go for a walk after the evening-meal,
with Tante Aimée’s great wolf-hound Natascha stepping majestically
beside her. She moved among the crowds and was never one of them. She
thought sadly that even on her solitary rambles along the tops of the
dikes she had never been so lost, so alone, as she was here. Sometimes
she searched the faces of the crowd for that one loved face, knowing as
she did so how empty was the hope.

It was the ancient sorrow of her race that fell upon her now; the fate
of the women of her people to be separated from the men they had chosen.
She thought of Evangeline ruthlessly torn from Gabriel whom she loved,
condemned to go all her life without him, wanting him, only in death to
meet. She was so young to know such sorrow. Perhaps he would never come
to her.

Then, one night, as she rode with her aunt and uncle to a dance at the
Château, she saw him. He was passing the brightly lighted window of a
bake-shop. Guy! She almost cried out his name. He looked as shabby, but
as gallant as ever. He wore no overcoat, though the night was bitter.
There was a gay habitant scarf, blue and gold, tied around his neck, and
a felt hat was pulled low over his eyes. Still she knew him in a moment.

The car stopped at the upraised hand of a traffic policeman and in an
instant, heedless of her aunt’s restraining hand, of her uncle’s
startled snortings, she had wrenched open the door and was out on the
slippery cobbles, forgetful of the rose-velvet that trailed the ground,
of the golden slippers, of the white fur evening-wrap and the blue
flowers in her hair. Across the frozen, treacherous street, among the
wildly hooting motors, she ran on winged feet.

The evening crowd in the street made way for her, turned wonderingly to
watch her, to wonder what it was that made her hasten so. Some of them
knew, those who had seen the starshine in her eyes, and the young ones
envied her and the old ones sighed. It is good to be young and to be in
love; good to forget that there is ever gray in the skies or shadows
upon the earth.

He turned as she caught up with him. She saw his eyes fly wide, his lips
part, saw a momentary struggle between pride and love, and then the
swift surrender of pride.

“Bionde!”

She was in his arms, tightly, tightly in his arms and his lips were warm
on hers.

“Oh, Guy! Why did you not——”

“_Ma mie!_” His lips stopped her words. “My sweet! A moment ago I was
hating you. I saw you pass in that car. I thought you had forgotten me.”

“But I wrote you——”

“I received no letter. I wrote you.”

“But I—” Her nostrils flared a little. “The letters I wrote were left
with others to be mailed, and yours came with the colonel’s mail—It is
clear now. They held our letters. The fools! Did they think that would
stop us, that anything would stop us!”

“But it might have. I—I was going away to-night. I just came to-day.”
He grinned. “And I would have been back to-morrow.”

“You would have gone away without speaking to me? Without even letting
me know you were here? How could you do that? How could you forget the
things we said, the promises we made?”

He looked at her contritely. “Because—I thought—I was fool enough to
think, that you had forgotten them. They were said long ago, it seems,
in another world than this. There were only you and I in that world. I
thought you had stepped out of it. I feared that when no answer came to
my letters. To-night, when I saw you pass, so like a queen, like some
_grande dame_, I was sure of it.”

“If you had gone away you would have forgotten me.”

“I would have tried, Bionde, but I should never have been able to forget
you.”

“But what shall we do?”

“Do!” He stared at her. “Why, we shall be married, of course. Oh, I
forgot, I did not tell you. Crosley sold a number of my pictures. And
there will be more. And I have money now. And if you will—if you’re
not——”

They were on Sainte-Ursule Street in a spot that had seen many a lovely
episode in many a gay romance, but never here nor elsewhere had man
kissed maid or maid kissed man as they kissed now. Light was her
laughter that night as they sat for hours in a little café drinking
coffee they did not want. She had advised her uncle’s house that she was
all right and would be home later.

“Ah, but they will be angry,” she said. “Angrier than ever they were
before. I cannot help it.” She looked, laughing, into his eyes. “It was
you who said once, Guy, that our love was written in the stars, and who
are little people, for even the Lacasses are but little people, to fight
the stars!”

“Who indeed!” echoed Guy.

And neither of them in their young ecstasy thought that there are stars
and stars, good ones and malignant ones, in the lives of all men and
women, and that always we are fighting some of them, even when we think
they all are for us.

To-night the stars of heaven were all for them and spelled out brightly
in the dark sky the words of their love, and proclaimed its glory for
all the world to see.

“Tell me of Sainte-Barbe,” commanded Bionde, round chin on hand that
never lost the golden hue of the summer’s giving. “I have thought so
much of home. Every night I would stand at my window and look across the
hills of Levis and try to see, hundreds of miles away, the old house
where you lived and all the places I loved so much.”

“You were not happy?”

“Never really happy—until now. Oh, it is gay here and one laughs easily
and there is much music and the lights are bright, but home there is the
brightness of the Northern Lights over the Tantramar and if you listen
you can hear the music the stars make.”

“But you hear that to-night?” He laid his hand on hers, his fingers
entwining with hers.

“Yes,” she said, looking at him through lowered lashes. “To-night I hear
it, very sweet and clear.”

They talked of what life would be for them, life together. “We shall
live in a garret, of course,” said Guy. “That is in the tradition of the
painter. Modern painting is not what it should be, simply because there
are no longer very many first-rate garrets.”

“With leaky roofs and rags to stuff the breaks in the window-panes? Ah,
but I shall love it.”

“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “And there I shall paint all day long and you
shall be my model. I’ll paint you in a thousand different poses and
still there will be new ones. Your hair alone, _chérie_, has a million
lights in it. How shall one brush, one palette, hope to reproduce them
all! Ah, I shall grow old painting you.”

“And I, being painted. But we shall never notice that we grow old. We
shall be always young.”




                              CHAPTER III


           _“Yes; ’tis a garret—let him know’t who will—_
           _There was my bed—full hard it was and small;_
           _My table there—and I decipher still_
           _Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.”_

How happy one can be in a garret when one is twenty. Guy de Varin was
thinking of the words of Beranger the next morning as he set up his
easel in the attic apartment on Sainte-Ursule Street hard by the spot
where Bionde had found him and right above the café where last night
they sat until the benevolent but weary proprietor had ostentatiously
wound his watch and put his two cats down into the cellar with a hearty
“_Bon soir, mes amis_.”

Laughing then, and making him share their youthful laughter, they had
gone, and in spite of the bitter cold and the high-heeled golden
slippers and the costume designed for the ball, Bionde had insisted on
walking all the way back to the house of Colonel Lacasse.

“A taxi,” she said, “would shorten by minutes the time I have with you.
We shall walk if you have to carry me, _mon bijou!_”

So they walked slowly along the narrow streets between the tall old
buildings; and the stars were very bright and there was a moon above the
city. The Château with its hundreds of lighted windows, high above the
Lower Town, looked like some enchanted palace. Sleighs with jingling
bells passed them in the street, and crowds of young men and girls
carrying skis and snow-shoes.

The air was frosty, keen, and breathed deeply in, went tingling to one’s
very toes and fingertips. Icicles glistened like pendent jewels from the
eaves of houses and the snow crunched hard underfoot. Words and laughter
carried far and clear, and no laughter farther or clearer than theirs.

There were none so happy as they. None in all the world so gay. They had
found each other. It was bliss merely to think of that. The future was
too beautiful to contemplate. They would be always together now. Nothing
would ever separate them for a moment.

“I shall keep the place I have for a while,” he said, “if it suits you.
It is a garret on Sainte-Ursule Street, up over the café where we were
to-night. Oh, don’t think I chose it for romantic reasons: merely
because it was the only place I saw that suited both my taste and my
pocket-book. But it really has a good north light and there is a tiny
bath and a tinier kitchen. You will come and see it to-morrow, eh?”

“I shall come in the morning. If I do not appear you will know I have
been locked up in the citadel or in one of those secret dungeons which
rumor says are still to be found here and there in the city.”

“I shall rescue you, Bionde, from whatever dungeon, whatever dark
oubliette they put you in. Let us see; in the stories, one finds one’s
beloved by means of a song. So if you are in a dungeon or in a tower you
will sing the Song of Ronsard. And I, looking for you, will sing it too.
Is it agreed?”

“It is agreed. And you will really do it? If I don’t appear you will
roam the streets of Quebec singing the Song of Ronsard?”

“I will indeed. I will even carry a rose in my teeth if you ask me.”

With such badinage they used many of the precious minutes saved from the
taxi, but there was at the end the solemn, the sweetly solemn moment
when he held her again in his arms. All the banter dropped from him
then, the laughter fled from his eyes giving place to an earnest light
and his voice was a little unsteady when he said, “Good night, Bionde. I
feel as if I had been dead and had found life again. You are lovelier
than I ever dreamed. You are far more than Guy de Varin ever dared hope
for or ever could deserve. But if a man by trying can make himself
worthy of any woman, then I shall hope to become worthy of you.”

Her answer was a kiss, a light, quick kiss on his lips, then she was
gone, swallowed up in the darkness of the old house of Colonel Hubert
Lacasse. What awaited her there he did not know. He felt sure it would
not be pleasant, but he knew too that they could do nothing to change
her. They had done their utmost, used all their ancient cunning, yet she
had come running over the ice and snow of the crowded streets to find
the man she loved.

The thought of that warmed him, brought to his spirit a great joy and an
abiding happiness to his heart. He despised himself for ever having
doubted her, for having believed, even momentarily, that she would have
her head turned by the glittering things with which they sought to tempt
her. She was not that kind, he knew. Light might be her laughter and she
could be as gay as the breeze in summer meadows, but deep in her was
some strength, some hard core of pure goodness, some sinew of soul, that
they could never reach, that nothing could ever vitiate.

That was the strong heritage handed down to her from those grand
gentlemen of France, the Breton and Norman adventurers who had ventured
across the sea and braved the wilderness and all its perils unknown, to
clear the land and rear their houses and build great dikes to drive back
the fury of the Fundy tides. In her spirit there were dikes too; but one
had opened now its floodgates for him alone. And forth came tumbling the
full tide of her passion.

He was thinking of that now as in the morning sunlight in his garret he
set up his easel and prepared the tools of his craft. There was work to
do. The art dealer had liked his studies of Acadian life; had written,
“You have something there, my friend, that is really worthwhile. It has
always puzzled me why our artists go around painting snow and barns and
fishing boats when the real history of our country is written in the
faces of the people. Give us more. Give us the miner coming up from the
pit, the farmer guiding the plow, the old peasant woman planting
potatoes, the boy leading the cow that doesn’t want to be led.”

Life looked good to De Varin this December morning. He had never been so
happy, not even during his student days in Montmartre. He had only
dreamed then of the loves he would have, the things he would do, the
pictures he would paint; now—and, dear God, how sweet it was!—he was
doing the things he wanted to do, he was about to marry the woman he
loved, he had his work ahead of him and he had the skill to do it. One
day his pictures would be great, his name renowned. He sang, to a tune
of his own making—

         _“‘Dans un grenier qu’ on est bien a vingt ans.’”_

         “‘How happy one can be in a garret when one is twenty.’”

And outside his door he heard a sweet voice singing the Ballad of
Ronsard:

              _“You say, ‘When I was fair and young,_
              _A poet sang to me!’”_

He ran to the door and opened it and she came into his arms and lifted
her face to his kiss. He looked down, studying the long dark lashes, the
deep blue eyes, the wide sweet mouth and firmly rounded chin. He knew
the proud Norman blood that made pulse that little vein in her temple,
that brought that rose pink flush to her cheeks.

“No dungeon?” he said. “No lonely room in a tower with a mere slit for a
window? No chance for me to sing my song?”

“Alas, none.” She shook her head as he led her into the apartment. “But
had it been a few centuries ago—! _Mon dieu! Mon dieu!_ How they
stormed, my good aunt and uncle. It seems I have set all Quebec talking,
merely because I walked through a traffic jam in my ball dress with my
golden slippers to find the man I love. I have forever disgraced them. I
am, they told me, like all the Acadians, a half-savage who should never
have been brought to this so civilized city but left to roam the lonely
woods and barren marshes of my own land. I am to be shipped home at
once, or in a very few days. If I marry you—if I marry you!—they wash
their hands of me even more completely than they have already done. So
now, my friend, they shall have very clean hands indeed.”

“But yes!” He touched her hair, from which she had removed the little
black hat with its gay cock’s feather. “We shall have a special license.
We shall be married in a few days if not at once. And will you be happy
in my garret?”

She looked around her gravely, she explored the rooms, gazed out at the
little dormer windows, touched the green painted walls.

“It is a veritable palace of a garret,” she said. “I shall love it.
Here, by this window I’ll sit with my knitting and watch you becoming
famous. Here, when you have built your great château in the Laurentians
and bought your yacht and have become the envy of the Royal Academy,
will we return and say, ‘It was here that we began long ago, one
winter’s day. It was here we first——’”

She ceased to jest. She came to him and pressed close to him and he felt
the trembling of her body. He smoothed her hair, held her close; soothed
her as one would soothe a frightened child.

“Do not be afraid,” he said. “It is all right now. It will always be all
right for you and me, Bionde.”

“It is not fear.” Her voice was muffled against his lapel. “It is
happiness that makes me tremble. It came so quickly, so unexpectedly.
Ah, I seemed brave when I told you to keep faith in yourself, to have
courage, to fight; but in my heart I was the coward, I was afraid. I
know it now.”

“You were never afraid. You could not have been, for it was from you
that I drew my courage. It was the thought of you that gave me the
strength to go on. Those nights in the old house down there at
Sainte-Barbe—the nights after you had gone, with the wind roaring and
howling across the marshes and the sea thundering and the house itself
shaking as if it would fall down— And I worked, those nights—worked
hard until I could hardly lift my arm, scarcely keep my eyes open. That
strength I drew from you.”

She released herself from his arms. “_Bien!_ Very well, then, I shall
now draw strength from you. I have done so. I feel much better. Do you
know, not since I came here have I put on my skates—not even once,
though often I have watched the crowds at the rink and envied them. I
had no heart for it. I knew the medicine would not work here; it had too
great an ill to cure. But to-day perhaps I shall skate, if I do not find
my boxes and all my things sitting out on the doorstep of Uncle Hubert’s
house.”

“How I should love to skate with you!” He frowned at his easel. “But I
have work to do. A half-finished picture that I told Crosley about in my
letter and which he wired me to rush to completion.” He sighed. “And
that was days ago. Am I not becoming very serious—for an artist?”

“And I for an artist’s wife-to-be? Get to your work, monsieur! Do not
loiter. Do not let skating interfere with art.”

“Ah, but I should like to see you skate again, Bionde. It has the same
effect on me as when I read a great poem or hear a wonderful piece of
music.”

“You shall have all your life to watch me, my good Guy. I will not let
you yield to temptation. To-night I shall phone you, to-morrow I shall
come again. Good luck with your painting.”

“Good luck with your skating.”

He watched her go down the narrow stairs, smiled at her as she stopped
on the landing and turned to blow him a kiss. Her uplifted face was a
picture more beautiful to him than any he ever hoped to paint. He
listened to the clatter of her heels after he could no longer see her,
then went slowly back to his room where the faint perfume of her
presence lingered. All day as he worked he could sense that elusive
fragrance—light and sweet and alluring, that had no name, that was of
her, of Bionde.

Easy to work now, easy to bend every faculty of his mind and body to the
task he was doing. There was magic in his brush to-day. For her, he
thought—it is for her. In this love and faith I can do all things. To
keep this happiness in her heart and mine, no effort, no sacrifice, can
be too great. Let there be new worlds to conquer: for her I can subdue
them.

In the late afternoon he went to see about their marriage license and to
make arrangements for the wedding. It might not be so easy after all.
She was a minor. The consent of her guardians must be obtained. The laws
were strict here. Of course, when one loved as they loved, one could get
around any amount of laws. He was not afraid. He knew nothing could stop
them—nothing. He was singing the Ballad of Ronsard to himself as he
walked along in the fading light of afternoon—

             _“Old tales are told, old songs are sung,_
             _Old days come back to memory.”_

That was the afternoon an accumulation of ice and snow slid like a small
avalanche from the roof of a building in Buade Street, killing one and
injuring three others. Guy de Varin was one of the injured. But Bionde,
gliding lightly over the open-air rink with Peter Van Alen, one of the
world’s greatest figure-skaters, who had humbly asked her for the favor,
knew nothing of that. A great crowd stood around the rink; in it many
who were experts and many more who were connoisseurs, and none of them,
they quietly agreed, had ever seen a performance that could surpass
hers.

“Lady!” said Van Alen. “Where, oh, where have you been! You make the
others look like little pigs on ice. Why, you have a fortune in those
lovely legs and those twinkling feet of yours. Don’t ever waste it!”

“A fortune! From skating! Why, it is fun to skate. It is the best fun I
know.” She turned wide eyes up at him. He had never before met any girl
so unspoiled, so forthright, so honestly full of the joy of life.
Probably in love, he thought regretfully; it’s always like that.

“Sure it’s fun,” he said. “But it is also big business now. Fellows with
piles of money are looking for pretty girls who can skate like you. See
how the crowd here stares and admires you. Well, people pay money to see
far poorer exhibitions than the one you are giving right now. Who taught
you to skate like that?”

“Tor taught me.” She smiled, thinking of the bitter, glassy winter days
when Tor had drilled into her these things that now were second nature.
“Tor Gustavssen. He lives in the Tantramar country where I come from. He
had a daughter once who would have been a great skater. She died.”

“Oh, I have heard of him.” Van Alen was impressed. “You were lucky. He
could have made lots of money teaching, but he preferred to hang up his
skates and lose himself from the world.”

“He gave me these skates I am wearing,” said Bionde proudly. “He was
always good to me.”

“That shouldn’t be hard.” Van Alen looked at her gravely. “You’re very
lovely.”

“And you, monsieur, are very kind.”

She called Guy’s apartment when she returned home that night, but got no
answer. She thought little of it. No doubt he had had to go out on some
errand. She would see him in the morning. So great was her happiness
that nothing, it seemed, dare come to spoil it. But Guy lay on a
hospital bed and two of the best surgeons in the city were standing with
grave faces above him. He knew nothing of it. He had not regained
consciousness. And they did not know his name or where he came from or
anything about him.

Bionde hurried to the garret in Sainte-Ursule Street next morning.
Coupled with the joy that the prospect of seeing him again had brought
to her was the excitement of the news she had to tell him. He would be
glad, she knew. He loved to see her skate. He would be proud to know
that others too had loved watching her, that she was, in a measure,
famous.

At breakfast, the frowning silence of Uncle Hubert had been suddenly
dissipated, routed by a great grunt of satisfaction and a smile like a
sunburst. He looked up from his newspaper and beamed at her.

“Little gamin!” he said. “Why did you not tell us about this? Here all
Quebec is admiring you! Here is your picture along with that of Peter
Van Alen. Here is another with Lord Danvers and the Honorable Sybil
Carrington admiring you—and they are in the background. Why, I did not
even know you could skate and here the paper says that a finer
exhibition of fancy skating has never been seen on the Château rink.
They say you must represent Quebec in the figure-skating championships
that are to be held next week. What is all this? How dare you keep it
all a secret from your aunt and uncle?”

His voice was stern, but his delight showed in his face. It was a great
thing for him to have his niece hold the spotlight, to occupy the center
of the stage. All Quebec was talking about her. In a little while she
would be famous. For the moment he forgot about that wretched
artist-fellow with whom she thought herself in love. This, anyway, would
soon make her forget him. Let her get a taste of fame, of the real
thing, and she would never be satisfied with a starved existence in a
garret.

“And they want you to represent Quebec in the figure-skating
championships—you, a complete stranger. They’re going to have you.”
Bionde felt a strange, exultant thrill. She was glad she had at last
done something to please them, to make them forget how angry they were
at her and, she thought, How pleased Guy will be and how proud. I hope
he has seen it. I must go to him at once.

“I love to skate,” she told the very much impressed Colonel Hubert and
the fluttering Tante Aimée. “I’ve always loved to skate. And I had a
great teacher, Tor Gustavssen. He was one of the best in Denmark. Each
winter, for years, he taught me. It was Tor who gave me the lovely
skates.”

“Well,” said Colonel Lacasse, “it will be Aimée and I who will give you
the loveliest costume to go with them. We are very proud of you, my
dear—very proud indeed. If only we can make you see the light on that
other matter, make you understand that all we care for is your own
happiness and well-being and that we doubt very much your chances for
any happiness with—with— But there! We will not talk of it now. Here
you have your foot on the first rung of the ladder to fame.” He laughed
in advance as a joke occurred to him. “Rather, I should say, your
skate.”

“It might be hard to climb on skates,” said Bionde, and for a moment
felt a twinge of doubt, of fear; for a moment wished she had not yielded
to her desire to skate or that she had found some place where none could
see her. Perhaps this would take her away from Guy, do some harm to
their love. But that was nonsense. How could it? Guy would be happy
about it all.

Colonel Lacasse was summoned to the telephone. He returned flushed and
jubilant. He put his hand on Bionde’s shoulder and bent down to kiss her
hair. “It is so! They lost no time. That was Raoul Pichette, head of the
skating association. They want you—they have to have you—in the
figure-skating championships. The poor man could hardly talk, he was so
excited. So, my child, you will have your great chance. You will do us
honor, all of us. You will bring fame to our family.”

“But I don’t know—” She was really afraid now. She saw things beginning
to shape her life, things outside her that she had never wanted, never
bargained for. She had always steered her own course, now she was being
swept into the swift flowing current. “Perhaps I had better wait——”

“Nonsense!” The colonel puffed out his cheeks and his eyes popped
alarmingly. “What in heaven’s name could cause you to hesitate about
skating for Quebec? Surely that has nothing to do with—hah—love! Come,
Bionde, be a sensible, good little girl. You are a great skater—well,
skate. Anyway, I told Pichette you would. It will be a wonderful thing
for you.”

She wanted to skate. She had to admit it to herself. It had been somehow
sweet to watch the silent, wide-eyed crowd around the rink yesterday, to
hear afterwards the comments, to receive the congratulations of utter
strangers, to have Peter Van Alen ask her to be his partner. She smiled,
thinking of the lovely lonely hours on the pond below the great dike, of
Tor’s patient teaching, of his gruff scolding, his grudging approval.
Tor would be proud. Oh, he would be very proud to see her doing what he
had hoped his own child, Kristie, would do one day, to have the world
admire the skill he had taught her. If only Tor could be there to see
her skate! But Tor, she knew, would never leave his farm, never try to
reawaken the dream that had died.

Well, she must tell Guy. She felt timid about telling him. Her heart
beat anxiously, flutteringly, as she hurried to his house. How would he
feel about it? Or would he let her know how he felt? Perhaps he wouldn’t
like it. But why not? It would be unreasonable for him to object. He
wouldn’t want her to refuse to skate. He would be glad that they had
asked her.

Timidly she knocked at the door of the garret studio, but no answer
came, and she could tell in a moment that he was not there to answer.
She tried the knob, the door was locked. She asked the landlady, on the
floor below, if he had gone out. The old Frenchwoman said that, as far
as she knew, he had not come in at all last night. She had heard no
sound abovestairs. Perhaps he had gone away. He was always changing his
mind. Artists were like that. Never the same for two days on end.

“But he—but he would not—” Bionde walked blindly down the narrow
stairs and out into the street. She could not think. She felt lost,
terribly afraid. She did not know which way to turn. She had no one to
help her. If she asked Uncle Hubert he would say, “What did you expect?
Fellows like that! You can never rely on them, never tell what they’ll
do next.”

Guy wasn’t like that. He was an artist, yes, but he loved her. His love
was true, constant. He could not, as he had done, talk of their future
together, plan their lives, the things they would do, and then——

All that day she haunted the streets where he might be. She returned a
dozen times to the door, that blank, hateful door, of the garret. Its
panels, after a while, seemed to stare at her. She knew every scratch,
every crack, every knot-hole in it. Eagerly, each time she would climb
the long stairs, hope beating high in her heart, and in sick despair she
would come down, to gaze up and down the street, to watch the
passers-by, to say, “He will be the next one to turn the corner—the
next one—he will be among the next ten.”

But he never was. He did not come. Toward evening she went wearily home.
The Lacasses saw at once that something had happened, that she was
deeply troubled, but they knew it wasn’t about the skating, which they
had so happily discussed all day, and if it wasn’t about the skating
then it was about that confounded De Varin. If she had lost him, if they
had quarreled and separated, so much the better. He would be just the
kind to object to her skating, to sneer at it, to tell her she was
selling herself to the crowd.

That night, long after the household had retired, she sat at her window
gazing out at the bright stars above the city, looking down at the quiet
street, her heart leaping at the approach of each shadowy figure, then
resuming slowly its normal beat as each one passed. Her ears strained
into the darkness, listening for the sound of telephone or doorbell.

“He must come! He must!” She told herself, thinking that, if she willed
it strongly enough, her desire must bring him to her. “He would not go
away and leave me. He could not do this to me. Perhaps he is home now in
his attic-room. Something delayed him and it was too late for him to see
me, but in the morning early he will call me, he will come to me.”

The old clock in the hall had chimed its three long strokes before she
closed her eyes. She dreamed then of Guy and he was walking steadily
away from her beseeching, outstretched hands. He was walking into a pit
of blackness that he did not seem to know was there in front of him. She
screamed to call him back, but he did not hear her.

Cold and trembling she awoke in the gray of the winter dawn and lay
there watching the darkness recede and the slow light enter into her
room. When she came downstairs she looked so wan and tired, her eyes so
large in the pallor of her face, that Tante Aimée spoke of calling the
doctor.

“The child will make herself ill, Hubert,” she told the colonel. “What
is one to do? It is all over this artist-fellow, De Varin.”

“I hope,” said the good colonel to his good wife, “the damned pup has
broken his neck.”

It was not so bad as that, but it was a terrible concussion. It had the
doctors baffled for a long while. Forty-eight hours had
passed—forty-eight hours in which he lived in blackness, before he
opened his eyes and looked about him and whispered at last: “Bionde?
Where is Bionde?”

Shortly after that the hospital telephoned to Colonel Lacasse’s home and
asked for her and told her what had happened. They heard a long drawn
“O-o-o-oh,” in which relief at learning his whereabouts overcame the
shock of knowing that he had been hurt. Then: “Tell Guy I will be there
at once—at once!”

The taxi seemed to crawl over the icy streets and the time it took to
traverse that short distance was, to her, interminable. He had been hurt
badly, that was sure. She recalled now reading in the same paper that
had held the account of her triumph, the headlines about the accident on
Buade Street. She had not even read the account of it. She had been too
much taken up with reading all the nice things they said about her, too
intent on looking at the pictures. And perhaps at the very moment when
she was pleasing the spectators at the Château rink and receiving their
homage, Guy was being taken, terribly injured, to the hospital, there to
lie friendless and unknown until he should awaken and speak her name.

He looked pale and his eyes seemed tired and his head was heavily
bandaged. Still his smile was the same gay, cheery welcome she knew and
loved. He held out his hand. She knelt by the bed and kissed him and
cried a little and laughed when he said, “Here lies the bridegroom,
smitten down in the very act of going to obtain a license. Oh, Bionde,
what must you have thought of me! What did you think? What did you do?”

“I haunted your door. I went there a dozen times and more. I walked
miles and miles of streets, looking for you, praying I’d find you. And I
thought I’d die. I thought it was more punishment than I was ever made
to endure. But I did not give up. I knew I would find you sometime,
somewhere. Are you badly hurt? Tell me, what do they say?”

“They say I must have the thickest skull in Christendom. No—no, I’m not
badly hurt. I’ll be out of here in less than a week, maybe in a few
days.” He stared at his fingers that plucked nervously at the coverlet.
The late afternoon sunlight was without warmth. It had the frigid
brightness of the winter. “Did you sing the Ballad of Ronsard, Bionde,
as you searched the streets for me?”

“Yes—in my heart. You could not hear me.”

“I’ll always hear you—always.”

She looked at him, hurt, puzzled. There was something about him that was
different, something that held him aloof from her. She took his hand in
both hers and held it strongly. She made him look at her. “You are sure,
quite sure, that you are not badly hurt? You must tell me the truth. You
must!”

“I told you the truth. I’m all right. A ton of ice on the head could
never hurt me. I’ll be out in a few days.”

“But there’s something——”

“Oh, forget about it! Tell me all about your triumphal debut as a
skater.”

She dropped his hand. Her eyes darkened. So that was it. He had heard,
and he didn’t like what he had heard. This was what she had feared. He
was jealous of her. He didn’t want her to skate for the crowd; only for
him.

“How did you know about it, Guy?”

“When I told them to telephone you, the nurse and doctor both looked
startled and the doctor said, ‘Is that the girl who has created such a
sensation by her figure-skating? All Quebec is talking about the
performance she gave at the Château rink.’ He told me that everyone
agrees they have never seen anything to equal you. I was not surprised,
Bionde. I was properly impressed. I knew you were good. I wouldn’t
admit, even to myself, just how good you were. I guess I wanted you all
to myself; I didn’t want to give you to the world.”

“And that—that is why you are different, why you have drawn away from
me, why you seem cold to me—just because my skating pleases others?”

His face was partly averted, but she saw his brows twitch, his mouth
thin. “If you like,” he said. “Oh, don’t let it bother you. I have no
right to be like this. It’s just—well, you remember what I told you the
last day we skated together down there in Sainte-Barbe—I was afraid
you’d skate away from me, go far beyond me. I said I should put golden
shackles on those winged feet of yours. Now I know I was right.”

“I will not skate again,” she said softly. “I will not, if you do not
wish me to. The skating means little; you mean everything to me.”

But as she spoke she felt a wistfulness, a regret that it had to be like
this. She had secretly looked forward to pitting her skill against that
of all those other girls. She had wanted to learn just how much she had
got from old Tor, and she had hoped to make him proud.

“You can’t do that.” Guy’s voice was harsh. “You’re entered in the
fancy-skating tournament, aren’t you? The doctor told me that. He told
me also that Quebec looks on you to win. You can’t back down. I want you
to skate as you have never skated before. I want you to win.”

“You are just saying that. You are not happy about it.”

“But I am, Bionde.” His voice had softened. “I hope in my heart that it
will be the beginning of great things for you——”

“The beginning of great things for me”—her lips quivered—“was the day
I met you, the day I saw you sitting on the bench sketching me. Great
things, Guy—your kiss, your telling me that you loved me, your coming
here, your—our—the future we planned. Don’t talk to me of other things
and call them great.”

For moments he did not answer. Somewhere a deep-toned bell struck the
hour of five. There was a strange hush over the city and in that room a
silence like the eternal silence of the marshlands.

“Why are you silent?” she said at last. “You—you believe in these
things even as I believe in them, don’t you?”

He turned a little on his elbow. He seemed to force himself to look at
her, steel himself to say the things that must be said. “Listen,
Bionde.” He spoke earnestly. “You must listen and try to understand that
I am thinking only of you and always of you. Here is opportunity for
you. Here is your chance. You have a skill that it would be wrong to
keep hidden. If you refused to go on you would be like a—a great artist
who will not paint, a great writer who will not write, a master musician
who will not play. Not I, not anyone, have the right to keep you from
doing what you are so well able to do. You can please and delight
thousands, you can make them feel better for just having watched you
skate, you can make youth see how wonderful and godlike the human body
is. You must go on.”

“I—I want to go on. But—not if it means that things will be any
different between you and me.” There was fear in her eyes. “Will there
be a difference?” Her voice was urgent, almost pleading. “Will there? Is
that what you’re trying to tell me—is it? You asked me to marry you.
Before—before I went skating you intended to marry me. Before this
happened, before people saw my skating and liked it, nothing could have
kept us apart.”

“I did not say we would be apart.”

“But I feel it. I know it.” She drew her hand wearily across her eyes.
“I do not understand.”

“Do you have to understand?”

“You ask me that! You know how much I—” She could not go on. “Oh, Guy,
what is it? What has happened? You are not yourself. I do not know what
to do. You know I love you—love you more than anything else in the
world. What is it you want of me? What would you have me do?”

“I want you to go ahead and show them—show them all—how good you are.”

“I will do that. What else?”

“I want you”—he hesitated, stopped for a moment and stared out at the
blue gray dusk that was falling upon the city. His voice was lower when
he resumed: “I want you to believe, no matter what happens, no matter
what may come, that I love you and have loved you from the moment I saw
you and that it will be so until the day I die. I want you to believe
that—that——”

He could not go on.

“You mean,” she said, “that you think this will lead me to what they
call fame. And that I will grow away from you so that—so that your life
and mine cannot go together. That will never be. I’ll never let
it—never. You will be greater than I could ever hope to be. To perform
a few motions on skates—what is that? Anyone with practice and a little
aptitude can learn that. But who could with practice and a little
aptitude ever acquire the godlike power to paint great pictures?”

“My pictures will never be great.” His mouth had a tired, almost sullen
droop. “Never.”

“They are! They will be!” she said fiercely. “I know they will. Long
after I have hung up the silly skates forever, your skill will grow,
your pictures become better and better. Don’t talk like this to me.
Don’t do this to me. You don’t know what you are doing.”

“I know better than you—much better. You will soon leave me behind.” He
spoke out of darkness now and into darkness, for swiftly her bright
dreams that all this time had been growing dim, lost their last
brightness. Something was happening, here in this quiet room—something
that she could not grasp. Something was slipping away from her and she
had no power to hold it, not even love could hold it.

A voice at the door told her she must go. She went without a word; she
could speak none.




                               CHAPTER IV


After Bionde had gone and the nurse had finished with her duties he
switched off the light and lay there in the darkness that was no darker
than his thoughts. She was gone. She had not even said good-by. And it
was his fault, all his fault. He had treated her cruelly, made her
suffer; yet every harsh word he said to her had thrust and twisted the
knife deeper in his own heart.

Queer how misfortune such as this altered a man’s thinking, showed
colors and shades undreamed of, in the pattern of his life. Gone now was
the high courage, the unquestioning fearlessness with which he had
stepped upon the road that he and Bionde were to travel.

Now he knew fear, discouragement, uncertainty—all too great for him,
all too inimical to those fine dreams and splendid visions. Love in a
garret was after all merely poverty, insecurity. Easy enough at first to
laugh at it, to make a game of being poor, to pretend that a crust was a
banquet. But they would know the sickness of heart that comes from hope
deferred, the bitterness of abortive effort, of work thought good that
goes unrewarded. Could he ask one he really loved to face a life like
that? In time love would go or would become a lifeless thing. There
would be discord, doubt——

Oh, it was all too impossible. It had always been so, but now it was
reduced to absurdity. A great chance was given to her and who was he to
expect her to reject it, to cast in her lot with his, to share the path
that he must walk, through darkness and despair. And still his love for
her mocked at all these dreary thoughts and he suffered in his soul at
the mad idea of renunciation.

“I can’t let her go,” he muttered. “I can’t. How could I go on without
her! Yet it is as I said; it is true what I told her: I would be a drag
on her—worse. Perhaps it will be best to let it end here. The break
seems clean now. She thinks I do not care. She will go on to great
things, she will climb to the heights. I know that as surely as I know
that I——”

His mouth was twisted and he could feel the bitterness of defeat and
failure already in his soul. Nothing ahead for him. How had he been so
sure, anyway, that his work was good? It passed, certainly. But then, so
did the work of thousands of others, mediocrities, second-raters, little
fellows with big opinions of themselves, ignoring the fustian they
turned out while they talked of the tapestries they could weave.

It had all seemed so easy, so inevitably sure. He would paint his
pictures, they would be good and the world would be quick to see their
worth. Money and fame would come his way. No thought of the toil-filled
days and nights, of the time when the hand falters and the eye grows dim
and the winds of doubt find crannies in the strong armor of youth,
through which to blow their breath of destruction. From the shining
heights he had plunged now into the lowest depths of defeatism. No love
could be great enough to make a man ignore these things. They were
there, starkly real. All his life would be a gamble and now the cards
were stacked against him.

He fought the tide of self-pity that had begun to engulf him. He must
not let these black thoughts conquer him, turn him bitter. He must not
let the certainty of failure get him down. Why, a man was never a
failure until he admitted it to himself. And he was so young. He would
make out some way. But in the meantime, she, on her silver skates, would
travel with the speed of light toward the shining goal of her success.
He could vision it. He knew that she could not, realized that it meant
little to her, that she would give it all up if he said the word.

“May my tongue drop out,” he muttered, “if ever I say anything to
discourage or dissuade her. May the ice always be smooth for her and her
skates sharp and the music good. I shall be happy in watching her
success. I shall know she would gladly share it with me. I shall know
that she does not understand, that if she did she would love me more.”

But he thought of the brief times they had been together in
Sainte-Barbe, lived each moment over lingeringly, each word she had
said, each smile she had given him. He wished now that they had never
left the marsh-country. Had they stayed there, they might in time have
found the solid happiness they looked for. Now, soon now, she would be
taken away from him. She had been taken already. She would belong to the
world that exploits such youth and beauty and skill as hers. It might
even be, he thought, that they will spoil her, make her their very
own—hard, metallic, without heart or warmth. No. No—she could never
be, deep inside her, different from what she is. Always Bionde. She will
be always the girl I knew.

He could not know the pain, the bitterness, that she carried with her
out of that room, through the busy streets where she walked alone among
the hurrying crowds, seeing no one, paying no attention to those who
jostled her and stared after her, this girl whose eyes were fixed on
something far, far off, who moved as one in a dream, taking no count of
where she was going.

It was the first real disillusionment that she had ever known. She could
not grasp its significance, could not see any valid reasons for its
happening to her. What had she done? What had occurred to do this to
their love? It had seemed, only a few days ago, so strong, so splendid a
thing that nothing could ever injure it. Now it seemed to have vanished.
It was as if it had never been. She had loved so much to share his
plans, his dreams, to picture their life together.

But it had seemed, in that quiet room where he lay, that she had talked
to another than man Guy de Varin. The same dark face, the same glow of
eyes, the same quiet strength. All there, yet something was gone,
something that had been dear and precious. It was as if the voice that
had spoken so close, so softly in her ear that night in an Acadian
garden, spoke now from afar off and was only faintly heard. He had moved
away from her.

She thought of the dream in which he had walked away from her asking
hands, from her restraining voice, walked heedlessly toward the dark
abyss. It had been symbolic. It was like that now: he was going away
from her and she could not bring him back. Yet he loved her still. It
was not in him to love lightly, to give up easily a thing he had so
prized.

That he should be jealous of any success she might have and think that
he had no place in it was a thought monstrous and unreal.

“He is not like that,” she told herself. “Oh, he is not! Even if—even
if I should have success, does he not know it would mean nothing if I
could not share it with him? How can he be jealous, bitter, about
something that may never happen? He wants me to go on, yet he makes it
clear that if I do go on, I lose him. I wish I had never come here,
never seen this place. I was so happy just loving him and knowing that
he cared for me——”

Someone touched her arm. She started. Slowly her eyes focused on Peter
Van Alen’s gaunt, handsome face and mechanically she returned his smile.
From the little she had seen of him, she liked him. He was sandy-haired,
freckled. He loved skating, lived for it.

“I’ve been trying to get you,” he said. “What about putting on the
skates to-night? First, what about having a spot of dinner with me?”

She had not the will or initiative to refuse. She did not want to face
her aunt and uncle right now. Van Alen was a stranger, yet they had the
kinship in the sport they loved. And he was kind and understanding.

“Sure you will,” he said, tucking her arm in his. “You look as if you
needed something. I called to you twice and I’m sure you didn’t even
hear me.”

“I didn’t. I was thinking——”

He shook his head. “Deep thoughts—too deep for one so young. If I were
you I’d give all my thoughts to my skating. Believe me, there’s some
satisfaction in that. It’s not like love; it won’t let you down or if it
does”—he grinned—“you land on the cushioned part and can get up again
without much harm being done. Love can play hob with some people’s
lives. I’ve always kept it out of mine. It’s strictly business with
Pete. Now here’s a good place to have dinner.”

He was good to her; gentle, understanding. He bought her a Martini and
saw that she drank it. He ordered her dinner for her and seemed to know
without hesitating the things she liked best. And he made her eat them.

“You’re my skating-partner, you know, and I can’t have you dying of
malnutrition in the middle of the show. I’ve been thinking of you ever
since the other day. Phenomenon is a frightening word, but you are
really a marvel. I’ve seen ’em all, but you have something none of the
rest of them ever seems able to get. You can skate. You can drop all the
fancy stuff and skate. You had a great teacher.”

“He was good, Tor. He was always so quiet and aloof. He never skated and
no one dreamed that in his own country he had been famous. Then one day
he walked along the dike when I was skating. He stopped to watch me. He
said, ‘I will teach you.’”

Van Alen nodded. “He knew what he was doing. He was a wizard before he
dropped out of the picture. He used to run a school in Copenhagen. He
made some stars. Didn’t he ever tell you how good you were?”

“When he gave me my skates, he said, ‘That’s all I can give you now; the
rest is up to you.’”

“That was your diploma, Bionde. I’m going to call you Bionde, if you
don’t mind. I’m dying to see the faces of some of these beauties who
will skate against you next Saturday. What a lot of nose you’re going to
put out of joint. With most of them, skating is an artificial thing and
they never really get their heart into it. They took it up, as they say,
in order to be accomplished or to make money or just because it seemed
the smart thing to do. That’s why their performances fall short. With
you, it is clearly a work of love and always will be, and you far
outshine any of them. You can skate them to a standstill.”

She shielded her eyes with her hand. “I don’t want to,” she said. “I
skated because I loved to skate. I let Tor teach me these things because
it made me happy to do them. I never thought——”

“That’s why you are so good. You weren’t straining to be a world beater,
and now you’ll never need to. All you have to do is skate and never
worry about the outcome. You know beforehand what it will be.”

“That is what bothers me,” she said wearily. “I think I know what it
will be.”

Pete’s brows drew down. He saw that she was troubled about something the
nature of which he could only surmise. He had learned a little about her
and her family, but no one in Quebec knew Guy de Varin. He had heard the
story of their meeting in Sainte-Ursule Street. That had been the chief
topic of gossip for several days.

“You sound as if you had an idea you will lose more than you gain.”

“That’s it.”

“But that’s nonsense. You aren’t telling me that anyone in the world is
so unreasonable as not to want you to——”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, please forget it. Believe me, when you land on top of the heap,
as you’re pretty sure to do, a lot of things that seem important now
won’t look to be so much. Don’t let anything stop you. To-night we’re
going to the rink, and we’re going to give ’em all a treat.”

She tried to object, but there was a breezy assurance about Peter Van
Alen that overcame all her scruples. Perhaps it would be good to skate.
It might help her to think this thing out, to decide what to do, to
understand what was troubling Guy.

Peter got his car and drove her home and waited while she changed into
her skating costume. She told her aunt and uncle where she was going and
never before in her life had she seen two elderly people move so fast.
They occupied the back seat of Peter’s convertible sedan. They were as
eager as children to see her skate. All the way to the rink they
questioned Pete Van Alen and listened avidly to his glowing descriptions
of their niece’s skill.

She wished that he might be a little more reserved in his comments, a
whit less lavish with his praise. He was filling the good colonel and
his lady with such stuff as would brim over and drown swiftly any
protestations that she might make, forbid any withdrawal from the plans
laid out for her. He was giving them, all unwittingly it might be,
strong ammunition to use against the bright battlements of her love for
Guy de Varin, where something else, something dark and insidious as a
Fifth Column, was sapping at the foundations.

“Bionde,” he assured them, “is truly a great skater. In no time she will
prove that she is at the top of her class.”

“It is gratifying,” rumbled Colonel Lacasse. “Most gratifying. And we
are glad to hear it from one like you, monsieur; who most certainly
knows what he is talking about.”

“I trust,” said Tante Aimée, “that Bionde will listen to what you tell
her and take advantage of the advice you can give her. She is young and
untried and all this is so new to her.”

“I am sure it will not turn her head.” Van Alen glanced at her and
smiled. “She seems to attach very little importance to it. I am afraid,”
he said, “that Bionde is in love.”

“All young girls are in love,” retorted Tante Aimée. “Or fancy that they
are. It may be that you can skate it out of your system. Eh, Bionde?”

“_Mon Dieu_, that’s a thought.” The colonel’s laughter was heavy. “That
might be a most excellent cure for such a malady. At least, it is a
novel remedy.”

Bionde sat silent, staring at the little lights on the dashboard, the
skates, the beloved skates that Tor had given her, on her lap, her hands
clutching them. What golden hours they had brought to her, what carefree
joy, what tired happiness! Where were they taking her now, those swift
graceful things of gleaming steel?

“You can go far on them,” old Tor had said, the day he proudly unwrapped
them, lovingly as if they were swaddled in dreams, and handed them to
her. “Or you can spend all your days skating on a pond. I do not know
which is better. All I know is that to skate is a good thing. I hope
they will bring you happiness. They were bought for Kristie, but she did
not live to wear them.”

Bionde was thinking of that now, picturing that blonde little Danish
girl whom Tor had so loved, to whom he had given all his life’s
devotion. She, had she lived, would have worn these skates and Tor knew
well that she would have shown the world such skating as it had never
before seen. Was it something like that he hoped for me, she wondered.
Was that why he gave them to me?

The word went round that Peter Van Alen had brought the blonde Lacasse
with him. As soon as she stepped upon the ice, her hand lightly in his,
the skaters melted away. For a moment she was frightened and unnerved,
then she saw his sharp blue eyes smiling at her, heard him whisper, “You
don’t even have to try, Bionde!”

And that was so. She didn’t even have to try. Those shining skates
obeyed every single thing she asked of them. Presently she forgot to
ask; she let them do what they would. She had forgotten time and place
and circumstance. The rows of pallid faces, ghastly in the floodlight’s
glare, around the rink; the lights, the music—she was conscious of none
of them. She knew only the wonder, the glory, of speed and motion. Even
Pete Van Alen, after a little while, skated to the edge of the rink and
stood watching her. She wasn’t trying to steal the show. He was the last
one in the world who would have permitted it. She skated this way; that
was all there was to it. And how she could skate!

She was back on her own beloved marshes, on the wide smooth sheet of ice
below the dike. She was alone in all the world. She could skate as she
willed. She could surrender to this rapture. Even Tor—white-haired,
stolid-visaged Tor—was not there to watch her. In the exhilaration of
speed, the poetry of motion, her troubled spirit found relief. She
soared away on wings, away from the carking fears, the gnawing
uneasiness that had beset her since her visit to Guy. Here now if she
thought of them, they seemed petty, unimportant things, and what had
been between her and Guy was still wondrous and intact. If only he could
share these moments with her, be lifted with her high on the rushing
wind, he would never doubt, never know fear.

Only the burst of wild applause awakened her, brought her from her
toe-tips to her blades and sent her like an arrow to the shelter of
Pete’s strong hand-clasp. She wanted to cry. She wished now that she
were in reality back on the frozen surface of the marshland pond under
the moon. This rapture was hers. She could never share it. They could
never understand what it meant to her. For a little while, listlessly,
she skated with Pete. Then she said, “I must go home now. It has been
good. You have been kind to me.”

“You’re a funny kid,” he said. “You’ve got something that’s worth a
million. You’re always yourself and by just being yourself you’re better
than the best actress in the world.” He snapped his fingers, as some
thought struck him. “Well, I’ll take you home now. And, listen, I heard
a story about you dashing through traffic in dance-slippers one slippery
night—don’t ever do that again! Why, you might have broken your ankle!
You might have wrecked yourself.”

“Perhaps I did,” she said dully. “Oh, I don’t know—I don’t know.”

“You’re very young, aren’t you?” said Pete gently. “Of course I know it
hurts cruelly. You think that if you don’t get what you want, school
will cease to keep and the world will end. But it isn’t really like
that.” He smiled with a twist of his mouth, sardonic, half-regretful.
“I’m not sure that I can tell you just how it is, but I’m certain you
wouldn’t believe me if you could.”

“You don’t understand——”

“Perhaps not. But I know you’re not happy and it does something to me. I
don’t like to see you like this. Sure there’s nothing I can do?”

“Nothing more than you are doing. And you are being good to me and I’m
not repaying you as I should. I’m sorry if I mope.”

“Oh, you’ll soon smile again, my child. The emotions of youth, thank
God, are not brittle. They’re very plastic things. Time, when you’re
young, is a swift healer. I don’t know what your trouble is about,
except that it springs from that ancient malady of the heart which you
French call ‘l’amour, toujours l’amour.’ But I’ll wager you will be
cured of it soon. And will contract it again.”

“Then you are rash, my friend. And most surely you would lose.”

She scarcely heard the fervently enthusiastic remarks of the colonel and
his lady. She sat as silent as on the trip down, beside Pete, the skates
in her lap, her gloved fingertip moving up and down the blades. She was
in a strange world, lost, bewildered, miserable. She felt as if great
forces, against which she had no power to fight, were tugging at her,
pulling her now this way, now that. And Guy—Guy lay in that silent room
where he could hear the bell ring out the lonely hours.

In the gloom of the car she cried quietly for Guy. Still she fondled the
silvery skates, loving the cold clean feel of them, cherishing them as
once she had cherished her dolls. They had meant so much to her, so much
of happiness. Strange that they should ever mean misery.

Yet she could not, would not, blame them for this present grief. To do
that was absurd. What was it that had made Guy talk the way he had, act
the way he had acted? Surely not her skating. He loved her skating. Oh,
she thought, I’ll go to him to-morrow. It will be all right to-morrow.
I’m not angry at him. I never could be. And to-morrow he will be
different. He will be the one I knew, the one I loved. He will talk
of—of when we are married, of when we can go back home. We shall be so
happy back in Sainte-Barbe.

Just thinking like that made her feel better. Pete Van Alen came in with
them to have a cup of coffee, to talk for a while in front of the fire,
to prophesy to the delighted ears of the elder Lacasses a wondrous
future for Bionde.

“Skating—the kind of skating Bionde can do—is big business now,” he
told them. “This is an age when great art becomes big business. And,
believe me, the girl is a Pavlowa on ice. Most of the fancy skating you
see is as cold as the ice and as mechanical as the freezing plant.
There’s no life in it, no attempt at interpreting anything. You have
only to watch her to realize that with her it is something real and
vital.”

“It is a splendid thing,” said Colonel Lacasse. “Splendid. It makes us
very happy to see a good future opening up for our little niece. Life,
for young girls like her can be so dull. Is it not so, Bionde? The
country where she comes from is flat and monotonous, the Acadian
marshes, which are the vastest in all the world. Oh, a veritable Sahara
of bogs and dikelands. That and a few years in the convent, which is a
Sahara of another sort—” he laughed hugely—“that has been her life.
Now she will have a chance to taste of the real thing. It is most
fortunate.”

“Yes,” agreed Van Alen. “It can lead to a great deal. These are the days
of speed, even the ascent to fame can be an overnight business. Of
course, I do not like to prophesy, but with such talent——”

Bionde was not listening. He stopped talking and watched her. She was
looking into the glowing coals on the hearth and what she was seeing
there he could not guess. She was troubled, he knew, and it was easy for
him to believe that some man was the trouble. Well, it was none of his
business. He had never in his swift, easy life tried the rôle of fixer,
and he wasn’t going to begin now. She was very young. She would get over
it. Once let her get a real taste of this business, he thought, and she
will live for it.

He said to her when he was leaving, “Don’t forget, Saturday is only a
few days away. Take it easy, won’t you? I’ll see that you get a few
workouts, but, for the love of all that’s holy, stop mooning over—over
whatever it is that’s bothering you. Put it aside for a few days
anyway.”

“If I can’t——”

“But you can. You have a job to do. Say it was wished on you, and I know
it was, you still want to make a go of it, don’t you? There’s nothing in
this world that can’t wait. You’ll find that out. After a while you will
laugh at yourself for taking anything so seriously. The world still goes
on.”

“You don’t know, _mon ami_,” she said gently, almost pityingly, as if he
were a very young and simple boy. “You do not realize.”

He stared at her, incredulous, tempted to laugh and then suddenly unable
to laugh. Here was no little schoolgirl, smitten with calf love, mooning
over some callow boy, dizzy with dreams and drowned in pale pink mists,
living on poetry and airy fancies. Here was a woman and, if he knew
anything of her kind, one who really loved. How should he know what was
in her heart? How presume to sound its depths? It might well be that he,
in his easy life, had dipped only into the shallows. Maybe it was not
given to him to know deep feeling when he met it in another.

He looked puzzled then, as if for the first time he had met something
that was beyond him. “That’s a thought too.” He whistled two little up
and down notes. “Perhaps I don’t understand. Perhaps I’m a doctor trying
to diagnose a brand new disease that he knows nothing about. Maybe I’m
prescribing liver pills for a broken heart.”

She smiled then and pushed him lightly on his way. “No,” she said.
“You’re a good doctor: you must blame the patient. Good night.”

“Good night,” he said slowly, looking down at her thoughtfully. And he
stood for a moment on the steps outside under the stars and walked half
a block before he remembered that his car was parked in front of her
door.

“An admirable young man,” said Tante Aimée when Bionde returned to the
living-room. “You are lucky to have made such a friend.” Privately,
Tante Aimée thought the whole family shared that luck. She was of the
snobs snobbish and never could pass the faded sign on the narrow street
in the Lower Town, that said Philibert Dorion, Marchand, without a
wincing of the spirit that she should have come from things so lowly,
that her upbringing had depended on the tallow and oakum and ship’s
stores that Philibert sold.

“A very rich young man,” reflected the colonel. “But not by any means of
that reprehensible class that one calls ‘playboy.’ He is, this Van Alen,
a very serious youth. He is already fond of you, Bionde.”

They knew she was paying very little attention to what they said. All
evening Tante Aimée had desired urgently to shake her and the good
colonel had bitten his lip with vexation that she should hand out such
cavalier treatment to a young man of Peter Van Alen’s position. To their
shrewd Norman minds, calculating and seeking ever the main chance, it
was utterly incomprehensible that one of their own flesh and blood
should not have, as they, the faculty of knowing a good thing when she
saw it. With Mathieu Bernard it had been different. They could, perhaps,
understand her unwillingness to give her affection to that Demosthenes
of the Acadian bogs, but this good looking young American would stir any
girl’s heart, even without his money.

For the time, however, they gave up and said good night. To-morrow they
would return to the siege.

                 *        *        *        *        *

She went to the hospital next morning, sure that everything between her
and Guy would be as it had been before. She went gayly. She told herself
there never had been any real misunderstanding; it had been one of those
silly lovers’ quarrels that signified nothing. To-day they would read in
each other’s eyes what they had always read before—love and trust and
understanding.

Her hopes, burning so high when she ran up the hospital steps, were
quickly dashed. M. de Varin, they told her regretfully, was seeing no
one. It was best that he should have absolute quiet. No, his condition
had not changed for the worse, but concussion was a serious thing and
one had to be careful. Yes, they would tell him that she had called.
They would give him the message she hastily wrote on borrowed paper and
sealed in a borrowed envelope:

    I love you, Guy. Don’t let anything but that matter to you,
    since only your love is important to me. I’m sorry I left you as
    I did yesterday, but I was not able to say good-by. I felt as if
    the world had ended. I know better now. I know that the world
    you and I have made for ourselves—a world of our own—will
    never end. I shall not be happy until I see you. B.

She felt a little better, after writing that, but her steps were slow as
she walked along the snow-crusted streets after leaving the hospital.
Snow had fallen during the night and still was falling, softly,
steadily, building up its rich carpet of white, hiding the soot and
smoke of the city. Little flakes of it were captured in her hair and
lingered there for a moment like white gems in a blonde queen’s diadem.

They had told her, with very little assurance however, that she might be
permitted to see him to-morrow. I must see him to-morrow, she told
herself—I must. The day after to-morrow I have to skate. I should like
to talk to him before that. I should like him to know that it is not by
my own desire that I am going into this thing, that I never really
sought it. I’ll make him understand that it meant more to me to skate
with him, just the two of us, down there in Sainte-Barbe, on the marsh
pond by the dike. He will understand that. I’ll make him understand.

But the next day came and she returned to the hospital and still they
would not let her see De Varin. They looked at her pityingly, the kindly
nuns, sorry for her in their gentle hearts, touched by the look in her
blue eyes—a baffled, puzzled look as in the eyes of a child who has
been rebuffed for no reason it can know. They could not tell her that it
was the patient’s expressed wish that no one be allowed to see him. They
knew it would be too cruel to tell her that.

“But he got my note, did he not?”

Yes, he had received her note. There was no more to it. He had not
answered. They saw a look in her eyes that made one of the two who
talked to her, little Sister Joanna of the Cross, lay a light hand on
her arm and say, “Do not fret. It will all come right. Do not feel
badly. Such things hurt, I know, when one is young. But to-morrow comes,
_ma petite_, and it is different. You will see. Time is the cure, and
always the great trust in the goodness of God.”

Bionde turned away. She did not want them to see her cry. She went
hurriedly, blindly, a mist covering her eyes. She knew it now; he did
not want to see her—that was it. If he were very ill, he could have
given an answer, even verbal, to her message. But there had been no
answer. He was telling her as bluntly as a man could to stay away from
him.

“I’ll stay away then. I’ll never go back to him. If he is so sure I am
drawing away from him, then, to give him the satisfaction of knowing how
right he was, I will do the things he said I would. Perhaps his own
vindication means more to him than my happiness. Perhaps he will like
some day to say, ‘I told you so.’ _Eh b’en!_ Let it be like that!”

She skated, on Saturday, before the watching thousands, as she had never
skated before. Before the magic symmetry of her movements, the
breathless speed and unearthly grace, fell one by one the vaunted queens
of the curved runners. Margot Paine, one of England’s best; the
Norwegian wonder, Helga Maersk; even the great Tanya Ulrich, who had
skated from the screen into the hearts of millions. An awful lot of
nose, as Pete Van Alen reiterated, was put out of joint that day.

Among the mighty crowd was a squarely-built, ruddy-faced man with
snow-white hair and eyes of glacier blue, whose great hands had stayed
clasped tightly all the time she skated. He came to her when it was
done. She saw him standing shyly at the far edge of the crowd
surrounding her and she called out to him and skated into his arms and
cried against the shoulder of his shabby blue overcoat. “Tor!” she said.
“Oh, Tor, how do you come here? And why did you not let me know?”

“I fly,” he said. “I see it in the paper. And I see you. It is enough. I
must come here—for Kristie. You are much like her. Ah, you have done so
well. You have made me proud. I can feel better now. Not so sad any
more. I was wrong to say God unkind. He showed that to me to-day.”

“Oh, I am so glad, so happy that you were here to see me! Believe me, I
thought of you when I stepped on the ice to-day. I tried to think of all
the things you had taught me.”

He smiled his slow, stolid smile. “Ah, no, you did not need to think of
what I have taught. You have learned. Those things now you do without
thinking of them any more. It is good. Life is good. You will become
famous now.”

She shook her head. “I am not anxious for that.”

“It is good to do the best, to do what you know how to do. You are a
great skater.”

“I had a great teacher.”

He spread his hands and said, “The potter must have the good clay.”

“I never thought you would leave Sainte-Barbe—even for a day, even to
see me skate.”

“Something—I do not know—made me to come here. Now I know it was good
to come. Now I go back feeling better. I have done something.”

Quebec, that day, was a sports writer’s dream of heaven. Pete Van Alen
knew the story of Tor Gustavssen, of what he had given up when young
Kristie died, of how he had buried himself in a Tantramar farm, of how
he had found Bionde and taught her with all his great skill, with all
the love and effort he would have lavished on his Kristie.

But Tor would not stay in Quebec. Nor would he talk to the insistent
reporters. They gave way before the rock of his reticence and even their
hard-boiled hearts could feel what this day meant to him.

He was going back by train and his train left in half an hour. He had
barely time to catch it. “You have not need of me,” he told her with
slow half-smile, his hard, unwinking stare. “What you do now, you must
do yourself.”

“But what am I to do?”

So many things confronted her. Pete Van Alen’s wire to New York had
brought Sig Marks, visiting there from Hollywood, reluctantly to Quebec.
But Sig was right at her elbow with a fountain-pen when the meet was
over. They wanted her. They needed her. They had to have her.

“Better keep Tor,” advised Pete. “Or arrange with him to go to Hollywood
with you. He’d be a good one to have.”

“I’m not going to Hollywood. And Tor is gone.” She was bewildered. She
needed someone—one who understood that all this was beyond her. That
she needed time to think, that she must talk to Guy. Pete didn’t
understand. He wanted her to seize the shining hour. But Tor had said,
“She is tired now. You let her rest. To-morrow you can talk.”

She had thanked him with her eyes. All this was wonderful. She would not
deny the thrill of it, the heady intoxication of the crowd’s applause.
She had had her dreams, but in none of them had she stood on the ice
among admiring thousands, the center of all their adulation. Never had
she worn a royal blue skating costume with white fur trim, a dream of a
costume that made her look like some queen of fairyland. This wasn’t
she, this wasn’t little Bionde Lacasse who had trotted off to
convent-school a few short years ago, who since then had found her
greatest pleasure in solitary walks along the dikes in summer, in
skating on the frozen marsh in winter.

Even the scene about her was unreal: the vast turreted bulk of the
Château Frontenac rising above her, the sun-gilded towers and steeples
of the old city, the bells ringing out into the still, frost-keen air.
Guy—her heart cried out for Guy. If he were here it would all be
different. If he could share this moment with her, she would love it and
all that went with it. Now she felt only an emptiness, a lonely bereft
sensation, as if no one really cared for Bionde Lacasse but only for a
girl who could do clever things on skates.

Pete Van Alen took her home, and he did not bother her by much talking.
He knew that she was not physically tired but he could see that her
emotions were strained to breaking. “Take it easy,” he advised. “This is
a lot of stuff for one little girl in one afternoon. You’re not seasoned
yet. If some of the others had won you’d have had an object lesson in
how to grab the spotlight and hold it. You don’t seem to care.”

“But I do. I won’t lie—I liked it. I was happy when the judges told me
I had won. What girl wouldn’t be?”

“None that I know,” said Pete gravely. “Say, who is this chap you’re so
much up in the air about? And what is he? And what’s wrong with him? I
know it’s none of my business, but——”

“You’re kind, Pete.” She touched his hand on the wheel, quite unaware of
what that slight warm contact did to Pete Van Alen of the cold heart and
icy nerves, Pete the woman-proof. “But this is a matter where none can
help. It—it is between him and me.”

“But if I could see him——”

“Please, no. It will be all right.”

“You sound as if you didn’t really believe it would. There!” He saw her
mouth move tremulously, that soft red curving mouth that he had found
himself often of late gazing at with longing. “All you need is to be
left alone. Don’t bother with the newspaper reporters or anyone—not
even Sig Marks. I’ll take care of him.”

“It was you that brought him here?”

He nodded. “I thought of it the other night when I was saying you’re a
great actress without having to act. I hope you don’t mind. When a girl
is good at her work, as you are, I think it’s the rottenest thing in the
world to see a lot of tramps doing their stuff while she sits on the
sidelines. That’s why I called Sig. He loves me for it now.”

“You are too good to me, Pete.”

“It’s easy to be good to you, youngster. I’m with you all the way. Take
things as they come, is my advice to you. And don’t let anybody kid you
that fame and money and success are not worth fighting for. That’s the
fairy-tale the great mass of failures concoct to console themselves. Old
Aesop wrote a fable about it ages ago—The Fox and the Grapes. It’s
still a good story.”

“But what would I do with those things? I have never wanted to be rich
and never in my life did I dream of fame. I—I had all I wanted from
life. I thought I had it, now I do not know, I am not sure.”

“What you will have, what is yours for the taking, my little
ice-swallow, will more than make up for anything you may lose. And does
it ever occur to you that quite possibly anything so easily lost is not
worth the keeping? The sea is large, you must remember, and there are an
awful lot of fish in it.”

She hardly listened to him. As soon as she was in the house she called
the hospital and asked for Guy. Now she must see him, now in this hour
when it seemed to her that he alone could advise her. These golden gifts
that were being held out to her—should she take them or refuse them?
What would he want her to do? She must know that. For what he wanted her
to do, that she would do.

“M. de Varin went home this afternoon.”

She could scarcely thank that crisp, machine-like voice at the other end
of the wire. She dropped the instrument and ran to the door, brushing
past her aunt and uncle with a few unintelligible words, flagging their
chauffeur before he could pull away from the curb, telling him to go as
fast as he could to Sainte-Ursule Street.

What would she find when she got there? The long low room empty forever
of his presence? His books, his easel, his pictures, packed and gone?
She felt that if he went away now she would never find him. She might
hunt the wide world over for him but his ears would be closed to the
Ballad of Ronsard, to that song he would be always deaf.

Dusk now, blue gray winter dusk, making a pale glimmer above the snow.
Lights blooming out here and there in the city, shining over the frozen
face of the great St. Lawrence wrapped in its icy slumber. The Angelus
bells filling the winter air with their brazen, dulcet clangor, great
waves of sound shivering across the river, shattering themselves against
the height of Levis, even as in the days when from those heights Wolfe’s
cannon blasted destruction at the City on the Rock.

Sainte-Ursule Street at last. The little café where she and Guy had sat
that first happy night, where the fat proprietor had two fat black
tabbies who kept the cellar clear of mice. The narrow staircase of happy
and wretched memory. She all but flew up it this time. She did not knock
at the familiar door, but turned the knob and went in and stood there in
the gloom, trying to distinguish the objects about her, not speaking,
not daring to call his name, for fear there should be no answer.

Then she saw the white of the bandage around his head, over by the
window where he sat in an old leather chair. She walked over to him and
reached down and touched his shoulder. In the gray glimmer of light from
the dormer window she could see now the blur that was his face. But he
did not move for a moment, did not speak. She touched his cheek with her
cold fingers and he took them then in his hand and pressed them to his
lips. She put her arm about his neck and bent and kissed his mouth, his
cheek.

“Why—why did you do those things to me?” she said in a whisper, sitting
on the arm of his chair. “Why did you punish me so, refuse to see me,
not answer my note, have them lie to me—? Oh, I will not ask those
things. I don’t care. I’m with you now, here alone with you and that is
all that matters.”

“I told you the other night,” he said, “that—that you must try to make
it cease to matter to you. There was good reason for it then. There is
all the more reason for it now.”

She drew away from him. She could not believe that anything could be so
cruel, so unkind. Here was no Guy de Varin, but some harsh, boorish
fellow, some dark changeling.

“You—but you didn’t mean that. You don’t mean it.”

“You heard me, Bionde.”

“I cannot believe what I heard. I will not.”

“I tell you you must.”

“But why? Why?”

“You reached the top even faster than I thought you would. You did it in
one jump. Sky-rocketed, the Americans say. Yes, that is it—you
sky-rocketed. You are up among the stars.”

“I am the girl you saw one autumn day in a faded garden.” Her voice was
far-off, filled with an infinite wistfulness. “Surely you remember? I
was standing, gazing at an old ruin of a house and suddenly I felt that
someone watched me. I saw you there sitting on a bench. You were
sketching me. There was an old rucksack beside you and you had a stick
and—you called me a dryad. I was that girl, but you—what has come to
you?”

“Nothing—nothing. But fame has come to you. Oh, you must try to
understand—try! I could have hoped to make that girl happy. She would
share what little I made, what little I had—a crust, a garret,
hardship, cold. What matter? We would have the misery, as we had the
joy, together. But you now”—he laughed. “I have a little radio in my
room here. I heard all about you this afternoon. They want you to go to
Hollywood. You will travel a road where it is best to travel alone or
with one who goes as swiftly, as brilliantly as yourself. That is not
Guy de Varin—you know that.”

“How can you say these things to me! Do you think all this means
anything to me compared with——”

“Perhaps not now, but if you gave it all up or if I tagged along, to
spoil it for you, in time——”

“I cannot listen to you. I will not. You are not yourself. You do not
know what you are saying, what you are doing to me.”

“But I do. I never saw my way marked out so clearly. I never saw a
finger point so steadily at the path I should follow.”

“Tell me—are you trying to destroy my love for you, are you trying to
put a finish to it? Don’t you care for me any more?”

He did not answer. He reached up and turned on the light beside the
chair. He looked up at her and his eyes were tormented, but there was a
hard, determined light in their brown depths.

“Suppose we say it’s that, Bionde. Why don’t you leave me? Forget me?”

“Is it what you really want?”

He nodded.

“And you will not tell me why?”

“I have told you why.”

“Because of my—of my skating! Surely you do not begrudge me that! I
thought you would be happy over it all. I was so glad when I saw old Tor
there in the crowd——”

“Oh, I would have gone too, but I didn’t feel up to it. I’m glad,
Bionde, that it turned out as it did. It—it makes everything fine for
you now.”

“It ruins everything.” Her voice was flat, discouraged. “It’s taken from
me all I ever wanted.”

“But it will bring you so many more things to make up——”

“Not all it could bring me would make up for some few brief moments that
I have known.”

“You feel that way now. In time——”

“I’ll feel that way always,” she said. She turned toward the door. “I’d
better go now.” She hesitated. “It’s good-by this time, I suppose.”

He was looking down at his clenched fist, standing by the easel with its
almost finished picture. “Yes,” he said, “I think good-by is best—for
both of us.”

She walked through a mist of tears and never after could recall opening
that door or groping her way down the steep stairs. But she remembered
the ride home through the early winter dusk, the lights gleaming on the
snow. She remembered how dreadfully alone she felt, how cold and lost
and utterly forsaken.

Often and often in the days ahead she thought of that darkest hour and
how cold the stars looked in the pale sky and how aloof they were and
how uncaring.

Back in her room she picked up the silvery blades on which she had
skated to victory and looked at them sadly and put them away, not caring
if she never wore them again. They had taken her away from all she
loved.




                               CHAPTER V


The evening after that strange, sad parting in the gloom of the old
garret on Sainte-Ursule Street, Colonel and Madame Lacasse gave a dinner
in honor of their niece. Not in a great many years had the family
fortunes looked so flourishing, not in the colonel’s memory had any of
the breed basked in such rosy light. He had sent long telegrams and
verbose letters to his brother Hormidas and Tante Adrienne. He had even
called Hormidas long distance late one night and talked for almost ten
minutes. He had not spent so much on a phone call since their brother
Leon was killed in a motor accident at Chambly five years before. He
rather regretted the call, for he lisped slightly and Hormidas was a bit
deaf.

Mathieu Bernard, that eloquent and ponderous little Caesar of the
Westmoreland marshes, if alluded to at all, was spoken of very
patronizingly as “a worthy fellow, but hardly the husband for Bionde.”
Mathieu, who only a short while ago had been a combination of
god-painter-carpenter-bricklayer-glazier, inasmuch as he was the one who
would supply money, put paint on the new shingles and point the
chimneys, after restoring all the broken panes of glass in the family
mansion.

Away with Mathieu! Let him marry some farmer-wench from Pré d’en haut or
Memramcook, Painsec or Scoudouc! Bionde was not the mate for him. “Here
in Quebec,” wrote Colonel Hubert, who never did things in a mean way,
“Bionde could have her pick of a hundred better than the worthy Bernard.
Young Peter Van Alen, a wealthy American, whose great love is
figure-skating, tries to monopolize her and, if I am not mistaken, is
making some headway. Something has gone very much awry between her and
the artist-fellow, De Varin. Perhaps she has begun to see how hopeless a
husband he would prove, though it may be that he is the one who has seen
this first. I do not like to give him credit for so much intelligence.
However, a bit of ice fell from a roof on top of his head and it may
have knocked some sense into him. There is no place in Bionde’s life for
him.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

There was a place, but Guy chose not to take it. He chose rather to sit
hours on end in that silent, low-ceilinged garret room, staring straight
ahead of him, glancing now and then at the unfinished picture on the
easel. It was a study of Clovis Gendreau, the blacksmith at
Sainte-Barbe, a man who was the artist’s conception of Vulcan, huge,
black-bearded, hairy, who swung the great sledge and plied the giant
tools of his trade as easily as if they were made of papier maché.

The picture was all but finished; a few more strokes of the brush and it
would be completed. But brush and palette lay neglected, gathering dust,
and Guy sat there idly, the frown on his face an index to the darkness
of his thoughts.

He had neither the will nor the power to paint. He knew for the first
time in his life a sense of utter futility. What was the use of
striving, of struggling? There had been times when he had felt
inadequate, known the sense of deficiency that comes to every man who
creates, moments when he sees clearly how much smaller he is than the
work he does, when he lets the clay in him assert itself over the bit of
godhead he is endowed withal. But this was the real thing, this was so
near defeat that he had all but lost sight of victory. He walked about
the city a little more each day, but he always chose the quiet time and
the streets where he was least likely to meet her.

He had no means of knowing what he would do if he should meet her face
to face, if, turning some corner, she should run into his arms, if he
should see again the hurt pleading of her eyes, the uncertainty of her
smile. He should, he knew, go quickly away from Quebec. There was no
good in his lingering here. Why did he stay? What did he hope for?
Better to go where he would never see her again, where his loneliness
and pain would not be intensified by the nearness of her.

She would soon forget. For a little while she would feel a hurt like
his, worse perhaps, because she could not know the truth or really
understand why this sorrow was inflicted on her. But she would make new
friends and there would be many bright and glittering things given her
to amuse and distract and make her forget in time that there had ever
been a foolish fellow named De Varin, who had spoken to her of love once
in a twilight garden.

Each day there was some item in the paper about her. His landlady,
Madame Geoffrion, who was the aunt of Charlebois Hudon, proprietor of
the downstairs café where Guy ate his meals, always told him the news.
She had seen Bionde’s picture in the papers and identified it with the
pretty girl who had come so often looking for her strange lodger, M. de
Varin.

“Now,” she confided to the stout Charlebois, “she comes no more. It is
of great sadness that it is so. Whose fault it may be, I cannot tell
you, my old one, but it would appear that since she has become famous
and all men admire her and rich ones want to marry her and others want
to make a star of the cinema out of her, she does not care for this poor
young artist. She spurns his love now, where, a short while ago, it was
a matter of life and death for her to find him.”

To support this romantic thesis she told Charlebois that the young De
Varin no longer bothered with his painting, that the fine portrait of
the blacksmith, that looked so much like Elzear Jean Paul Coquillard,
the smith in their own native village of Saint Philemon de Bas
Berthierville, still stood unfinished on the easel, that not since the
poor young gentleman had come back from the hospital had he touched his
brush.

“Often I allude to the so charming Mademoiselle Lacasse, but he merely
looks glum and shrugs and says, ‘How interesting!’ Ah, it is a great
pity that such love as theirs should perish.”

“A great pity indeed,” agreed Charlebois. “I remember well the first
night they came into my café. Happy as little children they were,
laughing and making jokes and sitting until all hours, and the young
lady in a magnificent gown of rose-velvet and slippers of gold and he
looking as he always does in spite of his clothes, so distinguished. An
hour after closing time I waited for them and, though I could hardly
stay awake, I hated to see them go. And they liked Victor Hugo and
Roncevalle, those two good cats.”

But they came no more together to the café of the good Charlebois. Guy
ate his frugal meals in solitude and seemed so disinclined to talk that
the curious restaurant-keeper respected his desire to be left alone, and
hid his bursting curiosity and deep sympathy under a broad and moon-like
smile. When one is young and in love and love has not treated one
well—why then a man wants to be left alone, he wants to suffer in
silence.

But this, mused Charlebois sadly—he was a great follower of the cinema,
where he went regularly, sat in the back row and wept copiously at all
the sad parts—was a cruel thing that the heartless lovely one had done
to him who adored her. She had yielded to the allurements of wealth, the
blandishments of fame; for the tinsel and show these things could give
she had made her heart cold and shut out the voice of love. Ah, but
women could be fickle! A man never knew where he stood with one of that
sex. Here was this poor young artist pining away, scarcely touching the
good food served with extra care, that was put before him, scarcely
heeding what one said to him. How that girl deserved to suffer!

To all those of the good bourgeois of the ancient city who frequented
the café, Charlebois told the sad story and with each telling it grew in
detail and embellishment, until Bionde became a symbol of all that is
treacherous, fickle and hard-hearted and De Varin an object of deep
compassion. But of all this, Guy knew nothing. He did not for a moment
dream that his affairs had become of great importance to the fat Hudon
and the good, if slightly acid, Madame Geoffrion. In his world there had
been only Bionde and himself. Now he was alone.

He walked past Colonel Lacasse’s house the night of the dinner-party.
Madame Geoffrion had told him it was to take place. She had said, “You
are perhaps among _les invités_?” And had nodded sorrowfully when he
shook his head.

It was clear and cold that night and his coat was thin. Still he did not
mind the cold. He looked up at the stars and to-night they were only
feeble little pinpoints of light and wrote no message of hope across the
heavens. The wavering streamers of the Northern Lights ribboned across
the sky in shifting, shimmering bands of brightness. The gray stone
walls of the city threw bluish shadows on the snow and in the houses
beyond the warmly lighted windows was comfort and cheer that made worse
the ache, the emptiness he knew. He seemed shut out from it all, doomed
to wander alone and unwanted.

He looked up at the lighted windows of _la maison Lacasse_. The dinner
was over. They were dancing now. He could see the moving couples swing
past the windows. He could see her there in some other man’s arms,
laughing and looking up into his eyes, beginning to forget, if she had
not already forgotten, that there was a youth named De Varin who had
been all her world once.

True, it was by his own choice that he had put himself out of her world,
that he had chosen to walk alone in these cold alleys of solitude.
Gladly, he knew, would she have walked them with him and gladly shared
all the hardships, the miseries that might come. Still, he could not
help resenting the thought that she could dance and laugh and be gay. He
could not help but feel hurt at the idea that she could forget him.

“For she will forget,” he told himself savagely. “Of course she will! It
is in the nature of a young girl to forget. And she will have so much to
help her, so many things that are new and wonderful. For a little while
it will hurt perhaps—and may it be only for a very little while. For if
it does to her what it is doing to me——”

He kicked angrily at a lump of ice, shrugged deeper into his old blue
trench-coat and trudged away. He should not have come here. He had
punished himself enough. He had to forget her. He had been trying his
best to put the thought of her out of his mind, to arrange for himself a
future of which she was not the heart and center. For so the future had
to be.

“My God,” he muttered, “what shall I do? Even what little I had has been
taken from me. I must think. I must apply myself as I never did before.
And I must do it all alone.”

There was the bitterest part. To have to fight alone. To have to deny
himself the ineffable solace and stimulus of a woman, the one woman, by
his side. It is hard to go it alone. For him, who had seen the veil of
the future parted, disclosing the bright road that they would walk
together, it seemed at times more than he could bear, to travel the dark
road alone. But he had courage to go on, to fight, to persevere as long
as life was in him.

So he went back to his garret-room, to the worn old chair and the
unfinished picture on his easel. Somehow—was it because he had been
near her, because he had looked at the place where she lived?—he felt
better to-night. He lit his pipe, that had so long been neglected. The
tobacco tasted good. Life could always be good. Why, a man was less than
a man to despair, to want to give up, to look for a hole into which to
crawl and perish there like some abject thing. The stars were always up
there no matter how dark the sky or how storm-filled; the sun would
always rise and there were good books for a man to read and great
thoughts for him to think and spring always came treading hard on the
receding heels of winter.

And there would always be new roads to travel and rivers to wander by;
there would be inns along the way where one could find cheer and
laughter. Somewhere there would be a quiet village at the foot of a
steep road and he would come upon it just at dusk of an autumn evening
and look down upon it from a hilltop and would know one of those rare
moments of beauty that come to him who has the eyes of the spirit. “Lift
up your heart,” said the voice within him. “Lift it to the stars; the
only sin is to despair.”

He had, too, the memories, albeit short ones, of hours that were gay and
bright. Nothing could ever take these from him—the memory of her as he
had seen her first in the tangled garden, of her as he had held her in
his arms, gazed down into her eyes, read all the meaning of life in
their mystery. Ah, bitter-sweet to remember those times, yet better far
than never to have known them. Like a miser, all through life, he would
hoard their sweetness, savoring it drop by drop. I shall remember, he
thought, and not be sad. I shall remember and be strong.

So he thought these good thoughts and saw pleasant things in the blue
smoke from his pipe and in the bright flames in the fireplace. He saw
her image in the smoke. She was on skates and she wore a blue-velvet
costume trimmed with white fur, tight waisted, with a little skirt that
billowed out like a blue poppy as she moved on swift-flying feet. She
skated for him alone to-night. She came down out of the smoke cloud and
danced on a round mirror-tray that was on the little table at his side.
She was a tiny skating marionette on this mirror-rink.

Marionette! What strange and vivid fancies came to him with that word!
Pictures of puppets dancing, going through their mimic play; little men
and little women going through their paces as the puppet-master pulled
the strings. Marionette—is not each one of us just that, and are not
the motions we perform in the play of living directed by strings strong
and invisible? Who shall say which way he will go and be sure that the
Grand Puppeteer, from his vantage point above, does not smile quietly
and pull the guiding strings?

He sat up, his pipe gripped tightly in fingers tensed with excitement.
To-night his mind worked smoothly, miraculously. It worked like a thing,
a wondrous, beautiful, living thing, apart from the poor body in which
it dwelt. The Grand Showman was good to him to-night, giving him a part
he could live. He could sit there and marvel at the workings of his
mind, at the things it did, the way it moved in its own fashion,
smoothly, beautifully, creating beauty.

“I’ll do it!” he said. “I’ll do it! Then I’ll have her always with me.
I’ll go about it at once.”

That night as he worked, he found himself singing his old song from
Beranger—“How happy one can be in a garret when one is twenty!” Yes,
one could be happy anywhere. Oh, he knew the dark moods weren’t gone
forever, that days would come when they would return darker than ever;
that Despair would come again to perch like the grim raven on the back
of his chair and croak its dismal warnings in his ear, that life would
show a false emptiness again, that he would ask himself, “What’s the
use? Why go on? Why keep on trying? What can there ever be for you?”

But not to-night, not for some time to come. He had work to do
now—something that he knew how to do and loved to contemplate. With
wood and wax and cloth and paste and scissors and needle and thread he
would work. And he laughed aloud as he thought of the things he would
make.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Pete Van Alen was at the colonel’s house for dinner, and Sig Marks and
many more. It was Bionde’s party. It was for her, and she tried to do
what they expected of her. She tried to laugh and be happy and give them
all the impression that this was one of the great times of her life. She
sparkled, because she had learned many new lessons since coming to
Quebec. She had learned to talk brightly of things that mattered little,
to laugh politely at jests that weren’t really funny. She did these
things to-night, but the whole business, for her, was funereal and she
prayed for the time when it would end. Her thoughts were still in the
gloom of that garret, still in the keeping of that dark fellow who sat
brooding in the old chair in the gray light from the dormer window.

Pete Van Alen, alone of all the company, knew what she was feeling, knew
that only in body was she with them. He asked her to dance and for a
while guided her light steps in silence. She could feel his gaze upon
her face. She knew she was not fooling him, and she was at once glad
that he understood her so well, and resentful that any man other than
Guy should be able so readily to see into her heart.

“Still suffering from the same mysterious malady, Bionde?” He spoke
lightly, but underneath the kindly smile, the banter, he was in deadly
earnest. “I’ve been trying, ever since the other night, to diagnose it.”

“Yes? And have you made some headway?”

He frowned, pursed his lips, shook his head doubtfully. “We-l-l, a very
little. It looks to me like a disease I never believed really existed.
It has no name in the medical-books. Perhaps I shall be the one to
christen it.”

“And what will you call it?”

“Incipient heart-break.”

She looked up at him, no mirth in her eyes. She found to her wonderment,
that there was none in his; only sympathy, tenderness, understanding.

“Yes, it may be that you have found the ailment. I have never tried to
give it a name. There are some things too great to be named, there is
too much to them for one word to cover it all. Ah, I do not make myself
clear——”

“But you do. Very clear. You are so young and you feel so deeply and you
can be hurt so easily; since, when you give, you give unreservedly, and
when you trust, your trust is entire. You have not learned the lessons
of deceit, camouflage, hypocrisy. You have to have those lessons before
you can be graduated into the world.”

“So?” She looked at him wide-eyed. “You mean one must know these things.
But one does not have to practice them.”

He smiled then. “You never could. There is no meanness in you.”

“Oh, là-là!” She shook her head. “You are wrong there. I can be very
mean and wicked if I choose to be. It is just that I have never had any
great occasion. I could hate as much as I could love.”

“And that is a lot?”

“A great deal.”

“I can believe it.”

They danced for a while in silence, he wondering about this man who
filled her thoughts. Once, Colonel Lacasse had made some slight
reference to an artist who came from her own village in Acadia. Some
flighty fellow, no doubt. Damn it, why were women always getting tangled
up with the least dependable of men! And usually, too, the best of
women. This girl was a wonder, quite apart from the fact that on skates
no one in the world could touch her.

“You’re going to sign up with Sig Marks, aren’t you?”

“I think so. I haven’t yet. He gives me no rest, but he says the offer
will stay open. I promised him I would go with no one else.”

“Better sign. I have an idea you’re chasing a will o’ the wisp. When you
have a Hollywood contract you have something you can lock up in a
safe-deposit box. You can’t do that with love, you know.”

“I know that.” She nodded pensively. “I thought I had it safely locked
up in my heart, but when I went to look for it, it wasn’t there.”

“Poor kid! If only——”

“Don’t feel sorry for me. Perhaps it’s a lesson I had to learn. But how
could he be so unkind——”

“Is there—another girl?”

She shook her head vehemently. “That, I could understand. I could face
it better than I can this. He—well, he is an artist and he is poor and
he thinks that if we were married he would be a drag on me.”

Privately, Pete thought the artist, for an artist, displayed an amazing
amount of common-sense. But diplomatically he said, “Well, men have a
queer pride, you know. They like to think they are the dominant ones.
They like to rule and lead. Sometimes it isn’t much fun being the
husband of a celebrity. Maybe he doesn’t want to be alluded to, if
alluded to at all, as ‘Madame’s husband—I believe he paints.’”

“It would not be like that. I told him if he wanted me to give up all
this, I would gladly do it.”

“You little idiot!”

“Idiot?” She shrugged. “To give up something I have never had, know
nothing about, for what has brought me the greatest happiness of my
life! I see nothing idiotic in that, Monsieur Pete.”

“No—no, you wouldn’t, I suppose. Of course, he wouldn’t hear of your
giving up your chance.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Naturally. If he let you do it, you’d both be reproaching yourselves
all your lives. He’d be sore because he’d feel that you sometimes
regretted what you had given up for him, even if you never did regret.
But, my dear, you sometimes would. Being the wife of a not too
successful artist is no fun; even in books when they try to make it look
like fun, the thing falls flat. When I read about such dreamy unions I
always hear the incidental music of the wolf-pack outside the door and
the patter of their little pawsy-wawsys on the stairs.”

“But you are hard!”

“I’m not really. It’s just that I’ve seen so many facts that fancy
doesn’t have much weight with me. I don’t dream a great deal. At least,
I didn’t until—until of late.”

He glanced down at her, but she hadn’t even heard him. They had stopped
by a window and she was staring into the street where a lamp shed bright
light on the snow, on a shadowy figure of a man walking by. Forgetting
all else, she gazed after him, and slowly rapture dawned in her eyes.
She became aware then of Pete’s interested study of her face.

“It was—” She stopped, the color rushing to her cheeks.

“‘I passed by your window,’” said Pete. “Well, that’s a symptom that I,
as a love doctor, can easily recognize. If he can’t stay away from
you——”

“It was Guy,” she said. “I would know him anywhere. But I did not hear
the Song of Ronsard—not even in my heart. Do you think——?”

“Hey, what is this?” Pete pretended alarm. “Where does the old
ballad-monger, Pierre de Ronsard, figure in this?”

“Oh, it is just something we had—” She was gay now. She felt better.
She liked the party now. He had come to look up at the place where she
was. He had stood out there in the icy, wind-swept street, to gaze at
the windows—and to see her dancing by. And what did he think? That she
was quick to forget perhaps? That she was putting the thought of him
away from her? That she was finding happiness in dancing with another
man’s arm around her?

You must know better, Guy, she thought. You will never let yourself
think that. You will remember the garden, where we met, the first night
when we stood under the stars, when we knew——

When the party had ended and the guests gone, she said a hasty good
night to her aunt and uncle and hurried to her room. There she waited
until she heard the door of their own apartment close for the night. She
slipped into her fur coat then and put a bright blue scarf over her
head, tying it under her chin. On tiptoe she went down the deep carpeted
stairs and out into the bitter cold of the night.

The city was sleeping. Only rarely did she see the vague figure of some
late traveler, some policeman stamping along on his chilly rounds. A
clock struck two long clear strokes that seemed to hang in the dry icy
air under the myriad stars. She breathed deeply of its freshness, its
clean tingling cold. She walked to Sainte-Ursule Street and looked up at
the attic window. His light still burned, but even as she watched it
darkness blotted it out.

She didn’t mind. She had not intended to go up there to-night. She
hadn’t the courage for that. But she had needed the solace of being even
this near to him. She stood there for a moment looking at the slate
covered dormer high above her. If I should go to him now, she thought,
and all her body seemed to glow and her heart-beat was loud. Would he
let me in? Would he take me in his arms and keep me always and never let
me go?

Perhaps that unadmitted thought had been hers when she decided to come
here. Perhaps where he was concerned she was losing all pride, all
restraint and all the good teaching of her convent years. But no—no, I
would not go to him like that. And he would not have me come like that.

But it would have been heaven, she knew, to have his arms about her, his
lips on hers, to feel his face in the softness of her hair, to hold each
other close and forget all else.

“Good night,” she said softly to the window up among the stars. “I will
come again. Once more. This time you will not drive me away. If you do,
I will not go.”

It was easy, there in the silent night, in the deserted street, to make
that vow, to feel sure that she could keep it. She had only the stars to
witness it. As she walked quickly homeward, thinking only now of the
lateness of the hour, she kept telling herself that it was only pride
that could keep her away from him. Yet her cheeks felt hot and her
spirit winced at the prospect of another rebuff. He had tried his best
to make it clear to her that he thought it better for them to go their
separate ways. He had been very final about it all; yet to-night he had
come to her house, drawn there by something stronger than whatever it
was that tried to persuade him to deny their love.

“If I let this go,” she thought, “I shall feel sorry all my life. I
shall always remember it as a precious thing. If I leave it, I’ll take
bitterness away in its stead, and all my life I will regret. I know I
will. I must fight for it now. What if he hurts me, humiliates me—I
know that in his heart he does not mean it, that only some crazy notion
makes him want to sacrifice himself.”

Yet she was afraid. He had made himself in a short while so much alone.
He had quickly built strong walls about himself and designed them for
the one purpose of keeping her away from him. Soon, if she did not do
something, he would have completed his redoubts, there would be no place
for her to enter. No way, she thought dismally, for her who loved him
so, to enter into his life.

She went quietly into the sleeping house and up the stairs. No light
burned, but as she reached the landing a switch clicked and the sudden
brightness dazzled her so that it was moments before she could see her
uncle standing in the hall, his hand still on the switch. His own
astonishment equaled hers. He had not taken time to put on a
dressing-gown. He wore a blue and white flannel nightshirt that came
almost to his heels; his eyes protruded, puffy with sleep, his droopy
white mustache seemed to bristle.

Bionde felt a mad impulse to laugh. He looked so funny standing there in
the draughty hall. All he needs, she thought impishly, is a candle and a
blunderbuss and we could caption the picture, “Where have you been, you
brazen hussy?”

For moments thus they stood and stared at each other, the colonel
groping for words that would sear and devastate, Bionde, with no sense
of guilt, careless of what he might say. As they were thus stalemated,
the clock struck three. The echoing mellow strokes, shivering in the
stillness of the house, dying in slow undulations, broke the spell.

“Where have you been?” The parade-ground manner went ill with the
undress uniform. “Where have you been until this hour of the night?”

“Out walking.” She was conscious of the utter inadequacy of her answer,
but it was really all she could say.

“Come!” The colonel was on the warpath. “You do not stand there and tell
me you have been walking the streets of Quebec at three o’clock in the
morning!”

“It is the truth. If you will recall—or perhaps you don’t—it was about
two when I went to my room.”

“You have been to see that—that fellow, that De Varin. Is it not so?”

“I wish it were,” she said honestly. “But it is not. I saw the light in
his window, but as I watched, it went out.”

“You—you mean to say you actually were——”

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It is so difficult to know.” She looked
at him almost sullenly, with sudden resentment against him and all he
stood for; against all his snobbishness, his tinsel ideas and fumings
and stampings.

“You are beyond my comprehension. I had begun to think that you were all
over that nonsense, that you were beginning to—to see reason. And here
I find you in the dead of night coming back from some rendezvous——”

“I told you I did not see him, uncle.” She felt very tired now. She
walked toward her door. “There!” With swift revulsion she was sorry for
this fat old man who breathed so stertorously, who set so much store on
a world on which he had so faint a hold. “I am sorry, uncle, if I have
upset you. It may be all over between him and me. I do not give up
easily, when it is something I want very much. But do not be angry at
me. You have been very kind and I have been ungrateful. I am sorry.”

He was somewhat mollified. He grunted and becoming for the first time
aware of his nightshirt, he coughed and said hastily, “Go to bed then!
Go at once. And while you are here, do not again go out so late.”

Demurely she said good night and went into her room. She was too tired
now to care how the old man felt or what he thought. He was keen enough,
she knew, to believe the truth when he heard it. It didn’t matter to her
what he believed. It was all his doing and through the combined scheming
of him and Uncle Hormidas and her aunts that she was here, that she had
to wander the streets at night to get a glimpse of Guy’s window. We
would have been all right, she thought, if they’d let us alone.

“First it was Mathieu Bernard, poor old fat Mathieu—nothing would do
but Bionde must marry him—‘Bionde should consider herself fortunate—’”
She mimicked Tante Adrienne’s prim tones. “I was to be Madame Bernard,
and all would be well. Now Mathieu is forgotten. They see better things
for me, and for them. Ah, _sapristi_, what a dog’s life! I wish I was
back in convent and the bell would ring at six and I’d have nothing to
worry about—there would be someone to tell me everything I should do!”

With this youthful cynicism she lulled herself to sleep, but no convent
bell rang for her at six o’clock. It was past ten when she awakened and
a wild storm was howling around the housetops and steeples of Quebec.
Snow, driven by a northerly blast, beat against the windows with a swish
and a rattle that threatened to break the panes. She got out of bed and
looked down into the street where the drifts already in some places were
three feet deep.

She stretched. The room was warm, the deep green carpet good on her bare
feet. She thought of the frigid bedroom that she had left in
Sainte-Barbe. You would need a knife to scrape the frost off its window
a morning like this. It was good to have such comfort.

“Eh! I am becoming soft, I’m afraid. I hope Uncle Hubert does not choose
to-day to put me out in the street with my bags and the silver cup I
won. I should have to go to Guy’s attic and he might not take me in.”

But the colonel made no allusion whatever to what had happened the
previous night. He was quite amiable all during breakfast. He trusted
Bionde. After all, she was a Lacasse, one of a hard-headed breed. She
wouldn’t, when it came down to the fine point, make such a fool of
herself as to marry this De Varin. She was young and romantic. She
would, left to herself, get over it. The colonel prided himself on his
knowledge of human nature. No use trying to push a person with any
stubbornness in her make-up—and his niece, he was well aware, had
plenty in her. One had to go easy.

“Our friend, Mr. Marks,” he said casually, “told me last night that he
must return to New York this evening. He spoke, too, about the splendid
contract he was offering you and which you have not as yet signed. Now,
my dear, as your guardian pro tem I have something to say in that
matter. I am wondering if you have yet made up your mind. I cannot for a
moment imagine that you would be so foolhardy as to refuse this offer
and lose this splendid opportunity. What do you say?”

Cornered! What could she say? She stared down at her plate. The colonel
and Tante Aimée were watching her. She could give them no reason for
refusing, none, at least, that would not sound absurd. She could not
say, “I want to ask the man I love. I want to have him tell me what it
will mean to him. I want the truth from him, which so far I have not
been able to get.”

“Think, child,” urged Tante Aimée, her hand on her heart. “Here is
something that every girl in the world wants, that anyone would
give—well, give her right hand to have. You—why, you owe it to
yourself, and yes, to us, to your family, to take it and go on to great
things.”

“But I—I am not sure that I want to take it.” They could see, but could
not understand, the unhappiness in her eyes. “I thought my life would be
different. This—it all came so quickly.”

“That,” said the colonel, “is the way of fortune.” He tried to recall
the bit of Shakespeare beginning, “There is a tide in the affairs of
man”—but he couldn’t get it straight. “You may never have this chance
again. It’s quite certain you will not.”

“But Mr. Marks said the offer would remain open——”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Marks said that, but to-morrow it may be a different
thing. Changes are swift and frequent in the world of the cinema. To-day
skaters like yourself are all the vogue; to-morrow it may be—well,
tight-rope walkers or something. You must make up your mind.”

“Very well then,” she said with sudden decision. “I’ll let him know my
answer before he goes.”

“But—but what——?”

“What will it be?” She laughed. “I do not know. You see, my good aunt
and uncle, I am not making this decision. I do not feel that I am
capable of making it. I do not want to make it myself and then have only
myself to reproach. I am something of a coward, perhaps. Who shall say?”

Colonel Hubert was dumfounded. “But who, then, is to decide for you?”

“The man I love. Surely what I do should mean as much to him as to me.”

“You are telling us that you will accept or refuse Mr. Marks’ offer on
the mere say-so of this out-at-elbows young De Varin? It is he you
allude to, isn’t it?”

“No other. And yes, I’ll hear from him what he wants me to do. Now if
you will excuse me——”

She left them sitting there, silent, outraged. Here was something they
would never understand. Why, the girl was out of her mind! Suppose, just
suppose, De Varin should tell her not to accept. Suppose she should run
off with him and get married. She was stubborn enough and headstrong, to
do that very thing.

“Hubert!” Tante Aimée looked at her spouse with urgent eyes. She was
sure her heart would not much longer stand this strain. “You had better
do something.”

“But—but what in the world——”

“You had better go to this—this artist and talk to him and try to make
him see what he is doing. Make him see what he should do. And you had
better get there before she does.”

“Sacred name!” growled the colonel, glowering out at the storm. “How
does one travel this morning! To me it looks as if only a dog sled could
get through the accursed snow. Why do girls pick such mornings as this
to be willful and stubborn? Now when I was young——”

“Do not start to tell me about when you were young. You must go to that
young man and try to reason with him. Show him what Bionde is in danger
of losing if she persists in this insane idea of marriage with him. Tell
him it is a wicked thing he does. I wish my heart would permit me to go
myself, but this morning I do not feel well. I could not stand the
strain. Do hurry, Hubert!”

“Perhaps I’d better. I’d like to horse-whip that fellow, but maybe a
good talking to——”

“Yes, talk to him. Tell him he’s ruining her life, tell him we’ll do
anything, we’ll give him money——”

“But we can’t do that!”

“Well, tell him something.” She fluttered her hands. “You will know how
to deal with him.”

“By gad, I do know, but I dare not. I’ll go at once.”

He picked a good time to call on Guy de Varin. The attic on
Sainte-Ursule Street was draughty and chill that morning, the work that
Guy had started the night before seemed to be a silly, futile thing now.
“Pipe-dream,” he told himself bitterly, “I’ve been seeing things in the
smoke. But then—they looked so lovely in the smoke. Perhaps I should
trust my dreams. I’ve always believed that dreams were the things that
made the brightest reality and that if only a man followed his dreams he
would find satisfaction for his spirit. It seemed that way last night.
It all seemed clean-cut and sure of fulfillment. If only I had her, if
only I could tell her—everything.”

He stared at his hands, smiling a forlorn smile at the work he was
doing. He felt utterly lonely. He knew the need of her as never had he
known need in all his life. If she came now, he thought, I couldn’t be
strong any longer. I couldn’t play the hero’s rôle. I think I must have
been cut out for the clown’s part. If I could only tell her again that I
love her, if I could only bring again that brightness into her eyes.

Dolefully he looked at the snow that lashed against the little
window-panes. He drove himself to work, but he could not seem to put
much into it. He could not capture again the fire that had warmed his
will last night. The cold that gripped the city had crept into the very
fiber of his heart. What was the use of all this? What good in eating
your very soul out when only bitterness could be your lot? Work and
sweat and toil and strive and worry; and frustration in the end. Only
that.

He glared at the picture of the village Vulcan, dusty on its easel. With
sudden fury he got up and kicked at the easel and sent it and the
picture in rickety ruin to the floor.

“Maybe you were stopping me,” he muttered, “maybe I can get on now with
what I’m doing.” And with a bitter effort he went again at his work,
singing the old song of Beranger in a mournful minor key.

It was thus that Colonel Hubert Lacasse, puffing and looking as near an
apoplectic-stroke as a man can look without having one, found him when
he opened the door at Guy’s eager command.

“Young man—!” he gasped, leaning on his stick.

“Oh!” Guy stood up, at once on the defensive. “Good day, monsieur.”

The colonel gaped at him, at what he held in his hand. The good
soldier’s eyes lost whatever of lids they possessed. “My God, man!” he
said. “What are those things you have there?”

“Dolls,” said De Varin.




                               CHAPTER VI


Some little time elapsed, marked by the rattling of the ancient
window-sashes, the swish-swish of the driven snow, the hiss of the logs
in the fireplace, before the colonel could say anything at all. Guy was
smiling, but there wasn’t any mirth in his smile. He was pretty sure he
knew the reason for this visit. And, in a way, he thought it well-timed.
Now what precisely, he wondered, can this pompous old fellow have to say
to me?

It would, of course, concern Bionde. The moment, then, was well chosen.
He had been weak a while ago. His strong purpose had begun to fail, his
will to waver a little. Had it been she who came to him this morning he
could no longer have kept up this harrowing deceit. Like a very young
boy, miserable and forlorn, he would have cast away his pride, his
stubbornness, his sense of the rightness of things, and poured out all
the grief and misery that was his. Now again he felt strong, sure of
what he had to do. If this gasping old warhorse had come to tell him to
leave Bionde alone, his errand would be a success. He looked down at the
little figure in his hands and smiled wickedly.

“Dolls,” said the colonel. “Yes, I can see they are dolls. But what the
devil——!”

“They are not, strictly speaking, dolls,” said De Varin. “They are
marionettes, puppets. You know, monsieur”—he was enjoying his own
irony, that the colonel sublimely missed—“little figures controlled by
strings. The puppet-master pulls the strings and they obey. He can make
them do his will. I am going to make myself a puppet-show. In Paris
once, I had a friend, Gaston Brideau, who was one of the greatest
puppeteers in France. Gaston’s puppets were, you can believe me, more
real than living persons. I used to help him and I always enjoyed it. I
came to know and like the little creatures whose every move was
controlled by invisible strings, yet who seemed to manage, in some way,
to give the illusion that they did just the things they wanted to do.
But there! I bore you with all this. You are not concerned.”

“On the contrary.” The colonel brushed his mustache, still wet from the
snow and sleet. “You can guess perhaps why I came here——”

De Varin inclined his dark head. “Perhaps.”

“So then it concerns me greatly that the man who seems to have gained
such an ascendancy over my niece should spend his time fooling with a
lot of silly marionettes.”

De Varin smiled down at the grinning face of one of the puppets, a jolly
little hunchback who seemed to wink an impish wink at him and to be
enjoying the whole thing hugely. “I do not find them silly. Far from it.
In many ways, they are more likeable than humans, who will never admit,
even if they realize it, that they too are pulled by strings invisible,
just as surely as the marionettes are; and that God is the Grand
Puppeteer.”

“Blasphemous!” grunted Colonel Hubert. People who discussed God always
made him nervous. God belonged in church. He looked at the overturned
easel, the picture of the village Vulcan staring with rather an
astonished look at the cracked ceiling of the garret. “That contradicts
free will. I should like to see anyone pull strings and make me do what
I didn’t want to. By gad, I should! I thought you were a painter.”

“I thought so too,” said Guy. “It would seem that I have wearied of
painting.”

The colonel scowled. He had a remote idea that he was being made game
of. He found himself—he who had come to settle this insolent young
nobody, somehow on the defensive. The fellow was so damnably cool and
unconcerned. Far from feeling abashed, he seemed rather to be enjoying
himself.

That was the worst of these artistic fellows. You never knew where to
have them. They always seemed to be talking a different language. Still,
it was only reasonable to expect queerness from a fellow who stuck
himself away in a loft and spent his time making dolls. There was, to
the colonel, something immoral about it. He rather thought there should
be a law or something and thought fleetingly that if ever it was his
luck to be appointed to the senate he would do something drastic about
it. These artists should be segregated, sent to Ungava or Baffin Land
the same way as the Russians sent their undesirables to Siberia. A touch
of the knout would be good too.

“You impress me,” he said, “as the sort of young man who would weary of
almost anything. How do you know that you would not weary of my niece?”

De Varin’s shoulders stiffened for a moment; then he shrugged. After
all, it was very much to his purpose not to argue with this man. Colonel
Lacasse, unknowingly, was doing the very thing Guy wanted done. “It
would seem to follow. How do you know that I—that I have not already
wearied of her?”

“Sir!” The colonel took a step toward him. De Varin held up a hand in a
tired gesture.

“There!” he said shortly. “Let us waste no more time. What is it,
_Monsieur le colonel_, that you have to say to me?”

“Since you would be brief: I want you to leave my niece alone.”

“That I will do.”

The colonel started. It was as if one of his cannons had fired from the
wrong end. He opened and closed his lips several times before he could
say, “You mean that?”

“I mean it.”

“You will give me your word that you will put an end to this
preposterous business—love-affair, I suppose you would call it?”

“I did call it that—once. Yes, my good sir, I will give you my word
that I will put an end to this preposterous business. I will make no
effort to see your niece again.”

Here indeed was something utterly strange and unexpected. The old
soldier was never prepared for things like that. He always figured in
advance just how matters should go and when they didn’t go that way he
became demoralized: that was why he always quarreled with Aimée when
they played bridge. He was suspicious now and wary. He had to think hard
to meet such tactics as these. Here was an enemy, believed strong and
stubborn, capitulating suddenly and completely. Ah, there must be a
catch in it somewhere.

“And if she comes to see you?” he demanded cannily. “What then, eh?”

Bionde’s soft voice, deeper now and strangely controlled, interrupted
them as she pushed open the door that the colonel had left ajar. “She
will not come again, Uncle Hubert.” For one brief moment she looked at
Guy, then turned away. “I have taken a lot of punishment—too much. I’ll
take no more.” She spoke to De Varin, but she was turned toward the
door, her hand urgently on the colonel’s sleeve. “We have said good-by
several times, _monsieur_. It is not necessary to repeat it. You have
made yourself too clear. Please come, uncle.”

The colonel gave De Varin a bewildered look. This victory had been too
easy. He did not understand it. He had come prepared for a fight, ready
to bluster, threaten, plead perhaps. When Bionde came he looked for
tears and the confusion that a woman can throw into such delicate
negotiations as these. And there had been no need for threats and she
had shed no tears.

Something was going on here, something he did not know about. Clearly
they were in love, these two, yet swiftly each had renounced the other.
De Varin seemed mockingly indifferent; Bionde was cold, but there was
bitterness in her and a deep hurt. The whole campaign, this wicked
winter’s morning, had gone askew. He had, apparently, gained his
objective and won a complete victory but he felt just about as
victorious as Napoleon leaving Moscow. He didn’t like it at all.

He nodded briefly to Guy and followed her out of the garret and down the
stairs. For some reason unknown to himself he felt sorry for her. All
the spirit seemed to have ebbed from her. She moved like an automaton,
like—by gad!—one of the queer fellow’s marionettes. What was all that
stuff he had said about human beings having invisible strings tied to
them and being made to do just what the Grand Puppeteer chose for them?
Preposterous. Yet he felt that what was happening to Bionde was produced
in some such way as the fellow visioned.

“Nonsense!” he muttered. “What folly!”

In the car going home he tried to console her. “You will understand,” he
said, “that I had to go to see that young man. It was my duty to see
him. Had I dreamed that matters had progressed so far between you two, I
should have gone long ago.”

“You went to convince him that it would be out of the question for us to
marry?”

“Quite so. Out of the question.”

“And you expected opposition on his part?”

“To be frank, yes.”

“And you found none.”

“None. It amazes me.”

“He—he had told me before—as good as told me—that he did not want
me——”

“He had the effrontery to tell you that—you, a Lacasse, a——”

The brashness of this fellow amazed him. What sort of game was he
playing anyway? Here he was, seemingly turning his back upon a girl who
would one day be rich and famous. The man was a worse fool even than one
would expect of a painter. Reasonably, one would expect such a hungry
breed to be looking out for the main chance, for a girl with money.

“You do not understand. He seemed to think he would be standing in the
way of what he pleased to think of as my career.” She smiled wanly. “It
is not my career. The one I had chosen was quieter, lovelier. It was
like an evening on the great dike when the sea is calm under the stars.
I won’t have that now.”

“He is making puppets,” said the colonel for want of something more
pertinent. “Amusing himself with ridiculous little marionettes; said he
thought more of them than he did of humans.”

Bionde smiled. It sounded so much like Guy.

“Kicked over his easel,” continued the colonel, “I do believe. Said he
was weary of painting. What would you do with a man like that, Bionde?
No stability, no stick-at-it-ness. In no time you would be thoroughly
miserable.”

“Perhaps. But in the first place I’d be thoroughly happy, so happy that
I might store up some of the happiness to tide me over the times when I
should be miserable.”

“It would not work. Believe me, it never would.”

“We’ll never know now.” She looked out at the drifts through which the
big car wallowed. “Never.”

“You will sign that agreement with Marks now?”

“Anything,” she said wearily. “I’ll sign anything. It doesn’t seem to
matter. Nothing matters.”

So, too, thought Guy, standing in the draughty garret in the same place
where he had stood when they left him, looking down at the grinning
little hunchback in his hand, returning his leer with a sad travesty of
a smile.

“There, my friend,” he said, “goes something that comes to few men and
to no man more than once. There goes part of Guy de Varin and the last
of his youth.” He shook his head. “It was so fair, so good, so lovely,
so bright with promise. But come, we have no time for repining, for
feeling sorry for ourselves, _hein_? You and I must go to work. I have
your confreres yet to make. And a little theater for you to act in. Oh,
we shall be a jolly company, you and I and the rest. And when we have
all become skilled we shall invite the élite to see our show and one day
we shall have a motor-van and we shall travel all through this old
province from Coaticook to Mistassini and from Temiskaming to the Gaspé.
Guy de Varin the puppet-master and his little friends, his jolly
marionettes. You will like that? Ah, yes, I can see you will like it:
you have a roguish eye.”

Indeed, Pitou, the little hunchback, seemed to think he would enjoy it
very much. He had looked sneeringly at the colonel and tenderly at
Bionde. He seemed to grin fraternally at his master and to promise many
things, as who should say, “Do not worry, _mon ami_, all will be well, I
shall be always with you and we shall have brave times together. Jolly
times. We’ll find inns where the pots hold more and places where the
girls are the prettiest ever. We’ll roam through flowery meads, you and
I, and what if love has gone; love will come again. Anyway we can be
merry. Let’s get to our business at once. It is wicked winter now, cruel
cold, but the spring must come again. It always does. Be of good cheer.”

So De Varin flung himself into his work, that day and in the days that
followed, and gradually a gay and motley company grew about him—an
artist in a smock and flowing tie, a portly soldier who looked strangely
like Colonel Hubert Lacasse, a pudgy fellow in silk hat, morning coat
and striped trousers who carried a bag of money, a blonde skater in
blue-velvet trimmed with white fur, who was so lovely that Pitou, the
hunchback, could scarcely tear his eyes away from her, an abbé in long
cassock and sugar-loaf hat——

“_Mon dieu!_” said Madame Geoffrion to her nephew, the portly and tender
hearted Hudon. “They are so much like real persons that almost I have
said good morning to them. I swear they smile at each other and talk
among themselves. There is one—_un bossu_, a hunchback—who is a
veritable devil of a man. A fiend. Pitou, he is called. I am afraid of
him. He has the evil eye.”

“What has come to that young man?” demanded Charlebois. “I swear there
is some witch’s spell upon him.”

“Ah, no.” Madame Geoffrion shook her head sagely. “It is not, my jewel,
what has come to him, it is what has gone from him.”

“You mean the lovely one?”

“None other. I have read in the paper that she goes now to Hollywood,
there to skate in the pictures and make of herself a famous actress. But
all her life, be sure, Charlebois, she will be haunted by the cruel
thing she has done to him.”

“It is of a great misery,” said Charlebois. “But”—he brightened—“maybe
Pitou the Hunchback will become an actor of renown and bring fame to his
master.”

“That one!” Madame Geoffrion scowled. “That devil’s imp. He is an agent
of the Evil One. To me it seems that he is the fiend who has come
between them. After she had gone that last time, the day Colonel Lacasse
came here, I happened to be outside his door and I heard him talking to
Pitou.”

“And did Pitou answer?”

“How should I know that? I was afraid he would. I fled.”

The little Pitou, so much feared and hated by Madame Geoffrion, at whom
he was wont to leer most benignly whenever she entered the garret, held
the place of honor on the window sill there and beamed approval or
glowered disdain, as the spirit moved him, at his comrades. But he liked
the lovely marionette who could pirouette and poise herself on her
shining little skates. He was tender toward her.

“Ah, you love her, Pitou,” said Guy. “I can see that, even as Quasimodo
adored l’Esmeralda, you worship this little lovely one whom we shall
call Mimi. It is your sad fate to love her, _mon Pitou_, and for such as
you to dream of one so fair brings only misery. Still you will grin and
caper, though your spirit is in hell.”

He had gone through his own private hell, and the end was not yet. He
had known many dark hours. Never before had he hated the winter, but now
he felt like snarling back at the roaring winds, like flinging defiance
in the teeth of the gale. The winter was a prison enclosing him,
pressing him in. He longed for the warmth, the blue sky, the soft winds
of summer. Ah, but the stars were cold, they were of ice, hard and
brittle. They were unkind.

Still he worked. He could lose himself in his work and, busy with brain
and hand, forget for a while the dreams he had lost. Only timidly did he
dare to dream new ones, and these he held in check. He had his little
friends, his mimic world around him. He could escape into it.

One day he could not work. It was the day the good Madame Geoffrion told
him that Mlle. Lacasse, as reported in the journals, had left for
Hollywood, accompanied by her aunt and Peter Van Alen, who also, it
appeared, acted in the cinema and would, no doubt, skate with the lovely
young Canadienne, who had climbed so swiftly to fame.

“She is gone, Pitou,” Guy said that day. “Gone!” And the word seemed to
have a death-like sound in the shadowy stillness of the garret. “It is
the end of dreaming.” He picked up the figure of Mimi—Mimi of the
silken blonde hair, the great blue, dark-lashed eyes and graceful legs.
He looked at her sadly. He pulled a tiny hook to which the string would
be attached, and a little panel in Mimi’s light blue-velvet bodice
opened and there was her heart, which he could take out. A little heart
of steel made to look like ice.

“See, Pitou—this is what you will find out about your beloved: her
heart is hard, made of steel. We’ll call it ice. It was not so with
Bionde. This is only for the play, Pitou. Her heart was warm and gentle
and loving. It will be always so. But your Mimi’s heart is hard and
cold. See, all of you, how her heart is hard as ice. You little fools,
you will not know it—you will all love her and weep when she dies.”

Soon the puppet-show was ready in all its fine detail. There were, even,
little trunks for those, like Mimi, who had extensive wardrobes. Pitou
had a minute cigar-box for his effects. A young relative of Madame
Geoffrion, a little gargoyle of a fellow named Elphege Plourde, became
assistant stage-manager. He loved the marionettes. He and Pitou were
comrades from the moment he shook Pitou’s claw-like hand. Indeed they
resembled each other.

There was a little hall available at no great cost and here one bright
winter’s night The Jolly Marionettes made their debut. There had been
posters and advertisements announcing the great spectacle, but Guy was
in no way prepared for the crowd that flocked to the première. The
little hall was packed and so many waited that he was forced to repeat
the show five times. He did not dream of the excellent publicity-experts
he had in Madame Geoffrion and Charlebois Hudon. He did not know that
half the population knew what they thought was the true story of his
unrequited love for Bionde Lacasse—as related by his landlady and
Charlebois. But some wept when the skating marionette’s heart turned out
to be made of ice.

Here was something they could understand and, understanding, love. They
could feel in their warm hearts a great sympathy for this poor young man
and a great contempt for the girl who had, as they believed, turned from
him when fame and wealth beckoned. “But it is a sad and beautiful
thing,” one said, “that he should make this little image of her that is
so real, so lifelike. How his heart must break each night as he makes
her skate on her little rink! How symbolic that her heart should turn
out to be made of ice! In the end it is only Pitou who remains true and
faithful to that cold-hearted one. Ah, the brave Pitou!”

Pitou was, in fact, by way of becoming a national hero. Replicas of
Pitou, made by the woodcarvers, of whom there are many in Quebec, began
to make their appearance in the shops, and each one sold brought to Guy
a few cents of royalty, so that Pitou rose to a place in his estimation
even higher than he had occupied before. “You are now a capitalist,
Pitou,” he said one day when there came a small check, royalties on a
few gross of little wooden Pitoux sold to a great store in Montreal.
“You are becoming as noted as the great Monsieur Charles McCarthy. You
have made a good place for yourself in the kind hearts of the Quebecois.
Your sad, unrequited love for the fair Mimi is known far and wide. One
weeps for you and sympathizes with you.”

Guy did not for a moment dream that the sympathy was more for Pitou’s
creator than for the grinning little hunchback. The kindness of the
people, their interest in his show, their steady patronage and good
wishes, touched him deeply. Ah, but they were good and kind! The
children flocked to watch Pitou as though without the Pied Piper’s music
he possessed all that gentleman’s mystic charm. They applauded him. They
shrieked with laughter at his antics and fell solemnly silent when he
was sad. They paid their pennies eagerly and saved more and came back to
pay them again.

“_Eh, bien!_” said Guy. “One lives anyway. One eats and Madame Geoffrion
and the good Charlebois Hudon are happy to have such a distinguished
impresario sheltering in their house and eating in their café. It is
well.”

The easel and the picture of Clovis Gendreau had been rescued from the
floor and placed in a corner by the cupboard where reposed his paints
and brushes, unused now save when Pitou needed a bit of red for his nose
or blue for his wicked eyes or Mimi required a touch of carmine for her
lips or pale rose for her cheeks.

At such times Guy, looking at the brush, would shrug and say, “I do not
regret too much. I shall never know what I have lost—if I have lost
anything. Perhaps I should never have produced anything better than poor
daubs. But I do know what I have gained—all these good friends who are
my players, who have given joy to so many and much happiness to myself.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

To Bionde, settled now in Hollywood, with Tante Aimée for duenna, with
Pete Van Alen exerting all his charm to try to rid her of the
loneliness, the bewilderment, that he knew was in her heart, Colonel
Hubert wrote:

    “De Varin seems to have forsaken his painting entirely. He is
    now a sort of glorified mountebank whose puppet-show is very
    much the vogue among the people. One of his marionettes, the
    hunchback Pitou, a droll little wretch, has become famous and,
    it seems, is bringing some prosperity to his master. At least,
    he will be able to make a living for himself, but you can see
    more readily now how utterly impossible would have been a union
    between you and this little showman. In summer he will travel
    through the country, it is reported, with a caravan and give
    performances in the villages and townships of the province. Can
    you picture yourself, a Lacasse, going through the country like
    a gypsy, a wife of a master of marionettes, living a
    hand-to-mouth existence, dependent for the very food you would
    eat on the antics of a set of dolls? How thankful you must be
    that you have gained such a fine place, that fame and success
    have come your way!”

Bionde cried over that letter. She had been hungry for news of Guy, yet
now she wished that the blundering old colonel had not mentioned his
name. She thought, secretly, that it would be rather wonderful to travel
through Quebec in Guy’s caravan, to play the gypsy and live the carefree
life that could be theirs. True, it was lovely here and people, after
their fashion, were kind. But she found no glitter to what they called
success and fame’s beckoning had never bothered her. In the picture they
were making she skated as she had always skated and found some happiness
in that part of her work. But she hated the artificiality of it all, the
paint, the make-up, the silly lines she had to speak. She hated to have
Pete Van Alen take her in his arms and speak to her of love, but it was
in the script and it was what she was paid for.

Those love scenes were not a success and nothing the director or any of
the rest could do, seemed to improve them. Pete tried. He said, “Can’t
you even pretend that you love me, Bionde? Is it so hard?”

“But I cannot. No one can pretend love. I do what Monsieur Kalimann
tells me to do. I look in your eyes, I put my arms about your neck, I
say, ‘I love you, Nick—I have always loved you.’ What more can I do?”

“No more, apparently.” They were sitting in the garden of the bungalow
Tante Aimée had selected. “No more unless—” he took her hand and toyed
with the small smooth fingers—“unless you could learn to care—actually
to care for me.”

She looked at him, startled, but did not withdraw her hand: his holding
it meant so little to her. It was the first time such a thing had
occurred to her. She liked Pete. He was thoughtful, kind, generous. She
had not dreamed that there was anything behind his constant attention to
her every wish.

She shook her head. “Oh, Pete, I am so sorry. But you—surely you do not
mean——”

“But I do. I always boasted to you that women had no place in my life.
And they had none—until you came. I fought against that. I told myself
you were just a kid and I liked you and I was being sort of a father to
you. I was only fooling myself. I have it badly. I have it so badly that
it doesn’t matter how you feel about it or what you say, I’m going to go
on loving you just the same.”

“Please——”

“Oh, no, you can’t stop me! I won’t annoy you. I won’t speak about it
again—until I think a time has come when you will listen. But the fire
will go on burning. It won’t go out.”

“I wish you had never told me this. I was happy with you, thinking of
you as my friend. Please don’t talk to me of love.” _Parlez-moi
d’amour_—the words, the music of the sentimental song came to her. But
she did not want him to talk to her of love. Not in this garden, not
anywhere. In another garden far away she had first heard soft words
spoken, first known the rising tide of passion. Then it had become a
great sea that engulfed her. But where was it now? Where was the one who
had spoken of it, his lips against her hair?

“I had to tell you,” he said earnestly. “And what are you eating your
heart out for? I understood it was all over between you and the artist.”

“All over?” She smiled. “But you are not consistent, _mon Pierre_! You
say the fire that burns you will go on burning. Do you think then that
the fires of others are not so strong, that they are easily
extinguished?”

“But you never hear from him, do you?”

“Does that matter so much?”

“I should think so. What do you intend to do? Go on waiting all your
life? You are losing so much—so many things that I should like to give
you. Can’t you care for me a little?”

“Oh, very much.” She looked full at him, liking the honest candor of his
gaze, thrilling a little to its quiet worship. “I’ll always like
you——”

“Don’t say ‘as a brother,’ my darling, or I shall strangle you.”

“But——”

“I can wait, my very little cabbage. The Van Alens were all great
waiters and who is Peter, of that ilk, to mind hanging around for forty
or fifty years until you decide that first love is over? And believe me,
while they say first loves are best, it’s not really true.”

“Oh, Pete, you are foolish to worry about me. You told me once you did
not care for love. You said you were proof against women.”

“That was my Imaginot Line, chérie. I just thought it was there. You
cracked it without even trying. Now tell me, what has your artist lover
that I haven’t? And where is he anyway? He’s turned puppeteer now,
hasn’t he? I saw a Canadian weekly with a story about him and his
marionettes. Are you still in love with him?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Of course you know. But you’ll get over it in time, if you’ll give
yourself a chance to get over it. If you’ll step out with me once in a
while, and dance and play around a bit and have fun. You’re too young to
hide yourself in your ivory tower or whatever it is, like the one the
Lady of Shalott lived in, watching the world go by in a mirror. Life,
love and laughter—those are the things for you.”

“Do I matter so much to you, Pete? I’ll try to—as you say—snap out of
it.”

“Fine! Let’s start to-night. Dinner and dance and a spot of mirth. Let
yourself go. You’ll feel better for it, believe me.”

“Still being the doctor!”

“Still the love-wizard, the heart-surgeon. Leave it to old Doc Van Alen.
In the end you’ll find he’s cured everyone’s heart-trouble but his own.”

“Oh, Pete, I hope it won’t be like that.”

“So do I,” he said gravely. “But—what is it you say in French?—_ce que
j’aime ne m’aime pas_—that which I love loves me not; that which I love
not loves me. And there it is. Perhaps time will remedy matters. One can
only hope.”

She could give him no hope. Once in her own land long ago—so long ago,
it seemed, that it was in another existence, she had looked into the
dark brown gypsy eyes of Guy de Varin and under the early stars she had
listened to his soft voice telling her of love—of their love that was a
timeless thing.

How soon he had forgotten, she thought now with no rancor, no
bitterness, only regret; so little it took to make him forget. He
believed our love was strong yet he feared to put it to the test. He was
afraid that this they call my success would make things different. It is
only an interlude, it will pass, as it would have passed for us both,
but what was between us would still have endured. I could not make him
see that.

She would never understand, she knew, that a man could so quickly
change; that one day all could be serene and bright and the next day
storm-filled and dark. It contradicted all the things she had believed,
and it bewildered her. So swiftly he had turned from her, so quickly
sought to cut himself loose. Where, she wondered, was her pride that it
could permit her to go on caring for a man who made little of love, who
forgot all the sacred promises he had made to her?

Here she saw laughter taken lightly, a most casual thing. She could not
understand. To her it was holy, a sacrament. It far transcended the
desire of the heart. It was a force potent and unending. You could not
put it on, throw it off, as you did a bright garment. If it was real, it
stayed with you and you would wear its mantle as long as life endured.

Somehow, she could not make herself believe that it was otherwise with
Guy de Varin. He was of her own people, strong, confirmed in the ancient
traditions of their race. And he had chosen her. He might put her out of
his life, but he could never destroy the feeling he once had for her. He
could never uproot that from his heart. It would last with him as it did
with her.

He must still think of me, she told herself. He must still take out
those dreams we shared together and look at them and remember many
things. And they must make him sad, they do that to me. And it must be
lonely there in the old garret. How I should like to have a magic carpet
that would take me to his window some evening, so that I could look in
at him and see him at his work!

She wanted, more than anything else, to see his puppet-show, to know the
marionettes he had for his comrades now. She knew him well enough to
realize that there was method in this seeming madness of his. Still, his
desire to do a thing was sufficient justification for his doing it, and
if he chose to turn to puppet-shows instead of painting, it was certain
that to him it was the logical procedure.

Well, one day she would see his show. She looked forward to that more
than to her own première, thought more of a puppet show than of many a
starred feature. Perhaps it would make her laugh and clap her hands;
perhaps it would make her cry, for she might see in it what no other
could see; she might be able to follow the controlling strings to the
hands of the puppet-master and from his hands go into his heart and see
why he maneuvered them as he did.

She went out with Peter Van Alen that night. She rode with him in his
great smooth car over magic roads under stars that here seemed brighter
from the radiance of the city of light they shone upon. The night air
was warm, balmy, and the voice of the great ocean was murmurous and
soft. In her own far-off land the marshes would lie sheeted in white,
gripped in the iron clutch of the frost, the stars would be sparkling
bright and glistening like little bits of ice; the wind would be cruel
as it raked across the miles and miles of frozen dikeland. In the rivers
the ice cakes would be piled up in crazy mountains as if the giants had
used them for playthings, and the voice of Fundy would be loud and
sullen, its waters dark under the winter sky. Yet to-night she would
rather be there, walking along the village street, hearing the stiff
crunch of the hard-packed snow under her heels.

To please Peter she tried to be gay. With him, on such a night, it was
hard to be unhappy. He could make her laugh. He spoke of the picture
they were making—“On Winged Feet”—and prophesied its success in spite
of the unconvincingness of the love-episodes.

“They will have to go as they are, I’m afraid, but it won’t make much
difference. Once the people see how you can skate they will forget
everything else—even the fact that you make love like a—like a
marionette.”

She sat up against the red oak leather and looked at him, startled, in
the starry gloom, in the light of oncoming cars. “Is it like that?” she
said. “But yes, I can believe it is.”

“There’s no heart in it, Bionde.”

“I cannot, I fear, put heart into it. Do not misunderstand me, Pete. I
like you so much——”

“I know. I’d rather you hated me, felt something toward me that came
from deep in you. You don’t know what you do to me, what just being near
you—near where I can touch you— But there, I promised I wouldn’t annoy
you, and I won’t.”

“You don’t annoy me. You make me feel sorry that I—that I do such
things to you. I don’t want it to be like that.”

“No more did I, _chérie_. But that is one of the queer things about this
most common and least understood of diseases, love—one cannot cure it
by any set remedy. I am near to you, I suffer; I stay away from you—and
I’ve tried that, too—and I am in hell. And the sad feature of it is,
I’m sure, that you feel the same way—but about someone else.”

“Yes, I think that is so. I try so hard to forget it all. I tell myself
it is all over. I say, ‘You are _folle_, Bionde. You are nothing but a
little fool. It is all over. There will be no more. It was never real.
In time you will see that it was no more true than what you once thought
about your dolls, and you’ll laugh at yourself.’ But, somehow, I cannot
make myself believe that. Somehow, the only reality in my life is a few
short hours, a few brief times—once in a garden, once in a garret, once
in a little café on Sainte-Ursule Street in Quebec, where the
restaurateur was fat and jolly and had two fine black cats named Victor
Hugo and Roncevalle, who caught mice in his cellar.”

“I see,” said Pete gently. “You live in those memories——”

“Yes.” Her voice was eager. “And there is that Song of Ronsard that we
loved, that we used to say one of us had only to sing and somehow the
other would hear. Strange, the things one says and does and believes
when one loves.”

“Strange,” agreed Van Alen, his eyes intent on the road. “And strangely
sweet. Do you listen for that song?”

“Always.”

“Do you think you’ll hear it some day?”

“I do not know. But I sing it too—and perhaps he will hear.”

“Do you think it’s a good thing to care so much? To love like that?”

“I cannot help it,” she said simply. “It is here, inside me. It is part
of me. I think it will always be here. He tried to destroy it. Tried
every way. I don’t know what else he could do. I’m not sure that there
is anything he could do that would put an end to it.”

Pete Van Alen was not so sure. He had seen loves come and go, flourish
and die. Perhaps they were not so deeply rooted in such virgin soil as
this, but some of them had been strong, had seemed made to last forever.

“I shall try to cure you,” he said when he brought her home. “This is
merely the beginning of the treatment. There is much more.”

“It is a pleasant treatment. The medicine is so easy to take; the doctor
so nice. But I am not sure that I wish to be cured.”

“Child, you do not know what is good for you.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Certainly not. So I shall cure you in spite of yourself. I cannot have
you wasting your life. One must face the facts, be rational about these
things. You are French. You are supposed to be hard-headed even about
love.”

“_Sapree!_ That is something you read in a book, my Pierrot. No woman,
French, Chinese or Eskimo, is hard-headed about love. If she is
hard-headed, you may be sure she is not in love.”

“Ah, the patient is now teaching the doctor.” Pete laughed. “Well, one
can always learn. But such young lips to speak with such old wisdom!”

“One knows such things.”

“And knows not why one knows them.”

“It is so. Good night, Pete. It has been good, being with you.”

“You have to get used to it. Perhaps I can make you so used to being
with me, that in time you will miss me if I’m not around. You know—like
a favorite pair of slippers or a pup you’re attached to.”

“I would not like it to be that way. I could never take you for granted.
It was sort of a miracle the way you came into my life and took me by
the hand and led me to—to all this.”

“Yes.” He nodded slowly. “But, do you know, I’ve often wondered if it
wouldn’t have been better had I left you alone. I mean to say, wouldn’t
you have been happier if your skill with the blades had gone unnoticed
and you’d married De Varin and settled down to raise one of those large
families for which you Canadian French are so famous?”

“Who can tell?”

“That’s it. No one can. Either way, you’d miss a great deal. I know you
enjoy being here, for a while anyway. It’s a change for you and you’ll
never, I hope, have occasion to learn that the whole setup is as phony
as the cardboard houses and that the biggest make-believe never gets on
the screen.”

“I have seen much. But it is like every place else. There are real
people, fine people, and there are the others. It is not hard to tell
those who are worthwhile. I do not worry. I always have you to turn to
if I need advice. Peter—that means rock. I remember it from my Latin
lessons—_Petrus es_, thou art Peter. And you are like a rock to me,
steady in the swift-running stream.”

“May it always be like that, Bionde. You are the kind of girl to make a
man thank God for the little bit of good that’s in him and wish that it
might be very much more.”

“You are greedy then, if you think you need much more.”

He held her hand briefly, but there was that in his eyes that made her
look away. She watched him as he ran down the path to his car, waved in
answer to his upflung hand as he drove away. She lingered on the
veranda. She could see Tante Aimée moving about in the living-room,
probably waiting to question her about where she had been, what she had
done, what Pete had said and what she had answered. Tante Aimée devoted
all her energies, considerable despite her weak heart, to promoting a
match between Pete and Bionde. She would question and probe tirelessly,
hoping for encouraging symptoms.

And to-night, thought Bionde, I do not feel like talking. Pete tried so
hard to cure me of my loneliness, my _nostalgie_, but it has returned to
me worse than ever. He would say I’ve had a relapse. I wish I was far
from here, I wish I was in the garret on Sainte-Ursule Street with Guy,
sitting there watching him while he showed me his marionettes.

She lingered so long there in the shadows that her aunt came looking for
her.

“Ah, there you are! I heard the car drive away some time ago. What are
you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Of what?”

“Of times when I have been happy. I’m trying to figure out why I was so
happy.”

“Rather an idle occupation. And it is turning cool now.”

“Cool! You, who come from Quebec, talk about its being cool! Very well.”
She linked her arm with Tante Aimée’s. “We shall go in now.”

“Hubert has sent some papers. In the weekly edition of one of them you
will see some pictures that may—interest you.”

“Yes!” Bionde’s eyes brightened. “Oh, let me see——”

“Here you are.” Tante Aimée handed her a rotogravure magazine, opened at
the center page. At first she thought it was one of the many pictures
they had taken of her. It was so like, only beneath the trim figure in
blue-velvet skating costume with white fur trim was the caption “Mimi
the Marionette.” And there too was a picture of Guy, with Pitou perched
on one shoulder and the Chinaman he had christened Mun Kee See on the
other.

Bionde’s eyes devoured them. She laughed with glee. “Ah, _que c’est
beau!_ How lovely! How charming these little people! And how real they
look! Why, one would swear that _petit bossu_, that little hunchback,
could talk and say the naughtiest things. Oh, Guy——”

“You are not angry that he has made his Mimi so much like yourself?”

“Angry! I am flattered. Is she really so much like me? Am I so lovely?
Ah, it was kind of him to remember me that much and to make his leading
lady in my image. He would not take the reality, this is next best.”

“I think it is in very poor taste.” Tante Aimée’s mouth was prim. “Very
poor taste indeed.”

“Why so? It shows, at least, that he thinks of Bionde. Every time she
skates on her little rink he must think of me. Every time he addresses
her he speaks to me. I wonder”—her blue eyes had a dreamy, far-off
look, as if she would see into the garret-room and learn what went on
and hear what Guy said—“I wonder if he ever tells her things that I
would like to hear.”

“What things?”

“Oh, that he loves her, that she is all he lives for, that——”

“You have not yet got over that folly!”

“Not yet,” said Bionde, looking at his picture, at his dark and smiling
face in which, despite the smile, there was a shadow of sadness.
“Perhaps not ever.”




                              CHAPTER VII


The long cold months of January and February dragged their glacier-like
length into the bleak and windy days of March and the half-smiling days
of April and “suddenly then the wind blew soft and Spring was here
again!” All winter long Guy’s marionettes had held the faithful and
drawn new admirers before their tiny stage. Pitou grimaced and strutted
and stole the show from even the beauteous Mimi. Tirelessly the elfin
actors went through their parts and with them the impresario had neither
temperament nor salary-troubles to worry about. Real troupers, they
seemed to know that the show must go on, even though the stage-manager
himself suffered from the migraine and sometimes Elphege Plourde had a
throat-cold that made Mimi talk in a hoarse tenor instead of the silvery
soprano that one expected from her. And steadily the constant little
stream of nickels and dimes flowed into the puppetmaster’s treasury so
that, come Spring, and with it the desire to take his players farther
afield, he was able to purchase a neat red van, load his company into
it, sit Elphege in the driver’s seat, take his place beside him, say a
temporary good-by to the old attic he had come to love, to Madame
Geoffrion and Charlebois, and set forth along the vernal highways of the
ancient province.

Before his departure from Quebec, the great skating-star, Bionde
Lacasse, had made her debut in the super ice-opera, “On Winged Feet.”
Madame Geoffrion had seen it, so had Charlebois, so had Elphege.

“Ah, Monsieur de Varin,” piped Elphege, who had no hoarseness that day,
“it was a spectacle beautiful to behold. To see that lovely one, that
Mlle. Lacasse! _Sapree mon Dieu!_ She was almost as pretty as our own
Mimi and certainly far more graceful on her skates than even that
wondrous one of ours. She seemed scarcely to touch the ice. It was as if
most of the time the air itself sustained her, like a feather in the
wind.”

“I can believe she was all that you say, Elphege. Yes and more.” They
were driving out of Quebec by way of the St. Louis Gate that day, the
van gay and resplendent in its bright red paint, an image of Pitou
perched for ornament on the radiator-cap, the good motor singing
underneath its hood. “To see her skate was like beholding the
incarnation of beauty. Like a great picture, a lovely poem, a grand
concerto.”

“So it was!” Elphege struck the wheel with his clenched fist. “Now I
know it. There have been a few moments in my life when I felt the same
thing. So indeed it was! Now that is just the way it seemed to me, but I
could not put it in such words. I knew well what it did to me, but I did
not understand why. I tell you it made me feel good, as if God had
forgiven me all my sins. Breathless I sat there, seeing only her with
her yellow hair flying in the wind as like a swan she floated along.”

“I recall so well the first time I saw her skate.” He could talk about
her now, to Elphege anyway, with freedom, with a warmth that did him
good. He loved again to speak her name, loved to feel that in spirit, at
least, he could be near to her. “I could scarcely believe my eyes. I
stood on the edge of the pond—this was in the Tantramar district of
Acadia where her family and mine belonged—and I was fascinated, held
spellbound. She has magic in those twinkling feet of hers. She has
naturally the poetry of motion and the power to express beauty by her
movements.”

“But yes,” agreed Elphege. “It was like witchcraft. I could not take my
eyes from her. I seemed to float high on the clouds when I watched her
and there was no ugliness or meanness in the world.”

“And everyone else felt the way you did?” Guy’s voice was wistful. “On
them all her skating had the same effect?”

“I think, on them all.” The little Elphege, who looked like Pitou’s
elder brother sans hump, nodded gravely. “Yes, one would not err in
saying they all fell beneath her spell. Who could resist such beauty as
hers, even if she could not skate a stroke? But there are, of course, a
great many in Quebec who are not in sympathy with her.”

Guy, turning his head as if it were jerked by one of his own
puppet-strings, stared so hard at his assistant that De Varin’s Jolly
Marionettes, car and all, were almost overturned in a deep ditch when
Elphege stared back at him. “Name of a name, my good friend and
understudy, what are you talking about? Who is not in sympathy with
Mlle. Lacasse, and why?”

Elphege was uneasy. He blinked his little eyes. He squirmed in his seat
and wished devoutly he had held his tongue. This master of his was a
queer one. Those dark eyes could cloud or brighten and give off sparks,
and he could be as sullen as a thundercloud or merry as a linnet. It
would not be well to anger him. And right now he did not look too
pleased. Elphege smiled feebly. He said, “This, Monsieur Guy, is a
joyous day of Spring—a day fit for two like us to embark on our
adventures with all our little friends riding comfortably behind us. Ah,
we are like brave adventurers going forth to see what the wide world has
to offer. Like——”

“Elphege!” Guy’s voice was stern. “Do not try to avoid my questions.
Just what are you talking about when you say——”

“When I say what, Monsieur? I babble on so, half the time I do not know
what I am saying and, even if I do, I forget it a few seconds
afterwards. Right now I cannot recall——”

“Do not lie to me, _mon vieux!_ You are well aware that I am asking you
what you meant when you spoke about some not being in sympathy with
Bionde Lacasse. What folly is this?”

“Ah, it is nothing. Some think——”

“Yes! Yes! Some think what?”

“That the blonde Lacasse was cruel to you,” blurted Elphege, and cowered
away before the wild look in De Varin’s eyes, the thinning of his lips.
Ah, he could terrify one, this creator of Pitou.

Guy’s hand gripped Elphege’s skinny arm. “What could ever give them that
idea? Why have I not heard of this before? Speak then. Tell me more!”

“Why, is it not true that you—that you were in love with her and she
with you?”

“What then?”

“And when fame came to her, she no longer loved you because you were a
poor artist in the garret of my good aunt, Madame Geoffrion, in
Sainte-Ursule Street? And because you lost her love, because she forsook
you, it was no longer possible for you to paint the pictures, which is
why we have the puppet-show——”

Guy bade him stop the truck. He put his elbow on the window ledge, his
chin in his hand, and stared at his assistant as if seeing him for the
first time. He took off the dark glasses he wore, wiped them and put
them on again. He muttered words that Elphege could not understand. They
might have been prayers. Then he said slowly, “How long have people felt
like that?”

“Oh, ever since the Jolly Marionettes first made their appearance. Did
you not realize, monsieur, that the good Quebecois wept for you?”

Guy’s lips parted and closed twice then opened to let him say, “For me!
They wept for me? Not for the sorrows of Pitou?”

“Oh, for both no doubt. But mostly for you.”

“What folly! What utter nonsense! We must correct this, Elphege—correct
this wrong idea. Why, there is no truth in it—not an ounce of truth.”

It was Elphege’s turn to goggle. He did it to perfection. “No truth? It
is not true that out of your broken heart you made these wondrous
creations—Pitou, Mimi, the Miller, Mun Kee See——”

“I made them solely that I might eat and have money to pay your good
aunt for the garret where I slept. And Charlebois Hudon for the food I
ate. And I thought it was they, the little puppets, that the people
loved, while all the time——”

“Oh, but the people loved them!” Elphege was really distressed. He
adored the puppets. They were real folk to him, to be treated with
deference. It was absurd to think that there could be anyone who would
not like them. “You will see that, you will more readily understand it
when we reach those outlying townships where the story has not yet
penetrated. You will witness the grand ovations we receive.”

“If there are any places where this wretched tale has not penetrated.
Lies spread very fast indeed,” said Guy. “Everyone in Quebec has
relatives in the province. Heaven knows how many have written to Cousin
Jean or Cousin Marie telling them to be on the watch for the sad
puppeteer whose heart was broken by— It is miserable. I have it in me
to run the whole show into the river.”

“They would say then,” observed Elphege sagely, “that you drowned
yourself and the rest of us because of what she did to you. They would
blame her for it all.”

Guy’s breath whistled through his teeth. “Listen, my friend, Mlle.
Lacasse had nothing—nothing whatever to do with this. Get that into
your thick though kindly skull. She is all that is good and lovely.”

Elphege’s sharp chin moved up and down in violent affirmation. “It was
indeed hard,” said he, “to believe that she was a snake.”

“A snake! Who——?”

“Madame Geoffrion said she was that—a cruel snake.”

“Drive on!” said Guy. “It is hopeless. I suppose now it has gone so far,
this monstrous lie has become so generally believed, that the more we
protest against it and try to make them believe the truth, the more they
will credit the falsehood.”

“Of course,” said Elphege. “They will say you love her so much that your
love will even cause you to lie just to save her.”

And so it is, thought Guy with that same darkening of his spirit, of his
hopes, that always came to him when he thought of her, of all that had
been between them, of all that never could be. And so it was, though not
in the way you and the good Quebecois think, friend Elphege, and in no
way that she knows. She could never believe that I’d lie to her, no
matter how splendid the lie might be.

But he said no more to Elphege, who, he felt quite sure, still held fast
to his romantic, erroneous idea about his employer and her he called
“The lovely blonde one.” Probably nothing would ever shake the little
fellow’s belief that his master was an injured and heart-broken lover
and that the girl had spurned him because he was poor and unknown.

Indeed, Elphege was thinking this very thing, only much more intensely
and with far greater faith in its truth than Guy could ever guess. He,
thought Elphege, is being noble, generous and kind. Such is his nature.
He is trying now to spare her feelings, seeking to make us think well of
this heartless jade. But it will not work. She moves now among the rich
and great and diamonds sparkle in her hair and when she skates in her
pictures she glitters like gold. The world applauds her because it does
not know the true story, but here is monsieur wandering through the
province with his puppet-show, making a meager living for the two of us,
and his great work, his painting, is utterly neglected and it may be
that he will never again touch brush to canvas. And what may be Canada’s
loss from this giving up of his art, only the good God can tell, but one
knows, all Quebec knows, that it was she, this Lacasse, who caused him
to smash his easel and vow never to paint again.

That story was so much believed in Quebec, and so great was the sympathy
felt by the people for the dark, sad-eyed young puppet-master that, at
the showing of Bionde’s picture in the city, there had been boos and
catcalls for her—though this Elphege would never have told his
master—no, let mad dogs rend him and wild horses try to drag the story
from him. But no one had applauded her and a good many had derided. Why
had not Monsieur Guy gone himself to see the picture if not because his
heart was broken and in his eyes a sadness which would not permit him to
look upon her who had forsaken him?

So Madame Geoffrion’s stern, Sybillic dictum still stood, and Mlle.
Lacasse, rich, famous, beautiful as she was, still merited the name of
cruel snake. One’s heart still bled for the poor artist, and would
continue to bleed.

In silence now they drove along country roads beginning to brighten with
the brightness of Spring, the young green beauty of buds bursting,
turning into little gay leaf pennons, the magic song of birds newly
returned from their sojourn in the south, the myriad voices of the
waters released. The mighty St. Lawrence itself flowing onward to the
sea, the yellow golden sunlight, warm on their faces. Through many an
ancient town and many a storied village they passed, stopping for an
hour or so here and there to edify the wide-eyed populace with the music
of Elphege’s concertina, prelude to the gargoyle antics of Pitou, whose
progress through these townships was one long series of triumphs. Mimi
now had discarded her high-laced white boots and gleaming skates, her
pretty poppy-like dress of blue-velvet with trim of elegant white fur.
She wore the shoes of a ballet dancer now and a white dress all frills
and ruffles, but Pitou still adored her, still allowed his poor heart to
be broken and anguished by her coldness.

The days went swiftly, busily, now, and life had a new zest for Guy de
Varin. So close together were the little villages that clustered around
their tall-spired churches, and so well-received were the puppet-showman
and his Jolly Marionettes, that word of the excellence of the
performance often spread five or six leagues ahead of the progress of
the gay red van and in the smallest hamlets a delegation waited to
demand that a performance be given. And a performance was given.

Spring blossomed into summer—long warm golden days, gardens
rainbow-hued and fragrant with the flowers—bright faces of boys and
girls, tiny Jacques and little Yvonne, whose eyes were wondrous good to
see as they watched the antics of Pitou, the swift pirouettes of the
gorgeous Mimi, their small grubby hands half upraised, ready to applaud,
to be the first to acclaim these little people who could dance and leap
and suffer and rejoice.

Thus by many short and pleasant stages the red van with its master, its
driver and its company of merry puppets, came one night late in the
month of July to the village of Saint-Jovite de la Haute Montagne, high
in the Laurentians, and rolled into the inn-yard of The Good King
Dagobert, who beamed in his majesty from the wooden signboard down at
the derisive countenance of Pitou, perched on the radiator-cap.

Many tourists were at the inn, many of the villageois waited eagerly for
the arrival of the marionette show, of whose outstanding excellence they
had heard from friends and relatives in the villages down the mountain.
The great barn of the inn was already prepared for the show and seats
were at a premium.

“A vast crowd to-night, Monsieur Guy,” announced Elphege, coming into
the bedroom where Guy sat, head on hands, staring moodily at the homely
handwrought pattern of the hooked-rug. “A mighty throng.”

“So?” Guy knew that any number of people over a hundred was a multitude
to Elphege. “It is a pity. To-night I should like to cancel the show.
I——”

“You are not well! I can see it.” The little fellow’s frogface showed
deep concern. “All day I have felt that you were not well.”

“I shall be all right.” There was no conviction in his tone. He closed
his eyes and Elphege saw the little lines about them deepen, as did
those that stretched from nose to lip-corner, lines that should never
have been in the face of one so young. And in Elphege’s tiny orbs was a
great pity and sadness and anger.

“I will direct the play myself!” he announced as if it were Hamlet that
would be played with a re-incarnation of Sarah Bernhardt in the rôle of
Ophelia. “By myself I can do it.”

Guy looked doubtful. He shook his head. But now, into Elphege’s eyes had
come a light of determination, of cunning resolve. Guy knew, too, that
the little fellow was an expert showman and could, with a bit of
camouflage, readily double for him and carry off the performance with a
sure and steady hand.

“Very well then,” he said, lying back in his chair, his hand covering
his eyes. “I fear, anyway, I wouldn’t be of much help to you to-night. I
shall stay here and rest, but if you feel you need me, if things do not
go well——”

Elphege spread his hands, long, quick, sensitive hands. “What should go
wrong, maestro? You know as well as I do that the little people, from
Pitou to the Dusty Miller, know and love me, because I understand them.
True, they cannot give of their best for anyone but you; still I am not
afraid that any of them will fail me.”

Guy waved a hand. “Go then, and good luck to you. There are many people
here at The King Dagobert. You will have a large crowd of spectators.”

“The barn will be filled. That is assured. There are hundreds; many
American cars are parked in the inn-yard.” He looked again sharply at
Guy but saw no reaction to the gentle feeler he had thrown out. He would
say no more, say nothing certainly of the long gray convertible coupé
with the California license plates nor of the girl who drove it, she of
the silken blonde hair, the great blue eyes, whom he had seen enter the
barn among the very first of the laughing crowd whom Pitou, with
outstretched hand, welcomed at the door. Ah, it would be a pleasure to
play for that one, to make the little actors go through their parts, to
show her something of herself perhaps.

Here, thought Elphege with vindictive glee, with the joy of the avenger,
is the chance to make that one feel something of the pain she has
caused; here is a chance to hold up to her the mirror in which she will
see her perfidy, her heartlessness and shame. It was the will of the
good God that to-night De Varin should be ill. It would never be in his
heart to punish her. She had bewitched him, for her he would suffer
gladly, he would let her walk upon him with those dainty feet of hers,
yes, he would even die for her. Where she was concerned he was even
worse than Pitou. Pah! But a pretty face and a mop of blonde hair could
make an imbecile out of a man!

She was brazen, this Lacasse. How dared she present herself at the
puppet-show? How dared she come so near to him she had scorned and
betrayed. She had come to sneer, no doubt; to laugh at his poor efforts,
to have a little fun at his expense. _Bien!_ She should have her fun,
and maybe more than she looked for. Her heart was hard, but it could be
touched. It could be pierced and hurt. He, Elphege Plourde, would be the
one to make her suffer.

He hurried downstairs and shortly afterwards Guy heard the music of his
concertina. He played the serenade from Les Millions d’Harlequin, which
Guy had never heard him play before. It had an ineffable wistfulness
about it, heard thus afar off, floating through the still warm air of
the summer evening, and, long after he had ceased playing, its strains
seemed to linger in that room where the twilight slowly settled, where
the curtains of white muslin blew softly in the breeze, where De Varin
sat alone with his thoughts.

Dark they were to-night—dark, as not in many weeks had they been. The
sun had been hot and glaring all day, the roads dusty, the journey long.
But something more than all that had come to disturb and depress him,
and what it was he could not tell. He had been prepared for the times
when despair, the sense of futility, the fear of defeat and failure,
would come again to plague him. Yet to-night it was hard to fight them,
hard to keep his spirit calm and sustain the high courage in his heart.

To-morrow it will pass, he told himself. It will go away. It may never
return again. I must think of that. So far, everything has been well
worth the doing—everything. If I were faced to-morrow with the same
choice I would choose again as I did before. Ah, but would I? It is so
hard, so bitterly hard, to go on alone, always alone, when I know in my
heart that one word of mine would bring her to me. Where is she now?
To-night? At this hour? And does she perhaps think of me?

She sat in the very front of the crowd that packed the great barn of The
Good King Dagobert. She was lovely in a green silk knitted suit, a gypsy
scarf of green covering her hair, knotted under her chin. She was alone,
for she had come here alone, and in all the crowd that thronged the inn
and flocked to the show of the Jolly Marionettes, only Elphege had
recognized her, had seen in this quiet, retiring girl, the great
skating-star who had shot so swiftly to fame. Only Elphege, who believed
with a belief unshakable the story that had originated with his Aunt
Geoffrion, that Quebec had learned to take as gospel. Oh, yes, in spite
of all that Guy had said, Elphege believed that story and because he
loved his master, suffered when he suffered, rejoiced when he was glad,
and hated anyone who injured him, he burned to-night with a cold hatred
against that lovely one who sat so tensely there to watch what she must
think of as the pitiful puppets that Guy had made.

Thus it was that the adorable Mimi, instead of appearing as the
ravishing ballet dancer in golden slippers and crisp white ruffles,
burst upon the stage in the blue-velvet skating costume, and pirouetted
on her silver blades.

A salvo of applause greeted her appearance, though many wondered why the
program had been changed, and the blonde girl sat up straighter in her
seat and her eyes were big, big in the pallor of her face that the
flickering oil-lamps made more ghastly.

What was this that she was about to see? Something cold struck deep into
her heart like a lance tipped with ice. This horrible, lovely marionette
with the fixed smile, the pale gold curls—this was she. Ah, yes, it was
intended to be she. Only his hand could have made it. Only he could have
known so well just how she looked and acted. And he had known it because
he once had loved her. What of this mimic play now? Was she going to see
herself as he saw her? Would she learn from this the secret of what had
come between them? Wide-eyed she followed the marionette with a
frightened, tremulous fascination. She had the sensation of standing off
from herself and watching as if she watched a stranger. He had managed,
in some magic way, to create an awful illusion of reality.

Ah, but Mimi excelled herself to-night. Elphege always thought of the
marionettes as living things, as real people acting in real life and
always subconsciously he had labored to create this illusion for those
who watched. To-night, this night of all nights, it was easy. To-night,
Mimi seemed really to live and Elphege, studying the faces out in front,
studying especially the face of that one girl, saw that he had captured
his audience, that Mimi, Pitou and all the rest were as real people to
those who watched, that their joys, their sufferings, their meannesses,
their noble qualities were what those people knew were in their own
hearts, in their own lives.

It was a triumph—a wondrous triumph, but only the little showman knew
just how great it was. He saw her start from her seat at the climax of
the play when Pitou, with sad, distorted face, the little hunchback
Pitou, held the skater’s heart in his hand and found that it was as
hard, as cold as the ice on which she had cut her magic capers. Now,
now, the lovely one was punished for what she had done. She settled back
in her seat, but when the curtain went down he saw her go like a storm
through the noisy crowd that jostled and pushed out of the barn.

“Now perhaps,” muttered Elphege, “you will know what your coldness, your
cruelty, have done to him. Now you will realize that he could see into
your heart and know what it is made of. You will feel shame for what you
have done.” But the face of Mimi wore a sad look now, the play ended;
and even Pitou looked grim. It was as if they all knew that something
had been going on this night, that another show was going on, another
act being written to their own.

“You have done well, _mes braves_,” said Elphege, putting them safely
away in the red caravan that he had backed into the barn. “You have this
night done a noble thing and have properly avenged your master. You have
caused one to suffer, let us hope, who richly deserves to suffer. Ah,
but rage burned in her, the rage of the wicked and the shame of the
traitress.”

But the girl who walked across the inn-yard under the stars in the soft
blue sky felt no shame, unless it was for him who had done this thing,
this ugly thing, to her. Slowly the furious seething tumult that had
risen in her as she followed the heartless, selfish career of the
skating marionette had ebbed. It was followed by a slow-burning anger
that left all her body cold. Yes, she thought, even my heart is cold
now, cold for him who always had its warmest beat, cold as the heart of
his skating doll. How could he ever think that of me? Or do such a thing
to me? All I did was love him, but he would not have that. He tried to
destroy love, to drive it away. With me he did not succeed. With the
tactics he used before, he never would have succeeded, but this way he
has chosen now will do his work as he apparently wants it done.

She went to her car and sat there for a little while. She was not
staying at the inn, but at the Château de Mornay, a Laurentian
summer-hotel ten miles away. Tante Aimée was there with her, but when
she had heard that Guy de Varin’s puppet-show was playing at
Saint-Jovite she had quietly slipped away, bent on finding out what he
was doing, eager, too, deep in the lonely heart of her, to see him
again, to hear his voice, to touch his hand. Perhaps, she thought, if I
sang the Ballard of Ronsard, he would come to me. Perhaps now, after
these months of loneliness, he would hear it. But no, I will go to him.

So she had driven over to Saint-Jovite, determined to see the
puppet-show and to come once more face-to-face with the showman. What
she felt for him swept away all her pride, all the sense of hurt she had
known that bitter winter’s morning when she had stood on the landing
outside his garret room and heard him tell Uncle Hubert that he was
through with her. Yes, even that had ceased to hurt.

She had come to Saint-Jovite with hope springing high again in her
heart. She would see him and in one glorious moment all would become as
it had been before and these months of absence, of loneliness, would be
only a vague dream to be swiftly forgotten.

That hope was destroyed now. Mimi had wrecked it with a toss of her
head, a wave of her hand, a saucy pirouette. Mimi had punished her
cruelly for a crime she had never committed. He had chosen this Mimi to
be the instrument of revenge for some wrong he must fancy she had done
him. How had he ever got this monstrously wrong conception of her? How
could he ever have believed that the girl he had known could turn into
the heartless, self-seeking jade he had depicted in his play?

She raged at him now. She burned to tell him what was in her heart. I
should not go to him, she thought. I should not even let him know I have
seen his cruel play, but I must—I must. I want him to know how
excellent is his show, how much better than any I could put on. Perhaps
he can sell it to Hollywood and they will ask me to play the lead. Ah,
that would be good, that would be sublime.

She went to the inn. Elphege, finished with the work of putting Pitou
and Mimi and the rest of the unwearied cast to bed in the red caravan,
saw her cross the lobby of the inn and speak to the dark mustached
little Frenchman at the desk. Elphege thought it wise then to go for a
walk under the stars. For the first time he felt a little uneasy about
what he had done. Of course, it had all been for Monsieur Guy’s own
good, to bring home to this hard-hearted one a sense of her own coldness
and treachery. But it might be that his employer would not see
eye-to-eye with him. It might be, he thought with a shiver, that De
Varin would wring his neck.

Bionde marched up the narrow stairs of the inn to the second floor, to
the room at the left end of the corridor where, the curious but
self-restrained young man at the desk had told her, she would most
likely find M. de Varin. Her mouth was set, her eyes filled with an icy
determination, yet she paused before that door, stood quietly listening,
thinking of the many times she had faced those blank panels of the door
of the garret in Sainte-Ursule Street, of how differently she had felt
then, of how much dearer the welcome she expected when that door would
open to her.

What would it be like now? No more of love between them. Nothing left of
all that tenderness they had felt for each other. Nothing of youth’s
high hope, its fair bright promise. Harsh words now and coldness of
eyes, bitter reproaches. The corpse of love lying between him and her,
to be trampled upon by everything they said and did, every cruel,
cutting, hateful thing.

At last, she lifted her clenched hand and knocked sharply on the panel.
For a moment there was silence, then a light clicked on: she saw its
radiance through the jamb of the ill-fitting door. His voice—strange
that it still had power to stir her—calling, “_Oui! Entrez!_”

She turned the knob slowly and went in. He was sitting at the window
under the green shaded lamp that he had just lighted. His back was
turned to her, he had evidently been looking out at the night and the
stars. She could see only the back of his dark, proud head, the slim
strength of his shoulders. A stranger now. One she did not know.

“Well, Elphege,” he said, “how did the show go? But I do not need to
ask. I could hear the brave applause that greeted your efforts. I could
hear the kindly words that were said as people crossed the yard below my
window. Soon you will outdo me, if you have not already. Soon Pitou will
have eyes for only you. And De Varin will be forgotten.”

“Perhaps,” she said softly, “Pitou has not a heart of ice. Perhaps he is
not cold, cruel, callous——”

He swung around so hard that the rickety old chair creaked in agonized
protest and shuddered in its every rung and joint. He could only stare
at her, his lips parted, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. Then
slowly he stood up, tall, dark and slender, as she had always remembered
him.

“Bionde!” he said softly. “It is Bionde.”

“It is, perhaps better, only Mimi of the cold heart. I saw your
performance, monsieur”—her voice did not break, but never in any scene
she had played had so much effort been required to keep it level—“I
must congratulate you upon it. Superb is the word. The skater is the
image of a girl who used to skate on a pond on the Tantramar Marshes,
oh, many years ago, a ghost of a girl you met in a faded garden and lied
to under the stars. I came to tell you that perhaps now the image you
made of her is a true one, perhaps the heart that was once so warm for
you, and before God, I tell you it was warm, is cold as ice now and will
be always cold. It is enough.”

She turned quickly and ran, closing the door behind her. She heard him
call; thought she heard, but knew it was only a lie, something like
agony in his voice. “Bionde! Bionde!”

She did not heed him. Careless of curious stares, she ran across the
lobby and out to her car. The starter whirred, the motor roared, the
long gray car shot away into the hole its headlamps made in the
darkness.

Elphege, who had seen her go, crossed himself reverently and went to
sleep in the van with the marionettes, and even Pitou, always so
well-disposed toward him, glowered and scowled darkly at him to-night.

“_Misère!_” he muttered. “What have I done! I have released a tempest.
My life is in danger when he finds out. I was born and have lived under
an evil star which to-night is in the ascendant.”




                              CHAPTER VIII


With fear in his heart and wobbly weakness in his pipestems of legs,
Elphege Plourde awaited the morning and his encounter with his master.
Pitou, grinning evilly at him in the early light of day, seemed to say,
“Ah, my friend, you will catch it to-day. You will be torn limb from
limb, and I have no sympathy for you.” Even Mimi, the light, the gay and
laughing, looked wan and haggard to-day. Elphege clawed his
mouse-colored hair and groaned with apprehension.

But Guy said nothing about last night’s proceedings when Elphege met him
in the inn-yard on his way to breakfast. He said only, “Good morning,
Elphege. It is a brave day for traveling. I have already breakfasted. As
soon as you have finished we shall take the road.”

Still Elphege had no great appetite for the good _crêpes de chez
nous_—the good home-made pancakes—for which The King Dagobert was
rightly renowned. It might be that M. de Varin was only postponing his
punishment until they were in some secluded country lane, when he would
turn upon his wretched helper and rend him.

Yes, thought Elphege, pale he looks and tired, as if he had not slept,
and if I could have seen behind those dark glasses he wears I would have
read misery and anguish in his eyes, and a great rage against me. I wish
I had minded my own business. I have turned even Pitou’s friendship into
bitter scorn and contempt.

Not until they were several miles from Saint-Jovite de la Haute
Montagne, rolling along a dusty mountain road, did Guy say anything
about the business that was tormenting Elphege’s very soul. He said
then, “I believe you had a great success last night, my old one; that
you staged the finest performance the Jolly Marionettes have so far
given.”

“I—I have reason to think so, monsieur,” returned Elphege with due
modesty.

“So have I,” said Guy. “Good reason. Why did you change the program? Why
did the lovely Mimi skate when her elegant ballet dancing would have
been far more suitable for the month of July?”

“More suitable perhaps,” muttered Elphege, staring at the road that
wound ahead. “But hardly more apropos for——”

“Ah, then, you had a good reason?”

“Forgive me, Monsieur Guy,” said the little fellow miserably. “It seemed
so to me. I just had to do it. I saw you suffering, in pain, unhappy,
discouraged; I saw her who was the cause of it all——”

“As you believed. And you took it on yourself to punish her. Did you not
think that you would be punishing me too? You say it is my love for her
that makes me suffer, well then do you not realize it would pain me to
see her hurt?”

“And she was hurt, monsieur?”

“You know it, I think. You designed to hurt her and you succeeded well.”

“I am sorry now. Ever since the show I have felt guilty, miserable. Even
Pitou looks at me as if I were Judas; and like Judas I have felt that I
should go procure a rope and hang myself.”

“Ah, no.” Guy smiled sadly and shook his head. “Unlike Judas, you
received no thirty pieces of silver. You did it, I think, because you
loved me.”

Elphege’s mouth quivered. His tiny eyes blinked fast. “Only because of
that, monsieur. And I did wrong.”

“Do not mind, good friend. Perhaps it was for the best that she should
take it the way you intended, that she should feel as she did and go as
she went—never to return.”

“Never!”

“I think never.”

“Then I have driven her away from you!”

“It was done before. Sometime you will know the truth and understand
things better.” He smiled with grim mirth. “There is a veil over the
truth, Elphege, which only I can remove.”

“Why not then remove it?”

“That is too hard to answer. I have the reason but I shall never give
it, I think.”

“She came to you last night?”

“And she was lovely—lovelier than I have ever seen her or even dreamed
her. She knocked at my door as I sat there in the darkness. I turned on
the light and told her to come in. I did not see who it was and I
addressed her as if it was you I spoke to. She had come to congratulate
me on the excellence of our show.”

“Only that, monsieur?”

“What more would you? Did you not try to excel yourself?”

“Yes, but——”

“Your work was appreciated.”

“Oh, I do not know what it was I tried to do, but you must believe me
when I say I thought I was doing it for you. Had I dreamed that it would
hurt you so much——”

“Forget about it.”

“But you—will not forget.”

“One can forget anything in time, so they say; but no one has ever
stipulated the time. Perhaps they meant a lifetime. Yes, I think that
must be so. _Eh bien!_ One goes on, Elphege. One can do no more than
carry on as one best knows how, eh?”

“That is brave, Monsieur Guy.”

“That is the way it shall be.”

So the red caravan traveled from village to village and the little
people gave performances without number and made friends beyond
counting, but Mimi did not wear again the blue-velvet dress with its
pretty white fur. Sometimes Guy opened the little trunk that bore her
name and picked up the dainty costume and looked at it and held it
tightly in his fingers, but what he thought at such times Elphege did
not know.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Bionde left the Château de Mornay with Tante Aimée the day following her
trip to the puppet-show at Saint-Jovite. They had planned to remain
longer, but she would not stay. She had to go. Her aunt noticed her
agitation, her pallor, the dark thoughtfulness of her eyes. She could
not guess the reason for these things. Only yesterday Bionde had seemed
so gay. She had been singing in her room before she went off on that
mysterious excursion which, Tante Aimée thought privately, had much to
do with this sudden change in her plans. She had sung an old Acadian
song which said——

                   “_Stay single, my poor Marie._
                   _Yup! Yup! Yup! La-ri-ra_
                   _You are not a prize in a lottery;_
                   _Yup! Yup! Yup! La-ri-ra._”

But in the morning she did not sing. She looked as if she had not slept
and her breakfast she hardly touched. She said, “We shall leave for
Quebec to-day, if you please, _ma tante_.”

“To-day!” Tante Aimée put down her coffee-cup. “But I thought we were to
stay here at the Château for three days more!”

“If you please, Tante Aimée. There is a telegram from Pete Van Alen. He
is in Quebec.”

That was true. The telegram had come only a half-hour ago and Bionde had
welcomed it as a message sent straight from heaven. She needed now, as
never before, Pete’s cool common-sense, his devotion, his loyalty.
Perhaps, she had thought, holding the yellow message that ended with
“all my love”—perhaps that was what love really meant: loyalty,
devotion, understanding. What had pain and heartache and denial to do
with a thing so sweet as love? Perhaps she had been blind to the true
worth of what Pete had offered her.

Tante Aimée did not mind going, now that she knew Peter Van Alen had
entered into the picture. It was the dream of her heart that Peter and
Bionde should marry. Always she had hoped and striven toward that end.
It might be that the child was acquiring some sense at last. Still,
Madame Lacasse was shrewd enough to know that the decision to go to
Quebec had been made before the telegram came.

“Well, we shall go then. After all, there is little time. You must soon
return to Hollywood, you know. There is another picture to make.”

“I know.”

“But you do not seem to care.”

“I do not.”

“Does all this mean so little to you—the success you have attained, the
place you have made for yourself, the friends——”

“It all means much to me— Oh, I do not know. I am a fool, I guess. I am
a great one for what Pete calls ‘sticking out my neck.’ Perhaps I am all
over it now. I hope so.”

“What happened? Something occurred last night that upset you very much.
I can tell when you are troubled. I could see this morning that you had
not slept.”

“It was nothing. Please, we will not talk about it.”

They drove away before noon. In the mountains toward evening they passed
the long red van that carried the Jolly Marionettes. It was parked in
front of a village inn, but there was no one in the driver’s seat.

“Here would be a good place to stop,” suggested Tante Aimée, who liked
her meals on time. “I know this village of Saint Placide. The inn is
excellent.”

“A little further, if you please, aunt,” said Bionde, her eyes intent on
the road. “I promise you it will not be long.”

Tante Aimée’s keen eyes had read the black letters on the side of the
van—

                        —THE JOLLY MARIONETTES—

She drew a deep breath and looked sharply at her niece, who pretended to
notice nothing. So that was it. She had seen the fellow, De Varin. She
had come away unhappy, angry, from the meeting. Because of him they had
been forced to leave the excellent accommodation and most fascinating
gossip and plentiful bridge of the Château de Mornay. Tante Aimée
resented Guy de Varin as she never had in her life before.

“I see it now,” she said. “One runs away.”

“But I do not——”

“You do not for a moment deceive me, my girl,” said Tante Aimée acidly.
“I know why you would not stop in Saint Placide but insisted on taking
me on to the next village, Saint Isaure, which is nothing but a
hog-wallow. Also, I understand now why we had to cut short our stay at
the Château de Mornay. It was because of M. de Varin. That was the silly
caravan which carries his wretched puppet-show from place to place,
parked in front of the inn back there.”

“What then?”

“You saw him last night,” said Tante Aimée accusingly. “You no doubt
witnessed the de luxe performance of the marionettes.”

“I was in it.”

“You were in——”

Bionde laughed. “But yes! I was the star of the performance. Oh, my name
was Mimi and there were points of difference, but it was Bionde,
nonetheless, who charmed the multitude in the big barn of The Good King
Dagobert.”

“Where, if you please, was this?”

“At Saint-Jovite de la Haute Montagne.”

“You heard he was there; you thought so little of yourself that you went
to see him, to humiliate yourself for the sake of this traveling
mountebank!”

“It is quite true, what you say. I thought so little of myself and
thought still so much of him, that like a silly convent-girl I went
chasing after him.”

“I am ashamed of you.”

“I’m a little ashamed of myself. Well, I suffered for my folly.”

“You talked to him?”

“I did indeed. I told him many things that needed to be told. I think I
played the part better than any I have done in Hollywood. You need not
worry now. There will be no more of this.”

“I think you said as much before—to your Uncle Hubert, in Quebec, the
day he was talking to De Varin and you came to the place.”

“I did, but I forgot. It is easy for me to forget things like that. But
this is an ugly thing; this I will not forget.”

“He had you in his puppet-show! He ridiculed you!”

“Oh, no. It may be that he has immortalized me; more so than the
pictures in which I act. There is something about his Mimi that makes
one love and hate her, pity and despise her all at once. I could tell
that from the faces of the crowd. It was a strange experience, one I do
not wish to have again—to see yourself as another sees you and to know
how wrong, how cruelly wrong, his seeing is. Yet the puzzling thing
about it all, the one that baffles me, is that this Mimi, this doll of
wood and wax and straw, pulled and directed by little strings, seemed to
me more like myself than the girls I portrayed on the screen.”

“Folly!”

Bionde did not heed her. “Can it be,” she continued dreamily, “that more
of heart, a deeper feeling went into the making of Mimi, than into those
whom I sought to create? Can it be that he knew better——”

“Anything can be!” snapped Tante Aimée. “But I am weary and hungry and
at the best of times have no patience with such foolish things as this.”

“My heart is not made of ice.” Bionde seemed still to be addressing her
own thoughts.

“Of marshmallow, rather,” muttered Tante Aimée, “if you can still give a
thought to this gypsy when a man like Peter Van Alen loves you.”

“Oh, yes, Peter. Well, to-morrow we shall see Peter.” She tried to think
of how pleasant that would be, of how happy would be their reunion. It
was some months since she had seen him. After their picture was finished
he had gone to Mexico. “Not,” he had said, “to try to forget you, but
just that I may look forward to the day when we meet again. And I shall
hope that in the time you are away from me, something will happen to
make you care.”

Something had happened. Was it enough? Would she give Peter the same
answer if again he spoke to her of love? Or would he, whose eyes were
sharp, whose feelings—his hunches, he called them—most sensitive where
she was concerned, guess that now was the time he had waited for, the
time to speak again of what he felt for her?

Still her thoughts winged back to the red caravan parked in front of the
inn, to Guy and the strange, bitter little goblin who worked for him,
who had come forward to acknowledge the plaudits of the crowd last night
and whose eyes seemed to glow with baleful fire when they rested on her.
To-night, no doubt, the marionettes would play again. Mimi would skate.
Pitou would hop about, swinging his long arms, grinning and mowing like
a fiend.

So busy was she with her thoughts that she all but shot by the inn at
Saint Isaure. Tante Aimée’s, “Stop here or I shall perish!” aroused her
and she turned into the inn-yard with a humble apology: “I am so sorry,
_ma tante_. I was thinking.”

“I am a fool, at my age, to risk my neck with girls who insist on
thinking,” grumbled the colonel’s lady. “After supper—if we are
fortunate enough to get any in this benighted place—you will please
pack yourself off to bed. And there, I suppose, you will dream of
marionettes dancing on the dresser.”

The accommodation at the inn was all that Tante Aimée had feared, and a
bit worse. “One should have christened this place ‘The Famished Cat,’”
she told Bionde as she presented to a scrawny-looking tabby the tough
steak that had been served to her. “Oh, well, with the grace of God, we
shall be in Quebec to-morrow. This gypsy life may be all right for those
that like it; I prefer my own home and my own cook and my own bed.
To-night we shall be on the rack.”

But morning came to “The Famished Cat” even as it comes to the grandest
of hostelries, and they both found that, despite the hardness of the
bed, they had slept surprisingly well and could eat their breakfasts and
start more cheerfully upon their way.

They were in Quebec that night. Bionde drove down Sainte-Ursule Street,
though there really was no need for it, and gazed up at the windows of
the garret, silvered by the moon, and in at the café of Charlebois
Hudon, he of the two black cats, and the kindly heart. Blessed memory!
How often had she thought of this old street and pictured it in her
dreams—the little coffee-shop, the tall old house sandwiched between
two just as tall, the garret with its quaint dormers and scarred door,
the sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed landlady.

Who had the garret now, she wondered. Had Guy kept it on perhaps? Or had
he packed his few possessions into the caravan and said an unregretful
good-by to it? She did not like to think so. To her it was like a
shrine, like a station along the road of their love, the winding,
troubled road. They had dreamed there, so sweetly, so briefly.

Tante Aimée sniffed and said, “Can’t you go a little faster? And what in
heaven’s name are you gaping up at the rooftops for?”

Bionde did not answer. Perhaps, late to-night, she thought, making a
little face at her duenna, I shall come here again—and gape in peace.
What do you know of love, my good aunt, married to Uncle Hubert, who
wheezes and wears flannel nightshirts?

On a theater marquee she saw her name and the announcement that “On
Winged Feet” was playing there. Tante Aimée spied it too and was vastly
delighted to see the name of Lacasse in lights in her native city.

“Hubert will be pleased,” she said smugly. “It is doubtless the first
time the name of Lacasse has appeared in lights.”

“I think not,” murmured Bionde. “Uncle Gerard kept a tavern in Montreal
not so long ago.”

“You are utterly lacking in family pride, Bionde. I shall have to speak
to Hubert about you. After all, there are some traditions in the
family.”

Of snobbery and ill-founded pride, thought Bionde. The first of the
tribe were good farmers and worked hard and had no notions of the
greatness of their house. Ah, well——

“I wonder if the Quebecois will like the picture,” she said. “It is not
as if I am one of them. After all, I am only a little savage from
Acadia.”

“Sometimes I can believe that without the least effort, my child. Still,
I think the people here will like the picture. After all you belong to
French-Canada. You are of the Canadian race. One will be proud of that.
It is nice to see our daughters making a place for themselves. It is
heartbreaking to see them making fools of themselves running after
Punch-and-Judy shows.”

With this final broadside the stately dame got out of the car, which had
stopped in front of the family residence, and hurried to embrace the
colonel, whom, despite his wheezes and his flannels, she loved very
dearly. “I am home, Hubert,” she announced, “and home I am going to
stay. My heart, you know, has always been weak. I have told Bionde we
shall find a good lady to accompany her back to Hollywood.”

The colonel’s welcome was warm indeed. He looked a little older. His
breath was a trifle shorter, his eyes the least bit more protuberant.
“Ah, Bionde,” he said, embracing his niece, “it is good you are here.
The young Van Alen has haunted the place, looking for news of you.
There, if ever I saw one, is a young man in love.”

“She has been going to puppet-shows,” said Tante Aimée, leading the way
into the house, speaking over her shoulder.

“Puppet-shows!” The colonel’s gasp was audible in the dim cool stillness
of the hall. “What— Not surely that young man, De Varin—not his
puppet-show!”

“I believe he has a monopoly of the marionette industry in Quebec,”
fired back Tante Aimée, drawing off her gloves and removing her hat with
veil, the motoring headgear of her youth and still, to her, the best.

“But I put an end to that affair,” announced Colonel Hubert. “It is all
over. Yes, most certainly it is all over.” He looked with troubled eyes
at his niece. “You said——”

“Don’t worry, uncle.” She squeezed his arm. “Nothing has happened. I am
as far from him and he from me, as we were that day in the garret. I
went to see the little show through—through curiosity. I was cured of
the desire ever to see it or him again.”

“I am glad—glad indeed. The young man seems to be quite content with
the vagabond life he leads. He has done very well. A good many of the
people idolize him and have made sort of a hero out of him.”

“A hero?” Bionde looked up at him. “Why a hero?”

“Oh, you know how people are,” muttered the colonel vaguely. “Kind to
the underdog. Thought it very brave of him to make his marionettes and
start up as a showman—all that.”

“Oh!” Bionde was not quite satisfied; there was more to this than the
old soldier was telling her.

More—yes, there was much more, thought Colonel Lacasse unhappily. He
could not tell Bionde that all the world, loving a lover, resents the
girl who, they think, jilted him because he was poor. He did not want
her to know how closely still her name was linked with De Varin’s; how
was told still the story of her running through the rows of cars over
the icy cobbles to throw herself in his arms—so many silly stories were
going the rounds. Well, they need not touch her now. Why should she,
from her high place, look down on this little showman, this petty
mountebank, this defeated artist, who had, moreover, said clearly enough
that he wanted none of her?

Peter Van Alen came that night, summoned, though Bionde did not know it,
by a surreptitious phone call from Tante Aimée. The same old smiling
Pete, who held her hands tightly and looked searchingly into her eyes as
if seeking to read in their blue depths all that had happened since
their last farewell at the little bungalow in Hollywood.

“Well, doctor?” She looked challengingly back at him. “What do you see
there? Has the patient fully recovered from—from whatever malady she
had?”

“Hmm!” He loosed one hand and stroked his long jaw. “I shall need a
little time—a little time. Offhand, I should say there has been a
slight improvement. I should prescribe a few hours under the stars, late
though the hour is; after which I can pronounce.”

But the hours under the stars were passed in quiet talk, of this and
that, of the picture they had made, the one they were going back to work
on. He did not speak of love. Something told him that this was not the
time. And Bionde thought, Had this been two nights ago, he could have
spoken and I would have listened, if not with my heart, then with my
mind. I would have said, “You are kind and good, Pete, and why should I
deny your love for one that is cruel and strange and indifferent?”

But to-night it was not like that. She was back in Quebec now, in the
city she had learned to love because in it she had found both beauty and
pain. Guy seemed near to her to-night. She fancied that if she walked
along Sainte-Ursule Street she would see his light burning in the attic
window and if she climbed the stairs and knocked at the door, he would
open it to her.

“Have you gone to see our picture here in Quebec?” she asked Pete, as
they passed the theater where the marquee lights were just blinking out.

He glanced quickly at her; then looked away. “Yes,” he said, “I went to
see it. They’re getting packed houses all the time. This is its second
run here, you know.”

“They like it?”

“Of course they like it,” he said almost crossly. “How could they help
but like it?”

“I do not know. I think I shall go to see it. Fun to slip in among the
crowd, all unknown, and see yourself on the screen and laugh a little to
think that the ones sitting next to you have no idea that you are the
girl they watch.”

“Pretty dull,” said Pete shortly. “Why not stay away? As a matter of
fact, I have so many things planned for us to do, you and I, that I
don’t think you’ll have a chance to gratify your vanity. You won’t have
time even to see your own picture.”

“You have become quite a tyrant, monsieur.”

“Oh, I can be very harsh where you are concerned, my very little
cabbage. And,” he added gravely, “very solicitous for your welfare.”

“I know.”

“I wonder if you do. You’ve never given me a chance to show you how much
you, everything you do, everything that happens to you, means to me.”

“You want that chance so much?”

“So very much, Bionde. It is still not the time to tell you again what I
feel for you, how much I care——”

“Maybe the time will come.”

“And may it be soon!”

                 *        *        *        *        *

He was waiting for her outside the Théâtre Orléans early the next
evening, stretching his neck this way and that to find her among the
crowd that streamed out after the first show. At last he spied her and
he knew at once what had happened.

“Damn them!” he muttered. “Them and their stupid cruelty and the ones
who started this lying story. If they could see what they have done to
her.”

He pushed his way through the crowd, careless of whom he elbowed, deaf
to angry protests, seeing none of them—seeing only the white-faced
girl, small and hurt and frightened, looking like a hunted thing,
looking for one who would comfort her.

“Bionde!” He caught her elbow and steered her out of the crowd. “I told
you not to go there. Why did you?”

“Pete!” It was only a whisper. “They—they hissed me. They hated me. I
sat there. I could not believe. I looked around to see if it was not
something else. But no, it was all for me. And I heard someone say that
I was nothing but a cheap gold-digger, that I’d thrown over the man I—
Oh, Pete!”

“Come on!” he said roughly. “Let’s get out of here. My car is down the
block. You’ve had enough. You never deserved such punishment. Believe
me, it is only a few, only the ignorant ones——”

“But Pete, it was—it was he who did not want me. I all but went on my
knees——”

“More fool, you! If he is party to this story—and certainly he’s done
nothing to stop it, I’d like to smash him.”

“Pete! He couldn’t. He would never——”

“I don’t know. I only know you shouldn’t have to take this. I’d like to
have the chance to protect you from it, to show you what love can be.”

She had quieted somewhat. She sat back against the cushions as they
drove toward l’ancienne Lorette under the stars and the gibbous moon.
“Very well,” she said. “You shall have the chance.”

He stopped the car. He put an arm about her shoulders, his cheek against
hers and held her close. “You mean it. You’ll marry me?”

“After the picture is made, I’ll marry you.”

“I’ll wait. I’ll wait forever, Bionde. But I want you to love me, I want
to show you how much I care for you.”

“I know how much.”

“Can’t you trust your own heart?” he asked.

“I’m afraid. It lied to me once.”

“I don’t think it lied. But someone lied to you.”

“Yes—yes, he lied to me.”

“It is a miserable business,” said Pete savagely. “I knew what was going
on. I heard the damndest yarns here in Quebec. They have everything
upside down and are quite sure you have broken the poor fellow’s heart
and blighted his life. And once these Quebecois get anything into their
heads, especially anything that appeals to them, there’s no hope of ever
getting it out. How can we make the truth known? No way that I know.
Someone has broken a feather bed in a high wind—just try to collect the
feathers and put them back. But you should worry, my dear. Such lies
cannot touch you.”

“But they hurt—they hurt so much.”




                               CHAPTER IX


She stood again in the garden of the old house of the De Varins. Because
time was precious and she must be back to the coast within the week, she
had flown to Moncton and come by train to Sainte-Barbe. How old and
faded had seemed Tante Adrienne and Uncle Hormidas! How grim and dingy
the home of her childhood! She had sent them a great part of her
earnings but little had been expended on the house. “There are only the
two of us,” explained Tante Adrienne. “You may never come back here. If
you do the money will be there in the bank and you can make the place
over. For us, now, it is good enough.”

She had left them as soon as she decently could and had taken the path
through the lilac hedge, green now, and across the tangled garden, all
bright with roses growing wild. With long free steps she made for the
marshes and the pathway her own feet had helped to wear in the top of
the great dike. And she loved the warm sweetness of the wind, that here
never ceases to blow; loved the salty zest of the sea, the way the tall
grass bent and straightened, bent and straightened, at the will of the
wind.

Here was home, and all the old dear things. Here were the places, the
people, the paths she loved and would always love. The kindly folk of
Sainte-Barbe, the village church, the school, and the great abiding
peace of the Tantramar. She stood on the edge of the pond where in
winter she used to skate. She could close her eyes and picture that
young girl lively as a gull who used to skim across the smooth hard
surface. She could hear in fancy Tor Gustavssen’s gruff, restrained
voice, as he told her what to do, now scolding volubly, now meagerly
praising. And she remembered the day, remembered it so well, when she
and Guy had skated here—“was it a year or lives ago?”

She walked slowly toward the uplands, toward that place, which, like the
garret in Quebec, was a shrine, a station along the road of their love.
Easier now to go between the sagging stone gateposts, for the gates had
rusted and crumbled to worse ruin since last she passed that way.

Here too the long-untended garden was a kaleidoscope of color—roses red
and white and pink, scarlet poppies, honeysuckle, and hollyhock of a
hundred different hues. The air was richly fragrant with the mingled
scent of the flowers, and the great bees droned and buzzed among the
nodding blossoms. Here and there still lay some of last year’s fallen
leaves, and as the winding driveway debouched upon the sweep of lawn
that had become a hayfield now, the old house showed its still proud but
scarred and ruined façade. There, untenanted now, was the bench where
Guy had sat, where she had first seen him in his shabby clothes, with
the stick of hornbeam and the ancient rucksack beside him—“Was it a
year or lives ago?”

Oh, not yet a year even. And it seemed to her that she had lived a long
age, that it had been another girl who stood in this tangled garden, who
crossed timidly over to that bench and sat beside the brown-eyed,
laughing gypsy fellow and said, “Did I look so solemn?”

She lingered there, sat for a while on the old stone bench and many and
crowded were the thoughts that came to her. She thought of the dream she
had so cherished, so fought for, so irrevocably lost. She thought how
little mattered any of the glittering things that had been given her in
its stead. Gladly she would have traded them all for another hour of
that dreaming. It seemed, she thought, that what began here in this
garden was too beautiful ever to die. It seemed to be not of time, but
of eternity. “He was the one who said our love was written in the stars.
What then? What?”

Always that question returned to plague her. Oh, perhaps he had been
right in wanting to go his own free, independent way. Perhaps her work
would have come between them in time and he would have felt that he had
no real place in her life. Perhaps it was a man’s way to be so practical
about things, even about love. She did not know. She did not understand.
She understood only what her heart told her and then only by instinct,
but not for that the less surely.

Still, when she thought of that night in Quebec she felt again the pain,
the blind hurt and bewilderment she had known when, seated in the
crowded theater, she had first realized it was she whom they were
hissing. Something dark and frightening had come into her heart then,
something that terrified her. She wanted to get up and run away and keep
on running until she reached a place where she would be forever alone,
yet all the time she knew there was no such place; that, go where she
would, the world with all its hates, its meannesses, its tears and its
brief laughter would still be with her, because we carry our own heaven
or hell right with us, and there is no getting away from ourselves while
life lasts.

Pete Van Alen had helped. Pete, in that hour of her deepest need, had
been a tower of strength to her, a tall beacon rearing above the sea of
doubt and disillusionment. He had brought her back to herself, made her
look at things calmly, reasonably. He had said before he left her that
night, “You know in your own heart, child, that you have done nothing
mean or unkind. I know that doesn’t help a great deal if people have
taken it into their heads that you have. You must be strong then. It’s
cruelly hard to be misunderstood, to be accused of things you never did
and to be, as you are, incapable of defending yourself or of setting
these people right. All one can do is grin and bear it, but you are big
enough and fortunately successful enough, to rise above such a little
thing as this.”

“But I cannot bear to have people hate me, to have them thinking the
wrong things about me——”

“They always will. People are like that. As long as you are doing the
right thing, why should you care what they think? And after all, it is
only a few people and probably the simplest, the most ignorant. You have
to develop some armor against the barbs and shafts that such people can
loose at you.”

“Yes,” she said wisely, “and the armor will do the same work of
protection against kindness and honesty, until in time it will become so
that you are all hard, that you trust no one and nothing—not even the
truth. I have learned that much in Hollywood. I don’t want to grow a
shell around me.”

Pete shrugged. He knew she was right. It was a hideous thing to destroy
such faith, such wide-eyed, starry faith as she possessed. It was like
cutting down some beautiful flower and trampling it into the dust. But
as long as she held to that blind faith, the world was going to hurt her
and hurt her cruelly. The world has a way of sticking sharp points into
the trusting and the simple of heart. Or was he wrong there? Were they
not better, stronger, if they survived the thrusts and still saw, even
dimly, the shining truth beyond the veil of lies?

So he had said, “Go on believing in what you have always believed,
Bionde. The advice I can give you is too much of the world to which I
belong. You were the first one to teach me blind faith and to bring home
to me the fact that there are times when a man can trust his heart. At
first I wondered about you—wondered that anyone, man or woman, could be
so free from guile, from deceit, from selfishness. I watched and watched
for a crack in your white armor, but there was none. So cling hard to
what you have and believe that your own heart will speak to you and tell
you what is right. I can only teach you what the world has taught me and
there have been times when I thought it taught me ill.”

She remembered those words now as she sat in the old garden and looked
at the falling ruin of the house where Guy had lived for that little
while in which he worked so hard at his painting. He had been working
for her, for an ideal, a dream, and he had worked well. Yes, though his
hands were numb with cold and he could not know whether the pictures he
painted were good or bad, he had fought blindly, bravely on.

Then the dream had faded, died——

She got up wearily and without a backward glance, quitted the garden
where, she knew, she had left, that far-off day, something of her fresh,
young heart, where now something of her youth stayed behind her. Perhaps
in the stillness of the moonlight their spirits would come there again
to sit side by side on the mossy stone slab of the bench; perhaps we are
only creatures of the dreams we dream and our only reality is in our
visions.

She did not know. The sun was getting lower now, making for itself a bed
of crimson clouds above the black hills across the valley. From the
church of Sainte-Barbe she heard the Angelus ring out—a clear,
peaceful, pastoral sound in the evening stillness. And she would leave
all this peace, this slow serenity, to go again into the mart, into the
struggle, the whirling mill that went round and round yet never moved
far between those two fixed points of birth and death.

Old thoughts for her young head. She knew there was laughter yet for her
and high hills for her to scale, from one of which she would see,
perhaps, the beauty that is the hope of all mankind. So she would go on.
Pete Van Alen was waiting for her in Chicago. One day soon she would
marry Pete. He had said he would make her happy, and she believed him.
In his steadfast loyalty and quiet devotion she had, she knew, something
worthwhile, a rock to which she could always cling, a refuge that never
would be closed to her.

She had dinner with her aunt and uncle, with Mathieu Bernard, newly
appointed to the senate, as a special treat. She did not mind Mathieu.
It came to her now that she had never really minded him, but only the
thought of marrying him. He had added new dignity to the tremendous
structure of that silly commodity he already possessed before a grateful
government threw over him the senatorial toga. He made it clear, in an
involved allegory, that while he had dreamed pleasantly of making her
Madame Bernard, there were still some things to live for—notably a
widow in Hull whose husband had owned a brewery. He talked patronizingly
of Quebec, Hollywood, Hitler and the Central Banking system with a
slight dissertation on the importance of the Tantramar farmers putting
in a larger crop of mangel-wurzels.

She rather enjoyed Mathieu. He had a splendid trait of getting down to
earth at the end of even his longest periods. Thus he traced the causes
and courses of all the wars since the Boer uprising and ended with the
greatness of the boon that commercial fertilizers had conferred on the
men who wrested their livelihood from the fields.

After he had gone she sat for a while with Uncle Hormidas, who nodded
over his pipe, and Tante Adrienne, who dozed over her knitting. There
was so strangely little to say to these two who had been the only
parents she had ever known. She had never been close to them and in the
short time of her absence she had grown so very far away. She went out
on the terrace for a little while and walked there, but she began to
cry, and she had had enough of crying. So presently, drying her eyes,
she returned to the house, kissed the old people good night and went up
to the little room that had sheltered her so many years. There she stood
for a while looking out at the dim reaches of the marshland over which
countless little fireflies carried their fairy lanterns. She heard the
frogs’ deep chorus in the swamp below the orchard, the whirring swoop of
the hawk, the chirp of some sleepy bird. She undressed in the dark and
went to bed. She slept.

She knew, when the early light touched her eyelids and awakened her,
such peace of heart as had not been hers in many a long day; perhaps
not, she thought, since she had left the shelter of this roof. Through
the open window she could see the green level marshes, ribbed by the
dikes, cut by the silver serpent of the river, stretching mile on mile
to the sea; the distant wooded uplands, dark against the soft blue sky
of morning, the little white farmhouses with their great barns and the
orchards whose trees marched in orderly ranks, their boughs already bent
with the ripening fruit.

She wished quietly that she might never have to leave it, yet she knew
that she must go. There was a compulsion on her greater even than the
love of this place. She had work to do, if work it could be called.
Certainly it was the thing she could do best. And it was not easy. From
the start of a picture until the finish there was no rest for her, no
rest for any of those engaged in it. Hard, grinding hours until she felt
that she could stand it no longer; then hours more.

But some day, she told herself, lying back on the pillow, staring at the
well-remembered cracks in the ancient ceiling, the place where once the
plaster had fallen, where an unskilled workman had done his worst—some
day I shall come back here, never to leave it. This is my own place,
where I belong. I can never lose the love of it.

Yet there were no tears at leaving. Hervey drove her to the train in the
rattly old dog-cart. Tor Gustavssen, quietly proud, rode with her. A
handful of the villagers were there to see her off. Many of them had
never seen a motion picture and none attached much importance to her
success. They came because she was Bionde Lacasse, because her people
had lived longer in Sainte-Barbe than any other family, and were
respected by all.

She waved to them from the observation platform of the Maritime Express,
watched them and the familiar landmarks of her native village until all
had faded from view. Her aunt and uncle had not come to the train to see
her off. They were old and tired. Partings meant little to them now, who
must soon part with life itself.

At Moncton she took the plane for Montreal, stayed there briefly, then
flew to Chicago where Pete Van Alen and a squad of newspaper
photographers awaited her. She did not think of them. It was Pete’s
smiling face, his outstretched hands. Then she was in his arms, close in
his arms, and all about them the shutters clicked dryly. She loosed
herself quickly then.

Pete said, “It’s all right, boys. We’re engaged. Do you mind, darling?”

Strangely, ungratefully, guiltily, she did mind. She hadn’t thought much
about what being engaged to a celebrity like Pete Van Alen would mean,
for apart from his skill as skater and actor, he was a very wealthy
member of a prominent family. Now he helped her fight off the
news-hounds, but every newspaper, next day, carried long stories and
astounding interviews and gave many facts about her life which she had
never known herself.

“You’ll have to get used to it,” consoled Pete as the plane winged
westward. “It’s all a bit bewildering at first, but after a while it
won’t hurt so much.”

“It’s like waking up in the morning to find the walls and roof have been
taken away during the night,” she said solemnly. “And they seem to know
everything about me.”

Too much, thought Pete, who had carefully kept from her the paper that
carried the story with the Quebec date-line, that told the same
unfounded tale of the way she had treated Guy de Varin. The story was
skillfully handled and for that very reason was all the more poisonous.
It made her out ruthless, calculating, bent on the main chance, and
triumphant now because she had captured one of the most eligible
bachelors in America. It told of De Varin and his puppet-show, of how,
when he had lost her love, when she had deserted him for fame and
fortune, he had made an image of her, a marionette called Mimi, who
played the lead in all his performances. It made one’s heart ache for De
Varin; about her it said nothing kind.

He knew it was no use to fight the thing and point out that it was only
a romantic fable. It was too good a story to contradict and any rebuttal
of his would be tucked away between the Marine Intelligence and Animal
Stories for Tiny Tots. All he could do was let it ride and trust that in
time it would die a natural death. It was his job now to safeguard her
from the sting of unkind things like this, to ward off from her all the
poisoned darts that would come her way.

I wish, he thought furiously, that I had hunted out this puppet-showman,
this little squirt who rides around the country in his dinky van and
never says a word that would help to kill this rotten slander. I cannot
understand how she ever could have cared for such a man. Still, women go
for some queer specimens. I’d like to wring his neck.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Guy, still playing the remote parts of Quebec, with his little troupe
and the tireless Elphege, knew nothing of this story, but one day he
found on his table a paper, carefully folded and placed there by his
understudy, with the picture of Bionde in Pete Van Alen’s arms. “Romance
on Ice” it was captioned, and there was the announcement of Mlle.
Lacasse’s engagement to Peter Luytens Van Alen.

He stared at the paper a long, long time. He felt something that burned
and twisted and tortured, deep inside him, deeper than any physical pain
could go. Somehow he had never thought of this, of Bionde in another
man’s arms, her soft, slender body, so boyishly, beautifully
symmetrical, pressed close to his, her lips on his——

He flung down the paper and ground his heel upon it, tearing it. He
looked about him, eyes wild, as if seeking for something to destroy;
then, finding nothing, he flung himself into his chair and stared
moodily at the wrecked and ruined paper. Why had he ever seen the thing?
Why had that little fiend Elphege put it there where he could not fail
to find it? The answer to that was easy: Elphege was trying to justify
himself for what he had done at Saint-Jovite. He was trying to show his
master that the Quebecois had been right in their appraisal of Bionde
Lacasse.

“I suppose it had to be like that,” muttered Guy. “She could not go on
alone—always alone. She is so young, so lovely. This fellow—he must be
good. He must be a fine fellow or she would not love him. Eh, well, thus
passes the love of Guy de Varin.” His face was contorted, his lips
pressed tightly together, his jaw grim, the skin stretched taut. “No,”
he said softly then, “it does not pass. Love does not pass. Not such as
mine has been. If it is love, as love has seemed to me, nothing on
earth, in heaven or in hell can destroy it. Even death is not so
strong.”

Sorry now for the outburst that had made him crush the paper underfoot,
he picked it up and sought to smooth it out. That could not be done, so
he put it in the fireplace among the waste-paper there and burned it. He
would not have Elphege’s keen eyes spy the imprint of his heel on the
paper. Were Elphege to see that, the story would be announced from the
rooftops of Quebec to bear out the truth of all the other lies that had
been told.

“She will be happy,” he assured himself. “It will be as I told her: she
will forget me and the little that was between us or if she ever
remembers, it will be only to laugh, to think how silly she was. She
will forget the Song of Ronsard, forget that a poet sang to her or an
artist painted for her, or a crazy puppet-maker fabricated a doll called
Mimi, that had a heart of ice. Surely she will forget. Women can all
forget.”

Yet, someone had said, “Women remember the first kiss when men have
forgotten the last.” That was not so. That was only a pretty fancy.
Bionde’s life would be so filled with brightness, her road so strewn
with flowers all the way, that there would be no room for any regrets,
no place for weeping. And it is well, he thought, that it should be so;
in mine there is darkness enough, darkness that leads only to a deeper
darkness. She will hear no more of me. Soon I will be only a name, to be
swiftly forgotten. Even Pitou will be better remembered.

This was in the village of Nicolette, a pretty, sleepy little place in
the Laurentian foothills. There were many more stops they had planned
before their itinerary should finally bring them back to Quebec, but not
even to deny Elphege the satisfaction of seeing the effect of the
newspaper story could Guy continue as they had planned. He had no heart
for any more of this endless tour. He was weary of it all, weary even of
his little friends who had done so well for him and Elphege that their
financial problems, for long months to come, would cause them little
worry.

I will go back to my garret, mused Guy, and the very memory of it
pleased him and in the warmth of the August day he forgot how draughty
the attic could be and remembered only its quiet privacy, its excellence
as a place in which to work. He smiled, thinking of the long, lonely
hours spent there when he tried so hard, and in good part succeeded, to
kill the loneliness with work. Why, there Mimi had been born, and Pitou
and Mun Kee See and the Dusty Miller—and there love had died.

“Oh, well,” he assured himself, “it will be good to go there now and
rest for a while, and think of things to do. And Elphege, no doubt, will
be glad to return to his family. There is no girl in his life except
Mimi. Perhaps I should make him a present of Mimi. He most certainly
loves her.”

Elphege heard without moving an eye-lash the announcement that the tour
was canceled. He had, in fact, expected as much. Guy had an urgent
desire to shake him, coupled with one, equally urgent, to embrace
him—queer little fellow with heart of gold.

“You do not mind, Elphege, I hope,” he said. “With your share of the
money our friends have made——”

Elphege waved an airy hand. “Mind? I do not at all mind, Monsieur Guy.
You are tired and, after all, you have received a terrible blow.”

“You allude of course to what was in _le Soleil_, which you
inadvertently left on my table folded by sheer chance at a place which
would insure my seeing just what you wished me to see?”

“Ah, I feared you would see that.”

“You schemer!”

Elphege shrugged. “Better to learn it that way, quietly from a—from a
friend—it is permitted to call you such?”

“Yes, my friend. It is permitted.”

Elphege bowed—“than to hear it from some rude source when the hearing
might be less pleasant.”

Guy nodded. “You are kind, Elphege. I think, my old one, if you gave
poison to your grandmother it would be only out of the kindness of your
heart.”

Elphege smiled, acknowledging the compliment. “So then we return to
Quebec, monsieur?”

“At once. The players, as well as the stage-managers, need a rest. We
shall place the van in the garage of your Aunt Geoffrion and we—well I,
at least, will sit down for a while and think of new ventures.”

“For us?” Elphege’s voice was timid yet eager. “For both of us,
monsieur?”

“Always for both of us, Elphege. You may be sure of that. I need you, my
comrade of many a long mile, far more than you need me, and the time may
come when my need will be greater yet. So you see, I am selfish. If I do
not forsake you, it’s because I know, if such a time comes, you will not
forsake me.”

“I do not know what you speak of,” said Elphege earnestly, “but I will
never leave you. Only snakes do that.”

He went hastily, a sly gleam in his eye, when he saw Guy’s hand grope
for a cushion to hurl at him. He was nobody’s fool, Elphege—unless to
be loyal and kind and true is to be a fool.

They made all speed toward Quebec that day and toward midnight, just as
Charlebois Hudon was about to close his café and Madame Geoffrion was
putting her hair in curlers, the red van drew up with a flourish at the
curb and Elphege leaped out as if, after a long voyage, he coveted the
honor of being the first one ashore.

It was a triumphal return. Charlebois closed the coffee-shop in front
but left the back door open and when the red van was safely housed in
the garage in the rear, Guy and Elphege came in to find Madame
Geoffrion, flanked by those two phenomenal cats, Victor Hugo and
Roncevalle, waiting for them at the head of a well-laden board over
which Charlebois hovered.

“Welcome home, Monsieur de Varin,” said the old dame with due deference.
“Welcome home, nephew. We do not need to ask of your tour, to inquire
about its success. From various relatives in the province—I am one of a
family of twenty-three, Monsieur de Varin—I have heard of your
triumphal progress. No jeers or hisses greeted the efforts of your
players. Take care of your feet, young Elphege, you kicked me that
time.”

“Yes,” said Elphege.

“Oh!” said Madame Geoffrion. “Well, you must be very hungry and very
weary. After you have refreshed yourself, Monsieur de Varin, your studio
is ready and waiting for you.”

“I am so glad to hear that, Madame—so glad. It is my home, that cozy
garret of yours—the only home I have except the caravan and an ancient
ruin in Acadia where I shall never go again. The poet Beranger said,
‘How happy one can be in a garret when one is twenty.’ I think there is
no age limit; it is just a matter of one’s definition of happiness.”

“And what is yours, monsieur?” ventured Charlebois, all this time
listening avidly. “May one ask?”

“One may. It is to harm no one and to feel that no one has really meant
to harm you.”

“Well,” Charlebois scratched his head. “I dare say there are worse
definitions than that.”

“If there are,” said Madame Geoffrion, “I have not yet heard them.”




                               CHAPTER X


Winter came again to Quebec, whitening the hills and the frozen river,
capping with beauty the towers and rooftops of the ancient capital of
New France. Once more the sleigh-bells jingled merrily in the narrow
streets and the skiers, the skaters and snow-shoers in their gay reds,
blues and greens and the marvelous woven colors of _la ceinture
flechée_, the arrow marked sash, traditional with the habitants, filled
the streets with merry laughter and the dark hills in the moonlight
re-echoed with their shouts.

Winter came, bringing with it good fortune, swift and breathtaking, for
Guy de Varin. So undreamt of was it, so strangely simple in its origin,
that sometimes, thinking of the great sums of money that came to him, he
would laugh, and at others feel just the least bit frightened. And it
was to Mimi—Mimi of the wide blue eyes, the corn-yellow hair, the grace
and swiftness of Pavlowa, that he owed all this that the papers called
“story-book success.” Offers came to put Mimi and Pitou in the animated
cartoons on the screen. Picture-books for little ones were made, telling
of their adventures. Their creator, the puppet-showman, the maker of
marionettes, became famous far beyond the bounds of Quebec. Pitou was
beloved in every land.

But Guy still stayed in his garret and in the quiet ways of his life
there was no change. He had retired to this refuge, like, Madame
Geoffrion confided to Charlebois and Elphege, a hermit to his cell, just
as soon as the party of welcome in the café was over. “For days,” good
Madame Geoffrion announced, “one saw next to nothing of him. He would
come downstairs to eat, then walk a little, then go back to his lonely
room.” It was no life for any man, certainly not for him in whose life
was a great sadness. Perhaps he was brooding. There was the omnipresent
danger of his becoming morbid, melancholy and deranged.

What did he do there? He sat and smoked his pipe a great deal and
thought a great deal and talked to Pitou and to Mimi, who sat both of
them, legs dangling, on the mantelpiece. And always as he sat there the
round table with its mirror top was beside him and in it, when he viewed
it at certain angles, he saw the graceful form of Mimi, just as in
dreams he saw the living form of that other he had loved, as she
skimmed, light and airy, over the frozen pond on the distant Acadian
marshes.

And, closing his eyes, he could fancy the round mirror was a little pond
and Mimi was skating on it, a tiny, flitting, fascinating figure in a
tight bodiced costume of blue-velvet trimmed with lovely white fur, in
high-laced white boots with skates bright as the mirror. For him alone
she skated, pirouetted, cut many lovely magic figures on the little
mirror rink and it was strangely satisfying to his soul just to sit
there and watch this fair figment of his dreams.

Then one day he sat up quickly, seized with a joyous exultation, just as
on that night when the idea of making the Jolly Marionettes had come to
him, and he said, “Why not? Why not?”

Thus was born The Skating Marionette, Mimi—the electric toy that
captured the world that winter. The mirror gave place to an electrified
plate of polished metal in whose whorls and grooves the little skates
ran and Mimi, in fashion most lifelike, went through her act, swift and
graceful and unerring. The eyes of young and old lighted as they watched
the tiny figure swoop and circle, like a bird of wondrous beauty.

The first model was made in a toy-maker’s tiny shop in the Lower Town,
with Elphege standing proudly by, and with the assistance of one Raoul
Perron who was a wizard with electricity and, like most wizards, always
poor. Soon he was no longer poor; the lovely little Mimi skated her way
into the hearts of the world. In shop windows on the great streets of
America she performed in front of admiring thousands. She swept the
country. The fame of great skating-stars of the screen, even of the
renowned Mlle. Bionde Lacasse, whom she so much resembled, was secondary
to hers.

And a great share of the earnings of the skating doll poured into the
pockets of Guy de Varin, who spent his time in the old garret in the
house of Madame Geoffrion; who thought little of the golden stream and
would not for a moment dream of swimming in it.

He had found some little peace. When he had dreamed of his toy, he had
thought only, It will perhaps make a little money for Elphege and me, to
tide us over the winter, until we can again take our show on tour. And
he found joy in the making of it and delight as patent as that of any of
the children who saw it, in watching its swift, lifelike maneuvers.

The way the thing mushroomed, grew in so short a space from a tiny
marionette to a colossal figure whose graceful legs straddled the
hemispheres, who towered far, far above the pygmy who invented her and
the pygmies who loved her, did not at all impress him. The business end
he handed over to Elphege, who was very shrewd in such matters and whose
system was to offer half of any price quoted him and to double any price
he quoted.

The Skating Marionette came to Hollywood. Pete Van Alen brought one to
Bionde, back in the same little bungalow with a pleasant Frenchwoman,
Madame Des Grieux, for companion. He plugged the little toy in at a wall
socket before Bionde came into the room. He stood back from it, watching
its effect on her when she entered.

He saw her stop in the doorway, saw her eyes widen, grow bright. Her
hands came up. She clapped them. She laughed. She ran over to the tiny
skater swooping around her little rink and stared down at her with the
rapt look of a child with its first sleeping, talking doll.

“_Mon Dieu! Que c’est merveilleux!_ But it is lovely, lovely. Where did
you get this? Who has made it? It is so real, so lifelike.”

“It was invented by Guy de Varin,” said Pete quietly. “Perhaps that is
why it’s so real and lifelike.”

“Ah!” She continued to watch the marionette, her bright head moving with
its graceful motions, in her eyes a look that made a funny choking come
in Pete Van Alen’s throat and a yearning that was almost pain in his
heart. He was watching a little girl with a toy. But here was the toy
her lover had made for her. Here was so much that he did not understand,
that he could never know.

“It has made him a fortune,” he said dryly. “The toys are selling like
wildfire. The studios are angling for the play rights to his
puppet-show. It’s another success-story like Disney’s. He’s a big shot
now. No need for him to worry about being a drag on your career. You’re
only one skater. He can make a million of these.”

She did not seem to be listening. She said, proving that she had heard
some of it, “He would not care about a fortune. It would mean very
little to him. He wanted to make something that would please people, so
he went ahead and made it. Now he will turn to something else. You do
not know him.”

“No,” muttered Pete, “I don’t know him. But he must be quite a lad.” He
came to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “What say you and I fly
down to Yuma and get married? The picture is finished. There is no need
to wait any longer.”

He moved closer to her, drawing her to him, and his toe caught the cord
that was connected with the marionette and pulled the plug so that she
ceased to skate and only stood there looking somehow forlorn and lonely
and little. And some of the brightness died from the eyes that had been
watching. It was as if she too, Bionde, had come out of a magic world
down to the hard, practical earth. Out of a world of dream into a world
of reality.

“All right, Pete. I shall go whenever you say.”

“Then I say let’s go to-day. You can be ready in a few hours?”

“Oh, yes. It will be easy to get ready.”

“Good! Then I’ll call back for you.” He put his hand under her chin and
tilted it and looked down into her eyes, hard and earnestly. He did not
smile. He kissed her lightly and let her go. She walked to the door with
him and after he had driven away she returned to the room where Mimi
waited on her little pond. She touched the marionette almost timidly,
shyly. Then she connected the cord and stood watching the little figure
as it whirled and circled and swooped.

“There I am,” she said softly. “Only I do not go so well. One pulls the
strings for me. It will be always like that. I try to fight but I cannot
find the strength. The strings are not easy to break. One string made me
go to Quebec, another made me skate, another pulled me away from Guy,
another carried me into Pete’s arms, this last one will bind me to him.
It will be the end. Oh, Guy was right to make his Mimi in my likeness.
My heart has had as little to do with the ordering of this life I lead,
as if it were a marionette’s heart, which is none at all. But not of
ice, not cold—oh never that!”

She sat down by the skating doll and rested her head on her arms
outflung on the table. Her shoulders shook. The sunlight touched the
silken blondness of her hair, lightly, tenderly. The marionette skated
on and on and on, a fixed smile on her pretty painted face.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The story was, of course, in the Quebec papers, and Elphege, with due
subtlety, had pointed it out to him, had announced, “Mlle. Lacasse has
flown with Monsieur Van Alen to a place called Yuma, where they will be
married. One sees them getting on the airplane, waving good-by. She is
smiling as all those actresses smile, with such teeth as never grew out
of human gums. Not,” he amended hastily, “that I for a moment think
her——”

“There, Elphege, it is enough. It is the end of it all. Perhaps you are
happy now. Perhaps you will leave me.”

Elphege went with venom in his heart, dark hatred against this girl who
had made an emptiness in Guy de Varin’s life that nothing else could
fill. It must be sad, mused Elphege, to love like that, the way he does,
and not be loved in return. She goes off and marries another. Why should
he still want the love of a girl like that? Why should something, some
bright thing go from his face when I point out to him, for his own good,
that now his last hope, if there was any hope left to him, has been
taken away?

He could find no satisfactory answer to these questions. Guy could have
given him the answers, but they were sealed up in his heart. Soon now,
perhaps, he would tell Elphege the truth, let the whole world know the
truth and cause those who despised her and called her heartless to kneel
at her feet. Soon the whole dark story could be told and one would see
the actors in their true parts and find a certain nobility in them both.

He could not picture Bionde as another man’s wife. He tried not to think
of it, just as he had fought hard to forget that picture of her, with
Pete Van Alen’s arms about her. In his heart, he knew she was his, and
always would be his. What they had felt for each other, could never
exist again—not between her and another man, any more than between
another girl and himself. It was a bond that held our hearts, our souls
together, he thought, one that could never be destroyed. She is still
mine, though I shall never have her. But may she find happiness with
this man she has chosen now. If she remembers me and all the things that
were between us, may she remember kindly and may it cause no pain.

He went out more now, sometimes alone, most often accompanied by the
little Elphege, on whom he seemed to lean. Sometimes they went skiing in
the hills beyond the city. Sometimes, Elphege thought, there was
something queer going on, something that had been there for a long time
and he had not seen—he who prided himself on missing nothing, on having
the sharpest eyes in all Quebec.

“I wish,” he said to Madame Geoffrion, who had a great respect for his
sagacity, “that I could tell what goes on in his mind. I thought I knew
all about him. You know how gifted I am when it comes to finding out
about people; and I have lived with him so long. I could have sworn I
knew him and could read him as easily as I read a book. Now I do not
know. I have a suspicion he is laughing at me, laughing in a queer way,
mind you; that he has the laugh on everyone, even the lovely blonde one
who deserted him. And it is a laugh that he does not enjoy. If only I
could know, if only I could figure it out——”

“Can you not question him, you who are so adept at asking questions?”

Elphege shook his head. “You know as well as I, my good aunt,” he said
with a touch of rebuke, “that Monsieur Guy is not one to be questioned,
even as diplomatically as I should question.”

“That is so,” agreed Madame Geoffrion.

“To-day he has gone skiing by himself,” Elphege frowned. “I should have
gone with him. Indeed I wanted to, but he told me to stay at home. He is
most skillful on the runners, yet there are times when he slows up,
stops, creeps his way almost as if he were a—a blind—My God, madame!”

At the frantic note in his voice, the wildness of his eyes, as he leapt
to his feet, Madame Geoffrion turned pale and moved her chair back from
him as if she feared he had suddenly gone mad.

“What is it? Speak, Elphege! What is this mystery?”

Elphege seemed to speak only to himself: “He only glanced at papers. He
did not go even to see her on the cinema. He refused to touch the wheel
of the car. He always wore those accursed glasses——”

Like one of the marionettes he loved gone suddenly berserk, he flung
himself out of the room and clattered down the stairs.
“Blind—half-blind, sometimes blind,” he kept muttering. “We were the
blind ones; we had eyes to see and did not see. _Eh, mon Dieu_, what he
must have endured! And what courage, what foolhardy courage, to go out
on the hills alone never knowing when the darkness will fall! Oh, God
help me to find him!”

                 *        *        *        *        *

De Varin coasted down a gentle slope of virgin white, marked here and
there by tall spruce trees of beautiful shape. His eyes felt good
to-day. He could see better, through the dark glasses, than he had since
the day in the hospital when he was recovering from the concussion, when
the doctor said, “There will be times when you will find it hard to see,
times even when you may be almost totally blind. And, I hate to tell you
this, but sooner or later——”

Guy had stared at him that day, at his sympathetic face, his kindly
eyes—Guy who was counting the hours until he could find Bionde to marry
her, whose work and whose livelihood depended on his eyes. “You mean
that—that there is no hope——”

The doctor had shrugged. “I would do wrong to give you any. It may be
that some new discovery, some——”

Guy had seen his face only as a blurred thing in a dark vaporous cloud.
Blind—groping—helpless—Oh, God! Not that—not that!

But that was what he had had to face. And alone, always alone. He could
not ask her now to take his hand and guide him along the path of their
love. The way lay straight for her. He would not mar her success. He
would not ever run the risk of seeing love turn to loyalty and finally
to resignation. No, through the darkness he would grope toward the
deeper darkness. So he had denied his love, denied hers, suffered a
quiet crucifixion that no one else might share his misery.

Now, as he coasted down the long slope up which a party of skiers
climbed, he thought, How bright is the sun and how good it is to see the
world and know——

And then the blackness was upon him. The snow, the hills, the dark
trees, all were blacked out as if a great hand had reached to the sun
and killed its light as one kills the light of a taper. Blackness all
about him. He cried out. He was moving fast now. He threw away the
ski-poles, stretched out his hands like a blind man, to fend away the
things that might strike and hurt him.

He seemed to have no power to think, but recklessly he flung himself
into the snow and lay there for a while, his eyes tight shut. Slowly he
got to his feet after kicking off the harness, and stood there. His
hands outstretched, he moved a step, two steps. He heard voices near
him. He touched the soft wool of a sweater, found an arm and clung to
it.

“Please,” he said. “Please, I cannot see. I was hurt once. They told me
I might one day be blind. I——”

He felt the arm he clung to stiffen and begin to tremble. He said, “Do
not be afraid. It will pass. There is a great doctor I saw only
yesterday. He said it would pass and he can fix it so it will never come
again Could you—take me home—I live in Sainte-Ursule Street——”

“Yes, yes, I know. In a garret on Sainte-Ursule Street where you lied to
the woman you loved.”

“Bionde!”

It was all part of this terrible darkness. Even his mind played tricks
now. But his hand came up and traced the contours of her face, touched
the wetness on her cheek. Then he felt her lips on his. Heard her
whisper with those lips still close, “It’s all right now. It will be
always all right.”

“But you are married now——”

“Oh, no. Pete asked me one question in Yuma. It was, ‘Do you love me?’
And because I could not say yes—well, that is why I came here—to find
the man I do love. I tried to forget, to put you out of my life. I could
not. Why did you lie to me?”

“It seemed right to lie.”

“I’d never have left you, whether it was light or darkness—never. You
should have known that.”

“I did know it.”

She was at his side when they took him back to the city, to the
hospital. He could hear the Song of Ronsard now. It was in all the air
about him; it was in her presence, her nearness. And with it was a
prayer, more fervent, more heart-meant than any other he had thought or
spoken. Come light for him, or come darkness, whichever it might be, she
would be always with him now. “But, oh God,” he prayed, “let it be light
for her and me. It has been dark so long.”

With high heart, unfearing, he faced the darkness, for her hand was in
his. In that same hospital where, in the steel gray of a winter dusk—so
long ago it seemed, ages gone, lives ago—he had denied his love, she
stood above his bed when the bandages were taken from his eyes. Hers was
the first face he saw, so dear, so loved. Even in darkness he would have
seen it so, but the light was sweet.

There was a little doctor, Renault, who said, “You need not worry now,
_mon vieux_. You may gaze upon the sun, if you so desire.”

“There are things brighter, fairer, than the sun, _monsieur le
docteur_,” said Guy.

And the little man, looking from him to Bionde, saw in her eyes that it
was so. It is wonderful, love, he mused, leaving them, almost unnoticed:
they have so little need of vision, those two.

And the winter dusk came again, creeping gray and silent into that room,
doing nothing to lessen the brightness that was there, closing softly
around them. Then the great bells of the city filled all the air with
sound and the small stars came, bright points in the frigid sky. And for
them both, in that moment, there was a great peace and a wondrous
promise.




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.

          [The end of _Marionette_ by Louis Arthur Cunningham]