CHAPTER XIX
ITS ANSWER
While Tessibel Skinner, lonely and despondent, was grieving in the squatter country, Frederick Graves arrived in Paris with his young wife.
There had been for him but few hours since that last evening upon the ragged rocks, during which Tessibel's face had not haunted him, the brown eyes, sometimes smiling, more frequently shadowed with tears.
Impotent remorse possessed his days and filled his wakeful nights with anguish. At such times when life seemed intolerable, the thought of the comfort he had supplied for his mother and sister was balm to his troubled soul.
He regretted, too, that he had not gone to the squatter settlement to see Tess again before his marriage to Madelene. He had thought, then, that the sight of her pleading pain would be more than he could bear. He had already vowed to himself over and over with clenched teeth that he would stay but a short time away from America. He must see Tess. He did not worry over her keeping the secret of their clandestine marriage ...
he had implicit confidence in her promise.
Madelene's keen enjoyment in displaying the many sights, already familiar to her, bored him to distraction, and they had been in France but a few days before she discovered his indifference to the wonders which seemed of such importance to her. On the way over she had noticed his spells of abstraction. She had seen how quickly the shadows descended upon her husband's face when it was in repose. With an intuition characteristically feminine, she concluded rightly that Frederick's interest was not in her, that his attention was really concentrated upon something quite apart from his wife and their honeymoon. She determined to find out the reason.
One morning, breakfasting in their charming room, Madelene started a bright conversation, which Frederick met with but a chilly response.
"What's the matter with you, Fred?" she demanded curiously. "You haven't spoken a pleasant word for two days."
A faint smile sketched itself about the corners of Frederick's lips.
"Aren't you stretching that a little, my dear?" he evaded half-playfully.
"Well, perhaps a wee bit," laughed Madelene, ruefully. "But honestly, dear, you look as if you'd lost your last friend instead of being on your--honeymoon."
She sprang up, rounded the table and perched daintily on the arm of his chair.
"I do want to make you happy, darling," she urged. "What's the trouble?"
Frederick made a slightly impatient gesture with one shoulder.
"I'm happy enough, Madelene! But it's this beastly weather! I suppose that's the reason I feel so lackadaisical. If you don't mind, I don't believe I'll go out today."
Madelene uttered a little cry of disappointment.
"Now, I _am_ vexed!" she pouted prettily.
"Oh, then I'll go with you, of course," Frederick hastily cut in. "It doesn't make any difference to me."
The young wife felt an impulse to anger.
"But it ought to make a difference, Fred dear," she pointed out to him.
"Why, you make me feel so small ... so insignificant.... I don't want to drag you about if you don't want to go."
Absorbed in his self-centered meditations his wife's sightseeing excursions seemed to him a perfect nuisance.
"I didn't mean to hurt you, dear," he apologized hurriedly.
Madelene got up and went to the window and gazed down upon the street.
"I know what we'll do," she stated, dancing back to the table. "Let's go to some quiet, cool place for a week or two. I hate Paris in the hot weather, anyway. And it'll be fun to be by ourselves ... and we'll have long walks.... Would you like that?"
The dark wave of blood surging into Frederick's temples made her look curiously at him. Why should he be embarrassed at such a suggestion?
"As you please, my dear," he interrupted her thought.
Madelene sighed. He did look ill. It might be the hot weather, but he had such a strange, detached manner most of the time ... as if he were far away ... or she was. Her mind was busy with the problem. She could not eat.
Frederick, too, was but toying with his breakfast. He was wondering just what Madelene was planning to do in the country. It would be even harder for him there than in the city. With Tessibel's face always between them, he could not make a lover's love to her anywhere.
An hour or so later, while Frederick had gone to smoke under the trees, his wife stood critically studying her reflection in the glass ... with but few misgivings. She was pretty, surely so, and very rich! What more could a man want? In the coolness of the country, Frederick would be better. He would lose his moroseness and give his undivided attention to her. She would make all the arrangements for the change without disturbing him. He should not be bothered a little bit; and Madelene grew quite happy again with the thought of having Frederick all to herself in some romantic country spot.
She summoned her maid, and for a while with the aid of the hotel officials, she sought for a place near Paris, yet far enough away to escape its harassing heat and noises. By night Madelene had decided upon a farm near the village of Epernon.
"We can get in to the city to shop, Marie," she told her maid. "But Mr.
Graves simply can't stand the hot weather in town."
"He does look sick and worried, ma'am, doesn't he?" agreed the maid.
Twenty-four hours later Frederick and Madelene were settled in a pretty villa nestled at the edge of the forest. Nature in its noblest expression surrounded them. At the going down of the sun, Madelene stood beside her husband on the porch, and pressed her cheek fondly against his shoulder.
"It's so beautiful, isn't it, dear?" she whispered coaxingly.
Out of his wife's words and the gentle gloaming, came a deadly sense of loneliness. A shiver shook Frederick from head to foot. His only answer was an ejaculated affirmative in a hoarse voice. The weird sighing of the trees took him back to Ithaca, back to the ragged rocks ... to Tessibel. For a moment he was so agonized that tears stung his lids to a deep hurt.
If in noisy Paris he had been carried in spirit to the squatter country, where a girl stood and gazed at him with red-brown eyes, how much more did she haunt him in the quiet spot where the leaves sang the same old tunes they sang in her world, where the wind played among them as it did in the Silent City! Now and then from yonder clump of trees a bird twittered; an owl screeched from the tall tree at the right, and farther on a brook chanted its purling song like Tessibel's brook under the mudcellar. Oh, his dear little girl! His Tess of the Storm Country! If in those olden days he had desired her, now that desire was a hundred times more poignant. In all his willful life he had never suffered like this. Tess with her clinging arms, her sweet, winning ways! He sighed a deep, long sigh. Yet soon he would hear something from her. He had written her, ... had sent her money for the necessities of her simple life ... his heart throbbed at the thought of a letter from her.
Madelene's conversation he had not heard, and it was not until she spoke directly to him that he remembered her presence.
"Don't you think so, Fred?" she was asking.
He heaved another sigh as he left Ithaca and came back to France after that flight of fancy.
"Don't I think what? I really didn't hear what you said, Madelene," he admitted guiltily.
Madelene experienced a hot flash of indignation.
"Do you mean to say you've allowed me to talk all this time and you haven't heard a word I've said?" she demanded in a thin, rasping voice.
"I'm sorry," murmured Frederick. "Pardon."
Then the girl lapsed into a sulky silence, and Frederick, too sick at heart, too indifferent to her likes and dislikes to care, did not encourage her to repeat what she had said.
It was perhaps a week later when young Mrs. Graves felt her first real jealousy. In the happiness of her hasty marriage, she had almost forgotten the story told her by the gossips of Ithaca. It was only when her husband's eyes were encircled and darkened by a far-away expression that Tess entered her mind. But even then, after a glance in the mirror, she dismissed the little singer contemptuously.
One morning just before breakfast, they were standing under the trees.
On Frederick's face was that dreary look of discontent. Madelene contemplated him steadily. She had watched and studied, but had not yet solved the problem that occupied her mind. Was the squatter girl the obstacle? she wondered. It didn't seem possible. Frederick was so fastidious. Why, the girl could scarcely speak a word of good English!
But it would do no harm to make sure. She decided to speak to her husband of Tessibel Skinner. But how?
Frederick owed her some consideration, and Madelene deeply desired he should be more attentive to her. Suddenly she laughed aloud. Frederick turned, the cloud partially lifting from his eyes.