THE GUEST 
OF QUESNAY 
By Booth Tarkington 
Copyright, 1908, by the McClure Company 
Copyright, 1987, 1908, by the Ridgway Company 
[ConTINUED.] 
“And so it is with my boy,” he pro- 
tlaimed, coming at last to the case in 
hand. “The spirit of him, the rea 
Oliver Saffren, that has never change 
The outside of him, those thing tha 
belong to him, like his memory, the: 
have change, but not himself, for him 
self is eternal and unchangeable. 
have taught him, yes. I have helpe 
him get the small things we can ad 
to our possession—a little knowledge 
maybe, a little power of judgment 
But, my dear sir, I tell you that sucl 
things are only possessions of a man 
They are not the man! So with Oli 
yer. He had lived a little while, twen 
ty-six years perhaps, when—pft!—liki 
that, he became almost as a bab} 
again. He could remember how t 
talk, but not much more. He had los 
his belongings. They were gone fron 
the lobe of the brain where he hac 
store them, but he was not gone. Ni 
part of the real himself was lacking 
Then presently they send him to me t 
make new his belongings, to restore 
his possessions. Ha, what a task—t 
take him with nothing in the world o: 
his own and see that he get only goo¢ 
possessions, good knowledge, good ex 
perience! I took him to the moun 
tains of the Tyrol two year, and ther 
his body became strong and splendi¢ 
while his brain was taking in th 
stores. It was quick, for his brair 
had retained some habits. It was not: 
baby’s brain, and some small part o: 
its old stores had not been lost. Buti 
anything useless or bad remain we 
empty it out—I and those mountair 
‘ with their pure air. Now, I say he i 
all good and the work was good. I au 
proud! But I wish to restore all tha’ 
_was good in his life. Your Keredec is 
something of a poet. You may put fi 
much the old fool! And for tha 
greatest restoration of all I have 
brought my boy back to France.” 
A half light had broken upon me a: 
‘he talked, pacing the floor, thundering 
his paean of triumph. Only one ex 
planation, incredible, but possible, suf 
ficed, Anything was possible, I thought 
with this dreamer. 
- - “By the wildest chance,” I gasped 
_ “you don’t mean that you wanted hin 
‘to fall in love”— > 
“Ha, my dear sir,” he laughed, “yo 
have said it! But you knew it. You 
told him to come.to me and tell me.” 
“But I mean that you—that you. had 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
Selected the lady whom you know as 
Mme, d’Armand.” 
“Again,” he shouted, “you have saié 
it!” 
“Professor Keredec,” I returned, witt 
asperity, “I have no idea Low you came 
to conceive such a preposterous 
scheme, but I agree heartily that the 
word for it is madness. I[n the firsi 
place, I must tell you that ber name is 
not even d’Armund.” 
“My dear sir, | know. It was the 
mistake of that absurd Amedee. She 
is Mrs. Harman.” 
“You Knew it?’ I cried, hopelessly 
confused. “But Oliver still speaks o1 
her as Mme. d’Armand.” 
“He does not know. She has not told 
him.” 
“In the meantime,” I said sharply, 
“there is a keen faced young man whe 
took a room in the inn this morning 
and who has come to spy upon you, J 
believe.” 
~“What is it you say?” 
He came to a sudden stop. 
I had not meant to deliver my infor- 
mation quite so abruptly, but there 
was no help for it now, and | repeated 
the statement, giving him a terse ac- 
count of my two encounters with the 
rattish youth end adding: 
“He seemed to be certain that ‘Oliver 
Saffren’ is an assumed name, and he 
made a threatening reference to the 
laws of France.” 
The effect upon Keredec was a very 
distinct pallor. 
“Do you think he came back to the 
inn? Is he here now?’ 
“I do not know.” 
“We must learn. I must know that 
at once!’ And he went to the door. 
“Let me go instead,” I suggested. 
I stepped out to the gallery, to dis- 
cover Mme. Brossard emerging from 
a door on the opposite side of the 
courtyard. 
“Mme. Brossard,” said the professor, 
“you have a vew client today.” 
“That monsieur who arrived this 
morning,” 1 suggested. 
“He was an American,” said the 
hostess, knitting her dark brows, “but 
I do not think that he was exactly a 
monsieur.” 
“Ts he at the inn now?” 
“No, monsieur, but two friends for 
whom he engaged apartments have 
just arrived.” 
“Who are they?’ 
quickly. 
“It is a lady and a monsieur from 
Paris, but not married. They have 
taken separate apartments, and she 
has a domestic with her—a uegress, 
Algerian.” 
“What are their names?’ 
“It is not ten minutes that they are 
installed. They have not given me 
their names.” 
“What is she?” demanded Keredec 
impatiently. “Is she blond? Is she 
brunette? Is she French, English, 
Spanish?’ 
“I think,’ said Mme. Brossard—“'l 
think one would call her Spanish, but 
asked Keredec 
she is very. fat, not young, and with 
& great aea) too mucn rouge.” 
She stopped with an audible intake 
of breath, staring at my friend’s white 
face. 
“M. Saffren and I leave at once,” ex- 
claimed Keredec. “I shall meet him 
on the road. He will not return to the 
inn. We go to—to Trouville. See that 
no one knows that we have gone until 
tomorrow, if possible. I shall leave 
fees for the servants with you. Go 
now, prepare your bill and bring it to 
me at once. I shall write you where 
to send our trunks. Quick! And you, 
my friend,’ he turned to me—‘“my 
friend, will you help us? For we need 
it!” 
“Anything in the world!” 
“Go to Pere Bandrv. Have hi 
put the least tired of his three horses 
to his lightest cart and wait in the 
road beyond the cottage. Stand in the 
road yourself while that is being done. 
Oliver will come that way. Detain 
him. I will join you there.” 
I strode to the door and out to the 
gallery. I was halfway down the 
steps before I saw that Oliver Saffren 
was already in the courtyard, coming 
toward me from the archway with a 
light and buoyant step. 
He looked up, waving his hat to me, 
his face lighted with a happiness most 
remarkable and brighter even than the 
strong midsummer sunshine flaming 
over him. Dressed in white as he was 
and with the air of victory he wore, 
he might have. been at that moment a 
ngure irom marpie ctriumpn, 
youthful, coaquering, crowned with 
the laurel. 
But entering from the road, upon 
the trail of Saffren and still in the 
shadow of the archway, I was startled 
to see the discordant fineries and 
hatchet face of the ex-pedestrian and 
tourist, my antagonist of the forest. 
I had opened my mouth to call a 
warning, ; 
“Hurry” was the word I would have 
said, but it stopped at “hur.” The 
second syllable was never uttered. 
There came a violent outery, raucous 
and shrill as the wail of a captured 
hen, and out of the passage across the 
courtyard floundered a woman fantas- 
tically dressed in green and gold. 
She was abundantly fat, double 
chinned, coarse, greasy, smeared with 
blue pencilings, carmine, enamel and 
rouge. ; 
At the scream Saffren turned. She 
made straight at him, crying wildly: 
“Enfin! Mon mari, mon mari—c’est 
moi! C’est ta femme, mon caeur!’ 
She threw herself upon him, her 
arms about his neck, with a tropical 
ferocity that was a very paroxysm of 
triumph. 
“Embrasse moi, Larrabi! 
moi!’ she cried, 
Horrified, outraged, his eyes blazing, 
he flung her off with a violence sur- 
passing her own and with loathing un- 
speakable. She screamed that he was 
killing her, calling him “husband,” and 
tried to fasten herself upon him again. 
But he leaped backward beyond the 
reach of her clutching hands and, 
Embrasse 
Turning: Di geps ana 
on Uy oman follow- 
From a) e strickea 
Face of Komment Saftren 
under the ited bim to 
the fallery pve to hol 
5, “18 this 
the Woman 
The giant gaammoross the gal- 
lery and inigimpor with one 
S'eat sweep damrode 2 after 
Him and ¢jgimied the door 
came a cerfalmmeognized the 
woman, -Sh na—la bella 
Mariana la J 
glimpses | hime bim, 1 had 
been familignimpesture, walk, 
intonation; eyjmit | had ever 
heard his voif™mih might have 
come to mel 
Larrabee Hi 
“Oliver Safitgmpatrabee Har- 
man! 
Ye F it we would not 
By speak of™™y of which | 
night in the 
lends at Mme. 
Brossard’s, h reluctance, 
but there wasigm Keredec had 
sent for me 
Keredec hadimmlagic ward too 
derstood but 
le catastrophe 
which overbuj™mim to France, 
and now tha fleed concrete 
and definite iM was forced 
into fuller Gi every word 
making the the listener 
moore intolerii@lim it seemed 
that he was MB to suffer for 
the sins of il 
“Do you Hl can make 
me believe |G ctied—“that 
1 made life Wr her, drove 
her from 
ting a gret 
_hayen’t been ill?” | 
“No; I’ve had a bad night. That's 
gil our Lives. Lou say 1 mw mov yuu 
who did such crazy, horrible things, 
and you are right. When this poor 
woman who is so painted and greasy 
first caught you, when you began to 
give your money and your time and 
your life to her, when she got you 
into this horrible marriage with her, 
you were blind—you went staggering 
in a bad dream. Your soul hid away, 
far down inside you, with its hands 
over its face. If it could have once 
stood straight, if the eyes of your body 
could have once been clean for it to 
look through, if you could have once 
been as you are today or as you were 
when you were a little child, you would 
have cry out with horror both of her 
and of yourself, as you do now, and 
you would have run away from her 
and from everything you had put in 
your life. But in your suffering you 
must rejoice. The triumph is that 
your mind hates that old life as great- 
ly as your soul hates it. You are as 
good as if you had never been the wild 
fellow—yes, the wicked fellow—that 
you were. For a man who shakes off 
his sin is clean. He stands as pure 
as if he had never sinned.” 
The desperate young man on the 
couch answered only with the sobbing 
of a broken hearted child. 
I came back to my pavilion after 
midnight, but I did not sleep, though 
I lay upon my bed until dawn. Then 
I went for a long, hard walk, break- 
fasted at Dives and begged a ride back 
to Mme. Brossard’s in a peasant’s 
cart which was going that way. 
I found George Ward waiting for 
me on the little veranda of the pavil- 
ion, looking handsomer and more pros- 
perously distinguished and distinguish- 
edly prosperous and generally well con- 
ditioned than ever, as I told him. 
“T have some news for you,” he 
said after the hearty greeting—‘an 
announcement, in fact. HElizabeth’s go- 
ing to marry Cresson Ingle.” 
“That is the news—the announce- 
ment—you spoke of?” 
“Yes, that is it.” 
To save my life I could not have told 
at that moment what else | had ex- 
pected or feared that he might say, 
but I certainly took a deep breath of 
relief. “I am very glad,’ I said. “It 
should be a happy alliance.” 
“On the whole, I think it will be,” 
he returned thoughtfully. ~‘‘Ingle’s 
done his share of hard living, and I 
once had a notion’—he glanced smil- 
ingly at me—‘well, I dare say you 
know my notion. But it is a good 
match for Blizabeth and not without 
advantages on many counts. You see, 
it’s time I married, myself. She feels 
that very strongly, and I think her 
decision to accept Ingle is partly due 
to her wish to make all clear for a 
new mistress of my household.” 
He laughed again, but, 1 did not, and, 
noting my silence, he turned upon me 
a more scrutinizing look than he had 
- yet given me and said: 
“You look ,quite haggard. You 
Le att 
\ 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
aul.” - 
“Oh, I heard something of a riotous 
scene taking place over here,” he said. 
“One of the gardeners was talking 
about it to Elizabeth.” 
“What was it you heard?” I asked 
quickly. 
“He said that there was great excite- 
ment at Mme. Brossard’s because a 
strange woman had turned up and 
claimed an insane young man for her 
husband.” 
“Damnation!” I started from my 
chair. “Did Mrs. Harman hear this 
story ?” 
“Not last night, I’m certain. But 
what difference could it possibly make 
whether she heard it or not? She 
doesn’t know these people surely ?”’ 
“She knows the man.” 
“This insane’— 
“He is not insane,’ I interrupted. 
“He has lost the memory of his earlier 
life—lost it through an accident. You 
and I saw the accident.” 
“That’s impossible,” said George, 
frowning. ‘I never saw but one acci- 
dent that you’’— 
“That was the one. The man is Lar- 
rabee Harman.” 
George had struck a match to light a 
cigar, but the operation remained in- 
complete. He dropped the match upon 
the floor and set his foot upon it. 
“Well, tell me about it,’”’ he said. 
“You haven’t heard anything about 
him since the accident?” 
“Only-that he did eventually recover 
and was taken away from the hos- 
pital. I heard that his mind was im- 
paired. Does Louise’’— he began, stop- 
ped and cleared his throat. “Has Mrs. 
Harman heard that he is here?” 
“Yes; she has seen him.” 
“Do you mean the scoundrel has been 
bothering her? Hlizabeth didn’t tell 
me of this.” 
“Your sister doesn’t know,” I said. 
“I think you ought to understand the 
whole case.” 
“Go ahead,” he bade me. 
“He’s not at all what you think,” I 
said. ‘“There’s an enormous differ- 
ence, almost impossible to explain to 
you, but something you’d understand 
at once if you saw him.” 
“What is the change?” pske Ward. 
and his voice showed that he was 
greatly disquieted. ‘What is he like?” 
“As well as I can tell you, he’s like 
an odd but very engaging boy, with 
something pathetic about him; quite 
splendidly handsome”’— 
“Oh, he had good looks to spare 
when. I first knew him,” George said 
bitterly. 
“No. When he came here he did not 
know of her existence except in the 
vaguest way. But, to go back to that, 
I’d better tell you first that the woman 
we saw with him one day on the 
boulevard and who was in the acci- 
dent with him’— 
“Ta Mursiana, the dancer; I know.” 
“She had got him to go through a 
marriage with her.” 
“What?’? Ward’s eyes flashed as 
he shouted the word. 
“It seems inexplicable: but. as I un- 
i 
gerstand it, ne was never quite soper 
at that time. He had begun-to use 
drugs and was often ina half. stupe- 
fied condition. As a matter of fact, the 
woman did what she pleased with 
him. There’s no doubt about the va- 
lidity of the marriage.” 
George asked suddenly, “Did this 
marriage take place in “France 2: 
“Yes; you’d better hear me through,” 
I remonstrated. “When he was taken 
from the hospital be was placed in 
charge of a Professor Keredec, a mad- 
man of whom you've probably heard.” 
“Madman? Why, no; he’s a member 
of the institute, a psychologist or meta- 
physician, isn’t he? At any rate, of 
eonsiderable celebrity.” 
“Nevertheless,” I insisted grimly, “as 
misty a vaporer as I ever saw, a poet- 
ic, self contradicting and inconsistent 
orator. Harman’s aunt put him in 
Keredec’s charge. and he was taken 
up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden 
for two years, the idea being literally 
to give him something like an eduea- 
tion. Keredec’s phrase is, ‘restore 
mind to his soul!” It was as vital to 
get him out of his horrible wife’s 
clutches. But she picked up that rat 
in the garden out yonder—hed been 
some sort of stable manager for Har- 
man once—and set him on the track.” 
“She wants money, of course.” 
“Yes: more money. A fair allowance 
has always been sent to her. Keredec 
has interviewed her notary, and she 
wants a settlement. naming a sum ac- 
tually larger than the whole estate 
amounts to. She refuses to budge un- 
til this impossible settlement is made. 
In the meantime Keredec’s ward is in 
so dreadful a state of horror and grief 
I am afraid it is possible that his mind 
may really give way.” 
“When was it that Louise saw him?” 
“Ah, that,” I said, “is where Keredec 
has been a poet and a dreamer indeed. 
It was his plan that they should meet.” 
“You mean he brought this wreck of 
Harman, these husks and shreds of a 
man, down here for Louise to see?” 
Ward cried incredulously. ‘‘Oh, mon- 
strous!” 
“There is something behind all this 
that you don’t know,” he said slowly 
“When did Keredeec make you his con: 
fidant?” 
“Last night. Most of what I learn 
ed was as much a revelation to his vie. 
tim as it was to me. Harman did nol 
know till then that the lady he had 
been meeting has been his wife or that 
he had ever seen her before he came 
here. He -had mistaken her name, and 
she did not enlighten him.” 
“Meeting?”° said. Ward harshly. 
“They have been meeting every day, 
George.” 
“I won't believe it.” 
“It’s true. He spoke to her in the 
woods one day; I was there and saw 
it. I know now. that she knew him 
at once, and she ran away, but not in 
anger. They’ve been together every 
day since then, and I’m afraid—mis: 
erably afraid, Ward—that her old feel 
ing for him has been revived.” 
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