In certain hearts love may refuse to die, and yet breed there a kind of hate. That was the way with Aubrey Stayne. His love was natural enough, and his hate could not be called unreasonable. An American by birth, he had lived many years abroad. Rich, handsome, notably intelligent, he had made in Paris the acquaintance of a woman who reigned as one of the social queens of Europe. Mme. d'Autreville was a widow, and yet scarcely past four-and-twenty when Stayne first met her. This meeting took place at a ball given by the English ambassador. It was a very brilliant affair, and the young Duchesse d'Autreville shone there amid the homage of hundreds. In spirit, Stayne found himself almost instantly at her feet. He was a great deal of an artist by temperament, and her face and figure, with their sculptural repose, enchanted him. Of course she was cold, he assured himself—glacially so. One feature alone seemed to indicate otherwise—her large eyes of drowsy brown, brooding below the lustrous curves of their lashes. But, after talking with her and feeling certain that he had wrought upon her a distinct impression, he told himself that this very coldness was an added charm. When all was said, did not this type of woman pique and fascinate him more than any other? She was proud, overbearing, even insolent, if you pleased; but did not these aggressive traits combine with the snowy loveliness of her beauty to make her winsome beyond all words? "I'm proud myself, for that matter," reflected Stayne, who was really quite the reverse, all things considered, for he came of a family distinguished three or four generations ago, and had fallen heir to a property of several million dollars. In his own country he occupied an almost exalted position, while abroad his reputed and magnified wealth was certainly no drawback. On general principles he soon found himself shrinking from the idea of marrying a woman with a title. It would be called a snobbish and cold-blooded thing by everybody who knew him. But then, on the other hand, there was the woman behind the title. And when she married him, she would change "Madame la Duchesse" into simply "Mrs. Aubrey Stayne."
But on further investigating the subject, Stayne received the bitter tidings that this lady would make no such matrimonial change whatever. The blow to him proved a fearful one. Not that she had mercilessly fooled him, or anything of that treacherous sort. Her fault was more subtle; she had refrained from showing him her real self.
They had spent a whole month together in Nice, and he had accompanied her into the most exclusive society there. Afterward they met in Rome, and finally, just as the chestnut-trees on the Champs Elysées had begun to whiten with their pearly springtide flowerage, Paris received them both. Madame owned a magnificent hotel on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. She chose to give two sumptuous balls that season, and her dinners, as usual, were the delight of the gilded cliques. People had begun to wonder if her engagement to the young American millionaire, seen so often in her train, would not soon publicly transpire.
It was after one of those costly banquets of hers that Stayne, on a certain evening, managed to linger later than all the other guests. He remembered so perfectly, in future reflections, the small white and gold room, with its tapestries of rose-colored velvet, where this woman whom he worshipped heard his first real declaration of passion. She was leaning back in a great arm-chair, indolently fanning herself. He had thought her almost maddeningly fair that night, in her robe of black tulle, with not a single jewel on her milky arms or neck, and a long, straggling spray at her breast of eglantine in diamonds. The dinner had not been very large, but some great people had attended it, and now they had all gone away—the Russian ambassador and the Austrian princess and the English duke—and he was seated on a sort of low little divan at her side, looking up into the marble beauty of her face and telling her how it had become the dream of his life to make her his own. She hardly seemed, at times, as if she listened to him. And yet he knew that she did listen. This was her way. Perhaps in a few more moments all that splendid apathy would vanish; perhaps flame would flash out, as it were, below the melting ice of her personality.
"I recollect what you have told me," Stayne was saying. "Your marriage was a forced and loveless one; your widowhood never dealt you a pang. Since then no woman in Europe has had more suitors at her feet. Well, I am merely one of this adoring multitude. Have I the right to hope for more than these? You Frenchwomen are sometimes terribly subtle, and it may be true that I have deceived myself in dreaming you would care to link your life with my own—to share with me the fortune that I lay before you in eager gladness."
He paused, and her face remained so irresponsive that he was on the verge of cursing his own folly for having mentioned, however lightly, the fact of his personal possessions. But suddenly, to his surprise and alarm, she also spoke of them, saying with lips that appeared just to move and no more:
"It is very large—is it not?—that fortune of yours?"
"Yes," he faltered, chagrined, fearing some delicate assault of that satire with which he knew that she now and then could most effectually play.
"Tell me just how large," she went on, with the faintest flicker of a smile. "I mean in francs, not dollars. Those American dollars of yours always confuse one so."
He made an impatient movement, half rising from his seat. Surely this was satire! But he soon answered her with a sort of matter-of-fact humility.
"Really, that is enormous," she said. "You're five times richer than I am; do you know it? I congratulate you." And then the crystal chandeliers seemed to darken for Stayne while she softly added: "But that must be all. I never mean to marry again, for one potent reason. Will you believe me when I tell you that love—the kind of love women feel toward men—is in my case impossible?"
"Impossible!" he muttered.
"Yes. You should not blame me; I don't deserve blame. I suspected that perhaps you cared for me, but I was not sure you would ever confess to me that you did, and I secretly hoped that you would not. It has been easy to answer those scores of others, but you it is not so easy to answer. Good Heavens!" she pursued, with her lips parting in a smile and her eyes for a moment rivalling the scintillance of the gems on her breast, "with your face, your figure, your good manners, your capable brain, and your monstrous fortune, what woman except myself would be insane enough to refuse you? And yet I do—I must. Listen," and she slowly furled her fan, letting its closed framework rest on his coat-sleeve. "It is quite true that they compelled me to marry the late Duc d'Autreville. It is equally true that I detested him. But merely because he was my husband; for no other reason. He was not at all ill-looking, and he was not particularly old. Yet my entire married life of five years was an exquisite martyrdom. Would you have me torture myself again?" she asked; and her smile at this point became horrible to him who witnessed it. "Would you have me do so because your engines of torment can be golden ones, and studded, if you please, with precious stones?"
Stayne sprang to his feet. "I don't understand you!" he broke out fiercely. "Or, if I do, I—I refuse to believe you!"
Mme. d'Autreville shrugged her statuesque shoulders. "I don't understand myself," she said. "And if you refuse to believe me, you will only be doing what I have done to myself for years. But the fact still stares me in the face."
"Shall I tell you what that fact is?" laughed Stayne, with great bitterness. "It is some other man—some man, perhaps, whom you think beneath you and—and yet adore!"
"Ah, if only it were!" exclaimed the lady. "I would reduce myself almost to beggary if I could once say of any living man that actually, absolutely I loved him!" It occurred to her listener, as she now continued, that either complete truth dwelt in both her voice and look or else that she was deceiving with a masterly adroitness. "For life," she hurried on, with a betrayal of excitement startlingly rare, "is, without love, like a wondrous book but half read. It often fills me with horror to think that I shall go to my grave and yet never know the chief charm and joy of living!"
"Answer me," exclaimed Stayne, with notes of grief and command mingling in his voice: "Can it be possible, Hortense d'Autreville, that you have never seen a man whom you could love?"
"Never," she returned.
"Not one whom you believed able to win your love?"
"Never."
"Then you—you are willing to swear to me that you will never marry again?"
"Yes. You have no right to require that I shall so swear; but I will—I do. There, now; are you satisfied?"
"Satisfied!" he broke forth, in pain and rebuke. "As if I could be that, with the love I feel for you!" Scanning her face intently, be paused for several moments. "Then you have no ideal," he resumed, "no——"
But here she cut him short, with a quick lifting of one hand. "I have an ideal—yes," came her reply. "But I have given up all hope of ever palpably realizing it. That is my sorrow—my despair! Perhaps the ideal of which I speak is not of this world at all. Perhaps I shall some day find it beyond the bounds of death. Only, one point is clear, is undeniable: you have been far more right than you suspected in accusing me of a great coldness. Although pity, affection, and other kindlier emotions are not foreign to my spirit, I am none the less a human creature born without the power of loving as a wife must alone love to save her marriage from being mockery and shame!"
In this final admission there seemed so much piercing sincerity that, for a long time after he had hastened from Hortense d'Autreville's presence, Stayne credited every word she had spoken; but, by degrees, a certain cynic element in his disposition prevailed, with gloomy result. After all, had he not merely been the dupe of a finished coquette? Might not the romantic novelty in which Mme. d'Autreville had chosen to mantle her confession have been simply the cruelty of a barren and arid soul? Did she deserve a gleam of his compassion? More than this, was she not privately exhilarated by the anguish of which she had made him a victim? Where was the necessity of such a woman as she marrying again? Her least wish was now gratified by the amplitude of those funds which her dead spouse had bequeathed her. Every new lover prostrate at her garment's hem was a new intoxication of triumph. The world was full of just such bloodless sirens, and what she deserved was not this tribute, on his own part, of moping and weak-willed forlornness. Punishment was indeed what she deserved, and in his altered and even savage mood Stayne found himself longing for some forceful means of inflicting upon her a kind of counter-blow that she would remember till the day of her death.
He did not remain more than two or three days in Paris, but betook himself to Havre, sailing thence to America.
During the next year, while passing his time between New York and the smaller, more southerly town where he was born, Stayne not seldom deported himself in the most eccentric way. His old suavity would at times wholly leave him, and a morose curtness would take its place. Now and then he would say irrelevant things, or plunge himself into fits of silence which were the despair of his entertainers. It is true that a man of his extreme note might have behaved in a far more cavalier manner and yet received no open censure; but, as it now happened, he was forced to pay the penalty of being conspicuous. A report got into circulation that he was on the verge of dementia, if not already mad. Had not his uncle, Andreas Aubrey, died a lunatic; and was it not well known that insanity had more than once cropped out with ugly persistence in his mother's family?
A friend at last told Stayne of the hard things that were being said of him. The informant was this time a real friend, and not, as so often happens in such cases, a foe under the guise of one. Stayne knew this, and hence felt the verity of the tidings bear in upon him with full force. At first they annoyed him excessively. Then a sense of disgust beset him, and of indifference as well. His life had grown purposeless. Nearly the most enviable man in the country, he was yet one of the least contented. He said something of this sort to the friend who had brought him news of those unpleasant rumors. "You should marry," was the reply. "Select some lovely girl (there are thousands to choose from), and devote yourself to her happiness."
"Ah, true, true," murmured Stayne, stroking his mustache. "There are thousands to choose from, and that's the devil of it. They're all alike—at least to me."
"Build some colossal monument of charity, then. Dive deep into the waters of altruism."
"And bring up a clam-shell instead of a pearl," sneered Stayne. "Still," he went on, with an air much less ironical and languid, "I have always hoped to do something lastingly humanitarian before I died. The only trouble with us, who possess power to help great masses of people in this way, is the thought of what horrible maladministration may overtake our work, after we have either bestowed it upon the people or bequeathed it to them, and what hideous charlatanism and dishonesty may hereafter balk our sincerest efforts."
He soon afterward sailed away for somewhere, in a magnificent steam yacht, entirely without personal companionship other than that of sailing-master and crew. His friends held this to be another mad freak, but their verdict was doubtless tinged with envy. Stayne, who passionately loved the sea, wanted to brood in its unshared company. The impulse was not unlike that of Byron; and when we recall that this young American was, in his own style, almost as handsome as the famed English singer, and that his tastes were strongly poetic, the analogy surely does not suffer.
"The sea may tell me," he would occasionally reflect before starting—and reflect half in humorous earnest, half in sombre jest, "what sort of incentive, occupation, self-absorption my life just now really desires. Or it may tell me, on the other hand, whether grief and disappointment have indeed thrust my soul into an oubliette of that austere Bastille, ennui and doomed that I shall wait there only a single summons—that of the turnkey, Death."
He had already cruised in this stately yacht of his, the Nomad, along numerous Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. He now chose the Pacific, reaching it after many days of indolent sailing and after pauses at many a port, from Rio Janeiro to San Francisco, a pleasure-journey at once audacious and immense.
On the Californian shores he lingered for two or three months, and at length put forth for a kind of adventurous ocean ramble among the mighty Polynesian sweeps.
Landing at Honolulu, he spent some time there, and then struck southwestward. His yacht was meanwhile in splendid condition, his picked crew in excellent health and perfect discipline. About ten days later he reached two islands, one of which was perhaps two thousand acres in extent and inhabited by a small settlement of English traders and a few hundreds of harmless, half-civilized natives. The other island lay possibly three miles distant, and the Nomad had scarcely landed him on its edge before Stayne became entranced with its lonely and lovely charms. Its extent was less than half that of its near neighbor, and, doubtless because of the English trading post across the intervening channel, it was apparently quite deserted. But Stayne found there, amid a grove of rustling palms, the quaintest kind of a dwelling, which combined the primitive features of a Hawaiian structure with a veranda and two or three tiny ceiled chambers. An American or European had evidently erected the curious edifice, and then left it here on this deserted island. Stayne at once conceived the idea of establishing himself as its latest occupant, and sent across the channel for rugs, couches, and other articles of convenience or comfort.
One afternoon he remained quite alone on the island, while the Nomadsteamed away for the purpose of securing and transporting some heavier furniture, which the small boats could scarcely carry and which he had purchased on the previous day. For a long time he paced the hard white curve of beach, that the musical beryl sea lapped with tender and foam-rimmed surges, below craggy cliffs colored a tawny brown and overhung with blossoming vines, where the great discs of the flowers looked like peering fairy faces.
"A paradise," said Stayne to himself, and wondered how long he would stay in the odd little species of bungalow that he was furnishing. But a short while before sunset, and just as he had begun to watch for some appearance of his returning yacht, a change not wholly of the sort which is supposed to occur in paradise fell upon sky and land. One became quickly and gloomily misted over, and the other caught new tints in the emerald of its palms and umber of its rocks.
A few minutes later a terrific tropical storm had broken loose. Stayne took refuge in the little building which he had designed for his hermitage, and here he abode for nearly two hours, while javelins of lightning pierced the almost inky air and he could hear the roar of the sea like voices from a multitude of giants in mingled wrath and pain. When at last the torrents of rain had lessened, and the whole riotous turbulence was in a measure stilled, he drew near the door of his retreat. This door faced a gap in the rocks, and he now succeeded in discerning, though very vaguely, the pale stretch of sand that lay perhaps a hundred yards beyond. But he caught only fitful glimpses of it, for the billows that poured over it were no less incessant than they were mammoth. Now and then the lightning aided his vision, followed as it was by crashes of thunder that seemed to phrase awful tidings of the Nomad and those who manned her.
Suddenly, as a fresh blaze of flame illumined the shore, he felt certain that the lightning had just missed dealing him death; for some great dark object seemed to tumble like an over-toppling cliff between himself and the white-lit, tempestuous sea. Then fiercer torrents of rain fell, and were driven toward the opening in such solid sheets that it needed all his might to close the door.
With strange abruptness the storm at length ceased. When Stayne reopened the door and again looked forth, masses of cloud were hurrying across a heaven in which beamed a full and golden-tinted moon. The sea, directly in front of him, still frothed angrily, but all its wild ardors were spent. Great crevices were scooped in the beach, and drenched tangles of torn-down vine invaded it, while here and there a prone palm-tree made him shudder at the hair-breadth escape of those grove-girt roofs which had so lately sheltered him. The moonlight now grew steadier, for the clouds were quite denuding the heavens in which they had so long and harshly raged. Stayne sank above his ankles, at first, in the inundated sand, as he moved forward to a certain dusky bulk which the sea laved and recoiled from, like a tiger sporting with the prey it has killed. What he presently gazed at was a nameless kind of ruin, and though jagged and splintery to a piteous degree, it oddly struck him, for a moment, as resembling a coffin. But this illusion soon vanished. He stooped and looked within the semi-shattered interior, which, for all its ruin could tell, might have been some narrow compartment of a ship. Yet while his hand rested on the broken verge of the thing, a certain chill and hardness made him aware that it was rather metallic than ligneous.
But in another moment he had forgotten everything except the fact that a human form lay stretched before his gaze. It was the form of a man, clad in some strange-made garment, not unlike that of the ancient Greeks. While stooping there in the vivid Southern moonlight and believing that he beheld a corpse, Stayne was thrilled by the realization that he had never before looked upon a being of so much facial beauty and physical grandeur.
He lifted the drooped head, whose heavy gold curls clung drenched about the wide and lordly brow. Having a flask of brandy on his person, he forced some of its contents between the hueless lips. Then he let the noble head sink backward again on what seemed a fragment of cushioned interior, and waited.
He had slight hopes of the man's resuscitation. It seemed to him that so splendid a creature should have every chance for his life, and yet how meagre was the aid that could now be furnished him! But soon, to Stayne's amazement, a shiver passed through the recumbent frame. Presently the still face grew fairer, for its eyes unclosed. Their hue could not be seen, but their size and brilliance were a new revelation.
Two good hours later, the sailing-master of the Nomad found, with great joy, that his employer was safe in a room of the little island dwelling. Stayne had lighted three or four candles, and had made a bed of some shawls and rugs, where his new-found companion reclined. He briefly explained that he had sheltered the youth after having revived him, and that he knew nothing either of the refugee's nationality or the destination of his wrecked bark, since he spoke a language quite incomprehensible. The captain stared and seemed greatly struck by the stranger's personal appearance. But Stayne, who was a kind superior yet one who never tolerated familiarity, cut short all expressions of wonderment by a series of questions concerning the fate of the Nomad. He received the pleasant information that his yacht had sustained only a few trifling injuries owing to her strength and size, and that she was now harbored close to the island, waiting his commands.
Food and drink in abundance were soon brought to the rescued waif. He partook of them with a certain surprise and fastidiousness, keenly watched by his host. He had spoken a language which had wholly baffled his hearer, who knew a number of languages more or less well. But the accent and vibrations of his voice had appealed to Stayne with great force. Its rhythms and cadences had delighted him. But he did not understand a syllable of what they meant. He had understood, however, a certain amount of graceful and extraordinary pantomime which the virile arms and faultless face had combined to enact. And such strange thoughts and feelings had resulted from this experience, that they possibly explained his reticence and crispness toward the master of his yacht.
Four weeks of continued and private intercourse now followed on this quiet little island between Stayne and his unforeseen charge. A great tide, as it proved later, had come on the midnight after the storm, and in its recession had washed away all traces of the curious wreckage. But Stayne was destined to learn, and with blood-curdling consternation, just what that weird fragment had represented. His discoveries on these and other like points were gradual. To make the youth comprehend his—Stayne's—language was difficult at first; but after a few days the task became marvellously easier. Marvellously, because here was an intelligence of no earthly grasp. With something that almost resembled horror and that surely was awe, Stayne found himself recoiling before mental faculties whose reach and penetration he had thus far imagined only.
Intercommunication became really facile between the two after a lapse of about four days. Then progress took a very fleet course, and actual conversation was carried on with mutual ease.
Chalco (by which name Stayne had got to know him) declared himself to be an inhabitant of the planet Mars. For many years, he stated, that world had been desirous of holding intercourse with our own. Enormous lengths of structure had been reared from a metal of peculiar lightness and suitability for purposes of building. From this same metal had been constructed the car in which he had shot, by electric potencies not explainable here, toward our comparatively adjacent orb. Electricity in Mars had reached great heights of development. This Chalco, the younger son of a powerful ruler, had been deemed almost despicable for his want of mental power. More than that, his high rank had made his love for a certain lady, held below him in the social grade, to be considered an almost treasonable offence. Chalco was in his way a pariah, and, when the tremendous problem of possible interplanetary communion had approached solution, his offer to mount the perilous car and make the audacious voyage had been received with sombre assent. The populace, in spite of his faults and youthful follies, loved him. The astronomer Golordon, though confident that his electric car would accomplish its purpose if launched at the given sidereal moment, was nevertheless a member of the royal family, and shrank from permitting so reckless an act on the part of one who stood third in succession to the throne. Yet Chalco had announced his intention either to wed the woman he loved or meet public execution. Then, suddenly, Golordon's great scheme was effected. Who would go? In the car there was room but for one. From the largest square of Dolostria, the chief city of Mars, rang a vast cry from an assembled multitude of many thousands. "Let our young prince Chalco mount the car if he is willing," shouted the people of Dolostria.
Chalco, standing near his father, smiled and waved his hand. At this the people gave a great roar that died into a wail of pain. They admired his courage, but they loved him while deploring his deficiencies, and were fearful of his destruction. Then, amid the tumult, Chalco turned toward his aged and royal father. "You know," he said, "that I love only one woman and shall love only her till my death. Yet you assert that if I wed her I must die."
"Yes," came the answer. "The son of royalty cannot wed among the common people."
Then Chalco, notwithstanding that he was believed so slight and inferior of capacity, pleaded strongly against this decree. Was not royalty a mere name now among this glorious people, who were empowered with every right of freedom? Why not shake precedent to its rotten foundations? Here in this mighty park where they stood, the statues of dead patriots, heroes, reformers, poets, all spoke of how centuries of tyranny had wrought popular redemption. Kingship was now but a name. "I will mount the car," he said to his father, "if you refuse me Alaria. I have the first claim to do so after the heir apparent, my brother, who refuses."
But the old king shook his head. And then Chalco descended from his father's side and went down among the populace and stretched out his hands to Alaria, who sprang toward him. He kissed the girl on the lips and put his arms about her, and they all knew it was a kiss of farewell; and, as Alaria was drawn fainting from his embrace, a shout that might almost have reached earth itself rose from the gathered throngs. Then Chalco, who was less beautiful (as he alleged) than countless other Martial men, and who had far less wit than they, and who did not understand the wondrous knowledge of his kinsman Golordon, fabricator of the aerial car, avowed himself ready for the daring and mystic voyage. He expected death, though they told him that Golordon was right and that his chances of reaching earth were many, and that the keen Martial telescopes had made it almost certain a race dwelt on the other planet, civilized enough to welcome him and to effect his safe return. Within the car was atmosphere enough to last him on his journey, which would, after all, be of inappreciable brevity. He had only to turn a certain knob, when once within the sealed chamber, and he would dart through space at the rate of millions of miles a second. Golordon had discovered a new law of electricity, and had already applied it to the satisfaction of all the famed Dolostrian academies. A single peril threatened him on reaching earth, and that was the hostile electricity of a thunderstorm. If ordinary lightning were in the terrestrial air, it would shatter the car by its negative and combative forces.
Chalco, with despair in his heart but a brave smile on his lips, bounded up the ladder that led to the platform where the aeronautic ship floated, like a great tethered bird. He kissed his hand to the multitude, which gazed up at him with tears and murmurs of admiration. Yet there were some among them who on our planet would be called "rationalists" and "agnostics," and these deplored his going. Far better, they said, to send a man of science than this young ignorant prince, who had nothing save his courage to recommend him in so important a venture, and whose intent was well known to have been suicidal because his marriage with the girl Alaria had met paternal veto.
In truth, Chalco cared little for his life. This contempt, mingled with the spirit of adventure, made him watch unflinchingly the final preparations. These were effected, and the car shot forth from the splendid city and became a speck in the blue Armament, soon fading to blankness.
For Chalco the voyage had been one as instantaneous as it would be to a cablegram flashed across the Atlantic, could that cablegram possess the power of thought. On reaching earth, however, there would have been no shock at all, so deft and admirable was the invention of Golordon and so neatly adapted to the laws of gravitation here. That fearful tropical thunderstorm, however, had ruined everything. The car fell shattered on the island coast, and its inmate, flung into the sea, Anally reached land after some magnificent efforts at swimming and sank unconscious where Stayne had found him, in a remnant of his own demolished vessel.
Chalco's listener (there can be no doubt of this fact) at first seriously doubted him. His story was too incredible, too preposterous! And then his entire admitted ignorance of what had been the methods of the astronomer Golordon—did not that smell of trickery and fraud? What more suspicious, too, than that all the material testimony of his native planet, testimony with which Chalco affirmed the car to have been packed, should have suffered, like that receptacle itself, complete destruction? And yet Stayne had seen a fragment of this alleged car. Moreover, to look on Chalco and listen to him was gradually, but implicitly, to believe his story.
He soon spoke with great fluency of the habits, customs, politics, and general national attainments on Mars. To Stayne it seemed impossible that he should not rank intellectually high among those whom he had left. And his beauty—how mobile, how captivating, how unparalleled it was! When the men and women on the other island saw him, they were plainly, yet pleasurably, shocked. But the women, young and old, could not keep their eyes from his face. Stayne, while watching him, thought of Tennyson's lines:
"Liker to the inhabitant
Of some clear planet close upon the sun
Than our man's earth."
After a while the Nomad brought them both to Californian shores. Chalco was in a way changed by this time. He had lost the charming and delicate air of wildness which had marked him at first. He had become, as it were, more "earthly." His new, conventional garb suited him far better than Stayne had expected. When at last he had grown able, with his almost miraculous facility, to master the English tongue, there was an element of peculiar diversion for his auditor in the regret with which he spoke of his thwarted mission.
"Golordon," he said, "supposed that you would send me back to him. He hardly doubted that in your world science had gained the same headway which it possesses in ours. He and thousands of others are now awaiting me."
"And you wish to return?" asked Stayne.
"No: I am contented here—with you."
"Chalco, you are not contented," replied Stayne, placing a hand on his shoulder. "You are secretly miserable."
"I remember Alaria," he responded, drooping his head.
"Our women are none of them so fair as this Alaria of yours?" asked Stayne, when they had been for some little time on the Californian coast and were about to dismiss the yacht prior to travelling eastward by an inland course.
"No; they are—almost ugly to me," Chalco answered. "I do not know if you can understand."
"I do understand," said Stayne, "when I look at you and realize how you surpass all earthly men in mind and body."
Stayne at last had found something keenly to interest him. The society of Chalco was an incessant intoxication. Wherever they went together his superb physique woke admiration, delight. Stayne introduced him as "Mr. Chalcott, a relative who has spent many years among the Polynesian islands." Remembering the rumors of his own madness and the extreme improbability of Chalco's history, this course to the young American wanderer seemed much the wisest. Meanwhile a certain idea had entered Stayne's head. They lingered only a short time in New York, after reaching it. At a supper of fashionable men and women which Stayne gave in the metropolis, and at which Chalco, with his insecure yet engaging English, took the whole company by storm, a lady of taste and social distinction murmured in his ear—
"This cousin of yours is an enchantment. I have never seen so wondrously handsome a man. We women are all at his feet. But he does not care for us. That is plain. He is like a god—like some one from another sphere. It's as though he had come from another sphere and loved a woman there—or a goddess—whom he cannot forget."
"Will she have the same feeling?" thought Stayne, whose mind was concerning itself with Mme. d'Autreville.
When, a fortnight later, they reached Paris, the winter season was at its gayest height. Stayne brought his friend into the salon of the duchesse. She was radiantly handsome as ever, and quite as coldly so. He watched her intently as she spoke with Chalco. He saw a change creep over her manner. Suitors as usual surrounded her, but she turned to Chalco with a novel spark of interest in her brown eyes, a deepened sweetness in her frigid smile. Time went on, and soon all Paris was talking of Mme. d'Autreville's grande passion. She made it almost public; she seemed like a woman drunk with infatuation. Stayne often accompanied Chalco when he visited the Hôtel d'Autreville, but not always. He was secretly triumphant, yet not at all contented. One day he said to Chalco:
"You are the rage here, as they call it. And yet everybody thinks you unhappy."
"I am," was the answer.
"You desire to—return?"
"No. Why should I? She is forbidden to me."
"And Mme. d'Autreville?" pursued Stayne. "There is a woman who has never loved living man, till she looked upon you. Have you no real regard for her?"
"None."
Stayne laughed. "Go and tell her so," he said.
"I have told her so," was the reply.
Stayne started terribly. "You have!" he exclaimed. "When?"
"This morning," returned Chalco, with a toss of his poetic head. "I was in her boudoir, as you call it. She suddenly burst into tears. It was very strange. I could do nothing—nothing but smile and speak the truth. She was like a statue that melts from marble into flesh. She flung herself at my feet. Well," he finished, "I left her very unhappy and very disturbed."
During these words Stayne had felt himself growing ghastly pale. Here was his victory! Hortense d'Autreville had been conquered at last! But a sudden transport of jealousy swept over him, nevertheless, inconsistent, idle, absurd, as he clearly realized.
"You—you have been very kind and complaisant to me," he tried to say calmly, yet not knowing just what he really said. "Yes, your—your acceptance of the situation, Chalco, was goodness itself. You might have told of your origin—you might have spoken of——"
He paused in horror, for Chalco had abruptly drawn a small, keen dagger from his breast, and now thrust it into his heart. As the splendid young creature fell, self-murdered before him, Stayne sprang to his side.
"Chalco!" he shouted. "What have you done?"
"I—I was tired of it all," came the gasped answer of the dying man. "You were a true friend, but Alaria haunted me so! I—I cannot live without her, and so I die sorrowing for her!"
When the gossip and consternation of "Mr. Chalcott's" suicide were at their height, Stayne went to Hortense d'Autreville.
He found her tremulous, tortured with anguish.
"So," he said to her, "you have loved at last."
"Yes—yes," she faltered. "Why did he kill himself? You know! Tell me!"
"He loved another woman, who was lost to him forever," Stayne answered, and turned on his heel and left her.
This was the revenge of Aubrey Stayne. But it brought him no consolation. Does any revenge ever do that? As for the secret of Chalco's origin, he religiously kept it through the rest of his life. Why should he not have done so? To tell what he knew, without a shred of proof for his support, would simply have made him the jest of unpitying sceptics.