With this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the rue de Rivoli, to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Chelles sitting on the other side of the room.
She had not seen Chelles since her return to Paris. It had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine. It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as “her luck” that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, who had now become the Marquise de Trezac. Undine knew that Chelles and his compatriots, however scandalized at her European companions, would be completely indifferent to Mrs. Rolliver’s appearance; but one gesture of Madame de Trezac’s eyeglass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as “wrong.”
All this passed through Undine’s mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Chelles had signalled his recognition. If their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results. As it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past.
Her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. She kept herself well in the foreground of Indiana’s life, and cultivated toward the rarely-visible Rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. Indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result; but still there came no hint of a reward. For a time Undine restrained the question on her lips; but one afternoon, when she had inducted Indiana into the deepest mysteries of Parisian complexion-making, the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain.
Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh.
“Oh, my dear, I’ve been meaning to tell you—it’s off, I’m afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr. Van Degen has seen you ‘round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed—”
“He guessed—and he wouldn’t?”
“Well, no. He wouldn’t. I hate to tell you.”
“Oh—” Undine threw off a vague laugh. “Since you’re intimate enough for him to tell you THAT he must, have told you more—told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn’t—even Peter Van Degen couldn’t—just simply have said to you: ‘I wont see her.’”
Mrs. Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.
“He DID say more?” Undine insisted. “He gave you a reason?
“He said you’d know.”
“Oh how base—how base!” Undine was trembling with one of her littlegirl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr. and Mrs. Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. “Of course he’s been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I’ve no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him.”
Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: “Indiana Rolliver, if you won’t do it for me I’ll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I’ll wait there in the hall till he sees me!”
Indiana lifted a protesting hand. “Don’t, Undine—not that!”
“Why not?”
“Well—I wouldn’t, that’s all.”
“You wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t you? You must have a reason.” Undine faced her with levelled brows. “Without a reason you can’t have changed so utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge. “Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn’t do you the least bit of good.”
“Have they turned him so completely against me? I don’t care if they have! I know him—I can get him back.”
“That’s the trouble.” Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion. “It’s not that any one has turned him against you. It’s worse than that—”
“What can be?”
“You’ll hate me if I tell you.”
“Then you’d better make him tell me himself!”
“I can’t. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU—something you did, I mean. Something he found out about you—”
Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. “About me? How fearfully false! Why, I’ve never even LOOKED at anybody—!”
“It’s nothing of that kind.” Indiana’s mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. “It’s the way you acted to your own husband.”
“I—my—to Ralph? HE reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?” “Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill.”
“How on earth did he know?” The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.
“It’s true, then?” Indiana exclaimed. “Oh, Undine—”
Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.
Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. “I didn’t believe it when he told me; I’d never have thought it of you. Before you’d even applied for your divorce!”
Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue—the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.
“The Marvells must have told him—the beasts!” It relieved her to be able to cry it out.
“It was your husband’s sister—what did you say her name was? When you didn’t answer her cable, she cabled Mr. Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back.”
Undine stared. “He never did!”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that show you the story’s all trumped up?”
Indiana shook her head. “He said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn’t another thing.”
Undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring. “Then he knew it all along—he admits that? And it made no earthly difference to him at the time?” She turned almost victoriously on her friend. “Did he happen to explain THAT, I wonder?”
“Yes.” Indiana’s longanimity grew almost solemn. “It came over him gradually, he said. One day when he wasn’t feeling very well he thought to himself: