"But we can decide that a bit later on."

"That? What, Alston?"

"I was going to say it might be as well to get Claude out of the way for a day or two while we start on old Crayford here. I suppose it could be managed somehow?"

"Alston--" Charmian stopped on the path between the geraniums. "Anything can be managed that will help to persuade Mr. Crayford to accept Claude's opera."

"Right you are. That's talking! I'll think it all over and let you know."

"Oh," she exclaimed. "How I wish the end of August was here! You'll be in London. All your time will be filled up. You'll be singing, being applauded, _getting on_. And I have to sit here, and wait--wait."

"You'll be studying the libretto."

"So I shall!"

She sent him a grateful look.

"What a good friend you are to us, Alston!" she said, and there was heart at that moment in her voice.

"And haven't you been good friends to me? What about the studio? What about the Prophet's Chamber? Why, you've given me a sort of a home and family, you and old Claude. I can tell you I've often felt lonesome in Europe, I've often felt all in, right away from everybody, and my Dad trying to starve me out, and all my people dead against what I was doing. Since I've known you, well, I've felt quite bully in comparison with what it used to be. Claude's success and yours, it's just going to be my success too. And that's all there is to it."

He wrung her hand and shouted for Claude.

It was nearly time for him to go.

CHAPTER XXVI

Jernington, after sending to Claude several anxious and indeed almost deplorable letters, pleading to be let off his bargain by telegram, arrived in Algiers in the middle of the following July, with a great deal of fuss and very little luggage.

The Heaths welcomed him warmly.

Although he was a native of Suffolk, and had only spent a year in Germany, he succeeded in looking almost exactly like a German student.

Rather large and bulky, he had a quite hairless face, very fair, with Teutonic features, and a high forehead, above which the pale hair of his head was cropped like the coat of a newly singed horse. His eyes were pale blue, introspective and romantic. At the back of his neck, just above his low collar, appeared a neat little roll of white flesh.

Charmian thought he looked as if he had once, consenting, been gently boiled. A flowing blue tie, freely peppered with ample white spots, gave a Bohemian touch to his pleasant and innocent appearance. He was dressed for cool weather in England, and wore boots with square toes and elastic sides.

In his special line he was a man of extraordinary talent.

He had intended to be a composer, but had little faculty for original work. His knowledge of composition, nevertheless, was enormous, and he was the best orchestral "coach" in England.

His heart was in his work. His devotion to a clever pupil knew no limits. And he considered Claude the cleverest pupil he had ever taught.

Charmian, therefore, accepted him with enthusiasm--boots, tie, little roll of white flesh, the whole of him.

He settled down with them in Mustapha, once he had been conveyed into the house, as comfortably as a cat in front of whom, with every tender precaution, has been placed a bowl of rich milk. In a couple of days it seemed as if he had always been there.

Charmian did not see very much of him. The two men toiled with diligence despite the great heat which lay over the land. They began early in the morning before the sun was high, rested and slept in the middle of the day, resumed work about five, and, with an interval for dinner, went on till late in the night.

The English Colony had long since broken up. Only the British Vice-Consul and his wife remained, and they lived a good way out in the country. Since May few people had come to disturb the peace of Djenan-el-Maqui. Charmian dwelt in a strange and sun-smitten isolation.

She was very much alone. Only now and then some French acquaintance would call to see her and sit with her for a little while at evening in the garden, or in the courtyard of the fountain.

The beauty, the fierce romance of this land, sometimes excited her spirit. Sometimes, with fiery hands, it lulled her into a condition almost of apathy. She listened to the fountain, she looked at the sea which was always blue, and she felt almost as if some part of her nature had fallen away from her, leaving her vague and fragmentary, a Charmian lacking some virtue, or vice, that had formerly been hers and had made her salient. But this apathy did not last long. The sound of Jernington's strangely German voice talking loudly above would disturb it, perhaps, or the noise of chords or pa.s.sages powerfully struck upon the piano. And immediately the child was with her again, she was busy thinking, planning, hoping, longing, concentrated on the future of the child.

She had studied the libretto minutely, had practised reading it aloud.

It was of course written in French, and she found a clever woman, retired from a theatrical career in Paris, Madame Thenant, who gave her lessons in elocution, and who finally said that she read the libretto "_a.s.sez bien_." This from Madame Thenant, who had played Dowagers at the Comedie Francaise, was a high compliment. Charmian felt that she was ready to make an effect on Jacob Crayford. She was in active correspondence with Alston Lake, who was still in London, and who had had greater success than before. From him she knew that Crayford was in town, and would take his usual "cure" in August at Divonne-les-Bains.

Lake had "begun upon him" warily, but had not yet even hinted at the visit to Africa. After his "cure" Crayford proposed making a motor tour.

He thought nothing of running all over Europe in his car. Lake was going presently to speak of the perfect surfaces of the Algerian roads, "the best way perhaps of getting him to go to Algeria." He still wanted operas "badly," and had asked after the Heaths directly he arrived in London. Lake had replied that Claude was finishing off an opera. Was he?

Where? Alston had evaded the question, giving the impression that Claude wished to remain hidden away. Thereupon Crayford had asked after Charmian, and had been informed that of course she was with her husband.

Turtle doves, eh? Crayford had dropped the subject, but had eventually returned to it again in a casual way. Had Lake heard the opera? Some of it. Did it seem any good? Lake had not expressed an opinion. He had shrewdly made rather a mystery of the whole thing. This, as he expected, had put Crayford on the alert. Since the success of Jacques Sennier he saw the hand of his rival, "The Metropolitan," everywhere, like the giant hand of one of the great Trusts. Lake's air of mystery had evidently made him suspect that Claude had some reason for keeping away and making a sort of secret of what he was doing. Finally he had inquired point blank whether any one was "after young Heath's opera."

Lake could not say anything as to that. "Why don't he write in Europe anyway, where folk could get at him if they wanted to?" had been the next question. Lake's answer had rather indicated that the composer was very glad to have a good stretch of ocean between himself and any "folk"

who might want to get at him.

This was the point at which the Lake correspondence with Charmian stood in the first week of August. His last letter lay on her knee one afternoon, as she sat in a hidden nook at the bottom of the garden, with delicate bamboos rustling in a warm south wind about her.

Claude knew nothing of this exchange of letters, of all the planning and plotting. It was all for him. Some day, when the result was success, he should be told everything, unless by that time it was too late, and the steps to success were all forgotten. Charmian did nothing to disturb him. She wished him to be obsessed by the work, to do it now merely for its own sake. The result of his labors would probably be better if that were so. If Crayford did come--and he must come! Charmian was willing it every day--his coming would be a surprise to Claude, and would seem to be a surprise to Charmian. She would get rid of Claude for a few days when Lake forewarned her that their arrival was imminent; would persuade him to take a little holiday, to go, perhaps, up into the cork woods to Hammam R'rirha. He was very pale, had dark circles beneath his eyes. The incessant work was beginning to tell upon him severely. Charmian saw that. But how could she beg him to rest now, when Jernington had come out, when it was so vital to their interests that the opera should be finished as soon as possible! Besides, she was certain that even if she spoke Claude would not listen to her. Jernington, so he said, always gave him an impetus, always excited him. It was a keen pleasure to show a man of such deep knowledge what he had been doing, a keener pleasure still when he approved, when he said, in his German voice, "That goes!"

And they had been trying over pa.s.sages with instrumentalists who had been "unearthed," as Jernington expressed it, in Algiers. They had got hold of a horn player, had found another man who played the clarinet, the violin, and a third instrument.

In fact, they were living for, and in, the opera. And Charmian, devoured by her secret ambition, had no heart to play a careful wife's part. She had the will to urge her man on. She had no will to hold him back.

Afterward he could rest, he should rest--on the bed of his laurels.

She smiled now when she thought of that.

Presently she felt that some one was approaching her. She looked up and saw Jernington coming down the path, wiping his pale forehead with a silk handkerchief in which various colors seemed fortuitously combined.

"Is the work over?" she cried out to him.

He threw up one square-nailed white hand.

"No. But for once he has got a pa.s.sage all wrong. I have left him to correct it. He kicked me out, in fact!"

Jernington threw back his head and laughed gutturally. His laugh always contradicted his eyes. They were romantic, but his laugh was prosaic.

He sat down by Charmian and put his hands on his knees. One still grasped the handkerchief.

"Dear Mr. Jernington, tell me!" she said. "You know so much. Claude says your knowledge is extraordinary. Isn't the opera fine?"

Now Jernington was a specialist, and he was one of those men who cannot detach their minds from the subject in which they specialize in order to take a broad view. His vision was extraordinarily acute, but it was strictly limited. When Charmian spoke of the opera he believed he was thinking of the opera as a whole, whereas he was in reality only thinking about the orchestration of it.

"It is superb!" he replied enthusiastically. "Never before have I had a pupil with such talent as your husband."

With a rapid movement he put one hand to the back of his neck and softly rubbed his little roll of white flesh.

"He has an instinct for orchestration such as I have found in no one else. Now, for example--"

He flung himself into depths of orchestral knowledge, dragging Charmian with him. She was happily engulfed. When they emerged in about half an hour's time she again threw out a lure for general praise.