“Lâcher prise? What strange things you say!” the girl sighed as fairly for pain.
“They meant to snub us so that we shouldn’t dare to go to Branches,” Mrs. Westgate substituted with confidence.
“On the contrary,” said Bessie, “the Duchess offered to show me the place herself.”
“Yes, you may depend upon it she won’t let you out of her sight. She’ll show you the place from morning till night.”
“You’ve a theory for everything,” our young woman a little more helplessly allowed.
“And you apparently have none for anything.”
“I saw no attempt to ‘overawe’ us,” Bessie nevertheless persisted. “Their manners weren’t fine.”
“They were not even good!” Mrs. Westgate declared.
Her sister had a pause, but in a few moments claimed the possession of an excellent theory. “They just came to look at me!” she brought out as with much ingenuity. Mrs. Westgate did the idea justice; she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it a credit to a fresh young mind; while in reality she felt that the girl’s scepticism, or her charity, or, as she had sometimes called it appropriately, her idealism, wasproof against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that day and well on into the morrow. She privately ached—almost as under a dishonour—with the aftersense of having been inspected in that particular way.
On the morrow before luncheon Mrs. Westgate, having occasion to go out for an hour, left her sister writing a letter. When she came back she met Lord Lambeth at the door of the hotel and in the act of leaving it. She thought he looked considerably embarrassed; he certainly, she said to herself, had no spring. “I’m sorry to have missed you. Won’t you come back?” she asked.
“No—I can’t. I’ve seen your sister. I can never come back.” Then he looked at her a moment and took her hand. “Good-bye, Mrs. Westgate—you’ve been very kind to me.” And with what she thought a strange sad air on his handsome young face he turned away.
She went in only to find Bessie still writing her letter; find her, that is, seated at the table with the arrested pen in her hand. She put her question after a moment. “Lord Lambeth has been here?”
Then Bessie got up and showed her a pale serious face—bending it on her for some time, confessing silently and, a little, pleading. “I told him,” the girl said at last, “that we couldn’t go to Branches.”
Mrs. Westgate gave a gasp of temporary disappointment. “He might have waited,” she nevertheless smiled, “till one had seen the Castle.” An hour afterwards she spoke again. “I do wish, you know, you might have accepted him.”
“I couldn’t,” said Bessie, with the slowest gravest gentlest of headshakes.
“He’s really such a dear,” Mrs. Westgate pursued.
“I couldn’t,” Bessie repeated.
“If it’s only,” her sister added, “because those women will think they succeeded—that they paralysed us!”
Our young lady turned away, but presently added: “They were interesting. I should have liked to see them again.”
“So should I!” cried Mrs. Westgate, with much point.
“And I should have liked to see the Castle,” said Bessie. “But now we must leave England.”
Her sister’s eyes studied her. “You won’t wait to go to the National Gallery?”
“Not now.”
“Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?”
Bessie lost herself for a little in this. “We can stop there on our way to Paris,” she then said.
Lord Lambeth didn’t tell Percy Beaumont that the contingency he was not prepared at all to like had occurred; but that gentleman, on hearing that the two ladies had left London, wondered with some intensity what had happened; wondered, that is, till the Duchess of Bayswater came a little to his assistance. The two ladies went to Paris—when Mrs. Westgate beguiled the journey by repeating several times: “That’s what I regret; they’ll think they petrified us.” But Bessie Alden, strange and charming girl, seemed to regret nothing.
I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had further been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I was inclined to a literary career and a friend had said to me: “If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house: there’s no other such way to pick up material.” I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by the celebrated Stendhal to his sister: “I have a passionate desire to know human nature, and a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people can’t conceal their real characters.” I was an admirer ofLa Chartreuse de Parme, and easily believed one couldn’t do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’sPère Goriot—the “pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres,” kept by Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was one of the most esteemed in Geneva and, standing in a little garden of its own not far from the lake, had a very homely comfortable sociable aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which looked upon the street, or rather upon a littleplaceadorned,like everyplacein Geneva, great or small, with a generous cool fountain. That approach was not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more or less in the kitchen—amid the “offices” and struck with their assault on your nostril. This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas things conformed frankly to their nature and the whole mechanism lay bare. It was rather primitive, the mechanism, but it worked in a friendly homely regular way. Madame Beaurepas was an honest little old woman—she was far advanced in life and had been keeping a pension for more than forty years—whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that she was fond of a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of seventy-four, she wore stacks of flowers in her cap. There was a legend in the house that she wasn’t so deaf as she pretended and that she feigned this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. I never indeed subscribed to this theory, convinced as I became that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity. She dealt with the present and the future in the steady light of a long experience; she had been having lodgers for nearly half a century and all her concern with them was that they should pay their bills, fold their napkins and make use of the doormat. She cared very little for their secrets. “J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,” she said to me. She had quite ceased to trouble about individuals; she cared only for types and clear categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a number of these and her mind become a complete collection of “heads.” She flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeonhole a new-comer, and if she made mistakes her deportment never betrayed them. I felt that as regards particular persons—once they conformed to the few rules—she had neither likesnor dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval, but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. “Je trouve que c’est déplacé!”—this exhausted her view of the matter. If one of her inmates had put arsenic into thepot-au-feuI believe Madame Beaurepas would have been satisfied to remark that this receptacle was not the place for arsenic. She could have imagined it otherwise and suitably applied. The line of misconduct to which she most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. “When people come chez moi it isn’t to cut a figure in the world; I’ve never so flattered myself,” I remember hearing her say; “and when you pay seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look down on the others. Yet there are people who, the less they pay, take themselves the more au sérieux. My most difficult boarders have always been those who’ve fiercely bargained and had the cheapest rooms.”
Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted red-armed peasant-women, kept the house going. If on your exits and entrances you peeped into the kitchen it made very little difference; as Célestine the cook shrouded herself in no mystery and announced the day’s fare, amid her fumes, quite with the resonance of the priestess of the tripod foretelling the future. She was always at your service with a grateful grin: she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad little back. She was always tramping in and out between her kitchen and the fountain in theplace, where it often seemed to methat a large part of the preparation for our meals went forward—the wringing-out of towels and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles. You enjoyed from the door-step a perpetual back-view of Célestine and of her large loose woollen ankles as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life proceeded but in a makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if we suffered from a sordid tone. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. Nothing can be better than that principle when the rich real underlies it. We had the rich real at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds equipped with fluffyduvets; of admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person as we lay recumbent on these downy couches; of copious wholesome succulent dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the Pension Beaurepas local colour, and this, with me, at that time, was a grand term. I was young and ingenuous and had just come from America. I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue and innocently believed it to flourish by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures at the Academy, the nursing mother of the present University, and come home with a violent appetite. I always enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge—there was only one just there in those days—which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town, and gave properest access to the house. There was a high wall with a double gate in the middle and flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty grillebristled with old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a small thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same complexion, together with three orange-trees in tubs disposed as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the salon.
As commonly happens in boarding-houses the rustle of petticoats was at the Pension Beaurepas the most familiar form of the human tread. We enjoyed the usual allowance of economical widows and old maids and, to maintain the balance of the sexes, could boast but of a finished old Frenchman and an obscure young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that well-perched place, but had once spent six months in Paris, where he had tasted of the tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he pronounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, “manquait d’agrêments.” When obliged, for reasons he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was after all more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans who might be more or less counted on to add to the resemblance. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man with a vast narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the garden and bent his eyes, with the aid of a large magnifying glass, on a volume from thecabinet de lecture.
One day a fortnight after my adoption of the retreat I describe I came back rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half an hour of themidday breakfast. I entered the salon with the design of possessing myself of the day’sGalignanibefore one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower—a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel-parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present moment in an hotel-parlour; his hat was on his head or rather half off it—pushed back from his forehead and more suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered; one of these he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding out at arm’s length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet theJournal de Genève, a newspaper then of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for myGalignani, the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eyeglass, a sad and solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search, he silently offered me theJournal de Genève.
“It appears,” he said, “to be the paper of the country.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I believe it’s the best.”
He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm’s-length as if it had been a looking-glass. “Well,” he concluded, “I suppose it’s natural a small country should have small papers. You could wrap this one up, mountains and all, in one of our dailies!”
I found myGalignaniand went off with it into the garden, where I seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall gentleman in the hat appear at one of the open windows of the salon and stand there with his hands in his pockets andhis legs a little apart. He looked infinitely bored, and—I don’t know why—I immediately felt sorry for him. He hadn’t at all—as M. Pigeonneau, for instance, in his way, had it—the romantic note; he looked just a jaded, faded, absolutely voided man of business. But after a little he came into the garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless helpless carriage and the vague unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered over the place seemed to make it proper that, as an older resident, I should offer him a certain hospitality. I addressed him some remark founded on our passage of a moment before, and he came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping one of his long knees in his hands.
“When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?” he inquired. “That’s what I call it—the little breakfast and the big breakfast. I never thought I should live to see the time when I’d want to eat two breakfasts. But a man’s glad to do anything over here.”
“For myself,” I dropped, “I find plenty to do.”
He turned his head and glanced at me with an effect of bottomless wonder and dry despair. “You’re getting used to the life, are you?”
“I like the life very much,” I laughed.
“How long have you tried it?”
“Do you mean this place?”
“Well, I mean anywhere. It seems to me pretty much the same all over.”
“I’ve been in this house only a fortnight,” I said.
“Well, what should you say, from what you’ve seen?” my companion asked.
“Oh you can see all there is at once. It’s very simple.”
“Sweet simplicity, eh? Well then I guess my two ladies will know right off what’s the matter with it.”
“Oh everything’s very good,” I hastened toexplain. “And Madame Beaurepas is a charming old woman. And then it’s very cheap.”
“Cheap, is it?” my friend languidly echoed.
“Doesn’t it strike you so?” I thought it possible he hadn’t inquired the terms. But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat there, clasping his knee and absently blinking at the sunshine.
“Are you from the United States, sir?” he presently demanded, turning his head again.
“Well, I guess I am, sir,” I felt it indicated to reply; and I mentioned the place of my nativity.
“I presumed you were American or English. I’m from the United States myself—from New York City. Many of our people here?” he went on.
“Not so many as I believe there have sometimes been. There are two or three ladies.”
“Well,” my interlocutor observed, “I’m very fond of ladies’ society. I think when it’s really nice there’s nothing comes up to it. I’ve got two ladies here myself. I must make you acquainted with them.” And then after I had rejoined that I should be delighted and had inquired of him if he had been long in Europe: “Well, it seems precious long, but my time’s not up yet. We’ve been here nineteen weeks and a half.”
“Are you travelling for pleasure?” I hazarded.
Once more he inclined his face to me—his face that was practically so odd a comment on my question, and I so felt his unspoken irony that I soon also turned and met his eyes. “No, sir. Not much, sir,” he added after a considerable interval.
“Pardon me,” I said; for his desolation had a little the effect of a rebuke.
He took no notice of my appeal; he simply continued to look at me. “I’m travelling,” he said at last, “to please the doctors. They seemed to thinkthey’denjoy it.”
“Ah, they sent you abroad for your health?”
“They sent me abroad because they were so plaguey muddled they didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s often the best thing,” I ventured to remark.
“It was a confession of medical bankruptcy; they wanted to stop my run on them. They didn’t know enough to cure me, as they had originally pretended they did, and that’s the way they thought they’d get round it. I wanted to be cured—I didn’t want to be transported. I hadn’t done any harm.” I could but assent to the general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and put to my companion that I hoped he hadn’t been seriously ill. He only shook his foot at first, for some time, by way of answer; but at last, “I didn’t get natural rest,” he wearily observed.
“Ah, that’s very annoying. I suppose you were overworked.”
“I didn’t have a natural appetite—nor even an unnatural, when they fixed up things for me. I took no interest in my food.”
“Well, I guess you’ll both eat and sleep here,” I felt justified in remarking.
“I couldn’t hold a pen,” my neighbour went on. “I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t walk from my house to the cars—and it’s only a little way. I lost my interest in business.”
“You needed a good holiday,” I concluded.
“That’s what the doctors said. It wasn’t so very smart of them. I had been paying strict attention to business for twenty-three years.”
“And in all that time you had never let up?” I cried in horror.
My companion waited a little. “I kind o’ let up Sundays.”
“Oh that’s nothing—because our Sundays themselves never let up.”
“I guess they do over here,” said my friend.
“Yes, but you weren’t over here.”
“No, I wasn’t over here. I shouldn’t have been where I was three years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe. I was in a very advantageous position. I did a very large business. I was considerably interested in lumber.” He paused, bending, though a little hopelessly, about to me again. “Have you any business interests yourself?” I answered that I had none, and he proceeded slowly, mildly and deliberately. “Well, sir, perhaps you’re not aware that business in the United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling-off. Different parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I’m aware none of their fine talk has set things going again.” I ingeniously intimated that if business was dull the time was good for coming away; whereupon my compatriot threw back his head and stretched his legs a while. “Well, sir, that’s one view of the matter certainly. There’s something to be said for that. These things should be looked at all round. That’s the ground my wife took. That’s the ground,” he added in a moment, “that a lady would naturally take.” To which he added a laugh as ghostly as a dried flower.
“You think there’s a flaw in the reasoning?” I asked.
“Well, sir, the ground I took was that the worse a man’s business is the more it requires looking after. I shouldn’t want to go out to recreation—not even to go to church—if my house was on fire. My firm’s not doing the business it was; it’s like a sick child—it requires nursing. What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up so that I could go on at home. I’d have taken anything they’d have given me, and as many times a day. I wanted to be right there; I hadmy reasons; I have them still. But I came off all the same,” said my friend with a melancholy smile.
I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise and so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his seniority and found myself offering him paternal advice. “Don’t think about all that. Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get well. Travel about and see Europe. At the end of a year, by the time you’re ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you’ll be quite well and happy.”
He laid his hand on my knee; his wan kind eyes considered me, and I thought he was going to say “You’re very young!” But he only brought out: “You’vegot used to Europe anyway!”
At breakfast I encountered his ladies—his wife and daughter. They were placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the pensionnaires had dispersed and some of them, according to custom, had come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of carrying out his offer.
“Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?” he said, moved apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with social diversion. She was standing with her mother in one of the paths, where she looked about with no great complacency, I inferred, at the homely characteristics of the place. Old M. Pigeonneau meanwhile hovered near, hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of a pretext. “Mrs. Ruck, Miss Sophy Ruck”—my friend led me up.
Mrs. Ruck was a ponderous light-coloured person with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye and an arrangement of hair, with forehead-tendrils, water-waves and other complications, that reminded me of those framed “capillary” tributes to the dead which used long ago to hang over artless mantel-shelves between the pair of glass domes protecting wax flowers. Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, tiny and pretty and lively, with no more maiden shyness than a feminine terrier in a tinkling collar. Both of these ladies were arrayed in black silk dresses,much ruffled and flounced, and if elegance werealla matter of trimming they would have been elegant.
“Do you think highly of this pension?” asked Mrs. Ruck after a few preliminaries.
“It’s a little rough,” I made answer, “but it seems to me comfortable.”
“Does it take a high rank in Geneva?”
“I imagine it enjoys a very fair fame.”
“I should never dream of comparing it to a New York boarding-house,” Mrs. Ruck pursued.
“It’s quite in a different style,” her daughter observed. Miss Ruck had folded her arms; she held her elbows with a pair of small white hands and tapped the ground with a pretty little foot.
“We hardly expected to come to a pension,” said Mrs. Ruck, who looked considerably over my head and seemed to confide the truth in question, as with an odd austerity or chastity, a marked remoteness, to the general air. “But we thought we’d try; we had heard so much about Swiss pensions. I was saying to Mr. Ruck that I wondered if this is a favourable specimen. I was afraid we might have made a mistake.”
“Well, we know some people who have been here; they think everything of Madame Beaurepas,” said Miss Sophy. “They say she’s a real friend.”
Mrs. Ruck, at this, drew down a little. “Mr. and Mrs. Parker—perhaps you’ve heard her speak of them.”
“Madame Beaurepas has had a great many Americans; she’s very fond of Americans,” I replied.
“Well, I must say I should think she would be if she compares them with some others.”
“Mother’s death on comparing,” remarked Miss Ruck.
“Of course I like to study things and to see formyself,” the elder lady returned. “I never had a chance till now; I never knew my privileges. Give me an American!” And, recovering her distance again, she seemed to impose this tax on the universe.
“Well, I must say there are some things I like over here,” said Miss Sophy with courage. And indeed I could see that she was a young woman of sharp affirmations.
Her father gave one of his ghostly grunts. “You like the stores—that’s what you like most, I guess.”
The young lady addressed herself to me without heeding this charge. “I suppose you feel quite at home here.”
“Oh he likes it—he has got used to the life. He says youcan!” Mr. Ruck proclaimed.
“I wish you’d teach Mr. Ruck then,” said his wife. “It seems as if he couldn’t get used to anything.”
“I’m used to you, my dear,” he retorted, but with his melancholy eyes on me.
“He’s intensely restless,” continued Mrs. Ruck. “That’s what made me want to come to a pension. I thought he’d settle down more.”
“Well, lovey,” he sighed, “I’ve had hitherto mainly to settle up!”
In view of a possible clash between her parents I took refuge in conversation with Miss Ruck, who struck me as well out in the open—as leaning, subject to any swing, so to speak, on the easy gate of the house of life. I learned from her that with her companions, after a visit to the British islands, she had been spending a month in Paris and that she thought she should have died on quitting that city. “I hung out of the carriage, when we left the hotel—I assure you I did. And I guess mother did, too.”
“Out of the other window, I hope,” said I.
“Yes, one out of each window”—her promptitude was perfect. “Father had hard work, I can tellyou. We hadn’t half-finished—there were ever so many other places we wanted to go to.”
“Your father insisted on coming away?”
“Yes—after we had been there about a month he claimed he had had enough. He’s fearfully restless; he’s very much out of health. Mother and I took the ground that if he was restless in Paris he needn’t hope for peace anywhere. We don’t mean to let up on him till he takes us back.” There was an air of keen resolution in Miss Ruck’s pretty face, of the lucid apprehension of desirable ends, which made me, as she pronounced these words, direct a glance of covert compassion toward her poor recalcitrant sire. He had walked away a little with his wife, and I saw only his back and his stooping patient-looking shoulders, whose air of acute resignation was thrown into relief by the cold serenity of his companion. “He’ll have to take us back in September anyway,” the girl pursued; “he’ll have to take us back to get some things we’ve ordered.”
I had an idea it was my duty to draw her out. “Have you ordered a great many things?”
“Well, I guess we’ve orderedsome. Of course we wanted to take advantage of being in Paris—ladies always do. We’ve left the most important ones till we go back. Of course that’s the principal interest for ladies. Mother said she’d feel so shabby if she just passed through. We’ve promised all the people to be right there in September, and I never broke a promise yet. So Mr. Ruck has got to make his plans accordingly.”
“And what are his plans?” I continued, true to my high conception.
“I don’t know; he doesn’t seem able to make any. His great idea was to get to Geneva, but now that he has got here he doesn’t seem to see the point. It’s the effect of bad health. He used to be so bright andnatural, but now he’s quite subdued. It’s about time he should improve, anyway. We went out last night to look at the jewellers’ windows—in that street behind the hotel. I had always heard of those jewellers’ windows. We saw some lovely things, but it didn’t seem to rouse father. He’ll get tired of Geneva sooner than he did of Paris.”
“Ah,” said I, “there are finer things here than the jewellers’ windows. We’re very near some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe.”
“I suppose you mean the mountains. Well, I guess we’ve seen plenty of mountains at home. We used to go to the mountains every summer. We’re familiar enough with the mountains. Aren’t we, mother?” my young woman demanded, appealing to Mrs. Ruck, who, with her husband, had drawn near again.
“Aren’t we what?” inquired the elder lady.
“Aren’t we familiar with the mountains?”
“Well, I hope so,” said Mrs. Ruck.
Mr. Ruck, with his hands in his pockets, gave me a sociable wink. “There’s nothing much you cantellthem!”
The two ladies stood face to face a few moments, surveying each other’s garments. Then the girl put her mother a question. “Don’t you want to go out?”
“Well, I think we’d better. We’ve got to go up to that place.”
“To what place?” asked Mr. Ruck.
“To that jeweller’s—to that big one.”
“They all seemed big enough—they weretoobig!” And he gave me another dry wink.
“That one where we saw the blue cross,” said his daughter.
“Oh come, what do you want of that blue cross?” poor Mr. Ruck demanded.
“She wants to hang it on a black velvet ribbon and tie it round her neck,” said his wife.
“A black velvet ribbon? Not much!” cried the young lady. “Do you suppose I’d wear that cross on a black velvet ribbon? On a nice little gold chain, if you please—a little narrow gold chain like an old-fashioned watch-chain. That’s the proper thing for that blue cross. I know the sort of chain I mean; I’m going to look for one. When I want a thing,” said Miss Ruck with decision, “I can generally find it.”
“Look here, Sophy,” her father urged, “you don’t want that blue cross.”
“I do want it—I happen to want it.” And her light laugh, with which she glanced at me, was like the flutter of some gage of battle.
The grace of this demonstration, in itself marked, suggested that there were various relations in which one might stand to Miss Ruck; but I felt that the sharpest of the strain would come on the paternal. “Don’t worry the poor child,” said her mother.
She took it sharply up. “Come on, mother.”
“We’re going to look round a little,” the elder lady explained to me by way of taking leave.
“I know what that means,” their companion dropped as they moved away. He stood looking at them while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and rubbed it with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr. Ruck’s.) I supposed him about to exhale some plaint, but I was mistaken. Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was a touching fatalist. “Well, they want to pick up something,” he contented himself with recognising. “That’s the principal interest for ladies.”
He distinguished me, as the French say; he honoured me with his esteem and, as the days elapsed, with no small share of his confidence. Sometimes he bored me a little, for the tone of his conversation was not cheerful, tending as it did almost exclusively to a melancholy dirge over the financial prostration of our common country. “No, sir, business in the United States is not what it once was,” he found occasion to remark several times a day. “There’s not the same spring—there’s not the same hopeful feeling. You can see it in all departments.” He used to sit by the hour in the little garden of the pension with a roll of American newspapers in his lap and his high hat pushed back, swinging one of his long legs and reading theNew York Herald. He paid a daily visit to the American banker’s on the other side of the Rhône and remained there a long time, turning over the old papers on the green velvet table in the centre of the Salon des Etrangers and fraternising with chance compatriots. But in spite of these diversions the time was heavy on his hands. I used at times to propose him a walk, but he had a mortal horror of any use of his legs other than endlessly dangling or crossing them, and regarded my direct employment of my own as a morbid form of activity. “You’ll kill yourself if you don’t look out,” he said, “walking all over the country. I don’t want to stump round that way—I ain’ta postman!” Briefly speaking, Mr. Ruck had few resources. His wife and daughter, on the other hand, it was to be supposed, were possessed of a good many that couldn’t be apparent to an unobtrusive young man. They also sat a great deal in the garden or in the salon, side by side, with folded hands, taking in, to vague ends, material objects, and were remarkably independent of most of the usual feminine aids to idleness—light literature, tapestry, the use of the piano. They lent themselves to complete displacement, however, much more than their companion, and I often met them, in the Rue du Rhône and on the quays, loitering in front of the jewellers’ windows. They might have had a cavalier in the person of old M. Pigeonneau, who professed a high appreciation of their charms, but who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived, in the connexion, of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs. Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently the language of conversation.
“They have a tournure de princesse—a distinction suprême,” he said to me. “One’s surprised to find them in a little pension bourgeoise at seven francs a day.”
“Oh they don’t come for economy. They must be rich.”
“They don’t come for my beaux yeux—for mine,” said M. Pigeonneau sadly. “Perhaps it’s for yours, young man. Je vous recommande la maman!”
I considered the case. “They came on account of Mr. Ruck because at hotels he’s so restless.”
M. Pigeonneau gave me a knowing nod. “Of course he is, with such a wife as that!—a femme superbe. She’s preserved in perfection—a miraculous fraîcheur. I like those large, fair, quiet women;they’re often, dans l’intimité, the most agreeable. I’ll warrant you that at heart Madame Roque is a finished coquette.” And then as I demurred: “You suppose her cold? Ne vous y fiez pas!”
“It’s a matter in which I’ve nothing at stake.”
“You young Americans are droll,” said M. Pigeonneau; “you never have anything at stake! But the little one, for example; I’ll warrant you she’s not cold. Toute menue as she is she’s admirably made.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“‘She’s very pretty’! Vous dites cela d’un ton! When you pay compliments to Mees Roque I hope that’s not the way you do it.”
“I don’t pay compliments to Miss Ruck.”
“Ah, decidedly,” said M. Pigeonneau, “you young Americans are droll!”
I should have suspected that these two ladies wouldn’t especially commend themselves to Madame Beaurepas; that as a maîtresse de salon, which she in some degree aspired to be, she would have found them wanting in a certain colloquial ease. But I should have gone quite wrong: Madame Beaurepas had no fault at all to find with her new pensionnaires. “I’ve no observation whatever to make about them,” she said to me one evening. “I see nothing in those ladies at all déplacé. They don’t complain of anything; they don’t meddle; they take what’s given them; they leave me tranquil. The Americans are often like that. Often, but not always,” Madame Beaurepas pursued. “We’re to have a specimen to-morrow of a very different sort.”
“An American?” I was duly interested.
“Two Américaines—a mother and a daughter. There are Americans and Americans: when you’re difficiles you’re more so than any one, and when you’ve pretensions—ah, par exemple, it’s serious. I foresee that with this little lady everything will beserious, beginning with her café au lait. She has been staying at the Pension Chamousset—my concurrente, you know, further up the street; but she’s coming away because the coffee’s bad. She holds to her coffee, it appears. I don’t know what liquid Madame Chamousset may dispense under that name, but we’ll do the best we can for her. Only I know she’ll make me des histoires about something else. She’ll demand a new lamp for the salon; vous allez voir cela. She wishes to pay but eleven francs a day for herself and her daughter, tout compris; and for their eleven francs they expect to be lodged like princesses. But she’s very ‘ladylike’—isn’t that what you call it in English? Oh, pour cela, she’s ladylike!”
I caught a glimpse on the morrow of the source of these portents, who had presented herself at our door as I came in from a walk. She had come in a cab, with her daughter and her luggage; and with an air of perfect softness and serenity she now disputed the fare as she stood on the steps and among her boxes. She addressed her cabman in a very English accent, but with extreme precision and correctness. “I wish to be perfectly reasonable, but don’t wish to encourage you in exorbitant demands. With a franc and a half you’re sufficiently paid. It’s not the custom at Geneva to give a pourboire for so short a drive. I’ve made inquiries and find it’s not the custom even in the best families. I’m a stranger, yes, but I always adopt the custom of the native families. I think it my duty to the natives.”
“But I’m a native too, moi!” cried the cabman in high derision.
“You seem to me to speak with a German accent,” continued the lady. “You’re probably from Basel. A franc and a half are sufficient. I see you’ve left behind the little red bag I asked you to hold between your knees; you’ll please to go back to the other houseand get it. Very well, si vous me manquez I’ll make a complaint of you to-morrow at the administration. Aurora, you’ll find a pencil in the outer pocket of my embroidered satchel; please write down his number—87; do you see it distinctly?—in case we should forget it.”
The young lady so addressed—a slight fair girl holding a large parcel of umbrellas—stood at hand while this allocution went forward, but apparently gave no heed to it. She stood looking about her in a listless manner—looking at the front of the house, at the corridor, at Célestine tucking back her apron in the doorway, at me as I passed in amid the disseminated luggage; her mother’s parsimonious attitude seeming to produce in Miss Aurora neither sympathy nor embarrassment. At dinner the two ladies were placed on the same side of the table as myself and below Mrs. Ruck and her daughter—my own position being on the right of Mr. Ruck. I had therefore little observation of Mrs. Church—such I learned to be her name—but I occasionally heard her soft distinct voice.
“White wine, if you please; we prefer white wine. There’s none on the table? Then you’ll please get some and remember to place a bottle of it always here between my daughter and myself.”
“That lady seems to know what she wants,” said Mr. Ruck, “and she speaks so I can understand her. I can’t understand every one over here. I’d like to make that lady’s acquaintance. Perhaps she knows whatIwant, too: it seems so hard to find out! But I don’t want any of their sour white wine; that’s one of the things I don’t want. I guess she’ll be an addition to the pension.”
Mr. Ruck made the acquaintance of Mrs. Church that evening in the parlour, being presented to her by his wife, who presumed on the rights conferredupon herself by the mutual proximity, at table, of the two ladies. I seemed to make out that in Mrs. Church’s view Mrs. Ruck presumed too far. The fugitive from the Pension Chamousset, as M. Pigeonneau called her, was a little fresh plump comely woman, looking less than her age, with a round bright serious face. She was very simply and frugally dressed, not at all in the manner of Mr. Ruck’s companions, and had an air of quiet distinction which was an excellent defensive weapon. She exhibited a polite disposition to listen to what Mr. Ruck might have to say, but her manner was equivalent to an intimation that what she valued least in boarding-house life was its social opportunities. She had placed herself near a lamp, after carefully screwing it and turning it up, and she had opened in her lap, with the assistance of a large embroidered marker, an octavo volume which I perceived to be in German. To Mrs. Ruck and her daughter she was evidently a puzzle; they were mystified beyond appeal by her frugal attire and expensive culture. The two younger ladies, however, had begun to fraternise freely, and Miss Ruck presently went wandering out of the room with her arm round the waist of Miss Church. It was a warm evening; the long windows of the salon stood wide open to the garden, and, inspired by the balmy darkness, M. Pigeonneau and Mademoiselle Beaurepas, a most obliging little woman who lisped and always wore a huge cravat, declared they would organise a fête de nuit. They engaged in this enterprise, and the fête developed itself on the lines of half a dozen red paper lanterns hung about in the trees, and of several glasses ofsiropcarried on a tray by the stout-armed Célestine. As the occasion deepened to its climax I went out into the garden, where M. Pigeonneau was master of ceremonies.
“But where are those charming young ladies,” hecried, “Mees Roque and the new-comer, l’aimable transfuge? Their absence has been remarked and they’re wanting to the brilliancy of the scene. Voyez, I have selected a glass of syrup—a generous glass—for Mees Roque, and I advise you, my young friend, if you wish to make a good impression, to put aside one which you may offer to the other young lady. What’s her name? Mees Cheurche? I see; it’s a singular name. Ca veut dire ‘église,’ n’est-ce-pas? Voilà, a church where I’d willingly worship!”
Mr. Ruck presently came out of the salon, having concluded his interview with the elder of the pair. Through the open window I saw that accomplished woman seated under the lamp with her German octavo, while Mrs. Ruck, established empty-handed in an armchair near her, fairly glowered at her for fascination.
“Well, I told you she’d know what I want,” he promptly observed to me. “She says I want to go right up to Appenzell, wherever that is; that I want to drink whey and live in a high latitude—what did she call it?—a high altitude. She seemed to think we ought to leave for Appenzell to-morrow; she’d got it all fixed. She says this ain’t a high enough lat—a high enough altitude. And she says I mustn’t go too high either; that would be just as bad; she seems to know just the right figure. She says she’ll give me a list of the hotels where we must stop on the way to Appenzell. I asked her if she didn’t want to go with us, but she says she’d rather sit still and read. I guess she’s a big reader.”
The daughter of this devotee now reappeared, in company with Miss Ruck, with whom she had been strolling through the outlying parts of the garden; and that young lady noted with interest the red paper lanterns. “Good gracious,” she inquired, “are they trying to stick the flower-pots into the trees?”
“It’s an illumination in honour of our arrival,” her companion returned. “It’s a triumph over Madame Chamousset.”
“Meanwhile, at the Pension Chamousset,” I ventured to suggest, “they’ve put out their lights—they’re sitting in darkness and lamenting your departure.”
She smiled at me—she was standing in the light that came from the house. M. Pigeonneau meanwhile, who had awaited his chance, advanced to Miss Ruck with his glass of syrup. “I’ve kept it for you, mademoiselle,” he said; “I’ve jealously guarded it. It’s very delicious!”
Miss Ruck looked at him and his syrup without making any motion to take the glass. “Well, I guess it’s sour,” she dropped with a small shake of her head.
M. Pigeonneau stood staring, his syrup in his hand; then he slowly turned away. He looked about at the rest of us as to appeal from Miss Ruck’s insensibility, and went to deposit his rejected tribute on a bench. “Won’t you give it to me?” asked Miss Church in faultless French. “J’adore le sirop, moi.”
M. Pigeonneau came back with alacrity and presented the glass with a very low bow. “I adore good manners.”
This incident caused me to look at Miss Church with quickened interest. She was not strikingly pretty, but in her charming irregular face was a light of ardour. Like her mother, though in a less degree, she was simply dressed.
“She wants to go to America, and her mother won’t let her”—Miss Sophy explained to me her friend’s situation.
“I’m very sorry—for America,” I responsively laughed.
“Well, I don’t want to say anything against yourmother, but I think it’s shameful,” Miss Ruck pursued.
“Mamma has very good reasons. She’ll tell you them all.”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t want to hear them,” said Miss Ruck. “You’ve got a right to your own country; every one has a right to their own country.”
“Mamma’s not very patriotic,” Aurora was at any rate not too spiritless to mention.
“Well, I call that dreadful,” her companion declared. “I’ve heard there are some Americans like that, but I never believed it.”
“Oh there are all sorts of Americans.”
“Aurora’s one of the right sort,” cried Miss Ruck, ready, it seemed, for the closest comradeship.
“Are you very patriotic,” I asked of the attractive exile.
Miss Ruck, however, promptly answered for her. “She’s right down homesick—she’s dying to go. If you were me,” she went on to her friend, “I guess your mother wouldhaveto take me.”
“Mamma’s going to take me to Dresden.”
“Well, I never heard of anything so cold-blooded!” said Miss Ruck. “It’s like something in a weird story.”
“I never heard Dresden was so awful a fate,” I ventured to interpose.
Miss Ruck’s eyes made light of me. “Well, I don’t believeyou’re a good American,” she smartly said, “and I never supposed you were. You’d better go right in there and talk to Mrs. Church.”
“Dresden’s really very nice, isn’t it?” I asked of her companion.
“It isn’t nice if you happen to prefer New York,” Miss Ruck at once returned. “Miss Church prefers New York. Tell him you’re dying to see New York; it will make him mad,” she went on.
“I’ve no desire to make him mad,” Aurora smiled.
“It’s only Miss Ruck who can do that,” I hastened to state. “Have you been a long time in Europe?” I added.
“As long as I can remember.”
“I call that wicked!” Miss Ruck declared.
“You might be in a worse place,” I continued. “I find Europe very interesting.”
Miss Ruck fairly snorted. “I was justsayingthat you wanted to pass for a European.”
Well, I saw my way to admit it. “Yes, I want to pass for a Dalmatian.”
Miss Ruck pounced straight. “Then you had better not come home. We know how to treat your sort.”
“Were you born in these countries?” I asked of Aurora Church.
“Oh no—I came to Europe a small child. But I remember America a little, and it seems delightful.”
“Wait till you see it again. It’s just too lovely,” said Miss Ruck.
“The grandest country in all the world,” I added.
Miss Ruck began to toss her head. “Come away, my dear. If there’s a creature I despise it’s a man who tries to say funny things about his own country.”
But Aurora lingered while she all appealingly put it to me. “Don’t you think one can be tired of Europe?”
“Well—as one may be tired of life.”
“Tired of the life?” cried Miss Ruck. “Father was tired of it after three weeks.”
“I’ve been here sixteen years,” her friend went on, looking at me as for some charming intelligence. “Itused to be for my education. I don’t know what it’s for now.”
“She’s beautifully educated,” Miss Ruck guaranteed. “She knows four languages.”
“I’m not very sure I know English!”
“You should go to Boston!” said our companion. “They speak splendidly in Boston.”
“C’est mon rêve,” said Aurora, still looking at me. “Have you been all over Europe,” I asked—“in all the different countries?”
She consulted her reminiscences. “Everywhere you can find a pension. Mamma’s devoted to pensions. We’ve lived at one time or another in every pension in Europe—say at some five or six hundred.”
“Well, I should think you had seen about enough!” Miss Ruck exhaled.
“It’s a delightful way of seeing Europe”—our friend rose to a bright high irony. “You may imagine how it has attached me to the different countries. I have such charming souvenirs! There’s a pension awaiting us now at Dresden—eight francs a day, without wine. That’s so much beyond our mark that mamma means to make them give us wine. Mamma’s a great authority on pensions; she’s known, that way, all over Europe. Last winter we were in Italy, and she discovered one at Piacenza—four francs a day. We made economies.”
“Your mother doesn’t seem to mingle much,” observed Miss Ruck, who had glanced through the window at Mrs. Church’s concentration.
“No, she doesn’t mingle, except in the native society. Though she lives in pensions she detests our vulgar life.”
“‘Vulgar’?” cried Miss Ruck. “Why then does she skimp so?” This young woman had clearly no other notion of vulgarity.
“Oh because we’re so poor; it’s the cheapest way to live. We’ve tried having a cook, but the cook always steals. Mamma used to set me to watch her; that’s the way I passed my jeunesse—my belle jeunesse. We’re frightfully poor,” she went on with the same strange frankness—a curious mixture of girlish grace and conscious cynicism. “Nous n’avons pas le sou. That’s one of the reasons we don’t go back to America. Mamma says we could never afford to live there.”
“Well, any one can see that you’re an American girl,” Miss Ruck remarked in a consolatory manner. “I can tell an American girl a mile off. You’ve got the natural American style.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t the natural American clothes,” said Aurora in tribute to the other’s splendour.
“Well, your dress was cut in France; any one can see that.”
“Yes,” our young lady laughed, “my dress was cut in France—at Avranches.”
“Well, you’ve got a lovely figure anyway,” pursued her companion.
“Ah,” she said for the pleasantry of it, “at Avranches, too, my figure was admired.” And she looked at me askance and with no clear poverty of intention. But I was an innocent youth and I only looked back at her and wondered. She was a great deal nicer than Miss Ruck, and yet Miss Ruck wouldn’t have said that in that way. “I try to be the American girl,” she continued; “I do my best, though mamma doesn’t at all encourage it. I’m very patriotic. I try to strike for freedom, though mamma has brought me up à la française; that is as much as one can in pensions. For instance I’ve never been out of the house without mamma—oh never never! But sometimes I despair; American girls do come out sowith things. I can’t come out, I can’t rush in, like that. I’m awfully pinched, I’m always afraid. But I do what I can, as you see. Excusez du peu!”
I thought this young lady of an inspiration at least as untrammelled as her unexpatriated sisters, and her despondency in the true note of much of their predominant prattle. At the same time she had by no means caught, as it seemed to me, what Miss Ruck called the natural American style. Whatever her style was, however, it had a fascination—I knew not what (as I called it) distinction, and yet I knew not what odd freedom.
The young ladies began to stroll about the garden again, and I enjoyed their society until M. Pigeonneau’s conception of a “high time” began to languish.
Mr. Ruck failed to take his departure for Appenzell on the morrow, in spite of the eagerness to see him off quaintly attributed by him to Mrs. Church. He continued on the contrary for many days after to hang about the garden, to wander up to the banker’s and back again, to engage in desultory conversation with his fellow boarders, and to endeavour to assuage his constitutional restlessness by perusal of the American journals. But it was at least on the morrow that I had the honour of making Mrs. Church’s acquaintance. She came into the salon after the midday breakfast, her German octavo under her arm, and appealed to me for assistance in selecting a quiet corner.
“Would you very kindly,” she said, “move that large fauteuil a little more this way? Not the largest; the one with the little cushion. The fauteuils here are very insufficient; I must ask Madame Beaurepas for another. Thank you; a little more to the left, please; that will do. Are you particularly engaged?” she inquired after she had seated herself. “If not I should like briefly to converse with you. It’s some time since I’ve met a young American of your—what shall I call it?—affiliations. I’ve learned your name from Madame Beaurepas; I must have known in other days some of your people. I ask myself what has become of all my friends. I used to have a charming little circle at home, but now I meet no one I eitherknow or desire to know. Don’t you think there’s a great difference between the people one meets and the people one would like to meet? Fortunately, sometimes,” my patroness graciously added, “there’s no great difference. I suppose you’re a specimen—and I take you for a good one,” she imperturbably went on—“of modern young America. Tell me, then, what modern young America is thinking of in these strange days of ours. What are its feelings, its opinions, its aspirations? What is itsideal?” I had seated myself and she had pointed this interrogation with the gaze of her curiously bright and impersonal little eyes. I felt it embarrassing to be taken for a superior specimen of modern young America and to be expected to answer for looming millions. Observing my hesitation Mrs. Church clasped her hands on the open page of her book and gave a dismal, a desperate smile. “Hasit an ideal?” she softly asked. “Well, we must talk of this,” she proceeded without insisting. “Speak just now for yourself simply. Have you come to Europe to any intelligent conscious end?”
“No great end to boast of,” I said. “But I seem to feel myself study a little.”
“Ah, I’m glad to hear that. You’re gathering up a little European culture; that’s what we lack, you know, at home. No individual can do much, of course; but one mustn’t be discouraged—every little so counts.”
“I see that you at least are doing your part,” I bravely answered, dropping my eyes on my companion’s learned volume.
“Ah yes, I go as straight as possible to the sources. There’s no one after all like the Germans. That is for digging up the facts and the evidence. For conclusions I frequently diverge. I form my opinions myself. I’m sorry to say, however,” Mrs. Church continued, “that I don’t do much to spread the light.I’m afraid I’m sadly selfish; I do little to irrigate the soil. I belong—I frankly confess it—to the class of impenitent absentees.”
“I had the pleasure, last evening,” I said, “of making the acquaintance of your daughter. She tells me you’ve been a long time in Europe.”
She took it blandly. “Can one ever betoolong? You see it’sourworld, that of us few real fugitives from the rule of the mob. We shall never go back to that.”
“Your daughter nevertheless fancies she yearns!” I replied.
“Has she been taking you into her confidence? She’s a more sensible young lady than she sometimes appears. I’ve taken great pains with her; she’s really—I may be permitted to say it—superbly educated.”
“She seemed to me to do you honour,” I made answer. “And I hear she speaks fluently four languages.”
“It’s not only that,” said Mrs. Church in the tone of one sated with fluencies and disillusioned of diplomas. “She has made what we callde fortes études—such as I suppose you’re making now. She’s familiar with the results of modern science; she keeps pace with the new historical school.”
“Ah,” said I, “she has gone much further than I!”
She seemed to look at me a moment as for the tip of the ear of irony. “You doubtless think I exaggerate, and you force me therefore to mention the fact that I speak of such matters with a certain intelligence.”
“I should never dream of doubting it,” I returned, “but your daughter nevertheless strongly holds that you ought to take her home.” I might have feared that these words would practically represent treachery to the young lady, but I was reassured by seeing themproduce in her mother’s placid surface no symptom whatever of irritation.
“My daughter has her little theories,” that lady observed; “she has, I may say, her small fond illusions and rebellions. And what wonder! What would youth be without its Sturm and Drang? Aurora says to herself—all at her ease—that she would be happier in their dreadful New York, in their dreary Boston, in their desperate Philadelphia, than in one of the charming old cities in which our lot is cast. But she knows not what she babbles of—that’s all. We must allow our children their yearning to make mistakes, mustn’t we? But we must keep the mistakes down to as few as possible.”
Her soft sweet positiveness, beneath which I recognised all sorts of really hard rigours of resistance and aggression, somehow breathed a chill on me. “American cities,” I none the less threw off, “are the paradise of the female young.”
“Do you mean,” she inquired, “that the generations reared in those places are angels?”
“Well,” I said resolutely, “they’re the nicest of all girls.”
“This young lady—what’s her odd name?—with whom my daughter has formed a somewhat precipitate acquaintance: is Miss Ruck an angel and one of the nicest of all? But I won’t,” she amusedly added, “force you to describe her as she deserves. It would be too cruel to make a single exception.”
“Well,” I at any rate pleaded, “in America they’ve the easiest lot and the best time. They’ve the most innocent liberty.”
My companion laid her hand an instant on my arm. “My dear young friend, I know America, I know the conditions of life there down to the ground. There’s perhaps no subject on which I’ve reflected more than on our national idiosyncrasies.”
“To the effect, I see, of your holding them in horror,” I said a little roughly.
Rude indeed as was my young presumption Mrs. Church had still her cultivated patience, even her pity, for it. “We’re very crude,” she blandly remarked, “and we’re proportionately indigestible.” And lest her own refined strictures should seem to savour of the vice she deprecated she went on to explain. “There are two classes of minds, you know—those that hold back and those that push forward. My daughter and I are not pushers; we move with the slow considerate steps to which a little dignity may still cling. We like the old trodden paths; we like the old old world.”
“Ah,” said I, “you know what you like. There’s a great virtue in that.”
“Yes, we like Europe; we prefer it. We like the opportunities of Europe; we like therest. There’s so much in that, you know. The world seems to me to be hurrying, pressing forward so fiercely, without knowing in the least where it’s going. ‘Whither?’ I often ask in my little quiet way. But I’ve yet to learn that any one can tell me.”
“You’re a grand old conservative,” I returned while I wondered whether I myself might have been able to meet her question.
Mrs. Church gave me a smile that was equivalent to a confession. “I wish to retain a wee bit—just a wee bit. Surely we’ve done so much we might rest a while; we might pause. That’s all my feeling—just to stop a little, to wait, to take breath. I’ve seen so many changes. I want to draw in, to draw in—to hold back, to hold back.”
“You shouldn’t hold your daughter back!” I laughed as I got up. I rose not by way of closing our small discussion, for I felt my friend’s exposition of her views to be by no means complete, but in order tooffer a chair to Miss Aurora, who at this moment drew near. She thanked me and remained standing, but without at first, as I noticed, really facing her parent.
“You’ve been engaged with your new acquaintance, my dear?” this lady inquired.
“Yes, mamma,” said the girl with a sort of prompt sweet dryness.
“Do you find her very edifying?”
Aurora had a silence; then she met her mother’s eyes. “I don’t know, mamma. She’s very fresh.”
I ventured a respectful laugh. “Your mother has another word for that. But I must not,” I added, “be indigestibly raw.”
“Ah, vous m’en voulez?” Mrs. Church serenely sighed. “And yet I can’t pretend I said it in jest. I feel it too much. We’ve been having a little social discussion,” she said to her daughter. “There’s still so much to be said. And I wish,” she continued, turning to me, “that I could give you our point of view. Don’t you wish, Aurora, that we could give him our point of view?”
“Yes, mamma,” said Aurora.
“We consider ourselves very fortunate in our point of view, don’t we, dearest?” mamma demanded.
“Very fortunate indeed, mamma.”
“You see we’ve acquired an insight into European life,” the elder lady pursued. “We’ve our place at many a European fireside. We find so much to esteem—so much to enjoy. Don’t we find delightful things, my daughter?”
“So very delightful, mamma,” the girl went on with her colourless calm. I wondered at it; it offered so strange a contrast to the mocking freedom of her tone the night before; but while I wondered I desired to testify to the interest at least with which she inspired me.
“I don’t know what impression you ladies mayhave found at European firesides,” I again ventured, “but there can be very little doubt of the impression you must have made there.”
Mrs. Church got in motion to acknowledge my compliment. “We’ve spent some charming hours. And that reminds me that we’ve just now such an occasion in prospect. We’re to call upon some Genevese friends—the family of the Pasteur Galopin. They’re to go with us to the old library at the Hôtel de Ville, where there are some very interesting documents of the period of the Reformation: we’re promised a glimpse of some manuscripts of poor Servetus, the antagonist and victim, you know, of the dire Calvin. Here of course one can only speak of ce monsieur under one’s breath, but some day when we’re more private”—Mrs. Church looked round the room—“I’ll give you my view of him. I think it has a force of its own. Aurora’s familiar with it—aren’t you, my daughter, familiar with my view of the evil genius of the Reformation?”
“Yes, mamma—very,” said Aurora with docility—and also, as I thought, with subtlety—while the two ladies went to prepare for their visit to the Pasteur Galopin.