The round moon was white and at its smallest, high overhead, when I stepped out of the phaeton in which Miss Elizabeth sent me back to Madame Brossard’s; midnight was twanging from a rusty old clock indoors as I crossed the fragrant courtyard to my pavilion; but a lamp still burned in the salon of the “Grande Suite,” a light to my mind more suggestive of the patient watcher than of the scholar at his tome.
When my own lamp was extinguished, I set my door ajar, moved my bed out from the wall to catch whatever breeze might stir, “composed myself for the night,” as it used to be written, and lay looking out upon the quiet garden where a thin white haze was rising. If, in taking this coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath some immoderate weight, and the noble form of Keredec emerged upon my field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed him to be either barefooted or in his stockings. His visible costume consisted of a sleeping jacket tucked into a pair of trousers, while his tousled hair and beard and generally tossed and rumpled look were those of a man who had been lying down temporarily.
I heard him sigh—like one sighing for sleep—as he went noiselessly across the garden and out through the archway to the road. At that I sat straight up in bed to stare—and well I might, for here was a miracle! He had lifted his arms above his head to stretch himself comfortably, and he walked upright and at ease, whereas when I had last seen him, the night before, he had been able to do little more than crawl, bent far over and leaning painfully upon his friend. Never man beheld a more astonishing recovery from a bad case of rheumatism!
After a long look down the road, he retraced his steps; and the moonlight, striking across his great forehead as he came, revealed the furrows ploughed there by an anxiety of which I guessed the cause. The creaking of the wooden stairs and gallery and the whine of an old door announced that he had returned to his vigil.
I had, perhaps, a quarter of an hour to consider this performance, when it was repeated; now, however, he only glanced out into the road, retreating hastily, and I saw that he was smiling, while the speed he maintained in returning to his quarters was remarkable for one so newly convalescent.
The next moment Saffron came through the archway, ascended the steps in turn—but slowly and carefully, as if fearful of waking his guardian—and I heard his door closing, very gently. Long before his arrival, however, I had been certain of his identity with the figure I had seen gazing up at the terraces of Quesnay from the borders of the grove. Other questions remained to bother me: Why had Keredec not prevented this night-roving, and why, since he did permit it, should he conceal his knowledge of it from Oliver? And what, oh, what wondrous specific had the mighty man found for his disease?
Morning failed to clarify these mysteries; it brought, however, something rare and rich and strange. I allude to the manner of Amedee’s approach. The aged gossip-demoniac had to recognise the fact that he could not keep out of my way for ever; there was nothing for it but to put as good a face as possible upon a bad business, and get it over—and the face he selected was a marvel; not less, and in no hasty sense of the word.
It appeared at my door to announce that breakfast waited outside.
Primarily it displayed an expression of serenity, masterly in its assumption that not the least, remotest, dreamiest shadow of danger could possibly be conceived, by the most immoderately pessimistic and sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest, you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the first-born—that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous, diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles, beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my repast with an unconcealed fondness at once maternal and reverential.
I did not attempt to speak. I came out silently, uncannily fascinated, my eyes fixed upon him, while he moved gently backward, cooing pleasant words about the coffee, but just perceptibly keeping himself out of arm’s reach until I had taken my seat. When I had done that, he leaned over the table and began to set useless things nearer my plate with frankly affectionate care. It chanced that in “making a long arm” to reach something I did want, my hand (of which the fingers happened to be closed) passed rather impatiently beneath his nose. The madonna expression changed instantly to one of horror, he uttered a startled croak, and took a surprisingly long skip backward, landing in the screen of honeysuckle vines, which, he seemed to imagine, were some new form of hostility attacking him treacherously from the rear. They sagged, but did not break from their fastenings, and his behaviour, as he lay thus entangled, would have contrasted unfavourably in dignity with the actions of a panic-stricken hen in a hammock.
“And so conscience DOES make cowards of us all,” I said, with no hope of being understood.
Recovering some measure of mental equilibrium at the same time that he managed to find his feet, he burst into shrill laughter, to which he tried in vain to impart a ring of debonair carelessness.
“Eh, I stumble!” he cried with hollow merriment. “I fall about and faint with fatigue! Pah! But it is nothing: truly!”
“Fatigue!” I turned a bitter sneer upon him. “Fatigue! And you just out of bed!”
His fat hands went up palm outward; his heroic laughter was checked as with a sob; an expression of tragic incredulity shone from his eyes. Patently he doubted the evidence of his own ears; could not believe that such black ingratitude existed in the world. “Absalom, O my son Absalom!” was his unuttered cry. His hands fell to his sides; his chin sank wretchedly into its own folds; his shirt-bosom heaved and crinkled; arrows of unspeakable injustice had entered the defenceless breast.
“Just out of bed!” he repeated, with a pathos that would have brought the judge of any court in France down from the bench to kiss him—“And I had risen long, long before the dawn, in the cold and darkness of the night, to prepare the sandwiches of monsieur!”
It was too much for me, or rather, he was. I stalked off to the woods in a state of helpless indignation; mentally swearing that his day of punishment at my hands was only deferred, not abandoned, yet secretly fearing that this very oath might live for no purpose but to convict me of perjury. His talents were lost in the country; he should have sought his fortune in the metropolis. And his manner, as he summoned me that evening to dinner, and indeed throughout the courses, partook of the subtle condescension and careless assurance of one who has but faintly enjoyed some too easy triumph.
I found this so irksome that I might have been goaded into an outbreak of impotent fury, had my attention not been distracted by the curious turn of the professor’s malady, which had renewed its painful assault upon him. He came hobbling to table, leaning upon Saffren’s shoulder, and made no reference to his singular improvement of the night before—nor did I. His rheumatism was his own; he might do what he pleased with it! There was no reason why he should confide the cause of its vagaries to me.
Table-talk ran its normal course; a great Pole’s philosophy receiving flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. (“If he could understand,” exclaimed Keredec, “that the individual must be immortal before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some intelligence!”) On the surface everything was as usual with our trio, with nothing to show any turbulence of under-currents, unless it was a certain alertness in Oliver’s manner, a restrained excitement, and the questioning restlessness of his eyes as they sought mine from time to time. Whatever he wished to ask me, he was given no opportunity, for the professor carried him off to work when our coffee was finished. As they departed, the young man glanced back at me over his shoulder, with that same earnest look of interrogation, but it went unanswered by any token or gesture: for though I guessed that he wished to know if Mrs. Harman had spoken of him to me, it seemed part of my bargain with her to give him no sign that I understood.
A note lay beside my plate next morning, addressed in a writing strange to me, one of dashing and vigorous character.
“In the pursuit of thrillingly scientific research,” it read, “what with the tumult which possessed me, I forgot to mention the bond that links us; I, too, am a painter, though as yet unhonoured and unhung. It must be only because I lack a gentle hand to guide me. If I might sit beside you as you paint! The hours pass on leaden wings at Quesnay—I could shriek! Do not refuse me a few words of instruction, either in the wildwood, whither I could support your shrinking steps, or, from time to time, as you work in your studio, which (I glean from the instructive Mr. Ferret) is at Les Trois Pigeons. At any hour, at any moment, I will speed to you. I am, sir,
“Yours, if you will but breathe a ‘yes,’
To this I returned a reply, as much in her own key as I could write it, putting my refusal on the ground that I was not at present painting in the studio. I added that I hoped her suit might prosper, regretting that I could not be of greater assistance to that end, and concluded with the suggestion that Madame Brossard might entertain an offer for lessons in cooking.
The result of my attempt to echo her vivacity was discomfiting, and I was allowed to perceive that epistolary jocularity was not thought to be my line. It was Miss Elizabeth who gave me this instruction three days later, on the way to Quesnay for “second breakfast.” Exercising fairly shame-faced diplomacy, I had avoided dining at the chateau again, but, by arrangement, she had driven over for me this morning in the phaeton.
“Why are you writing silly notes to that child?” she demanded, as soon as we were away from the inn.
“Was it silly?”
“You should know. Do you think that style of humour suitable for a young girl?”
This bewildered me a little. “But there wasn’t anything offensive—”
“No?” Miss Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows to a height of bland inquiry. “She mightn’t think it rather—well, rough? Your suggesting that she should take cooking lessons?”
“But SHE suggested she might take PAINTING lessons,” was my feeble protest. “I only meant to show her I understood that she wanted to get to the inn.”
“And why should she care to ‘get to the inn’?”
“She seemed interested in a young man who is staying there. 'Interested’ is the mildest word for it I can think of.”
“Pooh!” Such was Miss Ward’s enigmatic retort, and though I begged an explanation I got none. Instead, she quickened the horse’s gait and changed the subject.
At the chateau, having a mind to offer some sort of apology, I looked anxiously about for the subject of our rather disquieting conversation, but she was not to be seen until the party assembled at the table, set under an awning on the terrace. Then, to my disappointment, I found no opportunity to speak to her, for her seat was so placed as to make it impossible, and she escaped into the house immediately upon the conclusion of the repast, hurrying away too pointedly for any attempt to detain her—though, as she passed, she sent me one glance of meek reproach which she was at pains to make elaborately distinct.
Again taking me for her neighbour at the table, Miss Elizabeth talked to me at intervals, apparently having nothing, just then, to make up to Mr. Cresson Ingle, but not long after we rose she accompanied him upon some excursion of an indefinite nature, which led her from my sight. Thus, the others making off to cards indoors and what not, I was left to the perusal of the eighteenth century facade of the chateau, one of the most competent restorations in that part of France, and of the liveliest interest to the student or practitioner of architecture.
Mrs. Harman had not appeared at all, having gone to call upon some one at Dives, I was told, and a servant informing me (on inquiry) that Miss Elliott had retired to her room, I was thrust upon my own devices indeed, a condition already closely associated in my mind with this picturesque spot. The likeliest of my devices—or, at least, the one I hit upon—was in the nature of an unostentatious retreat.
I went home.
However, as the day was spoiled for work, I chose a roundabout way, in fact the longest, and took the high-road to Dives, but neither the road nor the town itself (when I passed through it) rewarded my vague hope that I might meet Mrs. Harman, and I strode the long miles in considerable disgruntlement, for it was largely in that hope that I had gone to Quesnay. It put me in no merrier mood to find Miss Elizabeth’s phaeton standing outside the inn in charge of a groom, for my vanity encouraged the supposition that she had come out of a fear that my unceremonious departure from Quesnay might have indicated that I was “hurt,” or considered myself neglected; and I dreaded having to make explanations.
My apprehensions were unfounded; it was not Miss Elizabeth who had come in the phaeton, though a lady from Quesnay did prove to be the occupant—the sole occupant—of the courtyard. At sight of her I halted stock-still under the archway.
There she sat, a sketch-book on a green table beside her and a board in her lap, brazenly painting—and a more blushless piece of assurance than Miss Anne Elliott thus engaged these eyes have never beheld.
She was not so hardened that she did not affect a little timidity at sight of me, looking away even more quickly than she looked up, while I walked slowly over to her and took the garden chair beside her. That gave me a view of her sketch, which was a violent little “lay-in” of shrubbery, trees, and the sky-line of the inn. To my prodigious surprise (and, naturally enough, with a degree of pleasure) I perceived that it was not very bad, not bad at all, indeed. It displayed a sense of values, of placing, and even, in a young and frantic way, of colour. Here was a young woman of more than “accomplishments!”
“You see,” she said, squeezing one of the tiny tubes almost dry, and continuing to paint with a fine effect of absorption, “I HAD to show you that I was in the most ABYSMAL earnest. Will you take me painting with, you?”
“I appreciate your seriousness,” I rejoined. “Has it been rewarded?”
“How can I say? You haven’t told me whether or no I may follow you to the wildwood.”
“I mean, have you caught another glimpse of Mr. Saffren?”
At that she showed a prettier colour in her cheeks than any in her sketch-box, but gave no other sign of shame, nor even of being flustered, cheerfully replying:
“That is far from the point. Do you grant my burning plea?”
“I understood I had offended you.”
“You did,” she said. “VICIOUSLY!”
“I am sorry,” I continued. “I wanted to ask you to forgive me—”
I spoke seriously, and that seemed to strike her as odd or needing explanation, for she levelled her blue eyes at me, and interrupted, with something more like seriousness in her own voice than I had yet heard from her:
“What made you think I was offended?”
“Your look of reproach when you left the table—”
“Nothing else?” she asked quickly.
“Yes; Miss Ward told me you were.”
“Yes; she drove over with you. That’s it!” she exclaimed with vigour, and nodded her head as if some suspicion of hers had been confirmed. “I thought so!”
“You thought she had told me?”
“No,” said Miss Elliott decidedly. “Thought that Elizabeth wanted to have her cake and eat it too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you’ll get no help from me,” she returned slowly, a frown marking her pretty forehead. “But I was only playing offended, and she knew it. I thought your note was THAT fetching!”
She continued to look thoughtful for a moment longer, then with a resumption of her former manner—the pretence of an earnestness much deeper than the real—“Will you take me painting with you?” she said. “If it will convince you that I mean it, I’ll give up my hopes of seeing that SUMPTUOUS Mr. Saffren and go back to Quesnay now, before he comes home. He’s been out for a walk—a long one, since it’s lasted ever since early this morning, so the waiter told me. May I go with you? You CAN’T know how enervating it is up there at the chateau—all except Mrs. Harman, and even she—”
“What about Mrs. Harman?” I asked, as she paused.
“I think she must be in love.”
“What!”
“I do think so,” said the girl. “She’s LIKE it, at least.”
“But with whom?”
She laughed gaily. “I’m afraid she’s my rival!”
“Not with—” I began.
“Yes, with your beautiful and mad young friend.”
“But—oh, it’s preposterous!” I cried, profoundly disturbed. “She couldn’t be! If you knew a great deal about her—”
“I may know more than you think. My simplicity of appearance is deceptive,” she mocked, beginning to set her sketch-box in order. “You don’t realise that Mrs. Harman and I are quite HURLED upon each other at Quesnay, being two ravishingly intelligent women entirely surrounded by large bodies of elementals. She has told me a great deal of herself since that first evening, and I know—well, I know why she did not come back from Dives this afternoon, for instance.”
“WHY?” I fairly shouted.
She slid her sketch into a groove in the box, which she closed, and rose to her feet before answering. Then she set her hat a little straighter with a touch, looking so fixedly and with such grave interest over my shoulder that I turned to follow her glance and encountered our reflections in a window of the inn. Her own shed a light upon THAT mystery, at all events.
“I might tell you some day,” she said indifferently, “if I gained enough confidence in you through association in daily pursuits.”
“My dear young lady,” I cried with real exasperation, “I am a working man, and this is a working summer for me!”
“Do you think I’d spoil it?” she urged gently.
“But I get up with the first daylight to paint,” I protested, “and I paint all day—”
She moved a step nearer me and laid her hand warningly upon my sleeve, checking the outburst.
I turned to see what she meant.
Oliver Saffren had come in from the road and was crossing to the gallery steps. He lifted his hat and gave me a quick word of greeting as he passed, and at the sight of his flushed and happy face my riddle was solved for me. Amazing as the thing was, I had no doubt of the revelation.
“Ah,” I said to Miss Elliott when he had gone, “I won’t have to take pupils to get the answer to my question, now!”
“Ha, these philosophers,” said the professor, expanding in discourse a little later—“these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell you that spirit is abstract!” He waved his great hand in a sweeping semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of honeysuckle. “Ha, the folly!”
“What do YOU say it is?” I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden.
“I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are only a question of names, and when I use the word ‘spirit’ I mean identity—universal identity, if you like. It is what we all are, yes—and those flowers, too. But the spirit of the flowers is not what you smell, nor what you see, that look so pretty: it is the flowers themself! Yet all spirit is only one spirit and one spirit is all spirit—and if you tell me this is Pant’eism I will tell you that you do not understand!”
“I don’t tell you that,” said I, “neither do I understand.”
“Nor that big Keredec either!” Whereupon he loosed the rolling thunder of his laughter. “Nor any brain born of the monkey people! But this world is full of proof that everything that exist is all one thing, and it is the instinct of that, when it draws us together, which makes what we call ‘love.’ Even those wicked devils of egoism in our inside is only love which grows too long the wrong way, like the finger nails of the Chinese empress. Young love is a little sprout of universal unity. When the young people begin to feel it, THEY are not abstract, ha? And the young man, when he selects, he chooses one being from all the others to mean—just for him—all that great universe of which he is a part.”
This was wandering whimsically far afield, but as I caught the good-humoured flicker of the professor’s glance at our companion I thought I saw a purpose in his deviation. Saffren turned toward him wonderingly, his unconscious, eager look remarkably emphasised and brightened.
“All such things are most strange—great mysteries,” continued the professor. “For when a man has made the selection, THAT being DOES become all the universe, and for him there is nothing else at all—nothing else anywhere!”
Saffren’s cheeks and temples were flushed as they had been when I saw him returning that afternoon; and his eyes were wide, fixed upon Keredec in a stare of utter amazement.
“Yes, that is true,” he said slowly. “How did you know?”
Keredec returned his look with an attentive scrutiny, and made some exclamation under his breath, which I did not catch, but there was no mistaking his high good humour.
“Bravo!” he shouted, rising and clapping the other upon the shoulder. “You will soon cure my rheumatism if you ask me questions like that! Ho, ho, ho!” He threw back his head and let the mighty salvos forth. “Ho, ho, ho! How do I know? The young, always they believe they are the only ones who were ever young! Ho, ho, ho! Come, we shall make those lessons very easy to-night. Come, my friend! How could that big, old Keredec know of such things? He is too old, too foolish! Ho, ho, ho!”
As he went up the steps, the courtyard reverberating again to his laughter, his arm resting on Saffren’s shoulders, but not so heavily as usual. The door of their salon closed upon them, and for a while Keredec’s voice could be heard booming cheerfully; it ended in another burst of laughter.
A moment later Saffren opened the door and called to me.
“Here,” I answered from my veranda, where I had just lighted my second cigar.
“No more work to-night. All finished,” he cried jubilantly, springing down the steps. “I’m coming to have a talk with you.”
Amedee had removed the candles, the moon had withdrawn in fear of a turbulent mob of clouds, rioting into our sky from seaward; the air smelled of imminent rain, and it was so dark that I could see my visitor only as a vague, tall shape; but a happy excitement vibrated in his rich voice, and his step on the gravelled path was light and exultant.
“I won’t sit down,” he said. “I’ll walk up and down in front of the veranda—if it doesn’t make you nervous.”
For answer I merely laughed; and he laughed too, in genial response, continuing gaily:
“Oh, it’s all so different with me! Everything is. That BLIND feeling I told you of—it’s all gone. I must have been very babyish, the other day; I don’t think I could feel like that again. It used to seem to me that I lived penned up in a circle of blank stone walls; I couldn’t see over the top for myself at all, though now and then Keredec would boost me up and let me get a little glimmer of the country round about—but never long enough to see what it was really like. But it’s not so now. Ah!”—he drew a long breath—“I’d like to run. I think I could run all the way to the top of a pretty fair-sized mountain to-night, and then”—he laughed—“jump off and ride on the clouds.”
“I know how that is,” I responded. “At least I did know—a few years ago.”
“Everything is a jumble with me,” he went on happily, in a confidential tone, “yet it’s a heavenly kind of jumble. I can’t put anything into words. I don’t THINK very well yet, though Keredec is trying to teach me. My thoughts don’t run in order, and this that’s happened seems to make them wilder, queerer—” He stopped short.
“What has happened?”
He paused in his sentry-go, facing me, and answered, in a low voice:
“I’ve seen her again.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She told me you knew it,” he said, “—that she had told you.”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not all,” he said, his voice rising a little. “I saw her again the day after she told you—”
“You did!” I murmured.
“Oh, I tell myself that it’s a dream,” he cried, “that it CAN’T be true. For it has been EVERY day since then! That’s why I haven’t joined you in the woods. I have been with her, walking with her, listening to her, looking at her—always feeling that it must be unreal and that I must try not to wake up. She has been so kind—so wonderfully, beautifully kind to me!”
“She has met you?” I asked, thinking ruefully of George Ward, now on the high seas in the pleasant company of old hopes renewed.
“She has let me meet her. And to-day we lunched at the inn at Dives and then walked by the sea all afternoon. She gave me the whole day—the whole day! You see”—he began to pace again—“you see I was right, and you were wrong. She wasn’t offended—she was glad—that I couldn’t help speaking to her; she has said so.”
“Do you think,” I interrupted, “that she would wish you to tell me this?”
“Ah, she likes you!” he said so heartily, and appearing meanwhile so satisfied with the completeness of his reply, that I was fain to take some satisfaction in it myself. “What I wanted most to say to you,” he went on, “is this: you remember you promised to tell me whatever you could learn about her—and about her husband?”
“I remember.”
“It’s different now. I don’t want you to,” he said. “I want only to know what she tells me herself. She has told me very little, but I know when the time comes she WILL tell me everything. But I wouldn’t hasten it. I wouldn’t have anything changed from just THIS!”
“You mean—”
“I mean the way it IS. If I could hope to see her every day, to be in the woods with her, or down by the shore—oh, I don’t want to know anything but that!”
“No doubt you have told her,” I ventured, “a good deal about yourself,” and was instantly ashamed of myself. I suppose I spoke out of a sense of protest against Mrs. Harman’s strange lack of conventionality, against so charming a lady’s losing her head as completely as she seemed to have lost hers, and it may have been, too, out of a feeling of jealousy for poor George—possibly even out of a little feeling of the same sort on my own account. But I couldn’t have said it except for the darkness, and, as I say, I was instantly ashamed.
It does not whiten my guilt that the shaft did not reach him.
“I’ve told her all I know,” he said readily, and the unconscious pathos of the answer smote me. “And all that Keredec has let me know. You see I haven’t—”
“But do you think,” I interrupted quickly, anxious, in my remorse, to divert him from that channel, “do you think Professor Keredec would approve, if he knew?”
“I think he would,” he responded slowly, pausing in his walk again. “I have a feeling that perhaps he does know, and yet I have been afraid to tell him, afraid he might try to stop me—keep me from going to wait for her. But he has a strange way of knowing things; I think he knows everything in the world! I have felt to-night that he knows this, and—it’s very strange, but I—well, what WAS it that made him so glad?”
“The light is still burning in his room,” I said quietly.
“You mean that I ought to tell him?” His voice rose a little.
“He’s done a good deal for you, hasn’t he?” I suggested. “And even if he does know he might like to hear it from you.”
“You’re right; I’ll tell him to-night.” This came with sudden decision, but with less than marked what followed. “But he can’t stop me, now. No one on earth shall do that, except Madame d’Armand herself. No one!”
“I won’t quarrel with that,” I said drily, throwing away my cigar, which had gone out long before.
He hesitated, and then I saw his hand groping toward me in the darkness, and, rising, I gave him mine.
“Good night,” he said, and shook my hand as the first sputterings of the coming rain began to patter on the roof of the pavilion. “I’m glad to tell him; I’m glad to have told you. Ah, but isn’t this,” he cried, “a happy world!”
Turning, he ran to the gallery steps. “At last I’m glad,” he called back over his shoulder, “I’m glad that I was born—”
A gust of wind blew furiously into the courtyard at that instant, and I heard his voice indistinctly, but I thought—though I might have been mistaken—that I caught a final word, and that it was “again.”
The rain of two nights and two days had freshened the woods, deepening the green of the tree-trunks and washing the dust from the leaves, and now, under the splendid sun of the third morning, we sat painting in a sylvan aisle that was like a hall of Aladdin’s palace, the filigreed arches of foliage above us glittering with pendulous rain-drops. But Arabian Nights’ palaces are not to my fancy for painting; the air, rinsed of its colour, was too sparklingly clean; the interstices of sky and the roughly framed distances I prized, were brought too close. It was one of those days when Nature throws herself straight in your face and you are at a loss to know whether she has kissed you or slapped you, though you are conscious of the tingle;—a day, in brief, more for laughing than for painting, and the truth is that I suited its mood only too well, and laughed more than I painted, though I sat with my easel before me and a picture ready upon my palette to be painted.
No one could have understood better than I that this was setting a bad example to the acolyte who sat, likewise facing an easel, ten paces to my left; a very sportsmanlike figure of a painter indeed, in her short skirt and long coat of woodland brown, the fine brown of dead oak-leaves; a “devastating” selection of colour that!—being much the same shade as her hair—with brown for her hat too, and the veil encircling the small crown thereof, and brown again for the stout, high, laced boots which protected her from the wet tangle underfoot. Who could have expected so dashing a young person as this to do any real work at painting? Yet she did, narrowing her eyes to the finest point of concentration, and applying herself to the task in hand with a persistence which I found, on that particular morning, far beyond my own powers.
As she leaned back critically, at the imminent risk of capsizing her camp-stool, and herself with it, in her absorption, some ill-suppressed token of amusement most have caught her ear, for she turned upon me with suspicion, and was instantly moved to moralize upon the reluctance I had shown to accept her as a companion for my excursions; taking as her theme, in contrast, her own present display of ambition; all in all a warm, if over-coloured, sketch of the idle master and the industrious apprentice. It made me laugh again, upon which she changed the subject.
“An indefinable something tells me,” she announced coldly, “that henceforth you needn’t be so DRASTICALLY fearful of being dragged to the chateau for dinner, nor dejeuner either!”
“Did anything ever tell you that I had cause to fear it?”
“Yes,” she said, but too simply. “Jean Ferret.”
“Anglicise that ruffian’s name,” I muttered, mirth immediately withering upon me, “and you’ll know him better. To save time: will you mention anything you can think of that he HASN’T told you?”
Miss Elliott cocked her head upon one side to examine the work of art she was producing, while a slight smile, playing about her lips, seemed to indicate that she was appeased. “You and Miss Ward are old and dear friends, aren’t you?” she asked absently.
“We are!” I answered between my teeth. “For years I have sent her costly jewels—”
She interrupted me by breaking outright into a peal of laughter, which rang with such childish delight that I retorted by offering several malevolent observations upon the babbling of French servants and the order of mind attributable to those who listened to them. Her defence was to affect inattention and paint busily until some time after I had concluded.
“I think she’s going to take Cressie Ingle,” she said dreamily, with the air of one whose thoughts have been far, far away. “It looks preponderously like it. She’s been teetertottering these AGES and AGES between you—”
“Between whom?”
“You and Mr. Ingle,” she replied, not altering her tone in the slightest. “But she’s all for her brother, of course, and though you’re his friend, Ingle is a personage in the world they court, and among the MULTITUDINOUS things his father left him is an art magazine, or one that’s long on art or something of that sort—I don’t know just what—so altogether it will be a good thing for DEAREST Mr. Ward. She likes Cressie, of course, though I think she likes you better—”
I managed to find my voice and interrupt the thistle-brained creature. “What put these fantasias into your head?”
“Not Jean Ferret,” she responded promptly.
“It’s cruel of me to break it to you so coarsely—I know—but if you are ever going to make up your mind to her building as glaring a success of you as she has of her brother, I think you must do it now. She’s on the point of accepting Mr. Ingle, and what becomes of YOU will depend on your conduct in the most immediate future. She won’t ask you to Quesnay again, so you’d better go up there on your own accord.—And on your bended knees, too!” she added as an afterthought.
I sought for something to say which might have a chance of impressing her—a desperate task on the face of it—and I mentioned that Miss Ward was her hostess.
One might as well have tried to impress Amedee. She “made a little mouth” and went on dabbling with her brushes. “Hostess? Pooh!” she said cheerfully. “My INFANTILE father sent me here to be in her charge while he ran home to America. Mr. Ward’s to paint my portrait, when he comes. Give and take—it’s simple enough, you see!”
Here was frankness with a vengeance, and I fell back upon silence, whereupon a pause ensued, to my share of which I imparted the deepest shadow of disapproval within my power. Unfortunately, she did not look at me; my effort passed with no other effect than to make some of my facial muscles ache.
“‘Portrait of Miss E., by George Ward, H. C.,’” this painfully plain-speaking young lady continued presently. “On the line at next spring’s Salon, then packed up for the dear ones at home. I’d as soon own an ‘Art Bronze,’ myself—or a nice, clean porcelain Arab.”
“No doubt you’ve forgotten for the moment,” I said, “that Mr. Ward is my friend.”
“Not in painting, he isn’t,” she returned quickly,
“I consider his work altogether creditable; it’s carefully done, conscientious, effective—”
“Isn’t that true of the ladies in the hairdressers’ windows?” she asked with assumed artlessness. “Can’t you say a kind word for them, good gentleman, and heaven bless you?”
“Why sha’n’t I be asked to Quesnay again?”
She laughed. “You haven’t seemed FANATICALLY appreciative of your opportunities when you have been there; you might have carried her off from Cresson Ingle instead of vice versa. But after all, you AREN’T”—here she paused and looked at me appraisingly for a moment-“you AREN’T the most piratical dash-in-and-dash-out and leave-everything-upside-down-behind-you sort of man, are you?”
“No, I believe I’m not.”
“However, that’s only a SMALL half of the reason,” Miss Elliott went on. “She’s furious on account of this.”
These were vague words, and I said so.
“Oh, THIS,” she explained, “my being here; your letting me come. Impropriety—all of that!” A sharp whistle issued from her lips. “Oh! the EXCORIATING things she’s said of my pursuing you!”
“But doesn’t she know that it’s only part of your siege of Madame Brossard’s; that it’s a subterfuge in the hope of catching a glimpse of Oliver Saffren?”
“No!” she cried, her eyes dancing; “I told her that, but she thinks it’s only a subterfuge in the hope of catching more than a glimpse of you!”
I joined laughter with her then. She was the first to stop, and, looking at me somewhat doubtfully, she said:
“Whereas, the truth is that it’s neither. You know very well that I want to paint.”
“Certainly,” I agreed at once. “Your devotion to ‘your art’ and your hope of spending half an hour at Madame Brossard’s now and then are separable;—which reminds me: Wouldn’t you like me to look at your sketch?”
“No, not yet.” She jumped up and brought her camp-stool over to mine. “I feel that I could better bear what you’ll say of it after I’ve had some lunch. Not a SYLLABLE of food has crossed my lips since coffee at dawn!”
I spread before her what Amedee had prepared; not sandwiches for the pocket to-day, but a wicker hamper, one end of which we let rest upon her knees, the other upon mine, and at sight of the foie gras, the delicate, devilled partridge, the truffled salad, the fine yellow cheese, and the long bottle of good red Beaune, revealed when the cover was off, I could almost have forgiven the old rascal for his scandal-mongering. As for my vis-a-vis, she pronounced it a “maddening sight.”
“Fall to, my merry man,” she added, “and eat your fill of this fair pasty, under the greenwood tree.” Obeying her instructions with right good-will, and the lady likewise evincing no hatred of the viands, we made a cheerful meal of it, topping it with peaches and bunches of grapes.
“It is unfair to let you do all the catering,” said Miss Elliott, after carefully selecting the largest and best peach.
“Jean Ferret’s friend does that,” I returned, watching her rather intently as she dexterously peeled the peach. She did it very daintily, I had to admit that—though I regretted to observe indications of the gourmet in one so young. But when it was peeled clean, she set it on a fresh green leaf, and, to my surprise, gave it to me.
“You see,” she continued, not observing my remorseful confusion, “I couldn’t destroy Elizabeth’s peace of mind and then raid her larder to boot. That poor lady! I make her trouble enough, but it’s nothing to what she’s going to have when she finds out some things that she must find out.”
“What is that?”
“About Mrs. Harman,” was the serious reply. “Elizabeth hasn’t a clue.”
“‘Clue’?” I echoed.
“To Louise’s strange affair.” Miss Elliott’s expression had grown as serious as her tone. “It is strange; the strangest thing I ever knew.”
“But there’s your own case,” I urged. “Why should you think it strange of her to take an interest in Saffren?”
“I adore him, of course,” she said. “He is the most glorious-looking person I’ve ever seen, but on my WORD—” She paused, and as her gaze met mine I saw real earnestness in her eyes. “I’m afraid—I was half joking the other day—but now I’m really afraid Louise is beginning to be in love with him.”
“Oh, mightn’t it be only interest, so far?” I said.
“No, it’s much more. And I’ve grown so fond of her!” the girl went on, her voice unexpectedly verging upon tremulousness. “She’s quite wonderful in her way—such an understanding sort of woman, and generous and kind; there are so many things turning up in a party like ours at Quesnay that show what people are really made of, and she’s a rare, fine spirit. It seems a pity, with such a miserable first experience as she had, that this should happen. Oh I know,” she continued rapidly, cutting off a half-formed protest of mine. “He isn’t mad—and I’m sorry I tried to be amusing about it the night you dined at the chateau. I know perfectly well he’s not insane; but I’m absolutely sure, from one thing and another, that—well—he isn’t ALL THERE! He’s as beautiful as a seraph and probably as good as one, but something is MISSING about him—and it begins to look like a second tragedy for her.”
“You mean, she really—” I began.
“Yes, I do,” she returned, with a catch in her throat. “She conies to my room when the others are asleep. Not that she tells me a great deal, but it’s in the air, somehow; she told me with such a strained sort of gaiety of their meeting and his first joining her; and there was something underneath as if she thoughtImight be really serious in my ravings about him, and—yes, as if she meant to warn me off. And the other night, when I saw her after their lunching together at Dives, I asked her teasingly if she’d had a happy day, and she laughed the prettiest laugh I ever heard and put her arms around me—then suddenly broke out crying and ran out of the room.”
“But that may have been no more than over-strained nerves,” I feebly suggested.
“Of course it was!” she cried, regarding me with justifiable astonishment. “It’s the CAUSE of their being overstrained that interests me! It’s all so strange and distressing,” she continued more gently, “that I wish I weren’t there to see it. And there’s poor George Ward coming—ah! and when Elizabeth learns of it!”
“Mrs. Harman had her way once, in spite of everything,” I said thoughtfully.
“Yes, she was a headstrong girl of nineteen, then. But let’s not think it could go as far as that! There!” She threw a peach-stone over her shoulder and sprang up gaily. “Let’s not talk of it; I THINK of it enough! It’s time for you to give me a RACKING criticism on my morning’s work.”
Taking off her coat as she spoke, she unbuttoned the cuffs of her manly blouse and rolled up her sleeves as far as they would go, preparations which I observed with some perplexity.
“If you intend any violence,” said I, “in case my views of your work shouldn’t meet your own, I think I’ll be leaving.”
“Wait,” she responded, and kneeling upon one knee beside a bush near by, thrust her arms elbow-deep under the outer mantle of leaves, shaking the stems vigorously, and sending down a shower of sparkling drops. Never lived sane man, or madman, since time began, who, seeing her then, could or would have denied that she made the very prettiest picture ever seen by any person or persons whatsoever—but her purpose was difficult to fathom. Pursuing it, I remarked that it was improbable that birds would be nesting so low.
“It’s for a finger bowl,” she said briskly. And rising, this most practical of her sex dried her hands upon a fresh serviette from the hamper. “Last night’s rain is worth two birds in the bush.”
With that, she readjusted her sleeves, lightly donned her coat, and preceded me to her easel. “Now,” she commanded, “slaughter! It’s what I let you come with me for.”
I looked at her sketch with much more attention than I had given the small board she had used as a bait in the courtyard of Les Trois Pigeons. Today she showed a larger ambition, and a larger canvas as well—or, perhaps I should say a larger burlap, for she had chosen to paint upon something strongly resembling a square of coffee-sacking. But there was no doubt she had “found colour” in a swash-buckling, bullying style of forcing it to be there, whether it was or not, and to “vibrate,” whether it did or not. There was not much to be said, for the violent kind of thing she had done always hushes me; and even when it is well done I am never sure whether its right place is the “Salon des Independants” or the Luxembourg. It SEEMS dreadful, and yet sometimes I fear in secret that it may be a real transition, or even an awakening, and that the men I began with, and I, are standing still. The older men called US lunatics once, and the critics said we were “daring,” but that was long ago.
“Well?” she said.
I had to speak, so I paraphrased a mot of Degas (I think it was Degas) and said:
“If Rousseau could come to life and see this sketch of yours, I imagine he would be very much interested, but if he saw mine he might say, 'That is my fault!’”
“OH!” she cried, her colour rising quickly; she looked troubled for a second, then her eyes twinkled. “You’re not going to let my work make a difference between us, are you?”
“I’ll even try to look at it from your own point of view,” I answered, stepping back several yards to see it better, though I should have had to retire about a quarter of the length of a city block to see it quite from her own point of view.
She moved with me, both of us walking backward. I began:
“For a day like this, with all the colour in the trees themselves and so very little in the air—”
There came an interruption, a voice of unpleasant and wiry nasality, speaking from behind us.
“WELL, WELL!” it said. “So here we are again!”
I faced about and beheld, just emerged from a by-path, a fox-faced young man whose light, well-poised figure was jauntily clad in gray serge, with scarlet waistcoat and tie, white shoes upon his feet, and a white hat, gaily beribboned, upon his head. A recollection of the dusky road and a group of people about Pere Baudry’s lamplit door flickered across my mind.
“The historical tourist!” I exclaimed. “The highly pedestrian tripper from Trouville!”
“You got me right, m’dear friend,” he replied with condescension; “I rec’leck meetin’ you perfect.”
“And I was interested to learn,” said I, carefully observing the effect of my words upon him, “that you had been to Les Trois Pigeons after all. Perhaps I might put it, you had been through Les Trois Pigeons, for the maitre d’hotel informed me you had investigated every corner—that wasn’t locked.”
“Sure,” he returned, with rather less embarrassment than a brazen Vishnu would have exhibited under the same circumstances. “He showed me what pitchers they was in your studio. I’ll luk ‘em over again fer ye one of these days. Some of ‘em was right gud.”
“You will be visiting near enough for me to avail myself of the opportunity?”
“Right in the Pigeon House, m’friend. I’ve just come down t’putt in a few days there,” he responded coolly. “They’s a young feller in this neighbourhood I take a kind o’ fam’ly interest in.”
“Who is that?” I asked quickly.
For answer he produced the effect of a laugh by widening and lifting one side of his mouth, leaving the other, meantime, rigid.
“Don’ lemme int’rup’ the conv’sation with yer lady-friend,” he said winningly. “What they call ‘talkin’ High Arts,’ wasn’t it? I’d like to hear some.”