“In the lodge of the Mother of Men,In the land of Desire,Are the embers of fire,Are the ashes of those who return,Who return to the world:Who flame at the breathOf the Mockers of Death.O Sweet, we will voyage againTo the camp of Love’s fire,Nevermore to return!”
“How am I doing?” she said at the end of this verse. She really did not know—her voice seemed an endless distance away. But she felt the stillness in the drawing-room.
“Well,” he said. “Now for the other. Don’t be afraid; let your voice, let yourself, go.”
“I can’t let myself go.”
“Yes, you can: just swim with the music.”
She did swim with it. Never before had Peppingham drawing-room heard a song like this; never before, never after, did any of Delia Gasgoyne’s friends hear her sing as she did that night. And Lady Gravesend whispered for a week afterwards that Delia Gasgoyne sang a wild love song in the most abandoned way with that colonial Belward. Really a song of the most violent sentiment!
There had been witchery in it all. For Gaston lifted the girl on the waves of his music, and did what he pleased with her, as she sang:
“O love, by the light of thine eyeWe will fare oversea,We will beAs the silver-winged herons that restBy the shallows,The shallows of sapphire stone;No more shall we wander alone.As the foam to the shoreIs my spirit to thine;And God’s serfs as they fly,—The Mockers of DeathThey will breathe on the embers of fire:We shall live by that breath,—Sweet, thy heart to my heart,As we journey afar,No more, nevermore, to return!”
When the song was ended there was silence, then an eager murmur, and requests for more; but Gaston, still lengthening the close of the accompaniment, said quietly:
“No more. I wanted to hear you sing that song only.”
He rose.
“I am so very hot,” she said.
“Come into the hall.”
They passed into the long corridor, and walked up and down, for a time in silence.
“You felt that music?” he asked at last.
“As I never felt music before,” she replied.
“Do you know why I asked you to sing it?”
“How should I know?”
“To see how far you could go with it.”
“How far did I go?”
“As far as I expected.”
“It was satisfactory?”
“Perfectly.”
“But why—experiment—on me?”
“That I might see if you were not, after all, as much a barbarian as I.”
“Am I?”
“No. That was myself singing as well as you. You did not enjoy it altogether, did you?”
“In a way, yes. But—shall I be honest? I felt, too, as if, somehow, it wasn’t quite right; so much—what shall I call it?”
“So much of old Adam and the Garden? Sit down here for a moment, will you?”
She trembled a little, and sat.
“I want to speak plainly and honestly to you,” he said, looking earnestly at her. “You know my history—about my wife who died in Labrador, and all the rest?”
“Yes, they have told me.”
“Well, I have nothing to hide, I think; nothing more that you ought to know: though I’ve been a scamp one way and another.”
“‘That I ought to know’?” she repeated.
“Yes: for when a man asks a woman to be his wife, he should be prepared to open the cupboard of skeletons.” She was silent; her heart was beating so hard that it hurt her.
“I am going to ask you to be my wife, Delia.”
She was silent, and sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap.
He went on
“I don’t know that you will be wise to accept me, but if you will take the risk—”
“Oh, Gaston, Gaston!” she said, and her hands fluttered towards his.
An hour later, he said to her, as they parted for the night:
“I hope, with all my heart, that you will never repent of it, Delia.”
“You can make me not repent of it. It rests with you, Gaston; indeed, indeed, all with you.”
“Poor girl!” he said, unconsciously, as he entered his room. He could not have told why he said it. “Why will you always sit up for me, Brillon?” he asked a moment afterwards.
Jacques saw that something had occurred. “I have nothing else to do, sir,” he replied. “Brillon,” Gaston added presently, “we’re in a devil of a scrape now.”
“What shall we do, monsieur?”
“Did we ever turn tail?”
“Yes, from a prairie fire.”
“Not always. I’ve ridden through.”
“Alors, it’s one chance in ten thousand!”
“There’s a woman to be thought of—Jacques.”
“There was that other time.”
“Well, then?”
Presently Jacques said: “Who is she, monsieur?”
Gaston did not answer. He was thinking hard. Jacques said no more. The next morning early the guests knew who the woman was, and by noon Jacques also.
Gaston let himself drift. The game of love and marriage is exciting, the girl was affectionate and admiring, the world was genial, and all things came his way. Towards the end of the hunting season Captain Maudsley had an accident. It would prevent him riding to hounds again, and at his suggestion, backed by Lord Dunfolly and Lord Dargan, Gaston became Master of the Hounds. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Master of the Hounds before him. Hunting was a keen enjoyment—one outlet for wild life in him—and at the last meet of the year he rode in Captain Maudsley’s place. They had a good run, and the taste of it remained with Gaston for many a day; he thought of it sometimes as he rode in the Park now every morning—with Delia and her mother.
Jacques and his broncho came no more, or if they did it was at unseasonable hours, and then to be often reprimanded (and twice arrested) for furious riding. Gaston had a bad moment when he told Jacques that he need not come with him again. He did it casually, but, cool as he was, a cold sweat came on his cheek. He had to take a little brandy to steady himself—yet he had looked into menacing rifle-barrels more than once without a tremor. It was clear, on the face of it, that Delia and her mother should be his companions in the Park, and not this grave little half-breed; but, somehow, it got on his nerves. He hesitated for days before he could cast the die against Jacques. It had been the one open bond of the old life; yet the man was but a servant, and to be treated as such, and was, indeed, except on rarest occasions. If Delia had known that Gaston balanced the matter between her and Jacques, her indignation might perhaps have sent matters to a crisis. But Gaston did the only possible thing; and the weeks drifted on.
Happy? It was inexplicable even to himself that at times, when he left Delia, he said unconsciously: “Well, it’s a pity!”
But she was happy in her way. His dark, mysterious face with its background of abstraction, his unusual life, distinguished presence, and the fact that people of great note sought his conversation, all strengthened the bonds, and deepened her imagination; and imagination is at the root of much that passes for love. Gaston was approached at Lord Dargan’s house by the Premier himself. It was suggested that he should stand for a constituency in the Conservative interest. Lord Faramond, himself picturesque, acute, with a keen knowledge of character and a taste for originality, saw material for a useful supporter—fearless, independent, with a gift for saying ironical things, and some primitive and fundamental principles well digested.
Gaston, smiling, said that he would only be a buffalo fretting on a chain.
Lord Faramond replied:
“And why the chain?” He followed this up by saying: “It is but a case of playing lion-tamer down there. Have one little gift all your own, know when to impose it, and you have the pleasure of feeling that your fingers move a great machine, the greatest in the world—yes the very greatest. There is Little Grapnel just vacant: the faithful Glynn is gone. Come: if you will, I’ll send my secretary to-morrow morning-eh?”
“You are not afraid of the buffalo, sir?”
Lord Faramond’s fingers touched his arm, drummed it “My greatest need—one to roar as gently as the sucking-dove.”
“But what if I, not knowing the rules of the game, should think myself on the corner of the veldt or in an Indian’s tepee, and hit out?”
“You do not carry derringers?”
He smiled. “No; but—”
He glanced down at his arms.
“Well, well; that will come one day, perhaps!” Lord Faramond paused, abstracted, then added: “But not through you. Good-bye, then, good-bye. Little Grapnel in ten days!”
And it was so. Little Grapnel was Conservative. It was mostly a matter of nomination, and in two weeks Gaston, in a kind of dream, went down to Westminster, lunched with Lord Faramond, and was introduced to the House. The Ladies Gallery was full, for the matter was in all the papers, and a pretty sensation had been worked up one way and another.
That night, after dinner, Gaston rose to make his maiden speech on a bill dealing with an imminent social question. He was not an amateur. Time upon time he had addressed gatherings in the North, and had once stood at the bar of the Canadian Commons to plead the cause of the half-breeds. He was pale, but firm, and looked striking. His eyes went slowly round the House, and he began in a low, clear, deliberate voice, which got attention at once. The first sentence was, however, a surprise to every one, and not the least to his own party, excepting Lord Faramond. He disclaimed detailed and accurate knowledge of the subject. He said this with an honesty which took away the breath of the House. In a quiet, easy tone he then referred to what had been previously said in the debate.
The first thing he did was to crumble away with a regretful kind of superiority the arguments of two Conservative speakers, to the sudden amusement of the Opposition, who presently cheered him. He looked up as though a little surprised, waited patiently, and went on. The iconoclasm proceeded. He had one or two fixed ideas in his mind, simple principles on social questions of which he had spoken to his leader, and he never wavered from the sight of them, though he had yet to state them. The Premier sat, head cocked, with an ironical smile at the cheering, but he was wondering whether, after all, his man was sure; whether he could stand this fire, and reverse his engine quite as he intended. One of the previous speakers was furious, came over and appealed to Lord Faramond, who merely said, “Wait.”
Gaston kept on. The flippant amusement of the Opposition continued. Something, however, in his grim steadiness began to impress his own party as the other, while from more than one quarter of the House there came a murmur of sympathy. His courage, his stone-cold strength, the disdain which was coming into his voice, impressed them, apart from his argument or its bearing on the previous debate. Lord Faramond heard the occasional murmurs of approval and smiled. Then there came a striking silence, for Gaston paused. He looked towards the Ladies Gallery. As if in a dream—for his brain was working with clear, painful power—he saw, not Delia nor her mother, nor Lady Dargan, but Alice Wingfield! He had a sting, a rush in his blood. He felt that none had an interest in him such as she: shamed, sorrowful, denied the compensating comfort which his brother’s love might give her. Her face, looking through the barriers, pale, glowing, anxious, almost weird, seemed set to the bars of a cage.
Gaston turned upon the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond, who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him. He began slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite observations, naive, pungent. Presently there came a poignant edge to his trailing tones. After giving the subject new points of view, showing him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely radical, so impractical.
He was saying: “In the history of the British Parliament—” when some angry member cried out, “Who coached you?”
Gaston’s quick eye found the man.
“Once,” he answered instantly, “one honourable gentleman asked that of another in King Charles’s Parliament, and the reply then is mine now—‘You, sir!’”
“How?” returned the puzzled member.
Gaston smiled:
“The nakedness of the honourable gentleman’s mind!”
The game was in his hands. Lord Faramond twisted a shoulder with satisfaction, tossed a whimsical look down the line of the Treasury Bench, and from that Bench came unusual applause.
“Where the devil did he get it?” queried a Minister.
“Out on the buffalo-trail,” replied Lord Faramond. “Good fellow!”
In the Ladies Gallery, Delia clasped her mother’s hand with delight; in the Strangers Gallery, a man said softly, “Not so bad, Cadet.”
Alice Wingfield’s face had a light of aching pleasure. “Gaston, Gaston!” she said, in a whisper heard only by the woman sitting next to her, who though a stranger gave a murmur of sympathy.
Gaston made his last effort in a comparison of the state of the English people now and before she became Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and then incisively traced the social development onwards. It was the work of a man with a dramatic nature and a mathematical turn. He put the time, the manners, the movements, the men, as in a picture.
Presently he grew scornful. His words came hotly, like whip-lashes. He rose to force and power, though his voice was never loud, rather concentrated, resonant. It dropped suddenly to a tone of persuasiveness and conciliation, and declaring that the bill would be merely vicious where it meant to be virtuous, ended with the question:
“Shall we burn the house to roast the pig?”
“That sounds American,” said the member for Burton-Halsey, “but he hasn’t an accent. Pig is vulgar though—vulgar.”
“Make it Lamb—make it Lamb!” urged his neighbour.
Meanwhile both sides applauded. Maiden speeches like this were not common. Lord Faramond turned round to him. Another member made way and Gaston leaned towards the Premier, who nodded and smiled. “Most excellent buffalo!” he said.
“One day we will chain you—to the Treasury Bench.”
Gaston smiled.
“You are thought prudent, sir!”
“Ah! an enemy hath said this.”
Gaston looked towards the Ladies Gallery. Delia’s eyes were on him; Alice was gone.
A half-hour later he stood in the lobby, waiting for Mrs. Gasgoyne, Lady Dargan, and Delia to come. He had had congratulations in the House; he was having them now. Presently some one touched him on the arm.
“Not so bad, Cadet.”
Gaston turned and saw his uncle. They shook hands. “You’ve a gift that way,” Ian Belward continued, “but to what good? Bless you, the pot on the crackling thorns! Don’t you find it all pretty hollow?”
Gaston was feeling reaction from the nervous work. “It is exciting.”
“Yes, but you’ll never have it again as to-night. The place reeks with smugness, vanity, and drudgery. It’s only the swells—Derby, Gladstone, and the few—who get any real sport out of it. I can show you much more amusing things.”
“For instance?”
“‘Hast thou forgotten me?’ You hungered for Paris and Art and the joyous life. Well, I’m ready. I want you. Paris, too, is waiting, and a good cuisine in a cheery menage. Sup with me at the Garrick, and I’ll tell you. Come along. Quis separabit?”
“I have to wait for Mrs. Gasgoyne—and Delia.”
“Delia! Delia! Goddess of proprieties, has it come to that!”
He saw a sudden glitter in Gaston’s eyes, and changed his tone.
“Well, an’ a man will he will, and he must be wished good-luck. So, good-luck to you! I’m sorry, though, for that cuisine in Paris, and the grand picnic at Fontainebleau, and Moban and Cerise. But it can’t be helped.”
He eyed Gaston curiously. Gaston was not in the least deceived. His uncle added presently, “But you will have supper with me just the same?”
Gaston consented, and at this point the ladies appeared. He had a thrill of pleasure at hearing their praises, but, somehow, of all the fresh experiences he had had in England, this, the weightiest, left him least elated. He had now had it all: the reaction was begun, and he knew it.
“Well, Ian Belward, what mischief are you at now?” said Mrs. Gasgoyne.
“A picture merely, and to offer homage. How have you tamed our lion, and how sweetly does he roar! I feed him at my Club to-night.”
“Ian Belward, you are never so wicked as when you ought most to be decent.—I wish I knew your place in this picture,” she added brusquely.
“Merely a little corner at their fireside.” He nodded towards Delia and Gaston.
“The man has sense, and Delia is my daughter!”
“Precisely why I wish a place in their affections.”
“Why don’t you marry one of the women you have—spoiled, and spend the rest of your time in living yourself down? You are getting old.”
“For their own sakes, I don’t. Put that to my credit. I’ll have but one mistress only as the sand gets low. I’ve been true to her.”
“You, true to anything!”
“The world has said so.”
“Nonsense! You couldn’t be.”
“Visit my new picture in three months—my biggest thing. You will say my mistress fares well at my hands.”
“Mere talk. I have seen your mistress, and before every picture I have thought of those women! A thing cannot be good at your price: so don’t talk that sentimental stuff to me.”
“Be original; you said that to me thirty years ago.”
“I remember perfectly: that did not require much sense.”
“No; you tossed it off, as it were. Yet I’d have made you a good husband. You are the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”
“The compliment is not remarkable. Now, Ian Belward, don’t try to say clever things. And remember that I will have no mischief-making.”
“At thy command—”
“Oh, cease acting, and take Sophie to her carriage.” Two hours later, Delia Gasgoyne sat in her bedroom wondering at Gaston’s abstraction during the drive home. Yet she had a proud elation at his success, and a happy tear came to her eye.
Meanwhile Gaston was supping with his uncle. Ian was in excellent spirits: brilliant, caustic, genial, suggestive. After a little while Gaston rose to the temper of his host. Already the scene in the Commons was fading from him, and when Ian proposed Paris immediately, he did not demur. The season was nearly over.
Ian said; very well, why remain? His attendance at the House? Well, it would soon be up for the session. Besides, the most effective thing he could do was to disappear for the time. Be unexpected—that was the key to notoriety. Delia Gasgoyne? Well, as Gaston had said, they were to meet in the Mediterranean in September; meanwhile a brief separation would be good for both. Last of all—he did not wish to press it—but there was a promise!
Gaston answered quietly, at last: “I will redeem the promise.”
“When?”
“Within thirty-six hours.”
“That is, you will be at my studio in Paris within thirty-six hours from now?”
“That is it.”
“Good! I shall start at eight to-morrow morning. You will bring your horse, Cadet?”
“Yes, and Brillon.”
“He isn’t necessary.” Ian’s brow clouded slightly.
“Absolutely necessary.”
“A fantastic little beggar. You can get a better valet in France. Why have one at all?”
“I shall not decline from Brillon on a Parisian valet. Besides, he comes as my camarade.”
“Goth! Goth! My friend the valet! Cadet, you’re a wonderful fellow, but you’ll never fit in quite.”
“I don’t wish to fit in; things must fit me.” Ian smiled to himself.
“He has tasted it all—it’s not quite satisfying—revolution next! What a smash-up there’ll be! The romantic, the barbaric overlaps. Well, I shall get my picture out of it, and the estate too.”
Gaston toyed with his wine-glass, and was deep in thought. Strange to say, he was seeing two pictures. The tomb of Sir Gaston in the little church at Ridley: A gipsy’s van on the crest of a common, and a girl standing in the doorway.
The next morning he went down to the family solicitor’s office. He had done so, off and on, for weeks. He spent the time in looking through old family papers, fishing out ancient documents, partly out of curiosity, partly from an unaccountable presentiment. He had been there about an hour this morning when a clerk brought him a small box, which, he said, had been found inside another box belonging to the Belward-Staplings, a distant branch of the family. These had asked for certain ancient papers lately, and a search had been made, with this result. The little box was not locked, and the key was in it. How the accident occurred was not difficult to imagine. Generations ago there had probably been a conference of the two branches of the family, and the clerk had inadvertently locked the one box within the other. This particular box of the Belward-Staplings was not needed again. Gaston felt that here was something. These hours spent among old papers had given him strange sensations, had, on the one hand, shown him his heritage; but had also filled him with the spirit of that by-gone time. He had grown further away from the present. He had played his part as in a drama: his real life was in the distant past and out in the land of the heathen.
Now he took out a bundle of papers with broken seals, and wound with a faded tape. He turned the rich important parchments over in his hands. He saw his own name on the outside of one: “Sir Gaston Robert Belward.” And there was added: “Bart.” He laughed. Well, why not complete the reproduction? He was an M. P.—why not a Baronet? He knew how it was done. There were a hundred ways. Throw himself into the arbitration question between Canada and the United States: spend ten thousand pounds of—his grandfather’s—money on the Party? His reply to himself was cynical: the game was not worth the candle. What had he got out of it all? Money? Yes: and he enjoyed that—the power that it gave—thoroughly. The rest? He knew that it did not strike as deep as it ought: the family tradition, the social scheme—the girl.
“What a brute I am!” he said. “I’m never wholly of it. I either want to do as they did when George Villiers had his innings, or play the gipsy as I did so many years.”
The gipsy! As he held the papers in his hand he thought as he had done last night, of the gipsy-van on Ridley Common, and of—how well he remembered her name!—of Andree.
He suddenly threw his head back, and laughed. “Well, well, but it is droll! Last night, an English gentleman, an honourable member with the Treasury Bench in view; this morning an adventurer, a Romany. I itch for change. And why? Why? I have it all, yet I could pitch it away this moment for a wild night on the slope, or a nigger hunt on the Rivas. Chateau-Leoville, Goulet, and Havanas at a bob?—Jove, I thirst for a swig of raw Bourbon and the bite of a penny Mexican! Games, Gaston, games! Why the devil did little Joe worry at being made ‘move on’? I’ve got ‘move on’ in every pore: I’m the Wandering Jew. Oh, a gentleman born am I! But the Romany sweats from every inch of you, Gaston Belward! What was it that sailor on the Cyprian said of the other? ‘For every hair of him was rope-yarn, and every drop of blood Stockholm tar!’”
He opened a paper. Immediately he was interested. Another; then, quickly, two more; and at last, getting to his feet with an exclamation, he held a document to the light, and read it through carefully. He was alone in the room. He calmly folded it up, put it in his pocket, placed the rest of the papers back, locked the box, and passing into the next room, gave it to the clerk. Then he went out, a curious smile on his face. He stopped presently on the pavement.
“But it wouldn’t hold good, I fancy, after all these years. Yet Law is a queer business. Anyhow, I’ve got it.”
An hour later he called on Mrs. Gasgoyne and Delia. Mrs. Gasgoyne was not at home. After a little while, Gaston, having listened to some extracts from the newspapers upon his “brilliant, powerful, caustic speech, infinite in promise of an important career,” quietly told her that he was starting for Paris, and asked when they expected to go abroad in their yacht. Delia turned pale, and could not answer for a moment. Then she became very still, and as quietly answered that they expected to get away by the middle of August. He would join them? Yes, certainly, at Marseilles, or perhaps, Gibraltar. Her manner, so well-controlled, though her features seemed to shrink all at once, if it did not deceive him, gave him the wish to say an affectionate thing. He took her hand and said it. She thanked him, then suddenly dropped her fingers on his shoulder, and murmured with infinite gentleness and pride:
“You will miss me; you ought to!”
He drew the hand down.
“I could not forget you, Delia,” he said.
Her eyes came up quickly, and she looked steadily, wonderingly at him.
“Was it necessary to say that?”
She was hurt—inexpressibly,—and she shrank. He saw that she misunderstood him; but he also saw that, on the face of it, the phrase was not complimentary. His reply was deeply kind, effective. There was a pause—and the great moment for them both passed. Something ought to have happened. It did not. If she had had that touch of abandon shown when she sang “The Waking of the Fire,” Gaston might, even at this moment, have broken his promise to his uncle; but, somehow, he knew himself slipping away from her. With the tenderness he felt, he still knew that he was acting; imitating, reproducing other, better, moments with her. He felt the disrespect to her, but it could not be helped—it could not be helped.
He said that he would call and say good-bye to her and Mrs. Gasgoyne at four o’clock. Then he left. He went to his chambers, gave Jacques instructions, did some writing, and returned at four. Mrs. Gasgoyne had not come back. She had telegraphed that she would not be in for lunch. There was nothing remarkable in Gaston’s and Delia’s farewell. She thought he looked worn, and ought to have change, showing in every word that she trusted him, and was anxious that he should be, as she put it gaily, “comfy.” She was composed. The cleverest men are blind in the matter of a woman’s affections; and Gaston was only a mere man, after all. He thought that she had gone about as far in the way of feeling as she could go.
Nevertheless, in his hansom, he frowned, and said: “I oughtn’t to go. But I’m choking here. I can’t play the game an hour longer without a change. I’ll come back all right. I’ll meet her in the Mediterranean after my kick-up, and it’ll be all O. K. Jacques and I will ride down through Spain to Gibraltar, and meet the Kismet there. I shall have got rid of this restlessness then, and I’ll be glad enough to settle down, pose for throne and constitution, cultivate the olive branch, and have family prayers.”
At eight o’clock he appeared at Ridley Court, and bade his grandfather and grandmother good-bye. They were full of pride, and showed their affection in indirect ways—Sir William most by offering his opinion on the Bill and quoting Gaston frequently; Lady Belward, by saying that next year she would certainly go up to town—she had not done so for five years! They both agreed that a scamper on the Continent would now be good for him. At nine o’clock he passed the rectory, on his way, strange to note, to the church. There was one light burning, but it was not in the study nor in Alice’s window. He supposed they had not returned. He paused and thought. If anything happened, she should know. But what should happen? He shook his head. He moved on to the church. The doors were unlocked. He went in, drew out a little pocket-lantern, lit it, and walked up the aisle.
“A sentimental business this: I don’t know why I do it,” he thought.
He stopped at the tomb of Sir Gaston Belward, put his hand on it, and stood looking at it.
“I wonder if there is anything in it?” he said aloud: “if he does influence me? if we’ve got anything to do with each other? What he did I seem to know somehow, more or less. A little dwarf up in my brain drops the nuts down now and then. Well, Sir Gaston Belward, what is going to be the end of all this? If we can reach across the centuries, why, good-night and goodbye to you. Good-bye.”
He turned and went down the aisle. At the door a voice, a whispering voice, floated to him: “Good-bye.”
He stopped short and listened. All was still. He walked up the aisle, and listened again.-Nothing! He stood before the tomb, looking at it curiously. He was pale, but collected. He raised the light above his head, and looked towards the altar.—Nothing! Then he went to the door again, and paused.—Nothing!
Outside he said
“I’d stake my life I heard it!”
A few minutes afterwards, a girl rose up from behind the organ in the chancel, and felt her way outside. It was Alice Wingfield, who had gone to the church to pray. It was her good-bye which had floated down to Gaston.
Politicians gossiped. Where was the new member? His friends could not tell, further than that he had gone abroad. Lord Faramond did not know, but fetched out his lower lip knowingly.
“The fellow has instinct for the game,” he said. Sketches, portraits were in the daily and weekly journals, and one hardy journalist even gave an interview—which had never occurred. But Gaston remained a picturesque nine-days’ figure, and then Parliament rose for the year.
Meanwhile he was in Paris, and every morning early he could be seen with Jacques riding up the Champs Elysee and out to the Bois de Boulogne. Every afternoon at three he sat for “Monmouth” or the “King of Ys” with his horse in his uncle’s garden.
Ian Belward might have lived in a fashionable part; he preferred the Latin Quarter, with incursions into the other at fancy. Gaston lived for three days in the Boulevard Haussman, and then took apartments, neither expensive nor fashionable, in a quiet street. He was surrounded by students and artists, a few great men and a host of small men: Collarossi’s school here and Delacluse’s there: models flitting in and out of the studios in his court-yard, who stared at him as he rode, and sought to gossip with Jacques—accomplished without great difficulty.
Jacques was transformed. A cheerful hue grew on his face. He had been an exile, he was now at home. His French tongue ran, now with words in the patois of Normandy, now of Brittany; and all with the accent of French Canada, an accent undisturbed by the changes and growths of France. He gossiped, but no word escaped him which threw any light on his master’s history.
Soon, in the Latin Quarter, they were as notable as they had been at Ridley Court or in London. On the Champs Elysee side people stared at the two: chiefly because of Gaston’s splendid mount and Jacques’s strange broncho. But they felt that they were at home. Gaston’s French was not perfect, but it was enough for his needs. He got a taste of that freedom which he had handed over to the dungeons of convention two years before. He breathed. Everything interested him so much that the life he had led in England seemed very distant.
He wrote to Delia, of course. His letters were brief, most interesting, not tenderly intimate, and not daily. From the first they puzzled her a little, and continued to do so; but because her mother said, “What an impossible man!” she said, “Perfectly possible! Of course he is not like other men; he is a genius.”
And the days went on.
Gaston little loved the purlieus of the Place de l’Opera. One evening at a club in the Boulevard Malesherbes bored him. It was merely Anglo-American enjoyment, dashed with French drama. The Bois was more to his taste, for he could stretch his horse’s legs; but every day he could be found before some simple cafe in Montparnasse, sipping vermouth, and watching the gay, light life about him. He sat up with delight to see an artist and his “Madame” returning from a journey in the country, seated upon sheaves of corn, quite unregarded by the world; doing as they listed with unabashed simplicity. He dined often at the little Hotel St. Malo near the Gare Montparnasse, where the excellent landlord played the host, father, critic, patron, comrade—often benefactor—to his bons enfants. He drank vin ordinaire, smoked caporal cigarettes, made friends, and was in all as a savage—or a much-travelled English gentleman.
His uncle Ian had introduced him here as at other places of the kind, and, whatever his ulterior object was, had an artist’s pleasure at seeing a layman enjoy the doings of Paris art life. Himself lived more luxuriously. In an avenue not far from the Luxembourg he had a small hotel with a fine old-fashioned garden behind it, and here distinguished artists, musicians, actors, and actresses came at times.
The evening of Gaston’s arrival he took him to a cafe and dined him, and afterwards to the Boullier—there, merely that he might see; but this place had nothing more than a passing interest for him. His mind had the poetry of a free, simple—even wild-life, but he had no instinct for vice in the name of amusement. But the later hours spent in the garden under the stars, the cheerful hum of the boulevards coming to them distantly, stung his veins like good wine. They sat and talked, with no word of England in it at all, Jacques near, listening.
Ian Belward was at his best: genial, entertaining, with the art of the man of no principles, no convictions, and a keen sense of life’s sublime incongruities. Even Jacques, whose sense of humour had grown by long association with Gaston, enjoyed the piquant conversation. The next evening the same. About ten o’clock a few men dropped in: a sculptor, artists, and Meyerbeer, an American newspaper correspondent—who, however, was not known as such to Gaston.
This evening Ian determined to make Gaston talk. To deepen a man’s love for a thing, get him to talk of it to the eager listener—he passes from the narrator to the advocate unconsciously. Gaston was not to talk of England, but of the North, of Canada, of Mexico, the Lotos Isles. He did so picturesquely, yet simply too, in imperfect but sufficient French. But as he told of one striking incident in the Rockies, he heard Jacques make a quick expression of dissent. He smiled. He had made some mistake in detail. Now, Jacques had been in his young days in Quebec the village story-teller; one who, by inheritance or competency, becomes semi-officially a raconteur for the parish; filling in winter evenings, nourishing summer afternoons, with tales, weird, childlike, daring.
Now Gaston turned and said to Jacques:
“Well, Brillon, I’ve forgotten, as you see; tell them how it was.”
Two hours later when Jacques retired on some errand, amid ripe applause, Ian said:
“You’ve got an artist there, Cadet: that description of the fight with the loop garoo was as good as a thing from Victor Hugo. Hugo must have heard just such yarns, and spun them on the pattern. Upon my soul, it’s excellent stuff. You’ve lived, you two.”
Another night Ian Belward gave a dinner, at which were present an actress, a singer of some repute, the American journalist, and others. Something that was said sent Gaston’s mind to the House of Commons. Presently he saw himself in a ridiculous picture: a buffalo dragging the Treasury Bench about the Chamber; as one conjures things in an absurd dream. He laughed outright, at a moment when Mademoiselle Cerise was telling of a remarkable effect she produced one night in “Fedora,” unpremeditated, inspired; and Mademoiselle Cerise, with smiling lips and eyes like daggers, called him a bear. This brought him to him self, and he swam with the enjoyment. He did enjoy it, but not as his uncle wished and hoped. Gaston did not respond eagerly to the charms of Mademoiselle Cerise and Madame Juliette.
Was Delia, then, so strong in the barbarian’s mind? He could not think so, but Gaston had not shown yet, either for model, for daughter of joy, or for the mademoiselles of the stage any disposition to an amour or a misalliance; and either would be interesting and sufficient! Models went in and out of Ian’s studio and the studios of others, and Gaston chatted with them at times; and once he felt the bare arm and bare breast of a girl as she sat for a nymph, and said in an interested way that her flesh was as firm and fine as a Tongan’s. He even disputed with his uncle on the tints of her skin, on seeing him paint it in, showing a fine eye for colour. But there was nothing more; he was impressed, observant, interested—that was all. His uncle began to wonder if the Englishman was, after all, deeper in the grain than the savage. He contented himself with the belief that the most vigorous natures are the most difficult to rouse. Mademoiselle Cerise sang, with chic and abandon very fascinating to his own sensuous nature, a song with a charming air and sentiment. It was after a night at the opera when they had seen her in “Lucia,” and the contrast, as she sang in his garden, softly lighted, showed her at the most attractive angles. She drifted from a sparkling chanson to the delicate pathos of a song of De Musset’s.
Gaston responded to the artist; but to the woman—no. He had seen a new life, even in its abandon, polite, fresh. It amused him, but he could still turn to the remembrance of Delia without blushing, for he had come to this in the spirit of the idler, not the libertine. Mademoiselle Cerise said to Ian at last:
“Enfin, is the man stone? As handsome as a leopard, too! But, it is no matter.”
She made another effort to interest him, however. It galled her that he did not fall at her feet as others had done. Even Ian had come there in his day, but she knew him too well. She had said to him at the time: “You, monsieur? No, thank you. A week, a month, and then the brute in you would out. You make a woman fond, and then—a mat for your feet, and your wicked smile, and savage English words to drive her to the vitriol or the Seine. Et puis, dear monsieur, accept my good friendship; nothing more. I will sing to you, dance to you, even pray for you—we poor sinners do that sometimes, and go on sinning; but, again, nothing more.”
Ian admired her all the more for her refusal of him, and they had been good friends. He had told her of his nephew’s coming, had hinted at his fortune, at his primitive soul, at the unconventional strain in him, even at marriage. She could not read his purpose, but she knew there was something, and answering him with a yes, had waited. Had Gaston have come to her feet she would probably have got at the truth somehow, and have worked in his favour—the joy vice takes to side with virtue, at times—when it is at no personal sacrifice. But Gaston was superior in a grand way. He was simple, courteous, interested only. This stung her, and she would bring him to his knees, if she could. This night she had rung all the changes, and had done no more than get his frank applause. She became petulant in an airy, exacting way. She asked him about his horse. This interested him. She wanted to see it. To-morrow? No, no, now. Perhaps to-morrow she would not care to; there was no joy in deliberate pleasure. Now—now—now! He laughed. Well then, now, as she wished!
Jacques was called. She said to him:
“Come here, little comrade.” Jacques came. “Look at me,” she added. She fixed her eyes on him, and smiled. She was in the soft flare of the lights.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “what do you think of me?”
Jacques was confused. “Madame is beautiful.”
“The eyes?” she urged.
“I have been to Gaspe, and west to Esquimault, and in England, but I have never seen such as those,” he said. Race and primitive man spoke there.
She laughed. “Come closer, little man.”
He did so. She suddenly rose, dropped her hands on his shoulders, and kissed his cheek.
“Now bring the horse, and I will kiss him too.”
Did she think she could rouse Gaston by kissing his servant? Yet it did not disgust him. He knew it was a bit of acting, and it was well done. Besides, Jacques Brillon was not a mere servant, and he, too, had done well. She sat back and laughed lightly when Jacques was gone. Then she said: “The honest fellow!” and hummed an air: