CHAPTER XIII
LUCILLA MERRITONhad much money, a kind heart and a pretty little talent in painting. The last secured her admittance to the circle of art-students round about the Rue Bonaparte, the second made her popular among them and the money enabled her to obey any reasonable dictate of the kind heart aforesaid. When those who were her intimates, mainly hard-working and none too opulent English girls, took her to task for her luxurious way of living, and pointed out that it was not in keeping with the Spartan, makeshift traditions of the Latin Quarter, and that it differentiated her too much from her fellows, she replied, with the frankness of her country, first, that she saw no sense in pretending to be other than she was, second, that in the atmosphere of luxury to which she had been born, she was herself, for whatever that self was worth; and thirdly, that any masquerading as a liver of the simple life would choke all the agreeable qualities out of her. When, looking round her amateur studio, they objected that she did not take her art seriously, she cordially agreed.
“I take what you call my art,” she would say, “just as it suits me. I can command too many things in the world for me to sacrifice them to the mediocre result I can get out of a paint-brush and a bit of canvas. I shall never need paint for money, and if I did I’m sure I shouldn’t earn any. But I love painting for its own sake, and I have enough talent to make it worth while to have good instruction in technique, so that my pictures shall more or less satisfy myself and not set my friends’ teeth on edge. And that’s why I’m here.”
She was a wealthy vagabond of independent fortune inherited from her mother long since deceased, with no living ties save her father, a railway director in America, now married to a young wife, a school-mate of her own, whom, since her childhood, she had peculiarly abhorred. But in the world, which lay wide open to her,videlicetthe civilised nations of the two hemispheres, she had innumerable friends. No human will pretended to control her actions. She was as free to live in Rosario as in Buda-Pesth; in Nairobi as in Nijni Novgorod. For the last two or three years she had elected to establish her headquarters in Paris and study painting. But why the latter process should involve a hard bed in a shabby room and dreadful meals at the Petit Cornichon, she could never understand. Occasionally, on days of stress at theatélier, she did lunch at the Petit Cornichon. It was convenient, and, as she was young and thirsty for real draughts of life, the chatter and hubbub of insensate ambitions afforded her both interest and amusement; but she found the food execrable and the universal custom of cleaning knife, fork, spoon and plate before using them exceedingly disgusting. Yet, being a lady born and bred, she performed the objectionable rite in the most gracious way in the world; and when it came to comradeship, then her democratic traditions asserted themselves. Her student friends ranged the social gamut. If the wearer were a living spirit, she regarded broken boots and threadbare garments merely as an immaterial accident of fortune, like a broken nose or an amputated limb. The flat on the Boulevard St. Germain was the haven of many a hungry girl and boy. And they found their way thither (as far as Lucilla was concerned) not because they were hungry, but because that which lay deep in their souls had won her accurate recognition.
By way of digression, an essential difference in point of view between English and Americans may here be noted. If an Englishman has reason to admire a tinker and make friends with him, he will leave his own respectable sphere and enter that of the tinker, and, in some humble haunt of tinkerdom, where he can remain incognito, will commune with his crony over pots of abominable and digestion-racking ale. The instinct of the American, in sworn brotherhood with a tinker, is, on the other hand, to lift the tinker to his own habitation of delight. He will desire to take him into a saloon which he himself frequents, fill him up with champagne and provide him with the best, biggest and strongest cigar that money can buy. In both cases appear the special defects of national qualities. The Englishman goes to the tinker’s boozing ken (thereby, incidentally, putting the tinker at his ease) because he would be ashamed of being seen by any of his own clan in a tinker’s company. The American does not care a hang for being seen with the tinker; he wants to give his friend a good time; but, incidentally, he has no intuitive regard for the tinker’s feelings, predilections and timidities.
From which disquisition it may be understood how Lucilla played Lady Bountiful without the slightest consciousness of doing so. She played it so well, with regard to Félise, as to make that young woman in the course of a day or two her slave and worshipper. She shewed her the sights of Paris, Versailles, the Galeries de Lafayette, the Tomb of Napoleon, Poiret’s, the Salon d’Hiver, the Panthéon and Cartier’s in the Rue de la Paix. With the aid of pins and scissors and Céleste, she also attired her in an evening frock and under the nominal protection of an agreeable young compatriot from the Embassy took her to dine at the Café de Paris and then to the Théâtre du Gymnase. A great, soft-cushioned, smooth, noiseless car carried them luxuriously through the infinite streets; and when they were at home it seemed to await them night and day by the kerb of the Boulevard Saint Germain. Lucilla set the head of the little country mouse awhirl with sensations. Félise revered her as a goddess, and whispered in awe the Christian name which she was commanded to use.
A breathless damsel, with a jumble of conflicting scraps of terror and delight instead of a mind, her arms full of an adored Persian kitten and an adoring Pekinese spaniel, after a couple of days’ flashing course through France, was brought in the gathering dusk, with a triumphant sweep up the hill, to the familiar front door of the Hôtel des Grottes. Baptiste, green-aproned, gaped as he saw her, and, scuttling indoors, shouted at the top of his voice:
“Monsieur, monsieur, c’est mademoiselle!”
In an instant, Bigourdin lumbered out at full speed. He almost lifted her from the car, scattering outraged kitten and offended dog, hid her in his vast embrace and hugged her and kissed her and held her out at arm’s length and laughed and hugged her again. There was no doubt of the prodigal’s welcome. She laughed and sobbed and hugged the great man in return. And then he recovered himself and became thebon hôtelierand assisted Lucilla to alight, while Félise greeted a smiling Martin and suffered the embrace of Euphémie, panting from the kitchen.
“If mademoiselle will give herself the trouble of following me——” said Bigourdin, and led the way up the stairs, followed by Lucilla and Céleste, guardian of the jewel case. He threw open the door of thechambre d’honneur, a double-windowed room, above the terrace, overlooking the town and the distant mountains of the Limousin, and shewed her with pride a tiny salon adjoining, the only private sitting-room in the hotel, crossed the corridor and flung to view the famous bathroom, disclosed next door a room for the maid, and swept her back to the bedroom, where a pine-cone fire was blazing fragrantly.
“Voilà, mademoiselle,” said he. “Tout à votre disposition.”
“I think it is absolutely charming,” cried Lucilla. She looked round. “Oh! what lovely things you have!”
Bigourdin beamed and made a little bow. He took inordinate pride in hischambre d’honneurin which he had stored the gems of the Empire furniture acquired by his great-grandfather, the luckless Général de Brigade. The instantaneous appreciation of a casual glance enchanted him.
“I hope, mademoiselle,” said he, in his courteous way, “you will do Félise and myself the honour of being our guest as long as you deign to stay at Brantôme.”
Lucilla met his bright eyes. “That’s delightful of you,” she laughed. “But I’m not one solitary person, I’m a caravan. There’s me and the maid and the chauffeur and the car and the dog and the cat.”
“The hotel is very little, mademoiselle,” replied Bigourdin, “but our hearts are big enough to entertain them.”
Nothing more, or, at least, nothing more by way of protest, was to be said. Lucilla put out her hand in her free, generous gesture.
“Monsieur Bigourdin, I accept with pleasure your delightful hospitality.”
“Je vous remercie infiniment, mademoiselle,” said Bigourdin.
He went downstairs in a flutter of excitement. Not for four generations, so far as he was aware, had such an event occurred in the Hôtel des Grottes. Members of the family, of course, had stayed there without charge. Once, towards the end of the Second Empire, a Minister of the Interior had occupied thechambre d’honneur, and had gone away without paying his bill; but that remained a bad black debt in the books of the hotel. Never had a stranger been an honoured guest. He had offered the position, it is true, to Corinna; but then he was in love with Corinna, which makes all the difference. The French are not instinctively hospitable; when they are seized, however, by the impulse of hospitality, all that they have is yours, down to the last crust in the larder; but they are fully conscious of their own generosity, they feel the tremendousness of the spiritual wave. So Bigourdin, kindest-hearted of men, lumbered downstairs aglow with a sense of altruistic adventure. In the vestibule he met Félise who had lingered there in order to obtain from Martin acompte renduof the household and the neighbourhood. Things had gone none too well—Monsieur Peyrian, one of their regular commercial travellers, having discovered a black-beetle in his bread, had gone to the Hôtel du Cygne. The baker had indignantly repudiated the black-beetle, his own black-beetles being apparently of an entirely different species. Another baker had been appointed, whose only defect was his inability to bake bread. ThebraveMadame Thuillier, who had been called in to superintend the factory, had quarrelled, after two days, with everybody, and had gone off in dudgeon because she did not eat at thepatron’stable. Then they had lost two of their best hands, one a young married woman who was reluctantly compelled to add to the population of France, and the other a girl who was discharged for laying false information against the very respectable and much married Baptiste, saying that he had pinched her. The old Mère Maquoise,marchande de quatre saisons, who was reputed to have known Général Bigourdin, was dead, and one of the hotel omnibus horses had come down on its knees.
Félise, forgetful of the Maison de Blanc and Nôtre Dame, wrung her hands. She had descended from fairyland into life’s dear and important realities.
“It’s desolating, what you tell me,” she cried.
“And all because you went away and left us,” said Martin.
“She is not going to leave us again!” cried Bigourdin, swooping down on her and carrying her off.
In the prim little salon he hugged her again and said gripping her hands:
“It appears you have greatly suffered, my poor little Félise. But why didn’t you tell me from the first that you were unhappy with your Aunt Clothilde? I did not know she had turned into such avieille pimbèche. She has written. And I have answered. Ah! I tell you, I have answered! You need never again have any fear of your Aunt Clothilde. I hope I am a Christian. But I hope too that I shall always differ from her in my ideas of Christianity.Mais tout ça est fini—bel et bien fini.We have to talk of ourselves. I have been a miserable man since you have been away,ma petiteFélise. I tell you that in all frankness. Everything has been at sixes and sevens. I can’t do without my littleménagère. And you shall never marry anybody, even the President of the Republic, unless you want to.Foi de Bigourdin! Voilà!”
Félise cried a little. “Tu es trop bon pour moi, mon oncle.”
“Allons donc!I seem to have been an old bear. Yet, in truth, I am harmless as a sheep. But have confidence in me, and in my very dear friend, your father—there are many things you cannot understand—and things will arrange themselves quite happily. You love me just a little bit, don’t you?”
She flung her arms round the huge man’s neck.
“Je t’adore, mon petit oncle,” she cried.
Ten minutes afterwards, with bunch of keys slung at her waist, she was busy restoring to order the chaos of the interregnum. Terrible things had happened during the absence of the feminine eye. Even Martin shared the universal reprimand. For Félise, manageress of hotel, and Félise, storm-tossed little human soul, were two entirely different entities.
“My dear Martin, how could you and my uncle pass these napkins from that infamous old thief of a laundress. They are black!”
And ruthlessly she flicked a napkin folded mitre-wise from the centre table before the eyes of the folder and revealed its dingy turpitude.
“It is well that I am back,” she declared.
“It is indeed, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.
She gave him a swift little glance out of the tail of her eye, before she sped away, and the corners of her lips drooped as though in disappointment. Then perhaps reflecting that she had been addressing the waiter and not the man, her face cleared. At all events he had taken her rating in good part.
Dinner had already begun and the hungry commercials, napkins at neck, were finishing their soup lustily, when Lucilla entered the dining room. The open Medici collar to a grey velvet dress shewed the graceful setting of her neck and harmonised with the brown hair brushed up from the forehead. She advanced smiling and stately, giving the impression of the perfect product of a new civilisation. Martin, who had but seen her for a few seconds in the dusk confusedly clad in furs, stood spell-bound, a pile of used soup-plates in his hands. Never had so radiant an apparition swum before his gaze. Bigourdin, dining as usual with Félise, rose immediately and conducted his guest to the little table by the terrace where once Martin and Corinna had sat. It was specially adorned with tawny chrysanthemums.
“I fell dreaming before the fire in the midst of your wonderful, old-world things, and had to hurry into my clothes, and so I’m late,” she apologised.
“If only you found all you needed, mademoiselle——” said Bigourdin anxiously. “It is the provinces and not Paris.”
She assured him that Félise had seen to every conceivable want and he left her to her meal. Martin delivered his soup-plates into the arms of the chambermaid and hovered over Lucilla with the menu card.
“Will mademoiselle take the dinner?” he asked in French.
She regarded him calmly and humorously and nodded. He became aware that her eyes were of a deep, deep grey, full of light. He found it difficult not to keep on looking at them. Breaking away, however, he fetched her soup and went off to attend to the others. At every pause by her table he noted some new and incomparable attribute. When bending over the platter from which she helped herself, he saw that her hands were beautifully shaped, plump, with long thin fingers and with delicate markings of veins beneath the white skin. An upward glance caught more blue veins on the temples. Another time he was struck by the supple grace of her movements. There were infinite gleams in her splendid hair. The faintest suggestion of perfume arose from her garments. She declined the vegetable course and, declining, looked up at him and smiled. He thought he had never seen a brow so noble, a nose so exquisitely cut, lips so kind and mocking. Her face was that of a Romney duchess into which the thought and spiritual freedom of the twentieth century had entered. As he sped about the service, thrusting dishes beneath bearded or blue, ill-shaven chins, her face floated before his eyes; every now and then he stole a distant glance at it, and longed for the happy though transient moment when he should come close to it again.
While he was clearing her table for dessert she said:
“Why do you speak French to me, when you know I’m an American?”
“It is the custom of the house when a guest speaks such excellent French as mademoiselle.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said in English; “but it seems rather ridiculous for an American and an Englishman to converse in a foreign language.”
“How do you know I am English, mademoiselle?” he asked, his heart a-flutter at the unexpected interchange of words.
She laughed. “I have eyes. Besides, I know all about you—first from our friend Corinna Hastings, and lately from my little hostess over the way.”
He flushed, charmed by the deep music of her voice and delighted at being recognised by her not only as an individual (for she radiated an attraction which had caused him to hate the conventional impersonality of waiterdom) but as a member more or less of her own social class. He paused, plate of crumbs in one hand and napkin in the other.
“Do you know Corinna Hastings?”
“Evidently. How else could she have told me of your romantic doings?” she replied laughingly, and Martin flushed deeper, conscious of an idiot question.
He set the apples and little white grapes before her. “I ought to have asked you,” said he, “how Miss Hastings came to talk to you about me?”
“She came on the train from Brantôme and rang my bell in Paris. She kept me up talking till four o’clock in the morning—not of you all the time. Don’t imagine it. You were just interestingly incidental.”
“Garçon,” cried a voice from the centre table.
“Bien, m’sieur.”
Martin tucked his napkin under his arm and turned away, followed by Lucilla’s humorous glance.
“L’addition!”
“Bien, m’sieur.”
He became the perfect waiter again, and brought the bill to the commercial traveller who had merely come in for dinner. The latter paid in even money, rose noisily—he was a stout, important, red-faced man—and, fumbling in several pockets rendered difficult of access by adiposity and good cheer, at last produced four coppers which he deposited with a base, metallic chink in Martin’s palm.
“Merci, m’sieur. Bon soir, m’sieur,” said the perfect waiter. But he would have given much to be able to dispose of the horrible coins otherwise than by thrusting them in his trouser pocket, to be able, for instance, to hurl them at the triple sausage neck of the departing donor; for he knew the starry, humorous eyes of the divinity were fixed on him. He felt hot and clammy and did not dare look round. And the hideous thought flashed through his mind: “Will she offer me a tip when she leaves?”
He busied himself furiously with his service, and, in a few moments, was relieved to see her ceremoniously conducted by Bigourdin and Félise from thesalle-à-manger. On the threshold Bigourdin paused and called him.
“You will serve coffee and liqueurs in thepetit salon, and if you go to the Café de l’Univers, you will kindly make my excuses to our friends.”
To enter the primly and plushily furnished salon, bearing the tray, and to set out the cups and glasses and bottles was an ordeal which he went through with the automatic rigidity of a highly trained London footman, looking neither to right nor left. He had a vague impression of a queenly figure reclining comfortably in an arm chair, haloed by a little cloud of cigarette smoke. He retired, finished his work in the pantry, swallowed a little food, changed his things and went out.
Instinct led him along the quays and through the narrow, old-world streets to the patch of yellow light before the Café de l’Univers. But there he halted, suddenly disinclined to enter. Something new and amazing had come into his life—he could not yet tell what—discordant with the commonplace of the familiar company. He looked through the space left between the edge of the blind and the jamb of the window and saw Beuzot, the professor at the Ecole Normale, playing backgammon with Monsieur Callot, the postmaster; and a couple of places away from them was visible the square-headed old Monsieur Viriot, smiting his left palm with his right fist. The excellent old man always did that when he inveighed against the government. To-night Martin cared little about the Government of the French Republic; still less for backgammon. He had a nostalgia for unknown things and an absurd impulse to walk abroad to find them beneath the moon and stars. Obeying the impulse, he retraced his steps along the quays and struck the main-road past the habitations of the rock dwellers. He walked for a couple of miles between rocks casting jagged shadows and a calm, misty plain without finding anything, until, following a laborious, zig-zag course, a dissolute quarryman of his acquaintance in incapable charge of a girl child of five, lurched into him and laid the clutch of a drowning mariner upon his shoulder.
“Monsieur Martin,” said he. “It is the good God who has sent you.”
“Boucabeille,” said Martin—for that was the name of the miscreant—“you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“You need not tell me, Monsieur Martin,” replied Boucabeille.
As the child was crying bitterly and the father was self-reproachful—he had taken themiocheto see her aunt, and coming back had met some friends who had enticed him into the Café of the Mère Diridieu, where they had given him some poisoned, leg-dislocating alcohol—Martin took the child in his arms, and trudged back to the rock-dwellings where the drunkard lived. On the way Boucabeille, relieved of paternal responsibility, the tired child now snuggling sleepily and comfortably against Martin’s neck, grew confidential and confessed, with sly enjoyment, that he had already well watered his throttle before he started. The man, he declared, with the luminousness of an apostle, who did not get drunk occasionally was an imbecile denying himself the pleasures of the Other Life. Martin recognised in Boucabeille a transcendentalist, no matter how muddle-headed. The sober clod did not know adventures. He did not know happiness. The path of the drunkard, Boucabeille explained, was strewn with joy.
The anxious wife who met them at the door called Martin a saint from heaven and her husband a stream of unmentionable things. He staggered under the outburst and laid his hand again on Martin’s shoulder.
“Monsieur Martin, I have committed a fault. I take you to witness”—his wife paused in her invective to hear the penitent—“if I was more drunk I wouldn’t pay attention to anything she says. I have committed a fault. I haven’t got drunk enough.”
“Sale cochon!” cried the lady, and Martin left them, meditating on the philosophy of drunkenness.Quo me rapis Bacche, plenum tui?To what godlike adventure? But the magic word wasplenum—right full to the lips. No half-and-half measures for Bacchus. Apparently Boucabeille had failed in his adventure and had missed happiness by a gill. Browning’s lines about the little more and the little less came into his head, and he laughed. Both the poet and the muddle-headed quarryman were right. Adventures not brought through to the end must be dismal fiasco. . . . His mind wandered a little. His shoulder was ever such a trifle stiff from carrying the child; but he missed the warmth of her grateful little body, and the trusting clasp of her tiny arms. It had been an insignificant adventure, an adventure, so to speak, in miniature; but it had been complete, rounded off, perfect. The proof lay in the glow of satisfaction at the thing accomplished. Materially, there was nothing to complain about. But from a philosophic standpoint the satisfaction was not absolute. For the absolute is finality, and there is no finality in mundane things. From a thing so finite as human joy eternal law decreed the evolution of the germs of fresh desires. There had been a strange sweetness in the clasp of those tiny arms. How much sweeter to a man would be the clasp, if the arms were his own flesh and blood? Martin was shocked by the suspicion that things were not going right with him as a human being.
The pleasant mass of the Hôtel des Grottes looming dimly white against its black background came into view. The lights in an uncurtained and unshuttered window, above the terrace, were visible. A figure passed rapidly across the room and sent drunkards and adventures and curly-headed five-year-olds packing from his mind. But he averted his eyes and walked on and came to the Pont de Dronne, and then halted to light a cigarette. The frosty silence of sharp moonlight hung over the town. The silver shimmer reflected from reaches of water and from slated roofs invested it with unspeakable beauty and peace. A little cold caressing wind came from the distant mountains, seen in soft outline. Near black shelves of rock and dark mysteries of forest and masses of houses beyond the bridge-end closed other horizons. He remembered his first impression of Brantôme, when he had sat with Corinna on the terrace, a mothering shelter from all fierce and cruel things.
“And yet,” thought he, as he puffed his cigarette smoke in the clear air, “beyond this little spot lies a world of unceasing endeavour and throbbing pulses and women of disturbing beauty. Such a woman on her meteoric passage from one sphere of glory to another has flashed before my eyes to-night. Why am I here pursuing an avocation, which, though honest, is none the less greasy and obscure?”
Unable to solve the enigma, he sighed and threw his cigarette, which had gone out during his meditation, into the river. A patter of quick footsteps at the approach of the bridge caused him to turn his head, and he saw emerge from the gloom into the moonlight a tall, fur-clad figure advancing towards him. She gave him a swift look of recognition.
“Monsieur Martin——”
He raised his cap. “Good evening, Miss Merriton.”
She halted. “My good host and hostess are gone to bed. I couldn’t sit by my window and sentimentalise through the glass; so I came out.”
“It’s a fine night,” said Martin.
“It is. But not one to hang about on a windy bridge. Come for a little walk, if you have time, and protect me against the dangers of Brantôme.”
Go for a walk with her? Defend her from dangers? Verily he would go through the universe with her! His heart thumped. It was in his whirling brain to cry: “Come and ride with me throughout the world and the more dragons I can meet and slay in your service, the more worthy shall I be to kiss the hem of your sacred grey velvet dinner-gown.” But from his fundamental, sober, commonsense he replied:
“The only dangers of Brantôme at this time of night are prudish eyes and scandalous tongues.”
She drew a little breath. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s frank and sensible. I’m always forgetting that France isn’t New York, or Paris for the matter of that, where one can do as one likes. I don’t know Provincial France a little bit, but I suppose, for red-hot gossip, it isn’t far behind a pretty little New England village. Still, can’t we get out of range, somehow, of the eyes? That road over there”—she waved a hand in the direction of the silent high-road, which Martin had lately travelled—“doesn’t seem to be encumbered with the scandal-mongers of Brantôme.”
He laughed. “Will you try it?”
She nodded assent.
They set forth briskly. The glimpse into her nature delighted him. She appreciated at once the motive of his warning, but was serenely determined to have her own way.
“We were just beginning an interesting little talk when you were called off,” she remarked.
Martin felt himself grow red, remembering the tightly pocketed bagman who took the stage while he searched for eleemosynary sous.
“My profession has its drawbacks,” said he.
“So has every profession. I’ve got a friend in America—I have met him two or three times—who is conductor on the Twentieth Century Express between New York and Chicago. He’s by way of being an astronomer, and the great drawback of his profession is that he has no time to sit on top of a mountain and look at stars. The drawback of yours is that you can’t carry on pleasant conversations whenever you like. But the profession’s all right, unless you’re ashamed of it.”
“But why should I be ashamed of it?” asked Martin.
“I don’t know. Why should you? My father, who was the son of a New England parson——”
“My father was a parson,” said Martin.
“Was he? Well, that’s good. We both come of a God-fearing stock, which is something in these days. Anyway, my father, in order to get through college, waited on the men in Hall at Harvard, and was a summer waiter at a hotel in the Adirondacks. Of course there are some Americans who would like it to be thought that their ancestors brought over the family estates with them in theMayflower. But we’re not like that. Say,” she said, after a few steps through the sweet keenness of the moonlit night. “Have you heard lately from Corinna?”
He had not. In her last letter to him she had announced her departure from the constricting family circle of Wendlebury. She was going to London.
“Where she would have a chance of self-development,” said Lucilla, with a laugh.
“How did you know that?” Martin asked in simple surprise, for those had been almost Corinna’s own words.
“What else would she go to London for?”
“I don’t know,” said Martin. “She did not tell me.”
They did not discuss Corinna further. But Martin felt that his companion had formulated his own diagnosis of Corinna’s abiding defect: her suspicion that the cosmic scheme centred round the evolution of Corinna Hastings. In a very subtle way the divinity had established implied understandings between them. They were of much the same parentage. In her own family the napkin had played no ignoble part. They were at one in their little confidential estimate of their common friend. And when she threw back her adorable head and drew a deep breath and said: “It’s just lovely here,” he felt deliciously near her. Deliciously and dangerously. A little later, as they came upon the rock dwellings, she laid a fleeting, but thrilling touch on his arm.
“What in the world are those houses?”
He told her. He described the lives of the inhabitants. He described, on the way back, for the rocks marked the limit of their stroll, his adventure with Boucabeille. Ordinarily shy, and if not tongue-tied, at least unimaginative in speech, he now found vivid words and picturesque images, his soul set upon repaying her, in some manner for her gracious comradeship. Her smiles, her interest, her quick sympathy, the occasional brush of her furs against his body, as she leaned to listen, intoxicated him. He spoke of France, the land of his adoption, and the spiritual France that no series of hazardous governments could impair, with rhapsodical enthusiasm. She declared, in her rich, deep voice, as though carried away by him:
“I love to hear you say such things. It is splendid to get to the soul of a people.”
Her tone implied admiration of achievement. He laughed rather foolishly, in besotted happiness. They had reached the steep road leading to the Hôtel des Grottes. She threw a hand to the moonlit bridge, where they had met.
“Were you thinking of all that when I dragged you off?”
He laughed again. “No,” he confessed. “I was wondering what on earth I was doing there.”
“I think,” said she softly, “you have just given me themot de l’enigme.”
In the vestibule they came across Bigourdin, cigarette in mouth, sprawling as might have been expected, on the cane-bottomed couch. He was always the last to retire, a fact which the blissful Martin had forgotten. Lucilla sailed up, radiant in her furs, the flush of exercise on her cheeks visible even under the dim electric light. Bigourdin raised his ponderous bulk.
“I found Monsieur Martin outside,” she said, “and I commandeered him as an escort round the neighbourhood. He couldn’t refuse. I hope I haven’t done wrong.”
“Martin knows more about Brantôme,” replied Bigourdin courteously, “than most of the Brantômois themselves.”
Céleste appeared from the gloom of the stairs. Lucilla, after an idle word or two, retired. Bigourdin closed and bolted the front door. To do that he would trust nobody, not even Martin. Having completed the operation, he advanced slowly towards his employé.
“Did you go to the café to-night?”
“No,” replied Martin. “I was walking with mademoiselle, who, as she may have told you, is a friend of Mademoiselle Corinna.”
“Yes, yes, she told me that,” said Bigourdin. “There is no need of explanations,mon ami. But I am glad you did not go to the café. I ought to have warned you. We must be very discreet towards the Viriots. There is no longer any marriage. Félise doesn’t want it. Her father has formally forbidden it. I have no desire to make anybody unhappy. But there it is.Foutu, le mariage.And I haven’t said anything as yet to the Viriots. And, again, I can’t say anything to Monsieur Viriot, until he says something to me.Voilà la situation. Cest d’une délicatesse extraordinaire.”
He passed his hand over his head and tried to grip the half-inch stubble.
“I tell you this,mon cherMartin, because you know the intimate affairs of the family. So”—he shook an impressive finger—“act towards the Viriots, father and son, as if you knew nothing, nothing at all.Laissez-moi faire.”
Martin pledged the discretion of the statues in the old Alhambra tale. What did the extraordinary delicacy of the situation between Bigourdin and the Viriots matter to him? When he reached his room, he laughed aloud, oblivious of Bigourdin, the Viriots and poor little Félise who (though he knew it not) lay achingly awake.
At last a woman, a splendid wonder of a woman, a woman with the resplendent dignity of the King’s daughter of the fairy tales, with the bewilderment of beauty of face and of form and of voice like the cooing of a dove, with the delicate warm sympathy of sheer woman, had come into his life.
The usually methodical Martin threw his shirt and trousers across the room and walked about like a lunatic in his under things, until a sneeze brought him to the consciousness of wintry cold.
The only satisfying sanction of romance is its charm of intimate commonplace.
CHAPTER XIV
THEYhad further talk together the next afternoon. A lost remnant of golden autumn freakishly returned to warm the December air. The end of the terrace caught a flood of sunshine wherein Lucilla, wrapped in furs and rugs and seated in one of the bent-wood rocking-chairs brought out from winter quarters for the occasion, had established herself with a book. The little dog’s head appeared from under the rug, his strange Mongolian eyes staring unsympathetically at a draughty world. Martin sauntered out to breathe the beauty of the hour, which was that of his freedom. He explained the fact when she informed him that Félise and Bigourdin had both left her a few minutes before in order to return to their duties. Martin being free, she commanded him to stay and entertain her.
“If I were a good American,” she said, “I should be racing about in the car doing the sights of the neighbourhood; but to sit lazily in the sun is too great a temptation. Besides,” she added, “I have explored the town this morning. I went round with Monsieur Bigourdin.”
“He is very proud of Brantôme,” said Martin.
She dismissed Brantôme. “I have lost my heart to him. He is so big and comfortable and honest, and he talks history like a poetical professor with the manners of an Embassy attaché. He’s unique among landlords.”
“I love Bigourdin,” said Martin, “but the type is not uncommon in these old inns of France—especially those which have belonged to the same family for generations. There is the proprietor of the Hôtel du Commerce at Périgueux, for instance, who makespâté de foie gras, just like Bigourdin, and is a well-known authority on the prehistoric antiquities of the Dordogne. He once went to London, for a day; and what do you think was his object? To inspect the collection of flint instruments at the Guildhall Museum. He told me so himself.”
“That’s all very interesting,” said Lucilla, “but I’m sure he’s nothing like Bigourdin. He can’t be. And his hotel can’t be like this. It’s the queerest hotel I’ve ever struck. It’s run by such unimaginable people. I think I’ve lost my heart to all of you. There’s Bigourdin, there’s Félise, the dearest and most delicate little soul in the world, the daughter of a remarkable mystery of a man, there are Baptiste and Euphémie and Marie, the chambermaid, who seem to exude desire to fold me to their bosoms whenever I meet them, and there is yourself, an English University man, an exceedingly competent waiter and a perfectly agreeable companion.”
The divinity crowned with a little sealskin motoring toque which left unhidden the fascination of her up-brushed hair, cooed on deliciously. The knees of Martin, leaning against the parapet, became as water. He had a crazy desire to kneel at her feet on the concrete floor of the terrace. Then he noticed that between her feet and the cold concrete floor there was no protecting footstool. He fetched one from the dining room and had the felicity of placing it for her and readjusting the rugs.
“I suppose you’re not going to be a waiter here all your life,” she said.
He signified that the hypothesis was correct.
“What are you going to do?”
It was in his awakened imagination to say:
“Follow you to the ends of the earth,” but common sense replied that he did not know. He had made no plans. She suggested that he might travel about the wide world. He breathed an inward sigh. Why not the starry firmament? Why not, rainbow-winged and golden spear in hand, swoop, a bright Archangel, from planet to planet?
“You ought to see Egypt,” she said, “and feel what a speck of time you are when the centuries look down on you. It’s wholesome. I’m going early in the New Year. I go there and try to paint the desert; and then I sit down and cry—which is wholesome too—for me.”
Before Martin’s inner vision floated a blurred picture of camels and pyramids and sand and oleographic sunsets. He said, infatuated: “I would give my soul to go to Egypt.”
“Egypt is well worth a soul,” she laughed.
Words and reply were driven from his head by the sight of a great splotch of grease on the leg of his trousers. A dress suit worn daily for two or three months in pursuit of a waiter’s avocation, does not look its best in stark sunlight. Self-conscious, he crossed his legs, as he leaned against the parapet, in order to hide the splotch. Then he noticed that one of the studs of his shirt had escaped from the frayed and blackened buttonhole. Again he felt her humorous eyes upon him. For a few moments he dared not meet them. When he did look up he found them fixed caressingly on the Pekinese spaniel, which had slipped upon its back in the hope of a rubbed stomach, and was waving feathery paws in pursuit of her finger. A moment’s reflection brought heart of grace. Greasy suit and untidy stud-hole must have been obvious to her from his first appearance on the terrace—indeed they must have been obvious while he had waited on her at déjeuner. Her invitation to converse was proof that she disregarded outer trappings, that she recognised the man beneath the soup-stained raiment. He uncrossed his legs and stood upright. Then he remembered her remark.
“The question is,” said he, “whether my soul would fetch enough to provide me with a ticket to Egypt.”
She smiled lazily. The sunlight being full on her face, he noticed that her eyelashes were brown. Wondrous discovery!
“Anyhow,” she replied, “where there’s a soul, there’s a way.”
She took a cigarette from a gold case that lay on the little iron table beside her. Martin sprang forward with a match. She thanked him graciously.
“It isn’t money that does the real things,” she said, after a few meditative puffs. “To hear an American say so must sound strange to your English ears. You believe, I know, that Americans make money an Almighty God that can work any miracles over man and natural forces that you please. But it isn’t so. The miracles, such as they are, that America has performed, have been due to the naked human soul. Money has come as an accident or an accretion and has helped things along. We have a saying which you may have heard: ‘Money talks.’ That’s just it. It talks. But the soul has had to act first. Money had nothing to do with American Independence. It was the soul of George Washington. It wasn’t money that invented the phonograph. It was the soul of the train newsboy Edison. It wasn’t money that brought into being the original Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was the soul of the old ferryman that divined the power of steam both on sea and land a hundred years ago, and accidentally or incidentally or logically or what you please, founded the Vanderbilt fortune. I could go on for ever with instances from my own country—instances that every school-child knows. In the eyes of the world the Almighty Dollar may seem to rule America —but every thinking American knows in his heart of hearts that the Almighty Dollar is but an accidental symbol of the Almighty soul of man. And it’s the soul that we’re proud of and that keeps the nation together. All this more or less was at the back of my mind when I said where there’s a soul there’s a way.”
As this little speech progressed her face lost its expression of serene and humorous contentment with the world, and grew eager and her eyes shone and her voice quickened. He regarded her as some fainéant Homeric warrior might have regarded the goddess who had descended cloud-haste from Olympus to exhort him to noble deeds. The exhortation fluttered both pride and pulses. He saw in her a woman capable of great things and she had appealed to him as a man also capable.
“You have pointed me out the way to Egypt,” he said.
“I’m glad,” said Lucilla. “Look me up when you get there,” she added with a smile. “It seems a big place, but it isn’t. Cairo, Luxor, Assouan—and at any rate the Semiramis Hotel at Cairo.”
And then she began to talk of that wonderful land, of the mystery of the desert, the inscrutable gods of granite and Karnac brooding over the ghost of Thebes. She spoke from wide knowledge and sympathy. An allusion here and there indicated how true a touch she had on far divergent aspects of life. Apart from her radiant adorableness which held him captive, she possessed a mind which stimulated his own so long lain sluggish. He had not met before the highly educated woman of the world. Instinctively he contrasted her with Corinna, who in the first days of their pilgrimage had dazzled him with her attainments. She had a quick intelligence, but in any matter of knowledge was soon out of her depth; yet she exhibited singular adroitness in regaining the shallows where she found safety in abiding. Lucilla, on the other hand, swam serenely out into deep blue water. From every point of view she was a goddess of bewildering attributes.
After a while she shivered slightly. The sun had disappeared behind a corner of the hotel. Greyness overspread the terrace. The glory of the short winter afternoon had departed. She rose, Heliogabalus, also shivering, under her arm. Martin held the rugs.
“I wonder,” said she, “whether you could possibly send up some tea to my quaint little salon. Perhaps you might induce Félise to join me.”
That was all the talk he had with her. In the evening the arrival of an English motor party kept him busy, both during dinner and afterwards; for not only did they desire coffee and liqueurs served in the vestibule, but they gave indications to his experienced judgment of requiring relays of whiskies and sodas until bedtime. Again he did not visit the Café de l’Univers.
The next morning she started for the Riviera. She was proceeding thither via Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne and the coast. To Martin’s astonishment Félise was accompanying her, on a visit for ten days or a fortnight to the South. It appeared that the matter had been arranged late the previous evening. Lucilla had made the proposal, swept away difficulty after difficulty with her air of a smiling, but irresistible providence and left Bigourdin and Félise not a leg save sheer churlishness to stand on. Clothes? She had ten times the amount she needed. The perils of the lonely and tedious return train journey? Never could Félise accomplish it. Bigourdin turned up anIndicateur des Chemins de Fer. There were changes, there were waits. Communications were arranged, with diabolical cunning, not to correspond. Perhaps it was to confound the Germans in case of invasion. As far as he could make out it would take seventy-four hours, forty-three minutes to get from Monte Carlo to Brantôme. It was far simpler to go from Paris to Moscow, which as every one knew was the end of the world. Félise would starve. Félise would perish of cold. Félise would get the wrong train and find herself at Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Naples, where she wouldn’t be able to speak the language. Lucilla laughed. There was such a thing as L’Agence Cook which moulded theIndicateur des Chemins de Ferto its will. She would engage a man from Cook’s before whose brass-buttoned coat and a gold-lettered cap band the Indicateur would fall to pieces, to transfer Félise personally, by easy stages, from house to house. Félise had pleaded her uncle’s need. Lucilla, in the most charming way imaginable, had deprecated as impossible any such colossal selfishness on the part of Monsieur Bigourdin. Overawed by the Olympian he had peremptorily ordered Félise to retire and pack her trunk. Then, obeying the dictates of his sound sense he had asked Lucilla what object she had in her magnificent invitation. His little girl, said he, would acquire a taste for celestial things which never afterwards would she be in a position to gratify. To which, Lucilla:
“How do you know she won’t be able to gratify them? A girl of her beauty, charm and character, together with a little knowledge of the world of men, women and things, is in a position to command whatever she chooses. She has the beauty, charm and character and I want to add the little knowledge. I want to see a lovely human flower expand”—she had a graceful trick of restrained gesture which impressed Bigourdin. “I want to give a bruised little girl whom I’ve taken to my heart a good time. For myself, it’s some sort of way of finding a sanction for my otherwise useless existence.”
And Bigourdin clutching at his bristles had plucked forth no adequately inspired reply. The will of the New World had triumphed over that of the Old.
All the staff of the hotel witnessed the departure.
“Monsieur Martin,” said Félise in French, about to step into the great car, a medley, to her mind, of fur rugs and dark golden dogs and grey cats and maids and chauffeurs and innumerable articles of luggage, “I have scarcely had two words with you. I no longer know where I have my head. But look after my uncle and see that the laundress does not return the table-linen black.”
“Bien, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.
Lucilla, pink and white and leopard-coated, shook hands with Bigourdin, thanked him for his hospitality and reassured him as to the perfect safety of Félise. She stepped into the car. Martin arranged the rugs and closed the door. She held out her hand to him.
“We meet in Egypt,” she said in a low voice. As the car drove off, she turned round and blew a gracious kiss to the little group.
“Voilà une petite sorcière d’Américaine,” said Bigourdin. “Pif! Paf! and away goes Félise on her broomstick.”
Martin stood shocked at hearing his Divinity maligned as a witch.
“Here am I,” continued Bigourdin, “between pretty sheets. I have no longer a housekeeper, seeing that Madame Thuillier rendered herself unbearable. However”—he shrugged his shoulders resignedly—“we must get on by ourselves as best we can. The trip will be good for the health of Félise. It will also improve her mind. She will stay in many hotels and observe their organisation.”
From the moment that Martin returned to his duties he felt unusual lack of zeal in their performance. Deprived of the Celestial Presence the Hôtel des Grottes seemed to be stricken with a blight The rooms had grown smaller and barer, the furniture more common, and the terrace stretched outside a bleak concrete wilderness. Often he stood on the bridge and repeated the question of the memorable evening. What was he doing there when the wide world was illuminated by a radiant woman? Suddenly Bigourdin, Félise, the circle of the Café de l’Univers became alien in speech and point of view. He upbraided himself for base ingratitude. He realised, more from casual talk with Bigourdin, than from sense of something wanting, the truth of Félise’s last remark. In the usual intimate order of things she would have related her experiences of Chartres and Paris in which he would have manifested a more than brotherly interest. During her previous absence he had thought much of Félise and had anticipated her return with a throb of the heart. The dismissal of Lucien Viriot, much as he admired the gallant ex-cuirassier, pleased him mightily. He had shared Bigourdin’s excitement over the escape from Chartres, over Fortinbras’s prohibition of the marriage, over her return in motoring state. When she had freed herself from Bigourdin’s embrace, and turned to greet him, the clasp of her two little hands and the sight of her eager little face had thrilled him. He had told her, as though she belonged to him, of the things he knew she was dying to hear. . . . And then the figure of the American girl with her stately witchery had walked through the door of thesalle-à-mangerinto his life.
The days went on dully, shortening and darkening as they neared Christmas. Félise wrote letters to her uncle, artlessly filled with the magic of the South. Two letters from Lucilla Merriton decreed extension of her guest’s visit. Bigourdin began to lose his genial view of existence. He talked gloomily of France’s unreadiness for war. There were thieves and traitors in the Cabinet. Whole Army Corps were notoriously deficient in equipment and transport. It was enough, he declared, to make a patriotic Frenchman commit protesting suicide in the lobby of the Chamber of Deputies. And what news had Martin received of Mademoiselle Corinna? Martin knew little save that she was engaged in some mysterious work in London.
“But what is she doing?” cried Bigourdin, at last.
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” replied Martin.
“Dites donc, mon ami,” said Bigourdin, the gloom of anxiety deepening on his brow. “You do not think, by any chance”—he hesitated before breathing the terrible surmise—“you do not think she has made herself a suffragette?”
“How can I tell?” replied Martin. “With Corinna all things are possible.”
“Except to take command of the Hôtel des Grottes,” said Bigourdin, and he sighed vastly.
One evening he said: “My good friend Martin, I am feeling upset. Instead of going to the Café de l’Univers, let us have a glass of thevieille fine du Brigadierin thepetit salonwhere I have ordered Marie to make a good fire.”
The old Liqueur Brandy of the Brigadier was literally, from the market standpoint, worth its weight in gold. In the seventies Bigourdin’s father, during the course of reparations, had discovered, in a blocked and forgotten cellar, three almost evaporated casks bearing the inscription just decipherable beneath the mildew in Brigadier General Bigourdin’s old war-dog handwriting: “Cognac. 1812.” His grandson, who had lost a leg and an arm in 1870, knew what was due to the brandy of theGrande Armée. Instead of filling up the casks with newer brandy and selling the result at extravagant prices, he reverently bottled the remaining contents of the three casks and on each bottle stuck a printed label setting forth the great history of the brandy, and stored the lot in a dry bin which he charged his son to venerate as one of the sacred depositaries of France in the family of Bigourdin.
Now in any first-class restaurant in Paris, Monte Carlo, Aix-les-Bains, you can get Napoleon Brandy. The bottle sealed with the still mind-stirring initial “N” on the neck, is uncorked solemnly before you by the silver-chained functionary. It is majestic liquid. But not a drop of the distillation of the Napoleonic grape is there. The casks once containing it have been filled and refilled for a hundred years. For brandy unlike port does not mature in bottle. The best 1812 brandy bottled that year would be to-day the same as it was then. But if it has remained for over sixty years in cask, you shall have a precious fluid such as it is given to few kings or even emperors to taste. I doubt whether there are a hundred gallons of it in the wide, wide world.
The proposal to open a bottle of the Old Brandy of the Brigadier portended a state of affairs so momentous that Martin gaped at the back of Bigourdin on his way to the cellar. On the occasion of what high solemnity the last had been uncorked, Martin did not know: certainly not on the occasion of the dinner of ceremony to the Viriots, in spite of the fact that the father of the prospective bridegroom wasmarchand de vins en grosand was expected by Bigourdin to produce at the return dinner some of his famous Chambertin.
“Come,” said Bigourdin, cobwebbed bottle in hand, and Martin followed him into the prim little salon. From a cupboard whose glass doors were veiled with green-pleated silk, he produced two mighty quart goblets which he set down on a small table, and into each poured about a sherry-glass of the precious brandy.
“Like this,” he explained, “we do not lose the perfume.”
Martin sipped; it was soft like wine and the delicate flavour lingered deliciously on tongue and palate.
“I like to think,” said Bigourdin, “that it contains the soul of theGrande Armée.”
They sat in stiff arm chairs covered in stamped velvet, one on each side of the wood fire.
“My friend,” said Bigourdin, lighting a cigarette, “I am not as contented with the world as perhaps I ought to be. I had an interview with Monsieur Viriot to-day which distressed me a great deal. The two families have been friends and the Viriots have supplied us with wine on an honourable understanding for generations. But the understanding was purely mercantile and did not involve the sacrifice of a virgin.Le PèreViriot seems to think that it did. I exposed to him the disinclination of Félise, and the impossibility of obtaining that which is necessary, according to the law, the consent of her parents. He threw the parents to the four winds of heaven. He conducted himself like a man bereft of reason. Always beware of the obstinacy of a flat-headed man.”
“What was the result of the interview?” asked Martin.
“We quarrelled for good and all. We quitted each other as enemies. He sent round his clerk this afternoon with his account, and I paid it in cash down to the last centime. And now I shall have to go to the Maison Prunier of Périgueux, who are incapable of any honourable understanding and will try to supply me with abominable beverages which will poison and destroy my clientèle.”
Recklessly he finished his brandy and poured himself out another portion. Then he passed the bottle to Martin.
“Sers-toi,” said he, using for the first time the familiar second person singular. Martin was startled, but said nothing. Then he remembered that Bigourdin, contrary to his usual abstemious habits, had been supplied at dinner with a cradled quart of old Corton which awakens generosity of sentiment towards their fellows in the hearts of men.
“Mon brave,” he remarked, after a pause, “my heart is full of problems which I cannot resolve and I have no one to turn to but yourself.”
“I appreciate your saying so very much,” replied Martin; “but why not consult our wise and experienced friend Fortinbras?”
“Voilà,” cried Bigourdin, waving a great hand. “It is he who sets me the greatest problem of all. Why do you think I have let Félise go away with that pretty whirlwind of an American?” Martin stiffened, not knowing whether this was a disparagement of Lucilla; but Bigourdin, heedless, continued: “It is because she is very unhappy, and it is out of human power to give her consolation. You are a gentleman and a man of honour. I will repose in you a sacred confidence. But that which I am going to tell you, you will swear never to reveal to a living soul.”
Martin gave his word. Bigourdin, without touching on long-past sorrows, described the visit of Félise to the Rue Maugrabine.
“It was my sister,” said he, “for years sunk in the degradation of drunkenness—so rare among Frenchwomen—it is madness,que veux-tu? Often she has gone away to be cured, with no effect. I have urged my brother-in-law to put her away permanently in amaison de santé; but he has not been willing. It was he, he maintains, who in far-off, unhappy days, when,pauvre garçon, he lifted his elbow too often himself, gave her the taste for alcohol. For that reason he treats her with consideration and even tenderness.Cest beau.And he himself, you must have remarked, has not drunk anything but water for many years.”
“Of course,” said Martin, and his mind went back to his first meeting with Fortinbras in the lonely Petit Cornichon, when the latter imbibed such prodigious quantities of raspberry syrup and water. It seemed very long ago. Bigourdin went on talking.
“And so,” said he, at last, “you see the unhappy situation which Fortinbras, like a true Don Quixote, has arranged between himself and Félise. She retains the sacred ideal of her mother, but holds in horror, very naturally, the father whom she has always adored. It is a bleeding wound in her innocent little soul. What can I do?”
Martin was deeply moved by the pitifulness of the tale. Poor little Félise, how much she must have suffered.
“Would it not be better,” said he, “to sacrifice a phantom mother—for that’s what it comes to—for the sake of a living father?”
Bigourdin agreed, but Fortinbras expressly forbade such a disclosure. In this he sympathised with Fortinbras, although the mother was his own flesh and blood. Truly he had not been lucky in sisters—one abigoteand the other analcoolique. He expressed sombre views as to the family of which he was the sole male survivor. Seeing that his wife had given him no children, and that he had not the heart to marry one of the damsels of the neighbourhood, he bewailed the end of the good old name of Bigourdin. But perhaps it were best. For who could tell, if he begat a couple of children, whether one would not be afflicted with alcoholic, and the other with religious mania? To beget brave children for France, a man,nom de Dieu! must put forth all the splendour and audacity of his soul. How could he do so, when the only woman who could conjure up within him the said splendour and audacity would have nothing to do with him? To fall in love with a woman was a droll affair. But if you loved her, you loved her, however little she responded. It was a species of malady which must be supported with courageous resignation. He sighed and poured out a third glass of the brandy of the Brigadier. Martin did likewise, thinking of the woman whose white fingers held the working of the splendour and audacity of the soul of Martin Overshaw. He felt drawn into brotherly sympathy with Bigourdin; but, for the life of him, he could not see how anybody could be dependent for soul provisions of splendour and audacity upon Corinna Hastings. The humbly aspiring fellow moved him to patronising pity.
Martin strove to comfort him with specious words of hope. But Bigourdin’s mental condition was that of a man to whom wallowing in despair alone brings consolation. He had been suffering from a gathering avalanche of misfortunes. First had come his rejection, followed by the unsatisfied longing of the devout lover. It cannot be denied, however, that he had borne himself gallantly. Then the fading of his dream of the Viriot alliance had filled him with dismay. Félise’s adventure in the Rue Maugrabine and its resulting situation had caused him sleepless nights. Lucilla Merriton had taken him up between her fingers and twiddled him round, thereby depriving him of volition, and having put him down in a state of bewilderment, had carried off Félise. And to-day, last accretion that set the avalanche rolling, his old friend Viriot had called him a breaker of honourable understandings and had sent a clerk with his bill. The avalanche swept him into the Slough of Despond, wherein he lay solacing himself with hopeless imaginings and the old brandy of the Brigadier. But human instinct made him beckon to Martin, call him “tu” and bid him to keep an eye on the quagmire and stretch out a helping hand. He also had in view a subtle and daring scheme.
“Mon brave ami,” said he, “when I die”—his broad face assumed an expression of infinite woe and he spoke as though he were seventy—“what will become of the Hôtel des Grottes? Félise will benefit principally,bien entendu, by my will; but she will marry one of these days and will follow her husband, who probably will not want to concern himself with hotel keeping.” He glanced shrewdly at Martin, who regarded him with unmoved placidity. “To think that the hotel will be sold and all its honourable traditions changed would break my heart. I should not like to die without any solution of continuity.”
“But, my dear Bigourdin,” said Martin, “what are you thinking of? You’re a young man. You’re not stricken with a fatal malady. You’re not going to die. You have twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years before you in the course of which all kinds of things may happen.”
Bigourdin leant forward and stretched out his great arm across the fireplace until his fingers touched Martin’s knee.
“Do you know what is going to happen? War is going to happen. Next year—the year after—five years hence—que sais-je, moi?—but it has to come. All these pacifists and anti-militarists are either imbeciles or traitors—those that are not dreaming mad-house dreams of the millennium are filling their pockets—of the latter there are some in high places. There is going to be war, I tell you, and many people are going to die. And when the bugle sounds I put on my old uniform and march to the cannon’s mouth like my fathers before me. And why shouldn’t I die, like my brother in Morocco? Tell me that?”
In spite of his intimacy with the sturdy thought of provincial France, Martin could not realise how the vague imminence of war could affect so closely the personal life of an individual Frenchman.
“No matter,” said Bigourdin, after a short discussion. “I have to die some day. It was not to argue about the probable date of my decease that I have asked you to honour me with this special conversation. I have expressed to you quite frankly the motives which actuate me at the present moment. I have done so in order that you may understand why I desire to make you a business proposition.”
“A business proposition?” echoed Martin.
“Oui, mon ami.”
He replenished Martin’s enormous beaker and his own and gave the toast.
“A l’Entente Cordiale—between our nations and between our two selves.”
Lest the uninitiated may regard this sitting as a dram drinking orgy, it must be borne in mind that in such brandy as that of the Brigadier, strength has melted into the gracious mellowness of old age. The fiery spirit that thecantinièreor thevivandièreof 1812 served out of her little waist-slung barrel to the warriors of theGrande Armée, was now but a fragrant memory of battles long ago.
“A business proposition,” repeated Bigourdin, and forthwith began to develop it. It was the very simplest business proposition in the world. Why should not Martin invest all or part of his little heritage in the century-old and indubitably flourishing business of the Hôtel des Grottes, and become a partner with Bigourdin? Lawyers would arrange the business details. In this way, whether Bigourdin met with a gory death within the next two or three years or a peaceful one a quarter of a century hence, he would be reassured that there would be no solution of continuity in the honourable tradition of the Hôtel des Grottes.
It was then that Martin fully understood the solemnity of the occasion—thepetit salonwith fire specially lit, the Brigadier brandy, the preparatory revelation of the soul-state of Bigourdin. The unexpectedness of the suggestion, however, dazed him. He said politely:
“My dear friend, your proposal that I should associate myself with you in this business is a personal compliment, which I shall never cease to appreciate. But——”
“But what?”
“I must think over it.”
“Naturally,” said Bigourdin. “One would be a linnet or a butterfly instead of a man if one took a step like that without thinking. But at least the idea is not disagreeable to you.”
“Of course not,” replied Martin. “The only question is how should I get the money?”
“Your little heritage,parbleu.”
“But that is in Consols—rentes anglaises, and I only get my dividends twice a year.”
“You could sell out to-morrow or the next day and get the whole in bank notes or golden sovereigns.”
“I suppose I could,” said Martin. Not till then had he realised the simple fact that if he chose he could walk about with a sack of a thousand sovereigns over his shoulder. He had taken it in an unspeculative way for granted that the capital remained locked up behind impassable doors in the Bank of England. Instinct, however, restrained him from confessing to Bigourdin such innocence in business affairs.