CHAPTER XVIII
JEAN had told Margot that the one thing he would never forgive was interference in his concerns. No friend, he had explained, had the right to force upon him such an indignity. One might willingly consent to being under an obligation to a friend, but to receive a compulsory and unconscious benefit behind one’s back was a wound to the personal honour which nothing could ever heal.
Such service was worse than enmity; it was more intimate and less forgivable.
Margot listened humbly to this statement of Jean’s views; she thought how noble he was; and then it occurred to her that he need never find out.
After all, the great thing was that Jean should be helped, and Margot had never felt that it was at all necessary she should be noble. Jean was Jean, but when you came to think of it, it was almost a moral convenience that Margot was only Margot.
On the day after Jean’s disastrous proposal of marriage Margot mysteriously left him. She said she had occasion to take the air—and she took it, after having made a toilette peculiarly ambitious for so simple a purpose. Jean was not, of course, offended with Margot; at the same time he was sufficiently hurt to evince no curiosity. She had not broken his heart, but there would have been something inappropriate in his expressing any wish to know why she wore her best hat and did her hair in the most complicated manner.
He satisfied himself, therefore, with looking extremely depressed, and watching which direction she took from the window. At the corner she stopped to buy two crimson roses and pinned them six inches under her chin; it was almost the last franc of the best bedstead money.
Monsieur Cartier had returned to Paris, and Margot sent her name up to his handsome rooms through the medium of a low-voiced, velvet-footed manservant—while she waited trembling at the door. She wrote on the card, “I want urgently to see you, Monsieur Jean’s friend, Margot Selba.”
The great Monsieur Cartier was a good-natured man; he was also curious.
All of Liane’s friends knew the name of Mademoiselle Selba almost as well as Liane’s enemies knew it, but Cartier was probably the only one ofthem who had no intention of dropping the young musician because of it.
Liane’s wrongs did not matter nearly so much to him as Jean’s touch on the piano—he considered, and he was an excellent authority, that Jean D’Ucelles had a very pretty touch and an idea or two behind it, while it had not occurred to him that Liane’s wrongs shared in either of these delicate qualities.
“Well, Mademoiselle,” he exclaimed, as Margot was announced, “of course I remember you—you had no need to announce yourself as a friend of Jean’s. It is a pleasure to see you. I read a charming account of one of your successes in theJournalthe other day. You stand on your own feet now, and Jean, I hope, continues to remain at them?”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” replied Margot, with a neat little bow. “It is of Monsieur Jean that I came to speak to you.”
Cartier pulled forward one of his big leatherarmchairs in which Margot’s tiny figure was almost lost. She continued, however, to behave with as much dignity and assurance as if she were six feet tall and had been born in the Tuileries. She had never been in such a big room in her life, and her feet didn’t quite touch the floor—but no one would ever have supposed so to look at her.
“What’s the young scapegrace been doing?”asked Cartier genially. “If he has not been practising four hours a day he had better avoid meeting me, that’s all! A genius that doesn’t work is like a blood-horse with a broken wind—all very fine for the preliminary canter, but good for nothing after the first fence. You don’t come here with tales like that, I hope, Mademoiselle?”
“Oh, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, “first, before I tell you anything, promise me never to let him know that I have been here!”
“Mademoiselle,” laughed Cartier, “I am discretion itself. No one shall ever know of it! Has he become aBarbe Bleue, le petitJean, in my absence?”
Then Margot told him. It was a long story, in spite of which there was a good deal left out of it.
Cartier followed it attentively, twisting his gold-rimmed glasses to and fro, and shaking his foot in a certain vexation of spirit. He did not like to hear of suffering, and it was of suffering Margot told him. Jean’s suffering, of course, his poverty, his heroism, his endurance; it lost nothing from Margot’s lips; only it appeared that she herself had taken no part in it. “And the worst of it is, Monsieur Cartier,” she finished, “that he is so proud; the best men always are, I think! It would be so difficult, you can’t think how difficult, to help him! The artists he used to playfor no longer offer him work; perhaps, Monsieur, you may have heard that he displeased Madame de Brances. If she had only known, there was nothing in it at all; but we cannot expect a lady like that to believe——”
“In innocence,” finished Cartier softly. “Indeed, Mademoiselle, you are right; that particular belief does not come easily to those who have lived for long in Paris....”
Margot coloured. “There was no way whatever in which Monsieur Jean was to blame,” she said, “no one, not his own mother, could have blamed him. Nevertheless, it is through his kindness to me that he has suffered. So you see, Monsieur, it is only natural that I should wish to make him some little amends.”
Cartier nodded. “Very natural indeed, Mademoiselle, and quite probable, if you will excuse my saying so, that you have already made them.”
“Madame de Brances has persuaded none of her friends to employ him,” continued Margot, taking no notice of Cartier’s remark.
“She has not persuaded me,” said Cartier simply.
“Oh, Monsieur!” cried Margot.
“There, there,” said Cartier quickly, “no thanks! no thanks, Mademoiselle. You and I, I fancy, are at one in that—we prefer not to be thanked for our little services. I like Monsieur Jean, I think him a musician; as for the de Brances affairs—they are,en général, an intolerable nuisance, andthey seem to increase as she gets older. I don’t, however, know of much I can put in Jean’s way at present. The Toriallis want anotheraccompagnateur; he might go there for the moment while I look about. It’s not the kind of thing I care for him to do—but it will keep his head above water. To-morrow I will call and make him the offer, and since he would be sure to refuse money—and you must have been put to some expense...”
Margot rose to her feet.
“I think, Monsieur,” she said, “that I also could not take money. If it could be from anyone it would be from you, but to-day I called again at the theatre at which I sang before his illness, and they have kindly said they will take me on again; so you see I shall not be long in want of anything. I will not thank you then, Monsieur, but to-morrow I shall expect you.” And Margot held out both her hands to Jacques Cartier.
“Personally,” he said, as he took them, “in spite of all you’ve been telling me, Mademoiselle, I think that Monsieur Jean is a very lucky fellow!”
“Oh, Monsieur!” said Margot, with some emphasis; and she shook her head.
“Then I think he’s uncommonlybête,” said Cartier, holding the door open for her.
“No indeed, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, and more emphatically still.
“Well, then,” said Cartier over thebanisters, as she stepped past him down the stairs, “I think the world’s a deuced clumsy place, Mademoiselle,” and this time Margot did not contradict him.