Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “What people?” I asked, drinking my coffee calmly, yet, it must be confessed, without quite the deliberation I could have wished.

  “Those who stopped yesterday evening on the way to the chateau. They might have recognised—”

  “Impossible. I knew none of them.”

  “But Mademoiselle Ward knows that you are here. Without doubt.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “Because she has inquired for you.”

  “So!” I rose at once and went toward the door. “Why didn’t you tell me at once?”

  “But surely,” he remonstrated, ignoring my question, “monsieur will make some change of attire?”

  “Change of attire?” I echoed.

  “Eh, the poor old coat all hunched at the shoulders and spotted with paint!”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” I hissed, thoroughly irritated. “Do you take me for a racing marquis?”

  “But monsieur has a coat much more as a coat ought to be. And Jean Ferret says—”

  “Ha, now we’re getting at it!” said I. “What does Jean Ferret say?”

  “Perhaps it would be better if I did not repeat—”

  “Out with it! What does Jean Ferret say?”

  “Well, then, Mademoiselle Ward’s maid from Paris has told Jean Ferret that monsieur and Mademoiselle Ward have corresponded for years, and that — and that—”

  “Go on,” I bade him ominously.

  “That monsieur has sent Mademoiselle Ward many expensive jewels, and—”

  “Aha!” said I, at which he paused abruptly, and stood staring at me. The idea of explaining Miss Elizabeth’s collection to him, of getting anything whatever through that complacent head of his, was so hopeless that I did not even consider it. There was only one thing to do, and perhaps I should have done it — I do not know, for he saw the menace coiling in my eye, and hurriedly retreated.

  “Monsieur!” he gasped, backing away from me, and as his hand, fumbling behind him, found the latch of the door, he opened it, and scrambled out by a sort of spiral movement round the casing. When I followed, a moment later — with my traps on my shoulder and the packet of sandwiches in my pocket — he was out of sight.

  Miss Elizabeth sat beneath the arbour at the other end of the courtyard, and beside her stood the trim and glossy bay saddle-horse that she had ridden from Quesnay, his head outstretched above his mistress to paddle at the vine leaves with a tremulous upper lip. She checked his desire with a slight movement of her hand upon the bridle-rein; and he arched his neck prettily, pawing the gravel with a neat forefoot. Miss Elizabeth is one of the few large women I have known to whom a riding-habit is entirely becoming, and this group of two — a handsome woman and her handsome horse — has had a charm for all men ever since horses were tamed and women began to be beautiful. I thought of my work, of the canvases I meant to cover, but I felt the charm — and I felt it stirringly. It was a fine, fresh morning, and the sun just risen.

  An expression in the lady’s attitude, and air which I instinctively construed as histrionic, seemed intended to convey that she had been kept waiting, yet had waited without reproach; and although she must have heard me coming, she did not look toward me until I was quite near and spoke her name. At that she sprang up quickly enough, and stretched out her hand to me.

  “Run to earth!” she cried, advancing a step to meet me.

  “A pretty poor trophy of the chase,” said I, “but proud that you are its killer.”

  To my surprise and mystification, her cheeks and brow flushed rosily; she was obviously conscious of it, and laughed.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said.

  “I!”

  “Yes, you, poor man! I suppose I couldn’t have more thoroughly compromised you. Madame Brossard will never believe in your respectability again.”

  “Oh, yes, she will,” said I.

  “What? A lodger who has ladies calling upon him at five o’clock in the morning? But your bundle’s on your shoulder,” she rattled on, laughing, “though there’s many could be bolder, and perhaps you’ll let me walk a bit of the way with you, if you’re for the road.”

  “Perhaps I will,” said I. She caught up her riding-skirt, fastening it by a clasp at her side, and we passed out through the archway and went slowly along the road bordering the forest, her horse following obediently at half-rein’s length.

  “When did you hear that I was at Madame Brossard’s?” I asked.

  “Ten minutes after I returned to Quesnay, late yesterday afternoon.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Louise.”

  I repeated the name questioningly. “You mean Mrs. Larrabee Harman?”

  “Louise Harman,” she corrected. “Didn’t you know she was staying at Quesnay?”

  “I guessed it, though Amedee got the name confused.”

  “Yes, she’s been kind enough to look after the place for us while we were away. George won’t be back for another ten days, and I’ve been overseeing an exhibition for him in London. Afterward I did a round of visits — tiresome enough, but among people it’s well to keep in touch with on George’s account.”

  “I see,” I said, with a grimness which probably escaped her. “But how did Mrs. Harman know that I was at Les Trois Pigeons?”

  “She met you once in the forest—”

  “Twice,” I interrupted.

  “She mentioned only once. Of course she’d often heard both George and me speak of you.”

  “But how did she know it was I and where I was staying?”

  “Oh, that?” Her smile changed to a laugh. “Your maitre d’hotel told Ferret, a gardener at Quesnay, that you were at the inn.”

  “He did!”

  “Oh, but you mustn’t be angry with him; he made it quite all right.”

  “How did he do that?” I asked, trying to speak calmly, though there was that in my mind which might have blanched the parchment cheek of a grand inquisitor.

  “He told Ferret that you were very anxious not to have it known—”

  “You call that making it all right?”

  “For himself, I mean. He asked Ferret not to mention who it was that told him.”

  “The rascal!” I cried. “The treacherous, brazen—”

  “Unfortunate man,” said Miss Elizabeth, “don’t you see how clear you’re making it that you really meant to hide from us?”

  There seemed to be something in that, and my tirade broke up in confusion. “Oh, no,” I said lamely, “I hoped — I hoped—”

  “Be careful!”

  “No; I hoped to work down here,” I blurted. “And I thought if I saw too much of you — I might not.”

  She looked at me with widening eyes. “And I can take my choice,” she cried, “of all the different things you may mean by that! It’s either the most outrageous speech I ever heard — or the most flattering.”

  “But I meant simply—”

  “No.” She lifted her hand and stopped me. “I’d rather believe that I have at least the choice — and let it go at that.” And as I began to laugh, she turned to me with a gravity apparently so genuine that for the moment I was fatuous enough to believe that she had said it seriously. Ensued a pause of some duration, which, for my part, I found disturbing. She broke it with a change of subject.

  “You think Louise very lovely to look at, don’t you?”

  “Exquisite,” I answered.

  “Every one does.”

  “I suppose she told you—” and now I felt myself growing red— “that I behaved like a drunken acrobat when she came upon me in the path.”

  “No. Did you?” cried Miss Elizabeth, with a ready credulity which I thought by no means pretty; indeed, she seemed amused and, to my surprise (for she is not an unkind woman), rather heartlessly pleased. “Louise only said she knew it must be you, and that she wished she could have had a better look at what you were painting.”

  “Heaven bless her!” I exclaimed. “Her reticence was angelic.”
>
  “Yes, she has reticence,” said my companion, with enough of the same quality to make me look at her quickly. A thin line had been drawn across her forehead.

  “You mean she’s still reticent with George?” I ventured.

  “Yes,” she answered sadly. “Poor George always hopes, of course, in the silent way of his kind when they suffer from such unfortunate passions — and he waits.”

  “I suppose that former husband of hers recovered?”

  “I believe he’s still alive somewhere. Locked up, I hope!” she finished crisply.

  “She retained his name,” I observed.

  “Harman? Yes, she retained it,” said my companion rather shortly.

  “At all events, she’s rid of him, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, she’s RID of him!” Her tone implied an enigmatic reservation of some kind.

  “It’s hard,” I reflected aloud, “hard to understand her making that mistake, young as she was. Even in the glimpses of her I’ve had, it was easy to see something of what she’s like: a fine, rare, high type—”

  “But you didn’t know HIM, did you?” Miss Elizabeth asked with some dryness.

  “No,” I answered. “I saw him twice; once at the time of his accident — that was only a nightmare, his face covered with—” I shivered. “But I had caught a glimpse of him on the boulevard, and of all the dreadful—”

  “Oh, but he wasn’t always dreadful,” she interposed quickly. “He was a fascinating sort of person, quite charming and good-looking, when she ran away with him, though he was horribly dissipated even then. He always had been THAT. Of course she thought she’d be able to straighten him out — poor girl! She tried, for three years — three years it hurts one to think of! You see it must have been something very like a ‘grand passion’ to hold her through a pain three years long.”

  “Or tremendous pride,” said I. “Women make an odd world of it for the rest of us. There was good old George, as true and straight a man as ever lived—”

  “And she took the other! Yes.” George’s sister laughed sorrowfully.

  “But George and she have both survived the mistake,” I went on with confidence. “Her tragedy must have taught her some important differences. Haven’t you a notion she’ll be tremendously glad to see him when he comes back from America?”

  “Ah, I do hope so!” she cried. “You see, I’m fearing that he hopes so too — to the degree of counting on it.”

  “You don’t count on it yourself?”

  She shook her head. “With any other woman I should.”

  “Why not with Mrs. Harman?”

  “Cousin Louise has her ways,” said Miss Elizabeth slowly, and, whether she could not further explain her doubts, or whether she would not, that was all I got out of her on the subject at the time. I asked one or two more questions, but my companion merely shook her head again, alluding vaguely to her cousin’s “ways.” Then she brightened suddenly, and inquired when I would have my things sent up to the chateau from the inn.

  At the risk of a misunderstanding which I felt I could ill afford, I resisted her kind hospitality, and the outcome of it was that there should be a kind of armistice, to begin with my dining at the chateau that evening. Thereupon she mounted to the saddle, a bit of gymnastics for which she declined my assistance, and looked down upon me from a great height.

  “Did anybody ever tell you,” was her surprising inquiry, “that you are the queerest man of these times?”

  “No,” I answered. “Don’t you think you’re a queerer woman?”

  “FOOTLE!” she cried scornfully. “Be off to your woods and your woodscaping!”

  The bay horse departed at a smart gait, not, I was glad to see, a parkish trot — Miss Elizabeth wisely set limits to her sacrifices to Mode — and she was far down the road before I had passed the outer fringe of trees.

  My work was accomplished after a fashion more or less desultory that day; I had many absent moments, was restless, and walked more than I painted. Oliver Saffron did not join me in the late afternoon; nor did the echo of distant yodelling bespeak any effort on his part to find me. So I gave him up, and returned to the inn earlier than usual.

  While dressing I sent word to Professor Keredec that I should not be able to join him at dinner that evening; and it is to be recorded that Glouglou carried the message for me. Amedee did not appear, from which it may be inferred that our maitre d’hotel was subject to lucid intervals. Certainly his present shyness indicated an intelligence of no low order.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE DINING-ROOM AT Quesnay is a pretty work of the second of those three Louises who made so much furniture. It was never a proper setting for a rusty, out-of-doors painter-man, nor has such a fellow ever found himself complacently at ease there since the day its first banquet was spread for a score or so of fine-feathered epigram jinglers, fiddling Versailles gossip out of a rouge-and-lace Quesnay marquise newly sent into half-earnest banishment for too much king-hunting. For my part, however, I should have preferred a chance at making a place for myself among the wigs and brocades to the Crusoe’s Isle of my chair at Miss Elizabeth’s table.

  I learned at an early age to look my vanities in the face; I outfaced them and they quailed, but persisted, surviving for my discomfort to this day. Here is the confession: It was not until my arrival at the chateau that I realised what temerity it involved to dine there in evening clothes purchased, some four or five or six years previously, in the economical neighbourhood of the Boulevard St. Michel. Yet the things fitted me well enough; were clean and not shiny, having been worn no more than a dozen times, I think; though they might have been better pressed.

  Looking over the men of the Quesnay party — or perhaps I should signify a reversal of that and say a glance of theirs at me — revealed the importance of a particular length of coat-tail, of a certain rich effect obtained by widely separating the lower points of the waistcoat, of the display of some imagination in the buttons upon the same garment, of a doubled-back arrangement of cuffs, and of a specific design and dimension of tie. Marked uniformity in these matters denoted their necessity; and clothes differing from the essential so vitally as did mine must have seemed immodest, little better than no clothes at all. I doubt if I could have argued in extenuation my lack of advantages for study, such an excuse being itself the damning circumstance. Of course eccentricity is permitted, but (as in the Arts) only to the established. And I recall a painful change of colour which befell the countenance of a shining young man I met at Ward’s house in Paris: he had used his handkerchief and was absently putting it in his pocket when he providentially noticed what he was doing and restored it to his sleeve.

  Miss Elizabeth had the courage to take me under her wing, placing me upon her left at dinner; but sprightlier calls than mine demanded and occupied her attention. At my other side sat a magnificently upholstered lady, who offered a fine shoulder and the rear wall of a collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table. This was a prince, ending in “ski”: he permitted himself the slight vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I should not have known her.

  Fragments reaching me in my seclusion indicated that the various conversations up and down the long table were animated; and at times some topic proved of such high interest as to engage the comment of the whole company. This was the case when the age of one of the English king’s grandchildren came in question, but a subject which called for even longer (if less spirited) discourse concerned the shameful lack of standard on the part of citizens of the United States, or, as it was put, with no little exasperation, “What is the trouble with America?” Hereupon brightly gleamed the fat young man whom I had marked for a wit at Les Trois Pigeons; he pictured with inimitable mimicry a western senator lately in France. This outcast, it appeared, had worn a slouch hat at a garden party and had ot
herwise betrayed his country to the ridicule of the intelligent. “But really,” said the fat young man, turning plaintiff in conclusion, “imagine what such things make the English and the French think of US!” And it finally went by consent that the trouble with America was the vulgarity of our tourists.

  “A dreadful lot!” Miss Elizabeth cheerfully summed up for them all. “The miseries I undergo with that class of ‘prominent Amurricans’ who bring letters to my brother! I remember one awful creature who said, when I came into the room, ‘Well, ma’am, I guess you’re the lady of the house, aren’t you?’”

  Miss Elizabeth sparkled through the chorus of laughter, but I remembered the “awful creature,” a genial and wise old man of affairs, whose daughter’s portrait George painted. Miss Elizabeth had missed his point: the canvasser’s phrase had been intended with humour, and even had it lacked that, it was not without a pretty quaintness. So I thought, being “left to my own reflections,” which may have partaken of my own special kind of snobbery; at least I regretted the Elizabeth of the morning garden and the early walk along the fringe of the woods. For she at my side to-night was another lady.

  The banquet was drawing to a close when she leaned toward me and spoke in an undertone. As this was the first sign, in so protracted a period, that I might ever again establish relations with the world of men, it came upon me like a Friday’s footprint, and in the moment of shock I did not catch what she said.

  “Anne Elliott, yonder, is asking you a question,” she repeated, nodding at a very pretty gal down and across the table from me. Miss Anne Elliott’s attractive voice had previously enabled me to recognise her as the young woman who had threatened to serenade Les Trois Pigeons.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, addressing her, and at the sound my obscurity was illuminated, about half of the company turning to look at me with wide-eyed surprise. (I spoke in an ordinary tone, it may need to be explained, and there is nothing remarkable about my voice).

  “I hear you’re at Les Trois Pigeons,” said Miss Elliott.