“Impromptu parties are always the best. Go and ask the Lady if she can
come with us. If she will—”
But only Barth in his corner heard the ending of her sentence.
Half an hour later, Nancy came rustling softly down the stairway, her
shining hair framed in the white fur ruff of her cloak. Two immaculate
youths were pacing the hall; but Barth had disappeared. She found him
sitting in the office beside the Lady. He rose, as Nancy appeared in the
doorway.
“Don’t let me keep you,” he said regretfully. “You are going out?”
In his present mood of content, St. Jacques felt that he could afford to
be gracious.
“Don’t we look it?” he asked boyishly.
Experience had taught Nancy what to expect when Barth fell to fumbling
about the front of his waistcoat. Nevertheless, even she blushed at the
prolonged stare which was too full of interest to be impertinent. Then,
without a glance at the others, Barth let the glasses fall back again.
“Oh, rather!” he answered, with unwonted fervor.
The Lady laughed.
“Is that the best you can say of us, Mr. Barth?” she inquired.
“_Rather_ is Barth’s strongest superlative,” Brock commented. “Well, are
we ready?”
The Lady rose with some reluctance. During the few days of his
imprisonment, she had been brought into closer contact with Barth. She
had watched him keenly, and she had come to the conclusion that,
underneath all his haughty indifference, the young Englishman was
lonely, homesick and altogether likable.
“It is really too bad to turn you out, Mr. Barth,” she said kindly.
“Won’t you stay here and read? It is more cosy here, and you can be
quite by yourself.”
The friendly words touched Barth and, for an instant, he lost his poise.
A sudden note of dejection crept into his voice, as he answered,—
“I seem to accomplish that end, wherever I go.”
Brock was already leading the way to the door, and Nancy was gathering
up her long skirt. It was St. Jacques who lingered.
“Perhaps you would like to go with us,” he suggested.
“Oh, I—” Barth was beginning, when the Frenchman interrupted,—
“We shall be very glad to have you, and I can easily telephone for
another seat. It is not a great opera; but it will be better than
sitting alone in your room.”
The unexpected addition to their party was by no means to Nancy’s
liking. Nevertheless, her eyes rested upon St. Jacques with full
approval. The deed had been a gracious one, and Nancy felt that, with
Brock and St. Jacques to help her, she could easily manœuvre Barth to
the outer seat beyond the Lady.
The event justified her belief. Barth demurred, then yielded to a second
invitation which was cordially echoed by the Lady; and it was at the
Lady’s side that he limped down the aisle. Nancy, in the rear with the
others, told herself that he had no need for his profuse apologies
regarding his dress. Even in morning clothes, Barth showed that both his
figure and his tailor were irreproachable. She also told herself that,
until then, she had had no notion of the way the man must have suffered.
It is not without reason that a man of the early twenties allows himself
to hobble ungracefully into a strange theatre, or gets white at the
lips, by the time he is finally seated.
As St. Jacques had said, the opera was by no means a great one. However,
Nancy, sitting in that dull green interior, looking about her at the
half-veiled lights and at the dainty gowns, was absolutely content.
Barth, at the farther end of the row, was talking dutifully to the Lady,
and Nancy had no idea that his position, bending forward with his hands
clasped over his knee, was taken for the sole purpose of being able to
watch herself. Brock was for the moment wholly absorbed in a scrutiny of
the audience, and Nancy settled back at her ease and fell into idle talk
with St. Jacques.
Already the young Frenchman was assuming a prominent place in her
thoughts. He was serious without being dull, merry without being
frivolous; and Nancy rarely found it needful to explain to him the
unexpected workings of her somewhat inconsequent mind. Even Brock was
sometimes left gasping in the rear. St. Jacques, although by different
and far less devious paths, was generally waiting to meet her, when she
reached her new viewpoint.
Little by little, she had come to know much of his history. The strong
habitant blood of two hundred years before had brought forth a line of
sturdy, earnest professional men. True to their ancestry, they had made
no effort to shake off its customs or its tongue. Highly educated, first
at Laval, then at Paris, they had gone back to the simple life of their
own people, to give to them the fruits of what, generations before, had
been taken from them. Because the primeval St. Jacques had wrested
supremacy from his neighbors, there was no reason that his son’s sons
should turn their backs upon their less fortunate brothers, and seek
wealth and fame in the luxury-loving cities to the southward. St.
Jacques was of the physical type of the old-time habitant; but developed
far towards the level of all that is best in manhood. The defensive
instincts of a young girl are not always unreliable. Nancy trusted
Adolphe St. Jacques implicitly. She was sure that he never stopped to
question how to show himself loyal and courteous; it came to him quite
as a matter of course.
“But you speak English at home?” she asked him.
“No; only French.”
“Then you surely have been trained in an English school,” she persisted.
He shook his head.
“The school was like Laval, all French.”
“And yet, you speak as we do.”
His lower lip rolled out into his odd little smile.
“As you do, but more slowly. Of course, I understand; but I think in
French, and it takes a little time to put it into English. But my
English is not like Mr. Barth’s.”
“Nor mine,” she assured him merrily.
But he met her merriment with a curiously grave face.
“Miss Howard, I do not see why I can’t like that fellow,” he said
thoughtfully.
“Nor I. And yet, he isn’t half bad,” Nancy replied, with unexpected
loyalty.
“I know. He is intelligent, and he means to be a gentleman,” St. Jacques
answered, frowning gravely as he argued out the position. “I think I see
his good points; but I have nothing that—that is in common with any of
them. Our worlds are different, and we can never bring them into
connection.”
For the moment, Nancy lost her own gayety and spoke with a seriousness
which matched his own.
“I think I understand you. I have felt it, myself. It is not anything he
does consciously, yet he leaves me feeling that we have absolutely no
common ground. By all rights, we Americans ought to feel kinship with
the English; but—”
St. Jacques turned to face her.
“But?” he echoed.
However, Nancy’s eyes were fastened on her fan, and she answered, with
the fearless honesty of a boy,—
“But now and then I have felt, since I came here, that my likeness was
entirely to the French.”
And St. Jacques bowed in silence, as the curtain rose for the final act.
Just then, there came an unexpected scene and one not down upon the
programme. The soprano was already in place and the tenor, in the wings,
was preparing to rush in to kneel at her feet, when the manager came out
across the stage. In the midst of the gaudy costumes, his black-clothed
figure made an instantaneous impression, an impression which was
heightened by his level voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to be obliged to announce to you—”
Brock never knew from what corner of the upper gallery came that shrill,
insistent cry of fire. When he realized his surroundings, he was bracing
himself against the seat in front of him, his whole tall figure tense in
the effort to keep Nancy from being crushed by the mad rush for the
doors. Then, with a bound, the young Frenchman vaulted over the seat
towards the other end of the row.
“Look out for the Lady, Brock,” he ordered, as he dashed past. “Some one
must help Barth. His foot is giving out, and he will drop, in a minute.”
Then, as swiftly as it had arisen, the panic died away. Again and again
the orchestra pounded out _God Save the King_ with an energetic rhythm
which could not fail to be reassuring. The tumult in the galleries
subsided; one by one, in shamefaced fashion, the people came straggling
back to their seats. Brock was mockingly recounting the list of his
bruises, while the manager completed his ill-timed announcement of the
sudden illness of one of the singers. Then the curtain was rung down and
rung up again for a fresh start. Just as it shivered and began to rise,
Barth bent forward.
“Oh, Mr. St. Jacques.”
“Yes?”
“I have to thank you for your help. I needed it, and it was given in a
most friendly way.”
St. Jacques had no idea of what those few words cost the dignity of the
taciturn young Englishman. Otherwise, he would have framed his answer in
quite another fashion. As it was, he shook his head.
“You count it too highly,” he said, with dry courtesy. “In our language
we call such things, not friendship, but just mere chivalry.”
And Nancy, though unswerving in her loyalty to St. Jacques, felt a
sudden pity for Mr. Cecil Barth, as he shut his lips and leaned back
again in his chair.