CHAPTER XVI

AS we emerged from the Hôtel Meurice I turned instinctively to the left.

Paragot drew me to the right.

"Henceforward," said he, "I resume the Paris which is my birthright. We

will forget for a moment that there are such places as the Boulevard

Saint-Michel and the Rue des Saladiers."

We walked along the Rue de Rivoli and taking the Rue Royale passed the

Madeleine and arrived at the Café de la Paix. It was a broiling

afternoon. The cool terrace of the café invited the hot wayfarer to

repose.

"Master," said I, "isn't it almost time for your absinthe?"

He raised his lemon kids as if he would ban the place.

"My little Asticot, I have abjured absinthe and forsworn cafés. I have

broken my new porcelain pipe and have cut my finger-nails. As I enter on

the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of

the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years."

If he had divested himself of the superfluous trappings of

respectability beneath which he was perspiring freely, I thought he

would have been happier. The sight of the umbrella alone made one feel

moist, to say nothing of the spats.

"We might have some grenadine syrup," I suggested ironically.

"Willingly," said he.

So we sat and drank grenadine syrup and water. He gave me the impression

of a cropped lion sucking lollipops.

"It is peculiarly nasty and unsatisfying," he remarked after a sip, "but

doubtless I shall get used to it. I shall have to get used to a devil of

a lot of things, my son. As soon as the period of her widowhood has

elapsed I hope to marry Madame de Verneuil."

"Marry Madame de Verneuil?" I cried, the possibility of such an

occurrence never having crossed my mind.

"Why not? When two people of equal rank love and are free to marry, why

should they not do so? Have you any objection?"

"No, Master," said I.

"I shall resume my profession," he announced, lighting a cigarette, "and

in the course of a year or two regain the position to which an ancient

_Prix de Rome_ is entitled."

I was destined that day to go from astonishment to astonishment.

"You a _Prix de Rome_, Master?"

"Yes, my son, in Architecture."

He was clothed in a new and sudden radiance. To a Paris art student a

_Prix de Rome_ is what a Field Marshal is to a private soldier, a Lord

Chancellor to the eater of dinners in the Temple. I must confess that

though my passionate affection for him never wavered, yet my childish

reverence had of late waned in intensity. I saw his faults, which is

incompatible with true hero-worship. But now he sprang to cloud summits

of veneration. I looked awe-stricken at him and beheld nothing but an

ancient _Prix de Rome_. Then I remembered our enthusiasm over the Palace

of Dipsomania.

"They said you were an architect that night at the Café Delphine," I

exclaimed.

"I was a genius," said Paragot modestly. "I used to think in palaces.

Most men's palaces are little buildings written big. My small buildings

were palaces reduced. I could have roofed in the whole of Paris with a

dome. My first commission was to put a new roof on a Baptist Chapel in

Ireland. It was then that I met Madame de Verneuil after an interval of

five years. We are second cousins. Her father and my mother were first

cousins. I have known her since she was born. When I was at Rugby, I

spent most of my holidays at her house. You must take all this into

account, my little Asticot, before you begin to criticise my plans for

the future."

By this time the nerve or brain cell whereby one experiences the

sensation of amazement was numb. If Paragot had informed me that he had

been a boon companion of King Qa and had built the pyramids of Egypt I

should not have been surprised. I could only record the various facts.

Paragot was at Rugby.

Paragot was Joanna's second cousin.

Paragot was a _Prix de Rome_.

Paragot was a genius who had put a new roof to a Baptist Chapel in

Ireland.

Paragot was going to marry Joanna.

How he proposed to start in practice at his age, with no connection, I

did not at the moment enquire. Neither did Paragot. It was Paragot's

easy way to leap to ends and let the means take care of themselves. He

drained his glass meditatively and then with a wry face spat on the

ground.

"If I don't have a cognac, my little Asticot," said he, "I shall be

sick. To-morrow I may be able to swallow syrup without either salivation

or the adventitious aid of alcohol."

He summoned the languid waiter and ordered _fine champagne_. Everything

seemed languid this torrid afternoon, except the British or American

tourists who passed by with Baedekers under their arms. The cab-horses

in the file opposite us dropped their heads and the glazed-hatted cabmen

regarded the baking Place de l'Opéra with more than their usual apathy.

It looked more like the market place of a sleepy provincial town than

the heart of Paris. When the waiter had brought the little glass in a

saucer and the _verseur_ had poured out the brandy, Paragot gulped it

down and cleared his throat noisily. I drowsed in my chair, feeling

comfortably tired after my all night journey. Suddenly I awakened to the

fact that Paragot was telling me the story of Joanna and the Comte de

Verneuil.

She was exquisite. She was fragrant. She was an English rosebud wet with

morning-dew. She had all manner of attributes with which I was perfectly

well acquainted. They loved with the ardour of two young and noble

souls. (Your ordinary Englishman would not thus proclaim the nobility of

his soul; but Paragot, remember, was half French--and Gascon to

boot--and the other half Irish.) It was more than love--it was a

consuming passion; which was odd in the case of an English rosebud wet

with morning-dew. However, I suppose Paragot meant that he swept the

beloved maiden off her feet with his own vehemence; and indeed she must

have loved him truly. He was fresh from the Villa Medici, the Paradise

where all the winners of the _Prix de Rome_ in the various arts complete

their training; he had won an important competition; fortune smiled on

him; he had only to rule lines on drawing paper to become one of the

great ones of the earth. He became engaged to Joanna.

Now, Joanna's father, Simon Rushworth, was a London solicitor in very

fashionable practice; a man of false geniality, said Paragot, who smiled

at you with lips but seemed always to be looking at some hell over your

shoulder. He also promoted companies, and the Comte de Verneuil, an

Anglo-French financier, stood ever by his elbow, using him as his tool

and dupe and drawer in general of chestnuts from the fire. The Comte

wanted to marry Joanna, "which was absurd, seeing that I was his rival,"

said Paragot simply.

One of Mr. Rushworth's companies failed. Mr. Rushworth's fashionable

clients grew alarmed. He gave a party in honour of Joanna's engagement

and invited all his clients. Ugly rumours spread among the guests. The

presage of disaster was in the air. Paragot began to suspect the truth.

It was a hateful party. The band in the garden played selections from

"Orphée aux Enfers," and the mocking refrain accompanied the last words

he was to have with Joanna. The Comte de Verneuil called him aside,

explained Rushworth's position. Ten thousand pounds of his clients'

money which he held in trust had gone in the failure of the company. If

that amount was not at his disposal the next morning, he was finished,

snuffed out. It appeared that no one in Paris or London would lend him

the money, his credit being gone. Unless M. de Nérac could find the ten

thousand pounds there was the gaol yawning with horrible certainty for

M. de Nérac's prospective father-in-law. As Paragot's patrimony,

invested in French government securities, was not a third of this sum,

he could do nothing but wring his hands in despair and call on

Providence and the Comte de Verneuil. The former turned a deaf ear. The

latter declared himself a man of business and not a philanthropist; he

was ready however to purchase an option on the young lady's affections.

Did not M. de Nérac know what an option was? He would explain. He

drafted the famous contract. In return for Paragot's signature he would

hand him a cheque drawn in favour of Simon Rushworth.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" cried Paragot, banging the marble table, with his fist,

"Do you see in what a vice he held me? He was a devil, that man! The

only human trait about him was a passion for rare apes of which he had a

collection at Nevers. Thank Heaven they are dead! Thank Heaven he is

dead! Thank Heaven he lost most of the money for which he preyed on his

kind. He was a vulture, a scaly-headed vulture. He was the carrion kite

above every rotten financial concern in London and Paris. That which

went near to ruin my poor vain fool of a father-in-law filled his

bulging pockets. I hated him living and I hate him dead!"

He tore open his frock coat and pushed the flat brimmed silk hat to the

back of his head and waved his lemon kids in his old extravagant

gestures.

"What did the stolen ten thousand pounds matter to him? It mattered

prison to Rushworth, Joanna's father--think of the horror of it! She

would have died from the disgrace--her mother too. And the devil jested,

Asticot. He talked of Rushworth being smitten with the slings and black

arrows of outrageous fortune. _Nom de Dieu_, I could have strangled him!

But what could I do? Two years! To go out of her life for two years as

if I had been struck dead! Yet after two years I could come back and say

what I chose. I signed the contract. I went out of the house. I kept my

word. _Noblesse oblige._ I was Gaston de Nérac. I came back to Paris. I

worked night and day for eighteen months. I had genius. I had hope. I

had youth. I had faith. She would never marry the Comte de Verneuil. She

would not marry anybody. I counted the days. Meanwhile he posed as the

saviour of Simon Rushworth. He poisoned Joanna's mind against me. He

lied, invented infamies. This I have heard lately. He confessed it all

to her before the devil took him as a play-fellow. Of one who had so

cruelly treated her all things were possible. She half believed them. At

last he told her I was dead. An acquaintance had found me in a Paris

hospital and had paid for my funeral. She had no reason for disbelief.

He pressed his suit. Her father and mother urged her--the fool Rushworth

soon afterwards came to another crisis, and de Verneuil again stepped in

and demanded Joanna as the price. She is gentle. She has a heart

tenderer than that of any woman who ever lived. One day I heard she had

married him. My God! It is thirteen years ago."

He poured some water into the syrup glass and gulped it down. I remained

silent. I had never seen him give way to violent emotion--save

once--when he broke the fiddle over Mr. Pogson's head.

Presently he said with a whimsical twist of his lips:

"You may have heard me speak of a crusader's mace."

"Yes, Master."

"That's when I used it. I had an inspiration," he remarked quietly.

"Master," said I after a while, "if Madame de Verneuil believed you to

be dead, it must have been a shock to her when she saw you alive at

Aix-les-Bains."

"She learned soon after her marriage that her husband had been mistaken.

Her mother had caught sight of me in Venice. Madame de Verneuil never

forgave him the lie. She is gentle, my son, but she has character."

It was after that, I think, that the frozen look came into her eyes.

Thenceforward she was ice to the Comte de Verneuil, who for pleasant,

domestic companionship had to resort to his rare apes. No wonder his

madness took the form of the fixed idea that he had murdered Paragot.

"After all," he mused, "there must have been some good in the man. He

desired to make amends. He sent me the old contract, so that his wife

should not find it after his death. He confessed everything to her

before he died. There is a weak spot somewhere in the heart of the Devil

himself. I shouldn't wonder if he were devoted to a canary."

"Master," said I, suddenly bethinking me of the canary in the Rue des

Saladiers, "if you marry Madame de Verneuil, what will become of

Blanquette?"

"She will come and live with us, of course."

"H'm!" said I.

Respect forbade downright contradiction. I could only marvel mutely at

his pathetic ignorance of woman. Indeed, his reply gave me the shock of

an unexpected stone wall. He, who had but recently taught me the chart

of Fanchette's soul, to be unaware of elementary axioms! Did I not

remember Joanna's iciness at Aix-les-Bains when I told her of his

adoption of my zither-playing colleague? Was I not aware of poor

Blanquette's miserable jealousy of the beautiful lady who enquired for

her master? To bring these two together seemed, even to my boy's mind, a

ludicrous impossibility. Yet Paragot spoke with the unhumorous gravity

of a Methodist parson and the sincerity of a maiden lady with a mission

to obtain good situations for deserving girls; a man, so please you, who

had gone into the holes and corners of the Continent of Europe in search

of Truth, who had come face to face with human nature naked and

unashamed, who had run the gamut of femininity from our rare princess

Joanna to the murderer's widow of Prague; a man who ought to have had so

sensitive a perception that the most subtle and elusive harmonies of

woman were as familiar to him as their providential love of babies or

their ineradicable passion for new hats.

He lit another cigarette, having dallied in a somewhat youthful fashion

with the newly acquired case, and blew two or three contented puffs.

"I believe in the Roman conception of the _familia_, my son. You and

Blanquette are included in mine. You being a man must go outside the

world and make your way; but Blanquette, being a woman, must remain

under the roof of the _paterfamilias_ which is myself."

I foresaw trouble.

* * * * *

When he left me after dinner to pay his promised visit to Joanna, I went

in quest of Cazalet of the sandals, with whom I spent a profitable

evening discussing the question of Subject in Art. Bringard and Bonnet

and himself had rented a dilapidated stable in Menilmontant which they

had fitted up as a studio, and, as his two colleagues were away, Cazalet

had displayed his own horrific canvases all over the place. The

argument, if I remember right, was chiefly concerned with Cazalet's

subject in art over which we fought vehemently; but though the sabre of

his father hung proudly on the wall, he did not challenge me to a duel.

Instead, he invited me to join the trio in the rent of the studio, and

I, suddenly struck with the advantage and importance of having a studio

of my own, gladly accepted the proposal. When one can say "my studio,"

one feels that one is definitely beginning one's professional career. I

left him to sleep on some contrivance of sacking which he called a bed,

and trudged homewards to the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Curiosity tempted

me to look into the Café Delphine. It was deserted. Madame Boin opened

her fat arms wide and had it not been for the intervening counter would

have clasped me to her bosom. What had become of Monsieur Paragot? It

was more than a fortnight since he had been in the café. I lied, drank a

glass of beer and went home. I could not take away Paragot's character

by declaring his reversion to respectability.

CHAPTER XVI

MY taking the share of the stable-studio in Menilmontant had one

unlooked-for result.

"You must paint my portrait," said Joanna.

"Madame," I cried, "if I only could!"

"What is your charge for portraits, Mr. Asticot?"

Paragot set down his tea-cup and looked at me with a shade of anxiety.

We were having tea at the Hôtel Meurice.

"The pleasure of looking a long time at the sitter, Madame," said I.

"That is very well said, my son," Paragot remarked.

"You will not make a fortune that way. However, if you _will_ play for

love this time--"

She smiled and handed me the cakes.

"Where did you say your studio was?"

"But, Madame, you can't go there!" I expostulated. "It is in the slums

of Menilmontant beyond the Cemetery of Père Lachaise. The place is all

tumbling down--and Cazalet sleeps there."

"Who is Cazalet?"

"A yellow-haired Caliban in sandals," said Paragot.

Joanna clapped her hands like a child.

"I should love to go. Perhaps Mr. de Nérac would come with me, and

protect me from Caliban. If you won't," she added seeing that Paragot

was about to raise an objection, "I will go by myself."

"There are no chairs to sit upon," I said warningly.

"I will sit upon Caliban," she declared.

Thus it came to pass that I painted the portrait of Madame de Verneuil

in periods of ecstatic happiness and trepidation. She came every day and

sat with unwearying patience on what we called the model throne, the one

comfortless wooden arm-chair the studio possessed, while Paragot mounted

guard near by on an empty box. Everything delighted her--the approach

through the unsavoury court-yard, the dirty children, the crazy

interior, Cazalet's ghastly and unappreciated masterpieces, even Cazalet

himself, who now and then would slouch awkwardly about the place trying

to hide his toes. She expressed simple-hearted wonder at the mysteries

of my art, and vowed she saw a speaking likeness in the first stages of

chaotic pinks and blues. I have never seen a human being so inordinately

contented with the world.

"I am like a prisoner who has been kept in the dark and is let out free

into the sunshine," she said one day to Paragot, who had remarked on her

gaiety. "I want to run about and dance and smell flowers and clap my

hands."

In these moments of exuberance she seemed to cast off the shadow of the

years and become a girl again. I regarded her as my contemporary; but

Paragot with his lined time-beaten face looked prematurely old. Only now

and then, when he got into fierce argument with Cazalet and swung his

arms about and mingled his asseverations with the quaint oaths of the

Latin Quarter, did he relax his portentous gravity.

"That is just how he used to go on," she laughed confidentially to me,

her pink-shell face close to mine. "He was a whirlwind. He carried

everybody off their feet."

She caught my eye, smiled and flushed. I quite understood that it was

she who had been carried off her feet by my tempestuous master.

"_Mais sacré mille cochons, tu n'y comprends rien du tout!_" cried

Paragot, at that moment. I, knowing that this was not a proper

expression to use before ladies, kept up the confidential glance for a

second.

"I hope he didn't use such dreadful language."

"You couldn't in English, could you? He always spoke English to me. In

French it is different. I like it. What did he say? _'Sacré mille

cochons'!_"

She imitated him delightfully. You have no idea what a dainty musical

phrase this peculiarly offensive expletive became when uttered by her

lips.

"After all," she said, "it only means 'sacred thousand pigs'--but why

aren't you painting, Mr. Asticot?"

"Because you have got entirely out of pose, Madame."

Whereupon it was necessary to fix her head again, and my silly fingers

tingled as they touched her hair. It is a good thing for a boy of

nineteen to be romantically in love with Joanna. He can thus live

spiritually beyond his means, without much danger of bankruptcy, and his

extravagance shall be counted to him for virtue. Also if he is painting

the princess of his dreams, he has such an inspiration as is given but

to the elect, and what skill he is possessed of must succeed in its

purpose.

One morning she found on her arrival a bowl of roses, which I had bought

in the markets, placed against her chair on the dais. She uttered a

little cry of pleasure and came to me both hands outstretched. Taking

mine, she turned her head, in an adorable attitude, half upwards to

Paragot.

"I believe it is Mr. Asticot who is in love with me, Gaston. Aren't you

jealous?"

I blushed furiously. Paragot smiled down on her.

"Hasn't every man you met fallen in love with you since you were two

years old?"

"I forgive you," she cried, "because you still can make pretty speeches.

Thank you for the roses, Mr. Asticot. If I wore one would you paint it

in? Or would it spoil your colour scheme?"

I selected the rose which would best throw up the pink sea-shell of her

face, and she put it gaily in her corsage. She pirouetted up to the dais

and with a whisk of skirts seated herself on the throne.

"If any of my French friends and relations knew I were doing this they

would die of shock. It's lovely to defy conventions for a while. One

will soon have to yield to them."

"Conventions are essential for the smooth conduct of social affairs,"

remarked Paragot.

She looked at him quizzically. "My dear Gaston, if you go on cultivating

such unexceptional sentiments, they'll turn _you_ into a churchwarden as

soon as you set foot in Melford."

I had seen, for the first time in my life, a churchwarden in Somerset, a

local cheesemonger of appalling correctitude. If Paragot ever came to

resemble him, he was lost. There would be an entity who had passed

through Paragot's experiences; but there would be no more Paragot.

"You must save him, Madame," I cried, "from being made a churchwarden."

Paragot lit a cigarette. I watched the first few puffs, awaiting a

repartee. None came. I felt a qualm of apprehension. Was he already

becoming de-Paragot-ised? I did not realise then what it means to a man

to cast aside the slough of many years' decay, and take his stand clean

before the world. He shivers, is liable to catch cold, like the tramp

whose protective hide of filth is summarily removed in the workhouse

bath. Nor did my dear lady realise this. How could she, bright freed

creature, hungering after the long withheld joyousness of existence, and

overwilling to delude herself into the belief that every shadow was a

ray of sunlight? She had no notion of the man's grotesque struggles to

conceal the shivering sensitiveness of his roughly cleaned soul.

She twitted him merrily.

"You can argue like a tornado with Monsieur Cazalet, but you think I

must be talked to like this country's _jeune fille à marier_. Isn't he

perverse, Mr. Asticot? I think I am quite as entertaining as Caliban."

Well you see, when he talked to Cazalet, he slipped on the slough again

and was comfortable.

He waited for a moment or two as if he were composing a speech, and then

rose and drawing near her, said in a low voice, thinking that as I was

absorbed in my painting I could not hear:--

"This new happiness is too overwhelming for fantastic talk."

"Oh no it isn't," she declared in a whisper. "We have put back time

thirteen years--we wipe out of our minds all that has happened in them,

and start just where we left off. You were fantastic enough then, in all

conscience."

"I had the world at my feet and I kicked it about like a football." He

hunched up his shoulders in a helpless gesture. "Somehow the football

burst and became a helpless piece of leather."

"I haven't the remotest idea what you mean," laughed Joanna.

"Madame," said I, "if you turn your head about like that I shall get you

all out of drawing."

"Oh dear," said Joanna, resuming her pose.

These were enchanted days, I think, for all of us. Even Cazalet felt the

influence and put on a pair of gaudily striped socks over which his

sandals would not fit. Joanna was very tender to him, as to everybody,

but she appeared to draw her skirts around her on passing him by, as if

he were a slug, which she did not love but could not harm for the world.

Paragot, having for some absurd reason forsworn his porcelain pipe,

smoked the cigarette of semi-contentment and fulfilled his happiness by

the contemplation of Joanna and myself. I verily believe he was more at

his ease when I was with them. As for the portrait, he viewed its

progress with enthusiastic interest. Now and then he would forget

himself and discourse expansively on its merits, to the delight of

Joanna. He regarded it as his own production. Had he not bought this

poor little devil and all his works for half-a-crown? Ergo, the work

taking shape on the canvas was his, Paragot's. What could be more

logical? And it was he who had given me my first lessons. No mother

showing off a precocious brat to her gossips could have displayed more

overweening pride. It was pathetic, and I loved him for it, and so did

Joanna.

The time came however--all too soon---when Madame de Verneuil could live

in her Land of Cockaigne no longer. Convention claimed her. Her cousin,

Major Walters, was coming from England to aid her in final arrangements

with the lawyers, and he was to carry her off in a day or two to

Melford. At the end of the last sitting she looked round the dismal

place--it had discoloured, uneven, bulging whitewashed walls, an

unutterably dirty loose plank floor, and a skylight patched with maps of

hideous worlds on Mercator's projection, and was furnished with packing

cases and grime and the sacking which was Cazalet's bed--and sighed

wistfully, as if she had been an unoffending Eve thrust out of Eden.

"I have been so happy here," she said to me. "I wonder whether I shall

ever be so happy again! Do you think I shall?"

I noticed her give a swift, sidelong glance--almost imperceptible--at

Paragot, who had sauntered down the studio to look at one of Cazalet's

pictures.

"The first time you saw me," she added, as I found nothing to say, "you

announced that you were learning philosophy. Haven't you learned enough

yet to answer me?"

"Madame," I replied, driven into a corner, "happiness is such an awfully

funny thing. You find it when you least expect it, and when you expect

it you often don't find it."

"Is that supposed to be comforting or depressing, Mr. Asticot?"

"I think we had better ask my master, Madame," I said. "He can tell you

better than I."

But she shook her head and did not ask Paragot.

* * * * *

"My son," said Paragot that evening by his window in the Rue des

Saladiers, trying to disintegrate some fresh air from the fetid odours

that rose from the narrow street below, "you have won Madame de

Verneuil's heart. You are a lucky little Asticot. And I am proud of you

because I made you. You are a proof to her that I haven't spent all my

life in absorbing absinthe and omitting to decorate Europe with palaces.

Instead of bricks and mortar I have worked in soul-stuff and my

masterpiece is an artist,--and a great artist, by the Lord God!" he

cried with sudden access of passion, "if you will keep 'the sorrowful

great gift' pure and undefiled as a good woman does her chastity. You

must help me in my work, my son. Let me be able to point to you as the

one man in the world who does not prostitute his art for money or

reputation, who sees God beneath a leper's skin and proclaims Him

bravely, who reveals the magical beauty of humanity and compels the fool

and the knave and the man with the muck-rake and the harlot to see it,

and sends them away with hope in their hearts, and faith in the destiny

of the race and charity to one another--let me see this, my son, and by

heavens! I shall have done more with my life than erect a temple made by

hands--and I shall have justified my existence. You will do this for me,

Asticot?"

I was young. I was impressionable. I loved the man with a passionate

gratitude. I gave my promise. Heaven knows I have tried to keep it--with

what success is neither here nor there.

The fantastic element in the psychological state of Paragot I did not

consider then, but now it moves me almost to tears. Just think of it. I

was his one _apologia pro vita sua_; his one good work which he

presented with outstretched hands and pleading eyes, to Joanna. I love

the man too well to say more.

* * * * *

Madame de Verneuil went away leaving both of us desolate. Even the

prospect of visiting Melford a month hence--at Mrs. Rushworth's cordial

invitation--only intermittently raised Paragot's spirits. It did not

affect mine at all. I felt that a glory had faded from Menilmontant.

Still, I had the portrait to finish, and the preliminary sketches to

make of a deuce of a mythological picture for which Cazalet and

Fanchette (who for want of better company had become addicted during

August to my colleague) were to serve as models. I had my head and hands

full of occupation, whereas the reorganized Paragot had none. He talked

in a great way of resuming his profession, and even went the length of

buying drawing-paper and pins, and drawing-board and T-squares and

dividers and other working tools of the architect. But as a man cannot

design a palace or a pigstye and put it on the market as one can a book

or a picture, he made little headway with his project. He obtained the

conditions of an open competition for an Infectious Diseases Hospital

somewhere in Auvergne, and talked grandiosely about this for a day or

two; but when he came to set out the plan he found that he knew nothing

whatever about the modern requirements of such a building and cared

less.

"I will wait, my son, until there is something worthy of an artist's

endeavour. A Palace of Justice in an important town, or an Opera House.

Hospitals for infectious diseases do not inspire one, and I need

inspiration. Besides, the visit to Melford would break the continuity of

my work. I begin, my son Asticot, when I come back, and then you will

see. An ancient Prix de Rome, _nom de nom!_ has artistic

responsibilities. He must come back in splendour like Holger Danske when

he wakes from his enchanted slumber to conquer the earth."

Poor Holger Danske! When he does wake up he will find his conquering

methods a trifle out of date. Paragot did not take this view of his

simile. I believed him, however, and looked forward to the day when his

winning design for a cathedral would strike awe into a flabbergasted

world.

* * * * *

"My son," said he a day or two after he had resolved upon this

Resurrection in State, "I want Blanquette. An orderly household cannot

be properly conducted by the intermittent ministrations of a concierge."

Our good Blanquette, believing as I had done, that the Master was riding

about France on a donkey, was still in villégiatura with our farmer

friends near Chartres, and in order that she should have as long a

holiday as possible he had hitherto forbidden me to enlighten her as to

his change of project.

"Besides," he added, "Blanquette has a place in my heart which the

concierge hasn't. I also want those I love to share the happiness that

has fallen to my lot. You will write to her my son and ask whether she

wants to come home."

"She will take the first train," said I.

"Blanquette is a curious type of the absolute feminine," he remarked.

"She is never happier than when she can regard us as a couple of babies.

Her greatest delight would be to wash us and feed us with a spoon."

"Master," said I, somewhat timidly, "I think Blanquette is sometimes

just a little bit miserable because you don't seem to care for her."

He regarded me in astonishment.

"I not care for Blanquette? But you ridiculous little lump of idiocy!

will you never understand? She, like you, is part of myself." He thumped

his chest as usual. "In the name of petticoats, what does she want? In

Russia I met an honest German artisan who had married a peasant girl.

After a month's unclouded existence she broke down beneath the load of

misery. Her husband didn't love her. Why? Because they had been married

a whole month and he hadn't beaten her yet! Does the child want me to

beat her? I believe lots of women do. And you, mindless little donkey,

what do you want me to make of her? Your head is full of the

imbecilities of the studio. Because I keep her here like my daughter,

and have not made her my mistress, you take it upon yourself to conclude

that I have no affection for her. Bah! You know nothing. You have lived

with me all these years, and you know nothing whatever about me. You

don't even know Blanquette. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior she has

a heart of gold. She has every large-souled quality that a woman can

stuff into her nature. She would live on cheese-rind and egg shells, if

she thought it would benefit either of us. I not care for Blanquette?

You shall see."

So the following afternoon when we met Blanquette's train at the Gare

Saint-Lazare, Paragot had taken her into his arms and planted a kiss on

each of her broad cheeks before she realised who the magnificent,

clean-shaven welcomer in the silk hat really was.

When he released her, she stared at him even as I had done.

"_Mais--qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?_" she cried, and I am sure that the

comfort of his kisses was lost in her entire bewilderment.

"It is the Master, Blanquette," said I.

"I know, but you are no longer the same. I shouldn't have recognised

you."

"Do you prefer me as I used to be?"

"_Oui, Monsieur_," said Blanquette.

I burst out laughing.

"She is saying '_Monsieur_' to the silk hat."

"_Méchant!_" she scolded. "But it is true." She turned to the master and

asked him how he had enjoyed his holiday.

"I never went, my little Blanquette."

"You have been in Paris all the time?"

"Yes."

"And you only send for me now? But _mon Dieu!_--how have you been

living?"

Visions of hideous upheaval in the Rue des Saladiers floated before her

mind, and she hurried forward as if there was no time to be lost in

getting there. When we arrived she held up horror-stricken hands. The

dust! The dirt! The state of the kitchen! The Master's bedroom! Oh no,

decidedly she would not leave him again! She would only go to the

country after she had seen him well started in the train with a ticket

for a long way beyond Paris. There was a week's work in front of her.

"Anyway, my little Blanquette," said Paragot, "you are glad to be with

me?"

"It is never of my own free will that I would leave you," she replied.

CHAPTER XVIII

"YOU perceive," said Paragot, waving a complacent hand, as soon as

Blanquette had retired to make the necessary purchases for the evening

meal, "you perceive that she is perfectly happy. You were entirely

wrong. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

When my master adopted the Panglossian view of the universe I used no

arguments that might cloud his serenity. I acquiesced with mental

reservations. We talked for a time, Paragot sitting primly on a

straight-backed chair. He had abandoned his sprawling attitudes, for

fear, I suspect, of spoiling his new clothes. The position, however, not

making for ease of conversation, he presently took up a book and began

to read, while I amused myself idly by making a furtive sketch of him.

Since his metamorphosis he was by no means the entertaining companion of

his unregenerate days. He himself was oppressed, I fancy, by his own

correctitude. The eternal reading which filled so much of his life did

not afford him the same wholehearted enjoyment now, as it did when he

lolled dishevelled, pipe in mouth and glass within reach, on bed or

sofa. This afternoon, I noticed, he yawned and fidgeted in his chair,

and paid to his book the distracted attention of a person reading a back

number of a magazine in a dentist's waiting room. My sketch, which I

happen to have preserved, shows a singularly bored Paragot. At last he

laid the book aside, and gathering together hat, gloves, and umbrella,

the precious appanages of his new estate, he announced his intention of

taking the air before dinner. I remained indoors to gossip with

Blanquette during its preparation. I had considerable doubts as to her

optimistic view of things, and these were confirmed as soon as the outer

door closed behind my master, and the salon door opened to admit

Blanquette.

She came to me with an agitated expression on her face which did not

accord with perfect happiness of spirit.

"_Dis donc, Asticot_," she cried. "What does it mean? Why did the master

not go on his holiday? Why did he not send for me? Why has he cut off

his hair and beard and dressed himself like a _Monsieur_? I know very

well the master is a gentleman, but why has he changed from what he used

to be?"

I temporised. "My dear," said I, "when you first knew me I wore a blue

blouse and boots with wooden soles. Almost the last time you had the

happiness of beholding me, I was clad in the purple and fine linen of a

dress-suit. You weren't alarmed at my putting on civilised garments, why

should you be excited at the master doing the same?"

"If you talk like the master, I shall detest you," exclaimed Blanquette.

"You do it because you are hiding something. _Ah, mon petit frère_," she

said with a change of tone and putting her arm round my neck, "tell me

what is happening. He is going to be married to the beautiful lady, eh?"

She looked into my eyes. Hers were deep and brown and a world of pain

lay behind them. I am a bad liar. She freed me roughly.

"I see. It is true. He is going to be married. He does not want me any

longer. It is all finished. O _mon Dieu, mon Dieu_! What is to become of

me?"

She wept, rubbing away the tears with her knuckles. I tried to comfort

her and lent her my pocket-handkerchief. She need have no fear, I said.

As long as the master lived her comfort was assured. She turned on me.

"Do you think I would let him keep me in idleness while he was married

to another woman? But no. It would be _malhonnête_. I would never do

such a thing."

She looked at me almost fiercely. There was something noble in her

pride. It would be dishonourable to accept without giving. She would

never do that, never.

"But what will become of you, my dear Blanquette?" I asked.

"Look, Asticot. I would give him all that he would ask. I am his, all,

all, to do what he likes with. I have told you. I would sleep on the

ground outside his door every night, if that were his good pleasure. It

is not much that I demand. But he must be alone in the room,

_entends-tu_? Another woman comes to cherish him, and I no longer have

any place near him. I must be far away. And what would be the good of

being far away from him? What shall I do? _Tiens_, as soon as he

marries, _je vais me fich' à l'eau_."

"You are going to do _what_?" I cried incredulously.

She repeated that she would "chuck" herself into the river--"_Se fich à

l'eau_" is not the French of Racine. I remonstrated. She retorted that

if she could not keep the master's house in order there was nothing left

to live for. Much better be dead than eat your heart out in misery.

"You are talking like a wicked girl," said I severely, "and it will be

my duty to tell the master."

She gave her eyes a final dab with my handkerchief which she restored to

me with an air of scornful resentment.

"If you do, you will be infamous, and I will never speak to you again as

long as I live."

I descended from my Rhadamanthine seat and reflected that the betrayal

of Blanquette's confidence would not be a gallant action. I maintained

my dignity, however.

"Then I must hear nothing more about you drowning yourself."

"We will not talk of it any longer," said Blanquette, frigidly. "I am

going to cook the dinner."

As the prim salon provided little interest for an idle youth, I followed

her into the slip of a kitchen, where I lounged in great contentment and

discomfort. Blanquette relapsed into her fatalistic attitude towards

life and seemed to dismiss the disastrous subject from her mind. While

she prepared the simple meal she entertained me with an account of the

farm near Chartres. There were so many cows, so many ducks and hens and

so many pigs. She rose at five every morning and milked the cows. Oh,

she had milked cows as a child and had not forgotten the art. It was

difficult for those who did not know. _Tiens!_ She demonstrated with

finger and thumb and a lettuce how it was done.

"I shall not forget it," said I.

"It is good to know things," she remarked seriously.

"One never can tell," said I, "when a cow will come to you weeping to be

milked: especially in the Rue des Saladiers."

"That is true," replied Blanquette. "The oddest things happen

sometimes."

Light satire was lost on Blanquette.

After dinner she continued the recital of her adventures for the

Master's delectation. The old couple no longer able to look after the

farm were desirous of selling it, so that they could retire to Evreux

where their only son who had married a rich wife kept a prosperous

hotel.

"Do you know what they said, Master. 'Why does not Monsieur Paragot, who

must be very rich, buy it from us and come to live in the country

instead of that dirty Paris?' _C'est drôle, hein?_"

"Why do they think I am very rich?"

"That is what I asked them. They said if a man did not work he must be

either rich or a rogue; and they know you are not a rogue, _mon

Maître_."

"They flatter me," said Paragot. "Would you like to live in the country,

Blanquette?"

"Oh yes!" she cried with conviction. "_Il y a des bêtes. J'adore ça._

And then it smells so good."

"It does," he sighed. "I haven't smelt it for over three years. Ah! to

have the scent of the good wet earth in one's nostrils and the sound of

bees in one's ears. For two pins I would go gipsying again. If I were a

rich man, my little Blanquette, I would buy the farm, and give it you as

your dowry, and sometimes you would let me come and stay with you."

"But as I shall never marry, _mon Maître_, there will be no need of a

dowry."

She said it smilingly, as if she welcomed her lot as a predestined old

maid. There was not a sign on her plain pleasant face of the torment

raging in her bosom. In my youthful ignorance I did not know whether to

deplore woman's deceit or to admire her stout-heartedness.

"My child," said Paragot, "no human being can, without arrogance, say

what he will or what he will not do. Least of all a woman."

Having uttered this profound piece of wisdom my master went to bed.

* * * * *

During the next few weeks Paragot suffered the boredom of a provisional

condition of existence. He went to bed early, for lack of evening

entertainment, and rose late in the morning for lack of daily

occupation. With what he termed "the crapulous years," he had divested

himself of his former associates and habits. Friends that would

harmonise with his gloves and umbrella he had none as yet. If he ordered

an _apéritif_ before the midday meal, it was on the terrace of a café on

the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he sat devouring newspapers in awful

solitude. Sometimes he took Blanquette for a sedate walk; but no longer

Blanquette _en cheveux_. He bought her a mystical headgear composed as

far as I could see of three plums and a couple of feathers, which the

girl wore with an air of happy martyrdom. He discoursed to her on the

weather and the political situation. At this period he began to develop

republican sympathies. Formerly he had swung, according to the caprice

of the moment, from an irreconcilable nationalism to a fantastic

anarchism. Now he was proud to identify himself with the once despised

_bourgeoisie_. He would have taken to his bosom the draper papa of

Hedwige of Cassel.

Most of his time he spent in the studio at Menilmontant; there at any

rate he was at ease. We were not too disreputable for the umbrella, and

though he deprecated the loose speech of Bringard and Bonnet who had

returned to Paris, and the queer personal habits of Cazalet, he appeared

to find solace in our society. At any rate the visits gave him

occupation. He also posed for the body of M. Thiers in an historical

picture which Bringard proposed to exhibit at the Salon the following

spring.

"_L'homme propose et Dieu expose_," said Paragot.

"If he is anything of a judge this ought to be hung on the line," said

Bonnet.

I regret to say the picture was rejected.

At last the time came for the Melford visit. Paragot consulted Ewing and

myself earnestly as to his outfit, and though he clung to his frock-coat

suit as a garb of ceremony, we succeeded in sending him away with a

semblance of English country-house attire. He took with him my portrait

of Joanna, packed in a wooden case and bearing, to my great pride, the

legend, "Precious. Work of Art. With great care," in French and English.

When he had gone I moved my belongings from my attic to the Rue des

Saladiers, and gave myself up to the ministrations of Blanquette.

A little while later I received from my dear lady an invitation to visit

Melford and paint the portrait of her mother, who regarded my portrait

of Joanna as a work of genius. If you are a young artist it makes your

head spin very pleasantly to hear yourself alluded to as a genius. Later

in life you do not quite like it, for you have bitter knowledge of your

limitations and are mortally afraid your kind flatterers will find you

out. But at twenty you really do not know whether you are a genius or

not. Mrs. Rushworth, however, backed her opinion with a hundred guineas.

A hundred guineas! When I read the words I uttered a wild shriek which

brought Blanquette in a fright from the bedroom. It was a commission,

Joanna explained, and I was to accept it just like any other artist,

and I was to stay with them, again like any other artist, during the

sittings.

"I am to go to England to paint another portrait, Blanquette. How much

do you think I shall be paid for it?"

"Much?" queried Blanquette, in her deliberate way.

I indicated with swinging arms a balloon of gold. Blanquette reflected.

"Fifty francs?"

"Two thousand six hundred and twenty five francs," I cried.

Blanquette sat down in order to realise the sum. It was difficult for

her to conceive thousands of francs.

"That will make you rich for the rest of your life."

"It is only the beginning," I exclaimed hopefully.

Blanquette shook a reproachful head.

"There are some folks who are never satisfied," she said.

CHAPTER XIX

WHEN I arrived at Melford my head was full of painting and

self-importance; and for the first week or so, Mrs. Rushworth, my

subject, occupied the centre of my stage. She was a placid lady of

sixty, whose hair, once golden, had turned a flossy white, and whose

apple cheeks, though still retaining their plumpness, had grown waxen

and were criss-crossed by innumerable tiny lines. The light blue of her

eyes had faded, and the rich redness of her lips had turned to faint

coral. One could trace how Time had day by day touched her with light

but unfaltering fingers, now abstracting a fleck of brightness, now

lowering by an imperceptible shade a tone of colour, until she had

become what I saw her, still the pink and white beauty, but with rose

all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white

character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as

dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress

in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a

bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a panel of Puvis de

Chavannes.

My young head, I say, was full of the masterpiece I was about to

execute, and though I found much joy in renewed intercourse with my

beloved lady and my master, I took no particular note of their

relations. We met at meals, sometimes in the afternoons, and always of

evenings, when I played dutiful piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while Joanna

made music on the piano, and Paragot read Jane Austen in an arm-chair by

the fire. To me the quietude of the secluded English home had an

undefinable charm like the smell of lavender, for which I have always

had a cat-like affection. Not having the Bohemian temperament--I am now

the most smugly comfortable painter in Europe--I was perfectly happy. I

took no thought of Paragot, whose temperament was essentially Bohemian;

and how he enjoyed the gentle monotony of the days it did not occur to

me to consider. Outwardly he shewed no sign of impatience. A dean might

have taken him as a model of decorum, and when he drove of afternoons

with Joanna in the dog-cart, no dyspeptic bishop could have assumed his

air of grim urbanity. But after a while I realised that the old Paragot

still smouldered within him; and now and then it burst into unregenerate

flame.

Mrs. Rushworth had inherited from her father an old Georgian Bath-stone

house at the end of the High Street of Melford. He had been the Duke of

Wiltshire's agent and a person of note in the town. Mrs. Rushworth also

was a person of note, and her beautiful daughter, the Countess, a lady

of fortune, became a person of greater note still. Now on Tuesday

afternoons Mrs. Rushworth was "at home." We saw a vast deal of Society,

ladies of county families, parsons' wives, doctors' wives and the female

belongings of the gentlemen farmers round about. There were also a stray

hunting man, a curate or two and Major Walters. The callers sat about

the drawing room in little groups drinking tea and discoursing on

unimportant and unintelligible matters, and seemed oddly shy of Paragot

and myself, whom Joanna always introduced most graciously. They

preferred to talk among themselves. I considered them impolite, which no

doubt they were; but I have since reflected that Paragot was an unusual

guest at an English country tea-party, and if there is one thing more

than another that an English country tea-party resents, it is the

unusual. I am sure that a square muffin would be considered an

indelicacy. On the second of these Tuesday gatherings which I was

privileged to attend, Joanna presented me to two well-favoured young

women, the daughters, I gathered, of people who had country places near

by.

"Mr. Pradel is the artist from Paris who is painting mamma's portrait,"

she explained.

I bowed and remarked that I was enchanted to make their acquaintance.

They stared. I know now that this Gallic mode of address is not usual in

Melford. One young woman, recovering from the shock, said she would like

to be an artist. The other asked me whether I had been to the Academy. I

said, no. I lived in Paris. Then had I been to the Salon?

"At Janot's," said I, with the idiot egregiousness of youth, "we don't

go to the Salon."

"Why?" asked the first, looking across the room, apparently at a curate.

"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which

might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to

preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."

"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me

(as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my

observation.

"No," said I.

"Shoot?"

"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard

Saint-Michel."

"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"

"Paris," said I.

"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of

bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure

at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic

horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended

it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her

annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired

whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient

hosts--pale shades of Acheron--who have angled off the quays of the

Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook

my head.

"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One

taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."

"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."

"At Christmas."

"What is he like?"

The hitherto unspeculative eyes of the young woman lit up; an answering

gleam awoke in the other's. Myra Brown and her engagement absorbed their

attention, and I slunk back in my chair, forgotten. I suffered agonies

of shyness. I disliked these foolish virgins and longed to flee from

them; but how to rise and make my escape, without rudeness, passed my

powers of invention. I looked around me. At the tea-table on the farther

side of the room stood Joanna and Major Walters. He was a tall soldierly

man with a blond moustache and fair hair thinning on the crown. There

are about two thousand like him at the present moment on the active and

retired list of the British Army. He seemed to be talking earnestly to

her, for her eyes were fixed on the point of her shoe, which she moved

slightly, from side to side. Presently she flashed a glance at him

somewhat angrily and her lips moved as though she said:--

"What right have you to speak like that?"

He made the Englishman's awkward paraphrase of the shrug, looked swiftly

over at Paragot, and turned to her with a remark. Then for the first

time since the Comte de Verneuil's death, the glacier blue came into her

eyes. She said something. He executed a little stiff bow and walked

away. Joanna, bearing herself very haughtily, crossed the room with a

cup of tea for a new arrival.

Paragot, gaunt and tight-buttoned in his famous frock coat--he had

donned it for the ceremonious afternoon, but Joanna (I think) had

suppressed the purple cravat with the yellow spots--was talking to an

elderly and bony female owning a great beak of a nose. I wondered how so

unprepossessing a person could be admitted into a refined assembly, but

I learned later that she was Lady Molyneux, one of the Great Personages

of the county. The lady seemed to be emphatic; so did Paragot. She

regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes. He waved his hands; she

raised her eyebrows. She was one of those women whose eyebrows in the

normal state are about three inches from the eyelids. I understood then

what superciliousness meant. Paragot raised his voice. At that moment

one of those strange coincidences occurred in which the ends of all

casual conversations fell together, and a shaft of silence sped through

the room, killing all sound save that of Paragot's utterance.

"But Great Heavens, Madam, babies don't grow in the cabbage patch, and

you are all well aware they don't, and it's criminal of your English

writers to mislead the young as to the facts of existence. Charlotte

Yonge is infinitely more immoral than Guy de Maupassant."

Then Paragot realized the dead stillness. He rose from his chair, looked

around at the shocked faces of the women and curates, and laughing

turned to Mrs. Rushworth.

"I was stating Zola to be a great ethical teacher, and Lady Molyneux

seemed disinclined to believe me."

"He is an author very little read in Melford," said the placid lady from

her sofa cushions, while the two or three women with whom she was in

converse gazed disapprovingly at my master.

"It would do the town good if it were steeped in his writings," said he.

As this was at a period when like hell you could not mention the name of

Zola to ears polite, no one ventured to argue the matter. Mrs.

Rushworth's plump faded lips quivered helplessly, and it was with a gush

of gratitude that she seized the hand of one of the ladies who rose to

take her leave, and save the situation. The little spell of shock was

broken. Groups resumed their mysterious conversations, and Paragot swung

to the hearth-rug and stood there in solitary defiance. I seized the

opportunity to escape from my two damsels. As I passed Lady Molyneux,

she turned to her neighbour.

"What a dreadful man!" she said. "I entirely disapprove of Mrs.

Rushworth having such persons in her house."

I could have wept with rage. Here was this turtle-brained, ugly woman

(so, in my presumption, I called her) daring to speak slightingly of my

beloved master who had condescended to speak out of his Olympian wisdom,

and no fire from Zeus shrivelled her up! She signified her disapproval

with the air of a law-giver, and the other woman acquiesced. I longed to

flame into defence of Paragot; but remembering how ill I fared on a

similar occasion when a member of the Lotus Club accused him of having

led a bear in Warsaw, I wisely held my peace. But I was very angry.

I joined Paragot on the hearth-rug. Presently Joanna came with her

silvery laugh.

"You mustn't be so dreadfully emphatic, Gaston," she said.

"Unintelligent women must not lay down the law on matters they don't

understand," said Paragot.

"But it was Lady Molyneux."

"Which signifies?"

"The sovereign lady of Melford."

"God help Melford!" ejaculated my master.

When the ladies had left us that evening after dinner, Paragot poured

out a glass of port and pushed the decanter across to me.

"My son," said he, "as a philosopher and a citizen of the world you will

find Melford repay patient study as much as Chambéry or Buda-Pesth or

the Latin Quarter. It is a garden of Lilliput. Here you will see Life in

its most cultivated littleness. A great passion bursting out across the

way would convulse the town like an earthquake. Observe at the same time

how constant a factor is human nature. However variable the

manifestation may be, the degree is invariable. In spacious conditions

it manifests itself in passions, in narrow ones in prejudices. The

females in and out of petticoats who were here this afternoon experience

the same thrill in expressing their dislike of me as a person foreign to

their convention, as the Sicilian who plunges his dagger into a rival's

bosom. When I am married, my son, I shall not live at Melford."

"Where do you propose to live, Master?" I enquired.

He made a great gesture and drew a deep breath.

"On the Continent of Europe," said he, as if even a particular country

were too cabined to satisfy his nostalgia for wide spaces. "I must have

room, my son, for the development of my genius. I must dream great

things, and immortal visions are blasted under the basilisk eye of Lady

Molyneux."

"She is a _vieille pimbêche_!" I cried.

"She is the curse of England," said Paragot.

* * * * *

After this it occurred to me that I might take more note of Melford and

its ways than I had done hitherto, and the more I observed it the less

did it appear to resemble either Eden or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At

times I felt dull. I would lean over the parapet of the bridge at the

other end of the High Street, and watch the tower and decorated spire of

the old parish church rise from the gold and russet bosom of the

church-yard elms, and wish I were back on the Pont Neuf with the

tumultuous life of Paris around me. There was a lack of breeziness in

the social air of Melford.

Meanwhile Paragot and Joanna continued the romance of long ago. They

walked together in the garden like lovers, his arm around her waist, her

delicate head lightly leaning on his shoulder. Once when I made my

presence known, he withdrew his arm, but Joanna laughingly replaced it.

"What does it matter? Asticot is in our confidence," she remarked.

"Isn't he going to be your best man? You will bring him over for the

wedding, Gaston."

"You cling to the idea of being married in Melford?" he asked.

"Of course."

"By that dry, grey-whiskered gentleman who treats me as if I were a

youth he would like to prepare for confirmation? And all these dreadful

people to look on? My dear, doesn't the thought of it chill you into the

corpse of a Melfordian?"

"I should have imagined that so long as we were married the 'how' would

not matter to you."

"Quite so," said he. "Why does the 'how' matter so much to you?"

"It is different," said Joanna. "It is right for me to be married here."

"We must do what is right at all costs," assented my master in an

ironical note, which she was quick to detect. She swerved from his

encircling arm.

"You would not be married under a bush like a beggar?" she quoted.

"I wish to heaven I could!" he exclaimed with sudden spirit. "It is the

only way of mating. I would take you to a little village I know of in

the Vosges, overhanging a precipice, with God's mountains and sky above

us, and not a schedule of regulations for human conduct within thirty

miles, and Monsieur le Maire would tie his tricolor scarf around him and

marry us, and we would go away arm in arm and the cow-bells overhead

would ring the wedding peal, and there would be just you and I and the

universe."

"We'll compromise," said Joanna, smiling. "We'll spend our honeymoon in

your village in the Vosges after we are well and duly and respectably

married in Melford. Don't you think I am reasonable, Asticot?"

"My dear Joanna," said Paragot, "you have infatuated this boy to such an

extent that he would agree with you in anything. Of course he will say

that the Reverend and respectable Mr. Hawkfield is better than the

picturesque Monsieur le Maire, and that a wedding cake from Gunter's is

preferable to the curdled cheese of Valdeauvau. He would perjure his

little soul to atoms for your sake."

"I thought somebody else would too," whispered Joanna softly.

Paragot yielded as he looked down at her sea-shell face.

"So he would. For your sake he would go through Hell and the Church of

England service for the Solemnization of Matrimony."

We were walking round and round the broad gravel path that enclosed the

tennis lawn. Land was cheap in the days when the Georgian houses of the

High Street were built, and people took as much for garden purposes as

they desired. The gardens were the only truly spacious things in

Melford. There was a long silence. The lovers seemed to have forgotten

my existence. Presently Joanna spoke.

"You must remember that I am still a member of the Church of England,

and look at the religious side of marriage. It would be very pretty to

be married by Monsieur le Maire, but I could not reconcile it to my

conscience. So when you speak scoffingly of a marriage in church you

rather hurt me, Gaston."

"You must forgive me, _ma chérie_," said he, humbly. "I am a happy

Pagan and it is so long since I have met anyone who belonged to the

Church of England that I thought the institution had perished of

inanition."

"Why, you went with me to church last Sunday."

"So I did," said he, "but I thought it was only to worship the Great

British God Respectability."

Joanna sighed and turned the conversation to the autumn tints and other

impersonal things, and I noticed that she drew Paragot's arm again

around her waist, as if to reassure herself of something. As we passed

by the porch, I entered the house; but loving to look on my dear lady, I

lingered, and saw her hold up her lips. He bent down and kissed them.

"Don't think me foolish, Gaston," she said, "but I have starved for love

for thirteen years."

By the gesture of his arm and the working of his features, I saw that he

rhapsodised in reply.

To the sentimental youngster who looked on, this love-making seemed an

idyll without a disturbing breath. Joanna, though she had lost the gay

spontaneity of her Paris holiday, smiled none the less adorably on

Paragot and myself. She wore a little air of defiant pride when she

introduced him to her acquaintance as "my cousin, Monsieur de Nérac,"

which was very pretty to behold. Convention forbade the announcement of

their engagement at so early a stage of her widowhood, but anyone of

rudimentary intelligence could see that she was presenting her future

husband. Few women can hide that triumphant sense of proprietorship in a

man, especially if they have at the same time to hold themselves on the

defensive against the possible fulminations of Lady Molyneux. Joanna

proclaimed herself a champion. Even when Paragot forgot his social

reformation and banged his fist down on the dinner table till the

glasses rang again, with a great _nom de Dieu!_ her glance swept the

company as if to defy them to find anything uncommon in the demeanour of

her guest. It was only towards the end of my stay that she began to

wince. And Paragot, save on occasion of outburst, went through the

love-making and the social routine with the grave but contented face of

a man who had found his real avocation.

Looking back on these idyllic days I realise the greatness of Paragot's

self-control. In his domestic habits he was less a human being than a

mechanical toy. At half past eight every morning he entered the

breakfast-room. At half past nine he went into the town to get shaved.

Had he an appointment with Joanna, he was there to the minute. He

clothed himself in what he considered were orthodox garments. He even

folded up his trousers of nights. He limited his smoking to a definite

number of cigarettes consumed at fixed hours. Apparently he had never

heard of the reprehensible habit of drinking between meals. If he only

went to church to worship the British God Respectability, he did so with

impeccable unction. No undertaker listened to the funeral service with

more portentous solemnity than Paragot exhibited during the Vicar's

sermon. Indeed, sitting bolt upright in the pew, his lined, brown face

set in a blank expression, his ill-fitting frock coat buttoned tight

across his chest, his hair--despite the barber's pains--struggling in

vain to obey the rules of the unaccustomed parting, he bore considerable

resemblance to an undertaker in moderate circumstances. Of the

delectable vagabond in pearl-buttoned velveteens fiddling wildly to

capering peasants; of the long-haired, unkempt Dictator of the Café

Delphine roaring his absinthe-inspired judgments on art and philosophy

for the delectation of his disciples, not a trace remained. He sang the

hymns. It was a pity they did not invite him to go round with the plate.

Yet the signs of a rebellious spirit continued now and then to manifest

themselves. He asked me, one day, with a groan whether he was condemned

to a daily clean collar for the rest of his life. Another day he seized

me by the arm, as we were lounging on the porch, and dragged me out of

earshot of the house.

"My good Asticot," said he in a dramatic whisper, "if I don't talk to a

man, I shall go mad. I shall dance around the flower beds and scream. I

have a yearning to converse with the host of the Black Boar, a fat

Rabelaisian scoundrel who has piqued my imagination. And besides, if

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were cast into my throat this minute they

would find it quite a different thing from Nebuchadnezzar's ineffectual

bonfire."

"There is no reason why we should not go to the Black Boar," said I.

He clapped me on the shoulder, calling me a Delphic oracle, and haled me

from the premises through the garden gate, with the lightning rapidity

of the familiar Paragot.

"Master," said I, as we hastened down the High Street--the Black Boar

stood at the other end, by the bridge--"if you want a man to talk to,

there is always Major Walters."

Paragot threw out his hand.

"He is a man, in that he is brave and masculine; in that he is

intelligent, he is naught. He is a machine-gun. He fires off rounds of

stereotyped conversation at the rate of one a minute, which is funereal.

I also have the misfortune, my little Asticot, to be under the ban of

Major Walters' displeasure. Your British military man is prejudiced

against anyone who is not cut out according to pattern."

"Madame de Verneuil is not cut out according to pattern," said I

maliciously.

"Your infant eyes have noticed it too? But I, my son, am Gaston de

Nérac, a vidame of Gascony, _nom de Dieu! et il aura affaire à moi, ce

pantin-là! Sacredieu_! Do you know what he had the impertinence to ask

me yesterday? What settlements I proposed to make on Madame de Verneuil.

Settlements, _mon petit_ Asticot! He spoke as trustee, whatever that may

be, under her husband's will. 'Sir,' said I, 'I will settle my love and

my genius upon her, and thereby insure her happiness and her prosperity.

Besides, Madame de Verneuil has a fortune which will suffice her needs

and of which I will not touch a penny.'"

I smiled, for I could see Paragot in his grand French manner, one hand

thrust between the buttons of his coat and the other waving

magnificently, as he proclaimed himself to Major Walters.

"I explained," he continued, "in terms which I thought might reach his

intelligence, that I only had to resume my profession and my financial

position would equal that of Madame de Verneuil. 'And, Sir,' said I, 'I

will not suffer you to say another word.' We bowed, and parted enemies.

Wherefore the conversation of the excellent Major Walters does not

appeal to me as attractive."

At the time I thought this very noble of Paragot. In a way it was so,

for my master, who had never committed a dishonourable action in his

life, was genuine in his scorn of the insinuation that he proposed to

live on Joanna's money. He verily believed himself capable of

reattaining fame and fortune. It was only the nuisance of having to do

so that, at introspective times, disconcerted him. He knew that to break

away from a thirteen-year-old habit of idleness would need considerable

effort. But he was a man, _nom d'un chien_!

To prove it he called for a quart of ale in the bar-parlour of the Black

Boar, an old coaching inn, set back from the road. The little eyes of

the fleshy rubicond host, loafing comfortably in shirt-sleeves,

glistened as he received the Pantagruelian order and brought the great

tankard with a modest half pint for me, and a jorum of rum for himself.

Paragot was worthy of a host's attention.

Paragot pledged him and literally poured the contents of the tankard

down his throat.

The landlord stared in an ecstasy of admiration.

"Well, I'm damned," said he.

"I'll take another," said Paragot.

The landlord brought another tankard.

"How do you manage it?" he asked.

Paragot explained that he had learned the art in Germany. You open your

throat to the good beer without moving the muscles whereby you swallow,

and down it goes.

"Well, I'm jiggered," said mine host.

"Have you no pretty drinkers hereabouts?" asked my master, sipping the

second quart.

"They lots of 'em comes here and gets fuddled, if that's what you mean."

Paragot waved an impatient hand. "To get fuddled on beer is not pretty

drinking. Haven't you any hard-headed topers who are famous in the

neighborhood? Men who can carry their liquor like gentlemen and whose

souls expand as they get more and more filled with the alcohol of human

kindness? If so, I should like to meet them."

"There isn't any as could toss off a quart like that."

"Have you always lived in Melford?"

"Oh no," replied the landlord, as if resenting the suggestion, "I was

born and bred in Devizes."

"It must be a devil of a place, Devizes," said Paragot.

"It be none so bad," assented the landlord. A woman's voice from the bar

summoned him away. Paragot pushed his unfinished quart from him and

rose. He shook his head sadly.

"I am disappointed in that man. He is a mere bucolic idiot. I shall

waste my talents intellectual and bibulous on him no longer. Our

excursion into the Bohemia of Melford is a failure, my little Asticot,

and the beer is confoundedly sour. I am glad I did not vagabondise in

rural England."

"Why?" I asked.

"To avoid an asylum for idiots I should have rushed into the dissenting

ministry. I might have expected mine host to be a dullard. In this

country the expected always happens, which paralyses the brain. Now let

us go home to lunch."

He paid the bill, and as we issued from the door of the inn we fell into

the arms of Joanna and Major Walters.

The latter regarded us superciliously, and Joanna catching his glance

flushed to the wavy hair over her forehead. The ordinary greetings

having been exchanged, she proudly and markedly drew Paragot ahead,

leaving me to follow with Major Walters. As he made no remark of any

kind during our little walk, I did not find him an exhilarating

companion.

CHAPTER XX

I HAD worked till the last glimmer of daylight at the portrait, which

was now approaching completion.

"That's the end of it for to-day," said I, laying my palette and brushes

aside, and regarding the picture.

Joanna rose from her chair by the fire where she had been sewing for the

last hour and stood by my side. The morning-room, which had a clear

north-east light through the French window leading into the garden, had

been assigned to me as a studio, and here, sometimes on a murky

afternoon, Joanna, who preferred the bright, chintz-covered place to the

gloomy drawing-room, honoured me with her company. Mrs. Rushworth was

asleep upstairs, and Paragot had gone for a solitary walk. We were

cosily alone.

It pleased my lady to be flattering.

"It is wonderful how a boy like you can do such work--for you _are_ a

boy, Asticot," she said with one of her bright comrade-like smiles. "In

a few years you will have the world at your feet imploring you to paint

its portrait. You will fulfil the promise, won't you?"

"What promise, Madame?" I asked.

"The promise of your life now. It is not everyone who does. You won't

allow outside things to send you away from it all."

She had slung the stole which she was embroidering for the vicar across

her shoulders, and holding the two ends looked at me wistfully.

"I owe it to my master, Madame," said I, "to work with all my might."

"If only he had had a master in the old days!" she sighed, "He would

have been by now a famous man full of honours, with all the world can

give in his possession."

"Hasn't he the best the world can give now that he has found you again?"

said I, somewhat shyly.

Joanna gave a short laugh. "You talk sometimes like one's grandfather. I

suppose that is because you became a student of philosophy at a tender

age. Yes, your master has found me again; but after all, what is a

woman? Just a speck of dust on top of the world."

She half seated herself on my painting stool, her back to the picture.

"Tell me, Asticot, is he at least happy?"

"Can you doubt it, Madame?" I cried warmly.

"I do so want him to be happy, Asticot. You see it was all through me

that he gave up his career and took to the strange life he has been

leading, and I feel doubly responsible for his future. Can you

understand that?"

Her blue eyes were very childish and earnest. For all my love of

Paragot, I suddenly felt something like pity for her, as for one who had

undertaken a responsibility that weighed too heavily on slender

shoulders. For the first time it struck me that Paragot and Joanna might

not be a perfectly matched couple. Intuition prompted me to say:--

"My master is utterly happy, but you must give him a little time to

accustom himself to the new order of things."

"That's it," she said. Then there was a pause. "You are such a wise

boy," she continued, "that perhaps you may be able to do something for

me. I can't do it myself--and it's horrid of me to talk about it--but do

you think you might suggest to him that people of our class don't visit

the Black Boar? I don't mind it a bit; but other people--my cousin Major

Walters said something a day or two ago--and it hurt. They don't

understand Gaston's Continental ways. It is natural for a man to go to a

café in France; but in England, things are so different."

I promised to convey to Paragot the tabu of the Black Boar, and then I

asked her which she preferred, England or France. She shivered, and a

gleam of frost returned to her eyes.

"I never want to see France again. I was so unhappy there. I am trying

to persuade Mr. de Nérac to live in London. He can find as much scope

for his art there as in Paris, can't he?"

"Surely," said I.

"And you'll come too," she said with the flash of gaiety that was one of

her charms. "You'll have a beautiful studio near by and we'll all be

happy together."

She jumped off the painting stool and having bidden me light the gas,

resumed her task of embroidering the stole, by the fireside.

"It's pretty, isn't it?" she asked, holding it up for my inspection.

I agreed. She had considerable talent for art needlework.

"Gaston doesn't appreciate it," she remarked, laughing. "He disapproves

of clergymen."

"They have scarcely been in his line," I answered apologetically.

"They will have to be. Oh, you'll see. I'll make him a model Englishman

before very long."

"I'm afraid you will find it rather difficult, Madame," said I.

"Do you think I'm afraid of difficulties? Isn't everything difficult? Is

it easy for you to get everything to come out on that canvas just as you

want it? If you could dash it off in a minute it wouldn't be worth

doing. As you yourself said, I'll have to give Gaston time."

I seated myself on the fender-seat close by her chair, and for some

minutes watched the clever needle work its golden way through the white

silk. No one has ever had such dainty fingers and delicate wrists.

"You mustn't think, because I have spoken about Mr. de Nérac, that I am

discontented. I wouldn't have him a bit altered integrally, for there is

no one like him living. And I'm utterly happy in the fulfilment of the

great romance of my life. Isn't it wonderful, Asticot? Have you ever

heard the like outside a story book? To meet again after thirteen years

and to find the old--the old----"

"Love," I whispered, as I saw that she suddenly blushed at the word.

"As strong and true as ever. It is the inner things that matter,

Asticot. The outside ones are nothing. Dreadful things have happened to

each of us during those years, but they haven't clouded the serenity of

our souls."

"Ah, Madame," said I, with a smile--it strikes me now that I was

slightly impertinent--"I am sure my master said that."

"Yes," she admitted, raising wide innocent eyes. "How did you guess?"

"You yourself once detected echoes in me!"

We both laughed.

"That is what brought us together, Asticot. You seemed to regard him as

a god rather than as a man--and I loved you for it."

She put out her left hand. I touched it with my lips.

"That's a charming French way we haven't got in England. And--you did it

very nicely, Asticot."

I almost scowled at the servant who entered with the announcement that

tea was waiting in the drawing-room.

* * * * *

I think of all human utterances I have heard fall from the lips of those

I love and honour, that formula of Paragot's echoed by Joanna was the

most pathetically vain. And they believed it. Indeed it was the vital

article of their faith. On its truth the whole fabric of their love

depended.

It counted for nothing in Joanna's romantic eyes that the brilliant

eager youth, "rich in the glory of his rising-sun," who had won her

heart long ago--(she shewed me his photograph: alas poor Paragot!)--was

now the tongue-tied spectre, the tale of whose ungentle past was scarred

upon his face: who stalked grotesquely comfortless in his ill-fitting

clothes: who with the art of dress had lost in the boozing-kens of

Europe the graces of social intercourse. It counted for nothing that he

was middle-aged, deserted forever by the elusive wanton, inspiration,

condemned (she knew it in her heart) to artistic barrenness in

perpetuity. It counted for nothing that her gods awakened his contempt,

and his gods her fear. It counted for nothing that they had scarcely a

single taste or thought in common--half-educated, half-bred boy that I

was, I vow I entered a sweeter chamber of intimacy in my dear lady's

heart than was open to Paragot.

You see, in spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her

married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had

found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of

Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone

after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, beloved by a man of

his type. Month had followed month and year had followed year, and she

had not developed. His family, nationalist and devout, of the old

school, regarded him, rightly, as a renegade from their traditions, and

regarded Joanna, wrongly, as the English heretic who had seduced him

from the paths of orthodoxy. Their relations with Joanna were of the

most frigid. On the other hand, the society of Hebraic finance in which

the Comte de Verneuil found profit and entertainment was repugnant to

the delicately nurtured Englishwoman. She led a lonely existence. "I

have so few friends in Paris," were almost her first words to me on the

day of our meeting outside the Hôtel Bristol. She went through the

world, her lips set in a smile, and her dear eyes frozen, and her heart

yearning for the sheltered English life with its rules for guidance and

its barriers of convention, its pleasant little routine of duties, and

its gentle communion of unemotional temperaments. Her eleven years

married life had been merely a suspension of existence. Her few

excursions into the unusual had been the scared adventures of a child.

Her romance was the romance of a child. Her gracious simplicity, and her

caressing adorableness which made my boy's love for her a passionate

worship which has lasted to this day, when we both are old and only meet

to shake heads together in palsied sympathy, were the essential charms

of a child. How should she understand the Paragot that I knew? His soul

still shone the stainless radiance that had dazzled her young eyes. That

was all that mattered. It was easy to convert the outer man to

convention. It was the simplest thing in the world to make the chartered

libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for

discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the

pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no

means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The

colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she

exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to

bid him throw off his undertaker's garb and gloom and to adopt his free

theories of life and conduct. At her mother's knee she had learned the

First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and

Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable

purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white

tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction

was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path.

There was not another one to walk.

Paragot accepted meekly my report of Joanna's tabu of the Black Boar.

"Whatever Madame de Verneuil says is right. I was forgetting that the

refrain of the ballade of the immortal Villon '_Tout aux tavernes et aux

filles_' which was that of my life for so many years is so no longer, I

wonder what the devil the refrain is now? Ha!" he exclaimed clapping his

hand on my shoulder in his old violent way, "I have it! also Villon.

Guess. Didn't I teach you all the ballades by rote as we wandered

through Savoy?"

"Yes, Master," said I; but I could only think of the one that came into

my Byronic little head on the occasion of my first meeting with Joanna,

"_Bien heureux qui rien n'y a_," which in the present circumstances was

clearly not applicable. The romantic lover does not base his conduct on

the formula that blessed is he who has nothing to do with women.

"What is it, Master?" I asked.

"'_En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._'"

I did not understand. "In which faith do you wish to live and die?" I

asked.

He made a gesture of disappointment. He too was a child in many

respects.

"You must go back to Paris to sharpen your wits, my son. I thought I had

trained you to catch allusion, one of the most delicate and satisfying

arts of life. Did I not preface my remarks by saying that Madame de

Verneuil was infallible? By which I mean that she is the mouthpiece of

all the sweeter kinds of angels. That is the faith, my little Asticot,"

and he repeated to himself the rascal poet's refrain to his most perfect

poem: "_En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir._"

"But that," said I, wishing to prove that I had not forgotten my

scholarship, "is a prayer to Our Lady made by Villon at the request of

his mother."

"You are as hopeless as mine host of the Black Boar," said my master,

and being wound up to talk--it was during the after-dinner interval

before joining the ladies--he launched into a half hour's disquisition

on the philosophic value of allusiveness, addressing me as if I had been

his audience at the Lotus Club or a choice band of disciples at the Café

Delphine.

In the drawing-room I played my piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while

Paragot sat with Joanna in a far corner. I could not help noticing how

little they spoke. Paragot's torrent of words had dried up, and the talk

seemed to flow in unsatisfying driblets. Why did he not entertain her

with his newly adopted romantical motto from Villon? Why did he not

express, in terms of which he was such a master, his fantastic

adoration? Why even did he not continue his disquisition on the

philosophic value of allusiveness? Anything, thought I, as I declared a

_quinzième_ and fourteen kings, rather than this staccato exchange of

commonplaces which I was sure neither Joanna nor himself in the least

enjoyed. In fact, my dear Joanna yawned.

Presently Major Walters was announced. He had come, he explained

apologetically, on trustee business and required Joanna's signature to

an important document. She flew to him with a pretty air of delight,

drew him by the arm to an escritoire in a corner of the room, and

laughed girlishly as she inked her fingers and confessed her

powerlessness to comprehend the deed she was signing. Paragot, after a

very cold exchange of greetings with Major Walters, sat down by our

card-table, and watched the game with the funereal expression he always

wore when he desired to exhibit his entire correctness of demeanour. To

Mrs. Rushworth's placid remarks during the deals he made the politest of

monosyllabic replies. Meanwhile his dingy white tie, which he never

could arrange properly (he dressed for dinner each night without a

murmur) had worked up beyond his collar, and encircling his lean neck

like a pussy-cat's ribbon, gave him a peculiarly unheroic appearance.

The signing over, Joanna kept Major Walters by the escritoire and

chatted in a lively manner. As far as I could hear--and I am afraid my

attention was sadly abstracted from my game--they talked of the same

unintelligible things as the Tuesday afternoon guests, personalities,

local doings and what not. She ran to fetch the stole, over which

Paragot had not glowed with rapturous enthusiasm; apparently Major

Walters said just the thing concerning it her heart craved to hear; her

silvery voice rippled with pleasure. A while later he must have returned

to some business matter which he declared settled, for she put her hand

on his sleeve in her impulsive caressing way and her eyes beamed

gratitude.

"I don't know what I should do without you, Dennis. You bear all my

responsibilities on your strong shoulders. How can I thank you?"

He bent down and said something in a low voice, at which she blushed and

laughed reprovingly. His remark did not offend her in the least. She was

enjoying herself. He drew himself up with a smile. It was then that I

noted particularly how well bred and clean-limbed he was; how easily his

clothes fitted. It seemed as impossible for Major Walters' tie to work

up round his neck as for his toes to protrude through his boots. He gave

one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person

all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I

beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through

Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly

enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb--the inborn and

incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of

it and scheming out a portrait in which that essential quality could be

expressed; whereby I played the fool with my hand and incurred the mild

rebuke of my adversary, as she repiqued and capoted me and triumphantly

declared the game.

There was a short, general conversation. Then Major Walters, declining

the offer of whisky and soda in the dining-room, took his leave. Paragot

accompanied him to the front door. When he returned, Mrs. Rushworth

retired, as she always did after her game, and Joanna instead of

remaining with us for an hour, as usual, pleaded fatigue and went to

bed.

"Master," said I, boyishly full of my new idea, "do you think Major

Walters would sit to me? I don't mean as a commission--of course I

couldn't ask him--but for practice. I should like to paint him as a

knight in armour."

"Why this lunatic notion?" asked my master.

I explained. He looked at me for some time very seriously. There was a

touch of pain in his tired blue eyes.

"You are right, my little Asticot," he said, "and I was wrong. My

perception is growing blunt. I regarded our friend as having fallen out

of the War Office box of tin soldiers. Your vision has been keener.

Breed counts for much; but for it to have full value there must be the

_life_ as well. All the same, the notion of asking Major Walters to pose

to you in a suit of armour is lunatic, and the sooner you finish Mrs.

Rushworth and get back to Janot's the better. There is also Blanquette

who must be bored to death in the Rue des Saladiers, with no one but

Narcisse to bear her company."

He put a cigarette into his mouth, but for some time did not light it

although he held a match ready to strike in his fingers. His thoughts

held him.

"My son," he said at last, "I would give the eyes out of my head to have

my violin."

"Why, Master?" I asked.

"Because," said he, "when one is afflicted with a divine despair, there

is nothing for it like fiddling it out of the system."

CHAPTER XXI

PARIS again; Janot's; the organized confusion of the studio; the

boisterous comradeship of my coevals; the Monday morning throng of

models in all stages of non-attire crowding the staircases; the noisy

café over the way; the Restaurant Didier where those of us, young men

and maidens, who had princely incomes dined marvellously for one franc

fifty, _vin compris_--such wine!--I writhe sympathetically at its

memory; the squabbles, the new romances, the new slang on the tip of

everyone's tongue; the studio in Menilmontant where the four of us

slaved at never-to-be-purchased masterpieces; the dear, full-blooded,

inspiring life again. Paris, too, which meant the Rue des Saladiers and

Blanquette and Narcisse, and the grace of dear familiar things.

It must not be counted to me for ingratitude that I was glad to be back.

I was still a boy, under twenty. My pockets bulged with the bank notes

into which I had converted Mrs. Rushworth's cheque, and I found myself

master of infinite delight. I presented Blanquette with a tortoise-shell

comb and Narcisse with a collar, and I electrified my intimate and less

fortunate friends by giving them a dinner in the dismal entresol at

Didier's which was superbly styled the "_Salle des Banquets_." Fanchette

and one or two of her colleagues being of the party, I fear we behaved

in a disreputable manner. If Melford had looked on it would have blushed

to the top of its decorated spire. We put the table aside and danced

eccentric quadrilles. We shouted roystering songs. When Cazalet tried

to sing a solo we held him down and gagged him with his own sandals. We

flirted in corners. A goodly portion of Rosaria, a Spanish model born

and bred in the Quartier Saint-Antoine, we washed in red wine. It was a

memorable evening. The next day Blanquette listened with great interest

to my expurgated account of the proceedings, and in her good unhumorous

way prescribed for my headache. When one is young, such a night is worth

a headache. I am unrepentant, even though I am old and the almond tree

flourishes and the grasshopper is trying to be a nuisance. I don't like

your oldsters who pretend to be ashamed of the follies of their youth.

They are humbugs all. There is no respectable elderly gentleman in the

land who does not inwardly chuckle over the chimes he has heard at

midnight.

Though I always had Joanna's gracious personality at the back of my

mind, and the love of my good master as part of my spiritual equipment,

yet I must confess to concerning my thoughts very little with the

progress of their romance. I took it for granted as I took many things

in those unspeculative days. The actual whirl of Paris caught me and

left me little time for conjecture. I wrote once or twice to Joanna; but

my letters were egotistical outpourings; the mythological picture at

Menilmontant inspired sheets of excited verbiage. She replied in her

pretty sympathetic way, but gave me little news of Paragot. It was

hardly to be expected that she should write romantically, like a young

girl foolishly in love, gushing to a bosom friend. Paragot himself, who

disliked pen, ink, and paper, merely sent me the casual messages of

affection through Joanna. He took the view of the Duenna in "Ruy Blas"

as to the adequacy of the King's epistle to the Queen: "Madame. It is

very windy and I have killed six wolves. Carlos." What more was

necessary? asked the Duenna. So did Paragot.

When I was with Blanquette I avoided the subject of the impending

marriage as much as possible. She looked forward with dull fatalism to

the day when another woman would take the master into her keeping and

her own occupation would be gone.

"But, Blanquette, we shall go on living together just as we are doing

now," I cried in the generosity of youth.

"And when a woman comes and takes you too?"

I swore insane vows of celibacy; but she laughed at me in her

common-sense way, and uttered blunt truths concerning the weaknesses of

my sex.