The cat that fell from the top of the Washington monument, and
scampered off unhurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a
certain painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been
seen to depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated
Norman stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone
wall of good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered
pebble, some ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected
over the wall, snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned
aforetime; it was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the
painter-man.
I could count on little less than a week of idleness within the
confines of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker
long-chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot
noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable
enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were strutting
on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into
the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and
fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot
sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest
from the ample figure of our maitre d'hotel reposing in a rustic chair
which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when
first occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee's
upper eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a
hazy gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon
his left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant
jerk, without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou,
rolling and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac,
watched with button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost
of some convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter.
A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a
deep inquiring rumble--the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was
I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to
expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in
the direction of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply
for a moment to make sure I had heard aright.
The name was repeated.
"Here I am," I called, "in the pavilion, if you wish to see me."
"Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir." With that the
professor's great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside.
"I have come to condole with you, if you allow it."
"To smoke with me, too, I hope," I said, not a little pleased.
"That I will do," he returned, and came in slowly, walking with
perceptible lameness. "The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only
from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi" he continued, seating
himself with a cavernous groan. "I am your confrere in illness, my dear
sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back."
"I hope it is not painful."
"Ha, it is so-so," he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his
eyes, dazzled by the sun. "There is more of me than of most men--more
to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this
big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war."
"You'll take a cigarette?"
"I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe."
He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened,
disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and,
fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister
tobacco from a pouch. "Always my pipe for me," he said, and applied a
match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of
cigarettes. "Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is
good for the soul." And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on
Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, "It is my first pipe since
yesterday."
"That is being a good smoker," I ventured sententiously; "to whet
indulgence with abstinence."
"My dear sir," he protested, "I am a man without even enough virtue to
be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary
repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am
temperate now."
"He has never smoked, your young friend?" I asked, glancing at my
visitor rather curiously, I fear.
"Mr. Saffren has no vices." Professor Keredec replaced his
silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene
benevolence. "He is in good condition, all pure, like little
children--and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the
eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is
his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window
than at his book. He looks very much from the window"--there was a
muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate
in the professor's torso, and took to be his expression of a
chuckle--"yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady some
days ago."
"You say your young friend's name is Saffren?"
"Oliver Saffren." The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a
shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd
notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec
was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace
syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the
seeming shadow upon my visitor's forehead became a reality, deepening
to a look of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: "It is
about him that I have come to talk to you."
"I shall be very glad," I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality
aside with a gesture of remonstrance.
"Ha, my dear sir," he cried; "but you are a man of feeling! We are both
old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth!
It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman's excuses when
he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject;
it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very
suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!"
"No, no," I protested hastily. "The name of Professor Keredec--"
"The name of NO man," he thundered, interrupting, "can protect his
reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I
know what you think. You think, 'He is a nice fine man, that old
professor, oh, very nice--only he hides behind the curtains sometimes!
Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.' Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you
have been thinking, my dear sir!"
"Not at all," I laughed; "I thought you might fear that _I_ was a spy."
"Eh?" He became sharply serious upon the instant. "What made you think
that?"
"I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps
writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and
that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter."
"So! And THAT is all," he returned, with evident relief. "No, my dear
sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I
confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what
kind of a man you are. And so," he concluded with an opening of the
hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for
concealment, "and so I have watched you."
"Why?" I asked.
"The explanation is so simple: it was necessary."
"Because of--of Mr. Saffren?" I said slowly, and with some trepidation.
"Precisely." The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Because I am
sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am--how should it be
said?--perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian."
"I see."
"Forgive me," he rejoined quickly, "but I am afraid you do not see. I
am not his guardian by the law."
"I had not supposed that you were," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case--his
case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane."
"Ha, my dear sir, you are right!" exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me,
much pleased. "You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as
yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now
much MORE sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with
the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like
the little children's mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little
learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more--ha, at
the greatest, a year from now--and he will not be different any longer;
he will be like the rest of us. Only"--the professor leaned forward and
his big fist came down on the arm of his chair--"he shall be better
than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now," he
continued, leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential
tone, "it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so
many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he
is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily,
those same people might meet him again after a while. 'Ha,' they would
say, 'there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!' And
so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those
clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and
I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this
quiet place where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any
foolish people. But, my dear sir"--he leaned forward again, and spoke
emphatically--"it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in
the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine
together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening but every
evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone.
It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the
world, but--a thousand saints!--let us be civilised to one another!"
"With all my heart," I said.
"Ha! I wish you to know my young man," Keredec went on. "You will like
him--no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him--and he is
your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make
friends, for he needs them."
"I think he has a host of them," said I, "in Professor Keredec."
My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and
sighed. "That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor
Keredec. And yet," he went on sadly, "it is all the friends that poor
boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?"
Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: "You will join me at the table on my
veranda, won't you? I can hobble that far but not much farther."
Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things
outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front
of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden
and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took
note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most
closely screened by the vines and said:
"May the table be placed yonder?"
"Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone."
"Ha, that is good," he exclaimed. "It is not human for a Frenchman to
eat in the house in good weather."
"It is a pity," I said, "that I should have been such a bugbear."
This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt
that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as
complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the
young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions
were altogether due to my presence at the inn.
And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance
repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their
nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever
they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased
Professor Keredec's mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was
sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen
of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.
"The reproach is deserved," he returned, after a pause. "It is to be
wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if
we had the courage, or the slyness"--he laughed--"to investigate."
I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his
back as he rose.
"Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I
must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor
fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in
summer!"
He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should
not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making
slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.
We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse. He crossed our vision
and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a
lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a
quick picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the
lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she
was not in white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was
certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in
recognising her. At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of
foot-steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled
pigeons fluttered up from the garden-path, betaking themselves to
flight, and "that other monsieur" came leaping across the courtyard,
through the archway and into the road.
"Glouglou! Look quickly!" he called loudly, in French, as he came; "Who
is that lady?"
Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth.
Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway,
carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which
for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.
"That lady, monsieur?" he gasped, checking himself at the young man's
side and gazing after the trap, "that is Madame d'Armand."
"Madame d'Armand," Saffren repeated the name slowly. "Her name is
Madame d'Armand."
"Yes, monsieur," said Amedee complacently; "it is an American lady who
has married a French nobleman."