Sometimes there comes in Paris towards the beginning of April a week or
two of such weather as is rarely seen in England before the end of May.
The horse-chestnut buds break in vivid green against the sober blue of
the sky, there is a warmth about the pavements that suggests the coming
blaze of summer, the gutter rivulets and the fountains sparkle with an
equal gaiety, and people begin to have their coffee out of doors again.
The spring, that on the day Francie was married at Bray was still mainly
indicated by east wind and fresh mackerel, was burgeoning in the woods
at Versailles with a hundred delicate surprises of blossom and leaf and
thick white storm of buds, and tourists were being forced, like
asparagus, by the fine weather, and began to appear in occasional twos
and threes on the wide square in front of the palace. A remnant of the
winter quiet still hung over everything, and a score or two of human
beings, dispersed through the endless rooms and gardens, only made more
emphatic the greatness of the extent and of the solitude. They certainly
did not bring much custom to the little woman who had been beguiled by
the fine weather to set up her table of cakes and oranges in a sunny
angle of the palace wall, and sat by it all day, picturesque and patient
in her white cap, while her strip of embroidery lengthened apace in the
almost unbroken leisure. Even the first Sunday of April, from which she
had hoped great things, brought her, during many bland and dazzling
hours, nothing except the purchase of a few sous worth of sweets, and
the afternoon was well advanced before she effected a sale of any
importance. A tall gentleman, evidently a Monsieur Anglais, was
wandering about, and she called to him to tell him of the excellence of
her _brioches_ and the beauty of her oranges. Ordinarily she had not
found that English gentlemen were attracted by her wares, but there was
something helpless about this one that gave her confidence. He came up
to her table and inspected its dainties with bewildered disfavour, while
a comfortable clink of silver came from the pocket in which one hand was
fumbling.
“Pain d’épices! Des gâteaux! Ver’ goot, ver’ sveet!” she said
encouragingly, bringing forth her entire English vocabulary with her
most winning smile.
“I wish to goodness I knew what the beastly things are made of,” the
Englishman murmured to himself. “I can’t go wrong with oranges anyhow.
Er--cela, et cela s’ils vous plait,” producing in his turn his whole
stock of French, “combieng.” He had only indicated two oranges, but the
little woman had caught the anxious glance at her cakes, and without
more ado chose out six of the most highly-glazed _brioches_, and by
force of will and volubility made her customer not only take them but
pay her two francs for them and the oranges.
The tall Englishman strode away round the corner of the palace with
these provisions, and along the great terrace towards a solitary figure
sitting forlornly at the top of one of the flights of steps that drop in
noble succession down to the expanses of artificial water that seem to
stretch away into the heart of France.
“I couldn’t find anywhere to get tea,” he said as soon as he was within
speaking distance; “I couldn’t find anything but an old woman selling
oranges, and I got you some of those, and she made me get some cakes as
well--I don’t know if they’re fit to eat.”
Mr. Lambert spoke with a very unusual timorousness, as he placed his
sticky purchases in Francie’s lap, and sat down on the step beside her.
“Oh, thank you awfully, Roddy, I’m sure they’re lovely,” she answered,
looking at her husband with a smile that was less spontaneous than it
used to be, and looking away again immediately.
There was something ineffably wearying to her in the adoring,
proprietary gaze that she found so unfailingly fixed upon her whenever
she turned her eyes towards him; it seemed to isolate her from other
people and set her upon a ridiculous pedestal, with one foolish
worshipper declaiming his devotion with the fervour and fatuity of those
who for two hours shouted the praises of Diana of the Ephesians. The
supernatural mist that blurs the irksome and the ludicrous till it seems
like a glory was not before her eyes; every outline was clear to her,
with the painful distinctness of a caricature.
“I don’t think you could eat the oranges here,” he said, “they’d be down
on us for throwing the skins about. Are you too tired to come on down
into the gardens where they wouldn’t spot us?” He laid his hand on hers,
“You _are_ tired. What fools we were to go walking round all those
infernal rooms! Why didn’t you say you had enough of it?”
Francie was aching with fatigue from walking slowly over leagues of
polished floor, with her head thrown back in perpetual perfunctory
admiration of gilded ceilings and battle pictures, but she got up at
once, as much to escape from the heavy warmth of his hand as from the
mental languor that made discussion an effort. They went together down
the steps, too much jaded by uncomprehended sight-seeing to take heed of
the supreme expression of art in nature that stretched out before them
in mirrors of Triton and dolphin-guarded water and ordered masses of
woodland, and walked slowly along a terrace till they came to another
flight of steps that fell suddenly from the stately splendours of the
terraces down to the simplicities of a path leading into a grove of
trees.
The path wound temptingly on into the wood, with primroses and celandine
growing cool and fresh in the young grass on either side of it; the
shady greenness was like the music of stringed instruments after the
brazen heroics of a military band. They loitered along, and Francie
slipped her hand into Lambert’s arm, feeling, unconsciously, a little
more in sympathy with him, and more at ease with life. She had never
pretended either to him or to herself that she was in love with him; her
engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness,
and bitterness of soul, but her instinctive leniency towards any man who
liked her, joined with her old friendliness for Mr. Lambert, made it as
easy a way out of her difficulties as any she could have chosen. There
was something flattering in the knowledge of her power over a man whom
she had been accustomed to look up to, and something, too, that appealed
incessantly to her good nature; besides which there is to nearly every
human being some comfort in being the first object of another creature’s
life. She was almost fond of him as she walked beside him, glad to rest
her weight on his arm, and to feel how big and reliable he was. There
was nothing in the least romantic about having married him, but it was
eminently creditable. Her friends in the north side of Dublin had been
immensely impressed by it, and she knew enough of Lismoyle society to be
aware that there also she would be regarded with gratifying envy. She
quite looked forward to meeting Hawkins again, that she might treat him
with the cool and assured patronage proper to the heights of her new
position; he had himself seared the wound that he had given her, and now
she felt that she was thankful to him.
“Hang this path! it has as many turns as a corkscrew,” remarked Mr.
Lambert, bending his head to avoid a down-stretched branch of hawthorn,
covered with baby leaves and giant thorns. “I thought we’d have come to
a seat long before this; if it was Stephen’s Green there’d have been
twenty by this time.”
“There would, and twenty old men sitting on each of them!” retorted
Francie. “Mercy! who’s that hiding behind the tree? Oh, I declare, it’s
only one of those everlasting old statues, and look at a lot more of
them! I wonder if it was that they hadn’t room enough for them up in the
house that they put them out here in the woods?”
They had come to an enclosed green space in the wood, a daisy-starred
oval of grass, holding the spring sunshine in serene remoteness from all
the outer world of terraces and gardens, and made mysterious and
poetical as a vale in Ida by the strange pale presences that peopled
every nook of an ivy-grown crag at its further side. A clear pool
reflected them, but waveringly, because of the ripples caused by a light
drip from the overhanging rock; the trees towered on the encircling high
ground and made a wall of silence round the intenser silences of the
statues as they leaned and postured in a trance of suspended activity;
the only sound was the monotone of the falling water, dropping with a
cloistered gravity in the melodious hollow of the cave.
“I’m not going to walk another foot,” said Francie, sitting down on the
grass by the water’s edge; “here, give me the oranges, Roddy, no one’ll
catch us eating them here, and we can peg the skins at that old thing
with its clothes dropping off and the harp in its hand.”
It was thus that Mrs. Lambert described an Apollo with a lyre who was
regarding them from the opposite rock with classic preoccupation.
Lambert lighted a cigar, and leaning back on his elbow in the grass,
watched Francie’s progress through her inelegant meal with the pride of
the provider. He looked at her half wonderingly, she was so lovely in
his eyes, and she was so incredibly his own; he felt a sudden insanity
of tenderness for her that made his heart throb and his cheek redden,
and would have ennobled him to the pitch of dying for her on the spot,
had such an extravagance been demanded of him. He longed to put his arms
round her, and tell her how dear, how adorable, how entirely delightful
she was, but he knew that she would probably only laugh at him in that
maddening way of hers, or at all events, make him feel that she was far
less interested in the declaration than he was. He gave a quick sigh,
and stretching out his hand laid it on her shoulder as if to assure
himself of his ownership of her.
“That dress fits you awfully well. I like you better in that than in
anything.”
“Then I’d better take care and not get the juice on it,” Francie
replied, with her mouth full of orange; “lend me a loan of your
handkerchief.”
Lambert removed a bundle of letters and a guide-book from his pocket,
and finally produced the handkerchief.
“Why, you’ve a letter there from Charlotte, haven’t you?” said Francie,
with more interest than she had yet shown, “I didn’t know you had heard
again from her.”
“Yes, I did,” said Lambert, putting the letters back in his pocket, “I
wish to goodness we hadn’t left our address at the Charing Cross Hotel.
People might let a man alone when he’s on his honeymoon.”
“What did she say?” inquired Francie lightly. “Is she cross? The other
one she wrote was as sweet as syrup, and ‘Love to dear Francie’ and
all.”
“Oh, no, not a bit,” said Mr. Lambert, who had been secretly surprised
and even slightly wounded by the fortitude with which Miss Mullen had
borne the intelligence of his second marriage, “but she’s complaining
that my colts have eaten her best white petticoat.”
“You may give her one of my new ones,” suggested Francie.
“Oh yes, she’d like that, wouldn’t she?” said Lambert with a chuckle;
“she’s so fond of you, y’know!”
“Oh, she’s quite friendly with me now, though I know you’re dying to
make out that she’ll not forgive me for marrying you,” said Francie,
flinging her last bit of orange-peel at the Apollo; “you’re as proud as
Punch about it. I believe you’d have married her, only she wouldn’t take
you!”
“Is that your opinion!” said Mr. Lambert with a smile that conveyed a
magnanimous reticence as to the facts of the case; “you’re beginning to
be jealous, are you? I think I’d better leave you at home the day I go
over to talk the old girl into good humour about her petticoat!”
In his heart Mr. Lambert was less comfortable than the tone of his voice
might have implied; there had been in the letter, in spite of its
friendliness and singular absence of feminine pique, an allusion to that
three hundred pounds that circumstances had forced him to accept from
her. His honeymoon, and those new clothes that Francie had bought in
London, had run away with no end of money, and it would be infernally
inconvenient if Charlotte was going, just at this time of all others, to
come down on him for money that he had never asked her for. He turned
these things over uncomfortably in his mind as he lay back on the grass,
looking up at Francie’s profile, dark against the soft blue of the sky;
and even while he took one of her hands and drew it down to his lips he
was saying to himself that he had never yet failed to come round
Charlotte when he tried, and it would not be for want of trying if he
failed now.
The shadows of the trees began to stretch long fingers across the grass
of the Bosquet d’Apollon, and Lambert looked at his watch and began to
think of _table d’hôte_ at the Louvre Hotel. Pleasant, paradisaically
pleasant as it was here in the sun, with Francie’s hand in his, and one
of his best cigars in his mouth, he had come to the age at which not
even Paradise would be enjoyable without a regular dinner hour.
Francie felt chilly and exhausted as they walked back and climbed the
innumerable flights of steps that lay between them and the Palace; she
privately thought that Versailles would be a horrible place to live in,
and not to be compared in any way to Bruff, but, at all events, it would
be a great thing to say she had been there, and she could read up all
the history part of it in the guide-book when she got back to the hotel.
They were to go up the Eiffel tower the next day; that would be some
fun, anyhow, and to the Hippodrome in the evening, and, though that
wouldn’t be as good as Hengler’s circus, the elephants and horses and
things wouldn’t be talking French and expecting her to answer them, like
the housemaids and shopmen. It was a rest to lean back in the narrow
carriage with the pair of starveling ponies, that rattled along with as
much whip-cracking and general pomp as if it were doing ten miles an
hour instead of four, and to watch the poplars and villas pass by in
placid succession, delightfully devoid of historical interest.
It was getting dark when they reached Paris, and the breeze had become
rough and cold. The lamps were shining among the trees on the
Boulevards, and the red and green eyes of the cabs and trams crossed and
recrossed each other like a tangle of fire-flies. The electric lights of
the Place du Louvre were at length in sight, lofty and pale, like globes
of imprisoned daylight above the mundane flare of the gas, and Francie’s
eyes turned towards them with a languid relief. Her old gift of living
every moment of her day seemed gone, and here, in this wonderful Paris,
that had so suddenly acquired a real instead of a merely geographical
existence for her, the stream of foreign life was passing by her, and
leaving her face as uninterested and wearied as it ever had been when
she looked out of the window at Albatross Villa at the messenger boys
and bakers’ carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower
and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre
of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with
the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and
indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from
them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe,
its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of
music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting
her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho
drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte’s piano, while Mr. Hawkins,
holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws
to thump a bass. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down,
was being played; he had pretended there that he was her music teacher,
and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a
tea-spoon, and gone on with all kinds of nonsense. The carriage started
forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place
beside her.
“Of all the asses unhung these French fellows are the biggest,” he said
fervently, “and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I
couldn’t hear my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last,
anyhow, and you’ve got to get out before me.”
The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not
answer a word. She turned her back on her husband, and stepping out of
the carriage she walked unsteadily across the courtyard in the white
glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered
his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to
him from the spectacle of her wet cheeks and trembling lips. She made
for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the
drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor.
The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the
tune that had torn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget
its associations and recover herself, catching up an illustrated paper
to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two
before Lambert followed her.
“Here’s a go!” he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his
hand, “here’s a wire to say that Sir Benjamin’s dead, and they want me
back at once.”