The next day Madame Beaurepas held out to me with her own venerable
fingers a missive which proved to be a telegram. After glancing at it I
let her know that it appeared to call me away. My brother had arrived in
England and he proposed I should meet him there; he had come on business
and was to spend but three weeks in Europe. “But my house empties
itself!” the old woman cried on this. “The famille Roque talks of
leaving me and Madame Cheurche nous fait la réverénce.”
“Mrs. Church is going away?”
“She’s packing her trunk; she’s a very extraordinary person. Do you know
what she asked me this morning? To invent some combination by which the
famille Roque should take itself off. I assured her I was no such
inventor. That poor famille Roque! ‘Oblige me by getting rid of them,’
said Madame Cheurche—quite as she would have asked Célestine to remove a
strong cheese. She speaks as if the world were made for Madame Cheurche.
I hinted that if she objected to the company there was a very simple
remedy—and at present elle fait ses paquets.”
“She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”
“She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let three months ago
to another family. She has an aplomb!”
Mrs. Church’s aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I’m not sure that
it wasn’t in some degree to laugh at my leisure that I went out into the
garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night was dark and not
particularly balmy, and most of my fellow pensioners, after dinner, had
remained indoors. A long straight walk conducted from the door of the
house to the ancient grille I’ve described, and I stood here for some
time looking through the iron bars at the silent empty street. The
prospect was not enlivening and I presently turned away. At this moment
I saw in the distance the door of the house open and throw a shaft of
lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight stepped the figure of an
apparently circumspect female, as they say in the old stories, who
presently closed the door behind her. She disappeared in the dusk of the
garden and I had seen her but an instant; yet I remained under the
impression that Aurora Church, on the eve of departure, had come out to
commune, like myself, with isolation.
I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward
the house, and before long a slight but interesting figure emerged from
among the shadows of the trees and encountered the rays of a lamp that
stood just outside the gate. My fellow solitary was in fact Aurora
Church, who acknowledged my presence with an impatience not wholly
convincing.
“Ought I to retire—to return to the house?”
“If you ought,” I replied, “I should be very sorry to tell you so.”
“But we’re all alone. There’s no one else in the garden.”
“It’s not the first time, then, that I’ve been alone with a young lady.
I’m not at all terrified.”
“Ah, but I?” she wailed to extravagance. “I’ve _never_ been alone—!”
Quickly, however, she interrupted herself. “Bon, there’s another false
note!”
“Yes, I’m obliged to admit that one’s very false.”
She stood looking at me. “I’m going away to-morrow; after that there
will be no one to tell me.”
“That will matter little,” I presently returned. “Telling you will do no
good.”
“Ah, why do you say that?” she all ruefully asked.
I said it partly because it was true, but I said it for other reasons, as
well, which I found hard to define. Standing there bareheaded in the
night air, in the vague light, this young lady took on an extreme
interest, which was moreover not diminished by a suspicion on my own part
that she had come into the garden knowing me to be there. I thought her
charming, I thought her remarkable and felt very sorry for her; but as I
looked at her the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured to
characterise her recurred to me with a certain force. I had professed a
contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that perhaps
this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young creature was
in quest of an effective preserver. She was certainly not a girl to
throw herself at a man’s head, but it was possible that in her
intense—her almost morbid—desire to render operative an ideal charged
perhaps after all with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed, she
might do something reckless and irregular—something in which a
sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit. The
image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot filled me
with a semblance of envy. For some moments I was silent, conscious of
these things; after which I answered her question. “Because some
things—some differences—are felt, not learned. To you liberty’s not
natural; you’re like a person who has bought a repeating watch and is, in
his satisfaction, constantly taking it out of his pocket to hear it
sound. To a real American girl her liberty’s a very vulgarly-ticking old
clock.”
“Ah, you mean then,” said my young friend, “that my mother has ruined
me?”
“Ruined you?”
“She has so perverted my mind that when I try to be natural I’m
necessarily indecent.”