JEAN had told Margot that the one thing he would never forgive was
interference in his concerns. No friend, he had explained, had the
right to force upon him such an indignity. One might willingly consent
to being under an obligation to a friend, but to receive a compulsory
and unconscious benefit behind one’s back was a wound to the personal
honour which nothing could ever heal.
Such service was worse than enmity; it was more intimate and less
forgivable.
Margot listened humbly to this statement of Jean’s views; she thought
how noble he was; and then it occurred to her that he need never find
out.
After all, the great thing was that Jean should be helped, and Margot
had never felt that it was at all necessary she should be noble. Jean
was Jean, but when you came to think of it, it was almost a moral
convenience that Margot was only Margot.
On the day after Jean’s disastrous proposal of marriage Margot
mysteriously left him. She said she had occasion to take the air--and
she took it, after having made a toilette peculiarly ambitious for so
simple a purpose. Jean was not, of course, offended with Margot; at the
same time he was sufficiently hurt to evince no curiosity. She had not
broken his heart, but there would have been something inappropriate in
his expressing any wish to know why she wore her best hat and did her
hair in the most complicated manner.
He satisfied himself, therefore, with looking extremely depressed, and
watching which direction she took from the window. At the corner she
stopped to buy two crimson roses and pinned them six inches under her
chin; it was almost the last franc of the best bedstead money.
Monsieur Cartier had returned to Paris, and Margot sent her name up to
his handsome rooms through the medium of a low-voiced, velvet-footed
manservant--while she waited trembling at the door. She wrote on the
card, “I want urgently to see you, Monsieur Jean’s friend, Margot
Selba.”
The great Monsieur Cartier was a good-natured man; he was also curious.
All of Liane’s friends knew the name of Mademoiselle Selba almost as
well as Liane’s enemies knew it, but Cartier was probably the only one
of them who had no intention of dropping the young musician because of
it.
Liane’s wrongs did not matter nearly so much to him as Jean’s touch on
the piano--he considered, and he was an excellent authority, that Jean
D’Ucelles had a very pretty touch and an idea or two behind it, while
it had not occurred to him that Liane’s wrongs shared in either of
these delicate qualities.
“Well, Mademoiselle,” he exclaimed, as Margot was announced, “of course
I remember you--you had no need to announce yourself as a friend of
Jean’s. It is a pleasure to see you. I read a charming account of one
of your successes in the _Journal_ the other day. You stand on your own
feet now, and Jean, I hope, continues to remain at them?”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” replied Margot, with a neat little bow. “It is
of Monsieur Jean that I came to speak to you.”
Cartier pulled forward one of his big leather armchairs in which
Margot’s tiny figure was almost lost. She continued, however, to behave
with as much dignity and assurance as if she were six feet tall and had
been born in the Tuileries. She had never been in such a big room in
her life, and her feet didn’t quite touch the floor--but no one would
ever have supposed so to look at her.
“What’s the young scapegrace been doing?” asked Cartier genially. “If
he has not been practising four hours a day he had better avoid meeting
me, that’s all! A genius that doesn’t work is like a blood-horse with
a broken wind--all very fine for the preliminary canter, but good for
nothing after the first fence. You don’t come here with tales like
that, I hope, Mademoiselle?”
“Oh, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, “first, before I tell you anything,
promise me never to let him know that I have been here!”
“Mademoiselle,” laughed Cartier, “I am discretion itself. No one shall
ever know of it! Has he become a _Barbe Bleue, le petit_ Jean, in my
absence?”
Then Margot told him. It was a long story, in spite of which there was
a good deal left out of it.
Cartier followed it attentively, twisting his gold-rimmed glasses to
and fro, and shaking his foot in a certain vexation of spirit. He did
not like to hear of suffering, and it was of suffering Margot told him.
Jean’s suffering, of course, his poverty, his heroism, his endurance;
it lost nothing from Margot’s lips; only it appeared that she herself
had taken no part in it. “And the worst of it is, Monsieur Cartier,”
she finished, “that he is so proud; the best men always are, I think!
It would be so difficult, you can’t think how difficult, to help him!
The artists he used to play for no longer offer him work; perhaps,
Monsieur, you may have heard that he displeased Madame de Brances.
If she had only known, there was nothing in it at all; but we cannot
expect a lady like that to believe----”
“In innocence,” finished Cartier softly. “Indeed, Mademoiselle, you are
right; that particular belief does not come easily to those who have
lived for long in Paris....”
Margot coloured. “There was no way whatever in which Monsieur Jean
was to blame,” she said, “no one, not his own mother, could have
blamed him. Nevertheless, it is through his kindness to me that he has
suffered. So you see, Monsieur, it is only natural that I should wish
to make him some little amends.”
Cartier nodded. “Very natural indeed, Mademoiselle, and quite probable,
if you will excuse my saying so, that you have already made them.”
“Madame de Brances has persuaded none of her friends to employ him,”
continued Margot, taking no notice of Cartier’s remark.
“She has not persuaded me,” said Cartier simply.
“Oh, Monsieur!” cried Margot.
“There, there,” said Cartier quickly, “no thanks! no thanks,
Mademoiselle. You and I, I fancy, are at one in that--we prefer not to
be thanked for our little services. I like Monsieur Jean, I think him
a musician; as for the de Brances affairs--they are, _en général_, an
intolerable nuisance, and they seem to increase as she gets older. I
don’t, however, know of much I can put in Jean’s way at present. The
Toriallis want another _accompagnateur_; he might go there for the
moment while I look about. It’s not the kind of thing I care for him to
do--but it will keep his head above water. To-morrow I will call and
make him the offer, and since he would be sure to refuse money--and you
must have been put to some expense...”
Margot rose to her feet.
“I think, Monsieur,” she said, “that I also could not take money. If it
could be from anyone it would be from you, but to-day I called again at
the theatre at which I sang before his illness, and they have kindly
said they will take me on again; so you see I shall not be long in want
of anything. I will not thank you then, Monsieur, but to-morrow I shall
expect you.” And Margot held out both her hands to Jacques Cartier.
“Personally,” he said, as he took them, “in spite of all you’ve been
telling me, Mademoiselle, I think that Monsieur Jean is a very lucky
fellow!”
“Oh, Monsieur!” said Margot, with some emphasis; and she shook her head.
“Then I think he’s uncommonly _bête_,” said Cartier, holding the door
open for her.
“No indeed, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, and more emphatically still.
“Well, then,” said Cartier over the banisters, as she stepped past
him down the stairs, “I think the world’s a deuced clumsy place,
Mademoiselle,” and this time Margot did not contradict him.