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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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, pa.s.sed 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-b.u.t.toned 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 a.s.sembly, 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 Maupa.s.sant."
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 cus.h.i.+ons, 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 h.e.l.l 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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."
"G.o.d help Melford!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed my master.
When the ladies had left us that evening after dinner, Paragot poured out a gla.s.s 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 Chambery 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.cious conditions it manifests itself in pa.s.sions, 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 s.p.a.ces. "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 pimbeche_!" 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."