Paragot a bore! It was unimaginable.
Was he paying the penalty of his past respectability? Had Melford repressed his n.o.ble rage and frozen the genial current of his soul? It is not unlikely. He often found himself condemned to solitary toping over a stained newspaper, one of the most ungleeful joys known to man.
Sometimes he played dominoes with Felicien Garbure, now icily received by the symbolists on account of an unpaid score. Whether desperation drove him occasionally to Bubu le Vainqueur and his friends I do not know. He was not really proud of his acquaintance with Bubu. Once he whimsically remarked that as he was half way between Gaston de Nerac and Berzelius Paragot, and therefore neither fish nor fowl, he could not find an appropriate hole in Paris. But when his hair and his beard and his finger nails had attained their old luxuriance of growth, and he was in every way Paragot again, the desired haven remained still unfindable. There were taverns without number and drink in oceans, and the life of Paris surged up and down the Boulevards as stimulating as ever: but the heart of Paragot cried out for something different. He took the old violin from its dirty case and spent hours in the Rue des Saladiers trying to fiddle the divine despair out of his system.
Sometimes he would call upon Blanquette to accompany him on her almost forgotten zither.
One day he was with me at the Cafe opposite Janot"s, when two or three of the studio came in and sat at our table. There was the usual eager talk. The subject, the new impressionism.
"But to understand it, you must be in the movement," cried Fougere, not dreaming of discourtesy.
But Paragot took the saying to heart.
"I see it now," said he afterwards. "I am no longer in the movement. You young men have pa.s.sed me by. I am left stranded. You may ask why I don"t seek the company of my own contemporaries? Who are they that know me, save worthless rags like Felicien Garbure? Stranded, my son. I have had my day."
After that he refused to talk at such social gatherings as chance afforded, and moodily listened, while he consumed profitless alcohol.
Then he began to frequent the low-life cafes of the Halles. When he had nearly poisoned himself with vile absinthe and sickened himself with the conversation of fishwives, he sent for me in despair.
I found him half-dressed walking up and down the salon. He looked very ill.
"I am going to leave Paris to-day," he began, as soon as I entered. "It is a city of Dead Sea apples. It has no place for me, save the sewer. I don"t like the sewer. I am going away. I shall never come back to Paris again."
"But where are you going, Master?" I asked in some surprise.
He did not know. He would pack his bundle and flee like Christian from the accursed city. Like Christian he would go on a Pilgrim"s Progress.
He would seek sweet pure things. He would go forth and work in the fields. The old life had come to an end. The sow had been mistaken. It could not return to its wallowing in the mire. Wallowing was disgustful.
Was ever man in such a position? The vagabond life had made the conventions of civilisation impossible. The contact with convention and clean English ways had killed his zest for the old order of which only the mud remained. There was nothing for it but to leave Paris.
He poured out his heart to me in a torrent of excited words, here and there none too coherent. He must work. He had lost the great art by which he was to cover Europe with palaces. That was no longer.
"My G.o.d!" said he stopping short. "The true knowledge of it has only come to me lately. I was living in a Fool"s Paradise. I could never have designed a building. I should have lived on her bounty. Thank G.o.d I was saved the shame of it."
He went on. Again he repeated his intention of leaving Paris. I must look after Blanquette for the present. He must go and dree his weird alone.
"And yet, my little Asticot, it is the dreadful loneliness that frightens me. Once I had a dream. It sufficed me. But now my soul is empty. A man needs a woman in his life, even a Dream Woman. But for me, _ni-ni, c"est fini_. There is not a woman in the wide world who would look at me now."
"Master," said I, "if you are going to settle down in the country, why don"t you marry Blanquette?"
"Marry Blanquette! Marry----"
He regarded me in simple, undisguised amazement which took his breath away. He pa.s.sed his hand through his hair and sat on the nearest seat.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" said he, "I never thought of it!"
Then he leaped up and caught me in the old way by the shoulders, and cried in French, as he did in moments of great excitement:
"But it"s colossal, that idea! It is the solution of everything. And I never thought of it though it has been staring me in the face. Why I love her, our little Blanquette. I have loved her all the time without knowing it as the good Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose. _Sacre nom d"un pet.i.t bonhomme!_ Why didn"t you tell me before, confounded little animal that you are?"
He swung me with a laugh, to the other side of the room, and waved his arms grotesquely, as he continued his dithyrambic eulogy of the colossal idea. I have never seen two minutes produce a greater change in a human countenance. Ten years fell from it. He looked even younger than when he had broken his fiddle over Mr. Pogson"s head and received the inspiration of our vagabondage. His blue eyes cleared, and in them shone the miraculous light of laughter.
"But it was written, my son Asticot. It was preordained. She is the one woman in the world to whom I need not pretend to be other than I am. She is _real, nom de Dieu_! What she says is Blanquette, what she does is Blanquette, and her sayings and doings would grace the greatest Queen in Christendom. But, have you thought of it? I have come indeed to the end of my journey. I started out to find Truth, the Reality of Things. I have found it. I have found it, my son. It is a woman, strong and steadfast, who looks into your eyes; who can help a man to accomplish his destiny. And the destiny of man is to work, and to beget strong children. And his reward is to have the light in the wife"s eyes and the welcome of a child"s voice as he crosses the threshold of his house. And it cleanses a man. But Blanquette----" he smote his forehead, and burst into excited laughter. "Why did it not enter into this idiot head before?"
The laughter ceased all of a sudden, and at least three years returned to his face.
"It takes two parties to make a marriage," said he in a chastened tone.
"Blanquette is young. I am not. She may be thinking of a future quite different. It is all very well to say I will marry Blanquette, but will Blanquette marry me?"
"Master," said I, feeling a person of elderly experience, "it was entirely on your account that Blanquette refused the _quincaillier_ at the corner of the street."
I had learned from her the day before that the superior hardware merchant had recently made her a ceremonious offer of marriage.
"A sense of duty, perhaps," said Paragot.
I laughed at his seriousness.
"But, Master, she has been eating her heart out for you since the wedding at Chambery."
"Asticot," said he, planting himself in front of me, "are you jesting or speaking what you know to be the truth?"
"The absolute truth."
"And you never told me? You knew that a real woman loved me, and you let me chase a will-o"-the-wisp with gloves and an umbrella? Truly a man"s foes are of his own household."
"But, Master----" I began.
He laughed at the sight of my dejected face.
"No, you were loyal, my son. The man who gives away a woman"s confidence, even when she avows the poisoning of her husband and the strangulation of her babes, is a transpontine villain."
He took up his porcelain pipe and filled it from the blue packet of caporal that lay on the table with the oilskin cover. He struck a match and was about to apply it to the bowl, when one of his sudden ideas caused him to blow out the match and lay down the pipe. Then with his old lightning swiftness he strode to the door and flung it open.
"Blanquette! Blanquette!" he cried.
"_Oui, maitre_," came from the kitchen, and in a moment Blanquette entered the room.
He took her by the hand and led her to the centre, while she regarded him somewhat mystified. With his heels together, he made her a correct bow.
"Blanquette," said he, "in the presence of Asticot as witness I ask you to do me the honour to become my wife."
It was magnificent; it was what Paragot would have called _vieille ecole_; but it was not tactful. It was half an hour before Blanquette fully grasped the situation.
CHAPTER XXIII
JOANNA married Major Walters, as soon as the conventionalities would permit.
She wrote then, for the first time, to Paragot.