The conversational union between Miss Ruck and her neighbour, in front of us, had evidently not become a close one. The young lady suddenly turned round to us with a question: "Don"t you want some ice-cream?"
"SHE doesn"t strike false notes," I murmured.
There was a kind of pavilion or kiosk, which served as a cafe, and at which the delicacies procurable at such an establishment were dispensed. Miss Ruck pointed to the little green tables and chairs which were set out on the gravel; M. Pigeonneau, fluttering with a sense of dissipation, seconded the proposal, and we presently sat down and gave our order to a nimble attendant. I managed again to place myself next to Aurora Church; our companions were on the other side of the table.
My neighbour was delighted with our situation. "This is best of all," she said. "I never believed I should come to a cafe with two strange men! Now, you can"t persuade me this isn"t wrong."
"To make it wrong we ought to see your mother coming down that path."
"Ah, my mother makes everything wrong," said the young girl, attacking with a little spoon in the shape of a spade the apex of a pink ice. And then she returned to her idea of a moment before: "You must promise to tell me--to warn me in some way--whenever I strike a false note. You must give a little cough, like that--ahem!"
"You will keep me very busy, and people will think I am in a consumption."
"Voyons," she continued, "why have you never talked to me more? Is that a false note? Why haven"t you been "attentive?" That"s what American girls call it; that"s what Miss Ruck calls it."
I a.s.sured myself that our companions were out of earshot, and that Miss Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream. "Because you are always entwined with that young lady. There is no getting near you."
Aurora looked at her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice. "You wonder why I like her so much, I suppose. So does mamma; elle s"y perd. I don"t like her particularly; je n"en suis pas folle. But she gives me information; she tells me about America.
Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I am all the more curious. And then Miss Ruck is very fresh."
"I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck," I said, "but in future, when you want information, I recommend you to come to me for it."
"Our friend offers to take me to America; she invites me to go back with her, to stay with her. You couldn"t do that, could you?" And the young girl looked at me a moment. "Bon, a false note I can see it by your face; you remind me of a maitre de piano."
"You overdo the character--the poor American girl," I said. "Are you going to stay with that delightful family?"
"I will go and stay with any one that will take me or ask me. It"s a real nostalgie. She says that in New York--in Thirty-Seventh Street- -I should have the most lovely time."
"I have no doubt you would enjoy it."
"Absolute liberty to begin with."
"It seems to me you have a certain liberty here," I rejoined.
"Ah, THIS? Oh, I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma, and I shall be lectured by Madame Galopin."
"The wife of the pasteur?"
"His digne epouse. Madame Galopin, for mamma, is the incarnation of European opinion. That"s what vexes me with mamma, her thinking so much of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin-- mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I"m so sick of that expression; I have heard it since I was six years old. Who is Madame Galopin--who thinks anything of her here? She is n.o.body; she is perfectly third-rate. If I like America better than mamma, I also know Europe better."
"But your mother, certainly," I objected, a trifle timidly, for my young lady was excited, and had a charming little pa.s.sion in her eye- -"your mother has a great many social relations all over the Continent."
"She thinks so, but half the people don"t care for us. They are not so good as we, and they know it--I"ll do them that justice--and they wonder why we should care for them. When we are polite to them, they think the less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much of them simply because they are foreigners. If I could tell you all the dull, stupid, second-rate people I have had to talk to, for no better reason than that they were de leur pays!-- Germans, French, Italians, Turks, everything. When I complain, mamma always says that at any rate it"s practice in the language. And she makes so much of the English, too; I don"t know what that"s practice in."
Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis, as regards this latter point, I saw something that made me rise, with a certain solemnity, from my chair. This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs. Church--a perfect model of the femme comme il faut--approaching our table with an impatient step, and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck. She had evidently come in quest of her daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman"s attendance, it had been on no softer ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child"s accomplice. My movement had given the alarm, and Aurora Church and M. Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone did not, in the local phrase, derange herself. Mrs.
Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked very serious, but not at all fluttered; she came straight to her daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she looked all round at the rest of us, very fixedly and tranquilly, without bowing. I must do both these ladies the justice to mention that neither of them made the least little "scene."
"I have come for you, dearest," said the mother.
"Yes, dear mamma."
"Come for you--come for you," Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the relics of our little feast. "I was obliged to ask Mr. Ruck"s a.s.sistance. I was puzzled; I thought a long time."
"Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you puzzled once in your life!"
said Mr. Ruck, with friendly jocosity. "But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you."
"We will take a cab, Aurora," Mrs. Church went on, without heeding this pleasantry--"a closed one. Come, my daughter."
"Yes, dear mamma." The young girl was blushing, yet she was still smiling; she looked round at us all, and, as her eyes met mine, I thought she was beautiful. "Good-bye," she said to us. "I have had a LOVELY TIME."
"We must not linger," said her mother; "it is five o"clock. We are to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin."
"I had quite forgotten," Aurora declared. "That will be charming."
"Do you want me to a.s.sist you to carry her back, ma am?" asked Mr.
Ruck.
Mrs. Church hesitated a moment, with her serene little gaze. "Do you prefer, then, to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these gentlemen?"
Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head.
"Well, I don"t know. How would you like that, Sophy?"
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Sophy, as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.
CHAPTER VIII.
I had half expected that Mrs. Church would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry in the English Garden. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman--I could not but admire the justice of this pretension--by recognising my irresponsibility. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church"s view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man, in such a situation, is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora"s appearing in public under the insufficient chaperonage of Miss Ruck.
Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to believe that of all the members of the Pension Beaurepas I had the most cultivated understanding. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view of making my peace with her, if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her book, and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked, rather, upon those general considerations in which her refined intellect was so much at home.
"Always at your studies, Mrs. Church," I ventured to observe.
"Que voulez-vous? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn"t study in the parlour of a boarding-house. But I do what I can; I have always done what I can. That is all I have ever claimed."
"No one can do more, and you seem to have done a great deal."
"Do you know my secret?" she asked, with an air of brightening confidence. And she paused a moment before she imparted her secret-- "To care only for the BEST! To do the best, to know the best--to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That"s what I have always done, in my quiet little way. I have gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best.
And it has not been for myself alone; it has been for my daughter.
My daughter has had the best. We are not rich, but I can say that."
"She has had you, madam," I rejoined finely.
"Certainly, such as I am, I have been devoted. We have got something everywhere; a little here, a little there. That"s the real secret-- to get something everywhere; you always can if you are devoted.
Sometimes it has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the history of art; every little counts you know.
Sometimes it has been just a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, an impression. We have always been on the look-out. Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a delightful social tie."