LUCILLA MERRITON had much money, a kind heart and a pretty little talent in painting. The last secured her admittance to the circle of art-students round about the Rue Bonaparte, the second made her popular among them and the money enabled her to obey any reasonable dictate of the kind heart aforesaid. When those who were her intimates, mainly hard-working and none too opulent English girls, took her to task for her luxurious way of living, and pointed out that it was not in keeping with the Spartan, makeshift traditions of the Latin Quarter, and that it differentiated her too much from her fellows, she replied, with the frankness of her country, first, that she saw no sense in pretending to be other than she was, second, that in the atmosphere of luxury to which she had been born, she was herself, for whatever that self was worth; and thirdly, that any masquerading as a liver of the simple life would choke all the agreeable qualities out of her. When, looking round her amateur studio, they objected that she did not take her art seriously, she cordially agreed. “I take what you call my art,” she would say, “just as it suits me. I can command too many things in the world for me to sacrifice them to the mediocre result I can get out of a paint-brush and a bit of canvas. I shall never need paint for money, and if I did I’m sure I shouldn’t earn any. But I love painting for its own sake, and I have enough talent to make it worth while to have good instruction in technique, so that my pictures shall more or less satisfy myself and not set my friends’ teeth on edge. And that’s why I’m here.”
She was a wealthy vagabond of independent fortune inherited from her mother long since deceased, with no living ties save her father, a railway director in America, now married to a young wife, a school-mate of her own, whom, since her childhood, she had peculiarly abhorred. But in the world, which lay wide open to her, videlicet the civilised nations of the two hemispheres, she had innumerable friends. No human will pretended to control her actions. She was as free to live in Rosario as in Buda-Pesth; in Nairobi as in Nijni Novgorod. For the last two or three years she had elected to establish her headquarters in Paris and study painting. But why the latter process should involve a hard bed in a shabby room and dreadful meals at the Petit Cornichon, she could never understand. Occasionally, on days of stress at the atélier, she did lunch at the Petit Cornichon. It was convenient, and, as she was young and thirsty for real draughts of life, the chatter and hubbub of insensate ambitions afforded her both interest and amusement; but she found the food execrable and the universal custom of cleaning knife, fork, spoon and plate before using them exceedingly disgusting. Yet, being a lady born and bred, she performed the objectionable rite in the most gracious way in the world; and when it came to comradeship, then her democratic traditions asserted themselves. Her student friends ranged the social gamut. If the wearer were a living spirit, she regarded broken boots and threadbare garments merely as an immaterial accident of fortune, like a broken nose or an amputated limb. The flat on the Boulevard St. Germain was the haven of many a hungry girl and boy. And they found their way thither (as far as Lucilla was concerned) not because they were hungry, but because that which lay deep in their souls had won her accurate recognition.
By way of digression, an essential difference in point of view between English and Americans may here be noted. If an Englishman has reason to admire a tinker and make friends with him, he will leave his own respectable sphere and enter that of the tinker, and, in some humble haunt of tinkerdom, where he can remain incognito, will commune with his crony over pots of abominable and digestion-racking ale. The instinct of the American, in sworn brotherhood with a tinker, is, on the other hand, to lift the tinker to his own habitation of delight. He will desire to take him into a saloon which he himself frequents, fill him up with champagne and provide him with the best, biggest and strongest cigar that money can buy. In both cases appear the special defects of national qualities. The Englishman goes to the tinker’s boozing ken (thereby, incidentally, putting the tinker at his ease) because he would be ashamed of being seen by any of his own clan in a tinker’s company. The American does not care a hang for being seen with the tinker; he wants to give his friend a good time; but, incidentally, he has no intuitive regard for the tinker’s feelings, predilections and timidities.
From which disquisition it may be understood how Lucilla played Lady Bountiful without the slightest consciousness of doing so. She played it so well, with regard to Félise, as to make that young woman in the course of a day or two her slave and worshipper. She shewed her the sights of Paris, Versailles, the Galeries de Lafayette, the Tomb of Napoleon, Poiret’s, the Salon d’Hiver, the Panthéon and Cartier’s in the Rue de la Paix. With the aid of pins and scissors and Céleste, she also attired her in an evening frock and under the nominal protection of an agreeable young compatriot from the Embassy took her to dine at the Café de Paris and then to the Théatre du Gymnase. A great, soft-cushioned, smooth, noiseless car carried them luxuriously through the infinite streets; and when they were at home it seemed to await them night and day by the kerb of the Boulevard Saint Germain. Lucilla set the head of the little country mouse awhirl with sensations. Félise revered her as a goddess, and whispered in awe the Christian name which she was commanded to use.
A breathless damsel, with a jumble of conflicting scraps of terror and delight instead of a mind, her arms full of an adored Persian kitten and an adoring Pekinese spaniel, after a couple of days’ flashing course through France, was brought in the gathering dusk, with a triumphant sweep up the hill, to the familiar front door of the H?tel des Grottes. Baptiste, green-aproned, gaped as he saw her, and, scuttling indoors, shouted at the top of his voice:
“Monsieur, monsieur, c’est mademoiselle!”
In an instant, Bigourdin lumbered out at full speed. He almost lifted her from the car, scattering outraged kitten and offended dog, hid her in his vast embrace and hugged her and kissed her and held her out at arm’s length and laughed and hugged her again. There was no doubt of the prodigal’s welcome. She laughed and sobbed and hugged the great man in return. And then he recovered himself and became the bon h?telier and assisted Lucilla to alight, while Félise greeted a smiling Martin and suffered the embrace of Euphémie, panting from the kitchen.
“If mademoiselle will give herself the trouble of following me——” said Bigourdin, and led the way up the stairs, followed by Lucilla and Céleste, guardian of the jewel case. He threw open the door of the chambre d’honneur, a double-windowed room, above the terrace, overlooking the town and the distant mountains of the Limousin, and shewed her with pride a tiny salon adjoining, the only private sitting-room in the hotel, crossed the corridor and flung to view the famous bathroom, disclosed next door a room for the maid, and swept her back to the bedroom, where a pine-cone fire was blazing fragrantly.
“Voilà, mademoiselle,” said he. “Tout à votre disposition.”
“I think it is absolutely charming,” cried Lucilla. She looked round. “Oh! what lovely things you have!”
Bigourdin beamed and made a little bow. He took inordinate pride in his chambre d’honneur in which he had stored the gems of the Empire furniture acquired by his great-grandfather, the luckless Général de Brigade. The instantaneous appreciation of a casual glance enchanted him.
“I hope, mademoiselle,” said he, in his courteous way, “you will do Félise and myself the honour of being our guest as long as you deign to stay at Brant?me.”
Lucilla met his bright eyes. “That’s delightful of you,” she laughed. “But I’m not one solitary person, I’m a caravan. There’s me and the maid and the chauffeur and the car and the dog and the cat.”
“The hotel is very little, mademoiselle,” replied Bigourdin, “but our hearts are big enough to entertain them.”
Nothing more, or, at least, nothing more by way of protest, was to be said. Lucilla put out her hand in her free, generous gesture.
“Monsieur Bigourdin, I accept with pleasure your delightful hospitality.”
“Je vous remercie infiniment, mademoiselle,” said Bigourdin.
He went downstairs in a flutter of excitement. Not for four generations, so far as he was aware, had such an event occurred in the H?tel des Grottes. Members of the family, of course, had stayed there without charge. Once, towards the end of the Second Empire, a Minister of the Interior had occupied the chambre d’honneur, and had gone away without paying his bill; but that remained a bad black debt in the books of the hotel. Never had a stranger been an honoured guest. He had offered the position, it is true, to Corinna; but then he was in love with Corinna, which makes all the difference. The French are not instinctively hospitable; when they are seized, however, by the impulse of hospitality, all that they have is yours, down to the last crust in the larder; but they are fully conscious of their own generosity, they feel the tremendousness of the spiritual wave. So Bigourdin, kindest-hearted of men, lumbered downstairs aglow with a sense of altruistic adventure. In the vestibule he met Félise who had lingered there in order to obtain from Martin a compte rendu of the household and the neighbourhood. Things had gone none too well—Monsieur Peyrian, one of their regular commercial travellers, having discovered a black-beetle in his bread, had gone to the H?tel du Cygne. The baker had indignantly repudiated the black-beetle, his own black-beetles being apparently of an entirely different species. Another baker had been appointed, whose only defect was his inability to bake bread. The brave Madame Thuillier, who had been called in to superintend the factory, had quarrelled, after two days, with everybody, and had gone off in dudgeon because she did not eat at the patron’s table. Then they had lost two of their best hands, one a young married woman who was reluctantly compelled to add to the population of France, and the other a girl who was discharged for laying false information against the very respectable and much married Baptiste, saying that he had pinched her. The old Mère Maquoise, marchande de quatre saisons, who was reputed to have known Général Bigourdin, was dead, and one of the hotel omnibus horses had come down on its knees.
Félise, forgetful of the Maison de Blanc and N?tre Dame, wrung her hands. She had descended from fairyland into life’s dear and important realities.
“It’s desolating, what you tell me,” she cried.
“And all because you went away and left us,” said Martin.
“She is not going to leave us again!” cried Bigourdin, swooping down on her and carrying her off.
In the prim little salon he hugged her again and said gripping her hands:
“It appears you have greatly suffered, my poor little Félise. But why didn’t you tell me from the first that you were unhappy with your Aunt Clothilde? I did not know she had turned into such a vieille pimbèche. She has written. And I have answered. Ah! I tell you, I have answered! You need never again have any fear of your Aunt Clothilde. I hope I am a Christian. But I hope too that I shall always differ from her in my ideas of Christianity. Mais tout ?a est fini—bel et bien fini. We have to talk of ourselves. I have been a miserable man since you have been away, ma petite Félise. I tell you that in all frankness. Everything has been at sixes and sevens. I can’t do without my little ménagère. And you shall never marry anybody, even the President of the Republic, unless you want to. Foi de Bigourdin! Voilà!”
Félise cried a little. “Tu es trop bon pour moi, mon oncle.”
“Allons donc! I seem to have been an old bear. Yet, in truth, I am harmless as a sheep. But have confidence in me, and in my very dear friend, your father—there are many things you cannot understand—and things will arrange themselves quite happily. You love me just a little bit, don’t you?”
She flung her arms round the huge man’s neck.
“Je t’adore, mon petit oncle,” she cried.
Ten minutes afterwards, with bunch of keys slung at her waist, she was busy restoring to order the chaos of the interregnum. Terrible things had happened during the absence of the feminine eye. Even Martin shared the universal reprimand. For Félise, manageress of hotel, and Félise, storm-tossed little human soul, were two entirely different entities.
“My dear Martin, how could you and my uncle pass these napkins from that infamous old thief of a laundress. They are black!”
And ruthlessly she flicked a napkin folded mitre-wise from the centre table before the eyes of the folder and revealed its dingy turpitude.
“It is well that I am back,” she declared.
“It is indeed, Mademoiselle Félise,” said Martin.
She gave him a swift little glance out of the tail of her eye, before she sped away, and the corners of her lips drooped as though in disappointment. Then perhaps reflecting that she had been addressing the waiter and not the man, her face cleared. At all events he had taken her rating in good part.
Dinner had already begun and the hungry commercials, napkins at neck, were finishing their soup lustily, when Lucilla entered the dining room. The open Medici collar to a grey velvet dress shewed the graceful setting of her neck and harmonised with the brown hair brushed up from the forehead. She advanced smiling and stately, giving the impression of the perfect product of a new civilisation. Martin, who had but seen her for a few seconds in the dusk confusedly clad in furs, stood spell-bound, a pile of used soup-plates in his hands. Never had so radiant an apparition swum before his gaze. Bigourdin, dining as usual with Félise, rose immediately and conducted his guest to the little table by the terrace where once Martin and Corinna had sat. It was specially adorned with tawny chrysanthemums.
“I fell dreaming before the fire in the midst of your wonderful, old-world things, and had to hurry into my clothes, and so I’m late,” she apologised.
“If only you found all you needed, mademoiselle——” said Bigourdin anxiously. “It is the provinces and not Paris.”
She assured him that Félise had seen to every conceivable want and he left her to her meal. Martin delivered his soup-plates into the arms of the chambermaid and hovered over Lucilla with the menu card.
“Will mademoiselle take the dinner?” he asked in French.
She regarded him calmly and humorously and nodded. He became aware that her eyes were of a deep, deep grey, full of light. He found it difficult not to keep on looking at them. Breaking away, however, he fetched her soup and went off to attend to the others. At every pause by her table he noted some new and incomparable attribute. When bending over the platter from which she helped herself, he saw that her hands were beautifully shaped, plump, with long thin fingers and with delicate markings of veins beneath the white skin. An upward glance caught more blue veins on the temples. Another time he was struck by the supple grace of her movements. There were infinite gleams in her splendid hair. The faintest suggestion of perfume arose from her garments. She declined the vegetable course and, declining, looked up at him and smiled. He thought he had never seen a brow so noble, a nose so exquisitely cut, lips so kind and mocking. Her face was that of a Romney duchess into which the thought and spiritual freedom of the twentieth century had entered. As he sped about the service, thrusting dishes beneath bearded or blue, ill-shaven chins, her face floated before his eyes; every now and then he stole a distant glance at it, and longed for the happy though transient moment when he should come close to it again.
While he was clearing her table for dessert she said:
“Why do you speak French to me, when you know I’m an American?”
“It is the custom of the house when a guest speaks such excellent French as mademoiselle.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said in English; “but it seems rather ridiculous for an American and an Englishman to converse in a foreign language.”
“How do you know I am English, mademoiselle?” he asked, his heart a-flutter at the unexpected interchange of words.
She laughed. “I have eyes. Besides, I know all about you—first from our friend Corinna Hastings, and lately from my little hostess over the way.”
He flushed, charmed by the deep music of her voice and delighted at being recognised by her not only as an individual (for she radiated an attraction which had caused him to hate the conventional impersonality of waiterdom) but as a member more or less of her own social class. He paused, plate of crumbs in one hand and napkin in the other.
“Do you know Corinna Hastings?”
“Evidently. How else could she have told me of your romantic doings?” she replied laughingly, and Martin flushed deeper, conscious of an idiot question.
He set the apples and little white grapes before her. “I ............