THE days went on, and nothing more was said of the proposal, it being understood that, as soon as Félise had wrought order out of chaos for a second time, Martin should consult with Fortinbras, his bankers, his solicitors and other eminent advisers. They resumed their evening visits to the Café de l’Univers, where Bigourdin and Monsieur Viriot sat as far apart as was consonant with membership of the circle. On meeting they saluted each other with elaborate politeness and addressed each other as “Monsieur” when occasion required interchange of speech. Every one knew what had happened, and, as every one was determined that the strained relations between them should not interfere with his own personal comfort, nobody cared. The same games were played, the same arguments developed. A favourite theme was the probable action of the Socialists on the outbreak of war. Some held, Monsieur Viriot among them, that they would refuse to take up arms and would spread counsels of ignominy among the people. The Professor at the Ecole Normale, allowed to express latitudinarian views on account of his philosophic position, was of opinion that the only safeguard against a European war lay in the solidarity of the International Socialist Brotherhood. “The Prussian drill-sergeant,” said the Mayor, “will soon see that there is no solidarity as far as Germany is concerned.”
“We have no drill-sergeants. The sous-officier is under the officer who is under the general who is bought by the men we are so besotted as to put into power to play into the hands of the enemy. Our Socialists will cleave to their infamous principles.” Thus declared Monsieur Viriot, who was a reactionary republican and regarded Socialism and Radicalism and Anti-clericalism as punishments inflicted by an outraged Heaven on a stiff-necked generation. “The Socialist will betray us,” he cried.
“Monsieur,” replied Bigourdin loftily, “you are wrong to accuse the loyalty of your compatriots. I am not a socialist. I, as every one knows, hold their mischievous ideas in detestation. But I have faith in the human soul. There’s not a Socialist, not an Anarchist, not even an Apache, who, when the German cannon sounds in his ears, will not rush to shed his blood in the defence of the sacred soil of France.”
“Bravo!” cried one.
“C’est bien dit!” cried another.
“After all, the soil is in the blood,” said a third.
Monsieur Cazensac, the landlord, who stood listening, said with a certain Gascon mordancy:
“Scratch even a Minister and you will find a Frenchman.”
And so the discussion—and who shall say it was a profitless one?—went on evening after evening, as it had gone on, in some sort of fashion conditioned by circumstances for over forty years.
On Christmas Eve came Félise, convoyed as far as Périgueux, where Bigourdin met her train, by the promised man from Cook’s. It was a changed little Félise, flushed with health and armoured in sophistication that greeted Martin. Her first preoccupation was no longer the disasters that might have occurred under helpless male rule during her absence.
“I’ve had the time of my life,” she asserted with a curious lazy accent. “It would take weeks to tell you. Monte Carlo is too heavenly for words. Lucilla committed perjury and swore I was over twenty-one and got me into the rooms and into the Sports Club, and what do you think? I won a thousand francs,” she tapped her bosom. “I have it here in good French money.”
Martin stared. The face was the face of Félise, but the voice was the voice of Lucilla. The English too of Félise was no longer her pretty halting speech, but fluent, as though, by her frequentation of English-speaking folk, all the old vocabulary of childhood had returned, together with sundry accretions. She rattled off a succinct account of the loveliness of the Azure Coast, with its flowers and seas and sunshine, the motor drives she had taken, the lunches, dinners and suppers she had eaten, the people she had met. Lucilla seemed to have friends everywhere, mainly English and American. They had seldom been alone. Félise had lived all the time in a social whirl.
“You will find Brant?me very dull now, Félise,” said Martin.
She laughed. “If you think my head’s turned, you’re mistaken. It’s a little head more solid than that.” Then, growing serious—“What I have seen and heard yonder, in a different sort of world, will enable me to form a truer judgment of things in Brant?me.”
Bigourdin came near the truth when he remarked later with a smile and a sigh:
“Here is our little girl transformed, in a twinkling, into a woman. She has acquired the art of hiding her troubles and of mocking at her tears. She will tell me henceforward only what it pleases her that I should know.”
Félise took up her duties cheerfully, performing them with the same thoroughness as before, but with a certain new and sedate authority. Her pretty assumption of dignified command had given place to calm assertion. Euphémie and Baptiste accustomed to girlish rebukes and rejoinders grumbled at the new phase. When Félise cut short the hitherto wonted argument by a: “Ma bonne Euphémie, the way it is to be done is the way I want it done,” and marched off like a duchess unperturbed, Euphémie shook her head and wondered whether she were still in the same situation. In her attitude towards Martin, she became more formal as a mistress and more superficial as friend. She had caught the trick of easy talk, which might have disconcerted him had the world been the same as it was before the advent of Lucilla. But the world had changed. He lived in Brant?me an automatic existence, his body there, his spirit far away. His mind dwelt little on any possible deepening or hardening in the character of Félise. So her altered attitude, though he could not help noticing it, caused him no disturbance. He thought casually: “Compared with the men she has met in the great world, I am but a person of mediocre interest.”
The New Year came in, heralded by snow and ice all over Europe. Beneath the steel-blue sky Brant?me looked pinched with cold. The hotel was almost empty, and Martin found it hard to occupy long hours of chilly idleness otherwise than by dreaming of Lucilla and palms and sunshine. Lucilla of course was always under the palms and the palms were in the sunshine; and he was talking to Lucilla, alone with her in the immensities of the desert. When he had dreamed long enough he shivered, for the H?tel des Grottes still depended for warmth on wood fires and there was no central heating and the bath in the famous bathroom received hot water through a gas geyser. And then he wondered whether the time had not come for him to make his momentous journey to Paris.
“I’ve had a letter from Miss Merriton,” said Félise one day, “she asks for news of you and sends you her kind regards.”
Martin, who, in shirt-sleeves and apron, was laying tables in the salle-à-manger, flushed at his goddess’s message.
“It’s very good of her to remember me.”
“Oh, she remembers you right enough,” said Félise.
That meant that his goddess must have spoken of him, not only once but on various occasions. She had carried him so far in her thoughts as to be interested in his doings. Did her words imply a veiled query as to his journey into Egypt? A lover reads an infinity of significance in his mistress’s most casual utterance, but blandly fails to interpret the obvious tone in which the woman with whom he is not in love makes an acid remark.
“Where is Miss Merriton now?” he asked.
She informed him coldly—not at all with the air of the wild flowers from which Alpine honey is made—that Lucilla was sailing next week for Alexandria. “And,” said she, “as I am a sort of messenger, what reply shall I make?”
Martin, who had developed a lover’s cunning, answered: “Give her my respectful greetings and say that I am very well.” No form of words could be less compromising.
That same evening, on their cold way back from the Café de l’Univers, Bigourdin said, using as he had done since the night of the intimate conversation the “tu” of familiarity:
“Now that Félise has returned, and all goes on wheels and business is slack, don’t you think it is a good opportunity for you to go to Paris for your holiday and your consultations?”
“I will go the day after to-morrow,” replied Martin.
“Have you told Félise of your proposed journey?”
“Not yet,” said Martin.
“C’est bien. When you tell her, say it is for the sake of a change, your health, your little affairs, what you will. It is better that she should not know of our scheme until it is all arranged.”
“I think that would be wiser,” said Martin.
“In the event of your accepting my proposition,” said Bigourdin, after a pause, “have you ever thought of the possibility of becoming a naturalised Frenchman? Like that, perhaps, business might roll more smoothly. We have already spoken, you and I, of your becoming a good Périgordin.”
Martin, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched so as to obtain ear-shelter beneath the upturned collar of his great coat, was silent for a few moments. Then—
“Nationality is a strange thing,” said he. “The more I live in France, the more proud I am of being an Englishman.”
Bigourdin sprang a pace apart, wounded to the quick. “Mais non par exemple! You of all men,” and it was the “vous” of formality, “ought not to say that.”
“Mais que tu es bête! You misunderstand me. You don’t let me proceed,” cried Martin, halting before him in the semi-darkness of the quay. “In France I have learned the meaning of the word patriotism. I have been surrounded here with the love of country, and I have reflected. This impulse is so strong in all French hearts, ought it not to be as strong in the heart of an Englishman? France has taught me the finest of lessons. I am as loyal a Frenchman as any of our friends at the Café de l’Univers, but—” adapting a vague reminiscence of the lyric to Lucasta—“I should not love France so much, if I did not love England more.”
“Mon brave ami!” cried Bigourdin, holding out both hands, in a Frenchman’s instinctive response to a noble sentiment adequately expressed, “Pardon me. Let us say no more about it. The true Englishman who loves France is a better friend to us than the Englishman who has lost his love for England.”
Martin went to bed in a somewhat tortured frame of mind. He was very simple, very honest, very conscientious. It was true that the flame of French patriotism had kindled the fire of English patriotism within him. It was true that he had learned to love this sober, intense, kindly land of France. It was true that here was a generous bosom of France willing to enfold him, an alien, like one of her own sons. But it was equally true that in his ears rang a clarion call sounded not by mother England, not by foster-mother France, but by une petite sorcière Américaine, a fair witch neither of England nor of France, but from beyond the estranging seas. And the day after to-morrow he was journeying to Paris to take the advice of Fortinbras, Marchand de Bonheur. What would the dealer in happiness decide? To wait until some turn of Fortune’s wheel should change his career and set him free to wander forth across the world, or to invest his all in an inglorious though comfortable future? Either way there would be heart-racking.
But Bigourdin, as he secured the H?tel des Grottes with locks and bolts, whistled “Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre,” a sign of his being pleased with existence. He had no doubt of Fortinbras’s decision. Fortinbras had practically given it in a letter he had received that afternoon. For he had told Fortinbras his proposal, which was based on the certainty of a marriage between Félise and Martin, as soon as the latter should find himself in a position that would warrant a declaration up to now impossible to a man of delicate honour. “They think I am an old mole,” he had written, “but for certain things I have the eyes of a hawk. Why did Félise suddenly refuse Lucien Viriot? Why has Martin during her last absence been in a state of depression lamentable to behold? And now that Félise has returned, changed from a young girl into that thing of mystery, a woman, why are their relations once so fraternal marked by an exquisite politeness? And why must Martin travel painful hours in a train in order to consult the father of Félise? Tell me all that! When it comes to real diplomacy, mon vieux Daniel, trust the solid head of Gaspard Bigourdin.”
Which excerpt affords a glimpse into the workings of a subtle yet ingenuous mind. He hummed “Malbrouck s’en var-t-en guerre” as he went upstairs. The little American witch never crossed his thoughts, nor did a possible application of the line “Ne sais quand reviendra.”
The High Gods hold this world in an uncertain balance; and, whenever they decree to turn things topsy-turvy, they have only to flick it the myriadth part of a millimetre. The very next day they gave it such a flick, and it was Bigourdin and not Martin who went to Paris.
“Ma petite Félise,” said Bigourdin the next day, “I have received this morning from Paris a telegram despatched last night summoning me thither on urgent business. I may be away three or four days, during which I have arranged for the excellent Madame Chauvet who devoted such maternal care to you on the journey to Chartres to stay here pour les convenances.”
The subtle diplomatist smiled; so that when she questioned him as to the nature of this urgent business and he replied that it was a worrying matter of lawyers and stockbrokers, she accepted the explanation. But to Martin—
“Mon pauvre ami,” said he, with woe-begone face, “it is the mother of Félise. She is dying. A syncope. We must not let Félise know or she would insist on accompanying me, which would be impossible.”
Martin took a detached view of the situation.
“Why?” he asked. “She is a woman now and able to accept her share in the tragedy of life with courage and with reason. Why not let her go and learn the truth?”
Bigourdin waved a gesture of despair. “I detest like you this deception. Lying is as foreign to my character as to yours. But que veux-tu? In the tragedy of my brother-in-law there is something at once infinitely piteous and sublime. In a matter like this the commands of a father are sacred. Ah, my poor Cécile!” said he, passing a great hand swiftly across his eyes. “Twenty years ago, what a pretty girl she was! Of a character somewhat difficult and bizarre. But I loved her more than my sister Clothilde, who had all the virtues of the petite rosaire.” He fetched a deep sigh. “One is bound to believe in the eternal wisdom of the All-Powerful. There is nothing between that and the lunatic caprice of an almighty mad goat. That is why I hold to Christianity and embark on this terrible journey with fortitude and resignation.”
He held out his packet of Bastos to Martin. They lit cigarettes. To give this confidential information he had drawn Martin into the murky little bureau whose window looked upon the sad grey vestibule.
“I am sorry,” he said, “that your holiday has to be postponed. But it will only be for a few days. In the meantime I leave Félise in the loyal care of yourself and the good Madame Chauvet.”
Bigourdin went to Paris and deposited his valise at a little hotel in a little street off the Boulevard Sébastopol, where generations of Bigourdins had stayed, perhaps even the famous Brigadier General himself; where the proposed entertainment of an Englishman would have caused the host as much consternation as that o............