The Belovéd Vagabond by William J Locke (lightweight ebook reader .TXT) 📕

I seated myself on the fender-seat close by her chair, and for some minutes watched the clever needle work its golden way through the white silk. No one has ever had such dainty fingers and delicate wrists.

"You mustn't think, because I have spoken about Mr. de Nérac, that I am discontented. I wouldn't have him a bit altered integrally, for there is no one like him living. And I'm utterly happy in the fulfilment of the great romance of my life. Isn't it wonderful, Asticot? Have you ever heard the like outside a story book? To meet again after thirteen years and to find the old--the old----"

"Love," I whispered, as I saw that she suddenly blushed at the word.

"As strong and true as ever. It is the inner things that matter, Asticot. The outside ones are nothing. Dreadful things have happened to each of us during those years, but they haven't clouded the serenity of our souls."

"Ah, Madame," said I, with a smile--it strikes me now that I was slightly impertinent--"I am sure my master said that."

"Yes," she admitted, raising wide innocent eyes. "How did you guess?"

"You yourself once detected echoes in me!"

We both laughed.

"That is what brought us together, Asticot. You seemed to regard him as a god rather than as a man--and I loved you for it."

She put out her left hand. I touched it with my lips.

"That's a charming French way we haven't got in England. And--you did it very nicely, Asticot."

I almost scowled at the servant who entered with the announcement that tea was waiting in the drawing-room.

* * * * *

I think of all human utterances I have heard fall from the lips of those I love and honour, that formula of Paragot's echoed by Joanna was the most pathetically vain. And they believed it. Indeed it was the vital article of their faith. On its truth the whole fabric of their love depended.

It counted for nothing in Joanna's romantic eyes that the brilliant eager youth, "rich in the glory of his rising-sun," who had won her heart long ago--(she shewed me his photograph: alas poor Paragot!)--was now the tongue-tied spectre, the tale of whose ungentle past was scarred upon his face: who stalked grotesquely comfortless in his ill-fitting clothes: who with the art of dress had lost in the boozing-kens of Europe the graces of social intercourse. It counted for nothing that he was middle-aged, deserted forever by the elusive wanton, inspiration, condemned (she knew it in her heart) to artistic barrenness in perpetuity. It counted for nothing that her gods awakened his contempt, and his gods her fear. It counted for nothing that they had scarcely a single taste or thought in common--half-educated, half-bred boy that I was, I vow I entered a sweeter chamber of intimacy in my dear lady's heart than was open to Paragot.

You see, in spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, beloved by a man of his type. Month had followed month and year had followed year, and she had not developed. His family, nationalist and devout, of the old school, regarded him, rightly, as a renegade from their traditions, and regarded Joanna, wrongly, as the English heretic who had seduced him from the paths of orthodoxy. Their relations with Joanna were of the most frigid. On the other hand, the society of Hebraic finance in which the Comte de Verneuil found profit and entertainment was repugnant to the delicately nurtured Englishwoman. She led a lonely existence. "I have so few friends in Paris," were almost her first words to me on the day of our meeting outside the Hôtel Bristol. She went through the world, her lips set in a smile, and her dear eyes frozen, and her heart yearning for the sheltered English life with its rules for guidance and its barriers of convention, its pleasant little routine of duties, and its gentle communion of unemotional temperaments. Her eleven years married life had been merely a suspension of existence. Her few excursions into the unusual had been the scared adventures of a child. Her romance was the romance of a child. Her gracious simplicity, and her caressing adorableness which made my boy's love for her a passionate worship which has lasted to this day, when we both are old and only meet to shake heads together in palsied sympathy, were the essential charms of a child. How should she understand the Paragot that I knew? His soul still shone the stainless radiance that had dazzled her young eyes. That was all that mattered. It was easy to convert the outer man to convention. It was the simplest thing in the world to make the chartered libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to bid him throw off his undertaker's garb and gloom and to adopt his free theories of life and conduct. At her mother's knee she had learned the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path. There was not another one to walk.

Paragot accepted meekly my report of Joanna's tabu of the Black Boar.

"Whatever Madame de Verneuil says is right. I was forgetting that the refrain of the ballade of the immortal Villon 'Tout aux tavernes et aux filles' which was that of my life for so many years is so no longer, I wonder what the devil the refrain is now? Ha!" he exclaimed clapping his hand on my shoulder in his old violent way, "I have it! also Villon. Guess. Didn't I teach you all the ballades by rote as we wandered through Savoy?"

"Yes, Master," said I; but I could only think of the one that came into my Byronic little head on the occasion of my first meeting with Joanna, "Bien heureux qui rien n'y a," which in the present circumstances was clearly not applicable. The romantic lover does not base his conduct on the formula that blessed is he who has nothing to do with women.

"What is it, Master?" I asked.

"'En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir.'"

I did not understand. "In which faith do you wish to live and die?" I asked.

He made a gesture of disappointment. He too was a child in many respects.

"You must go back to Paris to sharpen your wits, my son. I thought I had trained you to catch allusion, one of the most delicate and satisfying arts of life. Did I not preface my remarks by saying that Madame de Verneuil was infallible? By which I mean that she is the mouthpiece of all the sweeter kinds of angels. That is the faith, my little Asticot," and he repeated to himself the rascal poet's refrain to his most perfect poem: "En ceste foy je veuil vivre et mourir."

"But that," said I, wishing to prove that I had not forgotten my scholarship, "is a prayer to Our Lady made by Villon at the request of his mother."

"You are as hopeless as mine host of the Black Boar," said my master, and being wound up to talk--it was during the after-dinner interval before joining the ladies--he launched into a half hour's disquisition on the philosophic value of allusiveness, addressing me as if I had been his audience at the Lotus Club or a choice band of disciples at the Café Delphine.

In the drawing-room I played my piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while Paragot sat with Joanna in a far corner. I could not help noticing how little they spoke. Paragot's torrent of words had dried up, and the talk seemed to flow in unsatisfying driblets. Why did he not entertain her with his newly adopted romantical motto from Villon? Why did he not express, in terms of which he was such a master, his fantastic adoration? Why even did he not continue his disquisition on the philosophic value of allusiveness? Anything, thought I, as I declared a quinzième and fourteen kings, rather than this staccato exchange of commonplaces which I was sure neither Joanna nor himself in the least enjoyed. In fact, my dear Joanna yawned.

Presently Major Walters was announced. He had come, he explained apologetically, on trustee business and required Joanna's signature to an important document. She flew to him with a pretty air of delight, drew him by the arm to an escritoire in a corner of the room, and laughed girlishly as she inked her fingers and confessed her powerlessness to comprehend the deed she was signing. Paragot, after a very cold exchange of greetings with Major Walters, sat down by our card-table, and watched the game with the funereal expression he always wore when he desired to exhibit his entire correctness of demeanour. To Mrs. Rushworth's placid remarks during the deals he made the politest of monosyllabic replies. Meanwhile his dingy white tie, which he never could arrange properly (he dressed for dinner each night without a murmur) had worked up beyond his collar, and encircling his lean neck like a pussy-cat's ribbon, gave him a peculiarly unheroic appearance.

The signing over, Joanna kept Major Walters by the escritoire and chatted in a lively manner. As far as I could hear--and I am afraid my attention was sadly abstracted from my game--they talked of the same unintelligible things as the Tuesday afternoon guests, personalities, local doings and what not. She ran to fetch the stole, over which Paragot had not glowed with rapturous enthusiasm; apparently Major Walters said just the thing concerning it her heart craved to hear; her silvery voice rippled with pleasure. A while later he must have returned to some business matter which he declared settled, for she put her hand on his sleeve in her impulsive caressing way and her eyes beamed gratitude.

"I don't know what I should do without you, Dennis. You bear all my responsibilities on your strong shoulders. How can I thank you?"

He bent down and said something in a low voice, at which she blushed and laughed reprovingly. His remark did not offend her in the least. She was enjoying herself. He drew himself up with a smile. It was then that I noted particularly how well bred and clean-limbed he was; how easily his clothes fitted. It seemed as impossible for Major Walters' tie to work up round his neck as for his toes to protrude through his boots. He gave one the impression of having followed cleanliness of thought and person all his life. I began to have a sneaking admiration for the man. I beheld in its openness that which I had often seen pierce through Paragot's travesty of mountebankery or rags, but which singularly enough seemed hidden beneath his conventional garb--the inborn and incommunicable quality of the high-bred gentleman. I set to dreaming of it and scheming out a portrait in which that essential quality could be expressed; whereby I played the fool with my hand and incurred the mild rebuke of my adversary, as she repiqued and capoted me and triumphantly declared the