"Broken Music"

_By Phyllis Bottome, Author of “The Imperfect Gift,” “Crooked Answers,” “The Common Chord,” etc._

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS, CAMBRIDGE 1914

_Printed in Great Britain_

_Dedication_

“_To the Memory of the Siegfried Idyll_”

Preface By The Author.

The material for the French life in this book I owe entirely to a friend, without whose knowledge and assistance it would not have been written, but whose name I am not at liberty to disclose.

The faults of the work are my own, but the merit, if there is any merit, is his; if there is not, the misfortune is his as well as the public’s, since an abler hand should have made something of the material he placed at my disposal.

The actual characters are not, as children say of fairy tales, “true”; but many of them belong to that system of parallel cases which runs side by side with the truth.

“Broken Music”

Chapter I

“SO she’s sent for you too, has she?” said the doctor. Of course he knew that Miss Prenderghast must have sent for Monsieur le Curé as she had sent for the doctor himself, for neither of them would have gone to the Castle uninvited. They would have cheerfully borne with many things for the sake of Jean D’Ucelles, but they would not have gone uninvited to see his aunt, especially not for _déjeuner_.

The Curé hesitated; if he could have made a mystery out of his invitation he would have done so; he loved mysteries quite as much as the doctor loved probing them, but he was not quite such an adept at inventing them--he preferred those which had been already invented for him.

“She intimated that she desired to see me,” he cautiously replied. “I could have refused, but she is, as we all know, alas! a Protestant, and as such her soul is in hourly peril. I said to myself: ‘Perhaps this is an awakening to the truth.’ It’s true I should have preferred to go up to the Castle after _déjeuner_. It is a strange thing--I have often remarked it--that Protestants enjoy neither the fruits of the spirit nor the fruits of the earth. It was not so always at the Château. I can remember well enough in the late Baron’s time what a table she kept--the poor young English wife--even in his absence. She was not born a Catholic, it is true; but she became one. She spared no expense, and she had a great respect for the clergy. She was always telling me to take care of myself. She had a cook trained in Paris.”

“Perhaps she was able to train her cook,” said the doctor. “The more pity she couldn’t train her husband--the poor Baron, he was always a wild one. I had hoped the marriage would steady him, but it never did! How well I remember his saying to me: ‘You believe in nature, then, Monsieur; so do I. She has made the plants to keep still, but men she has made to move about--do not trouble yourself, then, that I fulfil my destiny!’ He was going to Paris, of course; he always was. I remember it was before Monsieur Jean’s birth. I had ventured to implore him to remain. I knew it was a liberty, but what would you? The Baronne was in a very delicate condition. I feared that she had anxieties, there was much talk about the Baron’s long absences--always without her, you understand, but not always, I fear, without others--and I had much sympathy with the poor lady, alone, and in a strange land. She was very young, too, and neurotic; she wanted to die.” The doctor blew his nose.

“That was a sin,” said the Curé severely. “I can hardly believe that of Madame; she never mentioned the fact to me. I think you must be exaggerating.”

“Bah!” snapped Dr. Bonnet. “I am not a priest. I have some experience of women; she was in love with her husband. English women are droll; it is a great mistake, I find, this love of the husband--it leads nowhere. However, it is not so easy to die when one is twenty-five and has a man of science against one, and then when Monsieur Jean was born it was all another story! The Baron sent a telegram in the best of taste, and came down later with the Comte and Comtesse D’Ucelles to the christening.”

The Curé nodded.

“It was a magnificent christening,” he said. “I myself officiated. There was talk of the Bishop of the Diocese, but Madame was firm; she said I should be the one to make her son a Christian, as I had made his mother Catholic. Yes, yes, doubtless she is with the Blessed Saints--the little English lady--and I hope the Baron too, though of that we cannot be quite so sure.”

Monsieur le Curé made the sign of the cross and looked very grave. There was every reason why he should, for the Baron D’Ucelles had shot himself through the head five years ago--two years after his wife’s death. It was natural that he should regret her. She had spent six months in giving him what he wanted, and thirteen years in not giving him what he didn’t want. She would have made an ideal wife for any man. Still it was not altogether on her account that he had followed her to the grave. The late Baron had been a little extravagant both with his money and with his life, and when he had at length discovered that he would shortly become a helpless paralytic on a very small income, he had decided to take the only means left him to avoid these issues. He had left behind him only Ucelles itself and two small farms, which was all that could be saved for his son out of his once handsome inheritance. His family said that this was what came of having married an English woman without a _dot_.

“There is one thing,” said the Curé, after a pause, “that I have never quite understood, and this is why Monsieur Jean should have been brought up by this English relation?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“I too have wondered,” he said. “But what will you? The Comte, his guardian, married a rich wife of the _bourgeoisie_, and they have a large house in Paris and a big income; they have no children of their own. What more likely, it would seem, than that they should adopt Monsieur Jean? In this world, so I take it, what is likely does not happen. Instead, one fine day this English aunt arrives, who knows nothing of our tongue or of our ways, and nothing--it would seem--of children, it is to her, then, that they entrust our little Baron. For myself, I am a philosopher, I have no theories--all I believe is that in the long run nature has her way, and her way is, perhaps, the best; at any rate it is the only one I know.”

“I have always endeavoured to guard him against her errors,” said the Curé; and indeed he had done his best. He had baptized Jean, he had taught him his catechism, and prepared him for confirmation and for his first communion; he had also taught him a little Latin, a great deal of theology, and what he thought was literature. He really believed that Jean thought so too, but then he had watched Jean so carefully and incessantly for twenty years that he knew nothing about him at all. The doctor, who had not seen nearly so much of Jean, understood him a great deal better. He had kept a fresher eye for change.

Both men were silent after this. Little St. Jouin lay in the broiling sun behind them, a small, huddled town in the ancient stubble-fields of the plain. The broad white road, through which life flashed by in swift, infrequent modern traffic, divided it from a fashionable watering-place on the one side and from a commercial seaport on the other. But nobody ever stopped at St. Jouin, there was no reason why they should; it had nothing rare enough about it to ensure its ruin and there was no one to realize that in being so near modernity it had altogether escaped it. Certainly the two figures that plodded along the broad white road had no such fancies; they had no fancies at all. They had lived in St. Jouin nearly all their lives. Monsieur le Curé in particular, with his high, narrow head and irritable, unseeing eyes (the kind of eyes that are always glancing about, driven by a suspicion that there is something wrong to be observed, and overlooking everything else), was not likely to approve of fancies. Why should he? his religion was sufficient for him. He was the most important person in St. Jouin; there was no unbelief there (in spite of the newspapers) and very little faith. Everybody went to church, so that their lives were always under the Curé’s eyes; only their souls escaped him.

The doctor had his ideas, of course, but he was terribly scientific; he had spent a year in Paris thirty years ago, and he took in a Radical newspaper. He thought he was a red-hot Socialist and a cynic, but he was really a very kind-hearted man and treated all his poorest patients free of charge, only he was a little impatient about what he did not understand. He was quite sure that what did not appeal to him personally was either old-fashioned or new-fangled, and when he talked about progress, he meant his own ideas.

The great bell at the Château rang out the hour of noon; it seemed to shake the hot air round them and to keep the silence listening to its deep reverberations. The Curé stopped, crossed himself, and repeated his _Ave_ with bowed head. The doctor, who was a stout man, was glad of the pause, but lest his friend should suppose that he was putting it to a religious purpose, he whistled--at least he tried to; but he was too much out of breath to make a success of it.

Through the opening in the trees beyond them Ucelles itself appeared. It was a long, low house, with a steep, grey roof, in which tiny round windows were thickly set. At a distance it still looked, what it had once been, the chief mansion in the district--the Château of Ucelles. The garden had been allowed to run to seed, but the long avenue of limes approaching the house made stout sentinels for its dignity.

In a small wood of fir and plane trees, close to the house, stood the family chapel; the sun shone through the leaves above it, and the priest and the doctor caught a glimpse through the open _grille_ of a tiny altar covered with fresh flowers. In front of the house stretched an uncultivated meadow, but in the centre a square was trimmed with neat little box hedges, and in the middle of the square was a small pond covered deep with water-lilies. Around it late roses and early chrysanthemums mingled their blooms together.

“He has always kept his mother’s garden gay,” said the Curé approvingly; “and the flowers in the chapel there are fresh. I prefer myself the artificial ones, but we must be indulgent to youth; the Church has always recognized that.”

The doctor frowned. The Curé had never revealed to him what his ambition for Jean was, but the doctor had long ago guessed it. You cannot know a man for thirty years and be entirely ignorant of his favourite idea, especially when he has not got more than one. The Curé wished Jean to become a priest, and the doctor hated the idea with all his heart. He was a Socialist, you must remember, a Radical and a cynic, so of course he wanted Jean to become a grand seigneur--a man of the world, and at the same time noted for his domestic happiness, with a large family of sons.

As for Jean himself, he wanted to become a musician, but nobody minded very much what Jean wanted.

“It has occurred to me,” said the Curé, after he had finished saying his _Ave_, “that we have been sent for--of course, you must understand that I have no authority for my idea; I am merely expressing what has passed through my mind--that we may be asked to consult with Mademoiselle Prenderghast on the subject of Monsieur Jean’s future.” The Curé coughed.

“There’s his uncle,” growled the doctor. “He ought to settle the question.”

“I think the boy’s taste should be considered,” suggested the Curé. He thought that he had formed Jean’s taste, and that he might safely leave it to settle matters his way.

“I wish he could have done his military service,” said the doctor. “If I had been the fool at the Maire de Valbranche I would have passed him; he is delicate, but it’s only raw, untrained nerves and morbid religious fancies. The old adhesion in the left lung they thought themselves so clever in spotting, why, it’s nothing--nothing at all, I tell you; just the result of that English spinster’s notion of how to treat a delicate child with measles. But there! modern science only goes by what’s at the end of a stethoscope, or a microscope, or a misanthrope,” said the doctor. He was not quite sure what a misanthrope was; however, it sounded all right, and, after all, the Curé wouldn’t know any better. “It doesn’t allow for life forces.”

“I have often told you that,” said the Curé complacently; “only I expressed it better. Science has tried to lead faith when she should have knelt before her.”

“Rubbish!” said the doctor.

By this time they had reached the house. Ucelles did not look quite so grand on a near approach. The long French windows opening on the _terrasse_ had a cold and vacant air, most of the house was closed, so that it appeared half blind and wholly dumb; it needed all the sunshine of summer to help the observer to bear the freezing sense of departed life. When the doctor rang the bell it echoed hauntingly through the empty corridors, and it was a long while before Miss Prenderghast’s reliable English maid answered it. She did at last, and received the men’s greetings with all the sourness of an exiled mind. If Miss Prenderghast was not at home in France, Elizabeth was still less likely to be so. Miss Prenderghast regarded it with suspicion, but Elizabeth with open-eyed hostility. Everything was different from what Elizabeth had been accustomed to, and Elizabeth knew that everything which was different was wrong. But all human consistency breaks down somewhere; Elizabeth’s broke down over Jean. When she first saw him he was a little French boy, very French indeed, and a Catholic; and he was not the less French now nor less Catholic at twenty; but Elizabeth was human and she loved him. That was why she stayed in a heathen country.

“If you will please to come this way, sir,” she said, addressing the doctor--she pretended not to see the Curé, she was Protestant to the core; then she led them along the polished parquet corridor, till at last they reached the smallest of a suite of reception-rooms. It was full of sunshine and golden dust that glistened in the sunbeams between the ceiling and the floor, but there was very little else in the room except Miss Prenderghast; she was knitting.

“You can serve lunch, Elizabeth,” she said, before she greeted her visitors.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Elizabeth, but she did not intend to serve lunch until Jean came; her idea of veracity was as strictly relative as if she had been a Jesuit.

Miss Prenderghast’s dress was very high about the neck and rather short about the ankles. Her nose was her most prominent feature, and she looked as if she felt cold but would have thought it extremely foolish to take any precautions against it.

It is easy to distinguish in the faces of the middle-aged those from whom life has receded from those, in whose existence, it has never played a formidable part. It was to this latter category that Miss Prenderghast belonged. From her earliest years she had been taught to repress all her emotions, and she had repressed them so thoroughly that at times it seemed even to herself as if she no longer had any to suppress. She had put her heart into her sense of duty, a performance which had resulted in developing her conscience at the expense of all her natural instincts. Nobody likes having to deal with a robust conscience and anæmic emotions, the Latin races least of all. The two men, who bowed low, and obediently took the two small cane chairs provided for them, never considered Miss Prenderghast in the light of a human being. She appeared to them as a natural phenomenon of a disagreeable nature, such as a land-slide or a series of bad harvests.

“English ladies can have no temptations,” thought the Curé. “That is why they are Protestants.”

“We shall have trouble with Jean sooner or later,” the doctor said to himself; “he has his father’s blood in him, and he has been brought up by a stone.”

“It was very kind of you both to come,” said Miss Prenderghast coldly; “you must have found the walk from St. Jouin long and dusty.”

“On the contrary,” said the doctor politely, “where the destination is agreeable the path is scattered with flowers.”

“The wild flowers in this part of the country are remarkably scarce,” observed Miss Prenderghast. “I have often regretted it.”

A silence followed. The Curé drew out his handkerchief and spilt some snuff on the floor. The doctor sneezed and Miss Prenderghast frowned. She disliked French habits.

“I have received a letter from the Comte D’Ucelles,” she observed finally; “he is, as you may remember, Jean’s nearest relation upon the French side--in fact, his only near French relation.”

“_Parfaitement_,” replied the doctor, “he is a gallant man and has had a certain success in Paris. There is a remarkable resemblance between him and the late Baron.”

“Ah!” said Miss Prenderghast thoughtfully, “I trust it is only superficial. Still it cannot be helped; he is Jean’s uncle, and he has at last chosen to intimate some interest in the boy’s future.”

“Very natural, very natural indeed,” exclaimed the Curé. “Nothing could be more _convenable_, madame, the true spirit of a good Catholic and of an uncle!”

“It may be as you say,” replied Miss Prenderghast, with knitted brows. “In any case, he has waited long enough before showing either of them. However, it is not easy for me to make up my mind what it is best to do.”

“And Jean, what is his opinion?” asked the doctor.

“I have not consulted him upon the question,” said Miss Prenderghast. “It is possible I should have done so, in which case I should hardly have troubled you for your advice; but yesterday a very, very painful incident occurred, which has greatly shaken my intention.”

Both the doctor and the priest started; they did not look at each other, though they were thinking the same thought.

“He has fallen from grace,” the priest said to himself.

“He has become a man,” thought the doctor.

“He has written an opera,” said Miss Prenderghast impressively. Neither of the men could help looking a little disappointed.

“You may well be surprised,” said Miss Prenderghast with satisfaction. “I was myself perfectly unprepared for this blow. I knew he was musical and that--as I thought most unnecessarily, Monsieur le Curé--you had encouraged it by allowing him to play the organ in your church.” The Curé collapsed, the doctor looked radiant. “And you, doctor,” said Miss Prenderghast, “have not improved matters by insisting upon him attending the meetings of a disreputable orchestral society! This is the result.”

“Well, well,” said the doctor bravely, “his mother was a neurotic!”

“There are certain professions,” said the Curé mildly, “in which a knowledge of music is not altogether a misfortune. I have myself studied harmony for a fortnight during my training at the Seminary. I have never regretted it.”

“No, but your congregation has,” snapped the doctor.

“What do you suggest?” asked Miss Prenderghast.

The doctor looked at the Curé. He really had no idea in his head at all, but the Curé looked so full of his own importance and so determined on making Jean a priest that the doctor found himself saying:

“Paris!” He only meant it as a joke.

“Paris?” said Miss Prenderghast thoughtfully.

“Paris!” echoed the Curé in horror.

“Paris?” said a clear boy’s voice just behind them.

It was Jean himself, fresh from a morning in the woods, with a retriever puppy gamboling at his heels. It was youth, and hope, and ardour, and all incredible, dauntless things! It was the spirit of growing life and spring, and it was followed by Elizabeth, who promptly announced _déjeuner_, half an hour after the usual time.

“We will finish this discussion later on,” said Miss Prenderghast.

Jean greeted his two old friends cordially.

“But what is all this about Paris, Aunt Anne?” he asked, smiling a little as he held back the _portière_ for her to pass out. “Have you and Monsieur le Curé and the doctor just discovered it?”

“You should not come into rooms suddenly,” said Miss Prenderghast coldly. “Then you would not overhear parts of other people’s conversations which were not meant for your ears.”

Jean frowned and apologized. Miss Prenderghast resented the frown, and ignored the apology.

It is so seldom that the very observant observe the right things. It was a dull lunch party; the doctor was a little frightened at Miss Prenderghast’s reception of his suggestion; the Curé was thinking how bad the lunch was, and how he could influence Jean to accept his point of view. Miss Prenderghast was greatly annoyed with Elizabeth. And to Jean the word “Paris” was like a lighted torch to a bundle of dry hay. Suddenly all his ideas had taken fire--but like all the fires of youth it burned silently, and none of his elders had the least idea that they were attending at a conflagration.

Chapter II

AFTER lunch Jean went to Elizabeth. She was washing up the dishes, or she preferred to let Jean think she was; as a matter of fact, she had been having what is known in servants’ quarters as a “snack,” but like all healthy, properly brought up English servants, she liked her employers to fancy that she lived upon air alone. Jean sat on the kitchen table and swung his legs to and fro in a confidential manner. He had an implicit masculine confidence in Elizabeth’s sympathy--Elizabeth was perhaps only a sour old maid, but she would know that he was there to have his grievance produced, and she would in time produce it for him. So he took a cigarette and waited.

“Oh, Master Jean, if Miss Anne should see you now!” said the scandalized Elizabeth. Jean was forbidden to smoke, but he knew Elizabeth admired it. His melancholy deep brown eyes had a sudden charming twinkle in them; he had a curious face, irregular as to its features, but very much alive; it reminded the observer of a young wild thing in the woods absorbed in the deep business of life.

“Though you do look nearly a man now,” went on Elizabeth, “and are grown so lately, Master Jean, and if I may say so, a thought more English about the shoulders.”

“I am a man,” said Jean. “I’m twenty, Elizabeth, and they’ve turned me out of their consultation as if I were a schoolboy, and I’m positive it’s about me.”

“There, there, Master Jean!” said Elizabeth soothingly. “You know you can get it all out of the doctor afterwards; ’e’s as easy to get into as a tin of apricots--’im and ’is professional secrets!”

Elizabeth snorted.

“I don’t like getting things out of people when they’re the things they ought to tell me any way,” said Jean. “When I went in this morning, Elizabeth, they were all saying ‘Paris’ as if they’d heard of it for the first time.”

Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully.

“There was a letter from there this very morning,” she said, “with a seal on the back; perhaps it’s a fortune, Master Jean, come from your rich uncle in Paris.”

“More likely a misfortune, I’m afraid,” said Jean gloomily. “Well, Elizabeth, I think I’m going off to the woods again. Put something cold out for me to-night; I shan’t be back till late.”

Elizabeth looked anxious, but she knew better than to expostulate with her idol. She was allowed to worship only on the distinct understanding that she never interfered. A worshipper that tries to manage his god is confusing the situation. From his tenth birthday on, Jean had ruled Elizabeth with a rod of iron. It was a small kingdom, perhaps, for the little lonely boy, it only contained his dog and Elizabeth, but he ruled it well, and there had never been a hint of rebellion. Elizabeth knew that Miss Prenderghast had noticed these increasing despotic absences of Jean’s. He went away almost daily now for hours at a time, and gave no account whatever of his proceedings. Miss Prenderghast shook her head over them; she had a shocked suspicion, not unlike the priest and the doctor, that he might be meeting some woman; but she would have been even more shocked if she had known he was meeting his own soul. A woman would not have prevented Jean from becoming a bank clerk, but no one knows what a man’s soul may prevent him from becoming. It has led him before now to become an artist, and it has even taught him (and this is the hardest thing perhaps for thoroughly good, religious people to understand) to develop into a saint.

But Jean wasn’t going to become a saint, he was only born a musician, and he had inherited on both sides of his nature a certain recklessness, only thinly covered by a reticence which was not natural to him, the inevitable result of a sensitive nature that has not found in its early years any direct response.

His mother had had a romantic zest for all the adventures of the spirit, even her broken heart had not checked her dauntless craving for the impossible; she had ceased to look for it in her husband, but she had never found that the world was small. The Baron on his side had a lucid, unwavering instinct for pleasure, it was his intention to make everything serve his senses. This instinct had descended upon Jean in the shape of a fierce desire, of which he was hardly conscious, to tear something living and responsive from the grip of his future. As he strode off once more upon his innocent adventures his mind was fiercely and ardently awake and busy. “What had he done with his life?” he asked himself, in frenzied self-reproach. Here he was at twenty--no older, no more experienced, no more active than many a boy of fourteen. He did not take his attempted opera nearly as seriously as Miss Prenderghast had taken it; he was possessed by melody, he always had been; ever since he could remember he seemed to have been listening to a tune, but he hardly knew that he was peculiar in this, and he knew enough of the music to which great musicians had listened not to think too much of his own ambitious flutterings. “I have done nothing,” he said to himself bitterly. “I am nothing--I have no powers!” And he flung himself face downwards on the dry, dead leaves of the late summer in the terrible abandonment of youth. To have never left Ucelles in his life, to have been brought up a good Catholic, to have no friends but a sour-faced English cook and a few inarticulate peasants (it is sad to say that Jean forgot the Curé and the doctor), wasn’t that a certain proof of his failure in life? He thought of Maurice Golaud, that magnificent young man he had met at the Choral Society. Maurice had all the world before him--money, a family of admiring sisters, and that unacquirable self-confidence which the artist, except in rare moments of creation, never knows! Jean had tried to play to Maurice once, but he had broken down in the middle; it was the only thing he could do--play--and it had come over him suddenly that Maurice did not think much of playing. He thought a great deal more of how to curl your moustache and look at a woman, and for the moment Jean was not sure that Maurice was not right.

Jean buried his face in the long dried grass, and drank in the haunting, fresh scent of the dead leaves; the air was full of a faint, warm haze that crept across the distant fields and hung above the trees. The leaves that were still upon them were very dry with the heat and rattled a little as the soft breeze shook them together. The birds spoke in sharp, disconnected twitters; all the sounds and all the life of the earth seemed interrupted now, and yet urgent. The swallows flung themselves in long, unsettled curves about the sky; everything was changing, moving, departing. Jean alone must stay here always to the bitter sound of his own wasted life! He watched himself grow tamely, narrowly old, through the coming years; there would be nothing in him to challenge life. Maurice and his fellow-officers and their fun would go out once more into the merry world, Jean would remain. In time he would cease attending the Lycée, he would come home and farm Ucelles. In the evenings he would play a little if he was not too tired, but never his own music any more! Why should he shame the divine flickering gift within him, which he could never develop, nor yet throw away? He wanted to be a musician--he wanted only that--and he buried his face in the friendly dry leaves that scratched his cheeks, and wept.

“I shall never be able to do anything,” sobbed Jean. “I shall never be able to go anywhere, and I shall never meet anyone to love.”

Miss Prenderghast waited half an hour for dinner. It was an unfortunate half hour; in it all the sacrifices she had made for Jean increased with the inroad he was making upon punctuality.

For the last ten years Miss Prenderghast had been practising the stoic virtues, and though these are probably the hardest of all the virtues to practise, they rarely, if ever, make the possessor lovable. In this one half hour Miss Prenderghast saw their worthlessness, but she could not admit that she was to blame; surely the guardians of youth only owed to their special charges the one great duty of correction, to be met by youth in its turn with implicit obedience? And Miss Prenderghast knew that she had corrected Jean and that he had usually obeyed her. Between them these two admirable virtues had destroyed any human relationship. “He is lacking in consideration,” said Miss Prenderghast to herself, and she wiped her glasses. She had given Jean a gold watch for his birthday present, and he had not kissed her. She had told him at the time that she hoped it would make him more punctual.

Elizabeth brought in the soup at nine.

“Master Jean is very late,” said Miss Prenderghast; “put something cold on the sideboard, Elizabeth, and go to bed. I will sit up for him.”

There was such a tone of finality in Miss Prenderghast’s voice that Elizabeth almost obeyed her. She put some soup on the kitchen fire and began to do her hair in curl-papers on the stairs.

Jean came in a few minutes afterwards. He apologized perfunctorily for the lateness of the hour, and his aunt remarked that careless people always gave trouble. Jean accepted the thrust in silence; he did not think it fair to receive an apology with further correction; it had the result also of drying up any possible springs of remorse.

“He is becoming hardened,” thought his aunt miserably; then she advised him not to take butter with meat; she said it was an extravagant habit and un-English. Jean took more butter.

Miss Prenderghast sighed and shook her head.

“Well, Jean,” she said at last, “I daresay you wonder why I have been sitting up here for you, just as I have been wondering what has made you so late. Have you no explanation you can offer me?”

“No, _ma Tante_,” said Jean, without lifting his eyes from his plate. He looked very guilty.

“I would have forgiven him anything if he were not so secretive,” thought his aunt; aloud she said, “I am afraid you have been idling--or worse! You are twenty, old enough to be doing some good in the world if you have any capacity for it. The time has come for something to be decided about your future.”

Miss Prenderghast was only expressing in her own familiar way the very thoughts that had kept Jean lingering in the field, but it is extraordinary how very different our own thoughts about ourselves can sound from the lips of our nearest relatives! Jean had not felt in the least hostile to himself as he lay in the long grass, speculating as to his lack of the talents necessary for life, but he felt very hostile to Miss Prenderghast now; he kicked the table leg.

“I daresay you hardly remember your Uncle Romain,” she went on, with a grieved glance at the furniture; “you are hardly likely to, as hitherto his only interest in you has been displayed by his remarkable confidence in my powers of bringing you up. However, it appears he has suddenly remembered that he is your natural guardian, and has written to suggest a profession for you.”

“I remember my Uncle Romain extremely well,” said Jean with more haste than accuracy, “and I am grateful to him for his interest. What profession does he suggest?”

“The Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas,” said Miss Prenderghast. “You are to receive no salary for the first six months, and your uncle does not apparently intend to offer you his hospitality. I cannot congratulate you upon the generosity of your French relatives.”

Jean said nothing, he looked more than ever like a trapped wild thing in the flickering candlelight. His brown eyes shone with a fierce glint peculiar to them in moments of excitement, his thin, long brown hands moved with nervous gestures, and his nostrils quivered and dilated like those of an excited horse. It seemed a good moment to his aunt to make an appeal to his feelings.

“My dear boy,” she said, “if you go to Paris, as I fear you must, I foresee great temptations for you. I have done all I could to bring you up a decent, respectable member of society, and to bring out in you the strain of your English blood; but several things have been against me, your Roman Catholic religion and your naturally difficult temper. I have never quite felt as if you understood me, but that doesn’t matter now. Try to be honourable, straightforward and economical, and whatever you do, don’t be like your father--I don’t like to mention such horrors, but there it is; you have that to fight against as well as the temptations natural to any young man--the poor man came, as we know, to a shocking end.”

Jean flung back his chair and sprang to his feet. He spoke in a tone Miss Prenderghast had never heard him use before, and he lapsed into quick, explosive French, which she always found it difficult to follow.

“Do not dare to say these things to me, Madame,” he said hoarsely. “Respect my father’s memory, if you respect nothing else that is mine. He had courage, he was a gallant man, he never did a dishonourable thing in his life--he died sadly!”

“He died by his own hand,” interrupted Miss Prenderghast dryly, “after he had lived what, in my religion, would very rightly be termed a life of sin.”

“_Mon Dieu!_ you shall not say these things to me,” cried Jean, and suddenly he caught up the plate nearest him, and with the quick gesture of an angry child, flung it through the nearest window-pane. It crashed through the glass of the long French window, out on to the terrace beyond. The boy trembled all over with excitement and fury. Miss Prenderghast regarded him with scandalized contempt. He had really startled her, but even in her astonishment she was scornful. Shame overwhelmed him; he rushed past her out into the long corridor, and tore upstairs to his room.

Elizabeth heard him; she ran out of her room to intercept him in a sulphur-coloured dressing-gown, her gray hair hanging about her head in rigid wisps.

“Ah, Master Jean! Master Jean! Whatever in the world ’ave you been and done?” she moaned in terror.

“Let me go! Let me go, Elizabeth! or I shall go mad,” gasped the boy.

“There, there! don’t you take on so, Master Jean,” said Elizabeth softly, but she let him go--she knew that there is one thing a man prefers even to a woman’s sympathy, and that is his own freedom.

Jean reached his room and flung himself headlong on his bed, shaking with sobs. “Why should he feel so--why should he always feel so much too much?” he asked himself. “He had acted like a bad child, like a mere boy; his aunt despised him. Who was he to go out and face the world, to see Paris--a man who could not keep his temper with his aunt?” Even lying there alone in the dark he felt the hot waves of colour rushing over him afresh. He had been rude to her, and she was a woman, and she had done so much for him! How he hated her having done so much for him--why couldn’t she have left him alone?

He raised his eyes to where he knew his mother’s crucifix was hung, but his Aunt Anne had said such things about his father--his poor father whose beautiful, unharassed eyes Jean so well remembered; and Jean had adored the father, who came so seldom but so grandly to Ucelles. His mother had been his life’s companion, but his father had been his dream--at the thought of the words his Aunt Anne had used about the late Baron the tears dried on his cheeks.

“No, I won’t apologize to her. I won’t,” said Jean, looking in the direction of the crucifix. Then he went on his knees and took out his rosary and prayed afresh all those special prayers the Curé had taught him to pray for his father’s wandering soul.

He felt vaguely comforted when he lay down again. His window was wide open and his room was full of the autumn evening. The night was very still; high above the avenue of whispering limes the waning moon slid idly through the sky. She was warped and twisted and out of shape, and silvery pale--she stood to Jean as a symbol of all perverted, tortured lives, his father’s, and his own too, perhaps; who knew what would happen to him in Paris? Not what his Aunt Anne thought, nothing ever happened quite as she thought, because life always leans a little to the side of the ideal, even in its ugliest moments; but strange things other than Jean could yet imagine? He prayed again that he might not disgrace his name and his blood.

Even his Aunt Anne had good blood, he remembered; she had never stirred when he had looked his savage rage at her and flung the plate through the window. No! he could not apologize to her, but he would pray too for his Aunt Anne. He was not quite sure what form his prayer should take--the Curé had told him always to pray that Miss Prenderghast might become a Catholic; but Jean had never felt that this was quite fair, for he knew how very little his Aunt Anne herself wanted it; at present, too, he particularly wished to be fair. So he decided at last to pray to St. Joseph, who was well known to be particularly benevolent, to grant his Aunt Anne any good thing that she might want. “And if she doesn’t want any good thing,” he argued to himself, “it really isn’t my fault!”

He would have been very much surprised, and even a little touched, if he had known that his aunt was at that very moment praying for him.

“I do not think I have been very wise,” Miss Prenderghast prayed, “but I cannot approve of his French relations, and I knew it was my duty to warn him against his father’s awful example. If I have done aught amiss--and I do not think the boy’s temper entirely his own fault (the Prenderghasts, too, always as a family had hasty tempers)--forgive me--lay his temper to my charge, and protect him, if it is possible, from Paris!”

As for Elizabeth, she prayed that Jean might enjoy himself. (In spite of her appearance, there was something rather Greek about Elizabeth.)

Chapter III

THE doctor gave Jean a thermometer as a parting present, and the Curé brought him a little medal of St. Francis; he gave it to Jean after mass on his last morning.

“Always wear this, my son,” he said, “it has been blessed by the Bishop. I tried to get a eucalyptus rosary which had received the Holy Father’s own touch, but it had been sent by mistake to Adélaide la Court, who is just going into service. It was necessary for her to be safeguarded in every way. I think, however, you will find this medal very efficacious. Do not forget your prayers, go to Mass regularly, and never miss a fast. You will find Paris very different in some ways from St. Jouin, at least I have always gathered so; but the Church is the same, nothing ever changes that. Keep your vocation.”

Jean nodded--he was not quite sure what his vocation was, but he foresaw no difficulty in keeping it.

Miss Prenderghast had been lying awake half the night, thinking how she should say good-bye to Jean. She said it very badly; he was all she had in the world, and she had never really had him. Jean made her a polite little speech in which he thanked her for all she had done for him, and Miss Prenderghast said, “Nonsense, somebody had to do it!” and “For goodness sake, boy, don’t gush; it’s not English.”

Jean hesitated for a moment, bowed, kissed her hand and left her. Then he ran into the kitchen and threw his arms around Elizabeth.

“For shame, Master Jean,” cried Elizabeth, with gratified horror. “You a great big man, how could you go for to do such a thing?”

“Oh, Elizabeth,” said Jean, and he was laughing and almost crying at the same time, “a man must kiss somebody, you know. You’ve been very good to me, Elizabeth!”

“There! there! Master Jean,” said Elizabeth, who was wholly crying. “You’ll take care of yourself, my lamb, now, won’t you? And don’t pay no attention to what nobody says to you in that there wicked Paris full of hussies and what not? You go your own way, Master Jean dear, and if you’re ever in want of anything you’ll write and tell me, won’t you? I know what young men and short commons is, and I’ve saved my wages for many a year a-purpose!”

“Oh, Elizabeth!” said Jean at last, “but you know a man can’t take money from a woman!”

“Can’t ’e though, my dear?” said Elizabeth grimly. “Then all I can say is ’e can take many other things which are a sight worse for ’im--for ’im and for ’er too, for the matter of that! Don’t you go muddlin’ yer ’ead with them notions, and oh! for ’eaven’s sake, Master Jean, don’t sit in yer wet feet or go short of your food!”

Elizabeth hadn’t any parting present to give Jean--but when he went out of the kitchen, he ran by a back way across the fields, because he did not want anyone just then to see his face, and Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table with her head on her arms, and refused to answer the bell to clear away the breakfast. She was the only person in St. Jouin who realized that Jean would never come back again--someone like him would return, no doubt, with his eyes and his voice, but the Jean D’Ucelles who ran across the wet, wind-blown fields that autumn morning would be a different person altogether.

On the railway station Jean found several of his class-mates from the Lycée, and among them Maurice Golaud, the young officer who was quartered at St. Jouin.

“Ah, you lucky beggar!” he cried. “Just to think that in seven hours’ time you will be in the heart of the universe, while I am wasting away in this old, aimless penitentiary of a spot. You don’t know what’s before you, my boy! The cafés, the good little drinks, the fine little dinners, the dear little women! I am sick for the sound of the streets and the lights down the Champs-Elysées in the evening! What a world, and what a place this country, where you go about knee-deep in mud to each other’s funerals, with only the cows to look at! But you’ll be strange at first, _mon cher_! Look here, I know what I’ll do,” and he took out a card with an address on it and pushed it into Jean’s hand. “Go and call there,” he said, as the train started. “If I can’t run up and put you through your paces, you’ll see someone there who’s worth seeing; at least she is usually considered to be so!” Maurice gave a significant twist to his moustache as he spoke. He was really more proud of the lady who lived at the address than of that extremely handsome feature, in fact he considered them both his features, and he thought he was very generous to let Jean have the unexampled opportunity of observing them. As for Jean, he put the address carefully in his pocket; it seemed to him that after all he should not be so very friendless in Paris.

The train took its short, uneven way through the flat lands of France.

Poplars and a pale sky, with peasants working in the fields, stretched through an eternity of daylight.

Here and there towers of grey stone and groups of tall, narrow houses broke through the long monotony of the fields, and Jean’s heart beat faster with the hope that this time it was really Paris.

The rain came on again, and the short day was closing before Jean realized that the sudden stream of grey houses was after all not going to break again into empty fields, but was Paris herself, the great insignificant fringe of the world’s enigma, the city where there is most pleasure and least happiness--the cleverest thought and the vainest action--where more ideas are born and more perish in their tarnished bloom than any other place on earth. None of these things did Jean dream of, as out of the grey evening the lights of Paris broke, wave after wave of them, through the curtain of rain, like handfuls of splendid jewels prodigally flung into colourless mud. And with the lights came the sound--the sound of Paris, which is so different from the soft, dull roar of London or the sharp, hysterical scream of New York, the sound that is pitilessly light and infinitely gay--the voice of Paris, which is like the laughter of a heartless woman mocking at a life she has wrecked. And when Jean heard it he drew his breath in for a moment and felt afraid.

Jean had never seen so many people in his life as he saw at the terminus of the Gare St. Lazare, nor had he ever seen people move so freely and so quickly; there was neither stiffness nor bustle in the swiftly circulating crowd. He dragged his valise on to the platform, feeling strange and isolated in this new, bewildering world.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a voice behind him, “but I think you must be Monsieur le Baron. I come from the Comte D’Ucelles, sir.”

Henri would have liked extremely to have come to Jean’s assistance, but beyond seeing after his scanty luggage and placing the oldest rug over him in the motor as comfortably as possible, there was nothing he could do. Still, Jean saw the friendliness in his eyes and liked it. It was the only friendliness he was to see for some time.

As he was dressing as quickly as he could for eight o’clock dinner (his train had been late and Henri had warned him to hurry) the Comte D’Ucelles tapped at his door and entered. Romain was a man who wore fifty years easily, he had a most charming manner and a perpetual smile; what he looked like when he wasn’t smiling no one ever knew, for no one had ever seen his face in repose. He smiled when he was pleased, when he was bored, and when he was angry. He did not smile when he was amused, because he had not been amused for some time; he had long ago worn out his capacity for amusement. He met Jean with a generous outburst of reproach.

Upon his honour--was this really Jean? And why on earth hadn’t he seen him all these preposterous years? Jean had really behaved abominably to them; and how immensely he had grown, and what a charming time he would have in Paris! He asked after Miss Prenderghast, he rallied Jean on the broken hearts he was certain to have left behind him in the country; he made the most lavish excuses for having put Jean into such a wretched room, though it was the handsomest Jean had ever seen.

“It’s intolerable, my dear fellow, that I can’t put you up permanently,” he went on, with his hard, light eyes wandering about the stately apartment and taking in the shabby luggage, the shy youth, the pitiful, small appearance which made Romain after all think that his wife had been right; “but as a matter of fact, you know, your good aunt is a little strict--young men will be young men, and in Paris--well! well! Paris isn’t a young man’s class of the Catechism, and the home is sacred! I assure you, my dear boy, I keep it so, and so must you, you know, when you marry; and meanwhile have rooms--have rooms--they’ve fascinating places in Paris to be had for almost nothing; we’ll look into all that to-morrow. And now we mustn’t keep your aunt waiting. To-morrow I’ll send you to a decent tailor; that suit won’t quite do for Paris, you know!”

Jean felt it wouldn’t. He had thought it very smart before, but he was broader and taller than his father, and the sleeves were too short, and the back too tight; besides, it looked different from his uncle’s.

Romain laughed genially, not cruelly, at Jean’s embarrassment; still Jean felt that he had disappointed this brilliant being; he wished he could think of something suitable to say, something dashing and witty and in the tone of his uncle’s talk; but he could think of nothing. He had always fancied before that conversation was a means of expressing what you wanted to say, a direct channel, as it were, for some very definite idea, but this hardly seemed Romain’s notion of the art. His words seemed to stand like a screen between Jean and his thoughts, and to take the place of some hard, light enamel covering a hidden substance. He ran on with his continual easy banter, quite as if he were Jean’s age, or as if Jean were his; and as if nothing in the world mattered, or could be worth a moment’s uneasiness or discomfort.

“We’ve very few people to-night,” he said. “I would have kept you quite to ourselves, you know, if I could, but one’s funny little social life here beats up like a tide; you cannot keep the waves off your particular piece of shore without being as ridiculous as King Canute was with the Atlantic, in your charming old England--which reminds me, my dear boy, I am sending you in to-night with an American girl; she can’t talk French, of course, or at least we hope against hope that she won’t try, and no one else can talk English, so you’ll have the very great honour! Make an impression upon her, I assure you it’s quite worth your while; she’s immensely rich and immensely handsome, and is going to be, I believe, quite the rage. I must confess to you American women don’t suit me, I prefer flesh and blood in a woman, not sawdust and cold steel. All the same, she has a ravishing figure, and I believe the figure of her income is still more magnificent. They may both be quite natural, for all I know to the contrary, but your dear aunt has made certain of the money!”

Jean was accustomed to a large house full of old things, but they were an entirely different type of old things from that of which his Uncle Romain had acquired possession. They were old because they were worn out and shabby, they were not old because they were precious and rare. The reception-rooms through which he passed with Romain to the drawing-room, where Madame D’Ucelles awaited them, were not larger than those he had left behind him, but they seemed so, because of their extraordinary brilliant emptiness. The first that they passed through had nothing in it but portraits, and a wonderful old bronze on a pedestal; this opened into another, with very little, very perfect Louis XVI. furniture. The chimney was in marble, with a delicate Sèvres china clock; in the corner was a grand piano covered with ancient jewel-encrusted embroidery. A screen of painted leather stood by the side of the fireplace, and one wall was entirely covered with shelves of oriental china. Madame D’Ucelles and a small group of friends stood by the fire. Jean had seen evening dress before in a provincial theatre, but it was not in the least like this. He hardly recognized his aunt in the bedizened, exposed, and highly coloured lady leaning over an old rose-pink sofa in an attitude that she tried to make as gracefully light as she could.

Madame la Comtesse D’Ucelles was extremely handicapped in the social race by a hopeless lack of the _souplesse_ she adored.

One of Romain’s friends said of her: “Our poor Marie would so love to be thought indiscreet, but what can one say? She fights hard to produce the appearance of evil, but the upper lip and the stubborn _bourgeois_ blood refuse to permit such laxity. She is hopelessly _bonne femme_, she cannot be anything wilder than a dear old cow. It is true that she can, if she likes, kick over the pail, but what she can’t do is to produce champagne instead of good rich country milk, and that, poor dear, is what she wants to do! She cannot go to anyone’s head, she is not intoxicating, she can only (look at our good Romain) help to create an _embonpoint_!”

Madame D’Ucelles’ upper lip might be against her, but she and her dressmaker had fought hard to defeat it! Of all the little group around her, she most looked to her nephew from the country, the extreme presentment of the ultra-fashionable life he had heard of and read about. Perhaps if Marie had known of this impression she might have allowed it to soften her manner a little; but as it was, she fixed her small, round, brown eyes on Jean, and despised him.

He was all the things she hated--poor, young, without even an incipient material value, and yet, even in his badly-fitting clothes and in the midst of a room full of strange sounds and light, and critical human beings, there was in him that ineradicable ease of race.

He was shy but he was not awkward; he was embarrassed but he was not as the men of her class would have been, clumsy. He did not, indeed, know quite what to say, but he lifted clear eyes to her face; and if there was anything that Madame D’Ucelles never forgave, it was dignity in an inferior. Jean had not felt his uncle’s light laughter at his appearance half as much as he felt the scornful glitter in his aunt’s eyes. Without moving her elbow from the sofa on which she leaned, she gave him her heavily bejewelled fingers to kiss.

“Your train must have been late, I fancy,” she said. “I hope you left your aunt well in the country; we must discuss our family affairs by and by. Miss Vanderpool, let me introduce my nephew to you--le Baron D’Ucelles, Miss Vanderpool. Romain, dinner has already been announced.”

Jean turned his attention to a magnificent young woman who seemed to take instant possession of him with a flicker of her stony, flat, grey eyes.

“I am delighted you can talk English,” she said to her companion. “My! I do get so weary of trying to slip into French; not that I ever do try very hard, though I take lessons every day, but one has to understand a bit, so as not to be taken in.”

Jean did not imagine that the young woman beside him would ever run much risk in that direction. Pauline Vanderpool was indeed, as Romain had told him, a very handsome young woman, but Jean thought she could never under any circumstances have been a young girl. She was dressed with consummate taste, though she wore rather too many pearls. She had the finished manner of a woman who is accustomed to admiring obedience, and he could never imagine anyone venturing either to deceive her or to disagree with her.

“I think the Comtesse is a real smart woman,” she obligingly added to Jean, as they took their seats. “She’s your aunt, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is my uncle’s wife,” said Jean.

“Well! that’s a good enough aunt in America,” conceded his companion. “She says she likes me, she says she adores me; do you think she’s sincere?”

Jean looked rather helpless.

“I don’t know my aunt very well,” he said at last.

Pauline threw back her head and laughed.

“Well, it’s easy to see that your mother was an Englishwoman,” she said. “Why, if I’d given your Uncle Romain that opening, he’d have sent me blushing into next week.”

“I’m afraid I am very stupid, mademoiselle,” said poor Jean. “I’ve only just come to Paris.” It was evident that whatever blushing there was going to be, would be entirely on Jean’s part.

Pauline laughed again.

“I suppose you are going to live right away with the D’Ucelles, aren’t you?” she asked curiously.

“No, I don’t think so, mademoiselle,” said Jean.

“My! but that’s odd,” cried Pauline, regarding him closely. “Why ever not?--where are you going to live, then?”

“I shall find rooms to-morrow, I imagine.”

“You people over here are funny,” said Pauline. “I suppose as your uncle and aunt haven’t any children, you are their heir, aren’t you?”

Jean shrugged his shoulders; he was getting angry, and it improved his manner.

“I am really afraid you must ask them, mademoiselle,” he said gently. “I know so very little myself about their affairs.”

“I suppose you have money of your own, then?” inquired the relentless Pauline.

“Mademoiselle, I have enough,” said Jean, trembling with rage.

“All the same,” Pauline went on, “I think it’s real mean of them not to keep you on here. Why, their house is as big as an hotel. Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“If you do not mind, mademoiselle, I should prefer not to discuss my relations in a language that they do not understand,” said Jean, biting his lip.

Pauline stared at him.

“Goodness me!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t discuss them in a language they _could_, I suppose?”

Jean hesitated.

“In France,” he said gently, “it is not our custom to discuss our relations at all.” And this time Pauline did understand. She did not blush, nor did she show any sign of displeasure. She measured Jean with a calculating eye; he was a negligible quantity, poor Jean--he was not even good looking; his face was too thin and too pallid, his features too angular, only his clear-cut, sensitive mouth and a certain shining eagerness in his vivid dark eyes held the observer’s attention, but they did not hold Pauline’s.

“In America,” she said, with calm distinctness, “we discuss what we choose, and I guess I intend to allow myself the very same licence over here!” And she turned a beautiful white shoulder upon Jean and devoted the rest of dinner to her other neighbour.

It was the second time that evening in which Jean discovered that if you have no material value you are not supposed to claim the right of a spiritual one.

Romain laughed at him after dinner.

“My dear boy!” he said, “what on earth did you say to La Belle Américaine to make her deluge poor Le Blanc with her atrocious French. He says she gave him a tooth ache; were you trying to snub her?”

Jean flushed scarlet.

“You did not tell me she had no manners!” he muttered.

Romain laughed again.

“My poor child,” he said, “good manners are historical nowadays; they are the survival of race. One does not expect them from Americans; they have--those charming children of yesterday--nothing to survive from. It is true one hears of the Pilgrim Fathers, but that can hardly be looked upon as a satisfactory pedigree, particularly as one gathers from the absence of all allusion to the mothers that ‘ces gens-là’ married beneath them! I don’t offer people advice as a rule, it might bore them and it would certainly bore me; still I will go so far as to say to you that you mustn’t think too much about manners. You see the rich have inherited the earth, but they’ve kept, poor dears, the manners of the soil, and it’s considered a little diplomatic just now to meet them half way. You take me, perhaps? An air just a little less rigid than your own, my dear Jean, will find itself more at home in Paris. Don’t trouble to go into the drawing-room again; if you’re tired go to bed.”

Jean escaped with relief. He thought his Uncle Romain fascinating, but he felt horribly raw and exposed, and quite appallingly young. When he reached his room he found that Henri had unpacked all his things, and put the thermometer and the medal on the dressing-table. There was an absence of direct utility about these memorials that went to Jean’s very heart.

At the sight of his incompetent treasures, all the jumbled impressions of the day rose up before him, the surprises, the shames, the bewilderments, and the loneliness. He too, like them, had nothing about him that seemed fitted to shine in this new existence; but they were more fortunate than he, for they did not lie awake far into the night wishing that they were ten years older, and could talk without meaning anything, and had a new dress-coat.

They lay on the dressing-table surrounded by beautiful silver ornaments, quite as if they were on the old wooden washing-stand in St. Jouin and not in the least aware of any depreciation in their value.

Chapter IV

“MY dear fellow,” said Romain, wandering vaguely into the breakfast-room at about eleven the following morning. “I really am quite desolated, but I find I can’t take you to the Bank to-day. It appears that I promised your aunt in some dreadful forgotten hour to go to a wedding, a funeral, or a christening--I never can keep any account of church functions, can you?--of a distant cousin on her side of the family. You and I, my dear Jean, manage better; we keep, as it were, our relatives down--between us I doubt if we could raise half a dozen; but I have always noticed a terrible tendency in families such as your aunt’s to have relations, here, there, and everywhere, and such substantial people too; and one can’t get away from substantial people in church. For my part I am a good Catholic, I think I may fairly say. I have the mind of a Byzantine, but I do not like the personal note in religion. I would so very much rather not know whom I am praying beside. A smart wedding is one thing, but your aunt’s relations do not have smart weddings. One goes to out-of-the-way churches where large, red-faced women in purple dresses weep into their handkerchiefs. I do not find myself inspired to comfort them. No, I have had my déjeuner, thanks, in my room--and you?”

It seemed that Henri had brought Jean something more than an hour ago.

“Yes,” said Romain thoughtfully, “Henri is an excellent servant, he thinks of things. Do you know I have such a good idea. He shall take you to the Bank this morning, and afterwards find you rooms! After all I do not think I should be of the least use in looking for rooms, candidly--I am not a man of affairs, and when it comes to questions of money I am very like the lilies of the field; as I have neither toiled nor spun, you know, I don’t quite appreciate how to economize. I daresay Henri knows a great deal about Paris, and I recommend you to find out what. Henri, take Monsieur le Baron to this address, and afterwards put yourself at his disposal to look for rooms. Now, my dear Jean, I don’t think there is anything more I can do for you, is there? Your aunt finds herself a little fatigued this morning, and I believe will not be able to give herself the pleasure of seeing you. That matters the less as I shall expect you, of course, to look on this house as your headquarters; come in and out whenever you like, you know. Au revoir!”

It would hardly be worth while relating the parting blessing of Romain if Jean had been so fortunate as to see him in the weeks that followed; but though he called six times upon his uncle in the next fortnight, he never found Romain in. Once indeed he met him in the evening entering a café, but Romain did not seem to see him. He was very much pre-occupied at the moment, preserving in his own inimitable way the sanctities of the home; but there was something in his eyes as he looked at Jean without seeing him which decided Jean not to call again without an invitation; and the invitation did not come. It was to Henri instead that Jean owed his introduction to Paris.

So this was Paris--Paris the siren city of all the world--this drenched, grey, violently noisy spectacle. The streets were full of thick and greasy mud, a multitude of shrieking taxis, thundering drays, and bustling tradesmen’s carts flung themselves fantastically through the crowded thoroughfares. The shrouded, dripping houses seemed to Jean to look disreputably, unwholesomely fatigued; the raw, heavy air made him shiver, and hurt his chest.

“Could we,” he asked Henry, “go by the Louvre and Nôtre Dame?”

Henri looked surprised, but he only replied:

“Where you wish, Monsieur; that you see away there on your left is the Louvre. Myself I think it _triste_, but it is worse inside; there is a cemetery there, and a cemetery indoors--there is something about it that chills the spine! Monsieur does not want to enter now, does he?”

“Just a minute,” pleaded Jean, “only a minute, if we have time.”

“But yes,” said Henri, giving in with a good grace when he found he must. “All the time in the world, only Monsieur le Baron must not expect to find much to amuse him in the Louvre; places of that kind in Paris are chiefly valuable for the English and the Americans--for that, yes, they are useful; but for us, I assure Monsieur, they are not at all considered the thing. There is the Luxembourg, now, which is far more gay, and one need not have been dead many years before one appears in it. But Monsieur will please himself.”

Jean did please himself; he left Henri in an outer court, and hardly knowing what led him, Jean went straight through the long corridor to the little room at the end where against her red curtain the Venus of the soul leans a little forward in tender welcome to her worshippers. Jean stood there for a long time, his hat in his hand, his eyes full of tears, looking at her. He felt as if amongst a crowd of hostile strangers he had seen his mother’s face.

There are certain moments in life that can never be repeated--one’s first great sorrow--one’s first great temptation--and one’s first sight of a divinely beautiful created thing.

Henri regarded Jean with perplexity when he came out of the Louvre.

“Monsieur le Baron has perhaps met a friend?” he asked inquisitively.

Jean blushed a little.

“Yes,” he said simply, “I have met a friend.”

“Monsieur begins well,” replied Henri with relief. “In Paris one needs friends. And now for the Bank, Monsieur le Baron. This to your left here is the Luxembourg; in the summer the garden has a most _chic_ appearance. One finds there the smartest nursemaids in Paris; there are also pictures within. I have an idea that we may find Monsieur rooms behind the Luxembourg. I shall make the endeavour; since Monsieur is to be alone at first, cheerful surroundings are of importance. Here is the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, as Monsieur le Baron sees.”

Jean hesitated a moment before the heavy front of his future prison. He knew quite well it would be to him a prison, and he feared his first deliberate entrance into it. He had not realized how he had counted on his light-hearted, unembarrassed uncle to help him make the first plunge into a serious life, but he remembered that he was after all Jean D’Ucelles, and that he would not have liked the Venus of Milo to be ashamed of him; so he pushed back the heavy doors and entered, presenting his letter quite firmly to a youth who was under the impression that it was his place as doorkeeper to impede as far as possible anyone who wished to go out or in. After a contemptuous stare at Jean, he turned the letter over, whistled, and vanished. By and by a much more important individual requested Jean to follow him; and he passed through a green-baize door shrouded in mystery, and found himself in the Directors’ room.

The Director gave him fully five minutes; he told him where to go next morning, and said that he might begin his duties then, and that the head clerk would tell him what to do. The Director asked after the Comte D’Ucelles and suggested that some day Jean might dine with him. Then he rang the bell and dismissed him. The one idea that had come to Jean during this important interview was that there was something the matter with his clothes. He explained his fears to Henri and consulted him about Romain’s tailor, though he thought he would probably prove too expensive.

“Why should Monsieur le Baron pay for his clothes at all?” asked Henri. “The name is the same.”

Jean was very indignant with Henri, which was a mistake, because Henri instantly retired into his shell.

“_Mon Dieu!_” he said to himself. “They come from the country with their eyes glued shut and their mouths open, and then wonder why they remain hungry! It is, after all, only in Paris that we know how to get the world between our teeth! Let him learn this! For myself, I shall do better to keep my mouth shut. It is a terrible task to teach a fool.” And so Jean lost his only friend in Paris.

In the end Jean ordered the suit, and was relieved to find that he should not have to pay for it at once.

“He has come to Paris straight from the _bon Dieu_,” thought Henri. “_Quelle bêtise!_”

“Monsieur le Baron will get very wet if he wishes to go as far as Nôtre Dame,” he remarked aloud. “But from this bridge here across the Seine we can see it very well. I should say if anything better; it is not a fashionable church!”

Jean strained his eyes through the curtain of rain to catch the towers of Nôtre Dame. To-day there was no sunshine, and the cathedral crouched menacingly under the dispirited sky, a big, colourless block of time-defiant stone. Henri shivered ostentatiously--he did not wish to encourage Jean to remain out longer in the rain. He ventured to suggest that rain in Paris being, as a well known fact, highly dangerous for strangers, Monsieur le Baron would do well first to get something of a cordial nature to drink, and then to find his lodgings as soon as possible. Jean obeyed both suggestions, and Henri benefited, as he had intended, by the first.

It was not, however, so easy to find lodgings; everything--even the least attractive rooms at the top of the steepest flight of stairs--seemed to Jean’s country mind wickedly extravagant.

“But one cannot need to pay all that just for a room to sleep in?” he expostulated over and over again.

“In Paris,” observed Henri, “the very air is worth more than elsewhere, but, Monsieur le Baron, I grieve very much to have to say it, hitherto we have made an attempt to keep to the fashionable quarter. I know very well where we can get rooms cheaper, but I had not wished to mention it. On my return, Monsieur le Comte will snap his fingers and say to me, ‘Then you have buried Monsieur my nephew in a neighbourhood of greengrocers; I am to fall over cabbages in order to see him, _hein_!’ And yet if one cannot have Bohemian pheasants, one need not starve on soup made from bones! That is how I look at it, Monsieur le Baron. Shall we try another quarter?”

“Yes,” said Jean impatiently. “Any other quarter. I do not wish to be fashionable to sleep! Anywhere that I can find a clean, decent room, and get into it out of this noise and rain, I shall be satisfied.”

“Noise, Monsieur?” said Henri, a little shocked. “What you hear is not noise, it is Paris. Down here by the river then and across the bridge. There, Monsieur, is the Académie Française. People think very much of it, I am told. I prefer Les Capucines, but _chacun son goût, non_? And here in the Rue de Seine is perhaps something for Monsieur.”

Jean was by this time so tired that even if Numéro 5, Rue de Seine, had been more grey, more dirty, more coldly stuffy and draughty than it was, he would have closed with it thankfully. Henri persisted in seeing the bright side of things--there were but four flights of stairs--the room was, he really thought, a marvel of cheapness; the concierge’s wife said so--there was a café opposite, so convenient for the meals of Monsieur--and then the view! Monsieur, being fresh from the country, would appreciate the fact that it was at the back of the house, where it had the quiet of a desert and a view of the sky itself. Henri thought there was something very cheerful about so many gilt mirrors, and he pointed out to Jean that with the help of a few photographs of beautiful women and a chair, which he could hire for a trifle from Henri’s nephew only two streets away, the room would have a distinguished air that would impress his uncle; in short (with a wink at the concierge’s wife) he thought that Monsieur le Baron was to be congratulated; and now was there anything more that he, Henri, could do for him?

No, Jean thought there wasn’t, and he was very grateful and shook hands so cordially with Henri, not forgetting either to give him ten francs, that Henri felt quite cross and bitter as he went downstairs; he almost refused the ten francs, and all the rest of the day he was sorry he had not refused them. However, he eased his conscience by speaking very handsomely of Jean to the concierge’s wife, and telling her it would be well worth her while to look after Jean as if he were her own son; and he arranged that Jean should have the armchair for less than his nephew would have wished to charge.

As for Jean, left alone in the gathering dusk of the autumn afternoon, there was nothing more anyone could do for him, and he realized, as he had never done before, what a very great deal there was left for him to do for himself.

Chapter V

JEAN tried hard to be interested in his daily work. The day after Henri left him he went to the Bank with the greatest punctuality, and had in consequence to walk up and down the pavement for half an hour outside, before the door opened. It was a chastening experience and Jean did not repeat it. He worked with diligence and industry at the tasks the head clerk assigned him, and found that by so doing he had hours on his hands with nothing to do at all; he also annoyed his fellow clerks, and they told him so. Jean was an extremely good-natured person upon all indifferent subjects (and like all artists, most subjects were indifferent to him). His pride was far too deep-seated an affair ever to appear in the presence of his inferiors, so that he gave up any inordinate desire to distinguish himself among columns of figures and bundles of cheques, and wrote bars of music on all available scraps of paper instead. This amused Jean and appeased the clerks, and the business of the Bank, not being entirely in the hands of these young gentlemen, went on in much the same manner as before.

After a fortnight the clerks decided that as Jean had shown no nonsense about him, had borne ridicule with indifference and accepted tips of the trade with a clear desire to show himself amenable, he might, if he responded favourably, be introduced into their real life.

Jean was intensely anxious to see real life and without the remotest notion of what it meant, so he responded with enthusiasm. He was invited to dine with three men at a café and go on to a few little things afterwards.

It was then that Jean made a most shocking discovery--he did not like life!

No! there was no doubt about it whatever; he was twenty-one, and in full possession of his faculties, and this presentment of existence so handsomely offered him by these junior clerks of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas did not amuse him at all. It even appeared to him ugly, meaningless and vulgar. This then was what the Curé meant by temptation, and what the doctor meant by “life,” and what his Aunt Anne would doubtless mean--a little sweepingly perhaps--by “sin.” And it was this kind of thing which destroyed his father?

It could not help surprising Jean; and it did not occur to him that there are as many forms of one particular kind of temptation as there are shapes of one particular feature, and because you do not admire a snub nose there is still the possibility of submission to the shape of a perfect Greek. At first Jean thought that perhaps the world was right and he was wrong (this is a great admission for any youth to make) and that the only difficulty lay in amusement being an acquired taste. So without confiding to his fellow clerks how extremely he disliked their little parties (which were for the most part harmless enough and not more vulgar than the extremely small salaries at their disposal warranted) Jean set himself to acquire the missing flavour. He was very much in earnest about it, and he spent an awful evening trying to entertain a little lady, who sang at a café, and to whom he had been introduced as a great and enormous privilege the evening before. The little lady had one idea of amusement and poor Jean had quite another. She wanted to attract attention, and it appeared that Jean did not. When at the end of the evening she got up on a table and danced, Jean would have liked to get under it and be no more seen.

It was then that he made his second decision. He saw that he was meant to be a hermit. It was quite probable that the lady would have agreed with him.

Jean set about altering his life as fast as possible; at twenty-one there is never any time to lose. So far his religion had been as natural as the air he breathed, but it had not been, so he owned himself, very practical. He had been born a good Catholic, as he had been born a gentleman, and he had considered his faith in the light of spiritual good manners. One fasted on Fridays and vigils and went to Mass on Sunday; it would have been extremely bad form and regrettably republican not to do so; still Jean felt that there were depths he had never plumbed. He told his Confessor this, and he pointed out to him that he was drawn to a higher life; he also added that he could not for a moment understand a taste for any other. The Confessor was an old man, he knew a good deal about life, and he listened very humbly to Jean. He saw that Jean was suffering from a feeling that the Church had hardly done its duty in permitting sin at this time of day to exist, and that something ought to be done about it at once. Jean explained to the Confessor that he thought the world, the flesh and the devil overrated as temptations, and if only the Church would show people how dull and vulgar all life that was not a direct spiritual vocation was, hermits would increase from that moment. The Confessor did not say that this, to him, would hardly be a desirable termination. He was not at all a sarcastic Confessor, and he was very fond of young men.

“I think, perhaps,” he said rather cautiously, “you do not know all about it yet. There are”--he hesitated again; he seemed a painfully slow old man to Jean--“so many different kinds of things.” He finished very lamely, Jean thought.

“To me there are only two kinds of things,” said Jean firmly--“what is beautiful and what is not. I have chosen.” He expected the priest to say something more, something a little appreciative perhaps, but he only sighed. “Of course, other people may be different,” added Jean, who was afraid he might have sounded intolerant.

“But I do not think they are,” said his Confessor gently. “My dear son, I think we are all very much alike. I have lived a long while, and I have seen very few different people, and those who have sometimes thought themselves so have not always proved very wise.”

Jean let this pass, it did not sound to him very probable.

“But you approve of my desire, do you not, father?” he added with impatience; he was beginning to think he had not made a good choice of a Confessor.

“I do not think I know quite what it is,” said the priest, after a pause.

“I mean to join the Third Order of St. Francis, and, while endeavouring, for a year at least, to stay in the world, to be preparing myself possibly for a sterner vocation.” How proud and pleased the good Curé at home would have been if he could have heard Jean, and how disgusted the doctor! But Jean’s present auditor was neither pleased nor disgusted, nor even very much surprised.

“I should not join any Order yet if I were you,” he answered. “You have told me that you are twenty-one--no, I should not join any Order; but for the rest I approve, my son, only----” The Confessor paused again.

“Yes, my father?” said Jean. He felt that every moment was wasted in which he was not leading the higher life, and he was impatient for the Confessor to give him some rules.

“Only,” said the father at last, “I think we should all beware of spiritual pride, it is apt to weaken the mind. I fancy we cannot see very clearly what is right if we are too sure about what is wrong. I fear I express myself very badly.”

Jean privately thought he did, but he could not very well say so; besides, he knew that he was in no danger from spiritual pride, he meant to be very humble and absolutely obedient, even to this rather foolish old man. It was a great sacrifice to Jean not to join the Third Order, but he never dreamed of doing so after his Confessor had advised him not to.

“If you can help it,” added his Confessor, “do not make up your mind very much about anything else, just now.”

“But do not you think it well to be definite, my father?” Jean asked, in great astonishment.

The old priest spoke quite firmly this time, it was the end of the interview.

“No, my son,” he said. “I do not think it well to be very definite; I think it better to be obedient. We all know a great deal--that is our danger; let us see that we do a little of it--this is our security.” And he dismissed Jean, to whom he had not given a single rule, at least Jean could not remember that he had.

Chapter VI

JEAN bore his new resolutions very easily at first; they filled up his days and they gave him an incentive, and for a time he did not come into contact with any other point of view.

“_Voyons_,” the concierge’s wife exclaimed to Henri, “you have sent us a saint. I am not the less careful of him on that account, you may imagine. For myself, I believe there is luck in such things. My husband is, as you know, a sceptic; he says that it will not last. Poor young man! I sometimes think to myself it is a little sad--so young and with so much to see, and always to be looking at Heaven!”

But Jean did not find it sad; he thought it was well to keep up his music--monks have been composers before now. So he spent all his spare time at the piano and bought the latest compositions of a famous Russian composer. One could hardly call his music strictly religious, perhaps, but Jean felt confident that it could be religiously applied. Then it occurred to him one day that he was a little selfish. Here he was, professedly conscious of a new truth, leading a splendid and invigorating life and making no attempt to share it. It was not that Jean wanted to preach; he was not a prig, even though he was very much in earnest; but he did want to do good and communicate, and he also wanted sympathy, but of this he was perhaps hardly aware. At twenty-one we are not likely to know very much about our own characters. We are too busy making them. Jean was extremely susceptible to sympathy. Appreciation and approval were like wings to his efforts, even opposition made life easier to him than indifference.

He could not really enjoy being a hermit without someone to say that it was, if not a great success, at least an astonishing attempt, and so far Jean had not surprised anyone in Paris. It came to him one Sunday afternoon with a flash of inspiration, why should he not reveal his new way of life to Maurice Golaud? He was almost certain to be in Paris now; he had said he would, as a matter of course, come up for the winter, and it was already late in December. It was improbable that Maurice would at once desire to share Jean’s austere existence, but he could discuss its charms with Maurice, and point out to him how disappointed he had been in what Maurice had called “life.” Perhaps by this time Maurice was disappointed too. At any rate, it would be very jolly to see Maurice again. He ought to go and see Maurice, and he re-read the address. The name Mademoiselle Liane de Brances meant nothing at all to Jean. He did not know that she was a lovely French actress, almost of the first class. How should he? As a hermit he had never entered the theatre, and in his pre-hermit days his fellow clerks had introduced him chiefly to music halls. He did think that it was a pity he should have to find Maurice at this lady’s address; he even thought of writing and arranging an appointment in his own room; but there was that fatal and entrapping confusion between desire and duty. Surely he ought not to waste any time in going to Maurice? He would waste no time--and he went.

Everything was different from what Jean had expected. To begin with, the maid did not think it necessary to inform Jean that Maurice was out; she knew her mistress to be alone and in a bad temper, and in these circumstances she had experienced before the extreme efficacy of a young man. He acted upon Liane’s nerves like a sedative, and Liane’s servants made a point of considering her nerves. So she took Jean’s card straight to her mistress and left him to make what he could of a fashionable actress’s boudoir, while he waited.

Maurice had often spoken to Jean of his “little place” in Paris, but Jean in his wildest dreams had never imagined a little place like this. The room was not very large, but it was extraordinarily light and gay. Great bowls full of scented flowers stood everywhere. Signed photographs of names that had reached even to St. Jouin were flung carelessly about, exquisite small ivories and dainty _bonbonnières_ were set out on little tables. By the delicately curtained windows stood a screen of very fine old miniatures, and on a long, narrow table was a valuable collection of old snuff-boxes.

Everywhere were mirrors--long mirrors, short mirrors, round mirrors, oval mirrors; the tables and chairs were white and gold, and here and there on the walls hung toneless Japanese prints, pale grey, or white with wavy black lines.

There was only one painting in the room--it hung over the mantelpiece, and after Jean had looked at it he saw nothing else.

It was a painting of a woman. She seemed almost to speak as she leaned with bent head out of the picture. There was no smile on her face--lovely and blooming and intensely gay, there was about her an enormous and unlimited satisfaction. She seemed, as it were, clothed in a dauntless confidence. There she sat with uplifted shining eyes, waiting for her opportunity, and relentlessly competent to take it.

Jean heard a faint sound behind him, and turning, he saw the original of the picture.

Liane was fifteen years older now, and she was no longer waiting for her opportunity.

She was a tall woman, whose figure already required care; she had thick coils of magnificent chestnut hair, much of which was still her own.

Her arched eyebrows gave a questioning, mysterious look to her wide grey eyes with their deep bisque shadows. She had the most beautiful mouth in Paris, and she had been famous for her smile. Poets had sung of it, artists had tried to paint it, lovers had sworn they would die for it. They had not found that necessary, but many of them had found it remarkably expensive.

Ten years ago that smile of Liane’s was the talk of Paris, but perhaps rather too many other things had been talked of since. It was by now a little blurred, tightened by repetition, and hardened by inevitable usage, still even now it was a work of art, and, without the stage, it would have afforded Liane a handsome income. It was perhaps no mean test of a hermit.

Jean stood watching her with a hypnotized air; it was a great tribute to Liane, but as an attitude in a Parisian boudoir it was a trifle awkward.

Poor Jean! How beautiful this woman was,--and he had never seen a beautiful woman before.

Liane hardly seemed to move as she approached him; her figure glided through the room like the idle wing of a bird in slow flight across a summer sky. It had taken a _danseuse_ two years to teach Liane how to walk.

She was dressed in a pale dove-grey tea-gown, with a knot of violets at her breast. It was not surprising that Maurice admired her more even than his own imperially cut and waxed moustache; nevertheless, he had gone to the _courses_ this afternoon without her, and Liane de Brances did not like being left alone.

“_Vous êtes le bien-venu_, Monsieur,” said Liane, in the modulated musical tone which she had learned for the theatre. It was not her natural voice, and she looked at Jean with a soft enclosing look which seemed to shut out the world.

No woman is very dangerous to a man unless she is a little self-conscious, and Liane was so completely self-conscious that she could afford to be perfectly natural. She knew herself as an artist knows his picture or a captain his ship.

“I think you have fallen from heaven!” she said, sinking into a _chaise longue_ and patting the cushions left and right of her into a suitable background. “Or if you have come from the other place that will be more amusing still! Think of it, Maurice has gone to the races, and left me alone in the rain! It was clothes of course--the clothes of a woman, Monsieur, are her tragedy. _Mon Dieu!_ the life one leads! I can assure you, it is a slavery, and yet what can we do? For if one does not strain every nerve to succeed, it becomes a massacre! I believe I may truly say that every woman in the company would murder me with a new costume to-morrow if I did not put myself in the hands of the greatest tyrant in Paris. You know Madame Berthe, of course? She dresses half the world, and we must attempt to accommodate her. I was, then, at her house, if you will believe me, at ten o’clock this morning--an hour when I am never awake--I must have been driven there in my sleep, I fancy, and if I have caught a cold and ruined my voice, one sees very well why! And after I had sat there an hour--an hour!--and I am without exception the busiest woman in Paris--I am sent a message that she cannot see me until three! I assure you that for two pins I would have burst into her private room and destroyed all the costumes within sight! But I was handicapped by thoughts of the future; I restrained myself, and I return here furious. Maurice appears. I cannot accompany him to the _courses_; instead I have to go back to that infamous woman, or she won’t have the second act ready at all; as it is, I shall have to run in and out in pins. And they accuse us of being gay. What a calumny! No housewife works as I do. I have three parts a mile long to learn for next week, and I haven’t looked at one of them! Costumes! Costumes! And then a silly author appears at lunch expecting me to know his twaddle by heart and praise him for it. Oh la! la! the vanity of these men who expect gratitude in return for parts only fit for a sick crow! You have seen _La Fin de l’Amour_ of course? I ask you frankly, how do I appear in it? You like it, _hein_? I assure you I can do better than that; but one is ruined of course by the rest of the cast. I told Colin so yesterday--the _premier_ is so careless, he forgets half his words and apparently he imagines that the front of the stage was meant only for him. The less said of the women the better, it is a marvel to me they are not hissed off the stage. But my public are always good to me. You like it?”

How was Jean to explain that he had never heard of it, that even if he had, he should have avoided it, that this lady’s whole profession appeared to him to be wrong?

He hesitated, but he did not explain; he said:

“Then, Mademoiselle, you are an actress?”

Liane flung back her head and laughed and laughed.

“Oh, _Mon Dieu_! An actress--I?” she cried, when she could speak. “But do you not know me, then? Have you never heard of me? I am Liane de Brances? _Ma foi_, I did not expect to have to explain myself at this time of day! I am not a vain woman, but, Monsieur, Paris knows me!” And she dropped her eyes and lifted them again, with her head bent like the girl in the picture. She spoke no more than the truth. Paris did know her.

“Maurice told me you came from the country,” she added. “But it appears I had over-estimated what the country amuses itself with. Perhaps you have never seen an actress before?”

“Oh yes, I have,” said Jean, flushing a little, “but I have not before had the pleasure----” and he broke off, for Liane was laughing again.

“I am the first, then?” she exclaimed, with caressing mockery. “Really the first? And you are not afraid to meet a lady who is to be seen on the posters? _Quel courage_, Monsieur!”

Here was Jean’s opportunity presented to him afresh. Now was the time for him to tell Liane that he had come to see Maurice, and Maurice alone, and that his views of life were so different from her own as to make all future communications impossible between them.

Jean saw himself telling Liane this, he saw the incredulous amusement, the offended dignity, and his own ignominious retreat; and then, after all, would it be _right_ to leave her like this? Perhaps if they became friends she might listen more sympathetically to his point of view. It never did to be premature. If he had but known it, this was his one opportunity of escape--women like Liane do not give a second opportunity. But he was fated never to tell her his point of view. He hesitated and was lost.

“Now you must make up for all you have not known, Monsieur,” said Liane, with her enchanting smile, “and I myself will teach you.”

It was a little difficult for Liane to talk to Jean, still for another quarter of an hour she tried. She really made an effort, because she was grateful to him for the passionate adoration in his eyes. It renewed her youth and gave her a feeling of ease and comfort. It was the sensation of a tired swimmer when the breeze drives back the salt water from his mouth, and nerves him afresh for the struggle. Liane was thirty-five, and lately the salt waters of life had risen threateningly close to those still perfect lips. In the end she knew she must yield to age, and she liked Jean because he made the end seem further off.

She asked him about his uncle, whom everybody knew and who was so charming; she asked him about his aunt, who of course was charming too, but whom unfortunately Liane had not happened to meet.

She was interested, to the point of stifling a yawn, in the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas; and where Jean lived and what he thought of Paris. It was rather like talking in letters of the alphabet to him instead of using civilized words.

But behind the talk she was busily thinking. Who was it Jean reminded her of so much? Someone she had known very well, whose little habits and tricks of talking were familiar to her; she must remember, and yet the name would not come back to her mind. Then her eyes fell on Jean’s hands and she started, they were narrow, well-shaped hands with long fingers and a wide gap between the thumb and the hand, and they were exactly like the hands of a musician--a musician whom Liane would never forget--the only real figure in her life, perhaps. Certainly the only man for whom she had really cared, and oh! how he had cared for Liane! It was long before she was famous, or it would never have done at all. He was poor and struggling and the most unpractical person on earth; he had no idea of what was due to a woman, but he loved fiercely, with the wild, unappeasable hunger of the soul which Liane never attempted to satisfy. Still he had made her laugh and cry, and in the end he had made her famous; because he killed himself for her. It was all a mistake really--it came of his taking things so seriously. He never had any _souplesse_ about him, and men who will not bend, break. She had only made an appointment to meet a friend; it was certainly unfortunate that he should happen to hear of it, and then he had promptly and publicly shot himself in her presence, and Liane became the talk of Paris. Through it she was offered the engagement which gave her her great opportunity. Certainly he was not a man to forget. Liane smiled a little as she thought of him, not cruelly at all, but with a feeling of grateful security, and amusement at her own power. She had many rivals on the stage, but she did not think that any woman had ever made men feel so much. She was a queen of the emotions. She leaned forward and laid her soft, perilous fingers on Jean’s.

“You have a musician’s hands,” she said. Jean did not attempt to return the pressure of her hand; it would, he felt, have been taking advantage of her heavenly kindness.

“I am not yet a musician,” he said, “but it is true that is what I want to be. It is the thing I love best and understand most in life.”

Had he already forgotten his new vocation? It would have astounded Jean to know that he had.

Liane considered; she could not talk to him any more, and he was obviously unfitted at present for any other form of amusement; perhaps he could play, she was really fond of music.

“Play to me then,” she said very gently. Jean drew in his breath. Play to her! Oh, if he could! He who was so little accustomed to play to anybody, how dared he play to her--to the exquisite and angelic human being whom merely to look at and speak to was a delicious and mysterious fever?

“Do you--do you really want me to?” he asked. For of course, if she really wanted him to, he must! Liane smiled.

“Well, yes,” she said. “I really want you to, Monsieur. Do you know ‘Les Jeux d’Eaux,’ that has an especial appeal to me, or better still, Debussy’s ‘Les Jardins sous la Pluie?’”

“I don’t know either of them,” said Jean.

Liane thought him an idiot.

“Play, then, what you will,” she said, and resignedly wondered if she could safely light a cigarette, but she decided to wait. However, she leaned back on the _chaise longue_ luxuriously and closed her eyes. Unless he played too badly she could perhaps go to sleep.

Jean found himself trembling all over when he rose to go over to the piano. Liane had talked to him so cleverly that it had not appeared to him that he had failed to amuse her. On the contrary, he had enjoyed their conversation intensely. Elizabeth was the most sympathetic woman he had ever met, but her conversation was not nearly so interesting as Liane’s. But music! music was different; here he was really afraid to fail, because he knew what good music was, and he knew nothing about amusing conversation. In half an hour’s time he felt he would be eternally disgraced in his own eyes and in Liane’s. Then he began to play some of the Russian music he had just been learning by heart in his rooms as a hermit. In a moment he realized that the music expressed Liane, expressed the wonder of her, the sacred beauty, the incredible force and joy! He was not nervous any more after that, the music became a communication between them, and he let himself go. Jean’s music was an original and instinctive note. He had spoken the truth when he had told Liane it was the only thing for which he cared. It was his only personal channel of expression, roughened by inexperience and without the bell-like clarity of disciplined practice, but it was an authentic, living talent, and it shook the artist in Liane wide awake. She sat up suddenly and opened her eyes. Who was this young man who was playing to her? This quite ordinary, inarticulate young man, with his _cachet_ of _fils de famille_ written all over him? The little Baron D’Ucelles, who oughtn’t by all the rules of the game to do anything better than anyone else?

He had caught at her heart and was holding it with those hands of the master; he was making her think and feel and forcing her back into the currents of life. The notes flowed from his fingers like fire and dew, his vivid impetuosity awaked and astonished her. He had come out of the world where, to Liane, men were as trees walking; and he had become a distinct value. When he stopped playing and came back to her, she looked straight in his eyes.

“_Bon!_” she cried, “you deceived me, my friend. I thought you were a young gentleman, it appears you are an artist. What, may I ask in the name of all the blessed saints, are you doing in the Bank?”

“Ah!” cried Jean, exhausted but triumphant. “Then you really think I can play? You really believe in me?” Liane looked at her watch.

“I have listened to you for an hour, my child,” she said; “do you not call that belief in you?”

“Oh, but Mademoiselle, I am ashamed, horrified--I have played to you for an hour, a thousand pardons!”

“A thousand nothings of the kind,” interrupted Liane impatiently. “We drop all this now, you know, you and I--we are artists, and artists, as you probably don’t know, are very simple people when they are together and attend strictly to business. You will, of course, throw up this performance at the Bank to-morrow. You had better come here on Sunday at ten o’clock (the evening, you know, _mon petit_; nothing is done at ten o’clock in the morning but the saying of one’s prayers, unless, indeed, one is under the tyranny of a dressmaker). Then you must play to Cartier; he will take you in hand, I fancy. I will have some other men here too; this affair of yours must be well looked into--and fancy that that _crétin_ of a Maurice hadn’t the sense to tell me you were an artist, and there I was stiffening my jaws with the rubbish of an afternoon call.”

Liane spoke to him simply, plainly, and like a man. The awe of her exquisite manner fell away. She no longer seemed to Jean like a mysterious and potent being from another world; but he had no time to regret the destruction of his illusion. For the first time in his life he was talking to a real comrade. Bliss had come out of solitude, and submitted joyously to the reinforcement of humanity. The names of great musicians flashed between them. Liane flung her experiences into his hands and drew out of him in return his ambitions and desires; these at present, it seemed, did not include retirement into a monastery or the rules of the Third Order.

“You are one of the emotional players,” she said to him. “Not the great, broad interpreters who give you the picked bones of a musician’s work--but one of their own brothers, who fire you afresh with their laughter and their tears. You will play Chopin most, I fancy. Schumann and Grieg, and the Russian men--our French moderns too, of course, Debussy above all; for there is so much dream in you--but Cartier won’t let you specialize yet. What he’ll give you is Bach and Mozart; he’ll stuff it into you by the yard. You must meet some singers, too, and play for them. Often one must begin this way.”

In the middle of their talk the door opened and Maurice Golaud stood there, tired and wet from the _courses_, but looking at them nevertheless with curious amusement in his eyes.

Jean stood up half embarrassed, with the burden of his youth upon him, and as he did so he saw Liane’s face change; it was as if she had covered herself subtly and suddenly with a veil of intangible gauze, the artist had retreated once more. She was the beautiful woman with the lure in her eyes. Her lips parted, and a glance ran between her and Maurice which seemed to Jean like quick flame. The smile in Maurice’s eyes deepened.

“Ah, you have found us at last, _mon ami_?” Maurice said to Jean. “For my part, I was fancying you must have picked up some pretty amusements elsewhere, since you have been in Paris nearly a month before looking us up. You should have been at the _courses_ this afternoon; it was really not half bad. No, it wouldn’t have amused you, _ma chérie_, no one was killed and no one was ruined, and the ladies’ clothes looked _passés_ in the rain. You really did better for yourself remaining here, and entertaining my dear old Jean.”

Liane smiled, but she did not say anything. She no longer looked at Jean.

He got up to go; they both of them urged him to remain, though Maurice went to the door with him in a bland cordiality of farewell.

“Well, and now you have found your way here you must come often,” he said. “I can see already that Liane likes you.”

It was not easy for Jean to explain to Maurice about his vocation now, but Maurice was, after all, only another man, and Jean was not a coward.

“This is not the kind of life I have been living,” he began lamely. “You see, Maurice, I am bound to say so, I don’t like the--the ways of Paris.”

“No?” said Maurice cheerfully. “Well, that is a pity! Still, if you have been leading a dull life and not mixing with clever people like ourselves--one understands. We must alter all that, you know; I’ll talk to Liane about it. _Au revoir_, Jean.”

The rain had stopped, and for the first time Jean discovered a charm in the streets of Paris. There was something mysterious and beautiful in the air to-night. The faces of the women in the crowd seemed as fresh as summer flowers, the lights along the Seine wound their way into the heart of the city like a string of fallen stars.

Jean held his head up as he walked; he felt an indefinable sense of youth and vigour in his veins.

He noticed that one or two of the women as he passed looked at him; and he no longer felt like a ghost.

After dinner he went back to his rooms, but he could not stay there. He was dissatisfied with himself and he did not want to think. He went to the window and looked out. It was ten o’clock; if he was going to early Mass to-morrow as usual, he had better go to bed.

_La Fin de l’Amour_ was on at the Odéon. Jean had never been to the Odéon, but he knew where it was. If he went at once he would be in time to see Liane in the last act.

After all, he had decided nothing, he had taken no vows. How wrong it was of the old Confessor not to let him join the Third Order! If he were living under rule now--then for one moment Jean faced his own soul and would not lie to himself. “If I were living under rule now,” he said beneath his breath, “I should break the rule.” After that he thought no more about the higher life.

“_Bon!_” said the concierge’s wife, as she saw him swing off down the street. “One knows very well when they begin to walk like that what has happened to them; but that will not make him better off; one must be careful now about the rent,” and she sighed. She was really at heart rather sad to lose her little saint; her husband, she knew, would triumph over her.

For the concierge’s wife, too, realized that Jean had ceased to be a hermit.

Chapter VII

JEAN did see Liane in the last act of _La Fin de l’Amour_, and Liane saw him.

Up to that moment she had no very definite intentions about Jean. She thought if she wasn’t too busy she would really give him an “evening” to meet a few artists. She was good-natured and liked to do inexpensive good turns, and if there was really anything remarkable in Jean’s powers it would decidedly prove something of a _réclame_ for Liane herself. But it had never occurred to her to regard him more personally. Now as she looked over the footlights and saw in one of the front stalls the fierce ardour of his eyes, another idea occurred to her. She was extremely sentimental and not a little superstitious. “My first musician brought me luck,” she said to herself, “why not try the second? It is of course an extravagance. He has no money and no importance, but one never knows what may come of a good action.”

From this reflection it will be seen that Liane’s moral code was a trifle perverted. Still she had a moral code, as most of us have, and Liane’s took the form of occasionally doing things that did not pay her. It almost seemed to Jean that Liane’s smile was specially for him; perhaps it was. The next evening he came in time for the first act of _La Fin de l’Amour_ though he could not again afford the stalls. It was all very wonderful to Jean, but it soon became merged and forgotten in the central wonder of Liane.

To Liane acting was a business, but it was a business brought to such perfection that it became an art. It is not enough in Paris for an actress to be beautiful, she must also act, and Liane on the stage was a very tremendous power indeed.

It seemed inconceivable to Jean that he should ever have had the privilege of words with her in private; his love became an effortless, impassioned dream. It was no use his thinking about her, so of course he thought of nothing else. Then one night he actually received a message from behind the scenes:

“Won’t you come and see me? Liane de Brances.”

He followed her messenger, though he still believed there was some mistake. Liane could not have seen him, and if she had, why should she remember him? It was five days since he had called upon her, but it had seemed like five years to Jean. The Odéon is a very big theatre--old-fashioned and given up to long passages and bare rooms; it lacks the exquisite arrangements of the first artists’ boudoir, the colour schemes and artistic furniture of the more modern theatres, but to Jean it all seemed magnificent enough, and Liane’s room of white and gold, stiflingly hot and brilliantly lighted, with a small dressing-room leading out of it, astounded him by its importance. Nothing could be too important for her, but he had never known that artists’ dressing-rooms would be the least like this. Liane was giving the little finishing touches to her third-act costume. The dresser was still in her room, passing her all the things she might want, and receiving a running fire of dispassionate abuse for her pains.

“What animals these women are!” said Liane, giving Jean her left hand, while she touched up the thick bisque of her arched eyebrows. “They are born clumsy, awkward, infuriating--now you may go,” she added to the impassive dresser, “and don’t forget to come in time for the next act; if I have to ring twice for you again, you shall be sent to paint the clown’s cheek in the next pantomime! Well, Monsieur Jean, do you realize that to-morrow is Sunday and that I wish you to meet all those grand music-makers I told you about at ten o’clock, _chez moi_; and how do you find _La Fin de l’Amour_? I perceive you have been here often enough; am I to congratulate its author on having at last found his public? The same piece five nights running--that I call faithfulness! And it is evident that no woman has influenced you, for you have never been seen in the green room!”

“I have not come to see the play,” said Jean quite simply. “I have come to see you.” He looked a little frightened at his boldness, but Liane only laughed, and ran a powder-puff lightly over her cheek and lips. “And I shall go on coming to see you,” he added firmly.

“But of course; it would be dreadful if you stopped!” said Liane, “that would be the end of the compliment; but does the front of the house satisfy you?”

Jean trembled. He could hardly believe his ears, but his eyes were more faithful witnesses, and he saw that Liane was still smiling.

“Not now,” he interposed, “not now, Liane.”

An electric bell rang out with a terrible persistent sound, close to Jean’s ear. Liane caught up a soft gauze wrap that lay on a chair.

“I must be off,” she said placidly. “_A demain, mon petit_; run away now, this passage to your right. But yes, you may kiss my hand if you like. _Au revoir!_” And Liane sailed swiftly off, leaving Jean to find his way back to his seat in the house, dizzy and stunned with emotion.

He did not ask himself what she meant; he did not ask himself what he meant. There are times when we do not care to look too closely at our intentions. He only said to himself: “I shall see her again,” and it appeared to him as if the entire theatre and the whole of Paris could read this splendid promise in his eyes. A week ago and the thought of actually seeing--and more tremendous still--playing before _des hommes arrivés_ in the musical world would have absorbed his every thought. But at present he did not greatly consider these gentlemen--he was to see Liane again, and not once only. And every word she had said in their short interview wrote itself across his brain and heart like fire.

Liane’s Sunday evenings were famous all over Paris. She was in the habit of gathering together a brilliant circle of writers, musicians, artists, and actors. Maurice was seldom made particularly welcome on these occasions. Liane preferred to keep her _intimes_ separate, but she could not very well refuse to allow him to attend Jean’s début, so that when Jean arrived the first figure his eyes fell on was that of his old friend, trying to play the experienced host and man of the world to a group of men who were more successful in ignoring him. They did not want Maurice to put them at their ease, for they were at their ease already, and they still less cared to be entertained, for they were more than capable of entertaining and being entertained by each other. Liane was dressed in a close-fitting gown of sea-green satin, without a single ornament. She was not in the very best of tempers, but that hardly appeared for the moment, though Maurice, who saw that it would probably manifest itself to some purpose in the future, felt extremely nervous and kept pressing earnest offers of food and drink upon everyone he could get to listen to him.

“Ah, my dear fellow!” he cried, with real delight, when Jean was announced. “I am so glad to see you. Come here! come here! You needn’t be alarmed with all these big-wigs; they are very good friends of mine and Liane’s--and I’ll introduce them all to you presently. Come into the dining-room and have a drink--you can smoke here also, you know.”

Liane’s velvety voice cut across Maurice’s bluff hospitality with merciless softness.

“Monsieur D’Ucelles will stay here with me, Maurice,” she said gently. There was a little silence for a moment. Maurice bit his lips and escaped into the dining-room by himself. He was relieved later by the appearance of two actress friends of Liane’s who greatly preferred his company to hers. At another time Liane would have resented this, but at present it suited her purpose, and she let it pass. Even the attraction of other women can be useful sometimes.

“Here is the Baron D’Ucelles,” said Liane, after Maurice’s disappearance. “He really plays, you know, and you must listen to him, _comme de bons enfants_. Afterwards,” she said smilingly to Jean, “you shall hear their names, but not until you have made your own. Have I not put that prettily?” And as all Liane’s friends were _bons enfants_ and quite acknowledged Liane to be one too, they prepared to listen.

Jean, seeing the keen, impassive attention on the faces before him, felt physically incapacitated to move. There were no young men present, the youngest could not have been under forty. Life and struggle and success were written in the lines of their faces. Liane had more than kept her word to him, these were all _des hommes arrivés_--the picked brains of Paris, which is the brain of the world. Liane glanced at Jean impatiently, but one of the men near her came forward and put his hand on Jean’s shoulder. He looked quite as confident and sure of himself as the other men did, but he looked something else too, he looked confident and sure of Jean.

“We’ve all of us been through this, you know,” he said, with a charming smile. “It’s deuced uncomfortable, of course, but it doesn’t last; nothing does, you know. Come over by the window, and when they’ve all forgotten what we’re about, you can make a start.” Jean obeyed him mechanically. The other men nodded, and began to discuss with neat, finished phrases the last great exhibition of Van Gogh; it seemed that they knew all about pictures. The room was full of smoke and soft light. Liane lay back on her _chaise longue_, just as she had done when Jean played to her a week ago, only this time her eyes were open; she kept them away from Jean, though, for she was annoyed with him for not playing at once.

This did not have as devastating an effect upon Jean as it might have had--for once Jean had succeeded in forgetting Liane, as a man will always forget a woman when he is face to face with the thing to be done. He could not so easily get away from the piano. He looked hesitatingly at his companion, Jacques Cartier.

“Our good Liane tells me you are fond of Russian music, it seems,” he said. Then Jean, hardly knowing what he was doing, found himself on the music-stool at last. “I, too, am very fond of it; we go to the Russians, we Frenchmen, to learn what is primitive again--for ourselves we have none of that _genre_ left, you know. We can only create complications, and complications are a purely modern note, don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know,” faltered Jean stupidly. He was trying to think of the first bar of anything; it seemed to him as if there were no first bars left. Then he began to play; he was not quite sure how it happened, because he didn’t consciously remember the first bar even then, but it appeared as if his fingers took volition into themselves and began without him. There was an instant lull in the conversation. Cartier leaned forward a little, listening. They all listened as men in Paris listen, with ruthless criticism and quite deadly lucidity of brain. Jean played nervously and unequally at first, but he soon began to gather strength out of the very thinness of the sound, and at last he made his attack, stung to desperation by the fear of failure, and flung himself headlong into the music, dragging out from his inmost being his own authentic note.

Then the listening artists nodded across Liane to each other. “She has found someone, the good girl,” their eyes said; and when he finished they attacked him with one voice.

They pointed out that he couldn’t play a chord; that that wasn’t the way to strike a note; they assured him that his style was feeble and that his conceptions wanted training. As for Jacques Cartier, he was the most merciless of all.

“What you want,” he explained, “is brain, pure brain, Monsieur; feeling runs about on the surface like a dog with a tin can tied to his tail. Anyone can hear him howl, yes, but that obtained, what follows? With brain it is different, that is walking about inside of yourself, and arriving at something.”

“Practice is what you want,” said an old man on the other side of Liane. “Practise eight hours a day; you were born with velvet in those finger-tips of yours; practise till one feels the steel behind them.”

Then they all began together again, and pointed out to Jean that he wouldn’t do at all as he was, and that he must take instant steps towards becoming different, and Jean was overwhelmed with delight, because he saw that they really took him seriously, and that they meant that he could one day do something after all, and behind them was Liane smiling at him, as if she were pleased (as indeed she really was). The hubbub of sound drew Maurice and the actresses into the room again, and then Monsieur Cartier got on to the piano-stool and played an imitation of Jean, just to show him where his faults were, and it was quite screamingly funny, and not at all unkind, because everyone took Jean into the joke and chaffed him unmercifully in the jolliest, friendliest way, as if they were all schoolboys together, but none of them praised him and said flattering things. They took him far too seriously for that. Maurice clapped him on the back, and the actresses made eloquent eyes at him, when they thought Liane couldn’t see them. And Liane found out, and there would have been terrible trouble, only that Liane discovered that Jean hadn’t known they were in the room; how could he look at anyone but her? Which made everyone begin laughing except the two actresses, who were naturally a little annoyed.

And Jean was so glad, so relieved, and so bewildered with their friendliness that for the first time in his life he got very drunk indeed, and Liane and the two other ladies, with the help of Maurice, who had at last begun to enjoy himself, had to put him to bed in the flat, where he fell happily asleep to the sound of immoderate laughter, and it was no wonder that the head clerk spoke to the Director about Jean’s appearance at twelve o’clock on the following morning.

It was really a very happy time if one swallowed the bad moments quickly and ran on fast enough into the good ones. Monsieur Jacques Cartier gave Jean lessons every Sunday morning for nothing, and the other men were always sending him tickets when they were going to perform, and often asking him to play for them. It was a fascinating world, but none of it meant money, and all of it meant life. So that at the end of just six months in Paris, neither the Curé nor the doctor would have recognized Jean. Miss Prenderghast might have done so, because she had made up her mind that Jean was going to change very much, and that all of it would be for the worse.

Chapter VIII

LIANE was not fond of preliminaries. She considered that life was short and that love was infinitely shorter, and she thought that the best plan with both was to live in the present.

Jean perplexed and amused her; he adored her ardently and blindly, and yet he seemed reluctant to give himself up to the elements which drew him. He was caught off his feet, but he struggled and fought with the power that held him. He had scruples and he wanted time. Liane gave him no time and she laughed immoderately at his scruples.

“You do not deceive your friend, _mon ami_,” she said one night as they were returning from the theatre. “If there is any deception on hand, it is certainly my own. But, I assure you, your friend Maurice does not consider me a nun, as you appear to do. I do not know that I have given him, or you either, any reason to suppose that I find myself at home in a convent! He is a man of the world, the good Maurice, at least he wishes to be thought so. _Bon!_ he must accept the world. It is doubtless as the good God made it, and he did not make it expressly for the _jeune fille_! In Paris we get out of it what we can. Maurice is the size of his income, neither larger nor smaller, and I give him his money’s worth, rest assured! Why should I give him more? He is not an object of charity! For myself I am an artist; I should bore myself prettily if I sat and pined all day for your little man of the world! I need a friend who is also an artist. It is you to-day; I remind you, though you do not like it, that there have been yesterdays, and that if you are not very good, there will be to-morrows.”

Jean closed his eyes. He hated what Liane was saying, and he thought if he shut his eyes he might not see her words. He loved Liane best when he was away from her and she could not disfigure herself in his eyes; when he was in his dark and lonely little room, and could feel a passionate impatience and disgust with Maurice, his old hero--who had long ago ceased to be a hero in Paris, where young man at twenty-five, with moustaches, self-importance, and a sense of life were not particularly rare.

But when Jean found himself with Liane in Maurice’s motor, he was apt to feel the disgust and impatience with himself, instead of with Maurice, and he was far too proud to like to feel himself to blame. Liane saw this quite plainly, even though she did not understand it. To-night she had decided to cure it. She laid her hand on his arm.

“_Alors_,” she whispered, “is it for me to tell you to profit by to-day? I give you all that an artist should give an artist; but, Jean, that is not all I have to give!”

Jean’s eyes were drawn to her face; she knew that was the way to make him forget all inconvenient ideas; and he forgot them. He looked at her and everything vanished, the cold of the night around them, the flashing lights, the swift, sharp cries of the streets, the softened whirr and buzz of the passing cars, the houses, those sheltered screens of human life, standing between them and the sky--all these outer things, and all the inner things too, Jean’s scruples and his struggles, his reluctance, and the safeguard of his pride, failed and fell away from him, under the spell of Liane’s eyes. A hard compulsion came upon him; at that moment he ceased to worship Liane, he wanted her. He ceased to reflect; he could not speak. He put out his hand and caught hers. He hurt her, but she did not wince; like the girl in the picture, she met his demand with serene, satisfied eyes, waiting for inevitable surrender.

“Maurice is away to-night,” she whispered. Jean followed her into the flat without a word.

The fortnight that followed Jean never cared greatly to recall. There was still the Bank in the daytime; sometimes he fell asleep over his work, but his fellow clerks were very kind; they woke him up and said to each other: “See how he has begun to live, this little one!”

When he was roused, Jean used to shiver and feel horribly sad; at these times he wished that he had never seen Liane; a fierce thirst for loneliness, and freedom for his soul, possessed him; he hungered to shut out Liane’s face and get back to his piano, his empty room, and the liberty of his dreams. The long, dull day cramped and stiffened him, and the money that ran through his hands seemed to his nervous fancy to stain them like an unclean thing. It was as if in its monotonous reiteration it spelt Liane. It was for her that it came there, for her that it increased, and then ran back into the streets of Paris, a golden, sordid stream. The sound of the money made Jean yearn for the sound and smell of the earth at St. Jouin, for the clean air and sweet loneliness of the woods. But when evening fell and the lights came out, and Paris awoke, when the streets filled with the stir of a well-dressed, living throng, then Jean’s heart quickened, and the Bank and St. Jouin, and even the piano and its dreams, sank back into a hidden place in his soul, and he became the happiest and gayest young man in Paris, inconceivably loved by the most splendid woman in the world.

It was not possible that he could wholly succeed in hiding from Liane his intense separation of spirit. She knew, indeed, extremely little about spirit, but on the other hand she knew a great deal about lovers, and it did not escape her that Jean had, at moments, the power of estranging himself from her possession. At the end of the fortnight Maurice returned from the provinces, and Jean explained to Liane in her dressing-room at the Odéon that he had met Maurice.

“Well,” said Liane impatiently. “I do not see anything very extraordinary in that. I have also met him, _mon cher_; what then?”

“But you must not meet him again, Liane, not now,” said Jean quietly. “You say the flat is your own, so I shall not ask you to leave it, but you must not allow Maurice to visit you there again.”

Liane was silent a moment from sheer astonishment. It was true that with a desire to spare Jean’s feelings she had told him the flat was her own. It was equally true that it was not--not in the sense in which she had led Jean to believe it to be.

“Must not, Jean!” she repeated, laying down her powder-puff and regarding him with blank amazement. “Are you mad? What has this poor Maurice done, then, that I am not to receive him?”

“Liane! Liane!” cried Jean, taking both her hands in his. “Why do you pretend that you do not understand me? You do! you do! you do!”

Liane withdrew her hands and returned to her powder-puff.

“You are absurd,” she said coldly. “Do not enrage me with your virtues from the provinces. I will not be taught how to live by a chicken whose shell I have just broken. I shall receive whom I like when I like. One would think, Monsieur, that I was your wife. Let me hear no more of these impertinences!”

Jean went to the window and opened it; something in his brain seemed to be burning to escape; he felt hot, savage, and reckless. No, she was not his wife; he supposed if she were he might have trusted her, he might have respected her. As it was, he did not, he hated her. All his heart seemed filled with a hard exasperation. When he turned to face her again, his eyes were fierce.

“I told him he could not come,” he said; “if you receive him you do it at your own risk.”

“You told Maurice--told him he could not come?” Liane gasped.

“I told him you must choose between us,” Jean continued doggedly. “I know he has all the things I have not got. I have nothing to offer you--yes, that is true. You see me here, Liane; how much do you suppose I have in my pocket? I think I have three francs. Well, it is all I shall have till the end of the month. Maurice is, I believe, rich; but there is one thing I have which I will not give up, and that is my pride. Now which is it to be, tell me. If it is Maurice, I go!”

Liane contrived to stare at him for a moment without speaking. She could say a good deal, but she was not going to say any of it at present. Jean with his ardent eyes full of fire and tears charmed her jaded senses. He was a new experience, she valued him. As for Maurice, that was another story. She could, she fancied, make some arrangement about Maurice. He would not cry for the moon, and she could manage for him to have something short of that commodity. As far as Jean was concerned, it was quite unnecessary that he should know anything about her arrangements. The blank look passed out of her eyes, she opened her arms to him and he knelt beside her, a child in her hands, trembling with distress at his own temerity.

“Only trust me, Jean,” she whispered. “You do trust me?”

“You won’t see him, Liane?”

“Selfish little boy, to please you then--no.”

Jean gave a long sigh of relief. Where was his hatred now? His bitter antagonism? that feeling in his heart of remorseless hardness? It seemed impossible that they had ever existed and incredible that they should ever exist again; but even now they were only hidden, like the sharp teeth of rocks covered for the moment by the rush of the incoming tide.

Liane carried out a suitable arrangement, and Jean believed that she had obeyed him; it made him extraordinarily humble and tender with her; he could not do enough to show his gratitude; and Liane was not always easy to serve, she required so much and she had a most terrible temper. Jean set himself to please her with an almost feminine gentleness and tact. He did not ask from her refined sensibilities or quick perceptions. He called her to himself a great artist, and he made himself believe that this excused everything.

He was very young and he loved her, and the young cannot love without the divine fire. They must look for their vine to bring forth grapes, and when it brings forth wild grapes they shut their eyes.

They will believe in beauty though they must go blind to keep their vision; they would rather enter into the kingdom of heaven maimed than know it is not the kingdom of heaven.

Jean persisted in believing in Liane in spite of Liane, but sometimes she made it very hard for him.

“There is still an arrangement we must make,” she said to him one day. “I cannot have anyone going about with me who is dressed like a piano-tuner. You carry yourself well, it is true. You have the good little air which says: ‘I own myself,’ but that is not enough when you are with me. It is necessary that you show a great deal more importance, you must, in short, look as if you owned me! and for that, _mon cher_, you will require clothes. I cannot put a placard on your back--‘_I beseech you, here is a man who is about to become a great musician; refrain from regarding his cravat!_’ And I will not be seen with a nobody! In Paris it is necessary to have a note, a tone, to express one’s self in such a way that the world cannot readily overlook you.”

Jean looked dogged, he did not wish to say he was too poor. He had already been forced into this confession rather frequently by Liane, who never understood anything about money, except that you spent it--yours or any one else’s--like water, and that when it was finished you made yourself excessively agreeable or disagreeable (according to the requirements of the case) till you were given more. There is more than one way of paying for your fun, and since Jean’s pockets were empty, he had had to pay for it lately with his pride, and he had several times made a stand about the price. He did not like supping here and there and everywhere at enormous expense, for which Liane paid; he did not like the invariable use of the expensive motor, and Liane never walked a step and never used anything else. He did not like his position as the man who carried things, shared things, bought things, and for none of which his whole salary (he had just been started on a hundred francs a month) would have covered the tips for one busy night. Cravats and tie-pins he had hardly seen his way to escape, but he drew the line at a silk hat for the Opera, and a new suit, and took the first opportunity during a short afternoon’s shopping to say so.

Liane stared at him.

“_Pourquoi, mon ami?_” she said, in a voice of toneless gentleness, which Jean had learned to dread as the preliminary of a rising fury.

“_Pourquoi pas?_” And she went out of the shop where she had turned over everything and bought nothing--she was a difficult shopper--with the air of a tragedy queen.

If she would only be angry, Jean thought he might manage to keep the little golden coin of his pride, but she wasn’t only angry. She was angry at first, splendidly, furiously angry, till she saw it was no use. Then she melted and entreated Jean with that flexible, dramatic tenderness which attacks all the weak places in a man’s heart and tyrannizes over them; but still Jean held out. She made him feel that he was a brute and know that he was a fool, but he clung to his pride and faced her with drawn lips and haggard eyes.

“Please, please don’t tempt me, Liane,” he pleaded. “I literally haven’t a penny except some money, a very small sum, my mother left me, which I have promised to keep intact for an emergency. You don’t want me to use that? I don’t even know if I legally can, and you certainly can’t suppose that I will accept clothes from you. It’s just like you to be generous enough to offer anything you have, but it would be impossible for me to take it. I know I’m not very smart, my poor Liane, but try to put up with me as I am! Perhaps I shall make something by playing soon, and every bit of it shall go to a jeweller for you, and a tailor for me; only have patience.”

Unfortunately Jean asked Liane for the quality she most despised and least possessed.

“So you will not even do this one little thing for me?” she said, gazing tragically in front of her.

“I would do anything in all the world for you, Liane,” said Jean, his voice trembling, “but I can’t take money!”

Liane flung her pathos from her as if it were an old shoe.

“Bah!” she said. “That same old story, then! The things a man will do for you! How often have I not heard them! _Hein!_ What are they, _mon ami_? First, die for me! You would naturally put this first, as it is the last thing I should ask of you! It is true you could die for me in any old suit, but how would it profit me? I am not a cannibal, nor am I a murderer. I do not desire the death of my friends! It would not contribute, this sacrifice of yours, anything to my safety, my comfort or my amusement! Anything! I again ask you--will you give up your Bank for me? No! You have already said that you cannot risk having no profession. I do not know what you call ten sous a month, but it appears that it may pass for a profession. You cannot offer me money--you have not got it. Talent? You will not use it. Beauty? Your friend Maurice with his ox eyes, his butcher’s moustache, his figure enlaced, presents something better to the eye than you. What then? Your wit? My poor Jean, you have just given me, it seems, a specimen. Pardon me if I prefer my own. You have not the sense to see that there are only two things worth having--money and life--and that one pays for the other! What can you do for me, then? I will tell you. You can take things when I want you to take them! But that, it seems at present, you can only do when you yourself want them! You are willing enough to take my time, for example, and also what you are so good as to call my charms? I introduce you into the artist world, I lift you here, I lift you there, I carry you about, I get myself even laughed at. They say: ‘The good Liane has turned nursemaid; behold how she trains her little one!’ I ask in return what? That you should not go about with me in rags from a country village. No, I do not care if the chauffeur hears or not--yes, rags! Yes! I say a suit left over from the year of your first Communion, and you say ‘No! this I will not do; this goes too far; this risks too much!’----”

“Liane,” entreated Jean. “The people on the pavement, everyone is staring at us!” Liane was enjoying herself. What if everyone was staring at them? She preferred an audience. She did not lower her tone at all as she continued:

“_Mon ami_, I am very reasonable. I am very calm, I am quite patient, _moi_! I say only this--” and she made a superb gesture with her hands which took in half the Bois de Boulogne, through which they were dashing at a magnificent pace, “which of us two is it, then, who asks too much?”

Jean capitulated. He answered that he would try and draw out the sum his mother had left for the special emergency.

Liane became pacific; they would dismount, she said, and take a stroll in the Bois, where they would have tea--the whole world was out this afternoon.

She did not at all mind what money Jean used, the great thing was that they should both be well dressed and that she should have what she wanted without any dispute about it.

“Now, _mon ami_, are you happy?” she asked Jean, with the acquired sublimity of the Liane smile as she led the way under the sun-touched, wintry trees of the Bois. Jean could not honestly say that he was happy, but he was at least glad that Liane should be so. Lately, he was beginning to realize that the desire to appease her was taking the place of finding in her his own tremendous joy. Instead of rapture at the miracle of her presence he felt relief if they succeeded in spending a peaceful hour together; and once or twice he had not been quite sure that the relief was due to the peace so much as to the fact that the hour was over, and he could go back once more to his stolen moments at the piano, the only free ones of his life. He began to think, too, more good-naturedly of Maurice, and less--very much less--proudly of himself; but he still thought that he loved Liane. It takes a great deal to kill love, for after the glory of the individual has faded, there still remains the inmost unquenchable fire--the love of love. Perhaps it would not be true to say that Jean still loved Liane. She had very much disgusted and distressed him, but she could still make him love love, and while she could do that there was no real danger of his escaping her.

Chapter IX

IT was the night of the presentation of Liane’s new play. Jean sat down on a box in one of the wings; he could see part of the sloping stage from where he sat, and far up above him in the distance the pale gleam of the footlights, with now and then the graceful sweep of a woman’s dress.

He heard without listening to the words the sound of Liane’s rich, penetrating voice; it did not seem to him as sweet as usual. There was a strange sense of fatigue and bitterness upon him to-night, in the moments when he had time to think, his life seemed cheap, he could not forgive the world its failure to meet his passionate expectations. It was not remorse that possessed him, but the revolt of the soul against the senses, which is sometimes more bitter even than remorse.

Had he reached the truth, he asked himself, about Maurice? Surely Liane had kept her promise not to see him again? But had she? Did people in Liane’s world ever keep their promises?

For the moment Jean shrank from asking her, he dared not put his love to the test of her possible treachery; it seemed to Jean like undermining something already frail. He was sick of the great foyer of the Odéon--everyone had business there but himself. He had to stand aside while the stage carpenters made their way here and there in the busy scene-shifting foyer behind him, pulling great planks forward, or manipulating yards of rope with one hand while they pushed the next scene’s furniture further forward with the other. The supers hung about, giggling as loud as they dared, and every now and then, one of the more important artists swept in and out of the distant dressing-rooms.

A voice sounded at Jean’s shoulder; it was low, but pitilessly distinct and sharp, “_Voyons_ Selba,” it said, “we have gone through this before, and I am telling you now for the last time, I cannot employ an untrained voice here. It is not any use for you to say you cannot afford to have it trained; you have lived long enough in Paris to know that is not true. There are Marcet and Dubarras--have they not both made you offers? _Eh bien!_ accept, then, one of them. Accept, or leave my company. I am giving you this one more chance because there are qualities in your voice that please; it is a pity, too, for so young a girl to throw away a career. Go to Torialli or Barrière and learn the new part. Do not dare to come here again without an idea and stand up on the stage like a charity-school girl saying her prayers!

“I tell you, my girl, this is Paris! This is a theatre! You don’t come here to be prepared for your first Communion. I do not care whom it is, it is all one to me, Marcet or Dubarras, take your choice. But you must have money, you must have lessons. Now pull yourself together--there is your first call--go!”

Jean recognized that it was the voice of Monsieur Picot, the Régisseur of the Odéon. He turned his head to see to whom the succinct advice had been given, and saw just behind him the small figure of what seemed to him to be a little child. In another moment Jean saw that she was, after all a grown-up young girl, but her obvious fear, her tiny stature, the great fawn-like eyes, the freshness and innocence of the round little face were astonishingly out of place in the Odéon. She did not see Jean. She looked over her shoulder at the manager, who had turned his attention to a clumsy scene shifter. “_Mais_ Monsieur,” she whispered, stammering and trembling, on the verge of tears. Monsieur Picot turned his back and walked away. A second sharp electric bell rang out her call, she drew herself together, and hurried past Jean on to the stage.

Jean leaned forward, excited and curious; who was this little girl with her untouched bloom and her frightened eyes?

He caught a glimpse of the huge stage and Liane standing with easy majesty, her head bent low, her smile fixed, heavily rouged and over-emphasized. He could not see Margot Selba, but in a moment he heard her; her voice rose against the heavy background of light and heat, the thick scents and the rich, dead gleam of jewelled stuffs, like the voice of a bird when spring is young. It seemed the only living thing in a dead world to Jean. The tears came to his eyes as he listened, good, honest tears, that washed away the bitter sense of degradation from his heart. He felt himself back in the country again, with the freedom of the fields before him and the greater freedom of his own unstained, innocent heart. The song ceased, and Liane’s powerful voice took its place, showy, flexible, practised. She did what she liked with it and the scene before her, but it seemed to Jean like the change from a hillside into a hothouse. The girl crept back into the wings again; no one took any notice of her; she found a corner where an old box had been left by the scene-shifters, and then she crouched down on it, burying her face in her hands.

Jean moved quickly towards her.

“Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle,” he whispered, “do not cry so, do not be distressed--tell me about your troubles?”

The child lifted her head with a frightened movement.

“It is nothing, it is nothing,” she muttered between her trembling lips.

But Jean sat down on the box beside her, and would not be denied. “It is not nothing,” he said firmly, “that you are here in trouble and alone! It is not nothing that you, who are no more than a child, should be spoken to as I have heard Monsieur Picot speak to you to-night. _Mon Dieu!_ I had no idea such infamies could go on here in Paris! Mademoiselle, I implore you, trust me! Speak to me, tell me what I can do for you, and believe that is the only advantage I will take of your confidence.”

“Help me, Monsieur?” asked Margot, sitting up straight and regarding this strange young man with wide-open, astonished eyes. “Why, what should you do for me? Are you not a friend of de Brances?”

Jean shook his head impatiently. “What difference does that make?” he exclaimed. “Am I not a man and an artist; do you suppose all men are inhuman and monstrous like that _crétin_ who spoke to you just now? My poor child, I will prove to you that all are not!”

“No, no,” said Margot quickly, “indeed I do not think it. I know that you, Monsieur, are for certain different. You have not seen me before, perhaps, but I have seen you often; you are not like the other gentlemen who come here and never leave us alone. I have often wondered what you came here for, but of course de Brances has many friends who like to see her on the stage, some of them may be--” Margot hesitated; it looked a little ungracious to admit to a friend of de Brances that some few of that lady’s intimates might behave with tolerable decency behind her back!--“may be artists,” she finished instead, “and that makes always for a kind of sympathy.”

“I am a musician,” said Jean with emphasis.

“A musician,” echoed Margot very softly.

“And I am very poor,” Jean continued, “I am a struggling artist!”

Jean announced this statement as if it were a proclamation of ascent to the throne. He succeeded in startling Margot, to whom, however, poverty did not appear to have quite the same meritorious halo that it wore to Jean’s less accustomed eyes. But then Margot knew what real poverty meant.

“But that is a misfortune for Monsieur,” she said gently.

“No, it is not,” replied Jean impatiently; “if I were not poor I could not offer to help you, you would very justly refuse me; but now I have a plan that I think you will be willing to accept.”

Margot’s eyes grew rounder and rounder; she was not quite sure that this strange and attractive gentleman sitting on the box beside her was sane, but she was quite sure that he was kind, and that it was extraordinarily interesting to listen to him. Margot thought he must be rather like an angel; but it is possible that Margot would have felt uncertain how practical an angel’s plan would be for Paris. She knew her Paris, and she did not fancy that the heavenly powers made much of a success there.

“Monsieur has a plan, then?” she murmured.

“I must explain myself,” said Jean, leaning forward with intense excitement, and stabbing the air with his forefinger. “I have said that I am a musician! More than that, I am the only kind of musician who can help you! When I came to Paris six months ago I met Cartier. You must have heard of him, his touch is famous in Paris--you’ll have to know him--there is a man who has a soul of gold! He gave me lessons for which he never charged me a penny, and then he sent me out to listen to all the best singers in Paris. He told me to study a method of teaching, and how to accompany the voice; he gave me introductions to several singers, and I have already accompanied Lucien le Page and Madame du Buissant. _Enfin!_ I have fitted myself to train a voice. That is what you need, is it not? Very well then, I will give up my Bank and train yours!”

“Pardon, Monsieur, your Bank?” exclaimed Margot. “What Bank?”

“It is nothing,” said Jean, with great calmness. “It happens to be my profession at the moment, but I have been meaning to give it up for some time. Now it is done! You will trust your voice to me? You consider my plan good?”

Margot gasped. “But, Monsieur,” she said, “I am not rich! I am not a Bank! I would gladly let you train my voice if I could afford to pay you for it; but alas, it is just there that your plan breaks down.”

“Not at all,” said Jean impatiently. “If I make your voice a success that will bring me into notice. It is a bargain, it is purely business, I assure you. Money--what is money? There will be no difficulty about that--what I want is fame.”

“But, Monsieur, meanwhile you must live,” expostulated Margot.

Jean looked annoyed; for a moment he was not sure that Margot was really an artist.

“That will arrange itself,” he said indifferently; “the great thing is we are agreed upon my plan?”

Margot hesitated, then she suggested a compromise; if Jean really didn’t care about the money, and since nothing would induce her to take up his time and skill without some form of a return, would he care to occupy her mother’s free room in their little apartment which had just been vacated by a theological student? It was really very convenient, as they were so high up he could practise as much as he liked. He would of course take the room for nothing, and she would then feel free to accept his lessons.

Still Margot urged him very forcibly not to give up the Bank. She seemed to attach an absurd importance to what Jean felt to be an overrated institution. Jean was in the mood for renunciation, and it seemed to him a small thing to burn this particular boat; he was in the act of wishing he could burn a larger one when Margot exclaimed:

“Ah! here comes Madame de Brances. _O ciel!_ What a splendid creature she is! Do you think we are in her way?”

Jean did not answer Margot, he was looking at Liane. Yes, there was no doubt that Liane looked splendid. She was advancing towards them like some stately Atlantic liner bearing down upon a small sea tramp, serenely conscious of her powers. She swept towards them, her lips set and her great bisque-fringed eyes shining like figured Chinese lanterns under the tightened rope of her marked eyebrows. Jean glanced from one woman to the other. Margot looked like an unformed child beside Liane; she huddled a little awkwardly on her wooden box, the colour going and coming in her round cheeks. She had no weapons to match the finished vision before her, nothing but the honesty of her heart, and yet to Jean that one small jewel outshone the whole golden argosy bearing down relentlessly upon them. At least, for the moment Jean thought it did. Meanwhile, even in that moment of recognition, he slipped back into the mire. Liane leaned forward a little as she reached them; she seemed to gather Jean up and hold him in her passionate deep eyes, those terrible possessive eyes that knew how, not in vain, to slip the