Part 6 (1/2)
Upon this ”that other monsieur” astonished me in good earnest.
Searching my eyes eagerly with his clear, inquisitive gaze, he took a step toward me and said:
”You are sure you are telling the truth?”
The professor uttered an exclamation of horror, sprang forward, and clutched his friend's arm again. ”Malheureux!” he cried, and then to me: ”Sir, you will give him pardon if you can? He has no meaning to be rude.”
”Rude?” The young man's voice showed both astonishment and pain. ”Was that rude? I didn't know. I didn't mean to be rude, G.o.d knows! Ah,” he said sadly, ”I do nothing but make mistakes. I hope you will forgive me.”
He lifted his hand as if in appeal, and let it drop to his side; and in the action, as well as in the tone of his voice and his att.i.tude of contrition, there was something that reached me suddenly, with the touch of pathos.
”Never mind,” I said. ”I am only sorry that it was the truth.”
”Thank you,” he said, and turned humbly to Keredec.
”Ha, that is better!” shouted the great man, apparently relieved of a vast weight. ”We shall go home now and eat a good dinner. But first--”
his silver-rimmed spectacles twinkled upon me, and he bent his Brobdingnagian back in a bow which against my will reminded me of the curtseys performed by Orloff's dancing bears--”first let me speak some words for myself. My dear sir”--he addressed himself to me with grave formality--”do not suppose I have no realization that other excuses should be made to you. Believe me, they shall be. It is now that I see it is fortunate for us that you are our fellow-innsman at Les Trois Pigeons.”
I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query:
”Why, how did you know that?”
Professor Keredec's laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him.
”Ho, ho, ho!” he shouted. ”But you shall not take me for a window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you!
Ho, ho!”
Then, followed submissively by ”that other monsieur,” he strode into the path and went thundering forth through the forest.
CHAPTER VI
No doubt the most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of Professor Keredec and his singular friend would have been to settle myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting--and that is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting.
I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the phrase, ”seated in a brown study,” I pictured my hero in a brown chair, beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses of ordinary correspondence allowed the occasion for it to remain unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at its mildest, a profound purple.
The confession has been made of my curiosity concerning my fellow-lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, ”What is wrong with him? What is wrong with him?”
This was the sillier inasmuch as the word ”wrong” (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to ”that other monsieur.” There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence--the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know.
Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his nationality; his face was of the lean, right, American structure; but they had hit the relation between the two men: Keredec was the master and ”that other monsieur” the scholar--a pupil studying boys' textbooks and receiving instruction in matters and manners that children are taught. And yet I could not believe him to be a simple case of arrested development. For the matter of that, I did not like to think of him as a ”case” at all. There had been something about his bright youthfulness--perhaps it was his quick contrition for his rudeness, perhaps it was a certain wistful quality he had, perhaps it was his very ”singularity”--which appealed as directly to my liking as it did urgently to my sympathy.
I came out of my vari-coloured study with a start, caused by the discovery that I had absent-mindedly squeezed upon my palette the entire contents of an expensive tube of cobalt violet, for which I had no present use; and sighing (for, of necessity, I am an economical man), I postponed both of my problems till another day, determined to efface the one with a palette knife and a rag soaked in turpentine, and to defer the other until I should know more of my fellow-lodgers at Madame Brossard's.
The turpentine rag at least proved effective; I scoured away the last tokens of my failure with it, wis.h.i.+ng that life were like the canvas and that men had knowledge of the right celestial turpentine. After that I cleaned my brushes, packed and shouldered my kit, and, with a final imprecation upon all sausage-sandwiches, took up my way once more to Les Trois Pigeons.
Presently I came upon an intersecting path where, on my previous excursions, I had always borne to the right; but this evening, thinking to discover a shorter cut, I went straight ahead. Striding along at a good gait and chanting sonorously, ”On Linden when the sun was low,” I left the rougher boscages of the forest behind me and emerged, just at sunset, upon an orderly fringe of woodland where the ground was neat and unenc.u.mbered, and the trimmed trees stood at polite distances, bowing slightly to one another with small, well-bred rustlings.
The light was somewhere between gold and pink when I came into this lady's boudoir of a grove. ”Isar flowing rapidly” ceased its tumult abruptly, and Linden saw no sterner sight that evening: my voice and my feet stopped simultaneously--for I stood upon Quesnay ground.
Before me stretched a short broad avenue of turf, leading to the chateau gates. These stood open, a gravelled driveway climbing thence by easy stages between kempt shrubberies to the crest of the hill, where the gray roof and red chimney-pots of the chateau were glimpsed among the tree-tops. The slope was terraced with strips of flower-gardens and intervals of sward; and against the green of a rising lawn I marked the figure of a woman, pausing to bend over some flowering bush. The figure was too slender to be mistaken for that of the present chatelaine of Quesnay: in Miss Elizabeth's regal amplitude there was never any hint of fragility. The lady upon the slope, then, I concluded, must be Madame d'Armand, the inspiration of Amedee's ”Monsieur has much to live for!”