Part 45 (2/2)

”I do want it-I happen to want it.” And her light laugh, with which she glanced at me, was like the flutter of some gage of battle.

The grace of this demonstration, in itself marked, suggested that there were various relations in which one might stand to Miss Ruck; but I felt that the sharpest of the strain would come on the paternal. ”Don't worry the poor child,” said her mother.

She took it sharply up. ”Come on, mother.”

”We're going to look round a little,” the elder lady explained to me by way of taking leave.

”I know what that means,” their companion dropped as they moved away. He stood looking at them while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and rubbed it with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr.

Ruck's.) I supposed him about to exhale some plaint, but I was mistaken.

Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was a touching fatalist. ”Well, they want to pick up something,” he contented himself with recognising. ”That's the princ.i.p.al interest for ladies.”

IV

He distinguished me, as the French say; he honoured me with his esteem and, as the days elapsed, with no small share of his confidence.

Sometimes he bored me a little, for the tone of his conversation was not cheerful, tending as it did almost exclusively to a melancholy dirge over the financial prostration of our common country. ”No, sir, business in the United States is not what it once was,” he found occasion to remark several times a day. ”There's not the same spring-there's not the same hopeful feeling. You can see it in all departments.” He used to sit by the hour in the little garden of the pension with a roll of American newspapers in his lap and his high hat pushed back, swinging one of his long legs and reading the _New York Herald_. He paid a daily visit to the American banker's on the other side of the Rhone and remained there a long time, turning over the old papers on the green velvet table in the centre of the Salon des Etrangers and fraternising with chance compatriots. But in spite of these diversions the time was heavy on his hands. I used at times to propose him a walk, but he had a mortal horror of any use of his legs other than endlessly dangling or crossing them, and regarded my direct employment of my own as a morbid form of activity.

”You'll kill yourself if you don't look out,” he said, ”walking all over the country. I don't want to stump round that way-I ain't a postman!”

Briefly speaking, Mr. Ruck had few resources. His wife and daughter, on the other hand, it was to be supposed, were possessed of a good many that couldn't be apparent to an un.o.btrusive young man. They also sat a great deal in the garden or in the salon, side by side, with folded hands, taking in, to vague ends, material objects, and were remarkably independent of most of the usual feminine aids to idleness-light literature, tapestry, the use of the piano. They lent themselves to complete displacement, however, much more than their companion, and I often met them, in the Rue du Rhone and on the quays, loitering in front of the jewellers' windows. They might have had a cavalier in the person of old M. Pigeonneau, who professed a high appreciation of their charms, but who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived, in the connexion, of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs.

Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently the language of conversation.

”They have a tournure de princesse-a distinction supreme,” he said to me.

”One's surprised to find them in a little pension bourgeoise at seven francs a day.”

”Oh they don't come for economy. They must be rich.”

”They don't come for my beaux yeux-for mine,” said M. Pigeonneau sadly.

”Perhaps it's for yours, young man. Je vous recommande la maman!”

I considered the case. ”They came on account of Mr. Ruck because at hotels he's so restless.”

M. Pigeonneau gave me a knowing nod. ”Of course he is, with such a wife as that!-a femme superbe. She's preserved in perfection-a miraculous fraicheur. I like those large, fair, quiet women; they're often, dans l'intimite, the most agreeable. I'll warrant you that at heart Madame Roque is a finished coquette.” And then as I demurred: ”You suppose her cold? Ne vous y fiez pas!”

”It's a matter in which I've nothing at stake.”

”You young Americans are droll,” said M. Pigeonneau; ”you never have anything at stake! But the little one, for example; I'll warrant you she's not cold. Toute menue as she is she's admirably made.”

”She's very pretty.”

”'She's very pretty'! Vous dites cela d'un ton! When you pay compliments to Mees Roque I hope that's not the way you do it.”

”I don't pay compliments to Miss Ruck.”

”Ah, decidedly,” said M. Pigeonneau, ”you young Americans are droll!”

I should have suspected that these two ladies wouldn't especially commend themselves to Madame Beaurepas; that as a maitresse de salon, which she in some degree aspired to be, she would have found them wanting in a certain colloquial ease. But I should have gone quite wrong: Madame Beaurepas had no fault at all to find with her new pensionnaires. ”I've no observation whatever to make about them,” she said to me one evening.

”I see nothing in those ladies at all deplace. They don't complain of anything; they don't meddle; they take what's given them; they leave me tranquil. The Americans are often like that. Often, but not always,”

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