Part 53 (1/2)

”She really asked you to get the Rucks out of the house?”

”She asked me to tell them that their rooms had been let three months ago to another family. She has an aplomb!”

Mrs. Church's aplomb caused me considerable diversion; I'm not sure that it wasn't in some degree to laugh at my leisure that I went out into the garden that evening to smoke a cigar. The night was dark and not particularly balmy, and most of my fellow pensioners, after dinner, had remained indoors. A long straight walk conducted from the door of the house to the ancient grille I've described, and I stood here for some time looking through the iron bars at the silent empty street. The prospect was not enlivening and I presently turned away. At this moment I saw in the distance the door of the house open and throw a shaft of lamplight into the darkness. Into the lamplight stepped the figure of an apparently circ.u.mspect female, as they say in the old stories, who presently closed the door behind her. She disappeared in the dusk of the garden and I had seen her but an instant; yet I remained under the impression that Aurora Church, on the eve of departure, had come out to commune, like myself, with isolation.

I lingered near the gate, keeping the red tip of my cigar turned toward the house, and before long a slight but interesting figure emerged from among the shadows of the trees and encountered the rays of a lamp that stood just outside the gate. My fellow solitary was in fact Aurora Church, who acknowledged my presence with an impatience not wholly convincing.

”Ought I to retire-to return to the house?”

”If you ought,” I replied, ”I should be very sorry to tell you so.”

”But we're all alone. There's no one else in the garden.”

”It's not the first time, then, that I've been alone with a young lady.

I'm not at all terrified.”

”Ah, but I?” she wailed to extravagance. ”I've _never_ been alone-!”

Quickly, however, she interrupted herself. ”Bon, there's another false note!”

”Yes, I'm obliged to admit that one's very false.”

She stood looking at me. ”I'm going away to-morrow; after that there will be no one to tell me.”

”That will matter little,” I presently returned. ”Telling you will do no good.”

”Ah, why do you say that?” she all ruefully asked.

I said it partly because it was true, but I said it for other reasons, as well, which I found hard to define. Standing there bareheaded in the night air, in the vague light, this young lady took on an extreme interest, which was moreover not diminished by a suspicion on my own part that she had come into the garden knowing me to be there. I thought her charming, I thought her remarkable and felt very sorry for her; but as I looked at her the terms in which Madame Beaurepas had ventured to characterise her recurred to me with a certain force. I had professed a contempt for them at the time, but it now came into my head that perhaps this unfortunately situated, this insidiously mutinous young creature was in quest of an effective preserver. She was certainly not a girl to throw herself at a man's head, but it was possible that in her intense-her almost morbid-desire to render operative an ideal charged perhaps after all with as many fallacies as her mother affirmed, she might do something reckless and irregular-something in which a sympathetic compatriot, as yet unknown, would find his profit. The image, unshaped though it was, of this sympathetic compatriot filled me with a semblance of envy. For some moments I was silent, conscious of these things; after which I answered her question. ”Because some things-some differences-are felt, not learned. To you liberty's not natural; you're like a person who has bought a repeating watch and is, in his satisfaction, constantly taking it out of his pocket to hear it sound. To a real American girl her liberty's a very vulgarly-ticking old clock.”

”Ah, you mean then,” said my young friend, ”that my mother has ruined me?”

”Ruined you?”

”She has so perverted my mind that when I try to be natural I'm necessarily indecent.”

I threw up hopeless arms. ”That again's a false note!”

She turned away. ”I think you're cruel.”

”By no means,” I declared; ”because, for my own taste, I prefer you as-as-”

On my hesitating she turned back. ”As what?”

”As you are!”

She looked at me a while again, and then she said in a little reasoning tone that reminded me of her mother's, only that it was conscious and studied, ”I wasn't aware that I'm under any particular obligation to please you!” But she also gave a clear laugh, quite at variance with this stiffness. Suddenly I thought her adorable.

”Oh there's no obligation,” I said, ”but people sometimes have preferences. I'm very sorry you're going away.”

”What does it matter to you? You are going yourself.”