Part 26 (2/2)

At Emmy's question he laughed, with a wave of his cigarette, and a clank of his bayonet against the leg of the chair. On a sou a day? Time enough for that when he had made his fortune. His mother then would doubtless find him a suitable wife with a dowry. When his military service was over he was going to be a waiter. When he volunteered this bit of information Emmy gave a cry of surprise. This das.h.i.+ng, swaggering desperado of a fellow a waiter!

”I shall never understand this country!” she cried.

”When one has good introductions and knows how to comport oneself, one makes much”--and he rubbed his thumb and fingers together, according to the national code of pantomime.

And then his hosts would tell him about England and the fogs, wherein he was greatly interested; or Septimus would discourse to him of inventions, the weak spot in which his shrewd intelligence generally managed to strike, and then Septimus would run his fingers through this hair and say, ”G.o.d bless my soul, I never thought of that,” and Emmy would laugh; or else they talked politics. Hegisippe, being a Radical, _fiche_'d himself absolutely of the Pope and the priests. To be kind to one's neighbors and act as a good citizen summed up his ethical code. He was as moral as any devout Catholic.

”What about the girl in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers?” asked Emmy.

”If I were a good Catholic, I would have two, for then I could get absolution,” he cried gaily, and laughed immoderately at his jest.

The days of his visits were marked red in Emmy's calendar.

”I wish I were a funny beggar, and had lots of conversation like our friend Cruchot, and could make you laugh,” said Septimus one day, when the _taedium vitae_ lay heavy on her.

”If you had a sense of humor you wouldn't be here,” she replied, with some bitterness.

Septimus rubbed his thin hands together thoughtfully.

”I don't know why you should say that,” said he. ”I never heard a joke I didn't see the point of. I'm rather good at it.”

”If you don't see the point of this joke, I can't explain it, my dear. It has a point the size of a pyramid.”

He nodded and looked dreamily out of the window at the opposite houses.

Sometimes her sharp sayings hurt him. But he understood all, in his dim way, and pardoned all. He never allowed her to see him wince. He stood so long silent that Emmy looked up anxiously at his face, dreading the effect of her words. His hand hung by his side--he was near the sofa where she lay. She took it gently, in a revulsion of feeling, kissed it, and, as he turned, flung it from her.

”Go, my dear; go. I'm not fit to talk to you. Yes, go. You oughtn't to be here; you ought to be in England in your comfortable home with Wiggleswick and your books and inventions. You're too good for me, and I'm hateful. I know it, and it drives me mad.”

He took her hand in his turn and held it for a second or two in both of his and patted it kindly.

”I'll go out and buy something,” he said.

When he returned she was penitent and glad to see him; and although he brought her as a present a hat--a thing of purple feathers and green velvet and roses, in which no self-respecting woman would be seen mummified a thousand years hence--she neither laughed at it nor upbraided him, but tried the horror on before the gla.s.s and smiled sweetly while the cold s.h.i.+vers ran down her back.

”I don't want you to say funny things, Septimus,” she said, reverting to the starting point of the scene, ”so long as you bring me such presents as this.”

”It's a nice hat,” he admitted modestly. ”The woman in the shop said that very few people could wear it.”

”I'm so glad you think I'm an exceptional woman,” she said. ”It's the first compliment you have ever paid me.”

She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart. She slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her soul and the pains of h.e.l.l got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and they became the holy water of an exorcism.

Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, pa.s.sed tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hotel G.o.det. A gleam of sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the _imperiale_, put him on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half invented some years before. The working out of this, and the superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes, occupied much of his time and thought. In matters appertaining to his pa.s.sion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to know where to buy a tooth-brush, and be dependent on the ministrations of a postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as a buffalo heads for water. Many of his books and papers had been sent him from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old villain's leisure. These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and bits of india rubber and the day before yesterday's _Pet.i.t Journal_. The _femme de chambre_ and the dirty, indeterminate man in a green baize ap.r.o.n, who went about raising casual dust with a great feather broom, at first stowed the litter away daily, with jackdaw ingenuity of concealment, until Septimus gave them five francs each to desist; whereupon they desisted with alacrity, and the books became the stepping-stones aforesaid, stepping-stones to higher things. His only concern was the impossibility of repacking them when the time should come for him to leave the Hotel G.o.det, and sometimes the more academic speculation as to what Zora would say should some miracle of levitation transport her to the untidy chamber. He could see her, radiant and commanding, dispelling chaos with the sweep of her parasol.

There were few moments in the day when he did not crave her presence. It had been warmth and suns.h.i.+ne and color to him for so long that now the sun seemed to have disappeared from the sky, leaving the earth a chill monochrome. Life was very difficult without her. She had even withdrawn from him the love ”in a sort of way” to which she had confessed. The G.o.ddess was angry at the slight cast on her by his secret marriage. And she was in California, a myriad of miles away. She could not have been more remote had she been in Saturn. When Emmy asked him whether he did not long for Wiggleswick and the studious calm of Nunsmere, he said, ”No.” And he spoke truly; for wherein lay the advantage of one spot on the earth's surface over another, if Zora were not the light thereof? But he kept his reason in his heart. They rarely spoke of Zora.

Of the things that concerned Emmy herself so deeply, they never spoke at all. Of her hopes and fears for the future he knew nothing. For all that was said between them, Mordaunt Prince might have been the figure of a dream that had vanished into the impenetrable mists of dreamland. To the girl he was a ghastly memory which she strove to hide in the depths of her soul. Septimus saw that she suffered, and went many quaint and irrelevant ways to alleviate her misery. Sometimes they got on her nerves; more often they made the good tears come. Once she was reading a tattered volume of George Eliot which she had picked up during a stroll on the quays, and calling him over to her side pointed out a sentence: ”Dogs are the best friends, they are always ready with their sympathy and they ask no questions.”

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