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The Guest of Quesnay, a novel by Booth Tarkington |
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Chapter 11 |
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_ CHAPTER XI The dining-room at Quesnay is a pretty work of the second of those three Louises who made so much furniture. It was never a proper setting for a rusty, out-of-doors painter-man, nor has such a fellow ever found himself complacently at ease there since the day its first banquet was spread for a score or so of fine-feathered epigram jinglers, fiddling Versailles gossip out of a rouge-and-lace Quesnay marquise newly sent into half-earnest banishment for too much king-hunting. For my part, however, I should have preferred a chance at making a place for myself among the wigs and brocades to the Crusoe's Isle of my chair at Miss Elizabeth's table. I learned at an early age to look my vanities in the face; I outfaced them and they quailed, but persisted, surviving for my discomfort to this day. Here is the confession: It was not until my arrival at the chateau that I realised what temerity it involved to dine there in evening clothes purchased, some four or five or six years previously, in the economical neighbourhood of the Boulevard St. Michel. Yet the things fitted me well enough; were clean and not shiny, having been worn no more than a dozen times, I think; though they might have been better pressed. Looking over the men of the Quesnay party--or perhaps I should signify a reversal of that and say a glance of theirs at me--revealed the importance of a particular length of coat-tail, of a certain rich effect obtained by widely separating the lower points of the waistcoat, of the display of some imagination in the buttons upon the same garment, of a doubled-back arrangement of cuffs, and of a specific design and dimension of tie. Marked uniformity in these matters denoted their necessity; and clothes differing from the essential so vitally as did mine must have seemed immodest, little better than no clothes at all. I doubt if I could have argued in extenuation my lack of advantages for study, such an excuse being itself the damning circumstance. Of course eccentricity is permitted, but (as in the Arts) only to the established. And I recall a painful change of colour which befell the countenance of a shining young man I met at Ward's house in Paris: he had used his handkerchief and was absently putting it in his pocket when he providentially noticed what he was doing and restored it to his sleeve. Miss Elizabeth had the courage to take me under her wing, placing me upon her left at dinner; but sprightlier calls than mine demanded and occupied her attention. At my other side sat a magnificently upholstered lady, who offered a fine shoulder and the rear wall of a collar of pearls for my observation throughout the evening, as she leaned forward talking eagerly with a male personage across the table. This was a prince, ending in "ski": he permitted himself the slight vagary of wearing a gold bracelet, and perhaps this flavour of romance drew the lady. Had my good fortune ever granted a second meeting, I should not have known her. Fragments reaching me in my seclusion indicated that the various conversations up and down the long table were animated; and at times some topic proved of such high interest as to engage the comment of the whole company. This was the case when the age of one of the English king's grandchildren came in question, but a subject which called for even longer (if less spirited) discourse concerned the shameful lack of standard on the part of citizens of the United States, or, as it was put, with no little exasperation, "What is the trouble with America?" Hereupon brightly gleamed the fat young man whom I had marked for a wit at Les Trois Pigeons; he pictured with inimitable mimicry a western senator lately in France. This outcast, it appeared, had worn a slouch hat at a garden party and had otherwise betrayed his country to the ridicule of the intelligent. "But really," said the fat young man, turning plaintiff in conclusion, "imagine what such things make the English and the French think of US!" And it finally went by consent that the trouble with America was the vulgarity of our tourists. "A dreadful lot!" Miss Elizabeth cheerfully summed up for them all. "The miseries I undergo with that class of 'prominent Amurricans' who bring letters to my brother! I remember one awful creature who said, when I came into the room, 'Well, ma'am, I guess you're the lady of the house, aren't you?'" Miss Elizabeth sparkled through the chorus of laughter, but I remembered the "awful creature," a genial and wise old man of affairs, whose daughter's portrait George painted. Miss Elizabeth had missed his point: the canvasser's phrase had been intended with humour, and even had it lacked that, it was not without a pretty quaintness. So I thought, being "left to my own reflections," which may have partaken of my own special kind of snobbery; at least I regretted the Elizabeth of the morning garden and the early walk along the fringe of the woods. For she at my side to-night was another lady. The banquet was drawing to a close when she leaned toward me and spoke in an undertone. As this was the first sign, in so protracted a period, that I might ever again establish relations with the world of men, it came upon me like a Friday's footprint, and in the moment of shock I did not catch what she said. "Anne Elliott, yonder, is asking you a question," she repeated, nodding at a very pretty gal down and across the table from me. Miss Anne Elliott's attractive voice had previously enabled me to recognise her as the young woman who had threatened to serenade Les Trois Pigeons. "I beg your pardon," I said, addressing her, and at the sound my obscurity was illuminated, about half of the company turning to look at me with wide-eyed surprise. (I spoke in an ordinary tone, it may need to be explained, and there is nothing remarkable about my voice). "I hear you're at Les Trois Pigeons," said Miss Elliott. "Yes?" "WOULD you mind telling us something of the MYSTERIOUS Narcissus?" "If you'll be more definite," I returned, in the tone of a question. "There couldn't be more than one like THAT," said Miss Elliott, "at least, not in one neighbourhood, could there? I mean a RECKLESSLY charming vision with a WHITE tie and WHITE hair and WHITE flannels." "Oh," said I, "HE'S not mysterious." "But he IS," she returned; "I insist on his being MYSTERIOUS! Rarely, grandly, STRANGELY mysterious! You WILL let me think so?" This young lady had a whimsical manner of emphasising words unexpectedly, with a breathless intensity that approached violence, a habit dangerously contagious among nervous persons, so that I answered slowly, out of a fear that I might echo it. "It would need a great deal of imagination. He's a young American, very attractive, very simple--" "But he's MAD!" she interrupted. "Oh, no!" I said hastily. "But he IS! A person told me so in a garden this VERY afternoon," she went on eagerly; "a person with a rake and EVER so many moles on his chin. This person told me all about him. His name is Oliver Saffren, and he's in the charge of a VERY large doctor and quite, QUITE mad!" "Jean Ferret, the gardener." I said deliberately, and with venom, "is fast acquiring notoriety in these parts as an idiot of purest ray, and he had his information from another whose continuance unhanged is every hour more miraculous." "How RUTHLESS of you," cried Miss Elliott, with exaggerated reproach, "when I have had such a thrilling happiness all day in believing that RIOTOUSLY beautiful creature mad! You are wholly positive he isn't?" Our dialogue was now all that delayed a general departure from the table. This, combined with the naive surprise I have mentioned, served to make us temporarily the centre of attention, and, among the faces turned toward me, my glance fell unexpectedly upon one I had not seen since entering the dining-room. Mrs. Harman had been placed at some distance from me and on the same side of the table, but now she leaned far back in her chair to look at me, so that I saw her behind the shoulders of the people between us. She was watching me with an expression unmistakably of repressed anxiety and excitement, and as our eyes met, hers shone with a certain agitation, as of some odd consciousness shared with me. It was so strangely, suddenly a reminder of the look of secret understanding given me with good night, twenty- four hours earlier, by the man whose sanity was Miss Elliott's topic, that, puzzled and almost disconcerted for the moment, I did not at once reply to the lively young lady's question. "You're hesitating!" she cried, clasping her hands. "I believe there's a DARLING little chance of it, after all! And if it weren't so, why would he need to be watched over, day AND night, by an ENORMOUS doctor?" "This IS romance!" I retorted. "The doctor is Professor Keredec, illustriously known in this country, but not as a physician, and they are following some form of scientific research together, I believe. But, assuming to speak as Mr. Saffren's friend," I added, rising with the others upon Miss Ward's example, "I'm sure if he could come to know of your interest, he would much rather play Hamlet for you than let you find him disappointing." "If he could come to know of my interest!" she echoed, glancing down at herself with mock demureness. "Don't you think he could come to know something more of me than that?" The windows had been thrown open, allowing passage to a veranda. Miss Elizabeth led the way outdoors with the prince, the rest of us following at hazard, and in the mild confusion of this withdrawal I caught a final glimpse of Mrs. Harman, which revealed that she was still looking at me with the same tensity; but with the movement of intervening groups I lost her. Miss Elliott pointedly waited for me until I came round the table, attached me definitely by taking my arm, accompanying her action with a dazzling smile. "Oh, DO you think you can manage it?" she whispered rapturously, to which I replied--as vaguely as I could--that the demands of scientific research upon the time of its followers were apt to be exorbitant. Tables and coffee were waiting on the broad terrace below, with a big moon rising in the sky. I descended the steps in charge of this pretty cavalier, allowed her to seat me at the most remote of the tables, and accepted without unwillingness other gallantries of hers in the matter of coffee and cigarettes. "And now," she said, "now that I've done so much for your DEAREST hopes and comfort, look up at the milky moon, and tell me ALL!" "If you can bear it?" She leaned an elbow on the marble railing that protected the terrace, and, shielding her eyes from the moonlight with her hand, affected to gaze at me dramatically. "Have no distrust," she bade me. "Who and WHAT is the glorious stranger?" Resisting an impulse to chime in with her humour, I gave her so dry and commonplace an account of my young friend at the inn that I presently found myself abandoned to solitude again. "I don't know where to go," she complained as she rose. "These other people are MOST painful to a girl of my intelligence, but I cannot linger by your side; untruth long ago lost its interest for me, and I prefer to believe Mr. Jean Ferret--if that is the gentleman's name. I'd join Miss Ward and Cressie Ingle yonder, but Cressie WOULD be indignant! I shall soothe my hurt with SWEETEST airs. Adieu." With that she made me a solemn courtesy and departed, a pretty little figure, not little in attractiveness, the strong moonlight, tinged with blue, shimmering over her blond hair and splashing brightly among the ripples of her silks and laces. She swept across the terrace languidly, offering an effect of comedy not unfairylike, and, ascending the steps of the veranda, disappeared into the orange candle-light of a salon. A moment later some chords were sounded firmly upon a piano in that room, and a bitter song swam out to me over the laughter and talk of the people at the other tables. It was to be observed that Miss Anne Elliott sang very well, though I thought she over-emphasised one line of the stanza: "This world is a world of lies!" Perhaps she had poisoned another little arrow for me, too. Impelled by the fine night, the groups upon the terrace were tending toward a wider dispersal, drifting over the sloping lawns by threes and couples, and I was able to identify two figures threading the paths of the garden, together, some distance below. Judging by the pace they kept, I should have concluded that Miss Ward and Mr. Cresson Ingle sought the healthful effects of exercise. However, I could see no good reason for wishing their conversation less obviously absorbing, though Miss Elliott's insinuation that Mr. Ingle might deplore intrusion upon the interview had struck me as too definite to be altogether pleasing. Still, such matters could not discontent me with my solitude. Eastward, over the moonlit roof of the forest, I could see the quiet ocean, its unending lines of foam moving slowly to the long beaches, too far away to be heard. The reproachful voice of the singer came no more from the house, but the piano ran on into "La Vie de Boheme," and out of that into something else, I did not know what, but it seemed to be music; at least it was musical enough to bring before me some memory of the faces of pretty girls I had danced with long ago in my dancing days, so that, what with the music, and the distant sea, and the soft air, so sparklingly full of moonshine, and the little dancing memories, I was floated off into a reverie that was like a prelude for the person who broke it. She came so quietly that I did not hear her until she was almost beside me and spoke to me. It was the second time that had happened. _ |
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