The Incomplete Amorist Part 21

The Place de la Concorde delighted her with its many lamps and its splendid s.p.a.ce.

"How glorious it would be to live alone in Paris," she thought, "be driven about in cabs just when one liked and where one liked! Oh, I am tired of being a school-girl! I suppose they won't let me be grown up till I'm so old I shall wish I was a school-girl again."

She loved the river with its reflected lights,--but it made her shudder, too.

"Of course I shall never be allowed to see the Morgue," she said; "they won't let me see anything real. Even this little teeny tiny bit of a drive, I daresay it's not comme il faut! I do hope Madame won't be furious. She couldn't expect me to wait forever. Perhaps, too, she's ill, and no one to look after her. Oh, I'm sure I'm right to go."

The doubt, however, grew as the carriage jolted through narrower streets, and when it drew up at an open carriage-door, Betty jumped out, paid the coachman, and went in quite prepared to be scolded.

She went through the doorway and stood looking for the list of names such as are set at the foot of the stairs leading to flats in London.

There was no such list. From a lighted doorway on the right came a babel of shrill, high-pitched voices. Betty looked in at the door and the voices ceased.

"Pardon, Madame," said Betty. "I seek Madame Gautier."

Everyone in the crowded stuffy lamplit little room drew a deep breath.

"Mademoiselle is without doubt one of Madame's young ladies?"

Perhaps it was the sudden hus.h.i.+ng of the raised voices, perhaps it was something in the flushed faces that all turned towards her. To her dying day Betty will never know why she did not say "Yes." What she did say was:

"I am a friend of Madame's. Is she at home?"

"No, Mademoiselle,--she is not at home; she will never be at home more, the poor lady. She is dead, Mademoiselle--an accident, one of those cursed automobiles ran over her at her very door, Mademoiselle, before our eyes."

Betty felt sick.

"Thank you," she said, "it is very sudden."

"Will Mademoiselle leave her name?" the concierge asked curiously.

"The brother of Madame, he is in the commerce at Nantes. A telegramme has been sent--he arrives to-morrow morning. He will give Mademoiselle details."

Again Betty said what she had not intended to say. She said:

"Miss Brown." Perhaps the brother in the commerce vaguely suggested the addition, "of Manchester."

Then she turned away, and got out of the light into the friendly dusk of the street.

"Tiens, but it is droll," said the concierge's friend, "a young girl, and all alone like that."

"Oh, it is nothing," said the concierge; "the English are mad--all!

Their young girls run the streets at all hours, and the Devil guards them."

Betty stood in the street. She could not go back to that circle of harpy faces, all eagerly tearing to pieces the details of poor old Madame Gautier's death. She must be alone--think. She would have to write home. Her father would come to fetch her. Her aunt was beyond the reach of appeal. Her artist-life would be over. Everything would be over. She would be dragged back to the Paris.h.i.+ng and the Mothers'

meetings and the black-cotton-covered books and the Sunday School.

And she would never have lived in Paris at all!

She walked down the street.

"I can't think--I _must_ think! I'll have this night to myself to think in, anyway. I'll go to some cheap hotel. I have enough for that."

She hailed a pa.s.sing carriage, drove to the Hotel Bete, took her luggage to the Gare du Nord, and left it there.

Then as she stood on the station step, she felt something in her hand.

It was the fat letter addressed to Madame Gautier. And she knew it was fat with bank notes.

She unfastened her dress and thrust the letter into her bosom, b.u.t.toning the dress carefully over it.

"But I won't go to my hotel yet," she said. "I won't even look for one. I'll see Paris a bit first."

She hailed a coachman.

"Go," she said, "to some restaurant in the Latin Quarter--where the art students eat."

"And I'm alone in Paris, and perfectly free," said Betty, leaning back on the cus.h.i.+ons. "No, I won't tell my coachman to drive along the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, wherever that is. Oh, it is glorious to be perfectly free. Oh, poor Madame Gautier! Oh dear, oh dear!" She held her breath and wondered why she could feel sorry.

"You are a wretch," she said, "poor Madame was kind to you in her hard narrow way, and now is she lying cold and dead, all broken up by that cruel motor car."

The horror of the picture helped by Betty's excitement brought the tears and she encouraged them.

"It is something to find one is not entirely heartless," she said at last, drying her eyes, as the carriage drew up at a place where there were people and voices and many lights.

CHAPTER X.

SEEING LIFE.

The thoughts of the two who loved her were with Betty that night. The aunt, shaken, jolted, enduring much in the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean express thought fondly of her.

"She's a nice little thing. I must take her about a bit," she mused, and even encouraged her fancy to play with the idea of a London season--a thing it had not done for years.

The Reverend Cecil, curtains drawn and lamp alight, paused to think of her even in the midst of his first thorough examination of his newest treasure in Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Philalethes, being an a.s.sault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown leather, he had found it propping a beer barrel in the next village.

"Dear Lizzie!--I wonder if she will ever care for really important things. There must be treasures upon treasures in those boxes on the French quays that one reads about. But she never would learn to know one type from another."

He studied the fire thoughtfully.

"I wonder if she does understand how much she is to me," he thought.

"Those are the things that are better unsaid. At least I always think so when she's here. But all these months--I wonder whether girls like you to _say things_, or to leave them to be understood. It is more delicate not to say them, perhaps."

Then his thoughts went back to the other Lizzie, about whom he had never felt these doubts. He had loved her, and had told her so. And she had told him her half of the story in very simple words--and most simply, and without at all "leaving things to be understood" they had planned the future that never was to be. He remembered the day when sitting over the drawing-room fire, and holding her dear hand he had said:

"This is how we shall sit when we are old and gray, dearest." It had seemed so impossibly far-off then.

And she had said: