The Guest of Quesnay Part 8

"You'll take a cigarette?"

"I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe."

He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch. "Always my pipe for me," he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. "Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul." And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, "It is my first pipe since yesterday."

"That is being a good smoker," I ventured sententiously; "to whet indulgence with abstinence."

"My dear sir," he protested, "I am a man without even enough virtue to be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now."

"He has never smoked, your young friend?" I asked, glancing at my visitor rather curiously, I fear.

"Mr. Saffren has no vices." Professor Keredec replaced his silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence. "He is in good condition, all pure, like little children--and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very much from the window"--there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor's torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle--"yes, very much, since the pa.s.sing of that charming lady some days ago."

"You say your young friend's name is Saffren?"

"Oliver Saffren." The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the seeming shadow upon my visitor's forehead became a reality, deepening to a look of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: "It is about him that I have come to talk to you."

"I shall be very glad," I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality aside with a gesture of remonstrance.

"Ha, my dear sir," he cried; "but you are a man of feeling! We are both old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth!

It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman's excuses when he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject; it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!"

"No, no," I protested hastily. "The name of Professor Keredec--"

"The name of NO man," he thundered, interrupting, "can protect his reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I know what you think. You think, 'He is a nice fine man, that old professor, oh, very nice--only he hides behind the curtains sometimes!

Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.' Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you have been thinking, my dear sir!"

"Not at all," I laughed; "I thought you might fear that _I_ was a spy."

"Eh?" He became sharply serious upon the instant. "What made you think that?"

"I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter."

"So! And THAT is all," he returned, with evident relief. "No, my dear sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what kind of a man you are. And so," he concluded with an opening of the hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for concealment, "and so I have watched you."

"Why?" I asked.

"The explanation is so simple: it was necessary."

"Because of--of Mr. Saffren?" I said slowly, and with some trepidation.

"Precisely." The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Because I am sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am--how should it be said?--perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian."

"I see."

"Forgive me," he rejoined quickly, "but I am afraid you do not see. I am not his guardian by the law."

"I had not supposed that you were," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case--his case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane."

"Ha, my dear sir, you are right!" exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me, much pleased. "You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now much MORE sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like the little children's mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more--ha, at the greatest, a year from now--and he will not be different any longer; he will be like the rest of us. Only"--the professor leaned forward and his big fist came down on the arm of his chair--"he shall be better than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now," he continued, leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential tone, "it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily, those same people might meet him again after a while. 'Ha,' they would say, 'there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!' And so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this quiet place where n.o.body comes, and we can keep from meeting any foolish people. But, my dear sir"--he leaned forward again, and spoke emphatically--"it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening but every evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone.

It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the world, but--a thousand saints!--let us be civilised to one another!"

"With all my heart," I said.

"Ha! I wish you to know my young man," Keredec went on. "You will like him--no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him--and he is your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make friends, for he needs them."

"I think he has a host of them," said I, "in Professor Keredec."

My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and sighed. "That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor Keredec. And yet," he went on sadly, "it is all the friends that poor boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?"

Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: "You will join me at the table on my veranda, won't you? I can hobble that far but not much farther."

Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most closely screened by the vines and said:

"May the table be placed yonder?"

"Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone."

"Ha, that is good," he exclaimed. "It is not human for a Frenchman to eat in the house in good weather."

"It is a pity," I said, "that I should have been such a bugbear."

This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions were altogether due to my presence at the inn.

And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Keredec's mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was sufficiently a.s.suaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.

"The reproach is deserved," he returned, after a pause. "It is to be wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we had the courage, or the slyness"--he laughed--"to investigate."

I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his back as he rose.

"Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!"

He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.

We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse. He crossed our vision and the open archway: a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers. It was a quick picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she was not in white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in recognising her. At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of foot-steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled pigeons fluttered up from the garden-path, betaking themselves to flight, and "that other monsieur" came leaping across the courtyard, through the archway and into the road.

"Glouglou! Look quickly!" he called loudly, in French, as he came; "Who is that lady?"

Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth.

Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway, carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.

"That lady, monsieur?" he gasped, checking himself at the young man's side and gazing after the trap, "that is Madame d'Armand."

"Madame d'Armand," Saffren repeated the name slowly. "Her name is Madame d'Armand."