Septimus Part 11

In Paris Zora was caught in the arms of the normal and the uneventful. An American family consisting of a father, mother, son and two daughters touring the continent do not generate an atmosphere of adventure. Their name was Callender, they were wealthy, and the track beaten by the golden feet of their predecessors was good enough for them. They were generous and kindly. There was no subtle complexity in their tastes. They liked the best, they paid for it, and they got it. The women were charming, cultivated and eager for new sensations. They found Zora a new sensation, because she had that range of half tones which is the heritage of a child of an older, grayer civilization. Father and son delighted in her. Most men did. Besides, she relieved the family tedium. The family knew the Paris of the rich Anglo-Saxon and other rich Anglo-Saxons in Paris. Zora accompanied them on their rounds. They lunched and dined in the latest expensive restaurants in the Champs Elysees and the Bois; they went to races; they walked up and down the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue de l'Opera and visited many establishments where the female person is adorned. After the theater they drove to the Cabarets of Montmartre, where they met other Americans and English, and felt comfortably certain that they were seeing the naughty, shocking underside of Paris. They also went to the Louvre and to the Tomb of Napoleon. They stayed at the Grand Hotel.

Zora saw little of Septimus. He knew Paris in a queer, dim way of his own, and lived in an obscure hotel, whose name Zora could not remember, on the other side of the river. She introduced him to the Callenders, and they were quite prepared to receive him into their corporation. But he shrank from so vast a concourse as six human beings; he seemed to be overawed by the mult.i.tude of voices, unnerved by the multiplicity of personalities. The unfeathered owl blinked dazedly in general society as the feathered one does in daylight. At first he tried to stand the glare for Zora's sake.

"Come out and mix with people and enjoy yourself," cried Zora, when he was arguing against a proposal to join the party on a Versailles excursion. "I want you to enjoy yourself for once in your life. Besides--you're always so anxious to be human. This will make you human."

"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."

But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge acquaintance--one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated his disastrous career--ran across him in the Boulevard Sevastopol.

"Why--if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"

"Oh--hooting," said Septimus.

Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally.

When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly changing the conversation to the price of hams.

"But what are you going to do with hams?"

"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I always want to buy them. They look so s.h.i.+ny."

Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old woman, a _marchande des quatre saisons_ who sold vegetables in the Place de la Republique. He had known her many years, and as she was at the point of death he comforted her with blood-puddings and flowers and hams and the ministrations of an indignant physician. But at the time Septimus hid his Good Samaritanism under a cloud of vagueness.

Then came a period during which Zora lost him altogether. Days pa.s.sed. She missed him. Life with the Callenders was a continuous shooting of rapids. A quiet talk with Septimus was an hour in a backwater, curiously restful. She began to worry. Had he been run over by an omnibus? Only an ever-recurring miracle could bring him safely across the streets of a great city. When the Callenders took her to the Morgue she dreaded to look at the corpses.

"I do wish I knew what has become of him," she said to Turner.

"Why not write to him, ma'am?" Turner suggested.

"I've forgotten the name of his hotel," said Zora, wrinkling her forehead.

The name of the Hotel Quincamboeuf, where he lodged, eluded her memory.

"I do wish I knew," she repeated.

Then she caught an involuntary but illuminating gleam in Turner's eye, and she bade her look for hairpins. Inwardly she gasped from the shock of revelation; then she laughed to herself, half amused, half indignant. The preposterous absurdity of the suggestion! But in her heart she realized that, in some undefined human fas.h.i.+on, Septimus Dix counted for something in her life. What had become of him?

At last she found him one morning sitting by a table in the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, patiently awaiting her descent. By mere chance she was un-Callendered.

"Why, what--?"

The intended reproval died on her lips as she saw his face. His cheeks were hollow and white, his eyes sunken The man was ill. His hand burned through her glove. Feelings warm and new gushed forth.

"Oh, my _dear_ friend, what is the matter?"

"I must go back to England. I came to say good-bye. I've had this from Wiggleswick."

He handed her an open letter. She waved it away.

"That's of no consequence. Sit down. You're ill. You have a high temperature. You should be in bed."

"I've been," said Septimus. "Four days."

"And you've got up in this state? You must go back at once. Have you seen a doctor? No, of course you haven't. Oh, dear!" She wrung her hands. "You are not fit to be trusted alone. I'll drive you to your hotel and see that you're comfortable and send for a doctor."

"I've left the hotel," said Septimus. "I'm going to catch the eleven train.

My luggage is on that cab."

"But it's five minutes past eleven now. You have lost the train--thank goodness."

"I'll be in good time for the four o'clock," said Septimus. "This is the way I generally travel. I told you." He rose, swayed a bit, and put his hand on the table to steady himself. "I'll go and wait at the station. Then I'll be sure to catch it. You see I must go."

"But why?" cried Zora.

"Wiggleswick's letter. The house has been burnt down and everything in it.

The only thing he saved was a large portrait of Queen Victoria."

Then he fainted.

Zora had him carried to a room in the hotel and sent for a doctor, who kept him in bed for a fortnight. Zora and Turner nursed him, much to his apologetic content. The Callenders in the meanwhile went to Berlin.

When Septimus got up, gaunt and staring, he appealed to the beholder as the most helpless thing which the Creator had clothed in the semblance of a man.

"He must take very great care of himself for the next few weeks," said the doctor. "If he gets a relapse I won't answer for the consequences. Can't you take him somewhere?"

"Take him somewhere?" The idea had been worrying her for some days past. If she left him to his own initiative he would probably go and camp with Wiggleswick amid the ruins of his house in Shepherd's Bush, where he would fall ill again and die. She would be responsible.

"We can't leave him here, at any rate," she remarked to Turner.

Turner agreed. As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it to earn its livelihood. She also had come to take a proprietary interest in Septimus.

"He might stay with us in Nunsmere. What do you think, Turner?"

"I think, ma'am," said Turner, "that would be the least improper arrangement."

"He can have Cousin Jane's room," mused Zora, knowing that Cousin Jane would fly at her approach.

"And I'll see, ma'am, that he comes down to his meals regular," said Turner.

"Then it's settled," said Zora.

She went forthwith to the invalid and acquainted him with his immediate destiny. At first he resisted. He would be a nuisance. Since his boyhood he had never lived in a lady's house. Even landladies in lodgings had found him impossible. He could not think of accepting more favors from her all too gracious hands.

"You've got to do what you're told," said Zora, conclusively. She noticed a shade of anxiety cross his face. "Is there anything else?"

"Wiggleswick. I don't know what's to become of him."