Lady Barbarina Part 44

"It was a confession of medical bankruptcy; they wanted to stop my run on them. They didn't know enough to cure me, as they had originally pretended they did, and that's the way they thought they'd get round it.

I wanted to be cured-I didn't want to be transported. I hadn't done any harm." I could but a.s.sent to the general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and put to my companion that I hoped he hadn't been seriously ill. He only shook his foot at first, for some time, by way of answer; but at last, "I didn't get natural rest," he wearily observed.

"Ah, that's very annoying. I suppose you were overworked."

"I didn't have a natural appet.i.te-nor even an unnatural, when they fixed up things for me. I took no interest in my food."

"Well, I guess you'll both eat and sleep here," I felt justified in remarking.

"I couldn't hold a pen," my neighbour went on. "I couldn't sit still. I couldn't walk from my house to the cars-and it's only a little way. I lost my interest in business."

"You needed a good holiday," I concluded.

"That's what the doctors said. It wasn't so very smart of them. I had been paying strict attention to business for twenty-three years."

"And in all that time you had never let up?" I cried in horror.

My companion waited a little. "I kind o' let up Sundays."

"Oh that's nothing-because our Sundays themselves never let up."

"I guess they do over here," said my friend.

"Yes, but you weren't over here."

"No, I wasn't over here. I shouldn't have been where I was three years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe. I was in a very advantageous position. I did a very large business. I was considerably interested in lumber." He paused, bending, though a little hopelessly, about to me again. "Have you any business interests yourself?" I answered that I had none, and he proceeded slowly, mildly and deliberately. "Well, sir, perhaps you're not aware that business in the United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling-off. Different parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I'm aware none of their fine talk has set things going again." I ingeniously intimated that if business was dull the time was good for coming away; whereupon my compatriot threw back his head and stretched his legs a while. "Well, sir, that's one view of the matter certainly. There's something to be said for that. These things should be looked at all round. That's the ground my wife took. That's the ground," he added in a moment, "that a lady would naturally take." To which he added a laugh as ghostly as a dried flower.

"You think there's a flaw in the reasoning?" I asked.

"Well, sir, the ground I took was that the worse a man's business is the more it requires looking after. I shouldn't want to go out to recreation-not even to go to church-if my house was on fire. My firm's not doing the business it was; it's like a sick child-it requires nursing. What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up so that I could go on at home. I'd have taken anything they'd have given me, and as many times a day. I wanted to be right there; I had my reasons; I have them still. But I came off all the same," said my friend with a melancholy smile.

I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise and so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his seniority and found myself offering him paternal advice. "Don't think about all that. Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get well. Travel about and see Europe. At the end of a year, by the time you're ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you'll be quite well and happy."

He laid his hand on my knee; his wan kind eyes considered me, and I thought he was going to say "You're very young!" But he only brought out: "_You've_ got used to Europe anyway!"

III

At breakfast I encountered his ladies-his wife and daughter. They were placed, however, at a distance from me, and it was not until the pensionnaires had dispersed and some of them, according to custom, had come out into the garden, that he had an opportunity of carrying out his offer.

"Will you allow me to introduce you to my daughter?" he said, moved apparently by a paternal inclination to provide this young lady with social diversion. She was standing with her mother in one of the paths, where she looked about with no great complacency, I inferred, at the homely characteristics of the place. Old M. Pigeonneau meanwhile hovered near, hesitating apparently between the desire to be urbane and the absence of a pretext. "Mrs. Ruck, Miss Sophy Ruck"-my friend led me up.

Mrs. Ruck was a ponderous light-coloured person with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye and an arrangement of hair, with forehead-tendrils, water-waves and other complications, that reminded me of those framed "capillary" tributes to the dead which used long ago to hang over artless mantel-shelves between the pair of gla.s.s domes protecting wax flowers.

Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, tiny and pretty and lively, with no more maiden shyness than a feminine terrier in a tinkling collar.

Both of these ladies were arrayed in black silk dresses, much ruffled and flounced, and if elegance were _all_ a matter of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g they would have been elegant.

"Do you think highly of this pension?" asked Mrs. Ruck after a few preliminaries.

"It's a little rough," I made answer, "but it seems to me comfortable."

"Does it take a high rank in Geneva?"

"I imagine it enjoys a very fair fame."

"I should never dream of comparing it to a New York boarding-house," Mrs.

Ruck pursued.

"It's quite in a different style," her daughter observed. Miss Ruck had folded her arms; she held her elbows with a pair of small white hands and tapped the ground with a pretty little foot.

"We hardly expected to come to a pension," said Mrs. Ruck, who looked considerably over my head and seemed to confide the truth in question, as with an odd austerity or chast.i.ty, a marked remoteness, to the general air. "But we thought we'd try; we had heard so much about Swiss pensions. I was saying to Mr. Ruck that I wondered if this is a favourable specimen. I was afraid we might have made a mistake."

"Well, we know some people who have been here; they think everything of Madame Beaurepas," said Miss Sophy. "They say she's a real friend."

Mrs. Ruck, at this, drew down a little. "Mr. and Mrs. Parker-perhaps you've heard her speak of them."

"Madame Beaurepas has had a great many Americans; she's very fond of Americans," I replied.

"Well, I must say I should think she would be if she compares them with some others."

"Mother's death on comparing," remarked Miss Ruck.

"Of course I like to study things and to see for myself," the elder lady returned. "I never had a chance till now; I never knew my privileges.

Give me an American!" And, recovering her distance again, she seemed to impose this tax on the universe.

"Well, I must say there are some things I like over here," said Miss Sophy with courage. And indeed I could see that she was a young woman of sharp affirmations.

Her father gave one of his ghostly grunts. "You like the stores-that's what you like most, I guess."

The young lady addressed herself to me without heeding this charge. "I suppose you feel quite at home here."

"Oh he likes it-he has got used to the life. He says you _can_!" Mr.

Ruck proclaimed.

"I wish you'd teach Mr. Ruck then," said his wife. "It seems as if he couldn't get used to anything."

"I'm used to you, my dear," he retorted, but with his melancholy eyes on me.

"He's intensely restless," continued Mrs. Ruck. "That's what made me want to come to a pension. I thought he'd settle down more."

"Well, lovey," he sighed, "I've had hitherto mainly to settle up!"

In view of a possible clash between her parents I took refuge in conversation with Miss Ruck, who struck me as well out in the open-as leaning, subject to any swing, so to speak, on the easy gate of the house of life. I learned from her that with her companions, after a visit to the British islands, she had been spending a month in Paris and that she thought she should have died on quitting that city. "I hung out of the carriage, when we left the hotel-I a.s.sure you I did. And I guess mother did, too."

"Out of the other window, I hope," said I.

"Yes, one out of each window"-her prompt.i.tude was perfect. "Father had hard work, I can tell you. We hadn't half-finished-there were ever so many other places we wanted to go to."