Lady Barbarina Part 45

"Your father insisted on coming away?"

"Yes-after we had been there about a month he claimed he had had enough.

He's fearfully restless; he's very much out of health. Mother and I took the ground that if he was restless in Paris he needn't hope for peace anywhere. We don't mean to let up on him till he takes us back." There was an air of keen resolution in Miss Ruck's pretty face, of the lucid apprehension of desirable ends, which made me, as she p.r.o.nounced these words, direct a glance of covert compa.s.sion toward her poor recalcitrant sire. He had walked away a little with his wife, and I saw only his back and his stooping patient-looking shoulders, whose air of acute resignation was thrown into relief by the cold serenity of his companion.

"He'll have to take us back in September anyway," the girl pursued; "he'll have to take us back to get some things we've ordered."

I had an idea it was my duty to draw her out. "Have you ordered a great many things?"

"Well, I guess we've ordered _some_. Of course we wanted to take advantage of being in Paris-ladies always do. We've left the most important ones till we go back. Of course that's the princ.i.p.al interest for ladies. Mother said she'd feel so shabby if she just pa.s.sed through.

We've promised all the people to be right there in September, and I never broke a promise yet. So Mr. Ruck has got to make his plans accordingly."

"And what are his plans?" I continued, true to my high conception.

"I don't know; he doesn't seem able to make any. His great idea was to get to Geneva, but now that he has got here he doesn't seem to see the point. It's the effect of bad health. He used to be so bright and natural, but now he's quite subdued. It's about time he should improve, anyway. We went out last night to look at the jewellers' windows-in that street behind the hotel. I had always heard of those jewellers' windows.

We saw some lovely things, but it didn't seem to rouse father. He'll get tired of Geneva sooner than he did of Paris."

"Ah," said I, "there are finer things here than the jewellers' windows.

We're very near some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe."

"I suppose you mean the mountains. Well, I guess we've seen plenty of mountains at home. We used to go to the mountains every summer. We're familiar enough with the mountains. Aren't we, mother?" my young woman demanded, appealing to Mrs. Ruck, who, with her husband, had drawn near again.

"Aren't we what?" inquired the elder lady.

"Aren't we familiar with the mountains?"

"Well, I hope so," said Mrs. Ruck.

Mr. Ruck, with his hands in his pockets, gave me a sociable wink.

"There's nothing much you can _tell_ them!"

The two ladies stood face to face a few moments, surveying each other's garments. Then the girl put her mother a question. "Don't you want to go out?"

"Well, I think we'd better. We've got to go up to that place."

"To what place?" asked Mr. Ruck.

"To that jeweller's-to that big one."

"They all seemed big enough-they were _too_ big!" And he gave me another dry wink.

"That one where we saw the blue cross," said his daughter.

"Oh come, what do you want of that blue cross?" poor Mr. Ruck demanded.

"She wants to hang it on a black velvet ribbon and tie it round her neck," said his wife.

"A black velvet ribbon? Not much!" cried the young lady. "Do you suppose I'd wear that cross on a black velvet ribbon? On a nice little gold chain, if you please-a little narrow gold chain like an old-fas.h.i.+oned watch-chain. That's the proper thing for that blue cross.

I know the sort of chain I mean; I'm going to look for one. When I want a thing," said Miss Ruck with decision, "I can generally find it."

"Look here, Sophy," her father urged, "you don't want that blue cross."

"I do want it-I happen to want it." And her light laugh, with which she glanced at me, was like the flutter of some gage of battle.

The grace of this demonstration, in itself marked, suggested that there were various relations in which one might stand to Miss Ruck; but I felt that the sharpest of the strain would come on the paternal. "Don't worry the poor child," said her mother.

She took it sharply up. "Come on, mother."

"We're going to look round a little," the elder lady explained to me by way of taking leave.

"I know what that means," their companion dropped as they moved away. He stood looking at them while he raised his hand to his head, behind, and rubbed it with a movement that displaced his hat. (I may remark in parenthesis that I never saw a hat more easily displaced than Mr.

Ruck's.) I supposed him about to exhale some plaint, but I was mistaken.

Mr. Ruck was unhappy, but he was a touching fatalist. "Well, they want to pick up something," he contented himself with recognising. "That's the princ.i.p.al interest for ladies."

IV

He distinguished me, as the French say; he honoured me with his esteem and, as the days elapsed, with no small share of his confidence.

Sometimes he bored me a little, for the tone of his conversation was not cheerful, tending as it did almost exclusively to a melancholy dirge over the financial prostration of our common country. "No, sir, business in the United States is not what it once was," he found occasion to remark several times a day. "There's not the same spring-there's not the same hopeful feeling. You can see it in all departments." He used to sit by the hour in the little garden of the pension with a roll of American newspapers in his lap and his high hat pushed back, swinging one of his long legs and reading the _New York Herald_. He paid a daily visit to the American banker's on the other side of the Rhone and remained there a long time, turning over the old papers on the green velvet table in the centre of the Salon des Etrangers and fraternising with chance compatriots. But in spite of these diversions the time was heavy on his hands. I used at times to propose him a walk, but he had a mortal horror of any use of his legs other than endlessly dangling or crossing them, and regarded my direct employment of my own as a morbid form of activity.

"You'll kill yourself if you don't look out," he said, "walking all over the country. I don't want to stump round that way-I ain't a postman!"

Briefly speaking, Mr. Ruck had few resources. His wife and daughter, on the other hand, it was to be supposed, were possessed of a good many that couldn't be apparent to an un.o.btrusive young man. They also sat a great deal in the garden or in the salon, side by side, with folded hands, taking in, to vague ends, material objects, and were remarkably independent of most of the usual feminine aids to idleness-light literature, tapestry, the use of the piano. They lent themselves to complete displacement, however, much more than their companion, and I often met them, in the Rue du Rhone and on the quays, loitering in front of the jewellers' windows. They might have had a cavalier in the person of old M. Pigeonneau, who professed a high appreciation of their charms, but who, owing to the absence of a common idiom, was deprived, in the connexion, of the pleasures of intimacy. He knew no English, and Mrs.

Ruck and her daughter had, as it seemed, an incurable mistrust of the beautiful tongue which, as the old man endeavoured to impress upon them, was pre-eminently the language of conversation.

"They have a tournure de princesse-a distinction supreme," he said to me.

"One's surprised to find them in a little pension bourgeoise at seven francs a day."

"Oh they don't come for economy. They must be rich."

"They don't come for my beaux yeux-for mine," said M. Pigeonneau sadly.

"Perhaps it's for yours, young man. Je vous recommande la maman!"

I considered the case. "They came on account of Mr. Ruck because at hotels he's so restless."

M. Pigeonneau gave me a knowing nod. "Of course he is, with such a wife as that!-a femme superbe. She's preserved in perfection-a miraculous fraicheur. I like those large, fair, quiet women; they're often, dans l'intimite, the most agreeable. I'll warrant you that at heart Madame Roque is a finished coquette." And then as I demurred: "You suppose her cold? Ne vous y fiez pas!"

"It's a matter in which I've nothing at stake."

"You young Americans are droll," said M. Pigeonneau; "you never have anything at stake! But the little one, for example; I'll warrant you she's not cold. Toute menue as she is she's admirably made."

"She's very pretty."

"'She's very pretty'! Vous dites cela d'un ton! When you pay compliments to Mees Roque I hope that's not the way you do it."

"I don't pay compliments to Miss Ruck."

"Ah, decidedly," said M. Pigeonneau, "you young Americans are droll!"

I should have suspected that these two ladies wouldn't especially commend themselves to Madame Beaurepas; that as a maitresse de salon, which she in some degree aspired to be, she would have found them wanting in a certain colloquial ease. But I should have gone quite wrong: Madame Beaurepas had no fault at all to find with her new pensionnaires. "I've no observation whatever to make about them," she said to me one evening.

"I see nothing in those ladies at all deplace. They don't complain of anything; they don't meddle; they take what's given them; they leave me tranquil. The Americans are often like that. Often, but not always,"