When Valmond Came to Pontiac Part 7

"I was never good at catechism," she answered. "But I will be as hospitable as I can."

"I've felt," he said, "that you can--can see through things; that you can balance them, that you get at all sides, and--"

She had been reading Napoleon's letters this very afternoon.

"Full squared?" she interrupted quizzically.

"As the Great Emperor said," he answered. "A woman sees farther than a man, and if she has judgment as well, she is the best prophet in the world."

"It sounds distinctly like a compliment," she answered. "You are trying to break that square!"

She was mystified; he was different from any man she had ever entertained. She was not half sure she liked it. Yet, if he were in very truth a prince--she thought of his debut in flowered waistcoat, panama hat, and enamelled boots!--she should take this confidence as a compliment; if he were a barber, she could not resent it; she could not waste wit or time; she could not even, in extremity, call the servant to show the barber out; and in any case she was too comfortably interested to worry herself with speculation.

He was very much in earnest. "I want to ask you," he said, "what is the thing most needed to make a great idea succeed."

"I have never had a great idea," she replied.

He looked at her eagerly, with youthful, questioning eyes.

"How simple, and yet how astute he is!" she thought, remembering the event of yesterday.

"I thought you had--I was sure you had," he said in a troubled sort of way. He did not see that she was eluding him.

"I mean, I never had a fixed and definite idea that I proceeded to apply, as you have done," she explained tentatively. "But--well, I suppose that the first requisite for success is absolute belief in the idea; that it be part of one's life; to suffer for, to fight for, to die for, if need be--though that sounds like a handbook of moral mottoes, doesn't it?"

"That's it, that's it," he said. "The thing must be in your bones--hein?"

"Also in--your blood--hein?" she rejoined slowly and meaningly, looking over the top of her coffee-cup at him. Somehow again the plebeian quality in that hein grated on her, and she could not resist the retort.

"What!" said he confusedly, plunging into another pitfall. She had challenged him, and he knew it. "Nothing what-ever," she answered, with an urbanity that defied the suggestion of malice. Yet, now that she remembered, she had sweetly challenged one of a royal house for the like lapse into the vulgar tongue. A man should not be beheaded because of a what. So she continued more seriously: "The idea must be himself, all of him, born with him, the rightful output of his own nature, the thing he must inevitably do, or waste his life."

She looked him honestly in the eyes. She had spoken with the soft irony of truth, the blind tyranny of the just. She had meant to test him here and there by throwing little darts of satire, and yet he made her serious and candid in spite of herself. He was of kin to her in some part of his nature. He did not concern her as a man of personal or social possibilities--merely as an active originality. Leaning back languidly, she was eyeing him closely from under drooping lids, smiling, too, in an unimportant sort of way, as if what she had said was a trifle.

Consummate liar and comedian, or true man and no pretender, his eyes did not falter. They were absorbed, as if in eager study of a theme.

"Yes, yes, that's it; and if he has it, what next?" said he meaningly.

"Well, then, opportunity, joined to coolness, knowledge of men, power of combination, strategy, and"--she paused, and a purely feminine curiosity impelled her to add suggestively--"and a woman."

He nodded. "And a woman," he repeated after her musingly, and not turning it to account cavalierly, as he might have done. He was taking himself with a simple seriousness that appealed to her.

"You may put strategy out of the definition, leaving in the woman," she continued ironically.

He felt the point, and her demure dart struck home. But he saw what an ally she might make. Tremendous possibilities moved before him. His heart beat faster than it did yesterday when the old sergeant faced him.

Here was beauty--he admired that; power--he wished for that. What might he not accomplish, no matter how wild his move, with this wonderful creature as his friend, his ally, his----He paused, for this house had a master as well as a mistress.

"We will leave in the woman," he said quietly, yet with a sort of trouble in his face.

"In your idea?" was the negligent question.

"Yes."

"Where is the woman?" insinuated the soft, bewildering voice.

"Here!" he answered emotionally, and he believed it was the truth. She stood looking meditatively out of the window, not at him.

"In Pontiac?" she asked presently, turning with a child-like surprise.

"Ah, yes, yes! I know--one of the people; suitable for Pontiac; but is it wise? She is pretty--but is it wise?"

She was adroitly suggesting Elise Malboir, whose little romance she had discovered.

"She is the prettiest and wisest lady I ever knew, or ever hoped to know," he said earnestly, laying his hand upon his heart.

"How far will your idea take you?" she asked evasively, her small fingers tightening a gold hair-pin. "To Paris--to the Tuileries!" he answered, rising to his feet.

"And you start--from Pontiac?"

"What difference, Pontiac or Cannes, like the Great Master after Elba,"

he said. "The principle is the same."

"The money?"

"It will come," he answered. "I have friends--and hopes."

She almost laughed. She was suddenly struck by the grotesqueness of the situation. But she saw how she had hurt him, and she said instantly:

"Of course, with those one may go far. Sit down and tell me all your plans."

He was about to comply, when, glancing out of the window, she saw the old sergeant, now "General Lagroin," and Parpon hastening up the walk.

Parpon ambled comfortably beside the old man, who seemed ten years younger than he had done the day before.

"Your army and cabinet, monseigneur!" she said with a pretty, mocking gesture of salutation.

He glanced at her reprovingly. "My General and my Minister; as brave a soldier and as able a counsellor as ever prince had. Madame," he added, "they only are farceurs who do not dare, and have not wisdom. My General has scars from Auerstadt, Austerlitz, and Waterloo; my Minister is feared--in Pontiac. Was he not the trusted friend of the Grand Seigneur, as he was called here, the father of your Monseiur De la Riviere? Has he yet erred in advising me? Have we yet failed? Madame," he added, a little rhetorically, "as we have begun, so will we end, true to our principles, and--"

"And gentlemen of the king," she said provokingly, urging him on.

"Pardon, gentlemen of the Empire, madame, as time and our lives will prove.... Madame, I thank you for your violets of Sunday last."

She admired the ac.u.men that had seized the perfect opportunity to thank her for the violets, the badge of the Great Emperor.

"My hives shall not be empty of bees--or honey," she said, alluding to the imperial bees, and she touched his arm in a pretty, gracious fas.h.i.+on.

"Madame--ah, madame!" he replied, and his eyes grew moist.

She bade the servant admit Lagroin and Parpon. They bowed profoundly, first to Valmond, and afterwards to Madame Chalice. She saw the point, and it amused her. She read in the old man's eye the soldier's contempt for women, together with his new-born reverence and love for Valmond.

Lagroin was still dressed in the uniform of the Old Guard, and wore on his breast the sacred ribbon which Valmond had given him the day before.

"Well, General?" said Valmond.