Dross Part 5

I was given to understand that the remainder of the evening was my own, and the Vicomte himself showed me the small staircase descending from the pa.s.sage between my study and his own, and presented me with a key to the door at the foot of it. This door, he explained, opened to a small pa.s.sage running between the Rue des Palmiers and the Rue Courte. It would serve me for egress and entry at any time without reference to the servants or disturbance to the house.

"I would not give the key to the first comer," he added.

I learnt later that he and I alone had access to the door of which the servants had no key, nor ever pa.s.sed there. The same evening I availed myself of my privilege and went to my club, where over a foolish game of chance I won a year's salary.

Such was the beginning of my career in the service of the Vicomte de Clericy. During the weeks that followed I found that there was, in fact, plenty for me to do were the estates to be properly worked--to be administered as we Englishmen are called upon to treat our property to-day, that is to say, like a sponge, to be squeezed to its last drop. I soon discovered that the Vicomte was in the hands of old-fas.h.i.+oned stewards, who, besides feathering their own nests, were not making the best of the land. My conscience, it must be admitted, was at work again--and I had thought it finally vanquished.

Here was I, admitted to the Hotel Clericy--welcomed in the family circle, and trusted there in the immediate vicinity of and with daily access to as innocent and trusting a soul as ever stepped from a French convent. I--a wolf who had not hitherto even troubled to cover my s.h.a.ggy sides with a fleece. What could I do? Lucille was so gay, so confiding, in a pretty girlish way which never altered as we came to know each other better. Madame was so placid and easy-going--in her stout black silk dress, with her lace-work. Monsieur de Clericy gave me his confidence so unreservedly--what could I do but lapse into virtue? And I venture to think that many a blacker sheep than myself would have blanched in the midst of so pure a flock.

One evening Madame asked me to join the family circle in the drawing-room. The room was very pretty and homelike--quite unlike our grim drawing-room at Hopton, where my father never willingly set foot since its rightful owner had pa.s.sed elsewhere. There were flowers in abundance--their scent filled the air--from the Var estate in Provence, which had been Madame's home and formed part of the _dot_ she brought into the diminis.h.i.+ng Clericy coffers. Two lamps illuminated the room rather dimly, and a pair of candles stood on the piano.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "YOU ARE SAD," SAID LUCILLE, WITH A LITTLE LAUGH, "WITH YOUR FACE IN YOUR HAND COMME cA."]

Monsieur de Clericy played a game at bezique with Madame, who chuckled a good deal at her own mistakes with the cards, and then asked Lucille for some music. The girl sat down at the piano, and there, to her own accompaniment, without the printed score, sang such songs of Provence as tug at the heart strings, one knows not why. There seemed to be a wail in the music--and in slurring, as it were, from one note to the other--a trick such Southern songs demand--I heard the tone I loved.

Madame listened while she worked. The Vicomte dropped gently to sleep.

I sat with my elbow on my knee and looked at the carpet. And when the voice rose and fell, I knew that none other had the same message for me.

"You are sad," said Lucille, with a little laugh, "with your face in your hand, comme ca."

And she imitated my position and expression with a merry toss of the head. "Are you thinking of your sins?"

"Yes, Mademoiselle," answered I, truthfully enough.

Many evenings I pa.s.sed thus in the peaceful family circle--and always Lucille sang those gaily sad little songs of Provence.

The weeks slipped by, and the outer world was busy with great doings, while we in the Rue des Palmiers seemed to stand aside and watch the events go past.

The Emperor--than whom no greater man lived at the middle of the present century--was losing health, and, with that best of human gifts, his grasp over his fellowmen. The dogs were beginning to collect--the dogs that are ever in readiness to fall on the stricken lion.

I marvelled to discover how little the Vicomte interested himself in politics. One other discovery only did I make respecting my patron; I found that he loved money.

My conscience, as I have said, was busy at this time, and the burden of my deception began to weigh upon my mind as if I had been a mere schoolboy, and no man of the world. I might, however, have borne the burden easily enough if chance had not favoured the right.

I was one morning writing in Monsieur de Clericy's study, when the door was impetuously thrown open and Lucille came running in. "Ah!"

she said, stopping, "only you."

"That is all, Mademoiselle."

She was turning to go when on an impulse of the moment I called to her.

"Mademoiselle!" She turned and slowly came back. With a little laugh she stood in front of me seated at the great table. She took up a quill pen, which I had laid aside a moment earlier, and played with it.

"What are you writing?" she asked, looking down at the papers before me--"your own history?"

As she spoke the pen escaped from her fingers and fell upon my papers, leaving ink stains there.

"There," she cried, with a laugh of mock despair, "I have spoilt your life."

"No; but you have altered its appearance," I answered. "Mademoiselle, I have something to say to you. When I came here I deceived your father. I told him that I was ruined--that my father had disowned me--that I was forced to earn my own livelihood. It was untrue--I shall one day be as rich as your father."

"Then why did you come here?" asked the girl, for a moment grave.

"To be near you."

And she broke into a laugh, shaking her head.

"I saw you in the crowd at the Fete Napoleon--I heard your voice.

There is no one in the world like you. I fell in love, Mademoiselle."

Still she laughed, as if I were telling her an amusing story.

"And it is useless," I pursued, somewhat bitterly, perhaps. "I am too old?"

There was a little mirror on the mantelpiece. She ran and fetched it and held it in front of my face.

"Look," she cried merrily. "Yes, hundreds of years!"

With a laugh and flying skirts she ran from the room.

Chapter V

C'est la Vie

"Les querelles ne dureraient pas longtemps si le tort n'etait d'un cote."

Monsieur Alphonse Giraud, unlike many men, had an aim in life--a daily purpose with which he rose in the morning at, it must be admitted, a shockingly late hour--without which he rarely sought his couch even when it was not reached until the foolish birds were astir.

The son of the celebrated Baron Giraud sought, in a word, to be mistaken for an Englishman--and what higher ambition could we, who modestly set such store upon our nationality, desire him to cherish?

In view of this praiseworthy object, Alphonse Giraud wore a mustache only, and this--oh! inconsistency of great minds--he laboriously twirled heavenwards in the French fas.h.i.+on. It was, in fact, the guileless Alphonse's chief tribulation that, however industriously he cultivated that devil-may-care upward sweep, the spa.r.s.e ornament to his upper lip invariably drooped downwards again before long. In the sunny land of France it is held that the mustache worn "en croc" not only confers upon its possessor an air of distinction, but renders that happy individual particularly irresistible in the eyes of the fair. Readers of modern French fiction are aware that the heroes of those edifying tales invariably wear the mustache "hardiment retroussee," which habit doubtless adds a subtle charm to their singularly puerile and fatuous conversation imperceptible to the mere reader.

Alphonse Giraud was a small man, and would have given a thousand pounds for another inch, as he frankly told his friends. His outward garments were fas.h.i.+oned in London, whence also came his hats, gloves and boots. But within all these he was hopelessly and absolutely French. The English boots trod the pavement--they knew no other path in life--in a manner essentially Gallic. The check trousers, of a pattern somewhat loud and startling, had the mincing gait in them of any "pantalon de fantasie," purchased a prix fixe in the Boulevard St.

Germain, across the water. It is useless to lift a Lincoln and Bennett from a little flat-topped head, cut, as they say, to the rat and fringed all over with black, upright hair.

But young Giraud held manfully to his purpose, and even essayed to copy the att.i.tudes of his own groom, a thin-legged man from Streatham, who knew a thing or two, let him tell you, about a 'oss. There was no harm in Alphonse. There is, indeed, less harm in Frenchmen than they--sad dogs!--would have you believe. They are, as a rule, domesticated individuals, with a pretty turn for mixing a salad.

Within the narrow but gay waistcoat of this son of Paris there beat as kind a little eager French heart as one may wish to deal with.

"Bon Dieu!" Alphonse would exclaim, when convinced that he had been robbed or cheated. "What will you? I am like that. I daresay the poor devil wanted the money badly--and I do not miss it."

There is a charity that gives, and another that allows the needy to take.

It was the Baron Giraud's great desire that Alphonse should be a gentleman of the great world, moving in his narrow orbit in the first circles of Parisian society, which was nothing to boast of in those days, and has steadily declined ever since. To attain such an eminence, the astute financier knew as well as any that only one thing was really necessary--namely, money. This he gave to his son with an open hand, and only gasped when he heard whither it went and how freely Alphonse spent it.

"There is plenty more," he said, "behind." And his little porcine eyes twinkled amid their yellow wrinkles. "I am a man of substance. You must be a man of position. But do not lend to the wrong people. Rather give to the right and be done with it. They will take it--bon Dieu!