Part 56 (1/2)

He asked if ladies also went there.

'Some do; I don't. Conventions mean nothing to me, as you perceive, or I should have a companion here to play propriety. But like you, perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand style. I have ideas as to how men should treat me. I can read Octave Feuillet. I have a terrible weakness for those _cavaliers_ of his. And garbage makes me ill. So I avoid the ”Trois Rats.”'

She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with a sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes.

'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is some religion left in your country, isn't there?'

'Yes, certainly,' he admitted, 'there was a good deal.'

Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Voltaire, watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should say something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have been doing all through.

'Voltaire!'--she shrugged her little shoulders--'Voltaire to me is just an old _perruque_--a prating philanthropical person who talked about _le bon Dieu_, and wrote just what every _bourgeois_ can understand. If he had had his will and swept away the clergy and the Church, how many fine subjects we artists should have lost!'

He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity a minute; then she returned to the charge.

'Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art--and its second is art--and its third is art!'

Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her cheek.

She flung her head back and looked straight before her with half-shut eyes.

'Yes--I believe in art--and expression--and colour--and _le vrai_. Velazquez is my G.o.d, and--and he has too many prophets to mention! I was devout once for three months--since then I have never had as much faith of the Church sort as would lie on a ten-sous piece. But'--with a sudden whimsical change of voice--'I am as credulous as a Breton fisherman, and as superst.i.tious as a gipsy! Wait and see. Will you look at my pictures?'

She sprang up and showed her sketches. She had been a winter in Algiers, and had there and in Spain taken a pa.s.sion for the East, for its colour, its mystery, its suggestions of cruelty and pa.s.sion. She chattered away, explaining, laughing, haranguing, and David followed her submissively from thing to thing, dumb with the interest and curiosity of this new world and language of the artist.

Louie meanwhile, who, after the refreshment of supper, had been forgetting both her fatigue and the other two in the entertainment provided her by the shoes and the Oriental dresses, had now found a little inlaid coffer on a distant table, full of Algerian trinkets, and was examining them. Suddenly a loud crash was heard from her neighbourhood.

Elise Delaunay stood still. Her quick speech, died on her lips. She made one bound forward to Louie; then, with a cry, she turned deathly pale, tottered, and would have fallen, but that David ran to her.

'The gla.s.s is broken,' she said, or rather gasped; 'she has broken it--that old Venetian gla.s.s of Maman's. Oh! my pictures!--my pictures!

How can I undo it? _Je suis perdue_! Oh go!--go!--_go_--both of you!

Leave me alone! Why did I ever see you?'

She was beside herself with rage and terror. She laid hold of Louie, who stood in sullen awkwardness and dismay, and pushed her to the door so suddenly and so violently that the stronger, taller girl yielded without an attempt at resistance. Then holding the door open, she beckoned imperiously to David, while the tears streamed down her cheeks.

'Adieu, Monsieur--say nothing--there is nothing to be said--go!'

He went out bewildered, and the two in their amazement walked mechanically to their own door.

'She is mad!' said Louie, her eyes blazing, when they paused and looked at each other. 'She must be mad. What did she say?'

'What happened?' was all he could reply.

'I threw down that old gla.s.s--it wasn't my fault--I didn't see it.

It was standing on the floor against a chair. I moved the chair back just a trifle, and it fell. A shabby old thing--I could have paid for another easily. Well, I'm not going there again to be treated like that.'

The girl was furious. All that chafed sense of exclusion and slighted importance which had grown upon her during David's _tete-a-tete_ with their strange hostess came to violent expression in her resentment. She opened the door of their room, saying that whatever he might do she was going to bed and to sleep somewhere, if it was on the floor.

David made a melancholy light in the squalid room, and Louie went about her preparations in angry silence. When she had withdrawn into the little cupboard-room, saying carelessly that she supposed he could manage with one of the bags and his great coat, he sat down on the edge of the bare iron bedstead, and recognised with a start that he was quivering all over--with fatigue, or excitement?

His chief feeling perhaps was one of utter discomfiture, flatness, and humiliation.