The Street Called Straight Part 41

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."

The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron arabesques, he said, in his best French: "_Prenez_."

Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne recoit pas." Perhaps it was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."

In the compa.s.sionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost.

Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Ma.s.s. Very urgent," he once more pa.s.sed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.

"_Allez_, please," he said, earnestly, "and--_vite_."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a large key carried beneath her ap.r.o.n. Her stony official manner had returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy, startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin, black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and wearing a knitted shawl--perhaps the mother of the three young people he had just seen--came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs, inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron bal.u.s.trade, struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts, Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings--with views through the long windows of the traffic on the Seine--when a little old lady appeared in a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy, youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in finding its reflection here--the fear of time beneath these painted cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the Marquise's whole brave bearing--rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

"Eh, bien, monsieur?"

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued:

"You've come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business. I always tell them not to send me people, but to cable. Why didn't they cable? They know I don't like Americans coming here. I'm pestered to death with them--that is, I used to be--and I should be still, if I didn't put 'em down."

The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack. It had the American quality with a French intonation. In speaking, the Marquise made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

"I haven't come on business, my--my lady."

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn't think of any other.

"Then what _have_ you come on? If it's to see the chateau you may as well go away. It's never shown. Those are positive orders. I make no exceptions. They must have told you so at the gate. But you Americans will dare anything. Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!"

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by saying: "Quel tah de bah-bah!"

"I haven't come to see the chateau either, my lady--"

"You can call me madame," she interrupted, not without a kindlier inflection on the hint.

He began again. "I haven't come to see the chateau, either--madame. I've come to see _you_."

She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! _Have_ you? I thought you'd learned better than that--over there. You used to come in s.h.i.+p-loads, but--"

He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you, madame, I mean, I came to--to tell you something."

"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"

He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what I came to talk about, madame--not about myself. I wanted to tell you of--of your nephew--Mr. Henry Guion."

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."

"You'd like to know them now, madame--because they're in great trouble."

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so, the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to me."

"She isn't looking to you, madame. _I_ am. I'm looking to you because I imagine you can help her. There's no one else--"

"And has she sent you as her messenger? Why can't she come herself, if it's so bad as all that--or write? I thought she was married--to some Englishman."

"They're not married yet, madame; and unless you help her I don't see how they're going to be--the way things stand."

"Unless I help her! My good fellow, you don't know what you're saying.

Do you know that she refused--refused violently--to help _me_?"

He shook his head, his blue eyes betraying some incredulity.

"Well, then, I'll tell you. It'll show you. You'll be able to go away again with a clear conscience, knowing you've done your best and failed.

Sit down."

As she showed no intention of taking a seat herself, he remained standing.

"She refused the Duc de Berteuil." She made the statement with head erect and hands flung apart. "I suppose you have no idea of what that meant to me?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Of course you haven't. I don't know an American who _would_ have.

You're so engrossed in your own small concerns. None of you have any conception of the things that really matter--the higher things. Well, then, let me tell you. The Duc de Berteuil is--or rather _was_--the greatest parti in France. He isn't any more, because they've married him to a rich girl from South America or one of those places--brown as a berry--with a bust--" She rounded her arms to give an idea of the bust.

"Mais, n'importe. My niece refused him. That meant--I've never confessed it to any one before--I've been too proud--but I want you to understand--it meant my defeat--my final defeat. I hadn't the courage to begin again. C'etait le desastre. C'etait Sedan."

"Oh, madame!"

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away a tear.

"It would have been everything to me. It would have put me where I belong, in the place I've been trying to reach all these years. The life of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel. We've nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front. It's all push, and little headway. They don't want us. That's the plain English of it. They can't imagine why we leave our own country and come over here. They're so narrow. They're selfish, too. Everything they've got they want to keep for themselves. They marry us--the Lord only knows why!--and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that we've been bamboozled out of our own _dots_. There was Rene de Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong. They ridiculed her when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back for having got her. That's as true as you live. It's their way. They would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn't been determined years ago to beat them on their own ground. I could have done it, too, if--"

"If it had been worth while," he ventured.

"You know nothing about it. I could have done it if my niece had put out just one little finger--when I'd got everything ready for her to do it.

Yes, I'd got everything ready--and yet she refused him. She refused him after I'd seen them all--his mother, his sisters, his two uncles--one of them in waiting on the Duc d'Orleans--Philippe V., as we call him--all of them the purest old n.o.blesse d'epee in Normandy."

Her agitation expressed itself again in little dartings to and fro. "I went begging to them, as you might say. I took all their snubs--and oh!

so fine some of them were!--more delicate than the point of a needle! I took them because I could see just how I should pay them back. I needn't explain to you how that would be, because you couldn't understand. It would be out of the question for an American."