“COPENHAGEN”:
A CHARACTER.
When I go home on summer visitations, old friends, with the most generous desire to aid one in an eccentric and indeed half-daft and wholly disreputable way of living, come to me covertly in reckless moments “for auld lang syne,” and remind me of native characters ancient or modern. They themselves are (if they only knew it) characters the most superb for any of my purposes, but, wholly unsuspecting, they narrate the whims and oddities, the follies and conceits of others, lamenting always that the race of characters is rapidly running done. “When Jiah, and Jocka, and Old Split-a-dale are gone,” say they, “we’ll can take to reading your own bits of stories, for there’ll be nothing better left to do, and not a ploy from Martinmas to Whitsunday and back again.”
I know better, of course. I know that unconventional characters—fantastic, whimsical, bombastic, awkward, crazed—will come to the surface there and elsewhere as constant as the bracken comes upon the braes in spring.
But age, undoubtedly, whether it matures an oddity or not, endears him to you if yours be the proper sympathetic soul for such caprices of the stars. What in a droll “going-about body” of thirty seems a rogue’s impertinence will appear to some one else, thirty years after this, or even to yourself perhaps, a quaint wit, and his sayings and doings will be the cause of merriment over all the countryside. So it is that even I am sometimes constrained to think the old characters dead and gone will never have such brilliant successors.
I had that thought yesterday as I walked past Copenhagen’s school. Alas! not Copenhagen’s school, for Copenhagen wields no earthly ferrule, and lies with many of his pupils under grass in Kilmailie, and the little thatched academy, where we drowsed in summer, and choked in winter in the smoke of our own individual peats, is but a huddle of stones, hidden by nettles, humbled in the shade of the birch-tree from which old Copenhagen culled the pliant and sibilant switch for our more noisy than unpleasant castigation. But there, persistent as are the roads old hunters made upon the hills of long ago, as are the ways our fathers went to market through glens for years untenanted, was the path we youngsters made between the highway and old Copenhagen’s school!
Is it conceivable, I ask my old companions of that hillside seminary, that Copenhagen should be dead? That a time should come when his thin, long, bent figure, carried on one of his own legs and one (as went our tradition) cut from an ash in the wood of Achnatra, should dart about the little school no more, and his tales of Nelson and the sea be all concluded?
He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single engagement—the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was elderly; he was—as we should think it now—ill-educated; he was without wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland school, and so he opened one—this same, so lowly to-day among the nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember (besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school. When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a glance aloft.
The fees for Copenhagen’s college were uncertain—not only in payment, but in amount. When our parents asked him what was to pay for Bob or Sandy, the antique pensioner blew his nose with noisy demonstration, and invariably answered, “We don’t know what we’ll need till we see what we’ll require.” His requirements were manifestly few, for three-fourths of the pupils contributed nothing to the upkeep of the school but a diurnal peat in winter, and the others had their fees wholly expended on pens and paper for themselves when the flying stationer came round twice a year.
We grew to like and to respect old Copenhagen, knowing nothing of his ran-dans, that were confined to the town six miles away, and never were allowed to interfere with his duty to his pupils. He made no brilliant scholars, but he gave us a thousand pleasant, droll, and kindly memories that go far as a substitute for a superficial knowledge of Greek. I would myself have learned the cutlass from him, being the oldest of the pupils and the likeliest to make a good practitioner of that noble marine weapon; but, unhappily, I left the school and started my career in town the very day he had unearthed the sword and brought it forth for my first lesson.
It was there I learned that Copenhagen was the church precentor, and had his little vices, whereof our folks at home, with wisdom and delicacy, had never given us a hint. He used to come down to town each Sunday in a pair of tightly-strapped breeches, a black surtout, and what we called a three-storey hat. The preacher chose the psalm, but it was Copenhagen chose the tune. He had but half a dozen airs in all his repertory—Selma, Dundee, Martyrdom, Coleshill, and Dunfermline, and what he called “yon one of my own.” I have sometimes been to the opera since; I fear, from knowledge gained by that experience, that the old man was not highly gifted for vocalism. Invariably he started on too high a key, and found that he had done so only when a bar or two was finished. With imperturbability unfailing, he just stopped short, and, leaning over his desk, said to the congregation, “We’ll have another try at it, lads!” The service was an English one, but this touching confidence was in Gaelic, and addressed particularly to the men who, married or single, sat apart from the women.
While Copenhagen still led the praise to Coleshill and “yon one of his own,” a pestilent innovator came to the place who knew music, and, unhappily, introduced a band of enterprising youths to the mysteries of harmony. He taught them bass and alto, and showed them how the melody of Dundee and Coleshill could be embellished and improved by those. The first Sunday these vocalists started to display their new art in the church, Copenhagen stopped in the middle of a verse to make a protest.
“I’ll have none of your boom-boom singing here to put me all reel-rall,” said he, “nor praising of the Lord with such theatricals,” then baffled them by changing the air to “yon one of his own.”
A bachelor by prejudice and conviction, he liked to hear of marriages, and when the “cries” were read he had for long—until a new incumbent made a protest—a cheerful, harmless habit of crying at the end of the announcement, “I have no objections to’t whatever.”
The new incumbent was less tolerant than his predecessor; to him was due the old man’s retirement from the office of conductor of the psalmody. He would not countenance the ran-dans, nor consent to the perpetuation of Copenhagen’s ancient manners in the precentor’s desk. First of all he claimed the right of intimating the tunes as well as the psalms to be sung to them, and sought thereby to put an end to the unseemly “yon one of my own”; but Copenhagen started what air he pleased, no matter what was intimated, and more often than before it was his own creation. Then were thrust upon the old man wooden boards with the names of half a dozen psalm tunes printed on them. They were to be displayed in front of the desk as required, and thus save all necessity for any verbal intimation. But Copenhagen generally showed them upside down, and still maintained his vested rights to start what airs he chose. “I think we agreed on Martyrdom in the vestry,” said the minister once, exasperated into a protest in front of the congregation when Copenhagen started “yon one.” “So we did, so we did—I mind fine; but I shifted my mind,” said Copenhagen, looking up, and cleared his throat to start again. “Upon my word,” said he to sympathisers in the afternoon, “upon my word the man’s a fair torment!”
Old Copenhagen’s most notable ran-dans were after he had demitted office as musician, out of patience at last with the “torment.” They were such guileless, easily induced excesses, so marked by an incongruous propriety, that I hesitate to speak of them as more than innocent exhilarations. ’Twas then his surtout was most spick and span, his manner most urbane and engaging. The poorest gangrel who addressed him on the highway then was “sir” to Copenhagen, and a boy had but to look at him to be assured of a halfpenny. His timber leg went tapping over the causeways then with an illusive haste, for it was Copenhagen’s wish to be thought a man immersed profoundly in affairs. He spoke in his finest English (reserved for moments of importance) of the Admiralty, and he never entered the inn without having in his hand a large packet of blue envelopes tied with a boot-lace, to suggest important and delicate negotiations with some messenger from the First Lord. Once, I remember, he came out of the inn with a suspicious-looking bulge in the tail-pocket of his surtout. As he passed the Beenickie and Jock Scott and me standing at the factor’s corner, and punctiliously returned the naval salute he always looked for from his own old pupils, a “Glenorchy pint” (as it was called) fell out of his pocket in the street, without suffering any damage. He never paused a moment or looked round, and the Beenickie cried after him, “You have dropped something, Mr Bain.” “It is just a trifle, lads,” he answered without looking back; “I will get it when I return,” and pursued his way to his house, six miles away. He was ashamed, I suppose, of the exposure.
Another time—on the night of St John’s, when the local Freemasons had their flambeau march, and every boy who carried a torch got threepence on production of its stump the following day (which induced some to cut their stumps in two, and so get sixpence)—I saw old Copenhagen falling down an outside stair. I hastened to his assistance, suffering sincere alarm and pity for my ancient dominie. He was, luckily, little the worse. “I was coming down in any case, John,” said he benignly. “Man! I am always vexed I never learned you the fencing with the cutlass, for you were a promising lad.” “I am sorry too, Mr Bain,” said I, though indeed I could not see that a clerk in a law office would find the accomplishment in question of much use to him. “I knew your Uncle Jamie,” he added. “Him and me was pretty chief. You will say nothing about my bit of a glide, John: I was coming down at any rate, I assure you.”
I should like my last reminiscence of old Copenhagen to be more reputable, for his own last words in gossiping of any one, no matter how foolish or vile, were always generous. And I recall a day when he came from his distant seminary through deep drifts of snow to the town to post a letter that he wished me to revise first. The ‘Courier’ of the week was full of tales of misery among our troops in the Crimean trenches, and Copenhagen’s sympathies were fired. His letter was a suggestion to the Admiralty that in these times of stress it might help my Lords a little if they were relieved of the payment of the pension of Archibald Bain, late of H.M.S. Elephant. He was very old, and frail, and tremulous in these days; his hand of write would have sorely puzzled any one but me, who knew so well its eccentricities. His folly touched me to the core; I knew his object, but for the life of me I could not read his letter.
“I think it would be a mistake to send it, Mr Bain,” I said, when he explained.
“Havers!” said he. “What I want you to tell me is if it is shipshape and Bristol fashion, eh? and not likely to give offence. Read it, man, read it!”
“Read it out to me yourself, Mr Bain,” I stammered, “the thing’s beyond me.”
He put on his spectacles and looked closely at his own scrawl. “I declare to you,” he said in a little, laughingly, “I declare to you I cannot read a word of her myself. But no matter, John, we’ll just let her go as she stands; they’re better scholars in London than what we are.”
The letter went, but I never heard that the British Admiralty availed itself of an offer so unusual and kind.
I thought of these things yesterday as I passed the ruins of Copenhagen’s school. How far, since then, have travelled the feet that trod there; how far, how weary, how humbled, how elate, how prosperous, how shamefully down at heel? Dear lads, dear girls, wherever you be, my old companions, were we not here in this poor place, among the hazel and the fern, most fortunate and happy? Has the wide world we travel through for fame or fortune—or, better still, content—added aught to us of joy we did not have (at least in memory) in those irrecoverable, enduring, summer days? Now it is mist for ever on the hill, and the rain-rot in the wood, and clouds and cares chasing each other across our heavens, and flowers that flame from bud to blossom and smoulder into dust almost before we have caught their perfume; then, old friends, we pricked our days out leisurely upon a golden calendar: the scent of the morning hay-fields seemed eternal.
THE SILVER DRUM.
Fifty yards to the rear of the dwelling-house the studio half hid itself amongst young elms and laurel bushes, at its outside rather like a granary, internally like a chapel, the timbers of the roof exposed and umber-stained, with a sort of clerestory for the top light, a few casts of life-size statues in the corners, and two or three large bas-reliefs of Madonnas and the like by Donatello helping out the ecclesiastical illusion. It was the last place to associate with the sound of drums, and yet I sat for twenty minutes sometimes stunned, sometimes fascinated, by the uproar of asses’ skin. The sculptor who played might, by one less unconventional, be looked upon as seriously sacrificing his dignity in a performance so incongruous with his age and situation. But I have always loved the whimsical; I am myself considered somewhat eccentric, and there is a rapport between artistic souls that permits—indeed, induces—some display of fantasy or folly when they get into each other’s society apart from the intolerant folks who would think it lunacy for a man of over middle age to indulge in the contre-dance of “Petronella” at a harvest-home, or display any accomplishment with the jew’s-harp.
Urquhart, at the time when I sat to him, was a man of sixty years or thereabout; yet he marched up and down the floor of his workshop with the step of a hill-bred lad, his whole body sharing the rhythm of his beating, his clean-shaven face with the flush of a winter apple, the more noticeable in contrast with the linen smock he used as an overall while at work among his clay. The deep old-fashioned side-drum swinging at his groin seemed to have none of a drum’s monotony. It expressed (at all events to me that have some fancy) innumerable ecstasies and emotions—alarms, entreaties, defiances, gaieties, and regrets, the dreadful sentiment of forlorn hopes, the murmur of dubious battalions in countries of ambush. The sound of the drum is, unhappily, beyond typographical expression, though long custom makes us complacently accept “rat-a-tat-tat” or “rub-a-dub-dub” as quite explanatory of its every phrase and accent; but I declare the sculptor brought from it the very pang of love. Alternated with the martial uproar of rouses, retreats, chamades, and marches that made the studio shake, it rose into the clerestory and lingered in the shades of the umber roof, this gentle combination of taps and roulades, like the appeal of one melodiously seeking admission at his mistress’s door.
“You had no idea that I handled sticks so terrifically?” said he, relinquishing the instrument at last, and returning to his proper task of recording my lineaments in the preparatory clay.
“You play marvellously, Mr Urquhart,” I said, astonished. “I had no idea you added the drum to your—to your accomplishments.”
“Well, there you have me revealed—something of a compliment to you, I assure you, for I do not beat my drum for everybody. If I play well it is, after all, no wonder, for with a side-drum and a pair of sticks I earned a living for seven years and travelled among the most notable scenes of Europe.”
“So?” I said, and waited. He pinched the clay carefully to make the presentment of the lobe of my ear, and stood back from his work a moment to study the effect.
“Yes,” he said, “few people know of it; and perhaps it is as well, for it might not be counted wholly to the credit of an R.S.A. if it were known; but for seven years I played the side-drum in the ranks of the 71st. I played from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, at Vimiera, Corunna, Talavera, Busaco, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo. Lord! the very names go dirling through my heart. They were happy days, I assure you, when I—when I—”
“Thumped the skin,” I ventured foolishly, as he paused to make a line of some importance on my effigy.
He corrected me with a vexed air.
“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say, were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an indifferent substitute.”
“Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty far in another art than music.”
“It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.”
“How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him follow up so promising an introduction.
“Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt) designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment. They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an experience.
“The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me. They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied. They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk—pleated, as we were told, by Kildalton’s daughter—appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.
“Our corps on that occasion was in the Light Division. While Picton’s men, away to our left and nearer the river, were to attack the great breach made in the ramparts by our guns on the Tessons, we were to rush into a lesser breach farther east. The night was black and cold to that degree I could not see the fortress at a hundred yards, and could scarcely close my fingers on the drum-sticks as I beat for the advance of Napier’s storming party. The walls we threatened burst in tongues of flame and peals of thunder. Grape-shot tore through our three hundred as we crossed the ditch; but in a moment we were in the gap, the bayonets busy as it were among wine-skins, the footing slimy with blood, and a single drum (my comrade fell mortally wounded in the ditch) beat inside the walls for the column outside to follow us.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, impatient, for Urquhart drew back abstracted, checking his tale to survey the effect of his last touch upon my eyebrows.
He smiled.
“Why,” said he, “I hardly thought it would interest you,” and then went on deliberately.
“I need not tell you,” he said, “how quick was our conquering of the French, once we had got through the walls. My drum was not done echoing back from Sierra de Francisca (as I think the name was), when the place was ours. And then—and then—there came the sack! Our men went mad. These were days when rapine and outrage were to be expected from all victorious troops; there might be some excuse for hatred of the Spaniard on the part of our men, whose comrades, wounded, had been left to starve at Talavera—but surely not for this. They gorged with wine, they swarmed in lawless squads through every street and alley; swept through every dwelling, robbing and burning; the night in a while was white with fires, and the town was horrible with shrieks and random musket-shots and drunken songs.
“Some time in the small hours of the morning, trying to find my own regiment, I came with my drum to the head of what was doubtless the most dreadful street that night in Europe. It was a lane rather than a street, unusually narrow, with dwellings on either side so high that it had some semblance to a mountain pass. At that hour, if you will credit me, it seemed the very gullet of the Pit: the far end of it in flames, the middle of it held by pillagers who fought each other for the plunder from the houses, while from it came the most astounding noises—oaths in English and Portuguese, threats, entreaties, and commands, the shrieks of women, the crackling of burning timber, occasionally the firing of weapons, and through it all, constant, sad beyond expression, a deep low murmur, intensely melancholy, made up of the wail of the sacked city.
“As I stood listening some one called out, ‘Drummer!’
“I turned, to find there had just come up a general officer and his staff, with a picket of ten men. The General himself stepped forward at my salute and put his hand on my drum, that shone brightly in the light of the conflagrations.
“‘What the deuce do you mean, sir,’ said he with heat, ‘by coming into action with my brother’s drum? You know very well it is not for these occasions.’
“‘The ordinary drums of the regiment were lost on Monday last, sir,’ I said, ‘when we were fording the Agueda through the broken ice.’ And then, with a happy thought, I added, ‘Kildalton’s drums are none the worse for taking part in the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. This was the first drum through the walls.’
“He looked shrewdly at me and gave a little smile. ‘H’m,’ he muttered, ‘perhaps not, perhaps not, after all. My brother would have been pleased, if he had been alive, to know his drums were here this night. Where is the other one?’
“‘The last I saw of it, sir,’ I answered, ‘was in the ditch, and Colin Archibald, corporal, lying on his stomach over it.’
“‘Dead?’
“‘Dead, I think, sir.’
“‘H’m!’ said the General. ‘I hope my brother’s drum’s all right, at any rate.’ He turned and cried up the picket. ‘I want you, drummer,’ he said, ‘to go up that lane with this picket, playing the assembly. You understand? These devils fighting and firing there have already shot at three of my officers, and are seemingly out of their wits. We will give them a last chance. I don’t deny there is danger in what I ask you to do, but it has to be done. The men in there are mostly of Pack’s Portuguese and the dregs of our own corps. If they do not come out with you I shall send in a whole regiment to them and batter their brains out against the other end, if the place is, as I fancy, a cul-de-sac. March!’
“I went before the picket with my drum rattling and my heart in my mouth. The pillagers came round us jeering, others assailed us more seriously by throwing from upper windows anything they could conveniently lay hand on (assuming it was too large or too valueless to pocket), but we were little the worse till in a lamentable moment of passion one of the picket fired his musket at a window. A score of pieces flashed back in response, and five of our company fell, while we went at a double for the end of the lane.
“‘By Heaven!’ cried the sergeant when we reached it, ‘here’s a fine thing!’ The General had been right—it was a cul-de-sac! There was nothing for us then but to return.
“You have never been in action; you cannot imagine,” Urquhart went on, “the exasperating influence of one coward in a squad that is facing great danger. There were now, you must know, but six of us, hot and reckless with anger, and prepared for anything—all but one, and he was in the fear of death. As I went before the picket drumming the assembly and the sergeant now beside me, this fellow continually kicked my heels, he kept so close behind. I turned my head, and found that he marched crouching, obviously eager to have a better man than himself sheltering him from any approaching bullet.
“‘You cowardly dog!’ I cried, stepping aside, ‘come out from behind me and die like a man!’ I could take my oath the wretch was sobbing! It made me sick to hear him, but I was saved more thought of it by the rush of some women across the lane, shrieking as they ran, with half a company at least of Portuguese at their heels. With a shout we were after Pack’s scoundrels, up a wide pend close (as we say in Scotland) that led into a courtyard, where we found the valorosas prepared to defend the position with pistol and sword. A whole battalion would have hesitated to attack such odds, and I will confess we swithered for a moment. A shot came from the dark end of the entry and tore through both ends of my drum.
“‘We’re wretched fools to be here at all,’ said lily-liver, plainly whimpering, and at that I threw down my outraged instrument, snatched his musket from him, and charged up the close with the other four. The Portuguese ran like rabbits; for the time, at least, the women were safe, and I had a remorse for my beloved drum.
“I left the others to follow, hurried into the lane, and found the poltroon was gone, my drum apparently with him. Ciudad Rodrigo was darker now, for the fires were burning low. It was less noisy, too; and I heard half-way up the lane the sound of a single musket-shot. I ran between the tall tenements; the glint of bright metal filled me with hope and apprehension. A man lay in the gutter beside my drum, and a Portuguese marauder, who fled at my approach, stood over him with a knife.
“The man in the gutter was the General, with his brother’s drum slung to him, and the sticks in his hands, as if he had been playing. He was unconscious, with a bullet through his shoulder.”
II.
Urquhart stopped his tale again, to wheel round the platform on which I sat, so as to get me more in profile.
“This looks marvellously like stuff for a story,” I said to him as he set to work again upon the clay. “My professional interests are fully aroused. Please go on.”
He smiled again.
“I am charmed to find you can be so easily entertained,” said he. “After all, what is it? Merely a trifling incident. Every other man who went through the Peninsular campaign came on experiences, I am sure, far more curious. My little story would have ended in the lane of Ciudad Rodrigo had not three companies of the 71st—mainly invalids after Badajos—been sent to Scotland for a whiff of their native air, and the fascination of recruits. I had got a spent ball in the chest at Badajos. I, too, had that gay vacation. I went with my silver drum to the county it came from. It was glorious summer weather. For three weeks we were billeted in the county town; for a fortnight I would not have changed places with King George himself.”
“Mr Urquhart,” I said, “I have a premonition. Here comes in the essential lady.”
The sculptor smiled.
“Here, indeed,” he said, “comes in the lady. There are, I find, no surprises for a novelist. We were one day (to resume my story) in the burgh square, where a market was being held, and hopes were entertained by our captain that a few landward lads might nibble at the shilling. Over one side of the square towered a tall whitewashed house of many windows; and as I, with a uniform tunic that was the pride of the regimental tailor, five feet eleven, twenty-one years of age, and the vanity of a veteran, played my best to half a dozen fifes, I noticed the lady at a window—the only window in all that massive house-front to manifest any interest in our presence or performance. I turned my silver drum a little round upon my leg that it might reflect more dazzlingly the light of the afternoon sun, and threw into my beats and rolls the most graceful style that was at my command, all the while with an eye on madam. It was my youthful conceit that I had caught her fancy when, a little later—our sergeants busy among the rustics—she came out from the house and over where I sat apart beside my drum on the steps of the market cross. She was younger than myself, a figure so airy and graceful, you would swear that if she liked she could dance upon blue-bells without bruising a petal; she had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.
“‘Excuse me,’ said she, ‘but I must look at the darling drum—the sweet drum,’ and caught the silken cords in her fingers, and ran a palm of the daintiest hand I had ever seen over the shining barrel.
“I thought she might, with more creditable human sentiment, have had less interest in my drum and more in me, but displayed my instrument with the best grace I could command.
“‘Do you know why I am so interested?’ she asked in a little, looking at me out of deep brown eyes in which I saw two little red-coated drummers, a thing which gave me back my vanity and made me answer her only with a smile. Her cheek for the first time reddened, and she hurried to explain. ‘They are Kildalton’s drums. Mr Fraser of Kildalton was my father, who is dead, and my mother is dead too; and I pleated and tied these cords and tassels first. How beautifully you keep them!’
“‘Well, Miss Fraser,’ said I, ‘I assure you I could not keep them better if I tried; but, after this, I shall have a better reason than ever for keeping them at their best,’ a soldier’s speech she smiled at as she turned away. As she went into the tall white house again she paused on the threshold and looked back for a moment at me, smiling, and for the first time since I took the bounty I rued my bargain, and thought I was meant for something more dignified than drumming. From that hour I lived in the eyes of Kildalton’s daughter Margory. Once a week we went fifing and drumming through the square. She was on these occasions never absent from her window; there was never a smile awanting for the smart young gentleman who beat the silver drum. A second and a third time she came into the square to speak to me. I made the most of my opportunities, and she was speedily made to discover in the humble drummer a fellow of race and education, a fellow with a touch of poetry, if you please. She was an orphan, as I have indicated—the ward of an uncle, a general, at the time abroad. She lived on the surviving fortune of Kildalton, in the tall white house, with an elderly aunt and a servant. At our third interview—we have a way of being urgent in the Army—she had trysted to meet me that evening in the wood behind the town.
“Let me do the girl justice, and say that the drum of Kildalton brought her there, and not the drummer. At least, she was at pains to tell me so, for I had mentioned to her, with some of the gift of poetry I have mentioned, how infinitely varied were the possibilities of an instrument she would never have a proper chance to judge of in the routine of a fife-and-drum parade.
“My billet was at the back of the town, on the verge of a wood, with the window of my room opening on a sort of hunting-path that went winding through the heart of what I have called a wood, but was in actual fact a forest of considerable dimensions. I went out by the window that evening with my drum, and walked, as had been arranged, about a mile among the trees till I came to a narrow glen that cleft the hills, a burn of shallow water from the peaty uplands bickering at the bottom of it. A half moon swung like a halbert over the heights that were edged by enormous fir-trees, and the wood was melancholy with the continuous call of owls. They were soon silenced, for I began to play the silver drum.
“I began with the reveille, though it was a properer hour for the tattoo, playing it lightly, so that while it silenced the hooting owls it did not affright the whole forest. She came through the trees timidly, clothed, as I remember, in a gown of green. She might have been the spirit of the pine-plantings; she might have been a dryad charmed from the swinging boughs. ‘Margory! Margory!’ I cried, my heart more noisy than my drum had been, and clasped her to my arms. ‘Here’s a poor drummer, my dear,’ I said, ‘and you a queen. If you do not love me you were less cruel to take this dirk and stab me to the heart than act the heartless coquette.’
“She faintly struggled. He hair fell loose in a lock or two from under her hat, surged on her shoulder, and billowed about my lips. Her cheek was warm; her eyes threw back the challenge of the silver moon over the tops of pine.
“‘For a young gentleman from a kirk manse, Master Drummer, you have considerable impertinence,’ said she, panting in my arms.
“‘My name, dear Margory, is George, as I have told you,’ I whispered, and I kissed her.
“‘George, dear George,’ said she, ‘have done with folly! Let me hear the drumming and go home.’
“I swung her father’s drum again before me and gave, in cataracts of sound, or murmuring cascades, the sentiments of my heart.
“‘Wonderful! Oh, wonderful!’ she cried, entranced; so I played on.
“The moon went into a cloud; the glade of a sudden darkened; I ceased my playing, swung the drum again behind, and turned for Margory.
“She was gone!
“I cried her name as I ran through the forest, but truly she was gone.”
Urquhart stopped his story and eagerly dashed some lines upon the clay. “Pardon!” he said. “Just like that, for a moment. Ah! that is something like it!”
“Well, well!” I cried. “And what followed?”
“I think—indeed, I know—she loved me, but—I went back to the war without a single word from her again.”
“Oh, to the deuce with your story!” I cried at that, impatient. “I did not bargain for a tragedy.”
“In truth it is something of a farce, as you shall discover in a moment,” said the sculptor. “Next day the captain sent for me. ‘Do you know General Fraser?’ said he, looking at a letter he held in his hand. I told him I had not the honour. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘it looks as if the family had a curious penchant for the drum, to judge from the fact that his brother gave yours to the regiment, and also’—here he smiled slyly—’from the interest of his niece. He is not an hour returned from Spain to his native town when he asks me to send you with your drum to his house at noon.’
“‘Very good, sir,’ I answered, with my heart thundering, and went out of the room most hugely puzzled.
“I went at noon to the tall white house, and was shown into a room where sat Margory, white to the lips, beside the window, out of which she looked after a single hopeless glance at me. A middle-aged gentleman in mufti, with an empty sleeve, stood beside her, and closely scrutinised myself and my instrument as I entered.
“‘This is the—the person you have referred to?’ he asked her, and she answered with a sob and an inclination of her head.
“‘You have come—you are reputed to have come of a respectable family,’ he said then, addressing me; ‘you have studied at Edinburgh; you have, I am told, some pretensions to being something of a gentleman.’
“‘I hope they are no pretensions, sir,’ I answered warmly. ‘My people are as well known and as reputable as any in Argyll, though I should be foolishly beating a drum.’
“‘Very good,’ said he, in no way losing his composure. ‘I can depend on getting the truth from you, I suppose? You were with the 71st as drummer at Ciudad Rodrigo?’
“‘I was, sir,’ I replied. ‘Also at Badajos, at Talavera, Busaco—’
“‘An excellent record!’ he interrupted. ‘I might have learned all about it later had not my wound kept me two months in hospital after Ciudad. By the way, you remember being sent as drummer with a picket of men down a lane?’
“I started, gave a careful look at him, and recognised the General whose life I had doubtless saved from the pillaging Portuguese.
“‘I do, sir,’ I answered. ‘It was you yourself who sent me.’
“He turned with a little air of triumph to Margory. ‘I told you so, my dear,’ said he. ‘I got but a distant glimpse of him this forenoon, and thought I could not be mistaken.’ And Margory sobbed.
“‘My lad,’ he said, visibly restraining some emotion, ‘I could ask your drum-major to take the cords of Kildalton my brother’s drum and whip you out of a gallant corps. I sent you with a picket—a brave lad, as I thought any fellow should be who played Kildalton’s drum, and you came back a snivelling poltroon. Nay—nay!’ he cried, lifting up his hand and checking my attempt at an explanation. ‘You came out of that infernal lane whimpering like a child, after basely deserting your comrades of the picket, and made the mutilated condition of your drum the excuse for refusing my order to go back again, and I, like a fool, lost a limb in showing you how to do your duty.’
“‘But, General—’ I cried out.
“‘Be off with you!’ he cried. ‘Another word, and I shall have you thrashed at the triangle.’
“He fairly thrust me from the room, and the last I heard was Margory’s sobbing.
“Next day I was packed off to the regimental depot, and some weeks later played a common drum at Salamanca.”
The sculptor rubbed the clay from his hands and took off his overall.
“That will do to-day, I think,” said he. “I am much better pleased than I was yesterday,” and he looked at his work with satisfaction.
“But the story, my dear Mr Urquhart. You positively must give me its conclusion!” I demanded.
“Why in the world should that not be its conclusion?” said he, drawing a wet sheet over the bust. “Would you insist on the hackneyed happy ending?”
“I am certain you did not take your quittance from the General in that way. You surely wrote to Margory or to him with an explanation?”
The sculptor smiled.
“Wrote!” cried he. “Do you think that so obvious an idea would not occur to me? But reflect again, I pray you, on the circumstances,—an obscure and degraded drummer—the daughter of one of the oldest families in the Highlands—the damning circumstantiality of her uncle’s evidence of my alleged poltroonery. My explanation was too incredible for pen and paper; and the poltroon himself, the man who had brought the disgrace upon me, was beyond my identification, even had I known where to look for him.”
“And yet, Mr Urquhart,” I insisted, all my instincts as romancer assuring me of some other conclusion to a tale that had opened on a note so cheerful, “I feel sure it was neither a tragedy nor a farce in the long-run.”
“Well, you are right,” he confessed, smiling. “It was my drum that lost me the lady before ever I met her, as it were, and it was but fair that my drum should be the means of my recovering her ten years later. A reshuffling of the cards of fortune in my family brought me into a position where I was free to adopt the career of Art, and by-and-by I had a studio of my own in Edinburgh. It was the day of the portrait bust in marble. To have one’s own effigy in white, paid for by one’s own self, in one’s own hall, was, in a way, the fad of fashionable Edinburgh. It was profitable for the artist, I admit, but—but—”
“But it palled,” I suggested.
“Beyond belief! I grew to hate the appearance of every fresh client, and it was then that I sought the solace of this drum. When a sitter had gone for the day I drummed the vexation out of me, feeling that without some such relief I could never recover a respect for myself. And by-and-by I began to discover in the instrument something more than a relief for my feelings of revolt against the commercial demands on my art. I found in it an inspiration to rare emotions: I found in it memory. I found, in the reveilles and chamades that I played in fields of war and in the forest to my Marjory, love revived and mingled with a sweet regret, and from these—memory, regret, and love—I fashioned what have been my most successful sculptures.
“One day a gentleman came with a commission for his own portrait. It was General Fraser! Of course, he did not recognise me. Was it likely he should guess that the popular sculptor and the lad he had sent in disgrace from the tall white house in the distant Highland burgh town were one? Nor did I at first reveal myself. Perhaps, indeed, he would never have discovered my identity had not his eyes fallen on my drum.
“‘You have had a military subject lately?’ he said, indicating the instrument.
“‘No, General,’ I answered on an impulse. ‘That is a relic of some years of youthful folly when I played Kildalton’s silver drum, and it serves to solace my bachelor solitude.’
“‘Heavens!’ he cried; ‘you, then, are the drummer of Ciudad Rodrigo?’
“‘The same,’ I answered, not without a bitterness. ‘But a very different man from the one you imagine.’ And then I told my story. He listened in a curious mingling of apparent shame, regret, and pleasure, and when I had ended was almost piteous in his plea for pardon. ‘The cursed thing is,’ he said, that Margory maintains your innocence till this very day.’
“That she should have that confidence in me,’ said I, ‘is something of a compensation for the past ten years. I trust Miss Margory—I trust your niece is well.’
“The General pondered for a moment, then made a proposition.
“‘I think, Mr Urquhart,’ said he, ‘that a half-winged old man is but a poor subject for any sculptor’s chisel, and, with your kind permission, I should prefer to have a portrait of Miss Margory, whom I can swear you will find quite worthy of your genius.’
“And so,” said Urquhart in conclusion, “and so, indeed, she was.”
“There is but one dénouement possible,” I said with profound conviction, and, as I said it, a bar of song rose in the garden, serene and clear and unexpected like the first morning carol of a bird in birchen shaws. Then the door of the studio flung open, and the singer entered, with the melody checked on her lips whenever she saw the unexpected stranger. She had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.
“My daughter Margory,” said the sculptor. “Tell your mother,” he added, “that I bring our friend to luncheon.”
THE SCOTTISH POMPADOUR.
Several years ago there was no figure more conspicuous on the boulevards of Paris at the fashionable hour than that of the dandy called le Pompadour écossais by the journals. He had what will command attention anywhere, but most of all in Paris—the mould of an Apollo, a tailor of genius, the money of a Monte Cristo, and above all, Mystery. In the speech of this tall, dark, and sober-visaged exquisite there was no hint of a foreign nationality. His French was perfect; his idioms were correctly chosen; only his title, Lord Balgowie, and a foible for the use of the checkered stuff his countrymen call tartan, in his waistcoats, proclaimed that he was a Scot. That he should elect to spend his time in Paris seemed but natural to the boulevardiers: it is the only place for young gentlemen of spirit and the essential cash; but why should he feed himself like an anchorite while he surfeited his friends? why, with such a gay exterior, should be allied a mind so sober, private character so blameless and austere? These problems exercised the speculations of the café tables all the summer.
In the rue Adolphe Yvon, one of the most exclusive and expensive streets in Paris, near enough to the Bois de Boulogne to be convenient for morning exercise, but far enough removed to be without the surge and roar of the tides of life that beat there in the afternoons, the Pompadour écossais had a mansion like a palace, where he entertained the fashionable world with the aid of a cook who seemed possessed of magic powers to startle and delight, a wine-cellar incredibly comprehensive, and a retinue of servants such as the President of the Republic himself could not command. If he dined at his house alone, he dined with all the grandiose formality of Lucullus; if he patronised a restaurant, he must have his private cabinet and a menu unbelievingly extravagant. But strictly speaking, he never dined alone, either in the rue Adolphe Yvon, Voisin’s, or Paillard’s: he was invariably accompanied by a fellow-countryman, who was his secretary or companion—a fellow saturnine and cynical, who ate and drank voraciously, while his master was content with the simplest viands and a glass of water.
They had come in spring to the Ville Lumière, and stepped, as it were, from the wagon-lit of the P.L.M. train from the South into the very vortex of frivolity. You saw the Pompadour écossais in the morning riding in the Bois on a snowy Irish hunter, wearing garments of a tone and cut that promptly set the fashion to the gommeaux, with a boutonnière of orchids; driving his coach through the avenues of Versailles in the afternoon with a coat of gendarme blue with golden buttons; at the clubs, the galleries, the opera, the cafés, the coulisses of the theatre—always the very latest cry in fashion, ever splendid and inscrutable! Withal, he never had so much as a sou in his pocket to buy a newspaper; his secretary paid for all, and paid with nothing less than gold. Balgowie, arbiter of elegance, envied by young men for his style, was adored by the most fastidious and discerning women for his sensibility, which was curiously out of keeping with his life of waste.
Quite as deeply interested in the Pompadour as any of the butterflies who fluttered round him in the rue Adolphe Yvon was a poor old widow, wholly unknown, in Scotland, for every Saturday she had a letter from her son, Balgowie’s secretary. She read of childish escapades, inordinate and unwholesome pleasures, reckless prodigality.
“What a miserable life!” she would exclaim at the news of some fresh imbecility, as it seemed to her. “A hundred pounds for a breakfast! Five hundred pounds for a picture to a lady! Oh, Jamie, Jamie, what a master!”
She grieved, indeed, exceedingly about the sinful course of life in which her son was implicated, and more than once, for his soul’s sake, asked him to come back to Scotland, but always he temporised. With Lord Balgowie he enjoyed a comfortable salary; he had no profession at his hands, although he had had the best of educations, thanks to his parents’ self-denial, and he saw himself doomed for a term of years to follow the progress of his rakish patron.
Her only comfort was in the shrewd and sober nature of his comments on his master’s follies. “I have looked at his manner of life in all ways, mother,” he wrote, “and it seems to me deplorable. Once I had the notion to be wealthy for the sake of the independence and the power for good that money can command; now I can see it has a cankering influence on the soul. I have gone with my lord to every part of Europe, looking for content and—in his own state—simple honesty, for friends to trust, and a creditable occupation for the mind. Nothing in all the capitals among the rich but idleness and riot and display, cunning intrigue, self-seeking, and calculation. Thank God that you’re poor!”
Not so very poor, though, for he sent her thirty shillings every week, a benefaction that enabled her to share among the really poor who were her neighbours. For years that sum had come to her with his letters every Saturday, often from towns whose names in their foreign spelling were unknown to her; a sense of opulence that caused her some uneasiness had more than once compelled her to protest. “I am sure you deprive yourself,” she wrote, “and half that money would do me finely. You should be saving, laddie; some day you will want to marry.”
“Marry,” he wrote her back, incontinent; “I am here in a world of mannequins, and have yet to see the woman I could be happy to sit with in auld age by a Scottish fire.”
But he was not always to be of that mind. One day her weekly letter held the fabulous sum of twenty pounds, and a hint of his infatuation for a lady he had met in Paris. His mother read his rhapsodies about the lass; they were, she noticed, more about her wit and beauty than about her heart. And in his letter was an unfamiliar undertone of apprehension, secrecy, evasion, which her mother sense discerned.
* * * * *
The Pompadour écossais rose one morning from his bed, which once belonged to Louis Quatorze, in the rue Adolphe Yvon; broke his fast on a bowl of coffee and a roll, and having dressed himself, as he always did, without a valet, with as much fastidiousness as if he were the Duke de Morny, rode for an hour in the wood, and later drove his English coach, with his English horses, English grooms, and English post-horn, out to the garden of St Germain. He was unusually resplendent, from his hat of silk, broad-brimmed, widely banded with bombazine, to high-heeled military shoes which seemed moulded to his feet, and had never known an unguent, but were polished daily to a fine dull lustre by the shin-bone of a deer. Upon his coat lapel was a green carnation that had cost a louis; his secretary sat behind him on the box, a man of undistinguished presence, wearing a sardonic smile; on the seats behind him was a company of guests for whom the lord had sieved the most exclusive salons of the capital—Prevost and Chatran, Chelmonski the Napoleonic painter, Paul Delourade the poet, half a dozen women of the most impeccable repute, and among them Mathilde de Langan with her ponderous mother, who was overjoyed to think that, after years of fruitless strategy, she was like to find an eminently eligible son-in-law in Lord Balgowie.
The girl was altogether lovely, exquisitely moulded, in the delicious gush of health and youthfulness, a miracle of grace with an aspect that recalled the pictures of Italian Madonnas; a brow benign and calm, a little tender mouth designed rather for prayer than for kissing, eyes purple black, profound as wells and prone to an alluring pensiveness.
They reached St Germain; stabled the horses, lunched upon the terrace that looks widely over the plain of Paris; obsequious silent servants hung about the tables; food and banter, wine and laughter, fruit and flowers engaged the company as it sat between the parterres, under awnings; and apart a little, looking on with eyes that gleamed at times with furtive and malicious entertainment, sat the secretary.
“That is a singular man of yours, milord,” remarked Mathilde, who sat beside the Pompadour. “I have never seen him smile but in derision.”
“He is a man with a peculiar sense of humour,” said the Pompadour, regarding her with gravely tender eyes. “I should not be surprised if the whole interior of that apparently saturnine body is at this moment rumbling with laughter.”
“Vraiment? What should he be laughing at?” asked the lady, whose judicious mother with discreet consideration sought a wicker arm-chair, screened herself with a quite unnecessary sunshade, and prepared to nap.
“At what he must think the folly of—of my quest for pleasure. He is, you know, my countryman, and the happy-starred among us find content and joy in the very cheapest, simplest entertainment. The cost of—of those flowers alone, perhaps he calculates at this moment, would suffice to keep his mother a fortnight.”
“Mon Dieu! has he got a mother?” said the lady airily. “To look at that rugged form and the square hard countenance, I would have thought he had been chipped from granite. But I hope the dear mother is not really hungry. Do you know her?”
“I am privileged to read her letters once a week,” said the Pompadour.
“That must be most amusing.”
“It is at least instructive; she has her own ideas of the life of fashion, and the character of le Pompadour.”
“Does she laugh, too, internally?”
“I fancy not,” said the Pompadour reflectively; “I think it is more likely that she prays.”
“How droll!” said the saintly lips. “But I suppose it is the best that one can do when one is poor. If I were so rich as you, and derived so much edification from her epistles, I should give her money.”
“More than she has from her son, who loves her, would make her miserable. Sixty years of strict frugality spoil the constitution for excess, and two guineas a week would make her as uncomfortable as one of Joseph’s dinners would.”
“You, at least, do not show appreciation of your Joseph’s dinners; you seem content with meagre soup and dry biscuits; one might think you were a physician, and we the subjects of experiment in indigestion.”
Madame de Langan slept assuredly; the egrets on her hat bobbed most grotesquely; now and then she gurgled. The company had scattered, some to see the old home of the exiled James of England, some to walk on the forest fringes.
“Mathilde,” said the Pompadour in a whisper, taking her hand in his and bending towards her with a look of burning concentration. “If I—if I were poor, could you love me?”
She started, bit her lip at a certain gaucherie in the question, but did not withdraw her hand. “I—I cannot say,” she stammered; “isn’t that a point for the little mother?” and she glanced at the sunshade hiding the ponderous sleeper.
“I know! I know! I know!” said the Pompadour in a fury of impatience. “But this is our Scottish fashion; first I must know from you, and then I shall consult your mother. Meanwhile, do you love me?”
“I have had no experience,” said the lady, not much embarrassed. “You have not told me yet if you love me, which is, I understand, the customary ritual.”
“Mon Dieu!” said he in an excess of fervour, “I’m in a flame of passion and worship of you,” and he crushed unconsciously her fingers in his two strong hands.
She winced. “Oh, ce n’est pas gentil,” she exclaimed, pulling away her hand. “You hurt me horribly.” Then she smiled up in his face, provocatively coquettish, whispering, “To-morrow,” for the other guests came trooping back upon the terrace.
On the following evening, when the dark was falling upon Paris, and the lamps began to bloom along the boulevards like flowers of fire, a little woman, simple, elderly, and timid, drove to the door of the mansion in the rue Adolph Yvon, and asked to see his lordship’s secretary.
“He is from home, madam,” said the English servant, looking with curiosity at the homely figure.
“From home!” she exclaimed, beset with fears, and realising now more poignantly than ever all the hazards of her scheme. “I must see him to-night; I am his mother.”
“He is meantime with his lordship at the restaurant of Voisin,” said the domestic kindly. “Will you come in and wait for him?”
“Thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed; “but, if it were possible, I should like to see him now.”
He put her in a cab, and gave the name of Voisin to the driver.
Voisin’s, in the rue Cambon, is a quiet and unpretentious restaurant, dear to aristocratic Paris, since it looks so cheap and really is expensive. So quiet, so discreet, so restrained externally, men from the rural parts have been known to go boldly in, misapprehending, and before they had recovered from the blinding radiance of its tables, ask for a brioche and a mug of beer.
To-night it had, more speciously than usual, the aspect of a simple village inn: a hush prevailed; its waiters moved about on list, and spoke in whispers; le Pompadour écossais dined en prince upstairs with a merry company, in a chamber upon which the whole attention of the house was concentrated, from M. le Gerant down to the meanest kitchen scullion, for the evening’s entertainment was upon a scale of reckless cost. Nothing would satisfy this wonderful man to-night but curious foods far-borne from foreign lands, strange rare beverages, golden vessels that had only once or twice been used in the Tuileries in the last days of the Empire. If diamonds could be crushed and turned by some miracle of alchemy into a palatable bouillon, he, or properly his secretary, would have cheerfully paid the cost. In an alcove screened by palms a string quartette played the most sensuous music, so exquisitely modulated that it seemed deliberately designed to harmonise with rallies of wit and peals of laughter.
Mathilde, who sat to the right of the host, and by her saintly aspect seemed at times incongruous with that company of fashion’s fools, was for once silent, thoughtful, and demure.
“You have not told me yet if I may hope,” said the Pompadour to her in a tender undertone, “and we disperse in less than twenty minutes.”
“Hush!” she interrupted, with an impetuous jewelled hand upon his knee; “your friend has his eye on us! That man makes me afraid—he looks so cold, so supercilious! I hate to have a man regard me so who is convulsed with inside laughter, as you say; he looks—more like a conscience than a human secretary!”
Le Pompadour cast a glance across the room to the chair from which his secretary was at the moment summoned by a whispered message from the manager of the restaurant.
“He is a student of life and men,” said he. “It is his humour to put the follies of fashion underneath the microscope of a mind as searchingly analytical as a lens.”
“I’m glad all Scots are not like that,” said the lady fervently. “Now, you have the real French temperament, and the means to entertain it; your secretary, were he as rich as you, I’m sure would be a skinflint.”
“There, I can swear, you misjudge him,” said the Pompadour,—“a man born unhappy, and spoiled for any useful purpose, I am sorry for him.”
“Get rid of him—get rid of him!” said the lady, with a cleverly simulated shudder.
“What!” said the Pompadour, regarding her with surprise, seeing for the first time cruelty in the mild Madonna eyes. “Upon the secretary’s stipend there depend, you know, the comforts of a poor old Scottish lady—”
“There are so many openings for a perambulating conscience! Those canaille! I am sure his frigid countenance spoils your appetite; it would spoil mine—and you eat like a Trappist monk. Is that Scots too?”
“Gluttony is the one aristocratic vice to which I could never become accustomed,” he replied. “I was—I was once, as many here to-night would think, quite poor!”
She started slightly, looked incredulous. “How provoking it must have been!” she said.
“No,” he reflected soberly. “Happiness—to speak platitude—has wonderfully little to do with a bank account. You look so good and wise I thought you had discovered that.”
She answered with deliberate acidity—
“I quite disagree. I, at all events, could never contemplate poverty with equanimity.”
“Not poverty,” he protested eagerly—“not poverty! The young, the earnest, and the hopeful know no poverty; they are not poor—where there is love,” and he searched her eyes as if his very life depended on discovering there a sign of her agreement with his sentiment.
She glanced about her at the indications of the speaker’s wealth and prodigality, smiled cynically, tapped him with her fan. “Farceur!” said she, “now you are romantic, and to talk romance in seriousness is ridiculous.”
Of a sudden he saw her what she really was—vain, cruel, calculating, parched in soul, despite her saintly face. He stared at her, almost stunned by disillusion, seeing the corruption of her nature rise like a scum upon the purple eyes.
To the left of his chair the door of the reception salon opened at the moment, and a voice beyond it plucked him from the depths of his despondency. He rose, incredulous, and rushed into the room, where a little old woman, simple and abashed at her surroundings, stood beside the secretary.
“Mother!” he exclaimed, with his arms around her, almost doubtful of her actual presence. “I thought it was your wraith.”
“I fear I come at an awkward time,” she said pathetically; “but all alone in this strange city, what was I to do?”
“You come at the very time I want you,” he replied. “I had—I had forgotten things. I have been play-acting, and the play is done! Was this”—and he turned to the pseudo-secretary—“was this a part of your entertainment, Lord Balgowie?”
“It is a most effective curtain,” said the other, smiling kindly on the little woman; “but it was not, strictly speaking, in the manuscript. I am glad the play, as you say, is over; for I had begun to think you took the part, in one respect, too seriously. I am honoured to meet you, madam; you must be wearied after such a journey. Both of you go at once to the rue Adolphe Yvon, and I shall make the requisite apologies to the company.”
He saw them to the street, and returned to join the guests. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with a manner they had never seen in him before, “Le Pompadour has taken his leave à l’anglais, and my little joke has terminated in the most dramatic fashion. I have long had a desire to see, as a spectator, what for a dozen years I was under the absurd impression was a life of pleasure; and, at the cost of paying the bills myself and lending my worthy young compatriot my name for a few months, I have had the most delicious and instructive entertainment. In many respects he filled the part of Lord Balgowie better than ever I could do; but two things rather spoiled his admirable presentation—a homely taste in viands, and his honest heart!”