Lady Barbarina Part 51

I a.s.sured myself that our companions were out of ear-shot and that Miss Ruck was much occupied with a large vanilla cream. "Because you're always interlaced with that young lady. There's no getting near you."

Aurora watched her friend while the latter devoted herself to her ice.

"You wonder, no doubt, why I should care for her at all. So does mamma; elle s'y perd. I don't like her particularly; je n'en suis pas folle.

But she gives me information; she tells me about her-your-everything but _my_-extraordinary country. Mamma has always tried to prevent my knowing anything about it, and I'm all the more devoured with curiosity. And then Miss Ruck's so very fresh."

"I may not be so fresh as Miss Ruck," I said, "but in future, when you want information, I recommend you to come to me for it."

"Ah, but our friend offers to take me there; she invites me to go back with her, to stay with her. You couldn't do that, could you?" And my companion beautifully faced me on it. "Bon, a false note! I can see it by your face; you remind me of an outraged maitre de piano."

"You overdo the character-the poor American girl," I said. "Are you going to stay with that delightful family?"

"I'll go and stay with any one who will take me or ask me. It's a real nostalgie. She says that in New York-in Thirty-Seventh Street near Fourth Avenue-I should have the most lovely time."

"I've no doubt you'd enjoy it."

"Absolute liberty to begin with."

"It seems to me you've a certain liberty here," I returned.

"Ah, _this_? Oh I shall pay for this. I shall be punished by mamma and lectured by Madame Galopin."

"The wife of the pasteur?"

"His digne epouse. Madame Galopin, for mamma, is the incarnation of European opinion. That's what vexes me with mamma, her thinking so much of people like Madame Galopin. Going to see Madame Galopin-mamma calls that being in European society. European society! I'm so sick of that expression; I've heard it since I was six years old. Who's Madame Galopin-who the devil thinks anything of her here? She's n.o.body; she's the dreariest of frumps; she's perfectly third-rate. If I like your America better than mamma I also know my Europe better."

"But your mother, certainly," I objected a trifle timidly-for my young lady was excited and had a charming little pa.s.sion in her eye-"your mother has a great many social relations all over the continent."

"She thinks so, but half the people don't care for us. They're not so good as we and they know it-I'll do them that justice-so that they wonder why we should care for them. When we're polite to them they think the less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much of them simply because they're foreigners. If I could tell you all the ugly stupid tenth-rate people I've had to talk to for no better reason than that they were _de leur pays_!-Germans, French, Italians, Turks, everything. When I complain mamma always says that at any rate it's practice in the language. And she makes so much of the most impossible English too; I don't know what _that's_ practice in."

Before I had time to suggest an hypothesis as regards this latter point I saw something that made me rise-I fear with an undissimulated start-from my chair. This was nothing less than the neat little figure of Mrs.

Church-a perfect model of the femme comme il faut-approaching our table with an impatient step and followed most unexpectedly in her advance by the pre-eminent form of Mr. Ruck, whose high hat had never looked so high. She had evidently come in search of her daughter, and if she had commanded this gentleman's attendance it had been on no more intimate ground than that of his unenvied paternity to her guilty child's accomplice. My movement had given the alarm and my young friend and M.

Pigeonneau got up; Miss Ruck alone didn't, in the local phrase, derange herself. Mrs. Church, beneath her modest little bonnet, looked thoroughly resolute though not at all agitated; she came straight to her daughter, who received her with a smile, and then she took the rest of us in very fixedly and tranquilly and without bowing. I must do both these ladies the justice that neither of them made the least little "scene."

"I've come for you, dearest," said the mother.

"Yes, dear mamma."

"Come for you-come for you," Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the relics of our little feast, on which she seemed somehow to shed at once the lurid light of the disreputable. "I was obliged to appeal to Mr.

Ruck's a.s.sistance. I was much perplexed. I thought a long time."

"Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you perplexed once in your life!"

cried Mr. Ruck with friendly jocosity. "But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you."

"We'll take a cab, Aurora," Mrs. Church went on without heeding this pleasantry-"a closed one; we'll enter it at once. Come, ma fille."

"Yes, dear mamma." The girl had flushed for humiliation, but she carried it bravely off; and her grimace as she looked round at us all and her eyes met mine didn't keep her, I thought, from being beautiful.

"Good-bye. I've had a ripping time."

"We mustn't linger," said her mother; "it's five o'clock. We're to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin."

"I had quite forgotten," Aurora declared. "That will be even more charming."

"Do you want me to a.s.sist you to carry her back, ma'am?" asked Mr. Ruck.

Mrs. Church covered him for a little with her coldest contemplation. "Do you prefer then to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these gentlemen?"

Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head. "Well, I don't know. How'd you like that, Sophy?"

"Well, I never!" gasped Sophy as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.

VIII

I had half-expected a person of so much decision, and above all of so much consistency, would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry by the most raffish part of the lakeside. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman-I couldn't but admire the justice of this pretension-by recognising my practical detachment. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church's view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man in such a situation is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora's appearing in public under the compromising countenance, as she regarded the matter, of Miss Ruck. Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to consider that of all the inmates of the Pension Beaurepas I was the best prepared for that exercise. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view to making my peace with her if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her inveterate volume and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked rather on those general considerations in which her cultivated mind was so much at home.

"Always at your deep studies, Mrs. Church," I didn't hesitate freely to observe.

"Que voulez-vous, monsieur? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn't study in the parlour of a boarding-house of this character. But I do what I can; I've always done what I can. That's all I've ever claimed."

"No one can do more, and you appear to have done a great deal."

"Do you know my secret?" she asked with an air of brightening confidence.

And this treasure hung there a little temptingly before she revealed it.

"To care only for the _best_! To do the best, to know the best-to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That's what I've always done in my little quiet persistent way. I've gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best. And it hasn't been for myself alone-it has been for my daughter. My daughter has had the best. We're not rich, but I can say that."

"She has had _you_, madam," I p.r.o.nounced finely.

"Certainly, such as I am, I've been devoted. We've got something everywhere; a little here, a little there. That's the real secret-to get something everywhere; you always can if you _are_ devoted. Sometimes it has been a little music, sometimes a little deeper insight into the history of art; sometimes into that of literature, politics, economics: every little counts, you know. Sometimes it has been just a glimpse, a view, a lovely landscape, a mere impression. We've always been on the look-out. Sometimes it has been a valued friendship, a delightful social tie."

"Here comes the 'European society,' the poor daughter's bugbear," I said to myself. "Certainly," I remarked aloud-I admit rather hypocritically-"if you've lived a great deal in pensions you must have got acquainted with lots of people."

Mrs. Church dropped her eyes an instant; taking it up, however, as one for whom discrimination was always at hand. "I think the European pension system in many respects remarkable and in some satisfactory. But of the friendships that we've formed few have been contracted in establishments of this stamp."

"I'm sorry to hear that!" I ruefully laughed.

"I don't say it for you, though I might say it for some others. We've been interested in European _homes_."

"Ah there you're beyond me!"

"Naturally"-she quietly a.s.sented. "We have the entree of the old Genevese society. I like its tone. I prefer it to that of Mr. Ruck,"

added Mrs. Church calmly; "to that of Mrs. Ruck and Miss Ruck. To that of Miss Ruck in particular."

"Ah the poor Rucks _have_ no tone," I pleaded. "That's just the point of them. Don't take them more seriously than they take themselves."

Well, she would see what she could do. But she bent grave eyes on me.

"Are they really fair examples?"