The Guest of Quesnay Part 5

Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and my cheeks burning.

There are women who will meet or pa.s.s a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind.

Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with sandwich that I dared not speak.

"Thank you," she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings.

I stood looking after her as she crossed the clearing and entered the cool winding of the path on the other side.

I stared and wished--wished that I could have painted her into my picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that I had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer hat, which was the last bit of her to disappear, had vanished. Then, discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and, recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again.

I did not immediately begin.

The pa.s.sing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no moment to a man, and the pa.s.sing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is an episode--even to a middle-aged landscape painter.

"An episode?" quoth I. I should be ashamed to withhold the truth out of my fear to be taken for a sentimentalist: this woman who had pa.s.sed was of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there in the woods--and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face burned again.

With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds.

He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white flannels, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him.

At sight of me he stopped short.

"Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her hat?" he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick eagerness which caused me no wonder--for I had seen the lady.

What did surprise me, however, was the instantaneous certainty with which I recognised the speaker from Amedee's description; certainty founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old fellow's powers.

My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so clear and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might have pa.s.sed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I guessed his years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome young fellows with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though out of the world we were near it. It was the new-comer's "singular air"

which established his ident.i.ty. Amedee's vagueness had irked me, but the thing itself--the "singular air"--was not at all vague. Instantly perceptible, it was an invest.i.ture; marked, definite--and intangible.

My interrogator was "that other monsieur."

In response to his question I asked him another:

"Were the roses real or artificial?"

"I don't know," he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical a.s.sumption of gravity. "It wouldn't matter, would it? Have you seen her?"

He stooped to brush the brambles from his trousers, sending me a sidelong glance from his blue eyes, which were brightly confident and inquiring, like a boy's. At the same time it struck me that whatever the nature of the singularity investing him it partook of nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think him odd enough.

"Isn't your description," I said gravely, thinking to suit my humour to his own, "somewhat too general? Over yonder a few miles lies Houlgate.

Trouville itself is not so far, and this is the season. A great many white hats trimmed with roses might come for a stroll in these woods.

If you would complete the items--" and I waved my hand as if inviting him to continue.

"I have seen her only once before," he responded promptly, with a seriousness apparently quite genuine. "That was from my window at an inn, three days ago. She drove by in an open carriage without looking up, but I could see that she was very handsome. No--" he broke off abruptly, but as quickly resumed--"handsome isn't just what I mean.

Lovely, I should say. That is more like her and a better thing to be, shouldn't you think so?"

"Probably--yes--I think so," I stammered, in considerable amazement.

"She went by quickly," he said, as if he were talking in the most natural and ordinary way in the world, "but I noticed that while she was in the shade of the inn her hair appeared to be dark, though when the carriage got into the sunlight again it looked fair."

I had noticed the same thing when the lady who had pa.s.sed emerged from the shadows of the path into the sunshine of the glade, but I did not speak of it now; partly because he gave me no opportunity, partly because I was almost too astonished to speak at all, for I was no longer under the delusion that he had any humourous or whimsical intention.

"A little while ago," he went on, "I was up in the branches of a tree over yonder, and I caught a glimpse of a lady in a light dress and a white hat and I thought it might be the same. She wore a dress like that and a white hat with roses when she drove by the inn. I am very anxious to see her again."

"You seem to be!"

"And haven't you seen her? Hasn't she pa.s.sed this way?"

He urged the question with the same strange eagerness which had marked his manner from the first, a manner which confounded me by its absurd resemblance to that of a boy who had not mixed with other boys and had never been teased. And yet his expression was intelligent and alert; nor was there anything abnormal or "queer" in his good-humoured gaze.

"I think that I may have seen her," I began slowly; "but if you do not know her I should not advise--"

I was interrupted by a shout and the sound of a large body plunging in the thicket. At this the face of "that other monsieur" flushed slightly; he smiled, but seemed troubled.

"That is a friend of mine," he said. "I am afraid he will want me to go back with him." And he raised an answering shout.

Professor Keredec floundered out through the last row of saplings and bushes, his beard embellished with a broken twig, his big face red and perspiring. He was a fine, a mighty man, ponderous of shoulder, monumental of height, stupendous of girth; there was cloth enough in the hot-looking black frock-coat he wore for the canopy of a small pavilion. Half a dozen books were under his arm, and in his hand he carried a hat which evidently belonged to "that other monsieur," for his own was on his head.

One glance of scrutiny and recognition he shot at me from his silver-rimmed spectacles; and seized the young man by the arm.

"Ha, my friend!" he exclaimed in a ba.s.s voice of astounding power and depth, "that is one way to study botany: to jump out of the middle of a high tree and to run like a crazy man!" He spoke with a strong accent and a thunderous rolling of the "r." "What was I to think?" he demanded. "What has arrived to you?"

"I saw a lady I wished to follow," the other answered promptly.

"A lady! What lady?"

"The lady who pa.s.sed the inn three days ago. I spoke of her then, you remember."

"Tonnerre de Dieu!" Keredec slapped his thigh with the sudden violence of a man who remembers that he has forgotten something, and as a final addition to my amazement, his voice rang more of remorse than of reproach. "Have I never told you that to follow strange ladies is one of the things you cannot do?"

"That other monsieur" shook his head. "No, you have never told me that.

I do not understand it," he said, adding irrelevantly, "I believe this gentleman knows her. He says he thinks he has seen her."

"If you please, we must not trouble this gentleman about it," said the professor hastily. "Put on your hat, in the name of a thousand saints, and let us go!"

"But I wish to ask him her name," urged the other, with something curiously like the obstinacy of a child. "I wish--"

"No, no!" Keredec took him by the arm. "We must go. We shall be late for our dinner."

"But why?" persisted the young man.

"Not now!" The professor removed his broad felt hat and hurriedly wiped his vast and steaming brow--a magnificent structure, corniced, at this moment, with anxiety. "It is better if we do not discuss it now."

"But I might not meet him again."

Professor Keredec turned toward me with a half-desperate, half-apologetic laugh which was like the rumbling of heavy wagons over a block pavement; and in his fl.u.s.tered face I thought I read a signal of genuine distress.

"I do not know the lady," I said with some sharpness. "I have never seen her until this afternoon."