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The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst · English · Gutenberg #34065 · 473,599 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

Author: Marie Van Vorst

Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball


        
Release date: October 13, 2010 [eBook #34065]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34065

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SENTIMENTAL ADVENTURES OF JIMMY BULSTRODE ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and
madame "_pour les enfants_"]





The Sentimental
  Adventures of
    Jimmy Bulstrode



BY

MARIE VAN VORST



With Illustrations by

ALONZO KIMBALL




NEW YORK

HURST & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS




COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


Published March, 1908




TO THE MEMORY

OF

H. E. TESCHEMACHER




CONTENTS


_THE FIRST ADVENTURE_

In which he buys a Christmas tree


_THE SECOND ADVENTURE_

In which he tries to buy a portrait


_THE THIRD ADVENTURE_

In which he finds there are some things which one cannot buy


_THE FOURTH ADVENTURE_

In which he makes three people happy


_THE FIFTH ADVENTURE_

In which he makes nobody happy at all


_THE SIXTH ADVENTURE_

In which he discards a knave and saves a queen


_THE SEVENTH ADVENTURE_

In which he becomes the possessor of a certain piece of property


_THE EIGHTH ADVENTURE_

In which he comes into his own




ILLUSTRATIONS

From drawings by ALONZO KIMBALL


_The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame "pour
les enfants"_ . . . . . . Frontispiece

"_I only like him like a kind, kind friend_"

_In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing_

"_I've had a telegram from my husband_"




THE FIRST ADVENTURE



I

IN WHICH HE BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE

There was never in the world a better fellow than Jimmy Bulstrode.  If
he had been poorer his generosities would have ruined him over and over
again.  He was always being taken in, was the recipient of hundreds of
begging letters, which he hired another soft-hearted person to read.
He offended charitable organizations by never passing a beggar's
outstretched hand without dropping a coin in it.  He was altogether a
distressingly impracticable rich person, surrounded by people who
admired him for what he really was and by those who tried to squeeze
him for what he was worth!

It was a general wonder to people who knew him slightly why Bulstrode
had never married.  The gentleman himself knew the answer perfectly,
but it amused him to discuss the question in spite of the pain, as well
as for the pleasure that it caused him to consider--_the reason why_.

Mary Falconer, the woman he loved, was the wife of a man of whom
Bulstrode could only think in pitiful contempt.  But, thanks to an
element of chivalry in the character of the hero of this story the
years, as time went on, spread back of both the woman and the man in an
honorable series, of whose history neither one had any reason to be
ashamed.

Nevertheless, it struck them both as rather humorous, after all, that
of the three concerned her husband should be the only renegade and,
notwithstanding, profit by the combined good faith of his wife and the
man who loved her.

Oh, there was nothing easy in the task that Jimmy set for himself!  And
it did not facilitate matters that Mary Falconer scarcely ever helped
him in the least!  She was a beautiful woman, a tender woman, and there
were times when her friend felt that she cleverly and cruelly taunted
him with Puritanism and with his simple, old-fashioned ideas and
crystal clearness of vision, the _culte_ he had regarding marriage and
the sacred way in which he held bonds and vows.  It was no help at all
to think she rebelled and jested at his reserve; that she did her best
to break it--and there were times when it was a brilliant siege.  But
down in her heart she respected him, and as she saw around her the
domestic wrecks with which the matrimonial seas are encumbered, and
knew that her own craft promised to go safely through the storm, Mary
Falconer more than once had been grateful to the man.

As far as Bulstrode himself was concerned, each year--there had been
ten of them--he found the situation becoming more difficult and
dangerous.  Not only did the future appear to him impossible as things
were, but he began to hate his arid past.  He was sometimes led to ask,
what, after all, was he getting out of his colossal sacrifice?  The
only reward he wanted was the woman herself, and, unless her husband
died, she would never be his.  Bulstrode had not found that he could
solve the problem, and now and then he let it go from sheer weariness
of heart.


In the face of the window of the drawing-room where Bulstrode sat on
this afternoon of an especial winter's day the storm cast wreaths of
snow that clung and froze, or dropped like feathers down against the
sill.  The gentleman had his predilections even in New York, and in the
open fireplace the logs crumbled and disintegrated to ashen caves
wherein the palpitating jewels of the heat were held.  Except for this
old-fashioned warmth, there was none other in the room, whose white
wainscoting and pillars, low ceilings and quaint chimney-piece,
characterized one of those agreeably proportioned houses still to be
found in lower New York around Washington Square.

Bulstrode had received about half an hour ago a letter whose qualities
and suggestions were something disturbing to him:


"There is such a thing, believe me" (Mary Falconer wrote in the pages
which Bulstrode opened to read for the twentieth time), "as the _gloom_
of Christmas, Jimmy.  People won't frankly own to it.  They're afraid
of seeming sour and crabbed.  But don't you, who are so exquisitely apt
to feelings--to other people's feelings,--at once confess it?  It
attacks the spinster in the bustling winter streets as she is elbowed
by some person, exuberantly a mother, and so arrogantly laden with
delicious-looking parcels that she is almost a personal Christmas tree
herself.  I'm confident this 'gloom of Christmas' grips the wretched
little beings at toy-shop windows as they stand 'choosin'' their
never-to-be-realized toys.  I'm sure it haunts the vagrant and the
homeless in a city fairly redolent of holly and dinners, and where the
array of other people's homes is terrifying.  And, my dear friend, it
is so horribly subtle that no doubt it attacks others whose only grudge
is that their hearths are not built for Christmas trees or the hanging
of stockings.  But these unfortunates are not saying anything aloud,
therefore we must not pry!

"There's a jolly house-party on at the Van Schoolings'.  We're to go
down to-morrow to Tuxedo and pass Christmas night, and you are, of
course, asked and wanted.  Knowing your dread of these family
feasts--possibly from just such a ghost of the gloom--I was sure you
would refuse.  But it's a wonderful place for a talk or two, and I
shall hope you will go--will come, not even follow, but go down with
me."


There was more of the letter--there always is more of women's letters.
Their minds and pens are so charmingly facile; there is nothing a woman
can do better than talk, except to write.

Bulstrode smoked slowly, the pages between his fingers, his thoughts
travelling like wanderers towards a home from which a ban had kept them
aliens.  His eyes drifted to the beginning of the letter.  He wasn't
familiar with the homeless vagrant class.  His charities to that part
of the population consisted in donations to established societies, and
haphazard giving called forth by a beggar's extended hand.

If anybody may be immune to the melancholy of which his friend Mrs.
Falconer spoke, it should surely be this gentleman, smoking his cigar
before the fire.  The unopened letters--there was a pile of them--would
have offered ample reason why.  No one of the lot but bore some
testimony to the generous heart which, beneath dinner-jacket and behind
the screw-faced watch with the picture in the back of it, beat so
healthy and so well.

But the bestowal of benefits, whilst it may beautify the giver, does
not always transform itself into the one benefit desired and console
the bestower!  Bulstrode had a charming home.  He was alone in it.  He
had his clubs where bachelors like himself, more or less infected with
Christmas gloom, would be glad to greet him.  He had his friends, many
of them, and their home circles were complete.  His, by force of
circumstances, began and ended with himself, and as if triumphant to
have found so tempting a victim, the gloom came and possessed Bulstrode
as he sat and mused.

But the decided sadness that stole across his face bore no relation, to
the season, to whose white mystery and holy beauty there was something
in his boyish, kindly heart that always responded.

The sadness Mrs. Falconer's letter awakened would not sleep.  What his
Christmas _might_ be...!  He had only to order his motor, to call for
her and drive over the ferry; to sit beside her in the train, to drive
with her again across the wintry roads.  He had but to see her, watch
her, talk with her, share with her the day and evening, to have his
Christmas as nearly what a feast should be as dreams could ask.  The
whole festival was there: joy, good-will--peace?  No.  Not peace for
him or for her--not that; everything else, but not that.  And he had
been travelling for five weary months in order to make himself keep for
her that peace a little longer.

Bulstrode sighed here, lifted the letter where there was more of it to
his lips--held it out toward the fire as if the red jewels were to set
themselves around it, thought differently, and putting it back in its
envelope, thrust it in the pocket of his waistcoat.

"Ruggles," he asked the servant who had come in, "you sent the despatch
to Tuxedo?"

"Yes, sir."

"There'll be later a note to send.  I'll ring.  Well, what is it?"

"There's a person at the door, sir, who insists on seeing you."

The servant's tone--one particularly jarring to the ears of a man who
had fellowship with more than one class of his kind--made the master
look sharply up.  Ruggles was a new addition to the household, and
Bulstrode did not like him.

"A person," Bulstrode repeated, quietly; "what sort of a person?"

"A man, sir."

"Not a gentleman?  No," he nodded gently; "I see you do not think him
one.  Yet that he is a man is in his favor.  There are some gentlemen
who aren't men, you know.  Let him in."

In doing so Ruggles seemed to let in the night.  Bulstrode had, in the
warmth of his fragrant room, forgotten that outside was the wintry
dark.  Ruggles, in letting the man in, had the air of thrusting him in,
and shut the door behind the visitor with a click.

The creature himself let in the cold; he seemed made of it.  The snow
clung to his shoulders; his shoes, tied up with strings, were encrusted
with it.  His coat, buttoned to his chin, frayed at the cuffs and
edges, was thin and weather-stained.  He had a pale face, a royal
growth of beard--this was all Bulstrode had time to remark.  He rose.

"My servant says you want to see me.  Come near the fire, won't you?"

The visitor did not stir.  Bewildered in the warmth of the room, he
stood far back on the edge of the thick rug.  To all appearances he was
a bit of driftwood from the streets, one of the usual vagrant class who
haunt the saloons and park and steer from lockup to night-lodging,
until they finally steer themselves entirely off the face of history,
and the potter's field gathers them in.  Nothing but his entrance into
this conventional room before this well-balanced member of decent
society was peculiar.

As he still neither moved nor spoke, Bulstrode, approaching him, again
invited: "Come near the fire, won't you? and when you are warm tell me
what I can do for you."

"It's the storm," murmured the man, and a half-human look came across
his face with his words.  "I mean to say, it's this hellish storm
that's got in my throat and lungs.  I can't speak--it's so warm here.
It will be better in a second.  No, not near the fire;
thanks--chilblains."  He looked down at his poor feet.

The voice which the storm had beaten and thrashed to painful hoarseness
was entirely out of keeping with the man's appearance, and in
intonation, accent, and language was a shock to the hearer.

"Don't stand back like that--come into the room." Bulstrode wheeled a
chair briskly about.  "There; sit down and drink this; it's a mild
blend."

"I'm very wet," said the man.  "I'll drip on the rug."

"Hang the rug!"

The tramp drained the glass given him at one swallow merely; it
appeared to clear his throat and release his speech.  He gathered his
rags together.

"I beg pardon for forcing myself on you like this, but I fancy I
needn't tell you I'm desperate--desperate!"  He held out his hand; it
shook like a pale ghost's.  "I look it, I'm sure.  I haven't eaten a
meal or slept in a bed for a fortnight.  I've begged work and charity.
All day I've been shovelling snow, but I'm too weak to work now."

He was being led to a chair.  He sank in it.  "Before they sent me to
the Island I decided to try a ruse.  I went into a saloon and opened a
directory, and I said, 'The first name I put my finger upon I'll take
as good luck, and I'll go and see the person, man or woman.  I opened
to James Thatcher Bulstrode, 9 Washington Square."  He half smiled; the
pale, trembling hand was waving like a pitiful flag, a signal of
distress to catch the sight of some bark that might lend aid.  "So I
came here.  When there seemed actually to be some chance of my getting
in, why, my courage failed me.  I don't expect you to believe my story
or to believe anything, except that I am desperate--desperate.  It's
below zero to-night out there--infernally cold."  He took the pin out
of the collar turned up around his neck and let his coat fall back.
Under it Bulstrode saw he wore a thin flannel shirt.  The tramp
repeated to himself, as it were, "It's a bad storm."

He looked up in a dazed fashion at his host as if for acceptance of his
remark.  In the easy chair, half swathed in rags, pitiful in thinness,
dripping from shoes and clothes water that the storm had drenched into
him, he was a sorry object in the atmosphere of the well-ordered
conventional room.  The heat and whiskey, the famine and exposure, cast
a film across his eyes and brain.  He indistinctly saw his host pass
into the next room and shut the door behind him.

"By Jove!" he murmured under his breath in wonder find dumb thanks for
the shelter.  "By Jove!"  The stimulant filtered agreeably through him;
more charitable than any element with which he had been lately
familiar, the fire's heat began to thaw the ice in his bones.  He laid
his dripping hat on his knees, his thin hands folded themselves over
it, his eyes closed.  For hours he had shuffled about the streets to
keep from freezing.  At the charity organization they gave work he was
too weak to do; he had not eaten a substantial meal in so long that he
had forgotten the taste of food and had ceased to crave it.  In the
soft light of lamp and fire he fell into a doze.  Bulstrode, if he had
stolen softly in to look at his visitor, would have seen a man not over
thirty years of age, although want and dissipation added ten to his
appearance.  He would have been quick to take note of the fine,
delicately cut face under the disfiguring beard, and of the slender,
emaciated body deformed by its rags.

Possibly he did so noiselessly come in and stand by the unconscious
creature, but the sleeping vagabond, dreaming fitful, half-painful
things, was ignorant of the visitor.  Finally across his mind's sharp
despair came a sense of warmth and comfort, and in its spell he awoke.

A servant, not the one who had thrust him into the drawing-room, but
another with a friendly face, stood at his side, and in broken English
asked the guest of Bulstrode to follow him; and gathering his scattered
senses together and picking up his rags and what was left of himself,
the creature obeyed a summons which he supposed was to hale him again
into the winter streets.


It was some three hours later that Bulstrode in his dining-room
entertained his singular guest.

"I have asked you to dine with me," he explained, with a certain
graciousness, as if he claimed, not gave, a favor, "as I'm all alone
to-night.  It's Christmas eve, you know--or perhaps you've been more or
less glad to forget it?"

The young man who took the chair indicated him was unrecognizable as
the stranger who had staggered into 9 Washington Square three or four
hours before.  Turned out in spotless linen and a good suit that fitted
him fairly well, shaven face save for a mustache above his lip, bathed,
brushed, refreshed by nourishment and sleep and repose, he looked like
one who has been in the waters, possibly a long, long time; like one
who has drifted, been bruised, shattered, and beaten, but who has
nevertheless drifted to shore; and in spite of his borrowed clothes,
his scarred, haggard face, he looked like a gentleman, and Bulstrode
from the moment he spoke had recognized him as one.

The food was a feast to the stranger, in spite of nourishment already
given him by Prosper.  He restrained the ferocious hunger that woke at
sight and smell of the good things, forced himself not to cry out with
eagerness, not to tear and grasp the eatables off the plate, not to
devour like a beast.  Every time he raised his eyes he met those of the
butler Ruggles, and as quickly the stranger looked away.  The face of
the servant standing by the sideboard, back of him the white and
gleaming array of the Bulstrode family silver like piles of snow, was
for some reason or other not a pleasant face; the stranger did not
think it so.

Once again seated in the room he had entered in his outcast state, a
cup of coffee at his hand, a cigar between his lips, the agreeable
atmosphere of the old room and its charming objects, the kindly look on
the face of his host, all swam before him.  Looking frankly at
Bulstrode, he said, not without grace of manner:

"I give it up.  I can't--it's not to be made out or understood..."

"Do you," interrupted the other, "feel equal to talking a little: to
telling me how it happens that you are wandering, as you seem to be?
For from the moment you first spoke----"

The young man nodded.  "I'm a gentleman.  It's worse somehow--I don't
know why, but it is."

Bulstrode thought out for him: "It's like remembering agreeable places
to which you feel you will never return.  Only," he quickly offered,
"in your case you must, you know, go back."

"No," said the young man, quietly.

There was so much entire renunciation in what he said that the other
could not press it.

"Better still, you can then go on?"

The vagrant looked at his companion as if to say: "Since I've known
you--seen you--I have thought that I might."  But he said nothing more,
and Bulstrode, reading a diffidence which did not displease him,
finished:

"You shall go on, and I'll help you."

The stranger bowed his head, and the wine sent the color up until his
cheeks took the flush of health.  Remaining a little bent over, his
eyes on his feet clad in Bulstrode's shoes, he said:

"I'm an Englishman.  My family is everything that's decent and all
_that_, you know, and proud.  We've first-rate traditions.  I'm a
younger son, and I've always been a thorn in the family's side.  I've
been a sort of vagabond from the first, but never as bad as they
thought or believed."

He paused.  His recital was painful to him.  Bulstrode waited, then
knocking off the ash from his cigar, urged:

"Tell me about it, tell me frankly; it will, you see, be a relief.  We
can do better that way--if I know."

The stranger looked up at him quickly, then leaning forward in his
chair, talked as it were to the carpet, and rapidly:

"It's just a year ago.  I'd been going it rather hard and got into
trouble more or less--lost at cards and the races, and been running up
a lot of bills.  My father was awfully down on me.  I'd gone home for
the holidays and had a talk with my father and asked him to pay up for
me just this once more.  He refused, and we got very angry, both of us,
and separated in a rage.  The house was full of people--a Christmas
ball and a tree.  My father had, so it happened, quite a lot of money
in the house.  I knew where it was--I had seen him count it and put it
away.  That night for some reason the whole thing sickened me, in the
mess I was in, and I left and went up to London without even saying
good-by.  In the course of the week my brother came and found me drunk
in my rooms.  It seems that the money had been taken from my father's
safe, and they accused me."

"But," interrupted Bulstrode, eagerly, "it was a simple thing to
exculpate yourself."

Ignoring his remark, the other continued: "I have never seen my father
since that night."

No amount of former deception can persuade a man that he is a lame
judge of character.  The young Englishman's emaciated face, where eyes
spoiled by dissipation looked out at his companion, was to this
impulsive reader of humanity a good face.  Bulstrode, however, saw what
he wanted to see in most people.  Given a chance to study them, or
rather further to know them intimately, he might indeed have ended by
finding in some cases a few of the imagined qualities.  Here misery was
evident, degradation as well, timidity, and hesitation,--but honesty?
Bulstrode fancied that its characters were not effaced, and he helped
the recital:

"Since you so left your people?"

"The steady go down!" acknowledged the other.  "I worked my passage to
the States on a liner--I stoked..."

"Any chap," encouraged the gentleman, "who can do that can pull
himself, I should say, out of a worse hole."

"There's scarcely a bad habit I haven't had down in the hole with me,"
confessed the other, "and they've held me there."

They both remained for a few seconds without speaking, and the host's
eyes wandered to where, over his mantel-shelf, in a great gold frame
was the portrait of a lady done by Baker.  A quaint young lady in her
early teens, with bare arms and frilled frock.  She had Bulstrode's
eyes.  By her side was the black muzzle of a great hound, on whose head
the little hand rested.  Under the picture, from a silver bowl of
roses, came a fragrance that filled the room, and, close by stood a
photograph of another lady, very modern, very mocking, and very lovely.

Bulstrode, delicately drawing inferences from the influences in his
life, and, if not consciously grateful, reflecting them charmingly,
broke the silence:

"You must have formed some plan or other in your mind when you came to
my door?  What, in the event of your being received, did you intend to
ask me to do?"

The stranger lifted his head and his response was irrelevant: "It seems
a hundred years since I stood there in that storm and your man pulled
me in.  I haven't seen a place like this for long, not the inside of
decent houses.  When I left the ship I managed to get down with a chap
as far as Florida, where he had an orange-plantation, but the venture
fell through.  I fancy the rest is as well forgotten.  When I came in
here to-night I intended to ask you for a Christmas gift of money, and
I should have gone out and drunk myself to hell."

"You spoke"--Bulstrode fetched him back--"of your father and your
brother; was there no one else?"

The younger man looked up without reply.

"There has been, then, no more kindly influence in your life--no
sister--no woman?"

Bulstrode brought out the words; in his judgment they meant so very
much.  He saw a change cross the other's face.

"I fancy there are not many men who haven't had a woman in their lives
for good or bad," he said, with a short laugh.

"Well," urged the gentleman, gently, "and for what was this woman?"

As if he repelled the insistence, the young fellow stammered:

"I say, this putting a fellow on the rack----"

But Bulstrode leaned forward in his chair and rested his hand on his
companion's knee and pleaded:

"Speak out frankly--frankly--I believe I shall understand; it will free
your heart to speak.  This influence which to a man should be the
best--the best--what was it to you?"  Bulstrode sat back and waited,
and the other man seemed quite lost in melancholy meditations for some
few seconds.  Then Bulstrode put it: "For a young man, no matter how
wild, to leave his home under the misapprehension you claim:--for him
to make no effort to reinstate himself: with no attempt at justice: for
him to become a wanderer--there must be an extraordinary reason, almost
an improbable one----"

"I don't ask you to hear," said the vagrant, quickly.

"I wish to do so.  It would have been a simple matter to exculpate
yourself--you had not the funds in your possession, had never had them.
You took no means to clear yourself?"

"None."

Bulstrode looked hard at the face his care had revealed to him: the
deep eyes, the neck, chin, the sensitive mouth--there was a certain
distinction about him in his borrowed clothes.

"Where is the woman now?"

"She married my brother--she is Lady Waring--my name," tardily
introduced the stranger, "is Cecil Waring."

Bulstrode bowed.  "Tell me something of her, in a word--in a word."

"Well, she is always clever," said the young man, slowly, "always very
beautiful, and then very poor."

"Yes," nodded Bulstrode.

"She is like the rest of us--one of a fast wild set--a----"

"A gambler?"  Bulstrode helped the description.

"She played," acknowledged the young man, "as the rest do--bridge."

"Were you engaged to her, Waring?"

"Yes," he slowly acknowledged, as if each word hurt him.

"And did she believe you guilty?"

"I think," said the other, with an inscrutable expression, "she could
not have done so."

"But she let you go under suspicion?"

"Yes."

"Without a word of good faith, of comfort?"

"Yes."

"Did she know of your embarrassments?"

"Too well."

"You tell me she was poor and--possibly she had embarrassments of her
own?"

"Possibly."

Bulstrode came over to him.

"Was she at the Christmas ball that night?"

The young man rose as well, his eyes on his questioner's; the color had
all left his face--he appeared fascinated--then he shook himself and
unexpectedly laughed.

"No," he said; "oh no."

The older man bowed his head and replied, quite inaptly:

"I understand!"

He took a turn across the room.

The few steps brought him in front of the mantel and the photograph of
the modern lady in her furs and close hat.  He stood and met the fire
of her mocking eyes.

"And you _believe_ him, Jimmy!" he could hear her say in her delicious
voice.

"Yes," he mentally told her, "I believe him."

"You think that to save a woman's name and honor he has become an
outcast on the face of the earth ... Jimmy!"

He still gently replied to her:

"Men who love, you know, have but one code--the woman and honor."

Still mocking, but gentle as would have been the touch of the roses in
the bowl near the photograph, her voice told him,

"Then he's worth saving, Jimmy."

Worth saving ... he agreed, and turned to his guest.  In doing so he
saw that Ruggles had come into the drawing-room to remove the
coffee-tray.

"Beg pardon, sir, but you mentioned there would be a letter to send
shortly?"

"By Jove! so I did!" exclaimed Bulstrode.  "I beg your pardon; will you
excuse me while I write a line at the desk?"  The line was an order to
the florist.

For some reason the eyes of the Englishman had not quitted the butler's
face, and Ruggles, with cold insolence, had stared at him in turn.
Waring, albeit in another man's clothes, fed and seated before a
friendly hearth, and once again within the pale of his own class, had
regained something of his natural air and feeling of superiority.  He
resented the servant's insolence, and his face was angrily flushed as
Bulstrode gave his orders, and the man left the room.

"I must go away," he said, rather brusquely.  "I can never thank you
for what you have done.  I feel as if I had been in a dream."

"Sit down."  His companion ignored his words.  "Sit down."

"It's late."

"For what, my friend?"

"I must find some place to sleep."

"You have found it," gently smiled Bulstrode.  "Your room is prepared
for you here."  Then he interrupted: "No thanks--no thanks.  If what
you tell me is all I think it is, I'm proud to share my roof with you,
Waring."

"Don't think well of me--don't!" blurted out the other.  "You don't
know what a ruined vagabond I am.  When you send me out to-morrow I
shall begin again; but let me tell you that although I've herded with
tramps and thieves, been in the hospital and lock-up, and worked in the
hell of a furnace in a ship's hold, nothing hurt me any more, not after
I left England--not after those days when I waited in Liverpool for a
word--for a sign--not after that, all you see the marks of now--nothing
hurts now but the memory.  I'm immune."

"You will feel differently--you will humanize."

"Never!" exclaimed the tramp.

"To-night," said Bulstrode, simply.

Waring looked at him curiously.

"What a wonderful man!" he half murmured.  "I was led to you by fate:
you have forced me to lay my soul bare to you--and now..."

"Let's look things in the face together," suggested the gentleman,
practically.  "I have a ranch out West.  A good piece of property.
It's in the hands of a clever Englishman and promises well.  How would
you like to go out there and start anew?  He'll give you a welcome, and
he's a first-rate business man.  Will you go?"

Waring had with his old habit thrust his hands in his pockets.  He
stood well on his feet.  Bulstrode remarked it.  He looked meditatively
down between the soles of his shoes.

"You mean to say you give me a chance--to--to----"

"Begin anew, Waring."

"I drink a great deal," said the young man.

"You will swear off."

"I've gambled away all the money I ever had."

"You will be taking care of mine, and it will be a point of honor."

"I'm under a cloud----

"Not in my eyes," said Bulstrode, stoutly.

"--which I can never clear."

Bulstrode made a dismissing gesture.

"I should want the chap out there to know the truth."

"The truth," caught his hearer, and the other as quickly interrupted:

"To know under what circumstances I left my people."

"No, that is unnecessary," said Bulstrode, firmly.  "Nobody has any
right to your past.  I don't know his.  That's the beauty of the
plains--the freshness of them.  It's a new start--a clean page."

Still the guest hesitated.

"I don't believe it's worth while.  You see, I've batted about now so
much alone, with nobody near me but the lowest sort; I've given in so
long, with no care to do better, that I haven't any confidence in
myself.  I don't want you to see me fail, sir,--I don't want to go back
on you."

Bulstrode had heard very understandingly part of the man's word, part
of his excuse for his weakness.

"That's it," he said, musingly.  "Butting about alone.  It's
that--loneliness--that's responsible for so many things."

Looking up brightly as his friend whose derelict dangerous vessel, so
near to port and repair, was heading for the wide seas again, Bulstrode
wondered: "If such a thing could be that some friend, not too
uncongenial, could be found to go with you and stand as it were by
you--some friend who knew--who comprehended----"

Waring laughed.  "I haven't such a one."

"Yes," said the older gentleman, "you have, and he will stand by you.
I'll go West with you myself to-morrow--on Christmas day.  I need a
change.  I want to get away for a little time."

Waring drew back a step, for Bulstrode had risen.  Cold Anglo-Saxon as
he was, the unprecedented miracle this gentleman presented made him
seem almost lunatic.  He stared blankly.

"It's simpler than it looks."  Bulstrode attempted conventionally to
shear it of a little of its eccentricity.  "There's every reason why I
should look after my property out there.  I've never seen it at all."

"I'm not worth such a goodness," Waring faltered, earnestly,--"not
worth it."

"You will be."

"Don't hope it."

"I believe it," smiled the gentleman; "and at all events I'll stand by
you till you are--if you'll say the word."

Waring, whose lips were trembling, repeated vaguely, "The _word_?"

"Well," replied Bulstrode, "you might say those--they're as good
any--will you stand by _me_----?"

Making the first hearty spontaneous gesture he had shown, the young man
seized the other's outstretched hand.  "Yes," he breathed; "by Heaven!
I will!"


It was past midnight when Bulstrode, pushing open the curtains of his
bedroom, looked out on the frozen world of Washington Square, where of
tree and arch not an outline was visible under the disguising snow; and
above, in the sky swept clear of clouds by the strongest of winds, rode
the round full disk of the Christmas moon.

The adoption of a vagrant, the quixotic decision he had taken to leave
New York on Christmas day, the plain facts of the outrageous folly his
impulsiveness led him to contemplate, had relegated his more worldly
plans to the background.  Laying aside his waistcoat, he took out the
letter in whose contents he had been absorbed when Cecil Waring crossed
the threshold of his drawing-room.

Well ... as he re-read at leisure her delightful plan for Christmas
day, he sighed that he could not do for them both better than to go two
thousand miles away!  "Waring thinks himself a vagrant--and so, poor
chap, he has been; but there are vagrants of another kind."  Jimmy
reflected he felt himself to be one of these others, and was led to
speculate if there were many outcasts like himself, and what
ultimately, if their courage was sufficient to keep them banished to
the end, would be the reward?

"Since," he reflected, "there's only one thing I desire--and it's the
one thing forbidden--I fail sometimes to quite puzzle it out!"

He had finished his preparations for the night and was about to turn
out the light, when, with his hand on the electric button, he paused,
for he distinctly heard from downstairs what sounded like a call--a cry.

Taking his revolver from the top drawer, he went into the hall, to feel
a draft of icy air blow up the staircase, to see over the balusters the
open door of the dining-room and light within it, and to hear more
clearly the sounds that had come to him through closed doors declare
themselves to be scuffling--struggling--the half-cry of a muffled
voice--a fall, then Bulstrode started.

"I'm coming," he declared, and ran down the stairs like a boy.

On the dining-room floor, close to the window wide open to the icy
night, lay a man's form, and over him bent another man cruelly, with
all the animus of a bird of prey.

The under man was Ruggles, Bulstrode's butler, his eyes starting from
their sockets, his mouth open, his color livid; he couldn't have called
out, for the other man had seized his necktie, twisted it tight as a
tourniquet around the man's gullet, and so kneeling with one knee on
his chest, Waring held the big man under.

"I say," panted the young man, "can you lend a hand, sir?  I've got
him, but I'm not strong enough to keep him."

Bulstrode thought his servant's eyes rolled appealingly at him.  He
cocked his revolver, holding it quietly, and asked coolly:

"What's the matter with him that he needs to be kept?"

"Would you sit on his chest, Mr. Bulstrode?"

"No," said that gentleman.  "I'll cover him so.  What's the truth?"

"I heard a queer noise," panted the Englishman, "and came out to see
what it was, and this fellow was just getting through the window.
There was another chap outside, but he got away.  I caught this one
from the back, otherwise I could never have thrown him."

"You're throttling him."

"He deserves it."

"Let him up."

"Mr. Bulstrode...!"

"Yes," said that gentleman, decidedly, "let him up."

But Ruggles, released from the hand whose knuckles had ground
themselves into his windpipe, could not at once rise.  The breath was
out of him, for he had been heavily struck in the stomach by a blow
from the fist of a man whose training in sport had delightfully
returned at need.

Ruggles began to breathe like a porpoise, to grunt and pant and roll
over.  He staggered to his feet, and with a string of imprecations
raised his fist at Waring, but as Bulstrode's revolver was entirely
ready to answer at command, he did not venture to leave the spot where
he stood.

"Now," said his master, "when you get your tongue your story will be
just the same as Mr. Waring's.  You found him getting away with the
silver.  The probabilities are all with you, Ruggles.  The police will
be here in just about five minutes.  Ten to one the guilty man is known
to the officers.  Now there's an overcoat and hat on the hat-rack in
the hall.  I give both of you time to get away.  There's the front door
and the window--which, by the way, you would better shut, Waring, as
it's a cold morning."

Neither man moved.  Without removing his eyes from the butler or
uncovering him, Bulstrode, by means of the messenger-call to the right
of the window, summoned the police.  The metallic click of the button
sounded loud in the room.

Ruggles shook his great hand high in air.

"I'd--I'd----"

"Never mind _that_," interrupted the householder.  "The man who's
_going_ had better take his chance.  There's one minute lost."

During the next half-second the modern philanthropist breathed in
suspense.  It was so on the cards that he might be obliged to apologize
to his antipathetic butler and find himself sentimentally sold by
Waring!

But Ruggles it was who with a parting oath stepped to the
door--accelerating his pace as the daze began to pass a little from his
brain, and snatched the hat and coat, unlocked the front door, opened
it, looked quickly up and down the white streets, and then without a
word cut down the steps and across Washington Square, slowly at first,
and then on a run.

Bulstrode turned to his visitor.

"Come," he said, "let's go up to bed."

"But," stammered the young man, "you're never going to let him go like
that?"

"Yes, I am," confessed the unpractical gentleman.  "I couldn't send a
man to jail on Christmas day."

"But the police----?"

"I shall tell them out of my window that it was a false alarm."

Bulstrode shut and locked his door, and turning to Waring, laughed
delightedly.

"I must tell you that when he let you in last night Ruggles did not
think you were a gentleman.  He must have found out this morning that
you were very much of a man.  It's astonishing where you got your
strength, though.  He'd make two of you, and you're not fit in any way."

He looked ghastly enough as Bulstrode spoke, and the gentleman put his
arm under the Englishman's.  "I'll ring for the servants and have some
coffee made and fetched to your room.  Lean on me."  He helped the
vagabond upstairs.

The New Yorker, whose sentimental follies were certainly a menace to
public safety and a premium to begging and vagabondage and crime, slept
well and late, and was awakened finally by the keen, bright ringing of
the telephone at his side.  As he took up the receiver his whole face
illumined.

"Merry Christmas, Jimmy!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"What _wonderful_ roses!  Thanks a thousand times!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"But of course I knew!  No other man in New York is sentimental enough
to have a woman awakened at eight o'clock by a bunch of flowers!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"Forgive you!"  (It was clear that she did.)

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"Jimmy, what a day for Tuxedo, and what a shame I can't go!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"You weren't going!  You mean to say that you had refused?"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"I don't understand--it's the connection--West?"

"Why, ranches look after themselves.  They always do.  They go right
on.  You don't _mean_ it, on Christmas day!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"I shouldn't care for your reasons.  They're sure to be
ridiculous--unpractical--unnecessary--don't tell them to me."

There was a pause, and then the voice, which had undergone a slight
change said:

"Jack's ill again ... that's why I couldn't go to Tuxedo.  I shall pass
the day here in town.  I called up to tell you this--and to
suggest--but since you're going West..."

Falconer's illnesses!  How well Bulstrode knew them, and how well he
could see her alone in the familiar little drawing-room by a hearth not
built for a Christmas tree!  He had promised Waring, "I'll stand by
you."  It was a kind of vow--a real vow, and the poor tramp had lived
up to his.

"Jimmy."  There was a note he had never heard before; if a tone can be
a tear, it was one.

He interrupted her.

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"How dear of you!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"But I haven't any Christmas tree!"

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"You'll fetch one?  How _dear_ of you!  We'll trim it--with your
roses--make it bloom.  Come early and help me dress the tree."


Two hours later he opened the door into his breakfast-room with the
guiltiness of a truant boy.  He wore culprit shame written all over his
face, and the young man who stood waiting for him in the window might
almost have read his friend's dejection in his embarrassed face.

But Waring came eagerly forward, answered the season's greetings, and
said quickly:

"Are you still in the same mind about the West, Mr. Bulstrode?"

(Poor Bulstrode!)

"I mean to say, sir, if you still feel like giving me this chance, I've
a favor to ask.  Would you let me go _alone_?"

Bulstrode gasped.

"Since last night a lot has happened to me, not only since you've
befriended me, but since I tussled with that fellow here.  I'd like a
chance to see what I can do alone.  If you, as you so generously plan,
go with me, I shall feel watched--protected.  It will weaken me more
than anything else.  I suppose I shall go all to pieces, but I'd like
to try my strength.  If I could suddenly master that chap with my fists
after months of dissipation----"

Bulstrode finished for him:

"You can master the rest."

"Don't give me any extra money," pleaded the tramp, as if he foresaw
his friend's impulse.  "Pay my ticket out West, if you will, and write
to the man who is there, and I'll start in."

Bulstrode beamed on him.

"You're a man," he assured him--"a man."

"I may become one."

"You're a fine fellow."

"You'll trust me, then?"

"Implicitly."

"Then let me start to-day.  I'm reckless--let me get away.  I may get
off at the first station and pawn my clothes and drink and drink to a
lower hell than before--but let me try alone."

"You shall go alone--and go to-day."

Prosper came in with the coffee; he, too, was beaming, and the servants
below-stairs were all agog.  Waring was a hero.

"Prosper," said his master, in French, "will you, after you have served
breakfast, go out to the market quarters and see if you can discover
for me a medium-sized, very well-proportioned little Christmas tree?
Fetch it home with you."

Waring smiled faintly.

Bulstrode smiled too, and more comprehendingly, and Prosper smiled and
said:

"Mais certainement, monsieur."




THE SECOND ADVENTURE



II

IN WHICH HE TRIES TO BUY A PORTRAIT

Bulstrode was extremely fond of travel, and every now and then treated
himself to a season in London or Paris, and in the May following his
adventure with Waring he saw, from his apartments in the Hotel Ritz,
from Boulevard, Bois, and the Champs Elysees, as much of the
maddeningly delicious Parisian springtime "as was good for him at his
age," so he said!  It gave the feeling that he was a mere boy, and with
buoyant sensations astir in him, life had begun over again.

Any morning between eleven and twelve Bulstrode might have been seen in
the Bois de Boulogne briskly walking along the Avenue des Acacias, his
well-filled chest thrown out, his step light and assured; cane in hand,
a boutonniere tinging the lapel of his coat; immaculate and fresh as a
rose, he exhaled good-humor, kindliness, and well-being.

From their traps and motors charming women bowed and smiled, the _fine
fleur_ and the _beau monde_ greeted him cordially.

"Regardez moi ce bon Bulstrode qui se promene," if it were a Frenchman,
or, "There's dear old Jimmy Bulstrode!" if he were recognized by a
compatriot.

Bulstrode was rather slight of build, yet with an evident strength of
body that indicated a familiarity with exercise, a healthful habit of
sport and activity.  His eyes, clear-sighted and strong, looked through
the medium of no glass happily and naively on the world.  Many years
before his hair had begun to turn gray, and had not nearly finished the
process; it grew thickly, and was quite dark about his ears and on his
brow.  Having gained experience and kept his youth, he was as rare and
delightful as fine wine--as inspiring as spring.  It was his heart
(Mrs. Falconer said) that made him so, his good, gentle, generous
heart!--and she should know.  His fastidiousness in point of dress, and
his good taste kept him close to elegance of attire.

"You turn yourself out, Jimmy, on every occasion," she had said, "as if
you were on the point of meeting the woman you loved."  And Bulstrode
had replied that such consistent hopefulness should certainly be
ultimately rewarded.

He gave the impression of a man who in his youth starts out to take a
long and pleasant journey and finds the route easy, the taverns
agreeable, and the scenes all the guide-book promised.  Midway--(he had
turned the page of forty)--midway, pausing to look back, Bulstrode saw
the experiences of his travels in their sunny valleys, full of goodly
memories, and the future, to his sweet hopefulness, promised to be a
pleasant journey to the end.

During the time that he spent in Paris every pet charity in the
American colony took advantage of the philanthropic Mr. Bulstrode's
passing through the city, and came to him to be set upon its feet, and
every pretty woman with an interest, hobby, or scheme came as well to
this generous millionaire, told him about her fad and went away with a
donation.

One ravishing May morning Bulstrode, taking his usual constitutional in
the Bois, paused at the end of the Avenue des Acacias to find it
deserted and attractively quiet; he sat down on a little bench the more
reposefully to enjoy the day and time.

There are, fortunately, certain things which, unlike money, can be
shared only with certain people; and Bulstrode felt that the pleasure
of this spring day, the charm of the opposite wood-glades into which he
meditatively looked, the tranquil as well as the buoyant joy of life,
were among those personal things so delightful when shared--and which,
if too long enjoyed alone, bring (let it be scarcely whispered on this
bewildering May morning) something like sadness!

Before his happier mood changed his attention was attracted by a woman
who came rapidly toward the avenue from a little alley at the side.  He
looked up quickly at the feminine creature who so aptly appeared upon
his musings.  She was young; her form in its simple dress assured him
this.  He could not see her face, for it was covered by her hands.
Abruptly taking the opposite direction, she went over to a farther
seat, where she sat down, and when the young girl put her arms on the
back of the seat, her head upon her arms, and in the remoteness this
part of the avenue offered, cried without restraint, the kind-hearted
Bulstrode felt that it was too cruel to be true.

But soft-hearted though he was, the gentleman was a worldling as well,
and that the outburst was a ruse more than suggested itself to him as
he went over to the lovely Niobe whose abundant fair hair sunned from
under her simple straw hat and from beneath whose frayed skirt showed a
worn little shoe.

He spoke in French.

"Pardon, madame, but you seem in great distress."

The poor thing started violently, and as soon as she displayed her
pretty tearful face the American recognized in her a compatriot.  She
waved him emphatically away.

"Oh, please don't notice me--don't speak to me--I didn't see that
anybody was there."

"I am an American, too: can't I do anything for you--won't you let me?"

And he saw at once that she wanted to be left alone.  She averted her
head determinedly.

"No, no, please don't notice me.  Please go away!"

He had nothing to do but to obey her, and as he reluctantly did so a
smart pony-cart driven by a lady alone came briskly along and drew up,
for the occupant had recognized him.

"Get in!" she rather commanded.  "My dear Jimmy, how _nice_ to find you
here, and how nice to drive you at least as far as the entrance!"

As the rebuffed philanthropist accepted he cast a ruthful glance at the
solitary figure on the bench.

"Do you see that poor girl over there?  She's an American, and in real
trouble."

"My _dear_ Jimmy!"  His companion's tone left him in no doubt as to her
scepticism.

"Oh, I know, I know," he interrupted, "but she's not a fraud.  She's
the real thing."

They were already gayly whirling away from the sad little figure.

"Did you make her cry?"

"I?  Certainly not."

"Then let the man who did wipe her tears away!"

But Bulstrode had seen the face of the girl, and he was haunted by it
all day until the Bois and its bright atmosphere became only the
setting for an unhappy woman, young and lovely, whom it had been
impossible for him to help.

Somebody had said that Bulstrode should have his portrait done with his
hands in his pockets, and Mrs. Falconer had replied, "Or rather with
_other_ people's hands in his pockets!"

The next afternoon he found himself part of a group of people who, out
of charity and curiosity, patronized the Western Artists' Exhibition in
the Rue Monsieur.

Having made a ridiculously generous donation to the support of this
league at the request of a certain lovely lady, Bulstrode followed his
generosity by a personal effort, and with not much opposition on his
part permitted himself to be taken to the exhibition.

He was not, in the ultra sense of the word, a _connaisseur_, but he
thought he knew a horror when he saw it!  So he said, and on this
afternoon his eyes ached and his offended taste cried out before he had
patiently travelled half-way down the line of canvases.

"My dear lady," he confided _sotto voce_ to his friend, "I feel more
inclined to establish a fund for sending all these young women back to
the _prairies_, if that's where they come from, than to aid in this
slaughter of public time and taste.  _Why_ don't they stay at home--and
marry?"

"That's a vulgar and limited point of view to take," his friend
reproached him.  "Don't you acknowledge that a woman has many careers
instead of one?  _You_ seem to be thoroughly enjoying your liberty!
What if I should ask you why _you_ don't stay at home, and marry?"

Bulstrode looked at his guide comprehensively and smiled gently.  His
response was irrelevant.  "Look at this picture!  It's too dreadful for
words."

"Hush, you're not a judge.  Here and there there is evidence of great
talent."

They had drawn up before a portrait, and poor Bulstrode caught his
breath with a groan:

"It's too awful!  It's crime to encourage it."

Mrs. Falconer tried to lead him on.

"Well, this _is_ an unfortunate place to stop," she confessed.  "That
portrait represents more tragedy than you can see."

"It couldn't," murmured Bulstrode.

"The poor girl who did it has struggled on here for two years, living
sometimes on a franc a day.  Just fancy!  She has been trying to get
orders so that she can stay on and study.  Poor thing!  The people who
are interested say that she's been near to desperation.  She is awfully
proud, and won't take any assistance but orders.  You can imagine
_they're_ not besieging her!  She has come to her last cent, I believe,
and has to go home to Idaho."

"Let her go, my dear friend."  Bulstrode was earnest.  "It's the best
thing she could possibly do!"

His companion put her hand on his arm.

"Please be quiet," she implored.  "There she is, standing over by the
door.  That rather pretty girl with the disorderly blonde hair."

Bulstrode looked up--saw her--looked again, and exclaimed:

"Is _that_ the girl?  Do you know her?  Present me, will you?"

"Nonsense."  She detained him.  "How you go from hot to cold!  _Why_
should you want to meet her, pray?"

"Oh," he evaded, "it's a curious study.  I want to talk to her about
art, and if you don't present me I shall speak to her without an
introduction."

Not many moments later Bulstrode was cornered in a dingy little room,
where tea that tasted like the infusion of a haystack was being served.
He had skilfully disassociated Miss Laura Desprey from her Bohemian
companions and placed her on a little divan, before which, with a
teacup in his hand, he stood.

She wore the same dress, the same hat--and he did not doubt the same
shoes which characterized her miserable toilet when he had surprised
her childlike display of grief on a bench in the Bois.  He had done
quite right in speaking to her, and he thanked his stars that she did
not in the least remember him.

He thought with kind humor: "No wonder she cries if she paints like
that!"

But it was not in a spirit of criticism that he bent his friendly eyes
on the Bohemian.  He had the pleasure of seeing her plainly this time,
for the window back of her admitted a generous square of light against
which her blonde head framed itself, and her untidy hair was like a
dusty mesh of gold.  She regarded the amiable gentleman out of eyes
child-like and purely blue.  Under her round chin the edges of a black
bow tied loosely stood out like the wings of a butterfly.  Her dress
was careless and poor, but she was grace in it and youth--"and what,"
thought Bulstrode, "has one a right to expect more of any woman?"  He
remembered her boots and shuddered.  He remembered the one franc a day
and began his campaign.

"I want so much to meet the painter of that portrait over there," he
began.

Her face lightened.

"Oh, did you like it?"

"I think it's wonderful, perfectly wonderful!"

A slow red crept up the thin contour of her cheek.  She leaned forward!

"Do you really mean that?"

He said most seriously:

"Yes, I can frankly say I haven't seen a portrait in a long time which
impressed me so much."

His praise was not in Latin Quarter vernacular, and coming from a
Philistine, had only a certain value to the artist.  But to a lonely
stranded girl the words were balm.  Bulstrode, in his immaculate dress,
his conventional manner, was as foreign a person to the Bohemian
student as if he had been an inhabitant of another planet.  Her speech
was brusque and quick, with a generous burr in her "rs" when she
replied.

"I've studied at Julian's two years now.  This was my Salon picture,
but it didn't get in."

"If one can judge by those that _did_"--Bulstrode's tact was
delightful--"you should feel honorably refused.  I suppose you are at
work on another portrait?"

The face which his interest had brightened clouded.

"No, I'm going home--to Idaho--I'm not painting any more."

All the tragedy to a whole-souled Latin Quarter art student that this
implied was not revealed to Bulstrode, but, as it was, his sensitive
kindness felt so much already that it ached.  He hastened toward his
goal with eagerness:

"I'm so awfully sorry!  Because, do you know, I was going to ask you if
you couldn't possibly paint my portrait?"  It came from him on the spur
of the moment.  His frank eyes met hers and might have quailed at his
hypocrisy, but the expression of joy on her face, eclipsing everything
else, dazzled him.

She cried out impulsively:

"Oh--goodness!" so loud that one or two tea-drinkers turned about.
After a second, having gained control and half as though she expected
some motive she did not understand:

"But you never _heard_ of me before to-day!  I don't believe you
_really_ liked that portrait over there so very much."

With a candor that impressed her he assured her: "I give you my word of
honor I've never felt quite so about any portrait before."

Here Miss Desprey had a cup of tea handed her by a vague-eyed girl who
stumbled over Bulstrode in her ministrations, much to her confusion.

Laura Desprey drank her tea with avidity, put the cup down on the table
near, and leaning over to her patron, exclaimed:

"I just _can't_ believe I've got an order!"

Bulstrode affirmed smiling: "You have, and if you could arrange to stay
over for it--if it would," he delicately put, "be worth your while----"

She said quietly:

"Yes, it would be worth my while."

A _distrait_ look passed over her face for a second, and Bulstrode saw
he was forgotten in, as he supposed, a painter's vision of an order and
its contingent technicalities.

"I can begin at once."  He lost no time.  "I'm quite free."

"But--I have no studio."

"There must be studios to rent."

Yes.  She knew of one; she could secure it for a month.  It would take
that time--she was a slow worker.

"But we haven't discussed the price."  Before so much poverty and
struggle--not that it was new to him, but clothed like this in beauty
it was rare and appealed to him--he was embarrassed by his riches.
"Now the price.  I want," he meditated, "a full-length portrait, with a
great deal of background, just as handsome and expensive looking as you
can paint it."

He exquisitely sacrificed himself and winced at his own words, and saw
her color with amusement and a little scorn, but he went on bravely:

"Now for a man like me, Miss Desprey--I am sure you will know what I
mean--a man who has never been painted before--this picture will have
to cost me a lot of money.  You see otherwise my friends would not
appreciate it."

In the vulgarian he was making himself out to be his friends would not
have recognized the unpretentious Bulstrode.

"Get the place, Miss Desprey, and let me come as soon as you can.  All
this change of plans will give you extra expenses--I understand about
that!  Every time I change my rooms it costs me a fortune.  Now if you
will let me send you over a check for half payment on the picture, for,
let us say"--he made it as large as he dared and a quarter of what he
wanted.  They were alone in the tea-room, the motley gathering had
weeded itself out.  Miss Desprey turned pale.

"No," she gasped; "I couldn't take anything like half so much for the
whole thing."

Bulstrode said coldly:

"I'm afraid I must insist, Miss Desprey; I couldn't order less than a
fifteen-hundred dollar portrait.  It's the sum I have planned to pay
when I'm painted."

"But a celebrated painter would paint it for that."

Bulstrode smiled fatuously.

"Can't a man pay for his fads?  I want to be painted by the person who
did that portrait over there, Miss Desprey."


In a tiny studio--the dingy chrysalis of a Bohemian art
student--Bulstrode posed for his portrait.

Each morning saw him set forth from the Ritz alert and debonaire in his
fastidious toilet---saw him cross the Place Vendome, the bridge, and
lose his worldly figure in the lax nonchalant crowd of the Quarter
Latin.  At the end of an alley as narrow and picturesque as a lane in a
colored print he knocked at a green door, and was admitted to the
studio by his protegee.  In another second he had assumed his
prescribed position according to the pose, and Miss Desprey before her
easel began the _seance_.

On these May days the glass roof admitted delightful gradations of
glory to the commonplace _atelier_.  A few cheap casts, a few yards of
mustard-toned burlaps, some Botticelli and Manet photographs, a mangy
divan, and a couple of chairs were the furnishings.  It had been
impossible for Bulstrode to pass indifferently the venders of flowers
in the festive, brilliant streets, and great bunches of _girofle_,
hyacinths, and narcissi overflowed the earthenware pitchers and vases
with which the studio was plentifully supplied.  The soft, sharp
fragrance rose above the shut-in odor of the _atelier_, and, while Miss
Desprey worked, her patron looked at her across waves of spring perfume.

Her painting-dress, a garment of _beige_ linen, half belted in at the
waist and entirely covering her, made her to Bulstrode, from the crown
of her fair hair to the tip of her old tan shoes, seem all of one
color.  He had taken tremendous interest in his pose, in the progress
of the work.  He would have looked at the portrait every few moments,
but Miss Desprey refused him even a glimpse.  He was to wait until all
manner of strange things took place on the canvas, till "schemes and
composition" were determined, "proper values" arrived at, and he
listened to her glib school terms with respect and a sanguine hope that
with the aid of such potent technicalities and his interest she might
be able to achieve this time something short of atrocious.

He posed faithfully for Miss Desprey, and smiled at her with friendly
eyes whenever he caught anything more personal than the squinting
glance with which she professionally regarded him, putting him far away
or fetching him near, according to her art's requirements.  They talked
in his rest, and he took pleasure in telling her how he enjoyed his
morning walks from his hotel, how the outdoor life delighted him, and
how all the suburban gardens seemed to have been brought to Paris to
glow and blossom in the venders' carts or in little baskets on the
backs of women and boys, and how thoroughly well worth living he
thought life in Paris was.

"There is," he finished, "nothing in the world which compares to the
Paris spring-time, I believe, but I have never been West.  What is
spring like in Idaho?"

Miss Desprey laughed, touched her ruffled hair with painty fingers,
blushed, and mused.

"Oh, it's all right, I guess.  There's a trolley-line in Centreville,
an electric plant and the oil works--no trees, no flowers, and the
people all look alike.  So you see"--she had a dazzling way of shaking
her head, when her fine white teeth, her sunny dishevelled hair, her
bright cheeks and eyes seemed all to flash and chime together--"so you
see, spring in Centreville and _Paris_ isn't the same thing at all!
Things are beautiful everywhere," she assured him slowly as she
painted, "if you're happy--and I was very unhappy in Centreville, so I
thought I'd come away and try to have a career."  She poured out a long
stream of _garance_ from the tube on to her palette.  Bulstrode
watched, fascinated.

"And here in Paris, are you--have you been happy here?"

"Oh, dear no!" she laughed; "perfectly miserable.  And it used to seem
as though it was cruel of the city to be so gay and happy when I
couldn't join in--"  Bulstrode, remembering the one franc a day and the
very questionable inspiration her poor art could impart, understood;
his face was full of feeling--"until," she went slowly on, "lately."
She stepped behind the canvas and was lost to sight.  "I've been
awfully happy in Paris for the first time.  I do like beautiful
things--but I like beautiful people better--and you're
beautiful--beautiful."

She finished with a blush and a smile.

Bulstrode grew to think nothing at all about his portrait further than
fervently to hope it would not shock him beyond power to disguise.  But
Miss Desprey was frightfully in earnest, and worked until her eyes
glowed with excitement and her cheeks burned.  Strong and vigorous and
(Bulstrode over and over again said) "young, so young!" she never
evinced any signs of fatigue, but stood when his limbs trembled under
him and looked up radiant when he was ready to cry "_Grace!_"  In her
enthusiasm she would have given him two sittings a day, but this his
worldly relations would not permit.  As she painted, painted, her head
on one side sometimes, sometimes thrown back, her eyes half closed, he
studied her with pleasure and delight.

"What a pity she paints so dreadfully ill!  What a pity she paints at
all!  What difference, after all, does it make _what_ she does?  She's
so pretty and feminine!"  She was a clinging, sweet creature, and the
walk and the flower debauch he permitted himself, the long quiet hours
of companionship with this lovely girl in the _atelier_, illumined,
accentuated, and intensified Bulstrode's already fatuous appreciation
of the spring in Paris.

During Bulstrode's artistic mornings there distilled itself into the
studio a magic to which he was not insensitive.  Whether or not it came
with the flowers or with the delicate filtering of the sun through the
studio light, who can say, but as he stood in his assumed position of
_nonchalance_ he was more and more charmed by his painter.  The spell
he naturally felt should, and for long indeed did, emanate from the
slender figure, lost at times behind her canvas, and at times
completely in his view.

For years Bulstrode had been the victim of hope, or rather in this case
of intent, _to love again_--to love anew!  Neither of these statements
is the correct way of putting it.  He tried with good faith to prove
himself to be what was so generally claimed for him by his
friends--susceptible; alas, he knew better!

As he meditatively studied the blonde young girl he spun for himself to
its end the idea of picking her up, carrying her off, marrying her,
shutting Idaho away definitely, and opening to her all that his wealth
and position could of life and the world.  He grew tender at the
thought of her poor struggle, her insufficient art, her ambition.  It
fascinated him to think of playing the good fairy, of touching her
gray, hard life to color and beauty, and as the beauty and the holy
intimacy of home occurred to him, and marriage, his thoughts wandered
as pilgrims whose feet stray back in the worn ways and find their own
old footprints there, ... and after a few moments Miss Desprey was like
to be farther away from his meditations than Centreville is from Paris,
and the personality of the dream-woman was another.  Once Miss
Desprey's voice startled him out of such a reverie by bidding him,
"_Please_ take the pose, Mr. Bulstrode!"  As he laughed and apologized
he caught her eyes fixed on him with, as he thought, a curious
expression of affection and sympathy--indeed, tears sprang to them.
She reddened and went furiously back to work.  She was more personal
that day than she had yet been.  She seemed, after having surprised his
absent-mindedness, to feel that she had a right to him--quite ordered
him about, and was almost petulant in her exactions of his positions.

Her work evidently advanced to her satisfaction.

As she stood elated before her easel, her hair in sunny disorder, her
eyes like stars, Bulstrode was conscious there was a change in her--she
was excited and tremulous.  In her frayed dress, sagging at the edges,
her paint-smeared apron, her slender thumb through the hole in the
palette, she came over to him at the close of the sitting, started to
speak, faltered, and said:

"You don't know what it means to me--all you have done.  And I can't
ever tell you."

"Oh, don't," he pleaded, "pray don't speak of it!"

Miss Desprey, half radiant and half troubled, turned away as if she
were afraid of his eyes.

"No, I won't try to tell you.  I couldn't, I don't dare," she
whispered, and impulsively caught his hand and kissed it.

When he had left the studio finally it was with a bewildering sense of
having kissed her hand--no, both of her hands! but one held her palette
and he _couldn't_ have kissed that one without having got paint on his
nose--perhaps he had!  He was not at peace.


That same night a telegram brought him news to the effect that Miss
Desprey was ill and would not expect him to pose the following day; and
relieved that it was not required of him to resume immediately the
over-charged relations, he went back to his old habit, rudely broken
into by his artistic escapade, and walked far into the Bois.

He thought with alarming persistency of Miss Desprey.  He was
chivalrous with women, old-fashioned and clean-minded and
straight-lived.  In the greatest, in the only passion of his life, he
had been a Chevalier Bayard, and he could look back upon no incidents
in which he had played the part which men of the world pride themselves
on playing well.  Women were mysterious and wonderful to him.  Because
of one he approached them all with a feeling not far from worship; and
he had no intention of doing a dishonorable thing.  Puzzled,
self-accusing--although he did not quite know of what he was guilty--he
sat down as he had done several weeks before on the bench in the Avenue
des Acacias.  With extraordinary promptness, as if arranged by a
scene-setter, a girl's figure came quickly out of a side alley.  She
was young--her figure betrayed it.  She went quickly over to a seat and
sat down.  She was weeping and covered her face with her hands.
Bulstrode, this time without hesitation, went directly over to her:

"My dear Miss Desprey----"

She sprang up and displayed a face disfigured with weeping.

"_You_!" she exclaimed with something like terror.  "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!"

Her words shuddered in sobs.

"Don't stay here!  Why did you come?  Please go--please."

Bulstrode sat down beside her and took her hands.

"I'm not going away--not until I know what your trouble is.  You were
in distress when I first saw you here and you wouldn't let me help you
then.  Now you can't refuse me.  What is it?"

He found she was clinging to his hands as she found voice enough to say:

"No, I can't tell you.  I couldn't ever tell you.  It's not the same
trouble, it's a new one and worse.  I guess it's the worst thing in the
world."

Bulstrode was pitiless:

"One that has come lately to you?"

"Oh, yes!"

She was weeping more quietly now.

"Please leave me: please go, Mr. Bulstrode."

"A trouble with which I have had anything to do?"

She waited a long time, then faintly breathed:

"Yes."

The hand he firmly held was gloveless and cold--before he could say
anything further she drew it away from him and cried:

"Oh, I ought never to have let you guess!  You were so good and kind,
you meant to help me so, but it's been the worst help of all, only you
couldn't know that," she pleaded for him.  "Please forgive me if I seem
ungrateful, but if I had known that I was going to suffer like this I
would have wished never to see you in the world."

Bulstrode was trying to speak, but she wouldn't let him:

"I never can see you again.  Never!  You mustn't come any more."

But here she half caught her breath and sobbed with what seemed naive
and adorable daring:

"Unless you can help me through, Mr. Bulstrode--it is your fault, after
all."

If this were a virtual throwing of herself into his arms, they were all
but open to her and the generous heart was all but ready "to see her
through."  Bulstrode was about to do, and say, the one rash and
irrevocable perfect thing when at this minute fate again at the ring of
the curtain opportuned.  The tap, tapping, of a pony's feet was heard
and a gay little cart came brightly along.  Bulstrode saw it.  He
sprang to his feet.  It was close upon them.

"You will let me come to-morrow?" he asked eagerly,

"Oh, yes," she whispered; "yes, I shall count on you.  I beg you will
come."


"Jimmy," said the lady severely as he accepted her invitation to get
into the cart, "this is the second wicked rendezvous I have
interrupted.  I didn't know you were anything like this, and I've seen
that girl before, but I can't remember where."

"Don't try," said Bulstrode.

"And she was crying.  Of course you made her cry."

"Well," said Bulstrode desperately, "if I did, it's the first woman
that has ever cried for me."


As the reason why Bulstrode had never married was again in Paris, he
went up in the late afternoon to see her.

The train of visitors who showed their appreciation of her by thronging
her doors had been turned away, but Bulstrode was admitted.  The man
told him, "Mrs. Falconer will see you, sir," by which he had the
agreeably flattered feeling that she would see nobody else.

When he was opposite her the room at once dwindled, contracted, as
invariably did every place in which they found themselves together,
into one small circle containing himself and one woman.  Mrs. Falconer
said at once to Bulstrode:

"Jimmy, you're in trouble--in one of your quandaries.  What useless
good have you been doing, and who has been sharper than a serpent's
tooth to you?"

Bulstrode's late companionship with youth had imparted to him a boyish
look.  His friend narrowly observed him, and her charming face clouded
with one of those almost imperceptible _nuances_ that the faces of
those women wear who feel everything and by habit reveal nothing.

"I'm not a victim."  Bulstrode's tone was regretful.  "One might say,
on the contrary, this time that I was possibly overpaid."

"Yes?"

"I haven't," he explained and regretted, "seen you for a long time."

"I've been automobiling in Touraine."  Mrs. Falconer gave him no
opportunity to be delinquent.

"And I," he confessed, "have been posing for my portrait.  Don't," he
pleaded, "laugh at me--it isn't for a miniature or a locket; it's
life-size, horribly life-size.  I've had to stand, off and on with the
rests, three hours a day, and I've done so _every day for three weeks_."

Mrs. Falconer regarded him with indulgent amusement.

"It's your fault--you took me to see those awful school-girl paintings
and pointed out that poor young creature to me."  And he was
interrupted by her exclamation:

"Oh, how _dear_ of you, Jimmy! how sweet and kind and ridiculous!  It
won't be fit to be seen."

"Oh, never mind that," he waved; "no one need see it.  I haven't--she
won't let me."

He had accepted a cup of tea from the lady's hand; he drank it off and
sat down, holding the empty cup as if he held his fate.

"Tell me," she urged, "all about it.  It was just like you--any other
man would have found means to show charity, but you have shown
unselfish goodness, and that's the rarest thing in the world.  Fancy
posing every day!  How ghastly and how wonderful of you!"

"No," he said slowly, "it wasn't any of these things.  I wanted to do
it.  It amused me at first, you see.  But now I am a little
annoyed--rather bothered to tell the truth--He met her eyes with almost
an appeal in his.  Mrs. Falconer was in kindness bound to help him.

"Bothered?  How, pray?  With what part of it?  You're not chivalrous
about it, are you?  You're not by the way of feeling that you have
compromised her by posing?"

"Oh, no, no," he hurried; "but I do feel, and I am frank to
acknowledge, that it was a mistake.  Because--do you know--that for
some absurd reason I am afraid she has become fond of me."  He blushed
like a boy.  Mrs. Falconer said coldly:

"Yes?  Well, what of it?"

"This--"  Bulstrode's voice was quiet and determined--"if I am right I
shall marry her."

Mrs. Falconer had the advantage over most women of completely
understanding the man with whom she dealt.  She knew that to attempt to
turn from its just and generous source any intent of Mr. Bulstrode
would have been as futile as to attempt to turn a river from its parent
fountain.

"You're quixotic, I know, but you're not demented, and you won't
certainly marry this nobody--whose fancies or love-affairs have not the
least importance.  You won't ever see her again unless you are in love
with her yourself."

Bulstrode interrupted her hastily:

"Oh, yes, I shall."

He got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs.
Falconer's trim little garden.  A couple of iron chairs and a table
stood under the trees.  Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds
whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease.  Beyond the iron
rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears.
Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:

"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."

"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."

As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have
grown darker and she to sit in the shadow.  She leaned toward him,
laughing:

"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we
have so often planned together."

Bulstrode stood looking down on her.

"I feel myself responsible," he said gravely.  "She was going home, and
by a mistaken impulse I came in and changed her plans.  She is
perfectly alone and perfectly poor, and I am not going to add to her
perplexities.  I have no one in the world to care what I do.  I have no
ties and no duties."

"No," said Mrs. Falconer; "you are wonderfully free."

He said vehemently:

"I am all of a sudden wonderfully miserable."

He had been in the habit for years of suddenly leaving her without any
warning, and now he put out his hand and bade her good-by, and before
she could detain him had made one of many brusque exits from her
presence.


On the following day--a Sunday, as from his delightful apartments in
the Ritz he set forth for the studio, Bulstrode bade good-by to his
bachelor existence.  He knew when he should next see the Place Vendome
it would be with the eyes of an engaged man.  His life hereafter was to
be shared by a "total stranger."  So he pathetically put it, and his
sentimental yearning to share everything with a lovely woman had died a
sudden death.

"There's no one in the world to care a rap what I do--really," he
reflected, "and in this case I have run up against it--that's the long
and the short of the matter--and I shall see it through."

As he set out for Miss Desprey's along his favorite track he remarked
that the gala, festive character of Paris had entirely disappeared.
The season had gone back on him by several months, and the melancholy
of autumn and dreary winter cast a gloom over his boyish spirits.  A
very slight rain was falling.  Bulstrode began to feel a twinge of
rheumatism in his arm and as he irritably opened his umbrella his
spirits dropped beneath it and his brisk, springy walk sagged to
something resembling the gait of a middle-aged gentleman.  But he urged
himself into a better mood, however, at the sight of a flower-shop
whose delicate wares huddled appealingly close to the window.  He went
in and purchased an enormous bunch of--he hesitated--there were certain
flowers he _could_ not, would _not_ send!  The selection his
sentimental reserve imposed therefore consisted of sweet-peas,
_girofles_, and a big cluster of white roses, all very girlish and
virginal.  His bridal offering in his hand, he took a cab and drove to
the other side of the river with lead at his good heart and, he almost
fancied, a lump in his throat.  He paid the coachman, whose careless
spirits he envied, and slowly walked down the picturesque alley of
Impasse du Maine.

"There isn't a man I know--not a man in the Somerset Club--who would be
as big a fool as this!"

He had more than a mind to leave the flowers on the doorstep and run.
Bulstrode would have done so now that he was face to face with his
quixotic folly, but his cab had been heard as well as his steps on the
walk, and the door was opened by Miss Desprey herself.  The girl's
colorless face, her eyes spoiled with tears, and a pretty, sad dignity,
which became her well, struck her friend with the sincerity and depth
of her grief, and as the good gentleman shook hands with her he
realized that less than ever in the world could he add a featherweight
of grief to the burden of this helpless creature.

"My dearest child!"  He lifted her hand to his lips.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode, I'm so glad you've come, I was so afraid you
wouldn't--after yesterday!"

His arms were still full of white paper, roses, and sweet-peas.

"Oh, don't give them to me, Mr. Bulstrode!  Oh, why, did you bring
them?  Oh, dear, what will you think of me?"  She had possessed herself
of the flowers and with agitation and distress hastily thrust them, as
if she wanted to hide them, behind the draperies of the couch.
Bulstrode murmured something of whose import he was scarcely conscious.
As she came tearfully back to him she let him take her hands.  He felt
that she clung to him.  "It would have spoiled my life if you hadn't
come.  I would have just gone and jumped in the Seine.  I may yet.  Oh,
you don't understand!  It's been hard to be poor--I've been often
hungry--but this last thing was too much.  When you found me yesterday
I didn't want to live any more."

Bulstrode's kind clasp warmed the cold little hands.  As tenderly as he
could he looked at her agitated prettiness.

"Don't talk like that"--he tried for her first name and found it.
"Laura, you will let me make it all right, my dear?  You will let me,
won't you?  You shall never know another care if I can prevent it."

She interrupted with hasty gratitude:

"Nobody else can make it all right but you."

He tried softly:

"Did I, then, make it so very wrong?"

She murmured, too overcome to trust herself to say much:

"Yes!"

She was standing close to him, and lifted her appealing face to his.
Her excitement communicated itself to him; he bent toward her about to
kiss her, when the door of the studio sharply opened, and before
Bulstrode could do more than swiftly draw back and leave Miss Desprey
free an exceedingly tall and able-bodied man entered without ceremony.

The girl gave a cry, ran from Bulstrode, and, so to speak, threw
herself against the arms of the stranger, for there were none open to
receive her.

"Oh, here's Mr. Bulstrode, Dan!  I knew he'd come; and he'll tell
you--won't you, Mr. Bulstrode?  Tell him, please, that I don't care
anything at all about you and you don't care anything about me....
That you don't want to marry me or anything.  Oh, please make him
believe it!"

The poor gentleman's senses and brain whirling together made him giddy.
He felt as though he had just been whisked up from the edge of a
precipice over which he ridiculously dangled.  Dan, who represented the
rescuer, was not prepossessing.  He was the complete and unspoiled type
of Western youth; the girl herself was an imperfect and exquisite
hybrid.

"I don't know that this gentleman can explain to me"--the young fellow
threw his boyish head back--"or that I care to hear him."

She gave a cry, sharp and wounded.  The sound touched the now normal,
thoroughly grateful patron, who had come out of his ordeal with as much
kindly sensibility as he went in.

"Of course, my dear young lady"--he perfectly understood the
situation--"I will tell your friend the facts of our acquaintance.
That's what you want me to do, isn't it?"

She was weeping and hanging on to the unyielding arm of her cross
lover, who glared at the intruding Bulstrode with a youthful jealousy
at which the older man smiled while he envied it.  He pursued
impressively:

"Miss Desprey has been painting my portrait for the past few weeks.  I
gave her the order at the Art League; other than painter and sitter we
have no possible interest in each other--Mr.----"

"Gregs," snapped the stranger, "Daniel Gregs!"

The slender creature, whose eyes never left the stolid, uncompromising
face, repeated eagerly:

"_No possible interest_--Dan--none!  He doesn't care anything about me
at all!  You heard what he said, didn't you?  I only like him like a
kind, kind friend."

[Illustration: "I only like him like a kind, kind friend"]

Her voice, soft as a flower, caressed and pleaded with the passionate
tenderness of a woman who feels that an inadvertent word may keep for
her or lose for her the man she adores.

"My dear man," exclaimed Bulstrode in great irritation, "you ought to
be ashamed to let her cry like that!  Can't you _understand_--don't you
see?"

"No," shortly caught up the other, "I don't!  I've come here from South
Africa, where I'm prospecting some mines for a company at Centreville,
and I heard she was poor and unhappy, and I hurried up my things so I
could come to Paris and marry her and take her with me, and here I find
her painting every day alone with a rich man, her place all fixed up
with flowers, and a thousand dollars in the bank"--his cheek
reddened--"I don't like it!  And that's all there is to it!" he
finished shortly.

"No, my friend," said the other severely, "there's a great deal more.
If, from what you say, and the way you speak, you wish me to understand
you have a real interest in Miss Desprey, you can follow me when I say
that I came here and found her a lonely, forsaken girl, obliged to
return to Idaho when she didn't want to go, without any money or any
friends.  May I ask you why, if there was any one in the world who
cared for her, she should be left so deserted?"

The girl here turned her face from her lover to her champion.

"Don't please blame Dan for that.  He was so poor, too.  He didn't have
anything when he went to South Africa; it was just a chance if he would
succeed.  And he was working for me, so that he could get married."

Gregs interrupted:

"I don't owe this gentleman any explanation!"

"No," accepted the other gently, "perhaps not, but you mustn't, on the
other hand, refuse to hear mine.  Be reasonable.  Why _shouldn't_ Miss
Desprey have an order for a portrait?"

Gregs, over the golden head against his arm, looked at Bulstrode:

"_She_ can't paint!"  His tone was gentler.  "Laura can't paint, and
you know it!"

"Dan!" she whispered; "how cruel you are to me!"

And here the desperate Bulstrode broke in:

"He is, indeed, Miss Desprey, cruel and unjust, and I frankly ask leave
to tell him so.  You don't deserve the girl, Mr. Gregs, if she's yours,
as she seems to be."

But the girl clung closer, as if she still feared Bulstrode might try
to rescue her.

"That's all right," frowned the miner.  "I am no better and no worse
than any man about his girl, and I'm going to know _just where I
stand_!"

The gentleman's reply was caustic.  "I should be inclined to say you'd
find it hard to be in a better place."

Laura Desprey had wound her arms around Mr. Gregs.  Bulstrode held out
his hand.  She couldn't take it, nor could her lover.  With arrogant
obstinacy he had folded his arms across his chest.

"Come, can't we be friends?" urged the amiable gentleman.  "I seem to
have made trouble when I only wanted to be friendly.  Let me set it
right before I go.  I am lunching in Versailles, and I have to take the
noon train from the Gare Montparnasse."

But Daniel Gregs did not unbend to the affable proposition.  Miss
Desprey said:

"When you saw me yesterday in the park, Mr. Bulstrode, Dan had just
come back the day before.  I was putting the flowers you sent me in
fresh water when he came in on me all of a sudden.  Oh, it was so
splendid at first!  I was _so_ happy--until he asked all about you, and
then he grew so angry and said unless you could explain to him a lot of
things he would go away and never see me again, and when you found me I
was crying because I thought he had left me forever.  I hadn't seen him
for two years, and if you hadn't helped me to stay on here I should
have had to go to Idaho, and I wouldn't have seen him at all.  You
ought to _thank_ him, Dan."

Bulstrode interrupted:

"Indeed, Mr. Gregs, you should, you know!--you should thank me; come,
be generous."

Dan relaxed his grim humor a little.

"When I get through with this South African business I'm going back to
Centreville, and if I ever get her out of this Paris _she'll_ never see
it again!"

"Dan," she breathed, "I don't want to.  Centreville is good enough for
me."

(Centreville!  The horrible environment he was to have snatched her
from.  Bulstrode smiled softly.)

"But this money," pursued the dogged lover, returning to his grudge.
"You've got to take it back, Mr. Bulstrode.  No picture on earth is
worth a thousand dollars, and certainly not Laura's."

"Oh, Dan!" she exclaimed.

But her friend said firmly: "The portrait is mine.  Come, don't be
foolish.  If Miss Desprey is willing to marry you and go out to Idaho,
take the money and buy her some pretty clothes and things."

Here the girl herself interrupted excitedly:

"No, no!  We couldn't take it.  I don't want any new clothes.  If Dan
doesn't care how shabby I am, I don't.  I don't want anything in the
world but just to go with Dan."

At this sweet tenderness Dan's face entirely changed, his arms
unfolded; he put them around her.

"That's all right, little girl."  His tone thrilled through Bulstrode
more than the woman's tears had done.  He understood why she wanted to
go to him, and how she could be drawn.  He had at times in his life
lost money, and sometimes heavily, and he had never felt poor before.
In the same words, but in a vastly different tone, Dan Gregs held out
his hand to Bulstrode.

"That's all right, sir.  When a fellow travels thousands and thousands
of miles to get his girl and hasn't much more than his car fare and he
runs up against another fellow who has got the rocks and all and who he
thinks is sweet on his girl, it makes him crazy--just crazy!"

"I see"--Bulstrode sympathetically understood--"and I don't at all
wonder."

They were all three shaking hands together and Bulstrode said:

"Would you believe it, I haven't seen my portrait, Miss Desprey."

Dan Gregs grinned.

"Don't," he said, "don't look at it.  It's what made all the trouble.
When I saw it yesterday and Laura told me it had drawn a thousand
dollars--why I said 'there isn't a man living who would give you fifty
cents for it.'  That made her mad at first.  Then she told me you
thought she was a great portrait-painter, and I knew you must be sweet
on her.  I'm fond of her all right, but I decided that you were bound
to have her and didn't care how you dealt your cards, and I thought I'd
clear out."

His face fell and threatened to cloud over, but it cleared again as
with the remembrance of his doubts came the actual sense of the woman
whose face was hidden on his breast, and he lightly touched the dusty
golden hair.

When in a few seconds Bulstrode took leave of them, Miss Desprey, in
her dingy painting-dress, seemed completely swallowed up in the embrace
of the big Dan Gregs.  From where he stood by the door Bulstrode could
see the white corner of his _fiancailles_ bouquet sticking out from the
draperies of the couch.  The paper was open and in the heat of the warm
little _atelier_ the fresh odor of the pungent flowers came strongly on
the air.

Bulstrode as he said good-by seemed to say it--and to look at the
lovers--through a haze of perfume--a perfume that, like the most
precious things in the world, pervades and affects, suggests and
impresses, while its existence is unseen, unknown to the world.


Once in his train, he had been able to catch it at the Invalides after
all, Jimmy drew a long breath and settled back into himself, for, he
had been, poor dear, during the past three weeks, in another man's
shoes and profiting by another man's identity.  It was perfectly
heavenly to feel that he had been liberated by the merciful providence
which takes care to provide the right lover for the right place.  He
couldn't be too grateful for the miracle which saved him from a
sacrifice alongside of which Abraham's would have been a jest indeed.

The June morning was warm and through the open car window, as the train
went comfortably along, the perfume of the country came into him where
he sat.  Opposite, a pair of lovers frankly and naturally showed their
annoyance at the third person's intrusion, and Bulstrode,
sympathetically turned himself about and became absorbed in Suburban
Paris.  His heart beat high at the fact of his deliverance.  His
gratitude was sincere--moreover, his thoughts were of an agreeable
trend, and he was able to forget everybody else within twelve miles.
Secure in his impersonality and in the indifference of his broad
unseeing back, the lovers kissed and held hands.

Bulstrode wandered slowly up from the Versailles station to the Hotel
des Reservoirs, crossed the broad square of the Palace Court, found the
pink and yellow facade more mellow and perfect than ever, and toward
twelve-thirty strolled into the yard of the old hostelry.  Breakfast
had been set for twelve-thirty, but his host was not there.

"Ah--mais, bon jour, Monsieur Bulstrode!"  The proprietor knew and
appreciated this client greatly.

Monsieur Falconer, it seemed, had been called suddenly to Paris....
Yes--well--there were, now and then, in the course of life, bits of
news that could be borne with fortitude.  "And Madame has also been
called to Paris?"

"Mais non!"  Madame had a few minutes since gone out in the Park, the
proprietor thought she would not be very far away.

Bulstrode thanked him, and crossed over to the hedge and the gateway
and through it to the Palace Gardens.  On all sides the paths stretched
broad and inviting toward the various alleys, and upon the terrace to
his left there shone a thousand flowers in June abundance.  The
gentleman chose the first path that opened, and went carelessly down
it, and in a few moments the pretty ring of an embowered circle spread
before him, but, although there was an inviting marble bench under a
big tree at one side, and several eighteenth century marbles on their
pedestals, illuminated by the bland eighteenth century smile, there was
not a living woman in sight to make him, the visitor, welcome!  He went
a little further along and found another felicitous, harmonious circle,
where a small fountain threw its jets on the June air.  At the sound of
the water Bulstrode remembered that the Grands Eaux were to play on
this afternoon at Versailles.

"Ah, _that_ is why they especially wanted me to come out to-day," he
decided.

On the other side of the fountain, the vivid white of her summer dress
making a flash like moonlight on the obscurity of the woods, a lady was
standing looking across at Mr. Bulstrode.

"Hush!" she said; "come over softly, Jimmy; there is a timid third
party here."

On a branch at her side, where an oriole sat, his head thrown back, his
throat swelling, there was a little stir and flutter of leaves, for
although the lady had put her finger to her lips, her voice broke the
spell, and a bit of yellow flashed through the trees.

"I don't believe _he_ will ever forgive you!" she cried; "you spoiled
his solo, but I'll forgive you.  What brought you out to Versailles
to-day?"

"The fountains," Bulstrode told her; "I have never seen them play.
Then, too--there are certain places to which, when I am asked to
luncheon, I always go."

"That's quite true," she accepted; "you _were_ invited!--but, to be
perfectly frank, I did not expect you, so your coming on this occasion
has only the pleasure of a surprise.  As a rule, I hate them.  My
husband informed me that he would telephone you to meet him in Paris,
but I think he must have forgotten you, Jimmy."

She was taking him in from his fresh panama to his boots, and she
apparently found an air of festivity about him.

"Was it," she asked, "in honor of the fountains' playing that you have
made yourself so beautiful?"

Bulstrode took the boutonniere out of his coat lapel and handed it to
her.  "Can't you pin it in somewhere?"  Mrs. Falconer laughed and
thrust the carnation into her bodice.

"I dressed to-day, more or less," Mr. Bulstrode confessed, "in order to
attend--well, what shall I call it--a betrothal?  That's a good
old-fashioned word."

"Oh!" exclaimed the lady, "a _fiancailles_?"

"Yes."

The two had wandered slowly along, out of the Bosquet towards the
canals.

"They make a great deal of these functions in France," Mrs. Falconer
said.

Her companion agreed.  "They made a great deal, rather more than usual,
out of this one."  And his tone was so suggestive that his companion
looked up at him quickly.

"Who _are_ your mysterious lovers?" she asked, "are they French?  Do I
know them?"

"They are not in the least mysterious," Bulstrode assured her.  "I
never saw anything less complex and more simple.  They are Americans."

She seemed now to understand that she was to hear of "one of Jimmy's
adventures," as she called his dashes in other people's affairs.

"I hope, Jimmy, in this case, that you have pulled the affair off to
your credit, and that if you have made a match the creatures will be
grateful to you for once!  And, by the way," she bethought; "whatever
has happened to the pretty girl whom you were quixotic enough to think
you had to marry?"

"The last time I saw her she appeared to be in the best of
circumstances," Bulstrode answered cheerfully.  "In point of fact--it
was, singularly enough, to _her_ engagement party that I went to-day!"

And Mrs. Falconer now showed real interest and feeling.  "No! how
delightful.  So she is really off your hands, Jimmy.  Well, that is too
good to be true.  There's one at least whom you don't have to marry,
Jimmy!"

"Oh, they grow beautifully less," he agreed.

Mrs. Falconer smiled softly.

"They are narrowing down every year," Jimmy went on; "when I am about
sixty the number will be reduced, I dare say, to the proper quantity."

"What a goose you are," she said jestingly.  "What a tease and a bother
you are, Jimmy Bulstrode; _I'll_ find you a proper wife!"

He accepted warmly.  "Do, do!  I leave myself quite in your hands."

His companion extended him her hand as she spoke, and after lifting it
to his lips, Bulstrode drew it through his arm.  It was clothed in a
glove of pale coffee-color suede.  It was a soft, dear hand, and rested
as if it were at home on Bulstrode's gray sleeve.  Side by side the two
friends walked slowly out toward the broader avenues leading to the
canals.  The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some
drifting cloud, like dashes of foam.  The trees about them lifted dark
velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and
flowers.

"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs.
Falconer.  "Isn't it _too_ beautiful!"

"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered.  And the lady went on to
say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories
of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because
he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys,
and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of
no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.




THE THIRD ADVENTURE



III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June,
Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not
an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world
wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in
their own country--but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming
rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and
where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made
him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.

On the very first day he went over the Hotel Montensier from _grenier_
to _caves_, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de
Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the
hotel and turn Parisian."  He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around
him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the
house gave in flights of marble steps.  When his friend suggested that
Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed.  "Do you think," he had asked,
"that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if
cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, _mon
cher_, turn Parisian?"  And the Duc had assured him that he did not
think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all
afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him!  "Why,
your coat alone--the cut of it--" Montensier had laughed, "speaks of
Poole with a Boston compromise!

The Duc had been in the United States--moreover, the Frenchman had
plans of his own and he wanted very much to go to Newport and leave his
house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode.  Whether the Puritan in him led
Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any
rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love
of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up
and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.

The Falconers were off somewhere _en auto_.  He had thought they had
gone through Spain.  It was pretty hot to do such a thing, however, and
he did not really know.  He wanted very much to be able not to let
himself follow them, and he knew that there was little chance of his
reaching such stoicism unless he began by not finding out where they
were going!  So he shut himself up with the books which the library
offered and gave many charming little dinners and parties on his
terraces in the bland summer nights, and tried with all his might and
main to forget the flight of a certain motor over the fair white roads
and, above all, to nerve himself up to refuse an invitation for the
middle of July.

Directly opposite the white facade of the Montensiers' hotel was a
hostelry for beggars, for domestics without places; for poor
professors; for actors with no stages but the last; for laborers with
no labor; in short, for the riff-raff of the population, for those who
no longer hold the dignity of profession or pay rent for a term.
Sometimes Bulstrode would look out at the tenement, whose windows in
this season were wide open; and the general aspect indicated that
dislocated fortunes flourished.  In one window, pirouetting or dancing
in it, calling out of it, leaning perilously over the sill of it, was a
child--as far as Bulstrode could decide, a creature of about six years
of age.  She was too small to see much of, but all he saw was activity,
gesticulation, and perpetual motion.  When the day was hot she fanned
herself with a bit of paper.  She called far out to the wine-merchant's
wife, who sat with her family before the shop while her pretty children
played in the gutter.


In Paris, when the weather climbs to eighty, Parisians count themselves
in the tropics and the people, who lived apparently out of doors
altogether, wore a melted, disheartened air.  But the De Montensier
garden, full of roses and heliotrope, watered and refreshed by the
fountains' delightful falling, was a retreat not to be surpassed by
many suburbs.  Bulstrode gave little dinners on the terrace; little
suppers after the theatre, when rooms and garden were lighted with
fairy lanterns, and his chef outdid his traditions to please his
American master.

One day as the American sat smoking on the terrace with nothing more
disturbing than the drip of the fountain and the remote murmur of Paris
to break his reverie, Prosper, his confidential man, made a tentative
appearance.

"Would m'sieu, _who is so good_, see a young lady?"

His master smiled as he rose, instinctively at the words "jeune
demoiselle," throwing away his cigar.

"Pardon, m'sieu, I thought it might amuse m'sieu--" and Prosper stepped
back.

Bulstrode had been intently thinking of the caravansary opposite him,
and he now saw that part of the _hotel meuble_ had come across the
street; he recognized it immediately for the smallest part.  Before him
stood the ridiculous and pathetic figure of a dirty little girl in
rags, tatters, and furbelows, her legs clad in red silk stockings
evidently intended for fuller, shapelier limbs; her feet slipped about
in pattens.  She had on a woman's bodice, a long flounced skirt pinned
up to keep her from tripping.  Her head was adorned by a torn straw
hat, also contrived and created for the coquetry of maturity.

"Monsieur is so good," she began in a flute-like voice.  "I have come
to thank monsieur with all my heart."

Bulstrode looked toward Prosper for enlightenment, but that individual
had cleverly disappeared.

"To thank me, my child?  But for what?"

"Why, for the eggs and butter and sugar that monsieur was so good as to
send me.  I have made the cake.  It is beautiful!  Monsieur le
cuisinier of this house baked it for me.  It is perhaps a little
flat--but that was because I got tired stirring.  See--it says--"  She
had, so he now saw, a book under her arm; letting fall a fold of her
cumbersome dress with both hands and opening a filthy cook-book, she
laid it on the table, bending over it.  "It says stir briskly half an
hour."  (Her "rs" rolled in her throat like tiny cannons in a rosy
hollow.)  "Quelle idee!  It was _too_ stupid!  Half an hour!  I just
mixed it round once or twice and then--voila! it has white on the top
and shall have a candle."

"So you've made a cake?" he said kindly.  "I'm sure it's a good one."

She nodded brightly.  "It is for that I came to thank monsieur and to
ask if he would accept a piece of it."

Poor Bulstrode, with dreadful suspicion, looked to see part of the
horror immediately offered for his degustation.  "I don't, my dear,
understand.  Why should you thank _me_--what had I to do with it?"

Her gesture was delightful.  "But for monsieur it would not exist; for
butter, eggs, and flour.  Monsieur Prosper, when he gave them, said it
was of the kindness of '_Monsieur Balstro_.'"

(Oh, Prosper!  "I have corrupted _him_," his master thought.  "He is as
bad as I am!")

"Well, I'm very glad indeed," and he said it heartily.  "But what did
you especially want to make it for--with the one candle?  That means
one year old.  Who's birthday may it then be?"

"It is the birthday of maman."  She shut the book, and as she did so
raised her great black eyes, which dirt and neglect could not spoil.
There was in her appearance so little suggestion of maternal care that
Bulstrode nearly incredulously asked, "Your mother?  And what, then,
does your mother do?"

"She's a fish," informed the child tranquilly.  And Bulstrode, although
startled, could believe it.  It too perfectly accounted for the
cold-blooded indifference to this offspring.  Not even a mermaid could
have been guilty of so little care for her child.  Still, he repeated:

"A fish?"

"Oui, a devil-fish in the aquarium at Bostock's.  Oh, que c'est beau!"
she clasped her little hands.  "Maman wears a costume of red--quite a
small, thin dress," she described eagerly.  "And it is all spangles,
like fire when she dives into the water.  I have been; the waiter at
the cafe downstairs took me.  I screamed.  I thought maman was drowned.
But no--she comes up always!"  The child threw her head back and lifted
her eyes in ecstasy.  "C'est magnifique!"

"What is your mother's name?"

"Mademoiselle Lascaze."

"And yours?"

"Simone."

"What do you do all day, Simone?"

"I wash and cook and sew and play--I have much to do--oh, much."  She
assumed an important air.  "The bad air of the room makes maman ill, so
she's out--'to breathe,' she says--and she locks me safely in.  I play
Bostock and dive like maman.  And sometimes"--she lowered her voice,
and looking back to see if they were alone--confided, "I cry."

"Ah!" sympathized Bulstrode.

"But, yes," she insisted, "when maman forgets to come home, and the
night is so black; then the seamstress next door knocks on the wall,
and I knock back for company."

"I see," he understood gently, "for company."

He rang for Prosper.  "You will conduct mademoiselle home, Prosper, and
give her everything she needs for her kitchen always."

"Yes, monsieur; I knew that monsieur would----"

At sight of Prosper the mite gathered up her voluminous skirts and bade
her new friend a cordial good-by.

From the corrupted Prosper Bulstrode extracted what he wished to know
concerning the child.

"It is of a scandalousness, monsieur!  Four nights of the seven the
poor little object is alone.  The mother appears to have money enough,
she pays her rent regularly, and there is therefore nothing to do.  She
sometimes even fetches her companions home with her, and Simone, when
she is not making sport for them, is tied to a chair to keep her from
falling off in her sleep."

Bulstrode expressed himself strongly, violently for him, went to see a
lawyer and a charitable French countess and found out that so long as
the mother did not actually ill-treat the child she could not be
replaced by any other guardian.

"Mon cher ami," said the spirituelle lady, "leave the fish to her
deviltry, and her child in her care.  We are _fin de race_, if you
like, and in direct opposition to your American progressive schemes,
but we have a tradition that the family is sacred, and that, however
bad it may be, a child is better off in its home than elsewhere.  You
will find it difficult to replace a mother by a _machine_ or an
_institution_, believe me."

And Bulstrode at the words felt a new sense of failure in
philanthropies, and his benevolence seemed pure dilletantism.  What was
he likely to accomplish in the case of this child?  Nothing more than
the momentary pleasure a few toys and a few hours of play could secure.
"And yet," as he mused he philosophically put it to himself, "isn't it,
after all, about the sum total any of us get out of destiny?"

In New York he would have quite known how to proceed in order to help
the child, but in the face of French law and strong family prejudice he
came up against a stone wall.

"I'm no sort of a real benefactor," he remorsefully acceded, "and I
don't believe I'm fit to be trusted alone with the poor."

Nevertheless he did not relinquish his idea entirely, and confided
Simone to Prosper's sympathetic care and that of an emotional
maid-servant, with the result that a cleaning woman penetrated by hook
or crook into the room of "the fish" and treated it to more _aqua pura_
than the piscatory individual had cognizance of outside of the aquarium.

The gentleman in this particular charity was surprised to find how
simple it sometimes is to do good.  In this case no one had come to him
with a petition or a demand; on the contrary, a note of undeserved
thanks had, with the strange little creature, been presented to him.
It was so pleasantly easy to help a child!  There were no _arrieres
pensees_--not that they would have troubled him, but there were none;
there were no wire-pullings, no time infringements, no suggestion or
criticism, no--he believed--expectations.  Everything he could do was
so annoyingly little!  The charwoman cleaned, Simone had a complete
wardrobe, the larder was full, and there remained nothing but toys to
buy.  The little thing was so womanly and capable--he had seen it and
marvelled in their interviews at her age and accomplishments--her hands
were so apt and almost creative, that toys seemed inadequate.  She took
her benefits charmingly; rushed over at the least provocation to pour
out her gratitude, and Bulstrode, who hated thanks, liked these.
Childhood, if it had been for sale on the Boulevard, even that he would
have bought Simone if he could!  As it was, he found himself pausing
before a series of shops other than chemisiers--florists, and
jewellers'--shops where diminutive objects were displayed--and one
afternoon had been standing ridiculously long in front of a certain
window on the Rue de Rivoli when he was accosted by an agreeable and
familiar voice.

"Jimmy!  It isn't possible! don't tell me it has come so cruelly
_soon_?"

The gentleman gave a violent, but an entirely happy start.  Well, there
were rewards then for people who didn't follow speeding motors through
France!  She was back and in Paris.

"What--has come so soon?" he asked.

Mrs. Falconer, on her way from a hat shop in her automobile, stopped by
his side.

"Why, your second childhood, my dear man.  Do you know what shop you
are standing before?"

Bulstrode seemed to be perfectly aware of his dotage and to delight in
it.  Behind the big window pane there was a bright and very juvenile
display.

Ships sailed there; dolls hung gaudily and smilingly aloft; giant
parti-colored balls rounded out their harlequin sides; tiny dishes for
pygmy festivals were piled with delicious carrots and artichokes on
little white, blue-rimmed platters.

"Have you a moment to spare?" Bulstrode asked her.

"I have bought all my hats," she replied; "after that a woman's time
hangs heavy on her hands."

"Ah!" he was as radiant as she had the genius for making him.  "Come,
then, in with me and help me choose a _doll_."

It was not the first purchase during the course of a long friendship
which Bulstrode had made with this charming woman by his side, but for
some reason he enjoyed it more than former errands.  The bachelor and
the childless woman were hard to please and their choice consumed an
unconscionable time.  As they lingered, the amiable shopman pressed
various toys on monsieur and madame "_pour les enfants_," and the lady,
finally depositing her friend with his parcels at the door of his
hotel, realized as she drove away that she knew nothing of the child
for whom the purchases had been made.  On her way up the Champs Elysees
she smiled softly.  "It's what you _share_," she mused, "what you give
of _yourself--with_ yourself--_that's_ charity!  Jimmy gives himself.
I wonder who his new love is?"

Bulstrode, in order to share what should be his "new love's" ecstasy at
first sight of the miraculous toy, sent for Simone.  The Rue de Rivoli
doll, on a small chair designed for diminutive ladies of the eighteenth
century or for the king's dwarfs, held out stiff but cordial arms and
was naturally, to a child, the first and sole object of the
drawing-room.

"_Monsieur!_"

"For you, Simone."

"_Monsieur!_"

She said nothing else as she clasped her hands, and the color rushed
into her face, but she felt the doll, touched reverently its feet,
hair, dress, incontinently forgot Bulstrode, and quite suddenly,
passionately, caught the image of life to her heart.  Just over its
blonde head, for it was nearly as large as herself, she met the
gentleman's eyes.

"It's my child!  I've prayed for it always, always!  I've never had a
doll, a _bebe_, m'sieu."

The tea-table with cakes and chocolate called them all too soon and, as
Prosper served, the fountains sang, the heat stole through the garden
and called up agreeable odors of sod and roses, the late afternoon sky
spread its expanse over the terrace of the hotel, where, perfectly
happy both of them, animated by as gentle and harmless pleasure as any
two in Paris that day, the child of the people and an American
gentleman chatted over their tea.

Bulstrode, being an original, erratic, and reckless giver of alms,
quite by this time knew that, more than often, for him to give was, if
not to regret, to have at least misgivings whether in the hands of some
colder, less poetic person his money would not have accomplished more
good.  In the case of Simone he had, as usual, happily gone on with
abandon, relegating any remorse to a future which he hoped would never
arrive.


But the middle of July did come and with it came poor Jimmy's exquisite
temptation.  A telephone helped it dreadfully.  There was something so
wonderful in the fact that in a couple of hours he could, if he would,
let himself reach the side of the lovely voice which called to him over
the wires.  And being nothing but a human man, he threw all his good
resolves to the wind, and went down and stayed three days at
Fontainebleau.

Out under the sky, where the elastic earth sprang softly beneath her
feet and the embowered forests were sifted through with gold, Mary
Falconer finally asked him, "And your doll, Jimmy?  Have you broken her
yet?"  Bulstrode felt a guilty twinge, for he had not once thought of
the little girl, nor did Mrs. Falconer's mention of her bring the
subject near enough for Bulstrode to tell her the pretty story.  He had
other things to say, and many things not to say, and this, as it always
did when he was with his lady, kept him very absorbed and occupied.  On
this occasion he forgot all about little Simone.

The night of his return Paris was _en fete_ and in no sense impatient
to reach his lonely house--for it seemed to him this night the
loneliest house in the world--he walked without haste up town along the
quays.

It was hard to forget that not fifty miles away he had left the cool
forests, their tempting roads, their alluring alleys.  He had forgotten
that it was the annual celebration and that at this late hour the
_fete_ would be in full swing, and as he strolled meditating along the
Seine the spirit of the gay populace--good-humor, reckless pleasure,
and the _joie de vivre_--poured itself out around him like cordial,
like a generous gift from an over-charged horn of cheer.  In his gray
clothes, modish panama, a little white rose plucked by a dear hand from
the trellis at Fontainebleau still in his buttonhole, Bulstrode
scarcely remarked the crowds or heard the music as he passed outdoor
dancing stands and was jostled by a dancing throng.

His own street, as he approached it, welcomed him with a strong odor of
onions and fried potatoes; it had apparently turned itself out of doors
and all of the houses seemed to have emptied themselves into the narrow
alley.  A hurdy-gurdy playing before the _hotel meuble_ tinkled and
jangled in the centre of a crowd of merry-makers, and the metallic
melody and wild ascending octaves were the first sounds Bulstrode
consciously heard since he left Fontainebleau.

In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing like a mad child,
hair, arms, and feet flying; her voice, thin and piercing, every now
and then above the rattle of the hand-organ, cried out the lines of a
popular song whose meaning on her lips was particularly horrifying.
The wine-shop family encircled her, encoring her vociferously.  As she
paused for breath the light from over the shop-door shone on her
excited little face.

[Illustration: In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing]

"I tired!  Mon Dieu, que non!  I could dance till morning.  Play again,
monsieur l'organiste.  Play again."

Bulstrode, on the crowd's edge, watched her, and for once in his
philanthropic history made no attempt to rescue.  As Prosper let his
master in he said:

"It's a shame, isn't it, monsieur?  The people over there have let her
run quite crazy.  The poor little thing!  Heaven knows where the mother
is!"

Of which celestial knowledge Bulstrode had his doubts.  It was close to
twelve, and dismissing Prosper for the night, he took his cigar out on
the terrace and to what solitude his garden might extend.  Before long
the noise of the music subsided, the people, tired out with hours of
festivity, dispersed, and the alley settled into quiet.  From the
distance now and then came the soft, dull explosion of fireworks, the
rumble and roar of Paris was a little accelerated; otherwise the
silence about Bulstrode's garden grew and deepened as the night
advanced.

It was rare for him to allow himself to be the object of his own
personal consideration, or that indeed he at all thought of himself,
and when he did the man he had long ignored had his revenge and made
him pay up old scores.

On the late afternoon of this very day he was to have walked for miles
through the Fontainebleau woods with Mrs. Falconer, and instead he had
fled.  Pleading a sudden summons to Paris, he left Fontainebleau.

It was well past four o'clock when he at last threw his cigar away and
rose.  He had been musing all night in his chair.

A sudden gust of noise blew down the quiet little street, the sound of
loud singing and the shrill staccato of a woman's laugh.  By the time
the revellers had passed his house and the hubbub had died away,
Bulstrode, with an idea at length of going up to his room, walked
across the salon and prepared to extinguish the electricity, but the
sound of some one tapping without caught his ear, and going over to the
window that gave on the street, he looked out.  From end to end the
alley was deserted except for the figure of a woman.  As he saw in the
ruddy light of early morning she huddled against the threshold of the
_hotel meuble_--knocking persistently at the door.  The tattered gauze
of her dress, whose bold _decolletee_ left her neck and shoulders bare,
a garland of roses on the bandeaux of her black hair, she epitomized
the carnival just come to its end--its exhaustion, its excess, spent at
length, surfeited, knocking for entrance at last to rest.  Bulstrode,
as he remarked the sinuous figure that swayed as the woman stood,
exclaimed to himself with illumination: "Why, she's the _fish_, of
course!  Simone's mother!  And this is the state in which she goes to
the miserable child!"

As, knocking at intervals, the object leaned there a few moments
longer, evidently scarcely able to stand, his pity wakened and he
slowly left the window, shut in its blinds, and crossed his
ante-chamber, where the artificial light of electricity was met by the
full sunshine of the breaking day streaming in through the open window
of his terrace.  Not entirely sure of his motive or to what excess of
folly it might lead him, he nevertheless opened wide his front door,
only to see that the woman on the opposite street had gone.  She had
been let in.  With a glance of relief up and down the street where the
_confetti_ in disks of lilac and yellow and red lay in dirty piles or
swam on the flushing gutters that sparkled in the light, Bulstrode shot
to his door on the Parisian world and after a _nuit blanche_ went
upstairs to his rooms.


And there had intensely come to him during the period of his dressing
the next morning after a tardy wakening the idea of taking the child,
of--he was certain it could be done--buying the mother off.  He would,
in short, if he could, legally adopt the Parisian _gamine_ for his own.
It would give him a distinct interest, and life was empty for want of
one; this, in a manner, however short of perfect, would supply the need
of a loving living creature in his environment and would--his thrill at
the idea proved to him how lonely he had been--give him companionship
and a responsibility of a tender, personal sort.  He could make a home
at last for a child.  Men are more paternal than they are credited with
being, and Bulstrode directly foresaw delightful _causeries_ in the
future with--(he knew many women)--_with one woman_ whose pretty taste,
whose wit and humor, should counsel him in his new role.  Mrs. Falconer
would dress Simone--her hand should be wonderfully in it all.
Bulstrode had let his fancy linger over the scheme.  Certainly, during
the hour in which he spun his fanciful plan, there was not one bar to
its execution.  Nor did there come to him any hint of its intrinsic
sterility, or the idea that it was possibly an excuse for the
interweaving of another interest more closely with his life--no idea
that he was simply strengthening an old bond, or by means of this
little tug pushing a mighty vessel nearer port.

He almost happily mused until a nursery grew out of thin air, a child's
little garments lay on a chair, and festivities, whose charm is of the
most mysterious, illuminated his reverie.  Bulstrode, even without the
shudder of the climatician, contemplated the rigors of his own country,
for a rosy room grew out of his dream, fire-lit and fragrant with fir
and holly, and in the centre shone The Tree, whose shiny globes and
marvels were reflected till they danced in a child's eyes.

There had been an hour earlier the quick, brusque dash of a French
thunder-storm, and the cooled air came refreshingly from the garden as
Bulstrode stood out on the terrace before going into the noonday
breakfast.  Prosper, fetching his master's coffee at nine o'clock, had
been informed that they were leaving Paris that day and received
instructions as to the setting in order of the hotel before returning
it to its proprietor.  Where his wanderings were to take him Bulstrode
had not as yet made up his mind.  It, after all, mattered so very
little what a bachelor did with his leisure!  It was the height of the
season along the seacoast and a dozen places brilliantly beckoned;
there were tri-weekly boats to the country, where he should most
properly be.

"There is," he with recurrent leeway to his inclinations reflected,
"always plenty of time to decide what one does not want to do!"

As he glanced at the little breakfast spread temptingly there for him
on the terrace he was arrested by the sound of French voices in quick,
agitated discussion, and looked up to see the unceremonious entrance of
quite a little band of people who had in point of fact penetrated his
seclusion.  In a second of time a group was before him and he
remembered afterward that certain figures in a twinkling assumed
familiar shapes: the wine-shop keeper, his wife, one or two other
patrons of the hotel; but in the centre--he was sure of her!--pale and
staring, stood little Simone, her big doll clasped in her arms.

Before the gentleman could ask their errand Madame Branchard, eager to
tell it, pushed forward.  Bulstrode afterward, when he thought of the
scene, could always distinctly see her important red face, sleek, oily
hair, and in spite of summer heat the crocheted shawl over her cotton
gown.

"We decided at once to address to monsieur, who is so good"--(he was
growing accustomed to the formula) "to monsieur who has been so like a
father to the poor little thing.  Not but that we are ready ourselves
to do all we can for her--she is so sweet, so intelligent!"

"The sweet, intelligent child" appeared, as Bulstrode's pitying gaze,
never leaving her, saw, to have shrunk overnight.  In their midst she
stood of a ridiculous smallness, her big doll nearly hiding her and
over its blonde head Simone's eyes peered pathetically into, as it
were, a vague and terrifying world.  Bulstrode asked shortly in the
face of the theatrical prelude:

"What is this all about?  What have you come to tell me?"

"Ah, monsieur!"  Madame Branchard's voice, particularly suited to
retailing the tragedies of the streets, quavered.  "There has been a
_malheur_--it is too horrible--the mother!"

"Stop!"  Bulstrode put out his hand.  "Simone!"

The little thing dragged herself to him with a new timidity, as though
she believed him in league with the world against her.

"Come," he encouraged, "come out here on the terrace, where you have so
often played with your doll, and don't be frightened, _mon enfant_;
everything will be all right."

When he had so settled her in the smallest of chairs he went back to
the other bit of Paris street-life which had seethed in to him.

Madame Branchard, whom his manner had reduced to, for her, marvellous
quiet and ease, approached impressively and lowered her voice as deeply
as it would fall.

"Mademoiselle Lascaze, whom monsieur knows has been my tenant for
months past, is dead--dead, monsieur!"

Bulstrode echoed, "Dead?" and his first thought was: "It was not she,
then, whom I saw striving for entrance this morning.  Ah, poor
creature!  Drowned?"

"Monsieur then knows?"

Knows--how should he know?  He had thought of the aquarium and her
often repeated feat.

"Monsieur is right, she is drowned; but it is not the aquarium--it is
the Seine.  It appears," the wine-merchant's wife went on, "that last
night she made _la fete_ in the streets.  We over here lock up, well,
at a decent hour, as monsieur will understand.  Those who are in stay,
those who are out--well, monsieur will understand----"

Yes, he understood.  Would she go on?

"Mademoiselle Lascaze had evidently lost her key of entry--so it
appears.  We have this story from her comrades, a bad lot, like
herself.  She tried to get in about five o'clock--they left her
knocking at the door.  She must then have wandered the streets for an
hour, for it was six when they met her again by chance quite by the
Pont des Arts.  They all had something to drink and started across the
river, when the poor thing offered to give an exhibition of her circus
feat and, before anyone could stop her, had dived off the bridge into
the Seine."

He had, then, seen her knocking there in the dawn, and if he had
hastened a little--not held conventionally back----

"It is all _en regle_," assured Madame Branchard.  "As my husband will
tell monsieur, he has been to the morgue to identify her."

The wine-merchant now at his cue, nodded impressively.  "Mais oui, I
assure monsieur she was quite natural--and she was une belle femme tout
le meme----"

His wife glanced at him scornfully.  "She was a bad mother, and all the
house will tell you so.  Many times, monsieur, I have gone in with my
pass-key and taken the poor little thing downstairs in my arms to give
her all the supper she would have had, and many a time, on cold nights,
when there was not a stick of fire in their room, and the woman
abroad--many a time I have had her sleep in our bed with us--my husband
will tell monsieur."

The wine-merchant nodded assent.  "She speaks the truth, monsieur."

Bulstrode found presence of mind to wonder.  "I suppose Mademoiselle
Lascaze left debts?"

The husband and wife exchanged glances.

"_En verite_, monsieur," confessed Madame Branchard, "she has left a
few, but they are small and not significant; a hundred francs will
cover them.  It is not for our pockets we are come to monsieur."

Here the sentimentality having been disposed of by the woman, the
husband broke in:

"It is like this, Monsieur Balstro" (Bulstrode saw how intimately the
_hotel meuble_ knew him): "In a few moments even the authorities will
be here to take charge of the woman's effects and Simone will become
the property of the State.  She has no relatives, as Monsieur will
understand.  Thinking, therefore, that monsieur, _who is so good_,
might for some reason care to take an interest in the child's
future----"

Branchard coughed and paused.  Having given Mr. Bulstrode ample time to
speak, to show some signs of life and of his usual quick benevolence,
and being greeted with nothing other than quiet, meditative silence,
the merchant shrugged and comprehensively relinquished suppositions and
hopes in one large gesture.

"In which case" (evidently that of taking for granted that Bulstrode
was less good than they had supposed), "in that case we shall put in a
plea ourselves for Simone and adopt her."

Madame's voice, now in full and customary volume, expressed frankly
_her_ goodness.  "We have five children and our means are modest,
but"--and she put it sublimely--"_one is not a mother for nothing_."

Her tirade, however, was quite lost on Bulstrode, who was occupied with
his own projects of benevolence.  Turning to this contingent of the
_hotel meuble_ a back scarcely more imperturbable than his face had
been, he went out of the room to the terrace, where Simone sat just as
he had left her.  She was, on her low chair, so tiny that in order more
nearly than ever before to approach her little point of view, to come
into her little sphere, Bulstrode knelt down on one knee.

"Don't look so frightened, my child.  Nothing will harm you--I assure
you of that; don't you"--he called her loyally to answer--"don't you
believe me, Simone?"

The little thing drew in a struggling breath and whispered: "Oui,
m'sieu."

"Good!"  He was smiling at her and had taken her ice-cold, dirty,
little hands.  "You are fond of me, Simone--you like a little M'sieu
Balstro'?"

"Oh," she caught at her frightened voice and more clearly whispered,
"oh, oui, m'sieu!"

"Bien encore!"

He wanted tactfully to break the ice which shock and terror had formed
around the poor little heart, and yet not to prolong the moment.

"_Voyons_," he said to her lightly, as if he were only to bid her come
and play in his garden, and not ask her to decide her destiny.
"_Voyons_, how would you like to come and live with me? to have toys
and pretty clothes and good things to eat--to be"--the bachelor put it
bravely--"to be _my_ little girl.  How, Simone, would you like it?"

If further startled she was humanized by his warmth, which was melting
her; her breast heaved, her lips trembled, and she asked: "Et
puis--maman?"

Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to
curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly
behind the two on the terrace.  Tears had sprung to her eyes and she
sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.

Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her,
"What does she then know?"

"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."

Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the
marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe
did not touch her.

"And maman?" she repeated.  "Where is she?  She did not come home last
night?"

Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but
Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms
around the child.

"Look, ma petite--your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful
country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever
this kind gentleman says.  Will you go to be his little girl?  He will
give you everything in the world."  She closed with this magnificent
promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp.  In order
to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the
wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.

Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion,
no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or
surprise.  She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting
in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame
Branchard's black shawl.

"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and
play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have.  You can be my
little girl, as you will--it is for you to decide--chez moi, or with
this bon monsieur."

Was it fair of them--thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own
destiny?

Simone raised her head; her cheeks had reddened a little at Madame
Branchard's last words.  She was unable to grasp the benefits that
Bulstrode's magnificence offered, but she knew Marie and Jeannette--she
knew the hands of Madame Branchard could tuck one in at night, and how
warm and soft was the bosom on which she had already wept her little
griefs.  There were many beautiful things in the world, but Simone just
then only wanted one.  Madame Branchard was not _her_ mother--but she
was still _a_ mother!  Simone whispered so low that only the woman
heard:

"I will go with you."


Prosper having embarked on a sea of indiscretion, went through the day
consistently.  With a love of the melodramatic in his Latin temperament
he had admitted the _hotel meuble sans ceremonie_: and late that
afternoon he gave entrance to another group of quite a different order,
and without formality ushered the lady and her friends to the terrace,
where the solitary inhabitant of another man's house was taking a
farewell beverage before leaving Paris.

"We have caught you in time, Jimmy!" Mrs. Falconer made a virtue of it.
"If you are absconding with the Montensier treasures, then let me show
Molly and the Marquis at least what has been left behind."

His bags and boxes in the hall, his automobile at the door, and
Bulstrode himself in travelling trim, it looked very much like a
flight, indeed.  Miss Molly and the Marquis, it transpired, were able
to explore for themselves and to find in the gallery and salons
pictures and objects of interest to excuse a prolonged absence.

"They're engaged," Mrs. Falconer explained to her host.  "Isn't it
ridiculous?  As you know, she hasn't a cent in the world, and his
family are not in the secret, but Molly and De Presle-Vaulx _are_, and
_I_ am, and I brought them off in pity for a spin to Paris."

The apparition of the lady, whose mocking beauty had a fresh charm
every time he saw her--her worldly wisdom and her keen
reasonableness--made, as he stood talking with her, his past debauch in
philanthropies seem especially grotesque.  With a long breath of joy at
the sight of her Bulstrode also realized how wonderfully separated from
her the introduction of another life into his environment would have
made him.

"Your garden is a waste," the lady criticised, "dusty and dull.  I
don't wonder you're getting away.  Fontainebleau, too, was only a
_faute de mieux_, and I have left it.  One should get really far away
at this season.  It's the time when only the persons who are actually
bred in its stones can stay in Paris--certainly the birds of passage
may now, if ever, fly."

"We are going to Trouville," she said; "we are all going to motor
through Normandy.  Won't you come--won't you come?"  He shook his head.

Mrs. Falconer looked across the terrace to where a little chair had
been overturned, and on the floor by its side lay a broken doll.

"Jimmy!" she laughed in triumph at the sight.  "You _have_ broken your
doll!"

Bulstrode said: "Yes, beyond repair, and I don't want another."  Then
in a few words, briefly, a little impatient, and still smarting under
the child's defection, he gave her the story.

Listening, absorbed, her charming eyes on him or at one moment turned
suspiciously away, the lady heard him to the end, and at the end said
softly:

"Jimmy, my poor Jimmy!  What have you nearly done!  What _would_ people
have thought?  Not that it matters in the least--it's what people _do_
that counts--but oh, I tremble for your next folly!"

"It might"--he spoke with something like bitterness--"be less harmless
and leave me less alone."

She had finished a glass of iced tea, put her goblet down on the tray
and rose, coming over to where Bulstrode stood; she lightly laid her
hand on his arm.

"You are, then, so very lonely?  So lonely that you would be capable of
doing this foolish thing?  Oh, you would have found, as I have found,
that it is those things which come into our lives, not those which we
by force _take_, which mean all we want them to mean!  This wasn't
_your child_!"  Mrs. Falconer's face softened as he had never seen it.
"Nor yet is she the child of some woman you love.  Believe me, it would
have made you far lonelier if it so happened--if you should ever come
to love--if you ever had loved----"

Bulstrode interrupted her abruptly:

"Yes, in that case I should no doubt be glad that Simone had gone back
on me."  He waited silent for a second, and then continued gently, "I
_am_ glad, very glad indeed!"




THE FOURTH ADVENTURE



IV

IN WHICH HE MAKES THREE PEOPLE HAPPY

There were times when Bulstrode decided that he never could see the
woman he loved any more: there were times when he felt he must follow
her to the ends of the world, just in order to assure himself that she
was alive and serene.  Such is the gentleman's character and point of
view, that she must always be serene, no matter what his own troubled
emotions might be.

He had the extraordinary idea that he could not himself be happy or
make a woman happy over the dishonor of another man.  It was
old-fashioned and unworldly of Bulstrode: still, that was the way he
was constituted.

It was on one of the imperious occasions when he felt as if he must
follow her to the ends of the earth, that he steered his craft toward a
little town on the edge of the Norman coast, to a very fashionable bit
of France--Trouville.  As soon as he understood that Mrs. Falconer was
to be in Normandy for the race week, he packed his things and ran down
and put up at the Hotel de Paris.  On this occasion the gentleman
followed so fast that he overleaped his goal, and arrived at the
watering-place before the others appeared.  Bulstrode took his own
rooms, and in response to a telegram, engaged the Falconers'
apartments.  He liked the way the little salon gave on the heavenly
blue sea, and with a nice fancy to make it something more home-like for
his friend to begin with, he filled it with flowers ... ran what
lengths he dared in putting a few rare vases and several pieces of old
Italian damask here and there.

"Falconer," he consoled himself, "will be too taken up with his horses
to notice the _inside_ of anything but a stable!  And I shall tell the
others that the hotel proprietor is a collector: most of these Norman
innkeepers are collectors."  And, as his idea grew, he went to greater
lengths, with the curiosity shops on either side the Rue de Paris to
tempt him.  The result was that when Mrs. Falconer came, she found the
hotel room wonderfully mellow and harmonious, and as a woman who revels
in beauty she responded to its charm.  She was delighted, her eyes
sparkled, her cheeks glowed.  And Jimmy Bulstrode had a moment of high
happiness as she looked at him and touched with her pretty hands the
flowers he had himself arranged.  It was a delightful moment, a moment
that was much to him.

The Falconers arrived with the usual lot of servants and motors and,
moreover, with a racing outfit, for Falconer had decided to enter his
English filly, Bonjour, for the events of August.  There was also with
them a Miss Molly Malines and a young sprig of nobility, the Marquis de
Presle-Vaulx, to whom Bulstrode was a trifle paternal.

"He can't, at least, be after Molly's _millions_," he reflected; "he
can't, at any rate, be a _fortune_ hunter, for the girl's face is the
only fortune she has!"

On a bright and beautiful morning, the first of all the days for many
weeks--for Bulstrode reckoned his calendar in broken bits, beginning a
New Year each time he saw his lady again--a bright and beautiful
morning he walked out at the fashionable hour of noon and turned into
the Rue de Paris.

The eyes of many women followed Bulstrode.

Being an early riser, he had already taken a brisk walk over the
cliffs, had swum out beyond the buoys, and now in his flannels, his
panama, a gay rose in the lapel of his coat, amongst the many
debonnaire and pleasing people who filled the little fishing town, his
was a distinguished figure.  He trusted very much to instinct to
discover his friend, and after a few moments found her at the extreme
end of the street which the papers of Paris tell you is "the most
worldly and fashionable in any part of the Continent, during race week
at Trouville."  Mary Falconer was of course dressed in the very height
of the mode.  She looked up and saw Bulstrode before he saw her, but
she could wait until he made his leisurely way down to her side.  She
waited for him a great deal.  He did not know how much, but then her
point of view and her feelings have never come into the history.  It
amused her to make him her many clever little bits of speech, for he
was so appreciative of everything she said, and looking up at him now
as he approached she said: "These people never seem to have anything to
do, do they?  Leisure is like money: to enjoy thoroughly either money
or leisure one should only have a little of each.  Now for us
good-for-nothings who have no occupation it doesn't make much
difference what we do or where we do it!"

The lady's camp-stool had been set down at the end of the street.
Those who are not promenading opened little _chaises pliantes_ and
watched from their little seats.  Mrs. Falconer sat facing the ocean,
or what was visible of it between the bathing tents.  Pagodas gay with
children's shovels and bright pails, striped bonbons and the sea of
muslins, ribbons and feathers and sunshades of the midsummer crowd.
All the capitals of Europe had poured themselves into Trouville, and
the resort overflowed with beauty and fashion.

'"It's perfectly bewitching," Bulstrode said to her, "perfectly
bewitching, and it makes one feel as though there were nothing but
pleasure in the world."

She wore a white dress and her hat was bright with flowers.  She opened
her rose-lined parasol over her head.

"Jimmy," she said abruptly, and brought his eyes to hers like a flash,
for he had been looking over the scene, "do you know I begin to see
where the innkeeper found his rare treasures; _there are a great many
other things_ that suggest them in this little street!"

Bulstrode replied, "You don't want him to take them away, do you?"

She shook her head.  "No," she said slowly, "they have been a great
pleasure, but I don't want to _buy_ them from him, either."

"I don't _think_ he'd sell them," Bulstrode was certain of it, "they're
extremely precious in his eyes."

"I'm a good judge of works of art, however," she said after a moment,
"that is to say, I know a good thing when I see it.  There was a little
picture in one of the shops back of me that I would have given a lot to
own."

Her friend exclaimed: "Are you going to buy it!  That is to say, will
Falconer buy it for you?"

"My dear soul--with his horse running to-morrow!  At any rate, the
bijou is already bought above my head.  I went in yesterday to see what
was the least they would take for it, and found the Prince Pollona, the
Englishman who buys for the Wallace Collection, and somebody who, they
tell me, was the Rockefeller of St. Petersburg.  Well, my little
picture was what they all wanted, and you can imagine that _I_ retired
from the running...!  But I tell you this," she said, "only to show you
how very good my taste is, and so that you may rely on my selections."

Bulstrode smiled in a way that said he thought he might rely on her,
but still he asked rather quizzically, "Well, what are you going to
recommend to me _now_?"

The lady at the moment, not having anything in mind, looked suddenly
up, gave him whimsically:

"Molly and her Marquis."

The two young people with Jack Falconer were coming slowly along the
Rue de Paris toward them.  The grace of the girl, her freshness under
her wide hat where flowers and ribbons danced and blended; the radiant
pleasure she exhaled, the swing of her dress, her youth, expressed so
happily the joy of life, recommended themselves easily in a flash....

"Oh, _Molly_--she's perfect!"

"And the Marquis?"

"He is perfectly in _love_," ... Bulstrode allowed him so much.

"My dear friend, remember I know my _objets d'art_."

"Oh, as an _objet d'art_...!"

Bulstrode took the young man in: his white immaculateness, his
boutonniere, his panama--(not less than forty dollars a straw, as Jimmy
knew) his monocle.

"As an _objet d'art_," he further conceded to her, "he's perfect, too!"

"As an _homme de race_," said the American lady eagerly, with the true
Republican appreciation of blood and title, "as an _homme du monde_, as
a..."

"Title?" he finished for her.  "Oh, the Presle-Vaulx are all right!
I'll grant him a perfect title, sound as a bell, first Crusade--_Leonce
de Presle-Vaulx main droite, or sur azur--Pour toi seule_.  It's a good
old tradition--a good old name."

She scented his lack of sympathy.  "Oh, I'll stand for him, Jimmy.  I
know the _pate_, as they say.  I know the ring and the tone; and you
must, at my valuation, take him."

"Molly, dear lady, has done the taking."  Bulstrode lifted his hat as
the trio came up.  "And what, after all, can we--the rest of us do?"

"The rest of them" watched the young couple with mingled emotions: Mary
Falconer with all the romance in her, and in spite of unusual cool
reasonableness she had a feminine share--Jimmy with the sympathy of a
kindly nature, a certain sting of jealousy at the decidedly perfect
completeness of young love, and with a singularly wide-awake practical
common sense for an impulsive gentleman whose pleasure in life is to
pour into people's hands the things they most long for and cannot
without him ever hope to enjoy!


Bulstrode, although owning his share of horse-flesh and a proper number
of automobiles and keeping, for the best part of the time, a yacht out
of commission, was a sport only in a certain sense of the word.  The
people who liked him best and who were themselves able to judge, said
he was a "dead game sport," but Jimmy smiled at this and knew that the
human element interested him in life above all, and that he only cared
for amusements as they helped others to enjoy.  He was backing
Falconer's horse, although he felt certain the winnings would go to the
Rothschild's gelding.  On the afternoon, however, when De Presle-Vaulx
came up to him in the Casino and said: "On what are you going to put
your money, Monsieur?" Bulstrode looked at him thoughtfully.  He had
stood by the young man the night before at baccarat and seen him lose
enough to keep a little family of Trouville fisherfolk for a year.

"Are you going to play the races, Marquis?"

"But naturally!" ...

De Presle-Vaulx had an attractive frankness, and his smile
was--Bulstrode understood what a girl would think about it!

"... But of course!  One doesn't come to Trouville in _la grande
semaine_ not to play!"

He put his hand cordially on Bulstrode's arm.

"Entre nous," he said, "I don't believe Falconer's horse has a chance
against Rothschild's Grimace.  And you?"

"Oh, I shall back Jack Falconer's mare," the older man replied.

The Marquis played with his moustache.  "She doesn't stand a show."

Bulstrode was walking slowly down the grand staircase by his
companion's side.  "And you will back Grimace?"  He ignored the young
man's prognostication.

De Presle-Vaulx said ingenuously: "_I_?  Oh, seriously, I'm not
betting.  I lost at baccarat last night, and I haven't a sou for the
race."

He looked boyish and regretful.  The American put his hand in his
pocket and took out his portefeuille.

"Let me," he suggested pleasantly, "be your banker."

The light dry rustle of French bank-notes came agreeably from between
his fingers.

The young man hesitated, then put out his hand.

"A thousand thanks, Monsieur, you are too good--I _will_ back Grimace,
and after the race----"

Jimmy handed him the notes to choose from.

At the stair foot stood Molly and Mrs. Falconer.

"We went this afternoon to see Jack's horse," Miss Malines said to the
Marquis.  Whatever she said, no matter how general, she said to
him--others might gather what they could.  "Bon Jour's a beauty--a
dear, and as fit as possible.  Oh, she's in great form!  Jack's crazy
about her, and so is the jockey.  I know Bon Jour will win!  I'm going
to put twenty-five francs on her to-morrow."

Mary Falconer smiled radiantly.  "And you, Jimmy," she took for
granted, "are of course betting on the favorite?"

"If you mean Grimace--" his tone was indifferent--"no, I shall back
your husband's horse."

"_Jimmy_!"  Her tone changed, and her expression as well.

De Presle-Vaulx saw it, and he knew what women's voices can mean.  He
was a Frenchman, and he understood what a slow, delicious flush, a
darkening of the eyes, a sharp note in the voice can signify of
feeling--as well as of gratitude, surprise and a little scorn.  There
was all this in Mary Falconer's exclamation and her face.

"And Maurice!" Molly said, "of course, you're doing the same?"

The Marquis met his fiancee's clear eyes, her girlish enthusiasm and
her confidence.  He bit his lip, shrugged, hesitated, looked at
Bulstrode, at Molly, and laughed.  The presence of the others and the
custom of his country made it only a pretty courtesy--he lifted Molly's
hand to his lips.

"Of course--_chere Mademoiselle_, I am backing Bon Jour with all my
heart, _cela va sans dire_!"

Miss Malines regarded her friend with a pretty grimace and a smile.

As they walked along together all four, Bulstrode said to himself:

"He's a sport, a true sport--that's five thousand francs to the bad.
He was game, however, he's a good sport and, better yet, he's a true
lover!"

Whether or not Mary Falconer really had an exalted idea of the merits
of Bon Jour, or whether she thoroughly understood the situation, how
was her friend to know?

Falconer adored the horse, and the lady showed in the matter, as in
everything else, a fine loyalty to her husband, which was undoubtedly
one of the reasons why--but this is going too deeply into the domain of
Bulstrode's feelings, which, since he keeps them honorably sealed, it
is unworthy to surprise even in the interest of psychology.

Bulstrode saw that his friend was pleased: her color, her mounting
spirits at dinner, showed it.  She spoke with interest of the races,
and with confidence greater than she had hitherto evinced in the
fortunes of her husband's racer--indeed she talked horse to Molly's
edification, her husband's delight, and Bulstrode's admiration.  All
this--the sense that the party was, so to speak, with him--put Jack
Falconer in the best of spirits, and the unruffled course of the
dinner, and, above all, the humor of the elder of the two ladies, quite
repaid Jimmy Bulstrode for the sure loss of his stakes.

"Does she really think that I have faith in the horse?" he
wondered---meeting her charming eyes over the glass of champagne she
was drinking.  They did not answer in text his question, but their glow
and the light of content in them answered for him other questions which
were perhaps of greater interest.

She was not unhappy.  All his life, since his acquaintance with her, it
had been his aim, in so far as he could aid it, that she should not be
unhappy.  His idea of affection was that in all cases it should bring
to the object--joy.  In his own life these things which brought him, no
matter how pleasant they might be, the after taste of regret and misery
he strove with all his manliness to tear out: "and surely," he so
argued, "if my presence in her life cause her for one moment anything
but peace, it would be better that we had never looked into each
other's eyes."

There was nothing especially buoyant, in the attitude of the young
Marquis!  His inclination to feminine will had cost him--he was so
familiar with the turf and the next day's programme to feel sure--five
thousand francs, which he had not the means to pay.


Later in the evening, very much later, indeed well on to one o'clock,
Bulstrode, wandering through the baccarat rooms--for no other purpose,
it would be said from his indifferent air, than to study types--saw
Maurice de Presle-Vaulx just leaving the Casino.

Bulstrode's air was as friendly and as naive as though he had not a
pretty clear idea of just how the tide of events was fluctuating toward
misfortune in the case of this young nobleman.

"What do you say," he suggested, "to getting something to drink or eat?
What do you say to a piece of _perdreau_ and some champagne?"

The Frenchman followed the older man, who in contrast to his pallor
looked the picture of health and spirits.  Bulstrode cheerily led him
to a small table in the corner of the restaurant, where they sat
opposite one another, and for a little time applied themselves in
silence to the light supper served them.

The Marquis drank more than he ate, and Bulstrode dutifully finished
the game and toast, quite glad, in truth, to break the fast of a long
evening which he had spent in the close rooms: for no other reason than
unseen, to befriend--and unasked, to chaperone Molly's lover.  Finally,
when he felt that the right moment to say something had come, he smiled
at the young man, and said frankly:

"Voyons, mon ami, don't you feel that you can talk to me a little more
freely than you could possibly to even so kind and charming a friend as
Mrs. Falconer?  We are not of the same race, perhaps, but then under
certain circumstances such distinctions are not important.  How do
you"--he handled the words as though in presenting them to the young
man he was afraid they might prick him--"How do _you_ now stand?--I
mean to say, the luck has been rather against you, I'm afraid."

Bulstrode would never be so near forty again, and De Presle-Vaulx was a
spoiled child--at all events, all that could be spoiled in him had been
taken care of by his mother, and in his own way he had spoiled a large
part of what remained.  He looked up smartly, for he had been following
the pattern of the table-cloth.  If the frankness of the other
threatened to offend him, as he met the kind eyes of the American he
found nothing there that could do otherwise than please him.  He
shrugged with his national habit, then threw out his hands without
making any verbal reply, but his smile and his gesture comprehended so
much that Bulstrode intelligently exclaimed:

"Oh, but you don't mean to _say_----?"

"I have not, monsieur, much to lose," the scion of an old house replied
simply.  "We have the reputation of being poor; but to-night and last
night have quite 'wiped me out,' as you say in America.  Je suis ruine."

Bulstrode lit his cigar.  De Presle-Vaulx took from his pocket one of
his own cigarettes and puffed at it gently.  Bulstrode smoked silently,
and thought of the young man without looking at him.  He liked him, and
did not understand him at all: not at all!  He supposed, that with his
different traditions, his Puritanism, his New World point of view, he
could _never_ understand him, but he would enjoy trying to do so, for
aside from the quality of spoiled boy, there was something of the man
in De Presle-Vaulx to which the New Englander extremely responded.

His next remark was impersonal:

"Bon Jour, then, you think is not likely----?"

"_Mon cher Monsieur_! ... She is not even mentioned for place!  Even in
the event of her winning," De Presle-Vaulx was gloomy, "I should be
able to discharge my debt to you and nothing more."  Again he looked up
quickly.  "I shall, of course, be quite able to discharge _that_; I
only mean to say that _en somme_, I am _roule completement roule_."

"What, then, are you going to do?"

De Presle-Vaulx looked at the end of his cigarette as though he took
counsel from it, and said measuredly:

"There is, in my position, but one thing possible for a man to do."

"You mean to say, marry, make a rich marriage?"

The Marquis flashed at him:

"A month ago, yes! that would have been the one way out of my
embarrassment: but I am no longer in the market.  It is the other
alternative."

Bulstrode in no case caring to hear put in words a tragically
disagreeable means of solving the problems of debt and love, and having
less faith in this extravagant, explosive alternative than in the
_marriage de convenance_, did not urge the Frenchman further.  He
simply brought out--his quiet eyes fixed on the other:

"And the little girl?--Molly--Miss Malines?----"

He gave him three chances to think of the pretty child, and for the
first De Presle-Vaulx's expression changed.  He had with a nonchalance
submitted to the discussion of his fortune and his fate, but now he
distinctly showed dignity.

"Don't, I beg of you, _speak_ of Mademoiselle Malines!" and then he
said more gently, "mille pardons, mon cher ami!"

Bulstrode smoked his Garcia meditatively.  He had not attempted the
solving of other people's questions, had not played the good fairy for
a long time.  He had the hazy feeling--such as he often experienced
just before stepping into the mysterious excitement of doing some good
deed, of undergoing the effects of a narcotic which put to sleep reason
and practical common-sense, and left alive only a desire to befriend.
In this case, determined not again to be the victim of sentimentality,
determined for once to unite common sense and common humanity, he
forcibly dissipated the haze and said:

"Your family!  I have, as you know, understood from Mrs. Falconer, the
facts of the case.  You must not be formal with me."  He smiled
delightfully.  "I am an American; you know we have all sorts of
barbarous privileges.  We rush in quite where the older races fear to
tread ... and Molly Malines' father is an old friend of mine."

(Mr. Bulstrode did not say what kind of an old friend!  or even allow
himself to remember the I.O.U.s and loans that his bankers had made to
the visionary, good-humored, sanguine, unfortunate stockbroker.)

"Your family--how do they take the idea of your marriage to a poor
American?"

De Presle-Vaulx pushed his coffee cup aside, leaned his arms on the
table, bent over, and said with more confidence:

"Oh, they are entirely opposed to it.  That's one reason, to be quite
frank with you, why I have been so reckless."

He added: "My mother has refused her consent, and I can never hope to
alter my father's attitude.  I have their letters to-day as well as
telegrams from Presle-Vaulxoron--they bid me 'come home immediately,'
and so far as my people are concerned, their refusal puts an end to the
affair!"

There was a mixture of amusement and reproach in Bulstrode's tone--"and
you have found nothing better to do than to throw away at baccarat what
money you had, and have found no other solution for the future than
to...?" he eyed the young man keenly, and a proper severity came into
his expression.  "Nonsense," he said, and repeated the word with more
indulgence: "nonsense, _mon ami_!"

His reproof was borne:

"We are an old race, M. Bulstrode----"

Bulstrode had heard this allocution before.  It gave lee-way to so
much; permitted so much; excused so much!

"... I don't need to tell you our traditions, or recall our customs.
You of course know them.  If I marry without my parents' consent I
shall probably, during my mother's lifetime, never see her again, and I
am her only son.  It means that I sever all relations with my people."

Bulstrode knocked the ash off his cigar and said thoughtfully:

"It's too bad!  A choice, if there _is_ one, is always too bad.  There
should in real things _be_ no choice.  As soon as such a contingent
arises, it proves that neither thing is really worth while!  When a man
loves a woman there can be no choice.  My dear friend, when a
_man_"--he paused--"loves--there is nothing in the world _but the
woman_."

The Marquis looked at the fine face of the elder man.  Years had, with
their gentle history, and kindly records, touched Jimmy Bulstrode
lightly.  Every experience made him better to look at; "like a good
picture," Mrs. Falconer had said, "painted by a master, and only
growing more splendid."  Nothing of the worldliness of the roue marked
his expression.  His memories were clear and honorable, and the
Frenchman experienced a sensation of surprise and also one of
enlightenment as he looked at him and responded to his expression.  He
had never seen any one quite like this man of the world, could not
think of his prototype in France.

He repeated:

"Nothing but the woman in the world--?  Honor--" Bulstrode quickly
added, "and the woman--they are synonymous."

In watching his companion he wondered in how much of a tangle the
Frenchman's mind was, and just how deep his feet were sunk in the
meshes of conventionality and tradition, and decided: "Oh, is it too
much to believe that he could----!"

As if in answer to his thoughts, De Presle-Vaulx spoke in the simplest
manner possible:

"J'aime Molly."

Quite surprised at the simplicity, Bulstrode beamed on him and waited.

Then the other added:

"But I can't ask any woman to share poverty and debts, and I have no
way of making a living; I'm not bred for it."

"You are not an invalid?"

"On the contrary."

"You can work."

De Presle-Vaulx smiled: "I am afraid not!  No De Presle-Vaulx has done
a stroke of work in three hundred years."

"It's time, then"--Bulstrode was tart--"that you broke the record.  Why
don't you?"  He said as though suddenly illumined--"make me your
banker, draw on me for whatever sum you will, and since you have faith
in her and are so well supported by the public opinion--bet on Grimace.
I believe, with you, that he is sure to win.  You would recoup much of
your loss here."

De Presle-Vaulx pushed back his chair and exclaimed: "Monsieur!"

"Oh," shrugged Bulstrode, "a woman's caprice, my dear fellow!  A
foolish little whim of a girl!  You can't be expected to mix sport and
flirtation to the tune of two or three thousand dollars."

He smiled deceptively.

The young man laughed bitterly:

"So that is something of what you think of me? for I see you are not
serious!  It's a folly, of course, a sentimental folly," he met
Bulstrode's eyes that silently accused him of a like--"but only a man
in love knows what sentimental follies are worth!  There is"--the young
man was suddenly serious, "a sort of prodigality in love only
understood by certain temperaments, certain races: it may be
degenerate: I suppose it is, and to push it quite to the last phase,
is, of course, cowardly, certainly very weak, and men like you,
Monsieur, will deem it so."

"You mean--?" and now Bulstrode's tone urged him to make himself clear.

"I mean," said De Presle-Vaulx firmly, "rather than renounce this woman
I adore I will without doubt--(given the tangle in which the whole
matter is!...") and he could not for the life of him put his intention
into words.  He smiled nevertheless unmistakably.  Bulstrode leaned
across the table and put his hand on the other's arm.

"Then you don't love her well enough not to break her heart?  Or well
enough to live a commonplace life for her?"

"I don't know how to do it."

"Well," said Bulstrode, "I have run upon quite a good many hard
moments, perhaps some, in their way, as difficult as this, and I have
never thought of getting out of the muddle.  Perhaps it _is_ a
question, as you say, of temperament and race.  I am inclined also to
think, stubbornly, that it is a question of the quality of the love
that one has for the woman.  You won't think it impertinent of me, my
dear friend,"--and his tone was such that no one could have thought it
impertinent--"you won't, I am sure, take it amiss if we talk this over
to-morrow, and if I try to show you something that means _life_,
instead of what you plan."


"You know you as good as stood for De Presle-Vaulx."

Bulstrode held Mrs. Falconer's parasol, her fan, as well as a gold bag
purse full of louis, a handkerchief and his own cane and field-glass.
For the lady, standing on a chair the better to see the race-track, was
applauding with enthusiasm the result of the first handicap.  She had
placed a bet on a horse called Plum-Branch "from a feeling of
sentiment," as she said, because she had, that day, quite by chance,
selected a hat with a decorative plum-branch amongst other garnitures.

"I am _standing_, certainly, Jimmy," she replied to his remark, "and to
the peril of my high heels!-- _There_, I've won! and won't you, like an
angel, go and cash my bets?--give me the purse, you might have your
hand picked!  You can put my winnings in your pocket; they're not so
enormous."

During his absence she watched the scene around her with animation.
The spotless day, if one might so call it, when the sky and the turf
and the whole world looked as though washed clean, and nature, seen in
the warm sunlight, seemed to palpitate and flutter in the wind that
gently stirred ends of ribbon or tips of plumes, and set the fragrance
of the country air astir.  Back of the lady the tribune was like a
floral display: here and there a corner red as roses, there a mass of
lily-white dresses enlivened by pink and blue parasols, and the green
_pesage_ stretched between the spectators and the race-track in bands
of emerald, whilst across it promenaded or stood in groups those
interested in the races.  Mrs. Falconer acknowledged a friend here and
there, glanced affectionately over to where Molly and the Marquis,
seated near, fixed their attention on the race-course, where the
winner, flying his blue ribbon, cantered triumphantly around the track.

One of a little group Falconer, the worse for many cocktails, stood by
the railing, talking familiarly with his jockey, whilst Bon Jour,
blanketed to the eyes, was being led up and down the outside track
alongside of her rival, Rothschild's Grimace.

Bulstrode returning, gave his friend a handful of gold, which she put
into her purse, and he repeated: "You remember that you stood, as it
were, for De Presle-Vaulx?"

"I do," she said, "if you think the race-course is the place to take me
to account for anything so serious, I do remember, and I do stand.
What is the trouble that he needs me?"

"He needs," Bulstrode was serious, "a good many things, it seems to me,
in order to get firmly on the plane where he should be!"

"And that is----?"

"On his feet, my dear friend."

"Well, he is head over heels in love," she nodded, "but when he finally
lands I think you will find Maurice perfectly perpendicular."

"He won't," returned the other, "at all events, land in the bosom of
his family."

"No?"--she looked away from the race-course and laughed--"you mean to
say, Jimmy, has he heard, then?"

"I mean to say that _they_ are quite clear in their minds about his
marriage!  They seem to have all the firmness that the young man lacks.
Tell me," he asked his friend, "just what do you know about the matter?
What happened that you so strongly took up his cause with Molly?  You
have not told me yet."

She relinquished the interests of the moment to those of the
sentimental question.

"It seems," she said, lowering her tone, "that they have been secretly
engaged for a year.  Nothing that an American girl can do would
surprise me, but you can imagine that I was overwhelmed at his part in
the matter.  When Molly joined me in Fontainebleau, De Presle-Vaulx
promptly followed, and I naturally obliged her to tell me everything.
I was dismayed at the lack of _tenue_ he had shown.  I had a plain talk
with him.  He said that he had first met Molly at some dance or other
in the American colony, I don't know where; that he understood that
American girls disposed of their own lives; that he loved her and
wanted to marry her, and that he was only waiting to gain the consent
of his family before writing to her father.  He seemed delighted to
talk with me and perfectly conventional in his feelings.  He further
told me that his parents until now knew nothing, that he had not been
able to tear himself away from Molly long enough to go down to the
country where they were and see them.  I forced him to write at once;
exacted myself that until he received their answer there should be
nothing between Molly and him but the merest distant acquaintance.  I
did not know that he had heard from the Marquise or his father.  You
seemed to have suddenly entirely gained his confidence and taken my
place."  She looked over at the young couple.  "Poor Molly!" she
exclaimed.  "He has not, I should say, told her: she looks so happy and
so serene!  It's of course only a question of _dot_, otherwise there
could be no possible objection.  She is perfectly beautiful, the
sweetest creature in the world; and she is a born Marquise!"

Bulstrode interrupted her impatiently:

"It would be more to the purpose if he were a born bread-winner and she
were a dairy-maid!"

"Jimmy, how vulgar you are!"

"Very--" he was wonderfully sarcastic for him--"money is a very vulgar
thing, my dear friend; it's as vulgar as air and bread and butter.  It
is like all other clean, decent vulgarity, it can be abused, but it's
necessary to life."

Mrs. Falconer opened her eyes wide on this new Bulstrode.

"Why, what has happened to you?"

He made a comprehensive gesture: "Oh, I am always supporting a family!"
he said with an amusing attempt at irritability.  "I am always
supporting a family that is not mine, that does not sit at my
hearthstone or at my table.  I am always marrying other people to some
one else, and dressing other people's children!"

He finished with a laugh: "There, No. 5 is up!  Aren't you interested
in this race?"

Mrs. Falconer and Bulstrode had walked a little from where the young
couple chattered indifferent to everything but each other.

"No; I am only interested in what you are saying.  What have you
planned to do or thought out for them, Jimmy?  What do your rebellious
phrases imply?  _Are_ you really going to make a home for----?"

Bulstrode said stubbornly.  "No!  I am going to show him how to make
one for himself."

He stopped short where he stood: he had resumed the care of her
parasol, her fan, and purse.

Her face, as she took in his exposition of his plan for the
regeneration of a decayed nobility, was inscrutable.  Instead of
exclaiming, she stopped to speak a moment to some people who passed,
shook hands with the owner of the favorite, and when they were once
again alone said to her friend:

"Isn't it too delightful! the whole scene?  I mean to say, how
perfectly they do it all.  How thoroughly gay it is, how debonnair,
graceful, and _bien compris_.  Look at the wonderful color of the
_pesage_, and the life of the whole thing!  These Latin most thoroughly
understand the art of living.  You scarcely ever see a care-worn face
in France.  Look at Jack now!  Did you ever see such anxiety as he
represents?  If Bon Jour is beaten I don't know _what_ will become of
him.  What shall I do with him?"

Bulstrode's interest on this subject was tepid.

"Oh, he'll be all right!" he said indifferently.  "Take him to the
Dublin Horse Fair."

And then as though she had not capriciously left the other topic, Mrs.
Falconer asked:

"Just what _is_ your plan for Molly and her Marquis?  May I not know?"

And Bulstrode who had never in any way thought out a plan or scheduled
a scheme for the wise distribution of the good he intended to do,
educated now, so he fondly hoped, by his failures, wiser, he was proud
to believe, by several sharp lessons--with no little confidence and
something of pride, said to his companion:

"I have a ranch out West, you know; a little property I took for a bad
debt once.  It has turned out to be a great and good piece of luck.
That time I was fortunate--" (his tone, was congratulatory and Mrs.
Falconer smiled prettily).  "I now need a second overseer again--a man
of brains, good temper, and physical endurance, who can keep accounts.
Experience isn't at all necessary.  There's my Englishman there, my
Christmas tramp, you recall; he'll show De Presle-Vaulx his duties.
It's a good enough berth for any determined chap who has his way to
make and an ideal to work for.  I purpose to send this Frenchman out on
a salary and to see what stuff he's made of.  After a year or two, with
good sense and push, he will be in a position to ask any girl to be his
wife.  I'll raise his salary, and if Molly is the girl I take her for,
she will help him there."

"And his family, Jimmy?"

"Damn his family!" risked the aroused Bulstrode.

Mrs. Falconer laughed.

"Really!  It is casual of you! but you don't know them and can't!  But
they can quite spoil the whole thing as far as Molly is concerned.  His
tradition and race, his home and all it means to him--why you can't
roughly run against all the old conventions like that, my dear man!"

"Well," said the ruthless gentleman, "then he can go and feed on their
charity, can take to his flesh-pots and give up the girl.  She is far
too good for any foreign fortune-hunter anyway.  You spoil a man, all
of you.  You'd prefer a disreputable roue to a cowboy with money in his
pocket and a heart."

"Would it then prove to you De Presle-Vaulx's heart if he threw over
his family and went West?"

"Yes," said the other quickly.  "It would prove he loves the girl."

"You forget his mother."

Bulstrode fumed.

"I have not the honor to forget her; I don't know the Marquise de
Presle-Vaulx."

"I do," interrupted his friend.  "She is a charming, gentle old dear;
narrow, if you call it so, clear-headed and delightful.  She adores her
only son, and thinks quite properly that his name, his estates,
beautiful if mortgaged, are a fair exchange for an American _dot_.
Maurice de Presle-Vaulx, after all, does not go poverty-stricken to the
woman he marries.  There are not so many ways to live after one is
twenty-five, and to uproot this scion of an old race, to exact such a
sacrifice----"

"It would make a man of him."

"He is one already.  There are all kinds, I need not tell you so."

"He is head over heels in debt."

Mrs. Falconer laughed again.

"We make him out an acrobat between us."

"He gambles on borrowed money."

"You mean that you have forced him to borrow from you?  He will pay
what he owes, I am sure of him."

Bulstrode wheeled and scrutinized her, and said with the natural
asperity of a man who is bored by a woman's too generous championship
of another man:

"You stand for him warmly."

Mrs. Falconer, reading him, said quickly:

"Oh, I know him thoroughly!  He has the faults of his race, but as an
individual he is the right sort."

With their pretty habit, her cheeks had grown red in the course of the
discussion.

"Please give me my parasol; it's awfully hot here."

He opened it for her and she held its rosy lining against the sun.

Mr. Falconer, who from the rail had been observing, through the haze
formed by countless cocktails, the figure of his wife in her white
dress, as well as the figure of her faithful squire, here came
swaggering up to them both.  He was never jealous, but Mr. Bulstrode's
uniform courtesy and attention to the woman neglected by her husband
often piqued him to attention.  As he drew near, Mrs. Falconer asked
quickly:

"And the Marquis, Jimmy?  What do you suppose he will say to your Wild
West scheme?"

Bulstrode smiled.

"Oh, you women understand us even when we are stupid mysteries to
ourselves!  Tell me, how will he take this?"

"He will refuse."  The lady was quick in her decision.  "He cannot in
consistence do otherwise.  He will consider your plan provincial and
Yankee, and he will consider, what you ignore, that it will kill his
mother.  If he cannot marry Molly with the family consent in proper
French fashion he will naturally give her up.  But first of all, my
dear Jimmy, he will put _you_ in your place!"

Bulstrode cast a fatherly glance to where the young people sat talking
together: the Marquis in gray clothes of the latest London make, a
white rose in his button-hole, and monocle in his eye, a figure more
unlike the traditional cowboy one could scarcely conceive.

"Your taste is good, ma chere amie," his voice was delighted.  "Your
instinct as a connoisseur is faultless; but you are not quite sure of
your _objet d'art_ this time."  He nodded kindly at the Parisian--"He's
all right! he's a true sport, a lover and a man.  De Presle-Vaulx knows
my Wild West scheme and has accepted."


Molly had put twenty-five francs on Bon Jour and expected to win it.
The money Bulstrode played would have bought a very handsome present
for his lady, and he felt as if he were making an anonymous gift to the
woman he loved.

At the ringing of the bell Falconer left his post by the railing and
came up and joined the little group of his friends just below the Grand
Stand.  He lit a cigar, threw down the match furiously, smoked
furiously, and nerved himself for the strain.

Nodding toward the betting contingent he muttered: "They're sheep.
They're all betting on the favorite naturally.  Bon Jour wasn't
mentioned for place even, poor little girl!"

The ignored little racer had ambled around the field, her jockey in
crimson and white, doubled up upon her back after the manner of his
profession.  Bon Jour was as golden red as a young chestnut; she had
four white feet that twinkled on the fragrant turf whose odors of
crushed blades and green blades, of earth and the distant smell of the
sea went to her pretty head.  She threw it up eagerly as her disputants
filled the field.  There were nine horses scheduled, but only five
qualified.  The Rothschild gelding, an English gray, and two others
named for probable places.

"She's cool as a rose," murmured Bon Jour's owner, "and just look at
her form, will you!"

It was charming, and already the American's horse was attracting
attention.

Molly, with De Presle-Vaulx's aid, rose on her chair, from which her
excitement threatened at any moment to precipitate her.

"Oh, Maurice--of course she'll win.  Isn't she a _dear_?  How much
shall I make on twenty-five francs?"

Bulstrode smiled.

"A frightful amount!  There are twenty to one up on her, Molly."

The girl mentally calculated, exclaimed with pleasure and, with
sparkling eyes, watched the lining-up of the racers.  Neck to neck they
stood, a splendid showing of satin and shine from fetlock to forelock,
equine beauty enough to gladden a sporting man's heart, and all five
were away before Miss Malines was even sure which one was the great
Grimace.

From the first the favorite's nose was to the good.  His shapely body
followed, and when the horses came in sight again beyond the right-hand
hedge, he had put four lengths between himself and the others.  The
winner of the Grand Prix had all the field with him.  But the gray
gelding who strained at Grimace's flanks had no staying powers,
although he was backed as strongly for place as was Grimace to win; as
he fell back Bon Jour began to attract notice.

Bulstrode and De Presle-Vaulx exchanged glances over the absorbed
figure of Jack Falconer.  "She may yet win place," murmured the younger
man.

As they came up the wide turf sweep that lay like an emerald sea
crested by the dark waves of the hedges, as the horses rocked like
ships over the obstacle--Bon Jour closely followed the favorite.

At the moment Miss Malines cried: "Oh, a jockey's off!  Oh, Jack, it's
Bon Jour!  She's _thrown_ her jockey!  I see the red and white."

But Falconer biting his cigar fiercely, laughed in scorn.  "She's
thrown _them_ all right.  She's left them all _behind_ her--see!" he
pointed, "there are only three running."  And, indeed, as they came
again in sight, one of the horses was seen to be wandering loose about
the course, and another cantered nonchalantly some hundred yards behind.

"She's not even trying," murmured her enchanted owner.  "She's cool as
a rose."

The cries which had named the Rothschild gelding from the start were
now mingled, and Bon Jour, flying around the emerald course, might have
heard her name for the first on the public lips.  She was running
gracefully, her head even with the favorite's saddle and the English
gray was a far-off third.  Bon Jour was pressing to fame.

At the last hurdle as they appeared flying in full sight of the Grand
Stand it was evident the pretty creature had made her better good.  The
horses leapt simultaneously and came down on all fours, with Grimace to
the rear, and amongst the frantic acclamation with which the public is
always ready to greet the surprise of unlooked-for merit, Bon Jour
passed Grimace by half a metre at the goal.  Jack Falconer was an
interesting figure on the turf; his horse was worth twenty thousand
pounds.


Several hours later, Bulstrode, early in the salon, walked up and down
waiting the arrival of the ladies.  He had paid downstairs a hundred
francs for the privilege of dining in the window of the restaurant,
because Mrs. Falconer chanced to remark that one saw the room better
from that point.  And the head waiter even after this monstrous tip
said if "_ces dames_" were late there would be no possibility to keep
this gilt-edged table for them.  It was the night of the year at
Trouville: Boldi and his Hungarians played to five hundred people in
the dining-room.

Bulstrode looked at the clock; they had yet ten minutes' grace.

Extremely satisfied with himself, with Bon Jour, above all with the
French Marquis--he felt a glow of affection for the whole French nation.

"How we misjudge them!" he mused; "how we accuse them of clinging to
their families' apron strings, of being bad colonists; call them
hearthstone huggers, degenerates; and declare that they lack nerve and
force to rescue themselves from degeneration!  And here without
hesitation this young man----"  At this moment the salon door opened,
and one of the ladies he had been expecting came in, the youngest one,
Miss Molly Malines, in a tulle dress, an enormous white hat, a light
scarf over her shoulders, and the remains of recent tears on her face.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!" she exclaimed, half putting out her hand and
drawing it back again, as she bit her lips: "I thought I should find
Mary here; I wanted to see her first to _cry_ with! but of course it is
you I _should_ see and not cry with!"

She gave a little gasp and put her handkerchief to her eyes to his
consternation; then to his relief controlled herself.

"Maurice has just told me _everything_," she repeated the word with
much the same desperation that De Presle-Vaulx had put into a gesture
which to Bulstrode had signified ruin.

"He's too wonderful! too _glorious_, Mr. Bulstrode, isn't he?  I loved
him before, but I _adore_ him now!  He's glorious.  I never heard
anything so terrible and so silly!"

Bright tears sprang to brighter eyes, and she dashed them away.

("She's adorable") he was obliged to acknowledge it.

"Why, how could you be so cruel; yes, I will say it, so cruel, so hard,
so brutal?"

"_Brutal_?"--he fairly whispered the word in his surprise.

"Why, fancy Maurice in the West, in the dreadful Western life, in that
climate----!"

"Why, it is the Garden of Eden," murmured Bulstrode.

"Oh, I mean to say with cattle and cowboys."

"Come," interrupted her father's friend, practically, "you don't know
what you are talking about, Molly.  You don't talk like an American
girl.  They've spoiled De Presle-Vaulx, and this will make a man of
him!"

Miss Malines called out in scorn:

"_A man of him_!  What do you think he is?  He's the finest man I ever
saw.  You don't know him.  Just because he has a title and his mother
spoils him, and because he has been a little reckless in debts and
things, you throw him over as you do all the French race without
knowing them!"

Her tears had dried and her cheeks flamed.

"Why, Maurice has served three years as a common soldier in the
Madagascar Army; and _that's_ no cinch!  Cuba's a joke to it.  He's had
the fever and marched with it.  He's slept all night with no covering
but the clothes he had worn for weeks.  He's eaten bread and drunk
dirty water.  He's been a soldier three years.  The way I came to know
him was at Dinard where he swam out into the sea to save a fisherman
who couldn't swim, and all the town was out in the storm to welcome
him!  They carried him up the streets in their arms--" she waited a
minute to steady her voice--"He's been two years exploring in Abyssinia
with a native caravan--no white man near him, he's the youngest man
wearing the Legion d'Honneur in France.  _And you want to send him out
to make a cowboy of him in the American West to turn him into a man_!"

Mr. Bulstrode had never heard such impressive youthful scorn.  Molly
threw back her pretty head and laughed.

"Do you know many cowboys who have been three years a soldier;
travelled through unexplored countries; written a book that was crowned
by an academy?  Well, I don't!" she said boldly.  "Of course I like his
title, of course I am proud of his traditions.  They're fine!  And it
is no dishonor to love his chateau and his Paris hotel, and I'd love
his mother, too--if she'd let me.  But I adore Maurice _as he is_, and
he's man enough for me!"

The floor seemed to quiver under poor Bulstrode, who could scarcely see
distinctly the lovely excited face as he ventured timidly:

"I didn't know all these things, Molly."

She was still unpitying.

"Of course not!  Americans never do know.  They only _judge_.  You
didn't think Maurice would tell you all his good points!  He doesn't
think they are anything.  He only sees the fact that he has debts and
that we are both poor and his family won't give their consent."

Mr. Bulstrode smiled and said:

"He is naturally forced to see these things, my dear child."

The girl softened at his tone and said more gently:

"Well, they are terrible facts, of course.  It only means that my heart
is broken, but it doesn't mean that I will consent to your plan, or to
his plan, Mr. Bulstrode.  I won't make him break his mother's heart and
ruin his career for me."

The gentleman came up and took her hands: his voice was very gentle:

"What, then, will you do?"

"Oh, wait," she said with less spirit.  "Wait until his mother
consents, or until she dies...."  She began to hang her head.  Her
eulogy of her lover over, only the dry facts of the present remained.
She had no more enthusiasm with which to animate her voice.

Here Mrs. Falconer and the Marquis opened the door, and started back as
the animated picture of beauty being consoled by kindness met their
view.

"Oh, come along in!" cried the girl cheerily.  "I have just been
ballyragging Mr. Bulstrode!"

De Presle-Vaulx came eagerly forward:

"Don't listen to her, Monsieur!  Molly's tired out after so much
success."

The startled benefactor looked doubtfully from her to the young man.

"And you?"

"Oh, I?" shrugged De Presle-Vaulx, "I'm already half cowboy!"

Mary Falconer put her arm round Molly's waist, drew her to her, "and
Molly is more than half Marquise."

"Mr. Bulstrode," again cried the girl impetuously.  "_Please_ reason
with him!  He's horribly obstinate.  You have put this dreadful idea in
his head; now please tell him how _ridiculous_ it is.  If he goes West
and spoils his career and breaks with his family, I'll never marry him!
As it is, I will wait for ever!"

"But my dear child!"  Mary Falconer was determined to have the whole
thing out before them, "you don't seem to get it into your head that
you have neither of you a sou, and Maurice can never earn any money in
France."

Miss Malines, to whom money meant that she drew on her father, the
extravagant stockbroker whose seat even in the Stock Exchange was
mortgaged, and who had not ten thousand dollars' capital in the
world--lost countenance here at the cruel and vulgar introduction of
the commodity on which life turns.  She sighed, her lips trembled, and
she capitulated:

"Oh, if that's really true ... as I suppose it is----"

Bulstrode watched her, she had grown pale--she drew a deep breath, and,
looking up, not at her lover, but at the elder man, said softly:

"Why, I guess I'll have to give him quite up then."

But here De Presle-Vaulx made an exclamation, and before them all took
Molly in his arms:

"No," he said tenderly, "never, never!  _That_ the last of all!  Mr.
Bulstrode is right.  I must work for you, and I will.  We'll both go
West together.  Couldn't you?  Wouldn't you come with me?"

... "And your mother?" asked the girl.

"Nothing--" De Presle-Vaulx whispered, "nothing, counts but _you_."

Over their heads Bulstrode met his friend's eye, and in his were--he
could not help it--triumph, keen delight, and in hers there was anger
at him and tears.

At this moment the waiter put his head in at the door and implored
Monsieur to come down if he wanted the seat in the window.

"Oh, we're coming!" Mrs. Falconer cried impatiently.  "Molly, there's
some eau-de-cologne on the table.  Put it on your eyes.  Don't be long
or we'll lose our place.  The West will keep!"

She went out of the door and Bulstrode followed her.  In the hall she
said tartly:

"Well, I hope you're satisfied!  I never saw a more perfect inquisitor.
Why didn't you live at the time of the Spanish persecution?"

He ignored her scathing question:

"I am satisfied," he said happily, "with both of them; they're bricks."

The lady made no reply as she rustled along by his side to the elevator.

From the floors below came the clear, bright sound of the Hungarian
music in an American cake-walk and the odor of cigars and wines and the
distinct suggestion of good things to eat came tempting their nostrils.

As Bulstrode followed the brilliant woman, a sense of defeat came over
him and with less conviction he repeated:

"I _am_ satisfied, but you, my friend, are not."

"Oh," shrugged Mary Falconer desperately, "you know _I've_ no right to
think, or feel, or criticise!  I never pretend to run people's lives or
to act the benefactor or to take the place of Fate."

The light danced and sparkled on the jet in her black dress, on the
jewels on her neck.  Under her black feather-hat her face, brilliant
and glowing, seemed for once to be defiant to him, her handsome eyes
were dark with displeasure.

The poor fellow could never recall having caused a cloud to ruffle her
face before in his life.  It was not like her.  Her tenderness for a
second had gone.  He could not live without that, he knew it, what ever
else he must forego.

He said, with some sadness, "I suppose you're right: if one can buy
even _a honeymoon_ for another couple he shouldn't lose the
opportunity."

She looked up at him quickly.  They had reached the ground floor--they
had left the elevator and they stood side by side in the hall.  The
lady had a very trifle softened, not very much, still he noticed the
change and was duly grateful.

"We must wait here," she said, "for the others to come down.  I can't
let Molly go in alone, and I don't know where my husband is; I haven't
seen him all day."

Bulstrode continued spiritlessly: "Molly, if you remember, begged me to
tell De Presle-Vaulx how 'perfectly ridiculous' my scheme for the Wild
West is.  I will tell him this--you will coach me,--there'll be some
pleasure in that, at least! and then I'll find out for what sum the
Marquise de Presle-Vaulx will sell her son.  I'll buy him," he said,
"for Molly, and of course," he brought it out quite simply, "I shall
_dot_ the girl."

And then the lady stepped back and looked at him.  He felt, before that
she had merely swept him with her eyes; now she looked at him.  She
cried his name out--"Jimmy!"--that was all.

But in the exclamation, in the change of her mobile face, in the lovely
gesture that her hand made, as if it would have gone to his, Bulstrode
was forced to feel himself eminently, gloriously repaid, and it is not
too much to say that he did.




THE FIFTH ADVENTURE



V

IN WHICH HE MAKES NOBODY HAPPY AT ALL

Bulstrode stood before the entrance of the Hotel de Paris bidding his
friends good-night.  Watching them, at least one of them, enter in
under the shelter of the glass pavilion, he considered how much more
lonely he was at that special moment than he could remember having been
before.  Of course he had bidden Mary Falconer good-night a hundred
dozen times in the course of his life, but it seemed to come with a
more sublime significance than ever how he gave her up every time he
said good-by and how he was himself left alone.  And yet, had Mrs.
Falconer been asked, she would have said that she never found her
friend more cold and more constrained.  In his correct evening dress
with the flower she herself had given him in his buttonhole, his panama
in his hand, he had been absorbed in her beauty, in the grace of her
dark dress, bright with scintillating ornaments--her big feathered hat
under which her face was more lovely, more alluring than ever; and
nothing in his eyes told the woman what he thought and felt.

She touched his arm, saying:

"Look, Jimmy."

"Isn't that the lovely woman we've so often remarked?  See, she's all
alone, how curious!  She's going over to the Casino to play, I suppose.
_What_ can have happened to the man who has been with her all this
time?  Where is the Prince Pollona?"

As Bulstrode turned his head in the direction indicated, through the
trees passed along the figure of a slender woman, trailing her thin
gown over the pebbles and the grass.  She disappeared in the lighted
doorway of the Casino.

"You're quite bearish to-night," Mrs. Falconer said reproachfully,
"quite a bear.  I believe you're angry!  Dear Jimmy, you may, I
promise, carry out all your philanthropies without my interference; I
won't even criticise or tease.  I promise you next time you shall go
sweetly and serenely on your foolish way!"

"Oh," he got out with effort, "I believe I've suddenly grown awfully
selfish, for I find I'm so ridiculous as only to want things for
myself----"

(When he stopped she did not help him but, instead, persisted gently
with the wicked feminine way she had of urging him, tempting him on.)

"What, then, what do you wish?  Can't you tell me?"

He laughed almost roughly and said, "No, it's a secret, and I'm one of
those unusual creatures who can keep a secret."

The woman's face changed.  He saw the shadow that crossed it.  "Come,"
she sighed, "you must bid me good-night..."

And at this moment he had seen Jack Falconer emerge from a still more
shadowy corner, a cigar between his teeth.  Drawing his wife's arm
through his, Falconer nodded to the other man and said they had all
better be going up.  Bulstrode noted bitterly the satisfaction on
Falconer's bestial, indulgent face and the content that man felt with
himself this evening, his triumph at the race's termination.  His horse
had won the stakes and was famous, his wife had been called to-day the
loveliest woman in Trouville, and not for the first time Bulstrode
suffered from it, the proprietorship with which Falconer considered his
wife.  For the smallest part of a second he fancied that the woman drew
away, half turned away, looked toward him; and in dread that he might,
if he met her eyes, see some look like appeal, Bulstrode avoided
meeting her glance.  He saw them pass under the glass roof of the hotel
leaving him standing alone.

The deserted lover waited until they had disappeared; then, turning
abruptly, vaguely in search of human beings with whom he might exchange
a word should he feel inclined to talk, dreading the deserted gardens
ami finding his own rooms the dreariest prospect of all, he went into
the Casino with the intention of waiting for the Frenchman who he
thought more than likely would come and join him there.  The Marquis
failing him, Bulstrode chose a place not far from the table where the
lovely woman, that Mrs. Falconer and himself had remarked, seated
herself before the game.

Bulstrode's sense of desolation and loneliness would not leave him.  If
his luck had been bad, the excitement of the sport might have brought
him some sensation; but, on the contrary, he won.  "Only," he said
humorously, as he gathered up his winnings, "only unlucky in love!"

It was well on in the night when he thrust his last roll of bank notes
into his pocket.  He had beaten the bank; he had raked up and stuffed
away a small fortune.  As he wandered out through the deserted rooms,
he noted, bent over the table, her head in her hand, the woman who, in
spite of his sincere absorption in Mary Falconer, had, like a
temptation, crossed his mind when he first came into the Casino.  No
one disturbed her, and she had remained in this dejected posture for
some time.  This one amongst the many women in Trouville, Bulstrode and
his friends had remarked for several days.  She had first appeared
alone; made a discreet _debut_ on the beach, passed through the Rue de
Paris and kept away from the more public parts of the town.  Later she
had been joined by a man well known in the world, the Prince Pollona,
who was travelling incognito.  The woman's beauty and manner were such
that her actual standing was a mooted question; it had even been
remarked that she was the princess herself incognita, but that they all
knew to be impossible.

Before the official who waited to see the last players leave the
_salle_ could speak to her, she rose of her own accord, gathering her
silken cloak about her, and went quickly from the gambling room.  Once
on the stairway, however, her footsteps halted and she went slowly down
as if reluctant to leave the shelter of the brightly lighted
apartments.  Bulstrode following her, observed her closely; tall, very
slender, with a fine carriage and a lovely blonde head set on the most
graceful of necks, older than Molly and younger than Mrs. Falconer, she
was quite as _comme il faut_.  All along she had worn a collar and rope
of pearls which had excited Molly's enthusiasm.  To-night she was
denuded of her jewels; her neck was bare.  Bulstrode remarked this

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