CHAPTER FOUR
Opposite No. 6 Rue Victor Hugo is a long black wall, and in the middle of this wall an old-fashioned gas lantern was glowing red when Joyselle and Brigit arrived.
The moon had risen, and mingling with the red of the gas made that part of the narrow street almost as light as if it had been high noon.
"There is the house, ma Brigitte," murmured Joyselle, pressing her hand close to his side. When she had left the inn arm-in-arm with him, she had felt as though they must look perilously like a German bride and groom, but there was in his old-fashioned bearing as he guided her through the streets a kind of chivalrous courtesy that she liked, and she began to feel like a princess being presented to his people by her lord.
"There is their house. I gave it to them twenty-five years ago. It is their palace, their country-place, their world, to my old people."
Through a half-door in the opposite wall the girl could just catch a glimpse of the left side of the house. It was hung with trumpet flowers.
Beyond, a clearly defined square of moonlight showed her a smooth patch of lawn, beyond which the side of a creeper-clad arbour blocked the view.
"The dinner is to be in the garden; they are to sit in the arbour, and there will be many narrow tables all over the lawn, which is rather large behind the house. They are very much interested in it; all of us will be there, and our children, and—theirs. I am old, ma Brigitte——"
His voice fell sadly as this idea occurred to him, and she pressed his arm and smiled up at him, her face ruddy in the gaslight.
"You are young, my man; you will never grow old. And you will play at the dinner? And you will play to me? I always know when you play to me."
"Yes, for it is always. You are good to me now, bien-aimée."
His gentleness was wonderfully appealing, as it always was to her. The long respite from nerve-racking misunderstandings had allowed her to see more clearly the real beauty of his faulty character, and a wave of compunction came over her as she thought how little she, with her bad qualities of jealousy, selfishness and cruelty, deserved this beautiful love.
For she fully understood that only a deep, real love could so vanquish the lower part of his nature as to let the nobler triumph as it had of late.
"I adore you, my great man," she said, very low, and their eyes met.
Then they crossed the street and he, leaning over the closed half of the door in the wall, opened it and they went in.
It was nine o'clock, and the old people had had their supper. Brigit who had, thinking of their great age, rather expected to find them more or less mummy-like, sitting in comfortable chairs tended by a middle-aged relation, was somewhat amused to find them squabbling fiercely over a game of dominoes, each with a glass of cider at hand.
"Mon père—la voici," announced Joyselle, with a kind of simple pomposity eminently fitted to the occasion.
Old Joyselle finished his act of adding a domino to the long line before him and then looked up. He was a rather small, bent old man, with quantities of rough, curly grey hair and a petulant expression.
"Ugh!" he said rudely.
"Shake hands with him, Brigit," suggested Victor pulling his moustache to suppress a smile. Brigit held out her hand.
"I am very glad to meet you," she said in French.
The old man stared. Then he smiled, showing one snow-white tooth. "Tu parles," he murmured. Then he went back to his game.
The old woman, more polite, had risen, and was waiting her turn. She was very tall and had a heavy moustache.
"They told me you were beautiful," she began courteously, whereupon the old man interrupted, repeating her words but, by a change in emphasis, casting derisive doubts on whoever "they" might be. "They told me you were beautiful."
Brigit burst out laughing, and leaning forward smiled at the speaker.
"Well—am I not beautiful?" she asked with an infectious chuckle of sincere amusement.
But old Joyselle was a man of character, apparently, and not to be beguiled.
"Belle? Non, non. Pas ça. Mais—Victor, petit, surely you can't be going to marry a real lady?"
Joyselle flushed, and she knew his flush had to do only with his father's lapse of memory, not his reference to her ladyhood.
"Not I, mon père. I married Félicité, you know, It is our boy who is going to marry this—ugly lady."
His father shook his head. "Not ugly, mon fils." he declared solemnly, "not ugly. Only plain."
This time Brigit did not laugh. Something in the old man's half-vacant face touched her. He was Victor's father; he had held, as a little baby, the man she loved; he had worked for him and helped to make him what he was. Laying her hand on his, she smiled down at him.
"You are quite right," she said gently, "only plain. Will you show me how to play dominoes?"
"He can't," retorted Madame Joyselle, eagerly, "he has forgotten, and, besides, he cheats."
Joyselle walked to the window, his shoulders shaking, and before the old man could retort, Théo came into the room carrying a lacquered tin tray with a jug of cider and some glasses on it.
"Ah, you have come? Grand-père, grand-mère, what do you think of my fiancée?"
But Brigit drew him away and sat down on the ingeniously uncomfortable sofa with him.
"Fighting again, are they? Poor old dears, it really is quite dreadful. You see, grandfather used to be a fearful tyrant, though he is so little, and grandmother was deathly afraid of him until his health began to fail. So now she is getting even with him. They adore each other, however. Isn't the house quaint? Have you seen the garden?"
She shook her head. "No, show it to me."
Leaving the room they crossed to the oilclothed passage and went into the dining-room, a small apartment enlivened by an oleograph of Leo XIII., and some gay chromos.
The windows opened to the ground, and opening one the young people went out into the moonlight. Brigit was feeling very happy, and therefore very kind. When Théo put his arm round her and drew her to him she did not protest.
"Brigitte," he whispered, "I do so love you."
"Dear Théo——" Suddenly she remembered that other moonlight night, nearly a year before, when she had accepted him. She recalled the look of the beautiful old house, the sound of Tommy at the pianola, the splashing of the fountain, the sun-dial at which, in his boyish grief, he had knelt.
And she had accepted his love, not because she loved him but because she hated her home and because, besides being sufficiently rich to satisfy her needs, he was nice and straight and kind. She had taken everything he had, and what had she given him? Nothing.
In the moonlight she saw as if with new eyes that he had changed. The young contours of his cheek were less round, his eyes had a deeper expression. He had suffered, and he had not complained.
"Théo," she said suddenly, smitten with pity, "I—have been horrid to you. I—I am so frightfully selfish. Will you forgive me?"
His eyes glistened as he looked at her.
"Forgive you? You angel!"
"No, no. I have been horrid. But—I will be nicer. And—you are so good to me."
He was silent for a moment, then he said slowly:
"Brigitte—you are never horrid. But—if you do not—care for me at all—will you tell me now?"
She was abashed and then shivered. Here was the chance she had longed for. He would, she knew, give her up without a word if she asked him to; and she had also learned to know that whatever Joyselle might have done in like case a few months before, he would not refuse to see her now if she told him that she and Théo had agreed to separate.
Here was freedom to go her own way, unrebuked by her own conscience or the conscience of the man she loved.
Théo had turned away and stood with folded arms, awaiting her answer.
And she let her chance go by, for she could not bear to say the words that should hurt him, and in the quiet night under the shadow of the old house, it seemed to her that, after all, her happiness lay in this boy's hands. Not the wild rapture she had once or twice felt with Joyselle, but the kind of happiness that builds homes, and—she wanted a home.
Inexplicably tangled with her feelings for Théo, too, was that anything binding her to him bound her to his father. They were more than father and son, these two, they belonged together.
"I—do care for you," she said quietly. "I am not in love with you, but I will marry you."
As he turned and held out his arms to her, Joyselle appeared at the end of the lawn. Brigit did not see him, and going slowly to her lover allowed him to embrace her.
"Ma Brigitte, mon ange—I—how can I thank you. Ah, what I have felt these last five months! I have thought—oh, many things, of late."
His voice shook and was good to hear in its sincere emotion. For the moment in her new-born wish to be good to him she felt that she had done the wise thing, and was happy. He was good, and she would marry him and—life would go on for ever, as it had been the last few weeks.
Joyselle, standing quite still in the shadow, watched them for a moment. Then he turned and went back into the house.