He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped him.
“I have hardly had one word with you, Odd,” said the Captain, whose high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its fundamental look of peevish pettiness. “Mrs. Brooke is going to take Katherine home. It’s a fine night, won’t you walk?”
Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré together.
“We are not far from you, you know,” the Captain said—“Rue Pierre Charron; you said you were in the Marbœuf quarter, didn’t you? We are rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I’ll leave you at the door of your hotel.”
They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysées, as they turned into it, almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights.
“Ten years is a jolly long time,” remarked Captain Archinard, “and a jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we’d left the Priory, of course?”
“I was very sorry to hear it.”
“Devilish hard luck. It wasn’t a choice of evils, though, if that is any consolation; it was that or starvation.”
“As bad as that?”
“Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations—safe enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I simply can’t go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the interest; and hard luck it is altogether,” the Captain repeated. “Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep all worry from her; she doesn’t know anything about my troubles; she lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself rather than deprive her of one luxury.” The tone in which the Captain alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. “And the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have of it. But what is my life, I ask you?” The Captain’s voice was very resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good gentleman’s unhappy situation. “What is my life, I ask you? I go dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and five o’clock tea in grass widows’ drawing-rooms for all distraction. Paris is full of grass widows,” he added, with an even deepened resentment of tone; “and I never cared much about the play, and French actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared about that sort of thing, which I never did—much,” and the Captain drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the tip as they passed beneath a lamp.