Ragged Jean Jacques held his mouth between two sun-blackened hands, showily pantomiming his appreciation of the Englishman’s costly waggishness. The subalterns of the Maltshire Royals tittered aloud. Alas! in a marching regiment, as elsewhere, has not human nature its weaker side? Is not a duke’s son, with two inches of brain, and wit in proportion, a duke’s son, even when he jests? The young ladies with one exception looked about as frigid as Italian snow looks under the kisses of an April sun. The exception was Marjorie Bartrand.
Away out of the church flew Marjorie, brushing against Rex Basire’s elbow in her exit. She waited in the porch outside, eager beggars pressing forward with their wounds, children with their half-dead wild-flowers, relic-mongers with their chaplets and rosaries—blest, ay, to the last bead, blest, ‘tout bonnement,’ by his Holiness, away in Rome. By and by, when the last of the loud-talking, merry-spirited knot of idlers had issued forth from the church, Marjorie fastened upon the offender-in-chief. With luminous eyes, with drawn breath, with hands tightly clenched in her hot indignation, she scathed him, thus:
‘You have played a delicate bit of comedy, have you not, Lord Rex? It was the finest stroke of humour to scandalise a few poor peasant women, saying prayers for their dead?... For me,’ looking one by one round the group, ‘I felt ashamed—more ashamed than ever I was in my life before—of belonging to the same nation as you all! I read once,’ said Marjorie, ‘in a wise book: “Where we are ignorant, let us show reverence.” The ignorance only has been shown to-day.’
Dinah Arbuthnot and Geoffrey, who had lingered behind the others in the church, arrived on the scene just in time to hear the last accents of this denunciation. Then, ere the culprits could utter a word in self-defence, away shot Marjorie’s arrowy figure along a shadowed by-street, away, neither stopping nor hesitating, along the old chaussée that leads from La Delivrande Paris-wards, in an exactly opposite direction to the Langrune road.
‘By Jupiter! I was never so frightened in my life.’ Rex Basire’s limbs collapsed under him in well-dramatised alarm. ‘Have all Girton girls got dynamite in their eyes? Does their speech invariably bristle with torpedoes? Is Marjorie Bartrand Protestant, or Catholic, or what?’
‘Ah, what!’ repeated Rosie Verschoyle, ever ready with a little amiable platitude. ‘A hundred years ago the Bartrands were Papists, remember. It is a moot question among the people who know them best what the Tintajeux religion is at the present day.’
‘I know one thing,’ cried Geoffrey’s friend, Ada de Carteret. ‘All through Tintajeux parish the Seigneur is looked upon as more learned than canny. When the country folk come near old Andros after dark, declaiming Greek, and with a couple of black dogs at his heels, they will run a mile round sooner than meet him.’
‘The Seigneur’s term of endearment for Marjorie is witch, when they happen to be on speaking terms at all,’ said another voice. ‘Poor girl! In spite of her temper one cannot help liking her extremely. Who was it said of Marjorie that she had such an olive-like flavour?’
‘You always feel there must be a fund of goodness in the dear child—somewhere.’ This finishing note was given in Miss Verschoyle’s thin voice. ‘As to the lecture you came in for, Lord Rex, you deserved it richly. It is quite too—in saying this, I mean it—quite! to laugh at other people’s beliefs, even when they are most ridiculous.’