The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron arabesques, he said, in his best French: "Prenez."
Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne reçoit pas." Perhaps it was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."
In the compassionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost. Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Mass. Very urgent," he once more passed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.
"Allez, please," he said, earnestly, "and—vite."
He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had returned.
As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy, startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin, black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and wearing a knitted shawl—perhaps the mother of the three young people he had just seen—came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs, inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he had expected.
The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade, struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library through the half-open door.
Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts, Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings—with views through the long windows of the traffic on the Seine—when a little old lady appeared in a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy, youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as well as the expensiveness of her taste.
She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in finding its reflection here—the fear of time beneath these painted cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the Marquise's whole brave bearing—rather pitifully comic.
Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.