‘I beg your pardon,’ he cried; ‘the name escaped me. I shall not have the chance to use it often after this, and you may let it pass. I am going, but I must tell you this: I have not been very fortunate in my choice of friends amongst women, or in the choice which has been thrust upon me, and so long as I live I shall remember——’ He paused, and waited for a while until he regained the mastery of himself. Then he went on steadily, with a level voice almost as if he were a schoolboy reading from a lesson-book: ‘I shall remember as long as I live the beautiful thoughts with which you have inspired me, your kindness, your friendship—and, and——’
He never knew how it happened—men of his temperament never do know—but he was on his knees before her, and the words burst from him with a sob.
‘And—you!’
She smiled upon him from the maternal height of the coquette who is a year or two older than the man she coquets with.
The tears were in his eyes and on his cheeks, and glistened in the virgin beard. She stooped forward and laid a hand upon his head.
‘Do you care so much to leave me, Paul?’ she asked.
A man of the world would have known the studied quaver in the voice—the throaty, stagey sweetness of it. What was to be expected of a yokel of genius who had been rushed through a hundred towns or so in everlasting association with De Vavasours and Montmorencys—rushed through London and through Paris under much the same inauspicious petticoat influences, and had hardly ever met a real live lady in his life on terms of intimacy until now? And Madame la Baronne de Wyèth had told him enough and had shown him enough in the way of correspondence with distinguished people of both hemispheres to let him know that she could play the part of grand dame at discretion anywhere. That was possibly the preponderant influence in his mind. Had he himself been a gentleman by extraction, had he been able to meet this exquisite and delicate creature of old dreams and modern conditions on any terms of equality, he would not have abased himself in spirit as he did. The woman was regnant The woman is always regnant, whether she be queen or dairymaid, but the barrier between himself and her was built of the old hurdles of low birth and iron fortune. Here anyway in his heart rang the knell ‘Good-bye,’ the farewell, farewell, farewell which every poet worth his salt has heard not once but many times, and, in the middle of the dirge the bell rang so remorselessly, came the exquisite chrysm of a fondling hand upon his head.
It dwelt there scarcely for a moment, and if every nerve had not been vibrant with feeling, the touch was so light that it might almost have passed unnoticed. As things happened it was like a torch touching a torch as yet unlighted, and the young man flamed. He caught the caressing hand as it left his hair, and kissed it.
Ah! the weeping tears and the melancholy Touchstone humour that smiled wryly to see them, each as big as a pea.
The Baroness surrendered her hand, and Paul kissed it with that passion which inspires a pilgrim at the shrine, and the odd something superadded which has made fools of men since Eve plucked her first girdle of fig-leaves. He wept above the hand, and he fondled the hand, and he kissed it with protesting murmurs of undying affection and esteem, and whilst this storm was in danger of playing itself out, and the unsuing suitor was likely to make an end of the business and go, the disengaged hand of the Baroness stole out and took him maternally by the chin, under the rain-soaked beard.