“Oh, she’s quite friendly with me now, though I know you’re dying to make out that she’ll not forgive me for marrying you,” said Francie, flinging her last bit of orange-peel at the Apollo; “you’re as proud as Punch about it. I believe you’d have married her, only she wouldn’t take you!”
“Is that your opinion!” said Mr. Lambert with a smile that conveyed a magnanimous reticence as to the facts of the case; “you’re beginning to be jealous, are you? I think I’d better leave you at home the day I go over to talk the old girl into good humour about her petticoat!”
In his heart Mr. Lambert was less comfortable than the tone of his voice might have implied; there had been in the letter, in spite of its friendliness and singular absence of feminine pique, an allusion to that three hundred pounds that circumstances had forced him to accept from her. His honeymoon, and those new clothes that Francie had bought in London, had run away with no end of money, and it would be infernally inconvenient if Charlotte was going, just at this time of all others, to come down on him for money that he had never asked her for. He turned these things over uncomfortably in his mind as he lay back on the grass, looking up at Francie’s profile, dark against the soft blue of the sky; and even while he took one of her hands and drew it down to his lips he was saying to himself that he had never yet failed to come round Charlotte when he tried, and it would not be for want of trying if he failed now.
The shadows of the trees began to stretch long fingers across the grass of the Bosquet d’Apollon, and Lambert looked at his watch and began to think of table d’hôte at the Louvre Hotel. Pleasant, paradisaically pleasant as it was here in the sun, with Francie’s hand in his, and one of his best cigars in his mouth, he had come to the age at which not even Paradise would be enjoyable without a regular dinner hour.
Francie felt chilly and exhausted as they walked back and climbed the innumerable flights of steps that lay between them and the Palace; she privately thought that Versailles would be a horrible place to live in, and not to be compared in any way to Bruff, but, at all events, it would be a great thing to say she had been there, and she could read up all the history part of it in the guide-book when she got back to the hotel. They were to go up the Eiffel tower the next day; that would be some fun, anyhow, and to the Hippodrome in the evening, and, though that wouldn’t be as good as Hengler’s circus, the elephants and horses and things wouldn’t be talking French and expecting her to answer them, like the housemaids and shopmen. It was a rest to lean back in the narrow carriage with the pair of starveling ponies, that rattled along with as much whip-cracking and general pomp as if it were doing ten miles an hour instead of four, and to watch the poplars and villas pass by in placid succession, delightfully devoid of historical interest.
It was getting dark when they reached Paris, and the breeze had become rough and cold. The lamps were shining among the trees on the Boulevards, and the red and green eyes of the cabs and trams crossed and recrossed each other like a tangle of fire-flies. The electric lights of the Place du Louvre were at length in sight, lofty and pale, like globes of imprisoned daylight above the mundane flare of the gas, and Francie’s eyes turned towards them with a languid relief. Her old gift of living every moment of her day seemed gone, and here, in this wonderful Paris, that had so suddenly acquired a real instead of a merely geographical existence for her, the stream of foreign life was passing by her, and leaving her face as uninterested and wearied as it ever had been when she looked out of the window at Albatross Villa at the messenger boys and bakers’ carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe, its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte’s piano, while Mr. Hawkins, holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws to thump a bass. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down, was being played; he had pretended there that he was her music teacher, and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a tea-spoon, and gone on with all kinds of nonsense. The carriage started forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place beside her.
“Of all the asses unhung these French fellows are the biggest,” he said fervently, “and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I couldn’t hear my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last, anyhow, and you’ve got to get out before me.”
The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not answer a word. She turned her back on her husband, and stepping out of the carriage she walked unsteadily across the courtyard in the white glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to him from the spectacle of her wet cheeks and trembling lips. She made for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor. The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the tune that had torn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget its associations and recover herself, catching up an illustrated paper to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two before Lambert followed her.
“Here’s a go!” he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his hand, “here’s a wire to say that Sir Benjamin’s dead, and they want me back at once.”