“Squatty or not, Louis, it is an exquisite bit—modern Tanagra, really. Seventeenth century, isn’t it, Lemois?”
Lemois nodded. If he had heard Louis’ remark he gave no sign of the fact.
“Yes,” continued Herbert, “and wonderfully modelled. We can’t do these things now—not in this way”—and he passed it to The Engineer, who turned it upsidedown, as if it were a teacup, glanced at the bottom in search of its mark, and without a word handed it back.
Lemois replaced the precious object in the triptych, his mind still filled with his favorite topic, and, turning suddenly, wheeled a richly upholstered chair from a far corner into the light.
“And here is another relic of Madame Sévigné, monsieur. This is madame’s own chair; the one she always used when she stopped here, sometimes for days at a time, on her way to her country-seat, Les Rochers. The room which she occupied, and in which she wrote many of her famous letters, is just over our heads. If monsieur will shift his seat a little he can see the very spot in which she sat.”
But The Engineer neither shifted his seat nor rose to the bait. None of the small things of past ages appealed to him. Even mummies and the spoil of coffins three thousand years old—and he had inspected many of them—failed to stir him. It was what was built over them, and the brains and power that hoisted the stones into place, as well as the forces of wind and water—the song of the creaking crane—those were the things that thrilled him. That Herbert, after his career in the open, had contented himself with a few tools and a mass of clay was what had most surprised him when he came upon his statues in the Royal Academy.
So he kept silent until what Louis called the “bric-à-brac moment” had passed—such discussion often occurring whenever Lemois felt he had a new audience. Gradually the talk drifted into other channels. Mistaken identity and the injustice of convictions on circumstantial evidence were gone into, The Engineer recalling some of his own errors in dealing with his men in Egypt. At this Le Blanc, wandering slightly from the main topic, gave an account of a mysterious woman in white who on certain nights when the moon was bright used to descend the wide staircase of a French château which he often visited, the apparition being the ghost of a beautiful countess who had been walled up somewhere below stairs by a jealous husband, and who took this mode of publishing her wrongs to the world. Le Blanc had seen her himself, first at the head of the great staircase and then as she crept slowly down the steps and disappeared through the solid wall to the left of the baronial fireplace. His hostess, who affected not to believe in such uncanny mysteries, tried to persuade him it was merely a shaft of moonlight stencilled on the white wall, but Le Blanc scouted the explanation and was ready to affirm on his word of honor that she looked at him out of her great, round, beseeching eyes, and would, he felt assured, have spoken to him had not one of the servants opened a door at the moment and so scared her away.
I told of a somewhat similar experience in which a strong-minded Englishwoman, who laughed at ghosts and all other forms of unsavory back numbers, and a bishop of distinction were mixed up. There was a haunted room in the Devonshire country house that no one dared occupy. Another white figure prowled here, but whether man or woman, no one knew. That it was quite six feet high and broad in proportion, and had at various times scared the wits out of several nervous and semi-hysterical females who had passed the night between the sheets, all agreed. As it was the week-end, there were a goodly number of visitors and the house more or less crowded. When the haunted room was mentioned, even the bishop demurred—preferring to take the one across the corridor—he being a frequent visitor and knowing the lay of the land. The strong-minded young woman, however, jumped at the chance. She had all her life been hoping to see a ghost and, in order to allow his or her ghostship free entrance, had left the door of the haunted room unlocked when she got into bed. Despite her screwed-up courage she began to get nervous, and when she heard the door creak on its hinges and felt the cold, clammy air of the corridor on her cheek, she slid down off her pillow and ducked her head under the sheet. Then, to her horror, she felt the blanket slowly slipping away and, peering out, was frozen stiff to see a tall figure, dressed in white, standing at the foot of her bed, its long, skinny fingers clutching at the covering. Without even a groan she passed promptly into a fit of unconsciousness, known as a dead faint, where, with only a sheet over her, she lay until the cold woke her. She left by the early coach and believes to this day that she would have been strangled had she offered the slightest protest. Nor did her hostess’s letter, covering a full explanation, satisfy her. “It was not a ghost you saw, my dear, but the bishop, who wanted an extra blanket, and who jumped out of bed in search of one, and into your room, thinking it empty. It’s a mercy you didn’t scream, for then the situation could never have been explained—better say nothing about it, or, if you do—stick to its being a ghost.”
While these and other yarns were sent spinning around the table, Louis had cut in, of course, with all sorts of asides—some whispers behind his hand to his next neighbor—some squibs of criticism exploded without rhyme or reason in our midst—all jolly and diverting, but nothing approaching a story short or long.
My own and Herbert’s efforts to draw him out into something sustained brought only—“Don’t know any yarns” and “Never had anything happen to me”—followed at last by—“The only time I was ever in a tight place was when I was sketching in Perugia; then I jumped through the window and took most of the sash with me.”