“Here—no more of that talk,” said Essex threateningly.
The man stopped, looking furtively at him as if half expecting to be struck. Essex turned toward the door and passed out. As he did so he heard him mutter: “And I’d seen her before, too.”
Back in his room the young man took up his book again, but the thread of his interest was broken. His mind refused to return to the prescribed channels before it, but began to drift here and there on the wayward currents of memory.
The house was now perfectly quiet. The little fire had fallen together into a pleasant core of warmth that genially diffused its heat through the room. Essex, sprawling in his chair, his long arms following its arms, his finely-formed, loose-jointed hands depending over the rounded ends, let his dreaming gaze rest on this red heart of living coal, while his pipe smoke lay between it and his face in delicate layers.
His thoughts slipped back over childish memories to his first ones, when he had lived a French boy’s life with his mother in Paris.
He remembered her far back in the days when he sat on her knee and was read to out of fairy books. She had been very pretty then and very happy, and had always talked English with him while every one else spoke French. She had been an Englishwoman, an actress of beauty and promise, who in the zenith of her popularity had made what the world called a fine marriage with a rich Venezuelan, who lived in Paris. The stories of Essex’s doubtful paternity were false. Rose Barry—Rose Essex, on the stage—had been the lawful wife of Antonio Perez, and for ten years was the happy wife as well.
They were very prosperous in those days. Barry had gone to the lycée all week and come back every Friday to the beautiful apartment in the Rue de Ponthieu. There were lovely spring Sundays when they drove in the Bois and sometimes got out of the carriage and walked down the sun-flecked allées under the budding trees. And there were even lovelier winter Sundays when they loitered along the boulevards in the crisp, clear cold, with the sky showing leaden gray through the barring of black boughs, and when they came home to a parlor lit with fire and lamplight and had oranges and hard green grapes after dinner.
He had loved his pretty mother devotedly in those happy days, but for his saturnine, dark-visaged father he had only a sentiment of uneasy fear. He was twelve, when at his mother’s request he was sent to England to school. He could remember, looking back afterward, that his mother had not been so pretty or so happy then.
When he came home from school for vacations she was living at Versailles in a little house that presented a secret, non-committal front to the stony street, but that in the back had a delightful garden full of miniature fountains and summer-houses and grottoes. From the wall he could see the mossy trees and stretches of sun-bathed sward of the Trianon. His father was not always there when he came. One Easter vacation he was not there at all, and when he had asked his mother why, she had burst into sudden, terrible tears that frightened him.
During the long summer holidays after that Antonio Perez was only there once over a Sunday. Then he did not come again, and Barry was glad, for he had never cared for his father. He passed delightful days in the Trianon Park with his mother, who was very silent and had gray hair on her temples. She walked beside him with a slow step, dragging her rich lace skirts and with her parasol hanging indolently over her shoulder. It pleased him to see that many people looked at her, but she took no notice of them.