Zut, and Other Parisians

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

Now, as he revolved the meeting in his mind, he found that it was not in the least degree a surprise. Somehow, he had always expected that this girl would step suddenly into his life, with her ruddy hair and her gray eyes. It seemed to him to be something which the natural evolution of that life demanded. He had sounded every note in the gamut of emotions appropriate to a man in his position. He had had his serious, almost ascetic moods, his despondencies, his flights of folly, his impulses of stern ambition, his hours of morbid brooding and of reckless gayety. He could no longer number his love-affairs with any approach to accuracy. They were hopelessly jumbled in his memory, by very reason of their number and their triviality. Here and there, a face stood out from its fellows—the Baronne de Banis, Lady Mary Kaswellyn, Rosa de Mirecourt, or the Marquise de Baucheron—but none of these impelled him to regret. There were no entanglements, no uncomfortable circumstances to recall. Not a stone lay in the way of the gate of the future, as, in his imagination, it swung open before him. As we have said, the fates were kind to Lieutenant Eugène Drouin. The current of experience had borne his individual shallop over deeps and shallows safely and with a song, and, now that a sudden turn of the stream had shown him Natalie Tournadour waiting on the bank, it seemed to him to be the most natural thing imaginable,—something which intuition had taught him was inevitable, and, what was better, which experience told him was desirable. The event had found him ready and willing to make room for her beside him in the boat, and, so, continue the journey in her company, well content. He bowed to fate politely, with a graceful merci!

For forty-eight hours he watched, almost as if he had been a disinterested outsider, this pleasant fancy moulding the details of his future life. He reckoned his rentes anew, assigning a due proportion to a little hôtel in the Monceau quarter, to a villa at Houlgate, to horses, household expenses, his wife's allowance, servants, entertainment, a month at Aix, another at Nice, a third at Hombourg. He saw himself retired, and in the Chambre. And over all hovered, like a luminous presiding angel, the presence of Mademoiselle Tournadour—Madame Drouin!

So Sunday came, and, with it, breakfast at Armenonville with two fellow officers, and the growing exhilaration of the approaching race. Eugène was in his gayest mood—for was not Vivandière not only the winner of last year's Steeple Chase, but to-day in better form than she had ever been? But he allowed his good spirits to be touched, now and again, with a gentle, pleasurable melancholy, as the violins of the tziganes glided into the long, languorous swell of the Valse Bleue, and his handsome eyes clouded thoughtfully, and his fine mouth drooped, so that Gaston Cavaignac rallied him joyously upon the new affair, which alone could account for such tristesse. It lent an added zest, this. Eugène smiled, and was glad that in his denial of the charge rang so little of conviction.

The first race had been already run, as the three officers slipped through the main entrance of Auteuil, and made their way across the pesage, and past the betting booths, to the grass oval around which the horses, in charge of stable lads, were slowly circling. It was one of May's clearest and most brilliant afternoons. The gravel pathways and stretches of vivid turf were thronged with the best known men and women of the two great Parisian worlds of sport and fashion, and the air rang with gay gossip and spirited discussion. But Eugène had ears for none of this, and eyes but for two things,—Vivandière, blanketed, and swinging around the oval with her long, sure stride, and Natalie Tournadour, in a delicious gown of soft blue, standing at the side of Vieux César. Life, at that moment, was good to live. The chasseur drew a quick breath of pleased surprise. She was there, then, to see him win. He might have known!

A mixture of sudden, unfamiliar embarrassment and boyish vanity caused him to avoid her eye as he made a turn of the oval, consulting with his stable lad about the mare's condition; but he held himself very straight, and was pleasantly conscious that his tunic was new, and his boots a veritable triumph of Coquillot's. When he went back to his companions his eyes were glowing.

"Content?" asked Cavaignac.

"Je te crois, mon vieux!" he answered. "One never can say, but it is certain that no one has a better chance. She is perfection!"

"There is the white," put in Lieutenant Mors, dubiously.

Eugène vouchsafed the rival racer a brief, contemptuous glance. It was a lean, powerfully built brute, with an astonishing reach to even the leisurely stride with which he paced the oval. A trainer would have had something to say of those lithe shoulders, and that long barrel, dwindling along the flanks, and that easy swing of haunch and swathed hock. But Eugène was not a trainer.