The little dining-room had a painted ceiling—a flock of doves circling in a blue sky. The kitchen was red tiled, and clean as a Dutch dairy. The bedrooms—bright and spotless, and simply furnished—were perfumed with the breath of the forest coming through the always open windows; the hangings were of chintz, flower-sprinkled, and light in tone. If May herself had chosen to build and furnish a little house to live in, she could not have improved on the Pavilion of Saluce, furnished as it was by a Parisian upholsterer at the direction of a Parisian boulevardier.
I had breakfasted in the kitchen—there was nothing to be done, the place was in perfect order—and, telling Fauchard's daughter (Madame Ancelot) that I would return that afternoon with a lady who would take up her abode at the Pavilion for an indefinite time, I returned to Paris, dropping Joubert in the Rue St. Honoré, and telling the coachman to take me to the Rue du Petit Thouars.
CHAPTER XXI "O YOUTH, WHAT A STAR THOU ART!"
In the Rue du Petit Thouars I sent the carriage home. The horses had done over forty miles. I would take Eloise down to Etiolles by rail, or we would hire a carriage. It did not matter in the least; it was only twelve o'clock, and we had the whole day before us.
It would be hard for the worldly minded to understand my happiness as I walked down the Rue du Petit Thouars towards the street where she lived. I had found something to love and cherish, but I was not in the least in love with Eloise after the fashion of what men call love. You must remember that ever since my earliest childhood I had been very much alone in the world. Drilled and dragooned by old Joubert, and treated kindly enough by my father, I had missed, without knowing it, the love of a mother or a sister. Little Eloise had been the only girl-child with whom I had ever played; and, though our acquaintance had been short enough, that fact had made her influence upon me doubly potent. I had found her again. She was now a woman, but, for me, she was still the child of the gardens of Lichtenberg. And the strange psychological fact remains that, though I had loved the beautiful Countess Feliciani with my childish heart, loved her almost as a man loves a woman, not a bit of that sort of love had I for Eloise, who was the Countess's facsimile. The very fact of the extraordinary likeness would have been sufficient to annul passion.
Perhaps it was because I had seen the Countess suddenly turned old and grey, sitting in that wretched room in the Hôtel de Mayence, the ruin of herself, a parable on the vanity of beauty and earthly things.
I do not know. I only can say that my love for Eloise was as pure as the love of a brother for a sister; and that my heart as I came along the sunlit Rue du Petit Thouars, rejoiced exceedingly and was glad.
I turned down the dingy little Rue Soufflot, and there, at the door, going into the dingy old house where she lived, poised like a white butterfly on the step, was Eloise.