‘Many a merry tramp we’ve had together, Armand,’ said Maurice, and he felt an odd sensation about his throat, while his eyelids pricked queerly. ‘We’ve got drunk together on devilish bad wine, and pledged ourselves eternally to many a worthless jade. We’ve smoked a pipe we neither of us shall forget, and walked beneath the midnight stars in many a curious place. And now we part, you for gilded halls and wedding chimes, I to seek a new comrade, and make a fresh start across the beaten track of Bohemia.’
Maurice crammed his knuckles furiously into his eyes. His eloquence had mounted to his head, and flung him impetuously into his friend’s arms with tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘You’ll come back again, won’t you, Armand?’
‘Come back? Yes,’ Armand replied sadly; ‘but I shall feel something like Marius among the ruins of Carthage.’
‘I’ll keep your velvet jacket, and when you are tired of grandeur and lords and dukes, you can drop in here and put it on, and smoke a comfortable pipe in your old arm-chair.’
Maurice went straightway to the nearest café, and spent a dismal evening, consuming bock after bock, until he felt sufficiently stupefied to face his solitary studio, where he shed furtive tears in contemplation of all his friend’s property made over to him as an artist’s legacy.
Though brimming over with happiness and excitement, Armand himself was not quite free of regret for the relinquished velvet jacket and brushes and boxes, as he made his farewell to wandering by a journey on the top of an omnibus from the Étoile to the Rue de Grenelle, and solaced himself with a cheap cigarette.
For one long week did he work dutifully at the bank, inspected books with his uncle, and repressed an inclination to yawn over the dreary discussion of shares and bonds and funds, of vast European projects and policies in jeopardy, and he felt the while a smart of homesickness for the little studio in the Avenue Victor Hugo. In the evening he dined with his mother, and found consolation for the irksomeness of etiquette in the excellence of the fare. He thought of Marguerite incessantly, and spoke of her whenever he could, but he did not forget Maurice or the cooking-stove, on which their dinners in the olden days had so often come to grief. He might sip Burgundy now, yet he relished not the less the memory of the big draughts of beer which he and Maurice had found so delicious.
III
But all these pinings and idle regrets were silenced, and gave place to rapturous content the first afternoon on which he walked up the long avenue of his uncle’s country house at Marly. The week of trial was at an end, and he was now to claim his reward from dear lips. Everything under the sun seemed to him perfect, and even banks had their own charm, discernible to the happy eye. There was a beauty in gold he had hitherto failed to perceive, and crusty old gentlemen were the appropriate guardians of lovely nymphs. In such a mood, there is melody in all things, and warmth lies even in frosted starlight. Nothing but the sweetness of life is felt: its turbidness and accidents, its disappointments, pains, and stumbles, lie peacefully forgotten in the well of memory; and we wish somebody could have told us in some past trouble that the future contained for us a moment so good as this.
‘Mademoiselle is in the garden,’ a servant informed him, and led the way through halls and salons, down steps running from the long window into a shaded green paradise. And then he heard a fresh voice that he seemed not to have heard for so long, and on hearing it only was his heart made aware how much he had missed it during the past age of privation.