“That’s so,” confessed Chalks, dashed for a moment. “Lucile’s the snag. But I guess on the whole Lucile will have to go too. I’ll hire a man I know to want her room. Madame won’t let family feeling stand in the way of trade. Especially the sky-pilot won’t, not he. And I’d like to know who’s the boss of this shebang, if not Monsieur the Abbé? There’s no love lying around loose between him and Lucile, as it stands. Just let a man turn up and ask for her room, Madame’ll drop her like a hot potato.”
But from the labour of putting such schemes in operation we were saved by a microbe: a mouse can serve a lion. Half of our male contingent went down with the influenza: and our ladies, Lucile included, incontinently fled the ship. They dreaded the infection; and the house was as melancholy as a hospital; and noise being inhibited, they couldn’t properly entertain their friends. Besides, I think they were glad enough of an occasion to escape from the proximity of Miss. She had infused an element of ozone into our moral atmosphere; their systems weren’t accustomed to it; it filled them with a vague malaise: they made a break for fouler air.
And it was at this crisis that Miss came out strong. She laid aside all business and excuses, and constituted herself our nurse.
All day long, and very nearly all night long too, she was at it: flying from room to room, administering medicines to this man, reading aloud to that, spraying eucalyptus everywhere, running for the doctor when somebody appeared to have taken a turn for the worse,—in short, heaping coals of fire upon our heads with a lavish, untiring hand. When we got up from our sick-beds, every mother’s son of us was dead in love with her. From that time to the end she went about like a queen with her body-guard; and there wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t have given his life to spare her a pain in the little finger; and our rewards were her smiles. It is to be noted that she accepted our devotion with the same calm unconsciousness of anything extraordinary that she had shown in the old days to our doubtful courtesy. She wore her crown and wielded her gentle sceptre like one in the purple born, whilst her subjects outdid each other in zeal to please her.
Meantime we had learned her previous history; we had pieced it together from a multitude of little casual utterances. Her father, some five years ago, had died a bankrupt; and she had gone as governess with an English family to the far West of America, where they had a cattle ranch; and now she was on her way home, to seek a new engagement; and she was breaking her pilgrimage with a season of art in Paris (she had always wanted to cultivate her natural gift for painting); and she had chosen the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shakespere because her guide-book recommended it.
Now Norton had a sister married to a squire in Derbyshire; and one day this good lady advertised in the Times for a governess; and Miss, who kept watch on such advertisements (going to Neal’s library to study the English papers), was on the point of answering it, when Norton cut in with a “Let me write that letter for you. Mrs. Clere happens to be my sister.” Of course Miss got the place; and it was to take it, and begin her duties, that she left us last night.
I follow her in fancy upon her journey, and imagine her arrival at the big, respectable, dull country house; and I wonder will she regret a little and think fondly now and then of Madame Bourdon’s hotel and the ragged staff of comrades she has left behind her here. For the present the Rue Racine is an abhorrent vacuum, and I am sick with nostagia for the Paris of yesterday.