René gazed up at her, a point of flame in his somber eyes. All of a sudden, with an amazingly quick, very vulgar, street-boy gesture and a wicked grimace, tipping his thumb over his shoulder, he indicated the other two guests holding uneasy converse at the other side of the room. The thing was done in a twinkling, and he regained his accustomed plaintive solemnity of aspect.
"What further reason, that he, the janitor, otherwise Adrian the Magnificent, was away?"
"You are impertinent," Madame St. Leger said, sternly. At first her anger concentrated itself upon René Dax. Then, quite arbitrarily and unjustly, it took a wider sweep. She called Bette to her; and, kneeling down, the train of her dress trailing out across the rosy carpet, her head bowed, began undoing the frogs of the child's fur pelisse.
"Pray understand," she said, still sternly, "Mr. Savage's presence or absence is a matter which in no degree affects my actions."
While in the pause which followed Adrian's voice, harsh from his effort to make it sound quite disengaged and natural, asserted itself forcibly.
"Yes," he was saying, "Colonel Rentoul Haig.—You cannot surely have been so heartless as to have forgotten his existence, dear Miss Beauchamp, when he retains such enthusiastic memories of you and of the brilliancy of your conversation?"
"Rentoul Haig? Rentoul Haig? Ah! to be sure! I have it at last. Yes, certainly, in the early eighties, at my cousin Delamere Beauchamp's place in Midlandshire. Of course, of course—a neat, little, tea-party subaltern, out in camp with some militia regiment, in general request for answering questions and running messages, and so on; qualifying, even then, as a walking hand-book of the English landed and titled gentry."
"He has continued in that line until his genealogical learning has reached truly monumental proportions," Adrian returned, in the same harsh voice. "It possesses and obsesses him, keeping him in a perpetual ferment of apprehension lest he should be called upon to associate with persons of no family in particular. In this connection my arrival, I fear, caused him cruel searchings of heart. His mother and my father were hundredth cousins. Hence, alarms. Should I prove presentable to the funny old gentlemen at the local club, or should I compromise him? He has hardly marched with the times, and pictured me—this I learned from his own ingenuous lips—as some long-haired, threadbare, starveling Bohemian, straight out of the pages of Henri Mürger or Eugène Sue. My personal appearance did, I rejoice to say, reassure him to a certain extent. But your name, and recollections both of your cousin's fine place and of your own conversational powers, did much more toward allaying the torment of his social sense. He ended, indeed, by conveying to me that, my beloved mother's alien nationality and my beloved father's profession notwithstanding, I was really quite a credit to the united houses of Savage and Haig."
"Are you going again to exclude me, are you going to shut the door on me, because I have been that which you qualify by the word 'impertinent'?" René Dax asked, softly and sadly, as Madame St. Leger—the little girl's coat removed and her frilled white skirts straightened out—rose proudly to her feet.
"You richly deserve that I should do so," she replied.