He laughed and drew her toward him, crushing the letter and spilling the water from the bowl.
“Impossible,” he said. “I forget what I am saying; not one half, one quarter, one hundredth part, chérie. There can be no love like mine for little Beatrix.”
He had been annoyed that the Chevalier Lefort, his father, had declined the journey to Strasburg until the last moment, for this seemed to put some shadow of a slight upon his little wife. But the Chevalier, who did not by any means welcome an English girl to his house, was notoriously the laziest man in France. He had written his excuses regularly from the deck of his yacht Le Cygne pleading illness, the unfailing refuge of his indolence. There were other reasons on the yacht, less creditable and by no means to be presented to Beatrix. Edmond guessed those reasons, and found solace in the generous cheques which were the Chevalier’s atonement.
“You will like my father,” he said to her, “you will forgive him as I do.”
“I hope so,” she said lightly. “I could forgive anyone at the Niederwald—even you, dearest, for reading your ten letters when the pony is waiting.”
She escaped his caress, and ran up the stairs lightly to set her hair straight and to put her roses in fresh water. She did not see that he had not her pleasure in the woods of Niederbronn, but hungered still for his comrades’ letters and their news of his regiment. He had not heard a man’s voice for ten days; peasants did not interest him. He could not tell one flower from another. He had no eye for the colour of glade and thicket. When he remembered that another ten days must pass before they left the châlet, he was even tempted to wish that he had chosen a city for his holiday. But of this he spoke no word to her. A sense of self-sacrifice pleased him. Her tenderness was a thing precious to see and to possess.
He brushed the “Prince de Galles,” and was quite ready for her when she came singing down the stairs, and he helped her up to the driver’s seat. She drove so badly, and “Apollo,” surely, was the ugliest pony in the Vosges. He said that risk was a thing a soldier should face for love of it; and declared that she would lead a charge superbly. The shady road through the mountains, the delicious wooded glades, the little white farmhouses, the fresh green heaths were for him so many items from a soldier’s map. Some day the armies of France would cross the Vosges and enter Baden beyond the frontier. He talked of it always, even upon that early day of his happiness, when Beatrix drove him to the picnic in the thickets of the Niederbronn.
“What a road for light cavalry,” he said, again and again; “with Pfalzburg at your back and Strasburg for your base, what a road to Berlin! We shall ride this road some day, chérie, and I shall show my comrades the old farmhouse, and tell them why I went there. You will be in Paris then, waiting for news of the victory. Ma foi! you will not wait long.”
“But I shall be very old,” she suggested. “You will be a general, and wear feathers for me to steal. And we shall have our own home in England. That would be ideal—a little house in Kent with an orchard and a meadow.”
He nodded his head indifferently.