“Oh, Master Jean, if Miss Anne should see you now!” said the scandalized Elizabeth. Jean was forbidden to smoke, but he knew Elizabeth admired it. His melancholy deep brown eyes had a sudden charming twinkle in them; he had a curious face, irregular as to its features, but very much alive; it reminded the observer of a young wild thing in the woods absorbed in the deep business of life.
“Though you do look nearly a man now,” went on Elizabeth, “and are grown so lately, Master Jean, and if I may say so, a thought more English about the shoulders.”
“I am a man,” said Jean. “I’m twenty, Elizabeth, and they’ve turned me out of their consultation as if I were a schoolboy, and I’m positive it’s about me.”
“There, there, Master Jean!” said Elizabeth soothingly. “You know you can get it all out of the doctor afterwards; ’e’s as easy to get into as a tin of apricots—’im and ’is professional secrets!”
Elizabeth snorted.
“I don’t like getting things out of people when they’re the things they ought to tell me any way,” said Jean. “When I went in this morning, Elizabeth, they were all saying ‘Paris’ as if they’d heard of it for the first time.”
Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully.
“There was a letter from there this very morning,” she said, “with a seal on the back; perhaps it’s a fortune, Master Jean, come from your rich uncle in Paris.”
“More likely a misfortune, I’m afraid,” said Jean gloomily. “Well, Elizabeth, I think I’m going off to the woods again. Put something cold out for me to-night; I shan’t be back till late.”
Elizabeth looked anxious, but she knew better than to expostulate with her idol. She was allowed to worship only on the distinct understanding that she never interfered. A worshipper that tries to manage his god is confusing the situation. From his tenth birthday on, Jean had ruled Elizabeth with a rod of iron. It was a small kingdom, perhaps, for the little lonely boy, it only contained his dog and Elizabeth, but he ruled it well, and there had never been a hint of rebellion. Elizabeth knew that Miss Prenderghast had noticed these increasing despotic absences of Jean’s. He went away almost daily now for hours at a time, and gave no account whatever of his proceedings. Miss Prenderghast shook her head over them; she had a shocked suspicion, not unlike the priest and the doctor, that he might be meeting some woman; but she would have been even more shocked if she had known he was meeting his own soul. A woman would not have prevented Jean from becoming a bank clerk, but no one knows what a man’s soul may prevent him from becoming. It has led him before now to become an artist, and it has even taught him (and this is the hardest thing perhaps for thoroughly good, religious people to understand) to develop into a saint.