"I may! Madame, you are an angel. You are a flock of angels. Why, I said to them, should I leave this beautiful city to throw myself into the arms of a mad librettist, who desires my blood simply because he cannot write? Must genius die because an idiot has practised on bottles with a revolver? It shall not be!"
"Do you mean Monsieur Gillier? Then they are going to Constantine!" said Charmian sharply.
"To Constantine, Tunis, Batna, Biskra, the Sahara—que sais-je? Adelaide is like a cat enraged! She cannot rest! And she has seduced my Henriette."
He seemed perfectly contented, ate an excellent dinner, stayed till very late in the night, talked, joked, and finally, sitting down at the piano, played and sang. He was by turns a farceur, a wit, a man of emotion, a man with a touch of genius. And in everything he said and did he was almost preposterously unreserved. He seemed to be child, monkey and artist in combination. It was inconceivable that he could ever feel embarrassed or self-conscious.
At first, after his unexpected entry, Charmian had been almost painfully preoccupied. Sennier, without apparently noticing this, broke her preoccupation down. He was an egoist, but a singularly amusing and even attractive one, throwing open every door, and begging you to admire and delight in every room. Charmian began to study him, this man of a great success. How different he was from Claude. Now that she was with Sennier she was more sharply aware of Claude's reserve than she had ever been before, of a certain rigidity which underlay all the apparent social readiness.
When Sennier sang, in a voice that scarcely existed but that charmed, she was really entranced. When he played after midnight she was excited, intensely excited.
It was past one o'clock when he left reluctantly, promising to return on the morrow, to take all his meals at Djenan-el-Maqui, to live there, except for the very few hours claimed by sleep, till the "cat enraged" and his wife returned. Charmian helped him to put on his coat. He resigned himself to her hands like a child. Standing quite still, he permitted her to button the coat. He left, singing an air from an opera he was composing, arm in arm with Pierre, who was to escort him to his hotel.
"I dare not go alone!" he exclaimed. "I am afraid of the Arabs! The Arabs are traitors. Gladly would they kill a genius of France!"
When he was gone, when his extraordinary personality was withdrawn, Charmian's painful preoccupation returned. She had sent Claude away because she did not wish Adelaide Shiffney to meet him. It had been an instinctive action, not preceded by any train of reasoning. Adelaide was coming out of curiosity. Therefore her curiosity should not be gratified. And now she had gone to Constantine, and taken Madame Sennier with her. Charmian remembered her inadvertence of the day before when she had said, perhaps scarcely with truth, that Jacob Crayford admired Claude's talent; the Frenchwoman's almost strangely blank expression and apparent utter indifference, her own uneasiness. That uneasiness returned now, and was accentuated. But what could happen? What could either Madame Sennier or Adelaide Shiffney do to disturb her peace or interfere with her life or Claude's? Nothing surely. Yet she felt as if they were both hostile to her, were set against all she wished for. And she felt as if she had been like an angry child when she had talked of her husband to Madame Sennier. Women—clever, influential women—can do much either for or against a man who enters on a public career.
Charmian longed to say all that was in her heart to Susan Fleet. But, blaming herself for lack of self-control on the previous day, she resolved to exercise self-control now. So she only kissed Susan and wished her "Good-night."