"That is what brought us together, Asticot. You seemed to regard him as a god rather than as a man—and I loved you for it."
She put out her left hand. I touched it with my lips.
"That's a charming French way we haven't got in England. And—you did it very nicely, Asticot."
I almost scowled at the servant who entered with the announcement that tea was waiting in the drawing-room.
I think of all human utterances I have heard fall from the lips of those I love and honour, that formula of Paragot's echoed by Joanna was the most pathetically vain. And they believed it. Indeed it was the vital article of their faith. On its truth the whole fabric of their love depended.
It counted for nothing in Joanna's romantic eyes that the brilliant eager youth, "rich in the glory of his rising-sun," who had won her heart long ago—(she shewed me his photograph: alas poor Paragot!)—was now the tongue-tied spectre, the tale of whose ungentle past was scarred upon his face: who stalked grotesquely comfortless in his ill-fitting clothes: who with the art of dress had lost in the boozing-kens of Europe the graces of social intercourse. It counted for nothing that he was middle-aged, deserted forever by the elusive wanton, inspiration, condemned (she knew it in her heart) to artistic barrenness in perpetuity. It counted for nothing that her gods awakened his contempt, and his gods her fear. It counted for nothing that they had scarcely a single taste or thought in common—half-educated, half-bred boy that I was, I vow I entered a sweeter chamber of intimacy in my dear lady's heart than was open to Paragot.
You see, in spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, beloved by a man of his type. Month had followed month and year had followed year, and she had not developed. His family, nationalist and devout, of the old school, regarded him, rightly, as a renegade from their traditions, and regarded Joanna, wrongly, as the English heretic who had seduced him from the paths of orthodoxy. Their relations with Joanna were of the most frigid. On the other hand, the society of Hebraic finance in which the Comte de Verneuil found profit and entertainment was repugnant to the delicately nurtured Englishwoman. She led a lonely existence. "I have so few friends in Paris," were almost her first words to me on the day of our meeting outside the Hôtel Bristol. She went through the world, her lips set in a smile, and her dear eyes frozen, and her heart yearning for the sheltered English life with its rules for guidance and its barriers of convention, its pleasant little routine of duties, and its gentle communion of unemotional temperaments. Her eleven years married life had been merely a suspension of existence. Her few excursions into the unusual had been the scared adventures of a child. Her romance was the romance of a child. Her gracious simplicity, and her caressing adorableness which made my boy's love for her a passionate worship which has lasted to this day, when we both are old and only meet to shake heads together in palsied sympathy, were the essential charms of a child. How should she understand the Paragot that I knew? His soul still shone the stainless radiance that had dazzled her young eyes. That was all that mattered. It was easy to convert the outer man to convention. It was the simplest thing in the world to make the chartered libertine of talk accept the Index Expurgatorius of subjects mete for discussion: to regulate the innate vagabond by the clock: to bring the pantheistic pagan of wide spiritual sympathies (for Paragot was by no means an irreligious man) into the narrowest sphere of Anglicanism. The colossal nature of her task did not occur to her; and there again she exhibited a child's unreasoning confidence. Nor did it occur to her to bid him throw off his undertaker's garb and gloom and to adopt his free theories of life and conduct. At her mother's knee she had learned the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have none other gods but me"; and Joanna's god, though serving her sweet innocent soul all the reasonable purposes of a deity, was Matthew Arnold's gigantic clergyman in a white tie. In obedience to his maxims alone lay salvation: Joanna's conviction was unshakable. As a matter of course Paragot must walk the same path. There was not another one to walk.
Paragot accepted meekly my report of Joanna's tabu of the Black Boar.
"Whatever Madame de Verneuil says is right. I was forgetting that the refrain of the ballade of the immortal Villon 'Tout aux tavernes et aux filles' which was that of my life for so many years is so no longer, I wonder what the devil the refrain is now? Ha!" he exclaimed clapping his hand on my shoulder in his old violent way, "I have it! also Villon. Guess. Didn't I teach you all the ballades by rote as we wandered through Savoy?"