“I retain my English views. I shall explain them to my brother-in-law and forbid the alliance. Besides, the excellent Bigourdin is the last man in the world to force her into a distasteful marriage. Reassure her on that point. She can go back to Brantôme with a quiet mind.”
“Will you remain in Paris with a mind equally serene?” Lucilla asked, her deep grey eyes examining his face, which he had vainly endeavoured to compose into its habitual aspect of detached benevolence. He met her glance.
“The derelict,” said he, “is a thing of no account. But it is better that it should not lie in the course of the young and living ship.”
Lucilla put her hands behind her back and sat on the corner of an old Venetian table. And she still looked at him, profoundly interested. Here was a Fortinbras she had never met before, a broken man, far removed from the shrewd and unctuous marchand de bonheur of the Latin Quarter with his rolling periods and opportunist philosophy.
“There’s something behind all this,” she remarked. “If I’m to be any good, I ought to know.”
He recovered a little and smiled. “Your perspicacity does credit to your country,” said he. “Also to your sex. There is much behind it. An unbridgeable gulf of human sorrow. Remember that, should my little girl be led away—which I very much doubt—to talk to you of most unhappy things. She only came to the edge of the gulf half an hour ago. The marriage matter is but a thistledown of care.”
“I more or less see,” said Lucilla. “The vulture’s perch overhangs the gulf. Right. Now what do you want me to do?”
“Just keep her until I can find a way to send her back to Brantôme.”
Lucilla raised a hand, and reflected for a few seconds. Then she said: “I’ll run her down there myself in the car.”
“That is most kind of you,” replied Fortinbras, “but Brantôme is not Versailles. It is nearly three hundred miles away.”