“Well? What of that? I suppose I can commandeer enough gasoline in France to take me three hundred miles. Besides, I am due the end of next week, anyway, to stay with some friends at Cap Martin, before going to Egypt. I’ll start a day or two earlier and drop Félise on my way. Will that suit you?”
“But, again, Brantôme is not on your direct route to Monte Carlo,” he objected.
She slid to her feet and laughed. “Do you want me to be a young mother to your little girl, or don’t you?”
“I do,” said he.
“Then don’t conjure up lions in the path. See here,” she touched his sleeve. “You were a good friend to me once when I had that poor little fool Effie James on my hands—I shouldn’t have pulled her through without you—and you wouldn’t accept more than your ridiculous fee—and now I’ve got a chance of shewing you how much I appreciate what you did. I don’t know what the trouble is, and now I don’t want to know. But you’re my friend, and so is your daughter.”
Fortinbras smiled sadly. “It is you that are the marchand de bonheur. You remove an awful load from my mind.” He took his old silk hat from the console where he had deposited it, and held out his hand. “The old vulture won’t stop to dinner. He must be flying. Give my love, my devoted love to Félise.”
And with an abruptness which she could not reconcile with his usual suave formality of manner, he turned swiftly and walked through the lobby and disappeared. His leave-taking almost resembled the flight he spoke of.
The wealthy, comely, even-balanced American girl looked blankly at the flat door and wondered, conscious of tragedy. What was the gulf of which he spoke? She knew little about the man. . . . Two years before a girl from Cheyenne, Wyoming, who had brought her letters of introduction, came to terrible grief. There was blackmail at her throat. Somebody suggested Fortinbras as counsellor. She, Lucilla, consulted him. He succeeded in sending a damsel foolish, reprehensible and frightened, but intact in reputation and pocket, back to her friends in Cheyenne. His fees for so doing amounted to twenty francs. For two years therefore, she had passed the time of day friendliwise with Fortinbras whenever she met him; but until her fellow-student, Corinna Hastings, sought her hospitality on the way back to England, and told her of Brantôme and Félise, she had regarded him merely as one of the strange, sweet monsters, devoid of domestic attributes, even of a private life, that Paris, city of portents and prodigies, had a monopoly in producing. . . . And now she had come upon just a flabby, elderly man, piteously anxious to avert some sordid misery from his own flesh and blood. She sighed, turned and saw Félise in charge of Céleste.
“Come, you must be famished.” She put her arm round the girl’s waist and led her into the dining-room. “Your father couldn’t stay. But he told me to give you his love and to regard myself as a sort of young mother to you.”
Félise murmured a shy acknowledgement. She was too much dazed for coherent thoughts or speech. The discovery of the conditions in which her father lived, and the sudden withering of her faith in him, had almost immediately been followed by her transference into this warm wonder-house of luxury owned and ruled by this queenly young woman, so exquisite in her simple marvel of a dress. The soft lights, the pictures, the elusive reflections from polished wood, the gleam of heavy silver and cut glass, the bowl of orchids on the table, the delicate napery—she had never dreamed of such though she held herself to be a judge of table-linen—the hundred adjuncts of a wealthy woman’s dining room, all filled her with a sense of the unreal, and at the same time raised her poor fallen father in her estimation by investing him with the character of a magician. Dainty food was placed before her, but she could scarcely eat. Lucilla, to put her more at her ease, talked of Corinna and of Brantôme which she was dying to visit and of the quaint Englishman, she had forgotten his name, who had become a waiter. How was he getting on?