There was a short silence. Corinna felt that the time had come for a dignified retirement. But whither repair at this unconscionably early hour? The hotel resembled now a railway station at which she was doomed to wait interminably, and one spot seemed as good as another. So she did not move.
“You have decided then to leave us, Mademoiselle Corinna?” said Bigourdin at last.
“I must.”
“Is there no means by which I could persuade you to stay? I desire enormously that you should stay.”
Her glance met his and lowered. The tone of his voice thrilled her absurdly. She had at once an impulse to laugh and a queer triumphant little flutter of the heart.
“To make pâté de foie gras? You must have unwarrantable faith in me.”
“Perhaps, in the end,” said he soberly, “it might amuse you to make pâté de foie gras. Who knows? All things are possible.” He paused for a moment, then bent forward, elbow on table and chin in hand. “This is but a little hotel in a little town, but in it one might find tranquillity and happiness—enfin, the significance of things,—of human things. For I believe that where human beings live and love and suffer and strive, there is an eternal significance beneath the commonplace, and if we grasp it, it leads us to the root of life, which is happiness. Don’t you think so, mademoiselle?”
“I suppose you’re right,” she admitted dubiously, never having taken the trouble to look at existence from the subjective standpoint. Her attitude was instinctively objective.
“I thank you, mademoiselle,” said he. “I said that because I want to put something before you. And it is not very easy. I repeat—this is but a little hotel in a little town. I too am but a man of the people, Mademoiselle; but this hotel—my father added to it and transformed it, but it is the same property—this hotel has been handed down from father to son for a hundred years. My great-grandfather, a simple peasant, rose to be Général de Brigade in the Grand Armée of Napoléon. After Waterloo, he would accept no favour from the Bourbons, and retired to Brantôme, the home of his race, and with his little economies he bought the Hôtel des Grottes, at which he had worked years before as a little va-nu-pieds, turnspit, holder of horses—que sais-je, moi? Those were days, mademoiselle, of many revolutions of fortune.”
“And all that means——?” asked Corinna, impressed, in spite of English prejudice, by the simple yet not inglorious ancestry of the huge innkeeper.