“His selection was due to you! Do not deny it!”
“Certainly not. I am proud to think that it was Monsieur des Sablières as the gipsy girl who was the success of the evening.”
“Especially in the scene with you! I watched you both, Juliana——”
“I should hope you did! I was told I looked very well as a wood-cutter’s daughter. Though if you had condescended to act yourself, as you were requested, Francis, you would not have been under the painful necessity of looking on—if it was painful.”
Sir Francis stifled some remark which sounded remarkably like a curse. “Juliana, for God’s sake drop this levity, this trifling with a serious question! You are——”
She interrupted him firmly. “You quite misapprehend, Francis. I am not trifling—far from it. It is indeed a serious question. You are trying to impose on me a perfectly unreasonable demand. And, leaving aside that it is unreasonable in itself, how do you suppose that, when I come to stay in this house, I am to avoid meeting a guest who frequents it as much as Monsieur des Sablières does? Stay in my room—by your orders—when this dangerous foreigner is announced . . . or ask Laetitia to have him refused entrance—and tell her why? He would have to be told too . . . and might be flattered at your apprehensions, I imagine.”
Sir Francis, darkly red, was gripping the back of a chair. “Juliana,” he said thickly, “are you trying to see how far you can go with me?”
“No,” answered she, her head very high, “only trying to show you how far you go—to lengths which, three months ago, in this very room, we could neither of us have foreseen, I think.”
Mulholland’s colour suddenly faded, faded to real pallor. The words seemed to hold a veiled threat. But he had no opportunity of ascertaining this, for (with a good deal of preliminary rattling, it is true) the door leading from the drawing room opened, and their host apologetically put his head in.
“I am sorry, but they are clamouring for you, Juliana, in there, and I could deny them no longer. Do not hate me, my dear.”
Juliana went to him and put her hand through his arm. “I think you come at a good moment, Mr. Bentley,” she said, and, without a glance at her betrothed, entered the drawing room.
But, as that gentleman instantly discovered, the bone of contention was no longer there.
CHAPTER II
“MR. ROWL” GETS INTO TROUBLE
“Pride . . . is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages.”—Rasselas, chap. ix.
After finishing his warmly received rendering of Queen Hortense’s ballad M. Raoul des Sablières had removed himself with what speed he might from the neighbourhood of the pianoforte, for he was a modest young man and had no desire whatever to monopolise attention, particularly in the anomalous situation which was his. With the idea of suggesting to Miss Bentley that the time had come for her father to sing them “A-Hunting We Will Go,” as his custom was, he sought for her among the little groups, and soon descried her in a corner talking to a very erect old gentleman, at sight of whose back he stopped and bit his lip. But at that moment the old man turned round, revealing a deeply marked, austere countenance with piercing blue eyes. His hair was snow-white; his clothes, spotless as they were, had seen long service. He wore a ribbon in his buttonhole.
“Ah, a French song for once, Monsieur des Sablières, but unfamiliar to me for all that,” he said, with a courteous little inclination. “A pretty air, though I did not hear the words as I should have done had I been younger. May I ask what it was?”
The singer’s colour rose faintly. “No, you would not know it, Monsieur,” he answered quickly. “It is new—only two or three years old. . . . Mademoiselle, I came to ask if Mr. Bentley——”
But Miss Bentley, disregarding his haste to leave the subject, ill-advisedly pursued it. “Monsieur des Sablières ought to tell you about it, Comte, as he was telling us just now, for it is so interesting. The song as written by a Queen—words and music too—by Queen Hortense.”
The old Royalist raised his eyebrows. “And pray who is Queen Hortense?”
The little smile that accompanied the question was so acid that Miss Laetitia realized (too late) what delicate ground she had thus rashly invaded. “I think . . . I forget . . . is she not Queen of Westphalia—or is it——?” she faltered, stealing in her confusion a glance at M. des Sablières, only to find that he, looking fixedly at his compatriot, was frowning—a phenomenon she had never witnessed in him before.
“Your ignorance, my dear Miss Laetitia,” said the Comte de Sainte-Suzanne with an intensification of his double-edged manner, “is fully excusable, since I, a Frenchman, share it. But Monsieur des Sablières can no doubt enlighten us—if indeed it be worth while—or rather, enlighten me, since I see your father making signs to you over there.”
It was true, and Laetitia, after a rather troubled glance at her two French friends, left them together. Immediately she had gone Raoul des Sablières remarked very stiffly in their common tongue:
“I should hardly have thought it was worth your while, Monsieur, to affect ignorance of the identity of Her Majesty the Queen of Holland.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied the old man. “The Queen of . . . Holland; thank you! But I am, you see, no . . . botanist; I am not well acquainted with the nomenclature of the mushroom tribe.”
“Really, Monsieur de Sainte-Suzanne,” exclaimed the young hussar angrily, “you exceed the bounds of——”
“And you, Monsieur des Sablières, are obviously aware of no bounds at all! So, lest you should be contemplating rendering any further compositions by the self-styled monarchs of that family, I will betake myself to the library. As far as I am concerned, you will then be free to sing the Ça ira, if it pleases you.” And, brushing aside the young man’s half stupefied protest, he marched to the door, an attempt on Raoul’s part to follow him being neatly frustrated by the intervention of two ladies and a very young gentleman who beset him with supplications.
“Monsieur des Sablières, do not go away, please! We want you to give us a translation of the words you sang. Here is Miss Curtis who understood but half, and Mr. Molyneux who understood none” (the very young gentleman blushed), “and I who have but the vaguest idea of what it was all about. The marriage of Dunois—was there not a marriage?—appeared so sudden!”
“It was a reward for his . . . what we call prouesse,” stammered Raoul, the English word evading him for a moment under the blue lightning shaft which was launched at him just before the door closed on the Comte de Sainte-Suzanne. He tugged angrily for a second at his tiny moustache. Preposterous behaviour—and all for what! Then he recovered himself, and the smile which was never far from it twitched the corners of his mouth. “Sudden? . . . yes, Mesdemoiselles, a little. In war, you know. . . . But I will translate from the beginning.”
And, with one elbow on the mantelpiece, he rendered the words of the romance into English, laughing himself when he came to
“De ma fille Isabelle
Sois l’époux à l’instant!”
and unaware of another listener, Mr. Sturgis, who had drifted to that corner of the room, and was thinking to himself as he watched the scene, “Strange how natural and easy they are, these French! Graceful young beggar—pity he’s not in uniform . . . no, perhaps on the whole just as well, young ladies are so susceptible. . . . But light, unreliable, of course, like all his nation.” For Mr. Sturgis had no great first-hand knowledge of the French.
“Yet, Mesdemoiselles,” he heard the expositor conclude, “the English chanson which I murdered