Madame Pouchée’s house, the goal of the girl’s journey, belonged to history; a thatched, lozenge-windowed structure, of which the pargeted gables, the black oak joints, and plaster panels abutted, with pathetically incongruous air, as of some aged spinster at a ball, on one of the brisk, modern thoroughfares of the town.
A brass plate engraved ‘Pouchée’ was on the front door, conferring a semi-professional character upon the mouldering household. Although the fencing-master, honest man, had lain for twenty years in Père la Chaise, and Madame Pouchée had no more ostensible livelihood than such small sums as Mademoiselle gained by the teaching of her language, their plate raised them to the plane of citizens. The mother and daughter formed units in that curious gathering of poor French people which exists in our University towns, decayed families of fencing-masters, hair-dressers, or cooks, once prosperous, who shiver through English fog and cold to the end of their existence because they are ‘dans leurs meubles,’ ratepayers!
To quit her dark old home, to forego the sound of Great St. Mary’s curfew, to submit her furniture to the hammer of the auctioneer, would, to Madame Pouchée, have seemed little short of sacrilege. She passed her life with no larger pleasure than knitting, no acuter pain than rheumatism. She could go to Mass on Sundays and festivals with more security in Cambridge than in France. Pouchée’s foils and masks were suspended in the raftered entrance hall. Pouchée’s portrait, as a glossy bachelor of twenty, with black frock coat, turn-down collar, and gamboge gloves, hung in the salon. Upstairs, in one of the low-ceiled attics, were her crucifix and bénitier, just as she brought them from far Provence before her first child saw the light.
Such things to an aged woman are more than climate, more than nationality. Madame Pouchée’s lot had not been rose-coloured during the fencing-master’s life. At the time of his death, even, Monsieur was in Paris, led thither by some of the unexplained affairs which perennially drew him from his own fireside. But his widow clung to the foils and masks and portrait with as much patient fidelity as though he had loved her always. The careless husband who lay in Père la Chaise belonged to Madame Pouchée’s middle age. The foils, the masks, the glossy bachelor with gamboge gloves and turn-down collar, were relics of her youth.
Every corner of the house was burnished to that vanishing point of cleanliness which only French housewives understand, on the evening of November 15. Ere Marjorie had well alighted from her cab, an unforgotten figure rushed forth through wet and darkness to meet her, a pair of kind solid arms held her fast.
‘But you are tall—but you are fresh and vermeille!’ Mademoiselle Pouchée hurried the girl across the strip of pavement to the house. ‘I see no more the little Cendrillon of old days. Come, then, mère, leave thy kitchen. Come, that I may present thee to our future Girton girl.’
Madame Pouchée’s cheeks were swarthy as the olives of her native country. An ample checked apron was tied round her neat black dress. She wore the provincial linen head-dress of her youth. Genuine French people do not shake hands on every occasion of human life, and fifty English years had left Madame Pouchée a genuine Frenchwoman still. The old lady came forward, not with a hand outstretched, but with such natural courtesy, such charming welcome written on her Southern face as reminded Marjorie of Spain, and caused her somewhat flagging spirit to rally.
‘I feel six years old again, dear Pouchée.’ This she said when Mademoiselle had led her into the salon, a tiny panelled room where a table was cosily spread for a dinner of two before the fire. ‘Surely we had our lessons this morning! Surely I was wicked—when was I not wicked?—and you gave me a double row of spelling for my penitence.’
Throughout the evening a mysterious sense of having gone back to her childhood fell balmily on Marjorie’s heart. Madame Pouchée gave them a little dinner, as exquisitely cooked, I dare to say, as was any dinner in Trinity or Magdalen that night. For dessert were Tintajeux pears, of which a goodly hamper had come over as a present from the Seigneur. Their coffee was served in Sèvres cups, dislodged for the occasion from Madame Pouchée’s inlaid cabinet—the costliest ornament of the salon, brought with her in bridal days from Paris, when the nineteenth century was in its teens.
‘It is like a Tintajeux holiday,’ cried Marjorie, as she and Pouchée sat, hand clasped in hand, beside the fire. ‘Do you remember every 29th of May we used to eat our dinner under the big oak in honour, you said, of le martyr Protestant, Charles?’ The prayer-books in the Tintajeux family pew were of ancient date. Pouchée, honest creature, was wont to entangle herself among the various Stuart and Orange services, greatly to the Seigneur’s edification. ‘Ah, Pouchée, we are wiser now. We have learnt history from loftier historians than Lady Callcott. And I, for one, am not happier.’
‘Whenever I look at Tintajeux I see a small Marjorie with temper, with eyes, with a determined Spanish face—and whom I loved much. There are no figures in the picture. Still, whenever I look at Tintajeux——’
Mademoiselle Pouchée’s voluble tongue stopped abruptly.
‘No figures in the picture?’ Marjorie glanced round the empty walls. ‘And what picture are you talking of? Where is the photograph of the Manoir I sent you last Christmas?’
As she spoke Madame Pouchée entered, bearing a fresh-trimmed lamp—for this little household boasted of no parlour-maid. The old Frenchwoman lingered a while, her quick septuagenarian eyes watching the faces of her daughter and of their guest. She had caught Marjorie’s last words.
‘The photograph of Tintajeux Manoir? Why, it has been moved upstairs. It hangs in the salon of our gentleman, notre bon locataire—pas vrai, ma fille?’
Mademoiselle Pouchée put the interruption quietly aside.
‘Mère loses her memory. We must not always heed her,’ she observed to Marjorie, presently. ‘In bygone days, when the good papa was living, our family received undergraduates as lodgers. Mère has the old time in her heart still.’
‘Jesuitry, Pouchée! I remember your talents in that line. In bygone days, when the good papa was living, no photograph of Tintajeux Manoir existed.’
The remark was accompanied by a Bartrand look, as familiar, as smiting to poor Pouchée as though she and Marjorie had done battle over some delicate point of moral faithfulness that very morning.
‘There are accidents—contingencies—nay, times being hard, there is necessity. As well confess the truth. We do not take lodgers.’ Pouchée’s eyes dwelt fondly on the inlaid cabinet, the porcelain, the exquisite order of the little salon. ‘We are private citizens—rentières, living on our means.’
‘And there is no one in the house save yourselves?’
A flourish of Pouchée’s fingers hinted negation. ‘The old place is, in fact, two houses, as you will see by daylight. There are rooms at the back that can be entered by a flight of open-air steps—steps dating from the fourteenth century, ma mie.’
‘You promised me truth—not history, Mademoiselle.’
‘And by hazard—for the moment—we have a locataire. Not an undergraduate. We spare a room or two, on occasion, to some quiet gentleman—some resident M.A.—some student from the Art Schools. No undergraduate sets foot within our doors. We are not licensed.’
So keen a sense of distinction was conveyed by the italicised words that Marjorie forebore from further questioning. An hour later, however, when they were parting for the night in the fresh, chintz-draped attic which was the guest-chamber of the house, she ventured on a last surmise.
‘As we passed a certain baize door at the turning of the stairs I smelt the smell of a pipe. Our bon locataire must live somewhere in that neighbourhood, Mademoiselle—our quiet gentleman, who is not an undergraduate, and who has the photograph of Tintajeux Manoir on his walls?’
But Pouchée was blankly uncommunicative. The gentleman went in and out by the other staircase. Marjorie would neither see nor hear him during her stay in Cambridge. As to the photograph—it would certainly return to its place in the salon to-morrow morning.
‘If you are afraid of University ghosts,’ added the Frenchwoman, as she bade her guest a final good-night, ‘you will do wisely to bolt your door. Sleep well, ma mie, and dream that we are making cowslip balls, as we used a dozen years ago, in the woods of Tintajeux.’
The first five days of her Cambridge visit were resolutely spent by Marjorie in sight-seeing. It was well for her, she said, to come under the external influences of the Alma Mater, watch the cheerful flow of undergraduate life, look at Newnham and Girton from without, before delivering her letters of introduction.... It was well for her, while she still stood uncommitted to the future, to run a last forlorn chance of meeting the man she loved!
Here was the truth, unrecognised, perhaps, as truth, even in Marjorie Bartrand’s moments of sternest self-questioning. Day after day, however, slipped vainly by. A dozen times in each twenty-four hours her heart would leap, her pulses throb as men of Geoffrey’s height or build went past her in the crowded streets. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appeared not. She fell to quarrelling with herself over her own folly. Geoffrey might be at the other side of the world—married—contented: in every case must have learnt long ago to live his life, to do his work without her. Happily, there were reprisals....
On the morning of the sixth day she determined to put her sweetheart away from her remembrance for ever.
‘I have come to the end of my sight-seeing.’ This she told the Pouchées at breakfast. ‘I have heard a University sermon and the services at King’s and Trinity. We have visited Trumpington churchyard and the Backs. I have seen Milton’s tree and Gray’s fire-escape, and—and the Girton girls playing tennis. When I have gone over your house, Madame Pouchée, when I know what kind of rooms reading gentlemen inhabit, my experience will be complete.’
The speech fell from her idly. Small curiosity in the affairs of others was never a sin to be reckoned among the Bartrand qualities.
But Mademoiselle Pouchée’s manner gave it purpose. Mademoiselle changed colour, fidgeted with her coffee-spoon, contradicted herself. ‘The rooms were the plainest rooms in Cambridge. No knowing at what time our gentleman went out or might return. For herself, she seldom entered his part of the house, and——’
‘Pouchée,’ exclaimed Marjorie, the old spirit of contradiction taking possession of her, ‘there is a mystery about our excellent lodger which I mean to solve. You seldom enter his part of the house, you say? You were in his rooms last evening. I saw you enter through the baize door, as I have seen you do pretty often already. I heard your voice as you talked to him. Explain these things.’
‘Enfin! It would be better if the truth were told,’ said old Madame Pouchée in her own language. ‘Our gentleman is an enemy of the sex. What will you have! When he heard a young lady was coming to visit us——’
‘He offered, of free will, to go in and out by the other stairs,’ interrupted Pouchée, adroitly. ‘He showed the finest, most delicate consideration. Since that first evening when Marjorie perceived his pipe our gentleman has not smoked. He goes out early. He does not return until he is worn out with work—such work as his is, too—at night!’
‘Then it is impossible we can disturb him,’ exclaimed Marjorie, rising briskly from the table. ‘As a matter of architecture I am interested in the fourteenth-century stairs. The rooms they lead to must be equally curious. You need not chaperon me.’ She looked back at Pouchée across her shoulder. ‘I shall push back the mysterious red baize, and walk straight into Bluebeard’s chamber without knocking.’
And running up the stairs, she was about to put her threat into execution when Pouchée, by a dexterous flank movement, cut off her advance.
‘There may be a litter of papers. Grand ciel! there may be the bones, the skull.’ With her hands upon the lock, Mademoiselle Pouchée barred Marjorie’s progress by her own solid person; then, opening two inches of door, she peered in, cautiously. ‘No; we are in order. We have locked up our skeleton for once. You may enter, child—Barbe-bleu is not here to eat you.’
Marjorie Bartrand stopped short upon the threshold. Something in the meagrely furnished room, the piles of books, the small fireless grate, the absence of any pretence at decoration or cheerfulness, affected her strongly. She shrank from intruding, unbidden, on such valiantly borne poverty as was here in evidence before her.
‘And you have robbed him of Tintajeux Manoir!’ She glanced round at the bare, damp-stained walls. ‘Tintajeux at least gives one a notion of quick and wholesome air, of honest sunshine!’
‘Our gentleman robbed himself. When I told him the morning after your arrival that you had asked for it, he took the photograph from his wall with his own hand.’
‘And you can give him no other picture to fill its place?’
‘He has a magnifique picture here, facing the window. See,’ Pouchée adjusted herself into a favourable light with an air of connoisseurship, ‘a magnifique portrait, just a little mildewed, of King William the Fourth. The fur on his Majesty’s cloak has been the admiration of many artists. Come in, ma mie, entrez. What are you afraid of?’
And Marjorie entered. She looked for a few seconds at the time-stained mezzotint which, with its black frame, its cheap glass, seemed but to make the wall whereon it hung more sorrowfully ugly. Then she crossed to the room’s one window—a diamond leaded casement through whose small dulled panes the side view of a crowded alley, of the corner of a still more crowded churchyard, was attainable.
A ponderous book lay on a chair beside the window. Marjorie Bartrand lifted it.
‘Marjorie, I forbid you to touch a book! Our gentleman studies for medicine. Medical works are not for the perusal of young girls.’
‘The girl of the future peruses everything! Quain’s “Elements of Anatomy,”’ cried Marjorie, holding the volume as high out of Pouchée’s reach as its weight would allow. ‘I wonder whether our gentleman would lend it to us, if we asked him prettily? We might study our bones together, Pouchée. Who knows, in days to come, that I may not go for a Natural Science Tripos?’
And—with the book still held aloft—her nimble fingers found their way to the title-page. In the top right-hand corner was a name, written in characters she knew:
‘GEOFFREY ARBUTHNOT, JANUARY, 1880.’
For an instant Marjorie Bartrand turned ashen pale. Then as she recalled her position, as she realised that she had forced herself, unasked, into Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s room, the poor child crimsoned from throat to brow. She felt that the very soul within her had cause to blush over her temerity.
‘Let us come away this moment. I am taken by surprise—there has been some cruel mistake.’
The book almost fell out of her grasp. Swiftly as her limbs would carry her she made her way out of the room and down the stairs. Then, when they were safe again in the little salon, she caught Pouchée’s hand with passion.
‘I look to you, Mademoiselle, for an explanation,’ she cried with impetuous voice, with flaming eyes. ‘What right had you to conceal from me that Geoffrey Arbuthnot lived here?’
But Pouchée had the strength of conscious innocence. All further need of mystification was over now. Regarding their lodger as a shy recluse, an enemy of the sex, the two poor French ladies had striven with will to keep him and their visitor from meeting. This was the secret of their reticence, the sum of their offending. Mademoiselle Pouchée met Marjorie’s lightning glance calmly.
‘Mère and I had nothing to conceal. How could it have interested you to hear a stranger’s name?’
‘And you have never spoken of me in his presence?’
‘If we did, it was by hazard. Why should Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux be more than any other young lady to Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘Simply,’ returned Marjorie, closely watching Pouchée’s unmoved face,—‘simply because Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot had the picture of Tintajeux hanging on his walls.’
‘By hazard, also. He took a fancy to the photograph from the first day he came to lodge with us. It had a look of Scotland,—it recalled some place where he had known good times. And so, to give him pleasure, I said that while he lodged here, Tintajeux should hang above his chimney-piece.’
‘From whence it was unhung, by his own hand, to please the caprice of an unknown visitor. Mr. Arbuthnot is very generous!’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot,’ cried Pouchée, warming on the instant, ‘is the most noble-hearted man living. Yes, and I have travelled! I have had my experiences widened. I know my world. That he should work hard at the hospital or over his books, I comprehend. A high degree is at stake. Men have their ambition. Mr. Arbuthnot goes into courts and alleys, vile places, left alone by the police, and where priests or parsons might get their throats cut. He searches out the worst outcasts in Barnwell and Chesterton, only to serve them.’
‘Now—at this present time?’ stammered Marjorie, conscience-stricken.
‘Now, while you and I, mon enfant, have been sight-seeing. His last protégé,’ went on Pouchée, ‘is a miserable bargeman, one of the worst characters on the river. This man was struck over the head by some falling timber two or three weeks ago. He was too nearly gone, so his mates thought, to be carried to hospital, and our gentleman just saved his life. He has nursed him day and night since, as one of your great London doctors would nurse a Prince of the Blood. If Mr. Arbuthnot were of our religion I could understand it. I visit in Barnwell myself a very little.’
This was Pouchée’s account of her own charities. She visited in Barnwell a great deal. Beside fever-stricken, dying pallets, her acquaintance with Geoffrey Arbuthnot had first begun.
‘But we, Catholics, see in the poor our own sick soul. We hope, in saving them, to save ourselves.’
‘And Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’
‘He serves them, gives them his time, his money—what do I know! his heart—simply because they are castaway men and women. “Sisters and brothers in a queer disguise.” You should hear him say that, with his grave smile! It was to talk over some of the sisters and brothers, Marjorie, that I went to our gentleman’s rooms last night.’
‘Our gentleman ought to be a happy man,’ said Marjorie, with a sigh.
The Frenchwoman’s shoulders were sceptically expressive.
‘A hair-shirt is never worn for pleasure, child. It is not in nature that a man of six-and-twenty should care for other people’s lives more than for his own. Geoffrey Arbuthnot might have made a good servant of the Church,—an Ignatius Loyola, a Francis Xavier. But if one speaks about happiness—allez!’