The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

"Who are your mysterious lovers?" she asked, "are they French? Do I know them?"

"They are not in the least mysterious," Bulstrode assured her. "I never saw anything less complex and more simple. They are Americans."

She seemed now to understand that she was to hear of "one of Jimmy's adventures," as she called his dashes in other people's affairs.

"I hope, Jimmy, in this case, that you have pulled the affair off to your credit, and that if you have made a match the creatures will be grateful to you for once! And, by the way," she bethought; "whatever has happened to the pretty girl whom you were quixotic enough to think you had to marry?"

"The last time I saw her she appeared to be in the best of circumstances," Bulstrode answered cheerfully. "In point of fact – it was, singularly enough, to her engagement party that I went to-day!"

And Mrs. Falconer now showed real interest and feeling. "No! how delightful. So she is really off your hands, Jimmy. Well, that is too good to be true. There's one at least whom you don't have to marry, Jimmy!"

"Oh, they grow beautifully less," he agreed.

Mrs. Falconer smiled softly.

"They are narrowing down every year," Jimmy went on; "when I am about sixty the number will be reduced, I dare say, to the proper quantity."

"What a goose you are," she said jestingly. "What a tease and a bother you are, Jimmy Bulstrode; I'll find you a proper wife!"

He accepted warmly. "Do, do! I leave myself quite in your hands."

His companion extended him her hand as she spoke, and after lifting it to his lips, Bulstrode drew it through his arm. It was clothed in a glove of pale coffee-color suede. It was a soft, dear hand, and rested as if it were at home on Bulstrode's gray sleeve. Side by side the two friends walked slowly out toward the broader avenues leading to the canals. The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some drifting cloud, like dashes of foam. The trees about them lifted dark velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and flowers.

"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs. Falconer. "Isn't it too beautiful!"

"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys, and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.

THE THIRD ADVENTURE

III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June, Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in their own country – but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.

On the very first day he went over the Hôtel Montensier from grenier to caves, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the hôtel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked, "that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, mon cher, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why, your coat alone – the cut of it – " Montensier had laughed, "speaks of Poole with a Boston compromise!

The Duc had been in the United States – moreover, the Frenchman had plans of his own and he wanted very much to go to Newport and leave his house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode. Whether the Puritan in him led Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.

The Falconers were off somewhere en auto. He had thought they had gone through Spain. It was pretty hot to do such a thing, however, and he did not really know. He wanted very much to be able not to let himself follow them, and he knew that there was little chance of his reaching such stoicism unless he began by not finding out where they were going! So he shut himself up with the books which the library offered and gave many charming little dinners and parties on his terraces in the bland summer nights, and tried with all his might and main to forget the flight of a certain motor over the fair white roads and, above all, to nerve himself up to refuse an invitation for the middle of July.

Directly opposite the white façade of the Montensiers' hôtel was a hostelry for beggars, for domestics without places; for poor professors; for actors with no stages but the last; for laborers with no labor; in short, for the riff-raff of the population, for those who no longer hold the dignity of profession or pay rent for a term. Sometimes Bulstrode would look out at the tenement, whose windows in this season were wide open; and the general aspect indicated that dislocated fortunes flourished. In one window, pirouetting or dancing in it, calling out of it, leaning perilously over the sill of it, was a child – as far as Bulstrode could decide, a creature of about six years of age. She was too small to see much of, but all he saw was activity, gesticulation, and perpetual motion. When the day was hot she fanned herself with a bit of paper. She called far out to the wine-merchant's wife, who sat with her family before the shop while her pretty children played in the gutter.

In Paris, when the weather climbs to eighty, Parisians count themselves in the tropics and the people, who lived apparently out of doors altogether, wore a melted, disheartened air. But the De Montensier garden, full of roses and heliotrope, watered and refreshed by the fountains' delightful falling, was a retreat not to be surpassed by many suburbs. Bulstrode gave little dinners on the terrace; little suppers after the theatre, when rooms and garden were lighted with fairy lanterns, and his chef outdid his traditions to please his American master.

One day as the American sat smoking on the terrace with nothing more disturbing than the drip of the fountain and the remote murmur of Paris to break his reverie, Prosper, his confidential man, made a tentative appearance.

"Would m'sieu, who is so good, see a young lady?"

His master smiled as he rose, instinctively at the words "jeune demoiselle," throwing away his cigar.

"Pardon, m'sieu, I thought it might amuse m'sieu – " and Prosper stepped back.

Bulstrode had been intently thinking of the caravansary opposite him, and he now saw that part of the hôtel meublé had come across the street; he recognized it immediately for the smallest part. Before him stood the ridiculous and pathetic figure of a dirty little girl in rags, tatters, and furbelows, her legs clad in red silk stockings evidently intended for fuller, shapelier limbs; her feet slipped about in pattens. She had on a woman's bodice, a long flounced skirt pinned up to keep her from tripping. Her head was adorned by a torn straw hat, also contrived and created for the coquetry of maturity.

"Monsieur is so good," she began in a flute-like voice. "I have come to thank monsieur with all my heart."

Bulstrode looked toward Prosper for enlightenment, but that individual had cleverly disappeared.

"To thank me, my child? But for what?"

"Why, for the eggs and butter and sugar that monsieur was so good as to send me. I have made the cake. It is beautiful! Monsieur le cuisinier of this house baked it for me. It is perhaps a little flat – but that was because I got tired stirring. See – it says – " She had, so he now saw, a book under her arm; letting fall a fold of her cumbersome dress with both hands and opening a filthy cook-book, she laid it on the table, bending over it. "It says stir briskly half an hour." (Her "rs" rolled in her throat like tiny cannons in a rosy hollow.) "Quelle idée! It was too stupid! Half an hour! I just mixed it round once or twice and then – voila! it has white on the top and shall have a candle."

"So you've made a cake?" he said kindly. "I'm sure it's a good one."

She nodded brightly. "It is for that I came to thank monsieur and to ask if he would accept a piece of it."

Poor Bulstrode, with dreadful suspicion, looked to see part of the horror immediately offered for his degustation. "I don't, my dear, understand. Why should you thank me– what had I to do with it?"

Her gesture was delightful. "But for monsieur it would not exist; for butter, eggs, and flour. Monsieur Prosper, when he gave them, said it was of the kindness of 'Monsieur Balstro.'"

(Oh, Prosper! "I have corrupted him," his master thought. "He is as bad as I am!")

"Well, I'm very glad indeed," and he said it heartily. "But what did you especially want to make it for – with the one candle? That means one year old. Who's birthday may it then be?"

"It is the birthday of maman." She shut the book, and as she did so raised her great black eyes, which dirt and neglect could not spoil. There was in her appearance so little suggestion of maternal care that Bulstrode nearly incredulously asked, "Your mother? And what, then, does your mother do?"

"She's a fish," informed the child tranquilly. And Bulstrode, although startled, could believe it. It too perfectly accounted for the cold-blooded indifference to this offspring. Not even a mermaid could have been guilty of so little care for her child. Still, he repeated:

"A fish?"

"Oui, a devil-fish in the aquarium at Bostock's. Oh, que c'est beau!" she clasped her little hands. "Maman wears a costume of red – quite a small, thin dress," she described eagerly. "And it is all spangles, like fire when she dives into the water. I have been; the waiter at the café downstairs took me. I screamed. I thought maman was drowned. But no – she comes up always!" The child threw her head back and lifted her eyes in ecstasy. "C'est magnifique!"

"What is your mother's name?"

"Mademoiselle Lascaze."

"And yours?"

"Simone."

"What do you do all day, Simone?"

"I wash and cook and sew and play – I have much to do – oh, much." She assumed an important air. "The bad air of the room makes maman ill, so she's out – 'to breathe,' she says – and she locks me safely in. I play Bostock and dive like maman. And sometimes" – she lowered her voice, and looking back to see if they were alone – confided, "I cry."

"Ah!" sympathized Bulstrode.

"But, yes," she insisted, "when maman forgets to come home, and the night is so black; then the seamstress next door knocks on the wall, and I knock back for company."