The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

"Oh, yes!"

She was weeping more quietly now.

"Please leave me: please go, Mr. Bulstrode."

"A trouble with which I have had anything to do?"

She waited a long time, then faintly breathed:

"Yes."

The hand he firmly held was gloveless and cold – before he could say anything further she drew it away from him and cried:

"Oh, I ought never to have let you guess! You were so good and kind, you meant to help me so, but it's been the worst help of all, only you couldn't know that," she pleaded for him. "Please forgive me if I seem ungrateful, but if I had known that I was going to suffer like this I would have wished never to see you in the world."

Bulstrode was trying to speak, but she wouldn't let him:

"I never can see you again. Never! You mustn't come any more."

But here she half caught her breath and sobbed with what seemed naïve and adorable daring:

"Unless you can help me through, Mr. Bulstrode – it is your fault, after all."

If this were a virtual throwing of herself into his arms, they were all but open to her and the generous heart was all but ready "to see her through." Bulstrode was about to do, and say, the one rash and irrevocable perfect thing when at this minute fate again at the ring of the curtain opportuned. The tap, tapping, of a pony's feet was heard and a gay little cart came brightly along. Bulstrode saw it. He sprang to his feet. It was close upon them.

"You will let me come to-morrow?" he asked eagerly,

"Oh, yes," she whispered; "yes, I shall count on you. I beg you will come."

"Jimmy," said the lady severely as he accepted her invitation to get into the cart, "this is the second wicked rendezvous I have interrupted. I didn't know you were anything like this, and I've seen that girl before, but I can't remember where."

"Don't try," said Bulstrode.

"And she was crying. Of course you made her cry."

"Well," said Bulstrode desperately, "if I did, it's the first woman that has ever cried for me."

As the reason why Bulstrode had never married was again in Paris, he went up in the late afternoon to see her.

The train of visitors who showed their appreciation of her by thronging her doors had been turned away, but Bulstrode was admitted. The man told him, "Mrs. Falconer will see you, sir," by which he had the agreeably flattered feeling that she would see nobody else.

When he was opposite her the room at once dwindled, contracted, as invariably did every place in which they found themselves together, into one small circle containing himself and one woman. Mrs. Falconer said at once to Bulstrode:

"Jimmy, you're in trouble – in one of your quandaries. What useless good have you been doing, and who has been sharper than a serpent's tooth to you?"

Bulstrode's late companionship with youth had imparted to him a boyish look. His friend narrowly observed him, and her charming face clouded with one of those almost imperceptible nuances that the faces of those women wear who feel everything and by habit reveal nothing.

"I'm not a victim." Bulstrode's tone was regretful. "One might say, on the contrary, this time that I was possibly overpaid."

"Yes?"

"I haven't," he explained and regretted, "seen you for a long time."

"I've been automobiling in Touraine." Mrs. Falconer gave him no opportunity to be delinquent.

"And I," he confessed, "have been posing for my portrait. Don't," he pleaded, "laugh at me – it isn't for a miniature or a locket; it's life-size, horribly life-size. I've had to stand, off and on with the rests, three hours a day, and I've done so every day for three weeks."

Mrs. Falconer regarded him with indulgent amusement.

"It's your fault – you took me to see those awful school-girl paintings and pointed out that poor young creature to me." And he was interrupted by her exclamation:

"Oh, how dear of you, Jimmy! how sweet and kind and ridiculous! It won't be fit to be seen."

"Oh, never mind that," he waved; "no one need see it. I haven't – she won't let me."

He had accepted a cup of tea from the lady's hand; he drank it off and sat down, holding the empty cup as if he held his fate.

"Tell me," she urged, "all about it. It was just like you – any other man would have found means to show charity, but you have shown unselfish goodness, and that's the rarest thing in the world. Fancy posing every day! How ghastly and how wonderful of you!"

"No," he said slowly, "it wasn't any of these things. I wanted to do it. It amused me at first, you see. But now I am a little annoyed – rather bothered to tell the truth – He met her eyes with almost an appeal in his. Mrs. Falconer was in kindness bound to help him.

"Bothered? How, pray? With what part of it? You're not chivalrous about it, are you? You're not by the way of feeling that you have compromised her by posing?"

"Oh, no, no," he hurried; "but I do feel, and I am frank to acknowledge, that it was a mistake. Because – do you know – that for some absurd reason I am afraid she has become fond of me." He blushed like a boy. Mrs. Falconer said coldly:

"Yes? Well, what of it?"

"This – " Bulstrode's voice was quiet and determined – "if I am right I shall marry her."

Mrs. Falconer had the advantage over most women of completely understanding the man with whom she dealt. She knew that to attempt to turn from its just and generous source any intent of Mr. Bulstrode would have been as futile as to attempt to turn a river from its parent fountain.

"You're quixotic, I know, but you're not demented, and you won't certainly marry this nobody – whose fancies or love-affairs have not the least importance. You won't ever see her again unless you are in love with her yourself."

Bulstrode interrupted her hastily:

"Oh, yes, I shall."

He got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs. Falconer's trim little garden. A couple of iron chairs and a table stood under the trees. Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease. Beyond the iron rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears. Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:

"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."

"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."

As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have grown darker and she to sit in the shadow. She leaned toward him, laughing:

"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we have so often planned together."

Bulstrode stood looking down on her.