His hostess sent for the phenacetin, and Brockett gulped down a couple of tablets: “Valérie doesn’t love me any more,” he sighed, with a woebegone look at Stephen. “I do call it hard, but it’s always what happens when I introduce my best friends to each other—they foregather at once and leave me in the cold; but then, thank heaven, I’m very forgiving.”
They laughed and Valérie made him get on to the divan where he promptly lay down on the lute.
“Oh God!” he moaned, “now I’ve injured my spine—I’m so badly upholstered.” Then he started to strum on the one sound string of the lute.
Valérie went over to her untidy desk and began to write out a list of addresses: “These may be useful to you, Miss Gordon.”
“Stephen!” exclaimed Brockett, “Call the poor woman Stephen!”
“May I?”
Stephen acquiesced: “Yes, please do.”
“Very well then, I’m Valérie. Is that a bargain?”
“The bargain is sealed,” announced Brockett. With extraordinary skill he was managing to strum “O Sole Mio” on the single string, when he suddenly stopped: “I knew there was something—your fencing, Stephen, you’ve forgotten your fencing. We meant to ask Valérie for Buisson’s address; they say he’s the finest master in Europe.”
Valérie looked up: “Does Stephen fence, then?”
“Does she fence! She’s a marvellous, champion fencer.”
“He’s never seen me fence,” explained Stephen, “and I’m never likely to be a champion.”
“Don’t you believe her, she’s trying to be modest. I’ve heard that she fences quite as finely as she writes,” he insisted. And somehow Stephen felt touched, Brockett was trying to show off her talents.
Presently she offered him a lift in the car, but he shook his head: “No, thank you, dear one, I’m staying.” So she wished them goodbye; but as she left them she heard Brockett murmuring to Valérie Seymour, and she felt pretty sure that she caught her own name.
VI
“Well, what did you think of Miss Seymour?” inquired Puddle, when Stephen got back about twenty minutes later.
Stephen hesitated: “I’m not perfectly certain. She was very friendly, but I couldn’t help feeling that she liked me because she thought me—oh, well, because she thought me what I am, Puddle. But I may have been wrong—she was awfully friendly. Brockett was at his very worst though, poor devil! His environment seemed to go to his head.” She sank down wearily on to a chair: “Oh, Puddle, Puddle, it’s a hell of a business.”
Puddle nodded.
Then Stephen said rather abruptly: “All the same, we’re going to live here in Paris. We’re going to look at a house tomorrow, an old house with a garden in the Rue Jacob.”
For a moment Puddle hesitated, then she said: “There’s only one thing against it. Do you think you’ll ever be happy in a city? You’re so fond of the life that belongs to the country.”
Stephen shook her head: “That’s all past now, my dear; there’s no country for me away from Morton. But in Paris I might make some sort of a home, I could work here—and then of course there are people. …”
Something started to hammer in Puddle’s brain: “Like to like! Like to like! Like to like!” it hammered.
XXXII
I
Stephen bought the house in the Rue Jacob, because as she walked through the dim, grey archway that led from the street to the cobbled courtyard, and saw the deserted house standing before her, she knew at once that there she would live. This will happen sometimes, we instinctively feel in sympathy with certain dwellings.
The courtyard was sunny and surrounded by walls. On the right of this courtyard some iron gates led into the spacious, untidy garden, and woefully neglected though this garden had been, the trees that it still possessed were fine ones. A marble fountain long since choked with weeds, stood in the centre of what had been a lawn. In the farthest corner of the garden some hand had erected a semicircular temple, but that had been a long time ago, and now the temple was all but ruined.
The house itself would need endless repairs, but its rooms were of careful and restful proportions. A fine room with a window that opened on the garden, would be Stephen’s study; she could write there in quiet; on the other side of the stone-paved hall was a smaller but comfortable salle à manger; while past the stone staircase a little round room in a turret would be Puddle’s particular sanctum. Above there were bedrooms enough and to spare; there was also the space for a couple of bathrooms. The day after Stephen had seen this house, she had written agreeing to purchase.
Valérie rang up before leaving Paris to inquire how Stephen had liked the old house, and when she heard that she had actually bought it, she expressed herself as being delighted.
“We’ll be quite close neighbours now,” she remarked, “but I’m not going to bother you until you evince, not even when I get back in the autumn. I know you’ll be literally snowed under with workmen for months, you poor dear, I feel sorry for you. But when you can, do let me come and see you—meanwhile if I can help you at all. …” And she gave her address at St. Tropez.
And now for the first time since leaving Morton, Stephen turned her mind to the making of a home. Through Brockett she found a young architect who seemed anxious to carry out all her instructions. He was one of those very rare architects who refrain from thrusting their views on their clients. So into the ancient, deserted house in the Rue Jacob streamed an army of workmen, and they hammered and scraped and raised clouds of dust from early morning, all day until evening—smoking harsh caporal as they joked or quarrelled or idled or spat or hummed snatches of song. And amazingly
