By that date, gradually, she had learned that he was Mark Tietjens of Groby, an immense estate somewhere in the North. He employed himself at an Office of the Government’s in Whitehall—apparently with questions of railways. She gathered, chiefly from ejaculations of the Messenger, that he treated his Ministry with contempt, but was regarded as so indispensable that he never lost his post. Occasionally, the Office would ring up and ask her if she knew where he was. She would gather from the papers afterwards that that was because there had been a great railway accident. On those occasions he would have been absent at a race-meeting. He gave the Office, in fact, just as much of his time as he chose, no more and no less. She gathered that, with his overpowering wealth, it was of no account to him except as an occupation of leisure time between meetings, and she gathered that he was regarded as an occult power amongst the rulers of the nation. Once, during the war when he had hurt his hand, he dictated to her a note of a confidential nature to one of the Cabinet Ministers. It had concerned itself with Transport and its tone had been that of singular, polite contempt.
For her he was in no way astonishing. He was the English Milor with le Spleen. She had read of him in the novels of Alexander Dumas, Paul de Kock, Eugene Sue and Ponson du Terrail. He represented the England that the Continent applauded—the only England that the Continent applauded. Silent, obstinate, inscrutable, insolent but immensely wealthy and uncontrollably generous. For herself, elle ne demandait pas mieux. For there was about him nothing of the unexpected. He was as regular as the Westminster Chimes; he never exacted the unexpected of her and he was all-powerful and never in the wrong. He was, in short, what her countrywomen called sérieux. No Frenchwoman asks better than that of lover or husband. It was the serious collage par excellence: they as a ménage, were sober, honest, frugal, industrious, immensely wealthy, and seriously saving. For his dinner, twice a week, she cooked him herself two mutton chops with all but an eighth of an inch of the fat pared off, two mealy potatoes, as light and as white as flour, an apple-pie with a very flaky crust which he ate with a wedge of Stilton and some pulled bread and butter. This dinner was never varied once in twenty years, except during the season of game, when on alternate weeks a pheasant, a brace of grouse or of partridges would come from Groby. Nor in the twenty years had they once been separated for a whole week except that every late summer he spent a month at Harrogate. She always had his dress-shirts washed for him by her own laundress in the Quartier. He spent almost every weekend in one country house or another, using at most two dress-shirts and that only if he stayed till Tuesday. English people of good class do not dress for dinner on Sundays. That is a politeness to God, because theoretically you attend evening service and you do not go to church in the country in evening dress. As a matter of fact you never go to evening service—but it is complimentary to suggest by your dress that you might be visited by the impulse. So, at least, Marie Léonie Tietjens understood the affair.
She was looking out on the Common that sloped up to beech trees, at the poultry—bright chestnut birds, extremely busy on the intense green of the browsed grass. The great rooster reminded her of the late Monsieur Rodin, the sculptor who had conspired against Casimir-Bar. She had once seen him in his studio, conducting some American ladies round his work, and he had precisely resembled a rooster kicking its leg back and drooping its wings in the dust round a new hen. Only round a new one. Naturally! … This rooster was a tremendous Frenchman. Un vrai de la vraie. You could imagine nothing more unlike Christopher Tietjens! … The backward-raking legs on the dancing toes; the gait of a true master of deportment at an academy of young ladies! The vigilant clear eye cocking up every minute. … Hark! A swift shadow ran over the ground: the sparrow-hawk! The loud, piercing croon of that Father of his Country. How the hens all reechoed it; how the chickens ran to their mothers and all together to the shadow of the hedge. Monsieur, the hawk would have no chance amidst that outcry. The hawk flits silent and detests noise. It will bring the poultry-keeper with his gun! … All is discovered because of the vigilance of Milord Chantecler. … There are those who reprove him because his eyes are always on the sky, because he has a proud head. But that is his function—that and gallantry. Perceive him with a grain of corn; how he flies upon it; how he invites with cries! His favourite—the newest—hens run clucking joyously to him. How he bows, droops and prances, holding the grain of corn in his powerful bill, depositing it, pecking to bruise it and then depositing it before his sultana of the moment. Nor will he complain if a little ball of fluff runs quickly and pecks the grain from his bill before Madame Partlet can take it from him. His gallantry has been wasted, but he is a good father! … Perhaps there is not even a grain of corn when he issues his invitations; perhaps he merely calls his favourites to him that he may receive their praise or perform the act of Love. …
He is then the man that a woman desires to have vouchsafed her. When he smites his wing feathers behind his back and utters his clarion cry of victory over the
