“Have you heard from Aunt Isabel?” she asked. “Albert had a cable from Belle this noon. She was married yesterday to Billy Winter.” Her blue eyes, meeting Jane’s, were twinkling with tranquil amusement. “She wouldn’t let me get ahead of her! But isn’t it nice?”
The clergyman had returned. His vested figure looked strangely out of place in Flora’s drawing-room.
“Come, Dad!” cried Cicily. “You know your place by this time!”
The little company had gathered in an informal semicircle. Stephen looked very grim as he took his stand by Cicily. Ed Brown was beaming, in step-paternal solicitude, at the ardent young face of Albert. Robin Redbreast was clinging to Molly’s hand. Jane moved to put her arms around the twins. Little John Ward smiled happily up at her. André was covertly watching her, all the time, from his stand between Flora and Muriel. The Church of England clergyman opened his prayer book.
“Dearly beloved brethren,” he said, “we are met together in the sight of God and this company to join together this man and this woman—”
Jane turned her eyes from the flushed and radiant face of her recalcitrant daughter. She would not look at it. She could not look at it. This was worse than any wedding. This was worse than all the weddings. The measured tones of the clergyman’s voice recalled with frightful vividness the ceremony in her little Lakewood garden. Was she the only wedding guest, Jane wondered dumbly, that saw so plainly the pleasant, snub-nosed, twinkle-eyed ghost of Jack, standing at Cicily’s side?
IX
“I didn’t think you’d come,” said Jane.
“Of course I came,” said André.
They were sitting side by side in a taxi that was rolling down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Half an hour before Jane had seen Cicily depart for her honeymoon with Albert Lancaster. The parting with the children had been painfully emotional. Cicily herself had been very much moved. Little Jane had wept, and John had clung to his mother, and Robin Redbreast had tried to run after her as she paused on Albert’s arm, in the doorway of Flora’s apartment, to toss one last tremulous kiss to Jane.
“Well—that’s over!” Stephen had said, when she had vanished. Personally Jane felt that it had just begun. The summer stretched before her with the children to watch over—the autumn with its inevitable parting—the years ahead with their adjustments and compromises. Then André had spoken.
“Are you really going tomorrow?” he had asked.
Jane had nodded.
“Then won’t you come back with me, now, to my studio? I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, go, Jane!” Flora had cried. “André’s studio is awfully interesting.”
“I think,” Jane had said rather slowly, “I’d better go back to the Chatham with Stephen. The children are dining with us, so Molly can pack.”
“Won’t Stephen come, too?” said André, a little hesitantly.
“No,” said Stephen abruptly. “I—I think I’d like to he with the kids. But why don’t you go, Jane?”
And André had picked up his hat. That was how Jane had come to be with him in the taxi. She was still trying to realize that he was really himself. It was a great waste of André, she reflected, to have to meet him after thirty-four years at Cicily’s wedding. Her thoughts were with the grandchildren. It was hard to concentrate on André, after all she had just been through. Perhaps at fifty-one, however, it would always be hard to concentrate on any man. At fifty-one, you were perpetually torn by conflicting preoccupations. Meeting André’s gaze with a smile, Jane observed, a trifle whimsically, that he, at least, had achieved concentration. His wise, sophisticated brown eyes were bent earnestly upon her.
“You didn’t really think I wouldn’t come, did you?” said André.
“I didn’t know,” said Jane. Then added honestly, “I didn’t want to hope too much that you would.”
“Why not?” smiled André.
“For fear of being disappointed,” said Jane promptly. “I like to keep my illusions.”
“Am I one of your illusions, Jane?” asked André, with a twinkle.
“You always have been,” said Jane soberly.
André laughed at that. “The same honest Jane!” he said, as the taxi drew up at the curbing.
As André paid the cabman, Jane stood on the sidewalk and wondered where she was. She stared up at the grey stone façade of the building before her. She had not noticed where the taxi was going. It had crossed the Seine. That was all she knew. She felt a pleasing little sense of adventure as she followed André through some iron gates, across the corner of a crumbling courtyard, and in a tall carved doorway that opened on the court. A curved stone stairway stretched before her, leading up into comparative darkness. Jane’s sense of adventure deepened.
“It’s three flights up,” said André, “and there is no lift.”
Jane tried not to catch her breath too audibly as she plodded up the stairs, her hand on the iron rail. Her sense of adventure had faded a little. How ignominious, she was thinking, how fifty-one, to have to puff and pant on a staircase at André’s side! On the third landing he unlocked a door.
“Come in,” he said.
Jane found herself in a large light whitewashed room, the walls of which were hung with charcoal sketches and lined with bronze and plaster and marble figures. A frame platform occupied the centre of the floor. On it were placed a high stool, a box of sculptor’s tools, and a tall ambiguous form that was draped in a white cloth. A grand piano stood in one corner. Near it were clustered a divan, two comfortable armchairs, and a tea-table. Above them a great square window looked out over the rounded tops of an avenue of horse-chestnuts, down a curving vista of narrow grey street to the Gothic portico of a little hunchbacked church. One of the tourist-free, nameless old churches, Jane thought, that you always meant to visit in Paris and never did!
“Well, how do you like it?”
