For a while husband and wife sat together, discussing matters of common interest, the illness of the bishop, the condition of Ruth’s father, the possibility that before the winter set in she herself would be able to assume the duties in the sphere to which she had been called; and when at last he rose to go, she declared that every ill had vanished. When a woman loves a man, his mere presence is a tonic.
As Gonfallon descended the stair, however, his thoughts were not of his wife. The brougham which had stood before the rectory that afternoon had in departing carried his fancy afar. It had roamed in and out of the possibilities of that young man’s career, and it had not roamed with approval.
According to Jones, Trement Yarde was hardly such an one as a young girl should know. Among women he had the reputation of a freebooter; the men, Jones asserted, were more lenient. But, then, are not men always that? Provided their own family be secure from attack, at deeds of a certain kind they were apt to wink, and approvingly too. Moreover, though the young man had a number of zeros behind him, those zeros were fronted with figures. The house of Yarde and Co. was, with that of Usselex, foremost in the Street. Of course the men were lenient—and the women as well. Gonfallon was not a fool. He knew that everything, virtue, genius, beauty—everything can be talked away, but never wealth. He had not lived under the shadow of the Bleeckers for nothing. But now, as he descended the stair, even that was forgot. One thing was present with him—his antipathy to Yarde, and the warning he must give. That young man, he decided, might disport himself wheresoever he listed, but Claire he should not approach. And with this decision, to which, since his conversation with Ruth, he made certain the girl would concur, he entered the room where she sat.
Claire was lounging on one of those sofas in which the occupant can fall asleep without being preached to. At Gonfallon’s entrance she looked up, and a book which she held fell from her. Her head was on one cushion and her feet on another.
Leïlah swinging in a hammock in a garden of Ispahan was less clothed, perhaps, but not more indolent, than she. At sight of her he seemed to catch some echo of ghuzlas and cithars. From above the lamplight shuttled her curls. On one ankle which the negligent fold of her frock disclosed, glittered a gold thread, the clockwork of the stocking. As he approached there came to greet him the clean odor of acorns and of pines.
Suddenly the curtain must have claimed his attention, for for a moment he busied himself with it. Then he turned again to where she lay.
“Did you ride this morning?” he asked, and, without waiting for an answer, he added at once, “You don’t get this Indian summer over there, do you? H’m. Rather close, though, don’t you think? By the way,”—he had been talking at the wall, but now he looked at her—“by the way, Claire, whose trap was that at the door this afternoon? Rather neat, I thought.”
And Claire, with that inappositeness which constitutes one of the crimes which the law cannot reach, murmured from the tips of her lips, “I say, would you mind lowering that wick?”
Gonfallon did as he was bidden, adding, as he moved to the lamp, “That brougham, I mean. The man on the box had two pair of reins; I counted them.”
“Is Ruth coming down?”
“I think not. She is expecting McMasters. Whose affair did you say it was?”
“The brougham, you mean?—bottle-green, with yellow wheels? Yarde’s, I fancy.”
“Ah, yes—that young fellow that crossed in the steamer with you. I thought—h’m—however—Claire, do you know he is not at all the kind of a man for you to know? Someone happened to speak of him the other day. To oblige Ruth and myself, I wish the next time he calls you would send word you are not visible. You see—”
The girl interrupted him with a yawn: “It was that lamp over there I meant.” And as she spoke she covered her mouth with her hand.
“You see, Claire,” Gonfallon continued, after he had attended to her behest—“you see, while I presume that this young man is not in any way personally offensive, yet, er—well, he is not of a class that we care to have you associate with.”
“Ah?”
“Not of that class at all.”
Claire raised herself a little on the lounge and looked up at Gonfallon. “And what class is it that you prefer?” she asked.
“H’m. Well, Claire, this Mr. Yarde is notoriously a loose fish. It is unnecessary that I should particularize; but we prefer that you only see men whose intentions are honorable.”
Claire laughed. “There aren’t any,” she answered, and let her head fall back on the cushion.
III
For a moment Gonfallon stared, open-mouthed, astonished as a yokel at a thimble-rigger. And as Claire picked up the book which she had dropped at his entrance, he stood quite still, groping among the obscurities of her speech. But it was impossible, he told himself, that a girl so fragrant of innocence should wittingly make a remark as paradoxically unanswerable as was that. It was a mistake; he had not heard her words aright, or else she had uttered them as a child utters haphazard a phrase caught up and retained. But something in her attitude, the manner in which she turned the page, the carriage of her head, the abandonment of the body, the indiscretion of a foot uptilted on a cushion, the contraction of the underlip betokening a smile suppressed and suggestive of merriment aroused not by the book she held but by some picture which memory had just disclosed—these things, intercepted in a glance, revealed a Claire unknown and wholly undivined.
Noiselessly as he had entered he
