British -- France -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Epistolary fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
I couldn’t help thinking some odd thoughts as I looked at one little
panel of a stained window over my head. It showed a kneeling girlish
figure, in white, with long yellow hair. On her right was a Bishop,
coped and mitred, extending his hand; and on her left was a loutish
leering fellow with a steel cap and a sword. I’m not ecclesiologist
enough to know what it was all about. Possibly it meant the Soul being
strengthened by the Sacraments against the onslaughts of the World.
More probably it was in praise of some virgin martyr. But the odd thing
was that if the yellow-haired, rather insipid damsel had had more colour
in her cheeks she would have been the image of Susan. The
large-mouthed, large-eared, large-limbed brute who was tempting or
threatening her was not wholly unlike the cur at the Cheval d’Or. Most
amazing and haunting of all, the Bishop, with his youthful, keen,
honest, manly, wholesome, clean-shaven face, was simply a coped and
mitred--Gibson!
Here they are, bringing the coffee in cups! Never mind. On Tuesday I
shall be drinking it with a big Normandy soup-spoon out of a little
Normandy bowl.
_Noon_.
He has tracked us down.
Coming away from High Mass at St. Rémi, we walked slap into him in the
Grande Rue.
I could have boxed Susan’s ears for her ridiculous goings-on. Such
flushings and flutterings and scurryings can’t possibly have been seen
in the town before. Yet, as we came back to the Astor by the zigzaggest
route I could find, she positively turned her head twice. Of course he
was following.
I’m quite prepared to find he’s secured the next table to mine for
lunch.
What worries me isn’t so much to-day’s meetings. It’s to-morrow’s. If
we can’t dodge him at Dieppe, how shall we manage at Sainte Véronique?
Then there’s my ridiculous promise to our poor young Bishop Gibson.
I’m forced to acknowledge that Alice is right. I’m neither old enough
nor wise enough to keep up Traxelby and go travelling abroad with no
companion save Susan. It looks strange, and it doesn’t work.
If this creature is indeed Lord Ruddington, I don’t trust him to deal
honestly by Susan. In that case, Gibson is just the man for the job.
Once let me be sure that it’s Ruddington and Gibson shall have his
telegram within half an hour.
_Half-past three_.
I’ve laughed and I’ve cried.
To think that all last night and all this morning I fully believed we
were deep in Act III. of a tragedy (Act I.: Miss Langley’s Boudoir at
Traxelby Grange. Act II.: The Grange Garden); and that when I walked
into the _salle-à-manger_ for _déjeuner_ and saw the Brute in Grey at a
corner table, my mind was so prepared for an ultimate Act V., that the
only uncertainty was as to whether Gibson would do it with a revolver or
with a knife!
It isn’t Act III., and there isn’t any tragedy. It turns out to be
merely the comic relief of a melodrama.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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