When I arrived at Melford my head was full of painting and self-importance; and for the first week or so, Mrs. Rushworth, my subject, occupied the centre of my stage. She was a placid lady of sixty, whose hair, once golden, had turned a flossy white, and whose apple cheeks, though still retaining their plumpness, had grown waxen and were criss-crossed by innumerable tiny lines. The light blue of her eyes had faded, and the rich redness of her lips had turned to faint coral. One could trace how Time had day by day touched her with light but unfaltering fingers, now abstracting a fleck of brightness, now lowering by an imperceptible shade a tone of colour, until she had become what I saw her, still the pink and white beauty, but with rose all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a panel of Puvis de Chavannes.

My young head, I say, was full of the masterpiece I was about to execute, and though I found much joy in renewed intercourse with my beloved lady and my master, I took no particular note of their relations. We met at meals, sometimes in the afternoons, and always of evenings, when I played dutiful piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while Joanna made music on the piano, and Paragot read Jane Austen in an arm-chair by the fire. To me the quietude of the secluded English home had an undefinable charm like the smell of lavender, for which I have always had a cat-like affection. Not having the Bohemian temperament—I am now the most smugly comfortable painter in Europe—I was perfectly happy. I took no thought of Paragot, whose temperament was essentially Bohemian; and how he enjoyed the gentle monotony of the days it did not occur to me to consider. Outwardly he shewed no sign of impatience. A dean might have taken him as a model of decorum, and when he drove of afternoons with Joanna in the dog-cart, no dyspeptic bishop could have assumed his air of grim urbanity. But after a while I realised that the old Paragot still smouldered within him; and now and then it burst into unregenerate flame.

Mrs. Rushworth had inherited from her father an old Georgian Bath-stone house at the end of the High Street of Melford. He had been the Duke of Wiltshire's agent and a person of note in the town. Mrs. Rushworth also was a person of note, and her beautiful daughter, the Countess, a lady of fortune, became a person of greater note still. Now on Tuesday afternoons Mrs. Rushworth was "at home." We saw a vast deal of Society, ladies of county families, parsons' wives, doctors' wives and the female belongings of the gentlemen farmers round about. There were also a stray hunting man, a curate or two and Major Walters. The callers sat about the drawing room in little groups drinking tea and discoursing on unimportant and unintelligible matters, and seemed oddly shy of Paragot and myself, whom Joanna always introduced most graciously. They preferred to talk among themselves. I considered them impolite, which no doubt they were; but I have since reflected that Paragot was an unusual guest at an English country tea-party, and if there is one thing more than another that an English country tea-party resents, it is the unusual. I am sure that a square muffin would be considered an indelicacy. On the second of these Tuesday gatherings which I was privileged to attend, Joanna presented me to two well-favoured young women, the daughters, I gathered, of people who had country places near by.

"Mr. Pradel is the artist from Paris who is painting mamma's portrait," she explained.

I bowed and remarked that I was enchanted to make their acquaintance. They stared. I know now that this Gallic mode of address is not usual in Melford. One young woman, recovering from the shock, said she would like to be an artist. The other asked me whether I had been to the Academy. I said, no. I lived in Paris. Then had I been to the Salon?

"At Janot's," said I, with the idiot egregiousness of youth, "we don't go to the Salon."

"Why?" asked the first, looking across the room, apparently at a curate.

"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."

"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me (as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my observation.

"No," said I.

"Shoot?"

"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard Saint-Michel."

"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"

"Paris," said I.

"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient hosts—pale shades of Acheron—who have angled off the quays of the Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook my head.

"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."

"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."

"At Christmas."

"What is he like?"

The hitherto unspeculative eyes of the young woman lit up; an answering gleam awoke in the other's. Myra Brown and her engagement absorbed their attention, and I slunk back in my chair, forgotten. I suffered agonies of shyness. I disliked these foolish virgins and longed to flee from them; but how to rise and make my escape, without rudeness, passed my powers of invention. I looked around me. At the tea-table on the farther side of the room stood Joanna and Major Walters. He was a tall soldierly man with a blond moustache and fair hair thinning on the crown. There are about two thousand like him at the present moment on the active and retired list of the British Army. He seemed to be talking earnestly to her, for her eyes were fixed on the point of her shoe, which she moved slightly, from side to side. Presently she flashed a glance at him somewhat angrily and her lips moved as though she said:—

"What right have you to speak like that?"

He made the Englishman's awkward paraphrase of the shrug, looked swiftly over at Paragot, and turned to her with a remark. Then for the first time since the Comte de Verneuil's death, the glacier blue came into her eyes. She said something. He executed a little stiff bow and walked away. Joanna, bearing herself very haughtily, crossed the room with a cup of tea for a new arrival.

Paragot, gaunt and tight-buttoned in his famous frock coat—he had donned it for the ceremonious afternoon, but Joanna (I think) had suppressed the purple cravat with the yellow spots—was talking to an elderly and bony female owning a great beak of a nose. I wondered how so unprepossessing a person could be admitted into a refined assembly, but I learned later that she was Lady Molyneux, one of the Great Personages of the county. The lady seemed to be emphatic; so did Paragot. She regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes. He waved his hands; she raised her eyebrows. She was one of those women whose eyebrows in the normal state are about three inches from the eyelids. I understood then what superciliousness meant. Paragot raised his voice. At that moment one of those strange coincidences occurred in which the ends of all casual conversations fell together, and a shaft of silence sped through the room, killing all sound save that of Paragot's utterance.

"But Great Heavens, Madam, babies don't grow in the cabbage patch, and you are all well aware they don't, and it's criminal of your English writers to mislead the young as to the facts of existence. Charlotte Yonge is infinitely more immoral than Guy de Maupassant."

Then Paragot realized the dead stillness. He rose from his chair, looked around at the shocked faces of the women and curates, and laughing turned to Mrs. Rushworth.

"I was stating Zola to be a great ethical teacher, and Lady Molyneux seemed disinclined to believe me."

"He is an author very little read in Melford," said the placid lady from her sofa cushions, while the two or three women with whom she was in converse gazed disapprovingly at my master.

"It would do the town good if it were steeped in his writings," said he.

As this was at a period when like hell you could not mention the name of Zola to ears polite, no one ventured to argue the matter. Mrs. Rushworth's plump faded lips quivered helplessly, and it was with a gush of gratitude that she seized the hand of one of the ladies who rose to take her leave, and save the situation. The little spell of shock was broken. Groups resumed their mysterious conversations, and Paragot swung to the hearth-rug and stood there in solitary defiance. I seized the opportunity to escape from my two damsels. As I passed Lady Molyneux, she turned to her neighbour.

"What a dreadful man!" she said. "I entirely disapprove of Mrs. Rushworth having such persons in her house."

I could have wept with rage. Here was this turtle-brained, ugly woman (so, in my presumption, I called her) daring to speak slightingly of my beloved master who had condescended to speak out of his Olympian wisdom, and no fire from Zeus shrivelled her up! She signified her disapproval with the air of a law-giver, and the other woman acquiesced. I longed to flame into defence of Paragot; but remembering how ill I fared on a similar occasion when a member of the Lotus Club accused him of having led a bear in Warsaw, I wisely held my peace. But I was very angry.

I joined Paragot on the hearth-rug. Presently Joanna came with her silvery laugh.

"You mustn't be so dreadfully emphatic, Gaston," she said.

"Unintelligent women must not lay down the law on matters they don't understand," said Paragot.

"But it was Lady Molyneux."

"Which signifies?"

"The sovereign lady of Melford."

"God help Melford!" ejaculated my master.

When the ladies had left us that evening after dinner, Paragot poured out a glass of port and pushed the decanter across to me.

"My son," said he, "as a philosopher and a citizen of the world you will find Melford repay patient study as much as ChambÉry or Buda-Pesth or the Latin Quarter. It is a garden of Lilliput. Here you will see Life in its most cultivated littleness. A great passion bursting out across the way would convulse the town like an earthquake. Observe at the same time how constant a factor is human nature. However variable the manifestation may be, the degree is invariable. In spacious conditions it manifests itself in passions, in narrow ones in prejudices. The females in and out of petticoats who were here this afternoon experience the same thrill in expressing their dislike of me as a person foreign to their convention, as the Sicilian who plunges his dagger into a rival's bosom. When I am married, my son, I shall not live at Melford."

"Where do you propose to live, Master?" I enquired.

He made a great gesture and drew a deep breath.

"On the Continent of Europe," said he, as if even a particular country were too cabined to satisfy his nostalgia for wide spaces. "I must have room, my son, for the development of my genius. I must dream great things, and immortal visions are blasted under the basilisk eye of Lady Molyneux."

"She is a vieille pimbÊche!" I cried.

"She is the curse of England," said Paragot.

After this it occurred to me that I might take more note of Melford and its ways than I had done hitherto, and the more I observed it the less did it appear to resemble either Eden or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At times I felt dull. I would lean over the parapet of the bridge at the other end of the High Street, and watch the tower and decorated spire of the old parish church rise from the gold and russet bosom of the church-yard elms, and wish I were back on the Pont Neuf with the tumultuous life of Paris around me. There was a lack of breeziness in the social air of Melford.

Meanwhile Paragot and Joanna continued the romance of long ago. They walked together in the garden like lovers, his arm around her waist, her delicate head lightly leaning on his shoulder. Once when I made my presence known, he withdrew his arm, but Joanna laughingly replaced it.

"What does it matter? Asticot is in our confidence," she remarked. "Isn't he going to be your best man? You will bring him over for the wedding, Gaston."

"You cling to the idea of being married in Melford?" he asked.

"Of course."

"By that dry, grey-whiskered gentleman who treats me as if I were a youth he would like to prepare for confirmation? And all these dreadful people to look on? My dear, doesn't the thought of it chill you into the corpse of a Melfordian?"

"I should have imagined that so long as we were married the 'how' would not matter to you."

"Quite so," said he. "Why does the 'how' matter so much to you?"

"It is different," said Joanna. "It is right for me to be married here."

"We must do what is right at all costs," assented my master in an ironical note, which she was quick to detect. She swerved from his encircling arm.

"You would not be married under a bush like a beggar?" she quoted.

"I wish to heaven I could!" he exclaimed with sudden spirit. "It is the only way of mating. I would take you to a little village I know of in the Vosges, overhanging a precipice, with God's mountains and sky above us, and not a schedule of regulations for human conduct within thirty miles, and Monsieur le Maire would tie his tricolor scarf around him and marry us, and we would go away arm in arm and the cow-bells overhead would ring the wedding peal, and there would be just you and I and the universe."

"We'll compromise," said Joanna, smiling. "We'll spend our honeymoon in your village in the Vosges after we are well and duly and respectably married in Melford. Don't you think I am reasonable, Asticot?"

"My dear Joanna," said Paragot, "you have infatuated this boy to such an extent that he would agree with you in anything. Of course he will say that the Reverend and respectable Mr. Hawkfield is better than the picturesque Monsieur le Maire, and that a wedding cake from Gunter's is preferable to the curdled cheese of Valdeauvau. He would perjure his little soul to atoms for your sake."

"I thought somebody else would too," whispered Joanna softly.

Paragot yielded as he looked down at her sea-shell face.

"So he would. For your sake he would go through Hell and the Church of England service for the Solemnization of Matrimony."

We were walking round and round the broad gravel path that enclosed the tennis lawn. Land was cheap in the days when the Georgian houses of the High Street were built, and people took as much for garden purposes as they desired. The gardens were the only truly spacious things in Melford. There was a long silence. The lovers seemed to have forgotten my existence. Presently Joanna spoke.

"You must remember that I am still a member of the Church of England, and look at the religious side of marriage. It would be very pretty to be married by Monsieur le Maire, but I could not reconcile it to my conscience. So when you speak scoffingly of a marriage in church you rather hurt me, Gaston."

"You must forgive me, ma chÉrie," said he, humbly. "I am a happy Pagan and it is so long since I have met anyone who belonged to the Church of England that I thought the institution had perished of inanition."

"Why, you went with me to church last Sunday."

"So I did," said he, "but I thought it was only to worship the Great British God Respectability."

Joanna sighed and turned the conversation to the autumn tints and other impersonal things, and I noticed that she drew Paragot's arm again around her waist, as if to reassure herself of something. As we passed by the porch, I entered the house; but loving to look on my dear lady, I lingered, and saw her hold up her lips. He bent down and kissed them.

"Don't think me foolish, Gaston," she said, "but I have starved for love for thirteen years."

By the gesture of his arm and the working of his features, I saw that he rhapsodised in reply.

To the sentimental youngster who looked on, this love-making seemed an idyll without a disturbing breath. Joanna, though she had lost the gay spontaneity of her Paris holiday, smiled none the less adorably on Paragot and myself. She wore a little air of defiant pride when she introduced him to her acquaintance as "my cousin, Monsieur de NÉrac," which was very pretty to behold. Convention forbade the announcement of their engagement at so early a stage of her widowhood, but anyone of rudimentary intelligence could see that she was presenting her future husband. Few women can hide that triumphant sense of proprietorship in a man, especially if they have at the same time to hold themselves on the defensive against the possible fulminations of Lady Molyneux. Joanna proclaimed herself a champion. Even when Paragot forgot his social reformation and banged his fist down on the dinner table till the glasses rang again, with a great nom de Dieu! her glance swept the company as if to defy them to find anything uncommon in the demeanour of her guest. It was only towards the end of my stay that she began to wince. And Paragot, save on occasion of outburst, went through the love-making and the social routine with the grave but contented face of a man who had found his real avocation.

Looking back on these idyllic days I realise the greatness of Paragot's self-control. In his domestic habits he was less a human being than a mechanical toy. At half past eight every morning he entered the breakfast-room. At half past nine he went into the town to get shaved. Had he an appointment with Joanna, he was there to the minute. He clothed himself in what he considered were orthodox garments. He even folded up his trousers of nights. He limited his smoking to a definite number of cigarettes consumed at fixed hours. Apparently he had never heard of the reprehensible habit of drinking between meals. If he only went to church to worship the British God Respectability, he did so with impeccable unction. No undertaker listened to the funeral service with more portentous solemnity than Paragot exhibited during the Vicar's sermon. Indeed, sitting bolt upright in the pew, his lined, brown face set in a blank expression, his ill-fitting frock coat buttoned tight across his chest, his hair—despite the barber's pains—struggling in vain to obey the rules of the unaccustomed parting, he bore considerable resemblance to an undertaker in moderate circumstances. Of the delectable vagabond in pearl-buttoned velveteens fiddling wildly to capering peasants; of the long-haired, unkempt Dictator of the CafÉ Delphine roaring his absinthe-inspired judgments on art and philosophy for the delectation of his disciples, not a trace remained. He sang the hymns. It was a pity they did not invite him to go round with the plate. Yet the signs of a rebellious spirit continued now and then to manifest themselves. He asked me, one day, with a groan whether he was condemned to a daily clean collar for the rest of his life. Another day he seized me by the arm, as we were lounging on the porch, and dragged me out of earshot of the house.

"My good Asticot," said he in a dramatic whisper, "if I don't talk to a man, I shall go mad. I shall dance around the flower beds and scream. I have a yearning to converse with the host of the Black Boar, a fat Rabelaisian scoundrel who has piqued my imagination. And besides, if Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were cast into my throat this minute they would find it quite a different thing from Nebuchadnezzar's ineffectual bonfire."

"There is no reason why we should not go to the Black Boar," said I.

He clapped me on the shoulder, calling me a Delphic oracle, and haled me from the premises through the garden gate, with the lightning rapidity of the familiar Paragot.

"Master," said I, as we hastened down the High Street—the Black Boar stood at the other end, by the bridge—"if you want a man to talk to, there is always Major Walters."

Paragot threw out his hand.

"He is a man, in that he is brave and masculine; in that he is intelligent, he is naught. He is a machine-gun. He fires off rounds of stereotyped conversation at the rate of one a minute, which is funereal. I also have the misfortune, my little Asticot, to be under the ban of Major Walters' displeasure. Your British military man is prejudiced against anyone who is not cut out according to pattern."

"Madame de Verneuil is not cut out according to pattern," said I maliciously.

"Your infant eyes have noticed it too? But I, my son, am Gaston de NÉrac, a vidame of Gascony, nom de Dieu! et il aura affaire À moi, ce pantin-lÀ! Sacredieu! Do you know what he had the impertinence to ask me yesterday? What settlements I proposed to make on Madame de Verneuil. Settlements, mon petit Asticot! He spoke as trustee, whatever that may be, under her husband's will. 'Sir,' said I, 'I will settle my love and my genius upon her, and thereby insure her happiness and her prosperity. Besides, Madame de Verneuil has a fortune which will suffice her needs and of which I will not touch a penny.'"

I smiled, for I could see Paragot in his grand French manner, one hand thrust between the buttons of his coat and the other waving magnificently, as he proclaimed himself to Major Walters.

"I explained," he continued, "in terms which I thought might reach his intelligence, that I only had to resume my profession and my financial position would equal that of Madame de Verneuil. 'And, Sir,' said I, 'I will not suffer you to say another word.' We bowed, and parted enemies. Wherefore the conversation of the excellent Major Walters does not appeal to me as attractive."

At the time I thought this very noble of Paragot. In a way it was so, for my master, who had never committed a dishonourable action in his life, was genuine in his scorn of the insinuation that he proposed to live on Joanna's money. He verily believed himself capable of reattaining fame and fortune. It was only the nuisance of having to do so that, at introspective times, disconcerted him. He knew that to break away from a thirteen-year-old habit of idleness would need considerable effort. But he was a man, nom d'un chien!

To prove it he called for a quart of ale in the bar-parlour of the Black Boar, an old coaching inn, set back from the road. The little eyes of the fleshy rubicond host, loafing comfortably in shirt-sleeves, glistened as he received the Pantagruelian order and brought the great tankard with a modest half pint for me, and a jorum of rum for himself. Paragot was worthy of a host's attention.

Paragot pledged him and literally poured the contents of the tankard down his throat.

The landlord stared in an ecstasy of admiration.

"Well, I'm damned," said he.

"I'll take another," said Paragot.

The landlord brought another tankard.

"How do you manage it?" he asked.

Paragot explained that he had learned the art in Germany. You open your throat to the good beer without moving the muscles whereby you swallow, and down it goes.

"Well, I'm jiggered," said mine host.

"Have you no pretty drinkers hereabouts?" asked my master, sipping the second quart.

"They lots of 'em comes here and gets fuddled, if that's what you mean."

Paragot waved an impatient hand. "To get fuddled on beer is not pretty drinking. Haven't you any hard-headed topers who are famous in the neighborhood? Men who can carry their liquor like gentlemen and whose souls expand as they get more and more filled with the alcohol of human kindness? If so, I should like to meet them."

"There isn't any as could toss off a quart like that."

"Have you always lived in Melford?"

"Oh no," replied the landlord, as if resenting the suggestion, "I was born and bred in Devizes."

"It must be a devil of a place, Devizes," said Paragot.

"It be none so bad," assented the landlord. A woman's voice from the bar summoned him away. Paragot pushed his unfinished quart from him and rose. He shook his head sadly.

"I am disappointed in that man. He is a mere bucolic idiot. I shall waste my talents intellectual and bibulous on him no longer. Our excursion into the Bohemia of Melford is a failure, my little Asticot, and the beer is confoundedly sour. I am glad I did not vagabondise in rural England."

"Why?" I asked.

"To avoid an asylum for idiots I should have rushed into the dissenting ministry. I might have expected mine host to be a dullard. In this country the expected always happens, which paralyses the brain. Now let us go home to lunch."

He paid the bill, and as we issued from the door of the inn we fell into the arms of Joanna and Major Walters.

The latter regarded us superciliously, and Joanna catching his glance flushed to the wavy hair over her forehead. The ordinary greetings having been exchanged, she proudly and markedly drew Paragot ahead, leaving me to follow with Major Walters. As he made no remark of any kind during our little walk, I did not find him an exhilarating companion.