CHAPTER IX
THE London physician arrived, sat up with Paul most of the night,
and went away the next morning saying that he was a dead man. Dr.
Fuller, however, advanced the uncontrovertible opinion that a man
was not dead till he died; and Paul was not dead yet. As a matter of
fact, Paul did not die. If he had done so, there would have been an
end of him and this history would never have been written. He lay
for many days at the gates of Death, and Miss Winwood, terribly
fearful lest they should open and the mysterious, unconscious shape
of beauty and youth should pass through, had all the trouble
promised her by the doctor. But the gates remained shut. When Paul
took a turn for the better, the London physician came down again and
declared that he was living in defiance of all the laws of
pathology, and with a graceful compliment left the case in the hands
of Dr. Fuller. When his life was out of danger, Dr. Fuller
attributed the miracle to the nurses; Ursula Winwood attributed it
to Dr. Fuller; the London physician to Paul's superb constitution;
and Paul himself, perhaps the most wisely, to the pleasant-faced,
masterful lady who had concentrated on his illness all the resources
of womanly tenderness.
But it was a long time before Paul was capable of formulating such
an opinion. It was a long time before he could formulate any opinion
at all. When not delirious or comatose, he had the devil of pleurisy
tearing at the wall of his lung like a wild cat. Only gradually did
he begin to observe and to question. That noiseless woman in coot
blue and white was a nurse. He knew that. So he must be in hospital.
But the room was much smaller than a hospital ward; and where were
the other patients? The question worried him for a whole morning.
Then there was a pink-faced man in gold spectacles, Obviously the
doctor. Then there was a sort of nurse whom he liked very much, but
she was not in uniform. Who could she be? He realized that he was
ill, as weak as a butterfly; and the pain when he coughed was
agonizing. It was all very odd. How had he come here? He remembered
walking along a dusty road in the blazing sun, his head bursting,
every limb a moving ache. He also vaguely remembered being awakened
at night by a thunder storm as he lay snugly asleep beneath a hedge.
The German Ocean had fallen down upon him. He was quite sure it was
the German Ocean, because he had fixed it in his head by repeating
"the North Sea or German Ocean." Mixing up delirious dream with
fact, he clearly remembered the green waves rearing themselves up
first, an immeasurable wall, then spreading a translucent canopy
beneath the firmament and then descending in awful deluge. He had a
confused memory of morning sunshine, of a cottage, of a
hard-featured woman, of sitting before a fire with a blanket round
his shoulders, of a toddling child smeared to the eyebrows with dirt
and treacle whom he had wanted to wash. Over and over again, lately,
he had wanted to wash that child, but it had always eluded his
efforts. Once he had thought of scraping it with a bit of hoof-iron,
but it had turned into a Stilton cheese. It was all very puzzling.
Then he had gone on tramping along the high road. What was that
about bacon and eggs? The horrible smell offended his nostrils. It
must have been a wayside inn; and a woman twenty feet high with a
face like a cauliflower--or was it spinach?--or Brussels
sprouts?--silly not to remember--one of the three, certainly--
desired to murder him with a thousand eggs bubbling up against rank
reefs of bacon. He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been
very lucky. His star had saved him. It had also saved him from a
devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood quite still, calm and
undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head
was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and
fall off the machine. And when the devil had picked himself up, he
had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; but
Paul had shown him his cornelian heart, his talisman, and the devil
had remounted his glowing vehicle and had ridden away in a spume of
flame. The Father of Lies had tried to pass himself off as a
postman. The memory of the shallow pretence tickled Paul so that he
laughed; and then he half fainted in pleuritic agony.
After the interlude with the devil he could recollect little. He was
going up to London to make his fortune. A princess was waiting for
him at the golden gate of London, with a fortune piled up in a
coach-and-six. But being very sick and dizzy, he thought he would sit
down and rest in a great green cathedral whose doors stood
invitingly open . . . and now he found himself in the hospital ward.
Sometimes he felt a desire to question the blue-and-white nurse, but
it seemed too much trouble to move his lips. Then in a flash came
the solution of the puzzle, and he chuckled to himself over his
cunning. Of course it was a dream. The nurse was a dream-nurse, who
wanted to make him believe that she was real. But she was not clever
enough. The best way to pay her out for her deception was to take no
notice of her whatsoever. So comforted, he would go to sleep.
At last one morning he woke, a miserably weak but perfectly sane
man, and he turned his head from side to side and looked wonderingly
at the fresh and exquisite room. A bowl of Morning Glow roses stood
by his bedside, gracious things for fevered eyes to rest upon. A few
large photographs of famous pictures hung on the walls. In front of
him was the Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio, which he recognized with
a smile. He had read about it, and knew that the original was in
Venice. Knowledge of things like that was comforting.
The nurse, noticing the change, came up to him and spoke in a
soothing voice. "Are you feeling better?"
"I think so "said Paul. "I suppose I've been very ill."
"Very ill," said the nurse.
"This can't be a hospital?"
"Oh, no. It's the house of some very kind, good friends. You don't
know them," she added quickly, seeing him knit a perplexed brow.
"You stumbled into their garden and fainted. And they're very
anxious for you to get well and strong."
"Who are they?" asked Paul.
"Colonel and Miss Winwood. T hey will be so glad to see you better--at
least Miss Winwood will; the Colonel's not at home."
She lifted his head gently and smoothed his pillows, and ordained
silence. Presently the doctor came, and spoke kindly. "You've had a
narrow shave, my friend, and you're not out of the wood yet," said
he. "And you'll have to go slow and take things for granted for some
time."
Then came Miss Winwood, whom he recognized as the puzzling but
pleasant nurse out of uniform.
"I don't know how to thank you for taking me in, a stranger, like
this," said Paul.
She smiled. "It's Providence, not me, that you must thank. You might
have been taken ill by the roadside far away from anybody.
Providence guided you here."
"Providence or Destiny," murmured Paul, closing his eyes. It was
absurd to feel so weak.
"That's a theological question on which we won't enter," laughed
Miss Winwood. "Anyhow, thank God, you're better."
A little later she came to him again. "I've been so anxious about
your people--you see, we've had no means of communicating with
them."
"My people?" asked Paul, surprised.
"Yes. They must be wondering what has become of you."
"I have no people," said Paul.
"No people? What do you mean?" she asked sharply, for the moment
forgetful of the sick room. She herself had hundreds of relations.
The branches of her family tree were common to half the country
families of England. "Have you no parents--brothers or sisters--?"
"None that I know of," said Paul. "I'm quite alone in the world."
"Have you no friends to whom I could write about you?"
He shook his head, and his great eyes, all the greater and more
lustrous through illness, smiled into hers. "No. None that count. At
least--there are two friends, but I've lost sight of them for
years. No--there's nobody who would be in the least interested to
know. Please don't trouble. I shall be all right."
Miss Winwood put her cool hand on his forehead and bent over him.
"You? You, alone like that? My poor boy!"
She turned away. It was almost incredible. It was monstrously
pathetic. The phenomenon baffled her. Tears came into her eyes. She
had imagined him the darling of mother and sisters; the gay centre
of troops of friends. And he was alone on the earth. Who was he? She
turned again.
"Will you tell me your name?"
"Savelli. Paul Savelli."
"I thought so. It was in the two books in your knapsack. A
historical Italian name."
"Yes," said Paul. "Noble. All dead."
He lay back, exhausted. Suddenly a thought smote him. He beckoned.
She approached. "My heart--is it safe?" he whispered.
"Your heart?"
"At the end of my watch-chain."
"Quite safe."
"Could I have it near me?"
"Of course."
Paul closed his eyes contentedly. With his talisman in his hand, all
would be well. For the present he need take thought of nothing. His
presence in the beautiful room being explained, there was an end of
the perplexity of his semi-delirium. Of payment for evident devoted
service there could be no question. Time enough when he grew well
and able to fare forth again, to consider the immediate future. He
was too weak to lift his head, and something inside him hurt like
the devil when he moved. Why worry about outer and unimportant
matters? The long days of pain and illness slipped gradually away.
Miss Winwood sat by his bedside and talked; but not until he was
much stronger did she question him as to his antecedents. The
Archdeacon had gone away after a week's visit without being able to
hold any converse with Paul; Colonel Winwood was still at
Contrexeville, whence he wrote sceptically of the rare bird whom
Ursula had discovered; and Ursula was alone in the house, save for a
girl friend who had no traffic with the sick-chamber. She had,
therefore, much leisure to devote to Paul. Her brother's scepticism
most naturally strengthened her belief in him. He was her discovery.
He grew almost to be her invention. just consider. Here was a young
Greek god--everyone who had a bowing acquaintance with ancient
sculpture immediately likened Paul to a Greek god, and Ursula was
not so far different from her cultured fellow mortals as to liken
him to anything else--here was a young Phoebus Apollo, all the
more Olympian because of his freedom from earthly ties, fallen
straight from the clouds. He had fallen at her feet. His beauty had
stirred her. His starlike loneliness had touched her heart. His
swift intelligence, growing more manifest each day as he grew
stronger, moved her admiration. He had, too, she realized, a sunny
and sensuous nature, alive to beauty--even the beauty of the
trivial things in his sickroom. He had an odd, poetical trick of
phrase. He was a paragon of young Greek gods. She had discovered
him; and women don't discover even mortal paragons every day in the
week. Also, she was a woman of forty-three, which, after all, is not
wrinkled and withered eld; and she was not a soured woman; she
radiated health and sweetness; she had loved once in her life, very
dearly. Romance touched her with his golden feather and, in the most
sensible and the most unreprehensible way in the world, she fell in
love with Paul.
"I wonder what made you put that Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio just
opposite the bed," he said one day. He had advanced so far toward
recovery as to be able to sit up against his pillows.
"Don't you like it?" She turned in her chair by his bedside.
"I worship it. Do you know, she has a strange look of you? When I
was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a
generous and holy bigness--the generosity of the All-woman."
Ursula flushed at the personal tribute, but let it pass without
comment. "It's not a bad photograph; but the original--that is too
lovely."
"It's in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa in Venice," said Paul
quickly.
He had passed through a period of wild enthusiasm for Italian
painting, and had haunted the National Gallery, and knew by heart
Sir Charles Eastlake's edition of Kugler's unique textbook.
"Ah, you know it?" said Ursula.
"I've never been to Venice," replied Paul, with a sigh. "It's the
dream of my life to go there."
She straightened herself on her chair. "How do you know the name of
the church?"
Paul smiled and looked round the walls, and reflected for a moment.
"Yes," said he in answer to his own questioning, "I think I can tell
you where all these pictures are, though I've never seen them,
except one. The two angels by Melozzo da Forli are in St. Peter's at
Rome. The Sposalia of Raphael is in the Breza, Milan. The Andrea del
Sarto is in the Louvre. That's the one I've seen. That little child
of Heaven, playing the lute, is in the predella of an altar-piece by
Vittore Carpaccio in the--in the--please don't tell me--in the
Academia of Venice. Am I right?"
"Absolutely right," said Miss Winwood.
He laughed, delighted. At three and twenty, one--thank goodness!--
is very young. One hungers for recognition of the wonder-inspiring
self that lies hidden beneath the commonplace mask of clay. "And
that," said he--"the Madonna being crowned--the Botticelli--is
in the Uffizi at Florence. Walter Pater talks about it--you know--in
his 'Renaissance'--the pen dropping from her hand--'the
high, cold words that have no meaning for her--the intolerable
honour'! Oh, it's enormous, isn't it?"
"I'm afraid I've not read my Pater as I ought," said Miss Winwood.
"But, you must!" cried Paul, with the gloriously audacious faith of
youth which has just discovered a true apostle. "Pater puts you on
to the inner meaning of everything--in art, I mean. He doesn't
wander about in the air like Ruskin, though, of course, if you get
your mental winnowing machine in proper working order you can get
the good grain out of Ruskin. 'The Stones of Venice' and 'The Seven
Lamps' have taught me a lot. But you always have to be saying to
yourself, 'Is this gorgeous nonsense or isn't it?' whereas in Pater
there's no nonsense at all. You're simply carried along on a full
stream of Beauty straight into the open Sea of Truth."
And Ursula Winwood, to whom Archbishops had been deferential and
Cabinet Ministers had come for, guidance, meekly promised to send at
once for Pater's 'Renaissance' and so fill in a most lamentable gap
in her education.
"My uncle, the Archdeacon," she said, after a while, "reminded me
that the great Savelli was a Venetian general--of Roman family;
and, strangely enough, his name, too, was Paul. Perhaps that's how
you got the name."
"That must be how," said Paul dreamily. He had not heard of the
great general. He had seen the name of Savelli somewhere--also
that of Torelli--and had hesitated between the two. Thinking it no
great harm, he wove into words the clamour of his cherished romance.
"My parents died when I was quite young--a baby--and then I was
brought to England. So you see"--he smiled in his winning way--
"I'm absolutely English."
"But you've kept your Italian love of beauty."
"I hope so," said Paul.
"Then I suppose you were brought up by guardians," said Ursula.
"A guardian," said Paul, anxious to cut down to a minimum the
mythical personages that might be connected with his career. "But I
seldom saw him. He lived in Paris chiefly. He's dead now."
"What a poor little uncared-for waif you must have been."
Paul laughed. "Oh, don't pity me. I've had to think for myself a
good deal, it is true. But it has done me good. Don't you find it's
the things one learns for oneself--whether they are about life or
old china--that are the most valuable?"
"Of course," said Miss Winwood. But she sighed, womanlike, at the
thought of the little Paul--(how beautiful he must have been as a
child!)--being brought up by servants and hirelings in a lonely
house, his very guardian taking no concern in his welfare.
Thus it came about that, from the exiguous material supplied by
Paul, Miss Winwood, not doubting his gentle birth and breeding,
constructed for him a wholly fictitious set of antecedents. Paul
invented as little as possible and gratefully accepted her
suggestions. They worked together unconsciously. Paul had to give
some account of himself. He had blotted Bludston and his modeldom
out of his existence. The passionate belief in his high and romantic
birth was part of his being, and Miss Winwood's recognition was a
splendid confirmation of his faith. It was rather the suppressio
veri of which he was guilty than the propositio falsi. So between
them his childhood was invested with a vague semblance of reality in
which the fact of his isolation stood out most prominent.
They had many talks together, not only on books and art, but on the
social subjects in which Ursula was so deeply interested. She found
him well informed, with a curiously detailed knowledge of the
everyday lives of the poor. It did not occur to her that this
knowledge came from his personal experience. She attributed it to
the many-sided genius of her paragon.
"When you get well you must help us. There's an infinite amount to
be done."
"I shall be delighted," said Paul politely.
"You'll find I'm a terrible person to deal with when once I've laid
my hands on anybody," she said with a smile. "I drag in all kinds of
people, and they can't escape. I sent young Harry Gostling--Lord
Ruthmere's son, you know--to look into a working girls' club in
the Isle of Dogs that was going wrong. He hated it at first, but now
he's as keen as possible. And you'll be keen too."
It was flattering to be classified with leisured and opulent young
Guardsmen; but what, Paul reflected with a qualm, would the kind
lady say if she learned the real state of his present fortunes? He
thought of the guinea that lay between him and starvation, and was
amused by the irony of her proposition. Miss Winwood evidently took
it for granted that he was in easy circumstances, living on the
patrimony administered during his boyhood by a careless guardian. He
shrank from undeceiving her. His dream was beginning to come true.
He was accepted by one of the high caste as belonging to the world
where princes and princesses dwelt serene. If only he could put the
theatre behind him, as he had put the rest, and make a
stepping-stone of his dead actor self! But that was impossible, or
at least the question would have to be fought out between himself
and fortune after he had left Drane's Court. In the meanwhile he
glowed with the ambition to leave it in his newly acquired
splendour, drums beating, banners flying, the young prince returning
to his romantic and mysterious solitude.
The time was approaching when he should get up. He sent for his
luggage. The battered trunk and portmanteau plastered with the
labels of queer provincial towns did not betray great wealth. Nor
did the contents, taken out by the man-servant and arranged in
drawers by the nurse. His toilet paraphernalia was of the simplest
and scantiest. His stock of frayed linen and darned underclothes
made rather a poor little heap on the chair. He watched the
unpacking somewhat wistfully from his bed; and, like many another
poor man, inwardly resented his poverty being laid bare to the eyes
of the servants of the rich.
The only thing that the man seemed to handle respectfully--as a
recognized totem of a superior caste--was a brown canvas case of
golf clubs, which he stood up in a conspicuous corner of the room.
Paul had taken to the Ancient and Royal game when first he went on
tour, and it had been a health-giving resource during the listless
days when there was no rehearsal or no matinee--hundreds of
provincial actors, to say nothing of retired colonels and such-like
derelicts, owe their salvation of body and soul to the absurd but
hygienic pastime--and with a naturally true eye and a harmonious
body trained to all demands on its suppleness in the gymnasium,
proficiency had come with little trouble. He was a born golfer; for
the physically perfect human is a born anything physical you please.
But he had not played for a long time. Half-crowns had been very
scarce on this last disastrous tour, and comrades who included golf
in their horizon of human possibilities had been rarer. When would
he play again? Heaven knew! So he looked wistfully, too, at his set
of golf clubs. He remembered how he had bought them--one by one.
"Do you want this on the dressing table?" The nurse held up a little
oblong case.
It was his make-up box, luckily tied round with string.
"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed. He wished he could have told her
to burn it. He felt happier when all his belongings were stowed away
out of sight and the old trunk and portmanteau hauled out of the
room.
Colonel Winwood came home and asked his sister pertinent questions.
He was a bald, sad-looking man with a long grizzling moustache that
drooped despondently. But he had a square, obstinate chin, and his
eyes, though they seldom smiled, were keen and direct, like Miss
Winwood's. Romance had passed him by long since. He did not believe
in paragons.
"I gather, my dear Ursula," said he in a dry voice, "that our guest
is an orphan, of good Italian family, brought up in England by a
guardian now dead who lived in France. Also that he is of
prepossessing exterior, of agreeable manners, of considerable
cultivation, and apparently of no acquaintance. But what I can't
make out is: what he does for a living, how he came to be half-
starved on his walking tour--the doctor said so, you remember--
where he was going from and where he is going to when he leaves our
house. In fact, he seems to be a very vague and mysterious person,
of whom, for a woman of your character and peculiar training, you
know singularly little."
Miss Winwood replied that she could not pry into the lad's private
affairs. Her brother retorted that a youth, in his physically
helpless condition, who was really ingenuous, would have poured out
his life's history into the ears of so sympathetic a woman, and have
bored her to tears with the inner secrets of his soul.
"He has high aspirations. He has told me of them. But he hasn't
bored me a bit," said Ursula.
"What does he aspire to?"
"What does any brilliant young fellow of two or three and twenty
aspire to? Anything, everything. He has only to find his path."
"Yes, but what is his path?"
"I wish you weren't so much like Uncle Edward, James," said Ursula.
"He's a damned clever old man," said Colonel Winwood, "and I wish he
had stayed here long enough to be able to put our young friend
through a searching cross-examination."
Ursula lifted her finger-bowl an inch from the doiley and carefully
put it down again. It was the evening of Colonel Winwood's arrival,
and they were lingering over coffee in the great, picture-hung and
softly lighted dining room. Having fixed the bowl in the exact
centre of the doiley, she flashed round on her brother. "My dear
James, do you think I'm an idiot?"
He took his cigar from his lips and looked at her with not
unhumorous dryness. "When the world was very young, my dear," said
he, "I've no doubt I called you so. But not since."
She stretched out her hand and tapped his. She was very fond of him.
"You can't help being a man, my poor boy, and thinking manly
thoughts of me, a woman. But I'm not an idiot. Our young friend, as
you call him, is as poor as a church mouse. I know it. No, don't
say, 'How?' like Uncle Edward. He hasn't told me, but Nurse has--a
heart-breaking history of socks and things. There's the doctor's
diagnosis, too. I haven't forgotten. But the boy is too proud to cry
poverty among strangers. He keeps his end up like a man. To hear him
talk, one would think he not only hadn't a care in the world, but
that he commanded the earth. How can one help admiring the boy's
pluck and--that's where my reticence comes in--respecting the
boy's reserve?"
"H'm!" said Colonel Winwood.
"But, good gracious, Jim, dear, supposing you--or any of us--
men, I mean--had been in this boy's extraordinary position--
would you have acted differently? You would have died rather than
give your poverty away to absolute strangers to whom you were
indebted, in the way this boy is indebted to us. Good God, jim"--
she sent her dessert knife skimming across the table--"don't you
see? Any reference to poverty would be an invitation--a veiled
request for further help. To a gentleman like Paul Savelli, the
thing's unthinkable."
Colonel Winwood selected a fresh cigar, clipped off the end, and lit
it from a silver spirit lamp by his side. He blew out the first
exquisite puff--the smoker's paradise would be the one first full
and fragrant, virginal puff of an infinite succession of perfect
cigars--looked anxiously at the glowing point to see that it was
exactly lighted, and leaned back in his chair.
"What you say, dear," said he, "is plausible. Plausible almost to
the point of conviction. But there's a hole somewhere in your
argument, I'm sure, and I'm too tired after my journey to find it."
Thus, as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so did
they fight for Paul; and in both cases they used a woman as their
instrument.
Colonel Winwood, in spite of a masculine air of superiority, joined
with the Archbishops and Cabinet Ministers above referred to in
their appreciation of his sister's judgment. After all, what
business of his were the private affairs of his involuntary guest?
He paid him a visit the next day, and found him lying on a couch by
the sunny window, clad in dressing gown and slippers. Paul rose
politely, though he winced with pain.
"Don't get up, please. I'm Colonel Winwood."
They shook hands. Paul began to wheel an armchair from the bedside,
but Colonel Winwood insisted on his lying down again and drew up the
chair himself. "I'm afraid," said Paul, "I've been a sad trespasser
on your hospitality. Miss Winwood must have told you it has scarcely
been my fault; but I don't know how to express my thanks."
As Paul made it, the little speech could not have been better.
Colonel Winwood, who (like the seniors of every age) deplored the
lack of manners of the rising generation, was pleased by the ever so
little elaborate courtesy.
"I'm only too glad we've pulled you round. You've had a bad time, I
hear."
Paul smiled. "Pretty bad. If it hadn't been for Miss Winwood and all
she has done for me, I should have pegged out."
"My sister's a notable woman," said the Colonel. "When she sets out
to do a thing she does it thoroughly."
"I owe her my life," said Paul simply.
There was a pause. The two men, both bright-eyed, looked at each
other for the fraction of a second. One, the aristocrat secure of
his wealth, of his position, of himself, with no illusion left him
save pride of birth, no dream save that of an England mighty and
prosperous under continuous centuries of Tory rule, no memories but
of stainless honour--he had fought gallantly for his Queen, he had
lived like a noble gentleman, he had done his country disinterested
service--no ambition but to keep himself on the level of the ideal
which he had long since attained; the other the creation of nothing
but of dreams, the child of the gutter, the adventurer, the
vagabond, with no address, not even a back room over a sweetstuff
shop in wide England, the possessor of a few suits of old clothes
and one pound, one shilling and a penny, with nothing in front of
him but the vast blankness of 'life, nothing behind him save
memories of sordid struggle, with nothing to guide him, nothing to
set him on his way with thrilling pulse and quivering fibres save
the Vision Splendid, the glorious Hope, the unconquerable Faith. In
the older man's eyes Paul read the calm, stern certainty of things
both born to and achieved; and Colonel Winwood saw in the young
man's eyes, as in a glass darkly, the reflection of the Vision.
"And yours is a very young life," said he. "Gad! it must be
wonderful to be twenty. 'Rich in the glory of my rising sun.' You
know your Thackeray?"
"'Riche de ma jeunesse,'" laughed Paul. "Thackeray went one better
than Beranger, that time."
"I forgot," said Colonel Winwood. "My sister told me. You go about
with Beranger as a sort of pocket Bible."
Paul laughed again. "When one is on the tramp one's choice of books
is limited by their cubical content. One couldn't take Gibbon, for
instance, or a complete Balzac."
Colonel Winwood tugged at his drooping moustache and again
scrutinized the frank and exceedingly attractive youth. His
astonishing perfection of feature was obvious to anybody. Yet any
inconsiderable human--a peasant of the Campagna, a Venetian
gondolier, a swaggering brigand of Macedonia--could be
astonishingly beautiful. And, being astonishingly beautiful, that
was the beginning and end of him. But behind this merely physical
attractiveness of his guest glowed a lambent intelligence, quick as
lightning. There was humorous challenge in those laughing and lucent
dark eyes.
"Do you know your Balzac?" he asked.
"Oh, yes," said Paul.
"I wonder if you do," said Colonel Winwood. "I'm rather a Balzacian
myself."
"I can't say I've read all Balzac. That's a colossal order," said
Paul, rather excited-for, in his limited acquaintance with
cultivated folk, Colonel Winwood was the only human being who could
claim acquaintance with one of the literary gods of his idolatry--
"but I know him pretty well. I can't stand his 'Theatre'--that's
footle--but the big things--'Le Pere Goriot,' 'La Cousine Bette,'
'Cesar Birotteau'--what a great book 'Cesar Birotteau' is!--"
"You're right," said Colonel Winwood, forgetful of any possible
barriers between himself and the young enthusiast. "It's one of the
four or five great books, and very few people recognize it."
"'Le Lys dans la Vallee,'" said Paul.
"There's another--"
And they talked for half an hour of the Baron Nucingen, and
Rastignac, and Hulot, and Bixiou, and Lousteau, and Gobsec, and
Gaudissart, and Vautrin, and many another vivid personage in the
human comedy.
"That man could have gone on writing for a hundred years," cried
Paul, "and he could have exhausted all the possibilities of human
life."
Colonel Winwood smiled courteously. "We have a bond in Balzac," said
he. "But I must go. My sister said I mustn't tire you." He rose.
"We're having a lot of people down here this week for the shooting.
There'll be good sport. Pity you're not well enough to join us."
Paul smiled. He had one of his flashes of tact, "I'm afraid," said
he modestly, "that I've never fired off a gun in my life."
"What?" cried the Colonel.
"It's true."
Colonel Winwood looked at him once more. "It's not many young men,"
said he, "who would dare to make such a confession."
"But what is the good of lying?" asked Paul, with the eyes of a
cherub.
"None that I know of," replied the Colonel. He returned to his chair
and rested his hand on the back. "You play golf, anyhow," said he,
pointing to the brown canvas bag in the corner.
"Oh, yes," said Paul.
"Any good?"
"Fair to middling."
"What's your handicap?" asked the Colonel, an enthusiastic though
inglorious practitioner of the game.
"One," said Paul.
"The deuce it is!" cried the Colonel. "Mine is fifteen. You must
give me a lesson or two when you pull round. We've a capital course
here."
"That's very kind of you," said Paul, "but I'm afraid I shall be
well enough for ordinary purposes long before I'm able to handle a
golf club."
"What do you mean?"
"This silly pleurisy. It will hang about for ages!"
"Well?"
"I'll have to go my ways from here long before I can play."
"Any great hurry?"
"I can't go on accepting your wonderful hospitality indefinitely,"
said Paul.
"That's nonsense. Stay as long as ever you like."
"If I did that," said Paul, "I would stay on forever."
The Colonel smiled and shook hands with him. In the ordinary way of
social life this was quite an unnecessary thing to do. But he acted
according to the impulses common to a thousand of his type--and a
fine type--in England. Setting aside the mere romantic exterior of
a Macedonian brigand, here was a young man of the period with
astonishingly courteous manners, of--and this was of secondary
consideration--of frank and winning charm, with a free-and-easy
intimacy with Balzac, of fearless truthfulness regarding his
deficiencies, and with a golf handicap of one. The Colonel's hand
and heart went out in instinctive coordination. The Colonel
Winwoods of this country are not gods; they are very humanly
fallible; but of such is the Kingdom of England.
"At any rate," said he, "you mustn't dream of leaving us yet."
He went downstairs and met his sister in the hall.
"Well?" she asked, with just a gleam of quizzicality in her eyes,
for she knew whence he had come.
"One of these days I'll take him out and teach him to shoot," said
the Colonel.
