The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

Mrs. Falconer had the advantage over most women of completely understanding the man with whom she dealt. She knew that to attempt to turn from its just and generous source any intent of Mr. Bulstrode would have been as futile as to attempt to turn a river from its parent fountain.

"You're quixotic, I know, but you're not demented, and you won't certainly marry this nobody – whose fancies or love-affairs have not the least importance. You won't ever see her again unless you are in love with her yourself."

Bulstrode interrupted her hastily:

"Oh, yes, I shall."

He got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs. Falconer's trim little garden. A couple of iron chairs and a table stood under the trees. Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease. Beyond the iron rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears. Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:

"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."

"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."

As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have grown darker and she to sit in the shadow. She leaned toward him, laughing:

"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we have so often planned together."

Bulstrode stood looking down on her.

"I feel myself responsible," he said gravely. "She was going home, and by a mistaken impulse I came in and changed her plans. She is perfectly alone and perfectly poor, and I am not going to add to her perplexities. I have no one in the world to care what I do. I have no ties and no duties."

"No," said Mrs. Falconer; "you are wonderfully free."

He said vehemently:

"I am all of a sudden wonderfully miserable."

He had been in the habit for years of suddenly leaving her without any warning, and now he put out his hand and bade her good-by, and before she could detain him had made one of many brusque exits from her presence.

On the following day – a Sunday, as from his delightful apartments in the Ritz he set forth for the studio, Bulstrode bade good-by to his bachelor existence. He knew when he should next see the Place Vendôme it would be with the eyes of an engaged man. His life hereafter was to be shared by a "total stranger." So he pathetically put it, and his sentimental yearning to share everything with a lovely woman had died a sudden death.

"There's no one in the world to care a rap what I do – really," he reflected, "and in this case I have run up against it – that's the long and the short of the matter – and I shall see it through."

As he set out for Miss Desprey's along his favorite track he remarked that the gala, festive character of Paris had entirely disappeared. The season had gone back on him by several months, and the melancholy of autumn and dreary winter cast a gloom over his boyish spirits. A very slight rain was falling. Bulstrode began to feel a twinge of rheumatism in his arm and as he irritably opened his umbrella his spirits dropped beneath it and his brisk, springy walk sagged to something resembling the gait of a middle-aged gentleman. But he urged himself into a better mood, however, at the sight of a flower-shop whose delicate wares huddled appealingly close to the window. He went in and purchased an enormous bunch of – he hesitated – there were certain flowers he could not, would not send! The selection his sentimental reserve imposed therefore consisted of sweet-peas, giroflés, and a big cluster of white roses, all very girlish and virginal. His bridal offering in his hand, he took a cab and drove to the other side of the river with lead at his good heart and, he almost fancied, a lump in his throat. He paid the coachman, whose careless spirits he envied, and slowly walked down the picturesque alley of Impasse du Maine.

"There isn't a man I know – not a man in the Somerset Club – who would be as big a fool as this!"

He had more than a mind to leave the flowers on the doorstep and run. Bulstrode would have done so now that he was face to face with his quixotic folly, but his cab had been heard as well as his steps on the walk, and the door was opened by Miss Desprey herself. The girl's colorless face, her eyes spoiled with tears, and a pretty, sad dignity, which became her well, struck her friend with the sincerity and depth of her grief, and as the good gentleman shook hands with her he realized that less than ever in the world could he add a featherweight of grief to the burden of this helpless creature.

"My dearest child!" He lifted her hand to his lips.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode, I'm so glad you've come, I was so afraid you wouldn't – after yesterday!"

His arms were still full of white paper, roses, and sweet-peas.

"Oh, don't give them to me, Mr. Bulstrode! Oh, why, did you bring them? Oh, dear, what will you think of me?" She had possessed herself of the flowers and with agitation and distress hastily thrust them, as if she wanted to hide them, behind the draperies of the couch. Bulstrode murmured something of whose import he was scarcely conscious. As she came tearfully back to him she let him take her hands. He felt that she clung to him. "It would have spoiled my life if you hadn't come. I would have just gone and jumped in the Seine. I may yet. Oh, you don't understand! It's been hard to be poor – I've been often hungry – but this last thing was too much. When you found me yesterday I didn't want to live any more."

Bulstrode's kind clasp warmed the cold little hands. As tenderly as he could he looked at her agitated prettiness.

"Don't talk like that" – he tried for her first name and found it. "Laura, you will let me make it all right, my dear? You will let me, won't you? You shall never know another care if I can prevent it."

She interrupted with hasty gratitude:

"Nobody else can make it all right but you."

He tried softly:

"Did I, then, make it so very wrong?"

She murmured, too overcome to trust herself to say much:

"Yes!"

She was standing close to him, and lifted her appealing face to his. Her excitement communicated itself to him; he bent toward her about to kiss her, when the door of the studio sharply opened, and before Bulstrode could do more than swiftly draw back and leave Miss Desprey free an exceedingly tall and able-bodied man entered without ceremony.

The girl gave a cry, ran from Bulstrode, and, so to speak, threw herself against the arms of the stranger, for there were none open to receive her.

"Oh, here's Mr. Bulstrode, Dan! I knew he'd come; and he'll tell you – won't you, Mr. Bulstrode? Tell him, please, that I don't care anything at all about you and you don't care anything about me… That you don't want to marry me or anything. Oh, please make him believe it!"

The poor gentleman's senses and brain whirling together made him giddy. He felt as though he had just been whisked up from the edge of a precipice over which he ridiculously dangled. Dan, who represented the rescuer, was not prepossessing. He was the complete and unspoiled type of Western youth; the girl herself was an imperfect and exquisite hybrid.

"I don't know that this gentleman can explain to me" – the young fellow threw his boyish head back – "or that I care to hear him."

She gave a cry, sharp and wounded. The sound touched the now normal, thoroughly grateful patron, who had come out of his ordeal with as much kindly sensibility as he went in.

"Of course, my dear young lady" – he perfectly understood the situation – "I will tell your friend the facts of our acquaintance. That's what you want me to do, isn't it?"

She was weeping and hanging on to the unyielding arm of her cross lover, who glared at the intruding Bulstrode with a youthful jealousy at which the older man smiled while he envied it. He pursued impressively:

"Miss Desprey has been painting my portrait for the past few weeks. I gave her the order at the Art League; other than painter and sitter we have no possible interest in each other – Mr. – "

"Gregs," snapped the stranger, "Daniel Gregs!"

The slender creature, whose eyes never left the stolid, uncompromising face, repeated eagerly:

"No possible interest– Dan – none! He doesn't care anything about me at all! You heard what he said, didn't you? I only like him like a kind, kind friend."

Her voice, soft as a flower, caressed and pleaded with the passionate tenderness of a woman who feels that an inadvertent word may keep for her or lose for her the man she adores.

"My dear man," exclaimed Bulstrode in great irritation, "you ought to be ashamed to let her cry like that! Can't you understand– don't you see?"

"No," shortly caught up the other, "I don't! I've come here from South Africa, where I'm prospecting some mines for a company at Centreville, and I heard she was poor and unhappy, and I hurried up my things so I could come to Paris and marry her and take her with me, and here I find her painting every day alone with a rich man, her place all fixed up with flowers, and a thousand dollars in the bank" – his cheek reddened – "I don't like it! And that's all there is to it!" he finished shortly.

"No, my friend," said the other severely, "there's a great deal more. If, from what you say, and the way you speak, you wish me to understand you have a real interest in Miss Desprey, you can follow me when I say that I came here and found her a lonely, forsaken girl, obliged to return to Idaho when she didn't want to go, without any money or any friends. May I ask you why, if there was any one in the world who cared for her, she should be left so deserted?"

The girl here turned her face from her lover to her champion.

"Don't please blame Dan for that. He was so poor, too. He didn't have anything when he went to South Africa; it was just a chance if he would succeed. And he was working for me, so that he could get married."

Gregs interrupted:

"I don't owe this gentleman any explanation!"

"No," accepted the other gently, "perhaps not, but you mustn't, on the other hand, refuse to hear mine. Be reasonable. Why shouldn't Miss Desprey have an order for a portrait?"

Gregs, over the golden head against his arm, looked at Bulstrode:

"She can't paint!" His tone was gentler. "Laura can't paint, and you know it!"

"Dan!" she whispered; "how cruel you are to me!"

And here the desperate Bulstrode broke in:

"He is, indeed, Miss Desprey, cruel and unjust, and I frankly ask leave to tell him so. You don't deserve the girl, Mr. Gregs, if she's yours, as she seems to be."

But the girl clung closer, as if she still feared Bulstrode might try to rescue her.

"That's all right," frowned the miner. "I am no better and no worse than any man about his girl, and I'm going to know just where I stand!"

The gentleman's reply was caustic. "I should be inclined to say you'd find it hard to be in a better place."

Laura Desprey had wound her arms around Mr. Gregs. Bulstrode held out his hand. She couldn't take it, nor could her lover. With arrogant obstinacy he had folded his arms across his chest.

"Come, can't we be friends?" urged the amiable gentleman. "I seem to have made trouble when I only wanted to be friendly. Let me set it right before I go. I am lunching in Versailles, and I have to take the noon train from the Gare Montparnasse."

But Daniel Gregs did not unbend to the affable proposition. Miss Desprey said:

"When you saw me yesterday in the park, Mr. Bulstrode, Dan had just come back the day before. I was putting the flowers you sent me in fresh water when he came in on me all of a sudden. Oh, it was so splendid at first! I was so happy – until he asked all about you, and then he grew so angry and said unless you could explain to him a lot of things he would go away and never see me again, and when you found me I was crying because I thought he had left me forever. I hadn't seen him for two years, and if you hadn't helped me to stay on here I should have had to go to Idaho, and I wouldn't have seen him at all. You ought to thank him, Dan."

Bulstrode interrupted:

"Indeed, Mr. Gregs, you should, you know! – you should thank me; come, be generous."

Dan relaxed his grim humor a little.

"When I get through with this South African business I'm going back to Centreville, and if I ever get her out of this Paris she'll never see it again!"

"Dan," she breathed, "I don't want to. Centreville is good enough for me."

(Centreville! The horrible environment he was to have snatched her from. Bulstrode smiled softly.)

"But this money," pursued the dogged lover, returning to his grudge. "You've got to take it back, Mr. Bulstrode. No picture on earth is worth a thousand dollars, and certainly not Laura's."

"Oh, Dan!" she exclaimed.

But her friend said firmly: "The portrait is mine. Come, don't be foolish. If Miss Desprey is willing to marry you and go out to Idaho, take the money and buy her some pretty clothes and things."

Here the girl herself interrupted excitedly:

"No, no! We couldn't take it. I don't want any new clothes. If Dan doesn't care how shabby I am, I don't. I don't want anything in the world but just to go with Dan."

At this sweet tenderness Dan's face entirely changed, his arms unfolded; he put them around her.

"That's all right, little girl." His tone thrilled through Bulstrode more than the woman's tears had done. He understood why she wanted to go to him, and how she could be drawn. He had at times in his life lost money, and sometimes heavily, and he had never felt poor before. In the same words, but in a vastly different tone, Dan Gregs held out his hand to Bulstrode.

"That's all right, sir. When a fellow travels thousands and thousands of miles to get his girl and hasn't much more than his car fare and he runs up against another fellow who has got the rocks and all and who he thinks is sweet on his girl, it makes him crazy – just crazy!"

"I see" – Bulstrode sympathetically understood – "and I don't at all wonder."

They were all three shaking hands together and Bulstrode said:

"Would you believe it, I haven't seen my portrait, Miss Desprey."

Dan Gregs grinned.

"Don't," he said, "don't look at it. It's what made all the trouble. When I saw it yesterday and Laura told me it had drawn a thousand dollars – why I said 'there isn't a man living who would give you fifty cents for it.' That made her mad at first. Then she told me you thought she was a great portrait-painter, and I knew you must be sweet on her. I'm fond of her all right, but I decided that you were bound to have her and didn't care how you dealt your cards, and I thought I'd clear out."

His face fell and threatened to cloud over, but it cleared again as with the remembrance of his doubts came the actual sense of the woman whose face was hidden on his breast, and he lightly touched the dusty golden hair.

When in a few seconds Bulstrode took leave of them, Miss Desprey, in her dingy painting-dress, seemed completely swallowed up in the embrace of the big Dan Gregs. From where he stood by the door Bulstrode could see the white corner of his fiançailles bouquet sticking out from the draperies of the couch. The paper was open and in the heat of the warm little atelier the fresh odor of the pungent flowers came strongly on the air.

Bulstrode as he said good-by seemed to say it – and to look at the lovers – through a haze of perfume – a perfume that, like the most precious things in the world, pervades and affects, suggests and impresses, while its existence is unseen, unknown to the world.

Once in his train, he had been able to catch it at the Invalides after all, Jimmy drew a long breath and settled back into himself, for, he had been, poor dear, during the past three weeks, in another man's shoes and profiting by another man's identity. It was perfectly heavenly to feel that he had been liberated by the merciful providence which takes care to provide the right lover for the right place. He couldn't be too grateful for the miracle which saved him from a sacrifice alongside of which Abraham's would have been a jest indeed.

The June morning was warm and through the open car window, as the train went comfortably along, the perfume of the country came into him where he sat. Opposite, a pair of lovers frankly and naturally showed their annoyance at the third person's intrusion, and Bulstrode, sympathetically turned himself about and became absorbed in Suburban Paris. His heart beat high at the fact of his deliverance. His gratitude was sincere – moreover, his thoughts were of an agreeable trend, and he was able to forget everybody else within twelve miles. Secure in his impersonality and in the indifference of his broad unseeing back, the lovers kissed and held hands.

Bulstrode wandered slowly up from the Versailles station to the Hôtel des Reservoirs, crossed the broad square of the Palace Court, found the pink and yellow façade more mellow and perfect than ever, and toward twelve-thirty strolled into the yard of the old hostelry. Breakfast had been set for twelve-thirty, but his host was not there.

"Ah – mais, bon jour, Monsieur Bulstrode!" The proprietor knew and appreciated this client greatly.

Monsieur Falconer, it seemed, had been called suddenly to Paris… Yes – well – there were, now and then, in the course of life, bits of news that could be borne with fortitude. "And Madame has also been called to Paris?"

"Mais non!" Madame had a few minutes since gone out in the Park, the proprietor thought she would not be very far away.

Bulstrode thanked him, and crossed over to the hedge and the gateway and through it to the Palace Gardens. On all sides the paths stretched broad and inviting toward the various alleys, and upon the terrace to his left there shone a thousand flowers in June abundance. The gentleman chose the first path that opened, and went carelessly down it, and in a few moments the pretty ring of an embowered circle spread before him, but, although there was an inviting marble bench under a big tree at one side, and several eighteenth century marbles on their pedestals, illuminated by the bland eighteenth century smile, there was not a living woman in sight to make him, the visitor, welcome! He went a little further along and found another felicitous, harmonious circle, where a small fountain threw its jets on the June air. At the sound of the water Bulstrode remembered that the Grands Eaux were to play on this afternoon at Versailles.

"Ah, that is why they especially wanted me to come out to-day," he decided.

On the other side of the fountain, the vivid white of her summer dress making a flash like moonlight on the obscurity of the woods, a lady was standing looking across at Mr. Bulstrode.

"Hush!" she said; "come over softly, Jimmy; there is a timid third party here."

On a branch at her side, where an oriole sat, his head thrown back, his throat swelling, there was a little stir and flutter of leaves, for although the lady had put her finger to her lips, her voice broke the spell, and a bit of yellow flashed through the trees.

"I don't believe he will ever forgive you!" she cried; "you spoiled his solo, but I'll forgive you. What brought you out to Versailles to-day?"

"The fountains," Bulstrode told her; "I have never seen them play. Then, too – there are certain places to which, when I am asked to luncheon, I always go."

"That's quite true," she accepted; "you were invited! – but, to be perfectly frank, I did not expect you, so your coming on this occasion has only the pleasure of a surprise. As a rule, I hate them. My husband informed me that he would telephone you to meet him in Paris, but I think he must have forgotten you, Jimmy."

She was taking him in from his fresh panama to his boots, and she apparently found an air of festivity about him.

"Was it," she asked, "in honor of the fountains' playing that you have made yourself so beautiful?"

Bulstrode took the boutonnière out of his coat lapel and handed it to her. "Can't you pin it in somewhere?" Mrs. Falconer laughed and thrust the carnation into her bodice.

"I dressed to-day, more or less," Mr. Bulstrode confessed, "in order to attend – well, what shall I call it – a betrothal? That's a good old-fashioned word."

"Oh!" exclaimed the lady, "a fiançailles?"

"Yes."

The two had wandered slowly along, out of the Bosquet towards the canals.

"They make a great deal of these functions in France," Mrs. Falconer said.

Her companion agreed. "They made a great deal, rather more than usual, out of this one." And his tone was so suggestive that his companion looked up at him quickly.

"Who are your mysterious lovers?" she asked, "are they French? Do I know them?"

"They are not in the least mysterious," Bulstrode assured her. "I never saw anything less complex and more simple. They are Americans."

She seemed now to understand that she was to hear of "one of Jimmy's adventures," as she called his dashes in other people's affairs.

"I hope, Jimmy, in this case, that you have pulled the affair off to your credit, and that if you have made a match the creatures will be grateful to you for once! And, by the way," she bethought; "whatever has happened to the pretty girl whom you were quixotic enough to think you had to marry?"

"The last time I saw her she appeared to be in the best of circumstances," Bulstrode answered cheerfully. "In point of fact – it was, singularly enough, to her engagement party that I went to-day!"

And Mrs. Falconer now showed real interest and feeling. "No! how delightful. So she is really off your hands, Jimmy. Well, that is too good to be true. There's one at least whom you don't have to marry, Jimmy!"

"Oh, they grow beautifully less," he agreed.

Mrs. Falconer smiled softly.

"They are narrowing down every year," Jimmy went on; "when I am about sixty the number will be reduced, I dare say, to the proper quantity."

"What a goose you are," she said jestingly. "What a tease and a bother you are, Jimmy Bulstrode; I'll find you a proper wife!"

He accepted warmly. "Do, do! I leave myself quite in your hands."

His companion extended him her hand as she spoke, and after lifting it to his lips, Bulstrode drew it through his arm. It was clothed in a glove of pale coffee-color suede. It was a soft, dear hand, and rested as if it were at home on Bulstrode's gray sleeve. Side by side the two friends walked slowly out toward the broader avenues leading to the canals. The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some drifting cloud, like dashes of foam. The trees about them lifted dark velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and flowers.

"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs. Falconer. "Isn't it too beautiful!"

"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys, and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.

THE THIRD ADVENTURE

III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June, Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in their own country – but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.

On the very first day he went over the Hôtel Montensier from grenier to caves, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the hôtel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked, "that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, mon cher, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why, your coat alone – the cut of it – " Montensier had laughed, "speaks of Poole with a Boston compromise!