The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode Part 20

"She's not even trying," murmured her enchanted owner. "She's cool as a rose."

The cries which had named the Rothschild gelding from the start were now mingled, and Bon Jour, flying around the emerald course, might have heard her name for the first on the public lips. She was running gracefully, her head even with the favorite's saddle and the English gray was a far-off third. Bon Jour was pressing to fame.

At the last hurdle as they appeared flying in full sight of the Grand Stand it was evident the pretty creature had made her better good. The horses leapt simultaneously and came down on all fours, with Grimace to the rear, and amongst the frantic acclamation with which the public is always ready to greet the surprise of unlooked-for merit, Bon Jour pa.s.sed Grimace by half a metre at the goal. Jack Falconer was an interesting figure on the turf; his horse was worth twenty thousand pounds.

Several hours later, Bulstrode, early in the salon, walked up and down waiting the arrival of the ladies. He had paid downstairs a hundred francs for the privilege of dining in the window of the restaurant, because Mrs. Falconer chanced to remark that one saw the room better from that point. And the head waiter even after this monstrous tip said if "_ces dames_" were late there would be no possibility to keep this gilt-edged table for them. It was the night of the year at Trouville: Boldi and his Hungarians played to five hundred people in the dining-room.

Bulstrode looked at the clock; they had yet ten minutes' grace.

Extremely satisfied with himself, with Bon Jour, above all with the French Marquis--he felt a glow of affection for the whole French nation.

"How we misjudge them!" he mused; "how we accuse them of clinging to their families' ap.r.o.n strings, of being bad colonists; call them hearthstone huggers, degenerates; and declare that they lack nerve and force to rescue themselves from degeneration! And here without hesitation this young man----" At this moment the salon door opened, and one of the ladies he had been expecting came in, the youngest one, Miss Molly Malines, in a tulle dress, an enormous white hat, a light scarf over her shoulders, and the remains of recent tears on her face.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!" she exclaimed, half putting out her hand and drawing it back again, as she bit her lips: "I thought I should find Mary here; I wanted to see her first to _cry_ with! but of course it is you I _should_ see and not cry with!"

She gave a little gasp and put her handkerchief to her eyes to his consternation; then to his relief controlled herself.

"Maurice has just told me _everything_," she repeated the word with much the same desperation that De Presle-Vaulx had put into a gesture which to Bulstrode had signified ruin.

"He's too wonderful! too _glorious_, Mr. Bulstrode, isn't he? I loved him before, but I _adore_ him now! He's glorious. I never heard anything so terrible and so silly!"

Bright tears sprang to brighter eyes, and she dashed them away.

("She's adorable") he was obliged to acknowledge it.

"Why, how could you be so cruel; yes, I will say it, so cruel, so hard, so brutal?"

"_Brutal_?"--he fairly whispered the word in his surprise.

"Why, fancy Maurice in the West, in the dreadful Western life, in that climate----!"

"Why, it is the Garden of Eden," murmured Bulstrode.

"Oh, I mean to say with cattle and cowboys."

"Come," interrupted her father's friend, practically, "you don't know what you are talking about, Molly. You don't talk like an American girl. They've spoiled De Presle-Vaulx, and this will make a man of him!"

Miss Malines called out in scorn:

"_A man of him_! What do you think he is? He's the finest man I ever saw. You don't know him. Just because he has a t.i.tle and his mother spoils him, and because he has been a little reckless in debts and things, you throw him over as you do all the French race without knowing them!"

Her tears had dried and her cheeks flamed.

"Why, Maurice has served three years as a common soldier in the Madagascar Army; and _that's_ no cinch! Cuba's a joke to it. He's had the fever and marched with it. He's slept all night with no covering but the clothes he had worn for weeks. He's eaten bread and drunk dirty water. He's been a soldier three years. The way I came to know him was at Dinard where he swam out into the sea to save a fisherman who couldn't swim, and all the town was out in the storm to welcome him! They carried him up the streets in their arms--" she waited a minute to steady her voice--"He's been two years exploring in Abyssinia with a native caravan--no white man near him, he's the youngest man wearing the Legion d'Honneur in France. _And you want to send him out to make a cowboy of him in the American West to turn him into a man_!"

Mr. Bulstrode had never heard such impressive youthful scorn. Molly threw back her pretty head and laughed.

"Do you know many cowboys who have been three years a soldier; travelled through unexplored countries; written a book that was crowned by an academy? Well, I don't!" she said boldly. "Of course I like his t.i.tle, of course I am proud of his traditions. They're fine! And it is no dishonor to love his chateau and his Paris hotel, and I'd love his mother, too--if she'd let me. But I adore Maurice _as he is_, and he's man enough for me!"

The floor seemed to quiver under poor Bulstrode, who could scarcely see distinctly the lovely excited face as he ventured timidly:

"I didn't know all these things, Molly."

She was still unpitying.

"Of course not! Americans never do know. They only _judge_. You didn't think Maurice would tell you all his good points! He doesn't think they are anything. He only sees the fact that he has debts and that we are both poor and his family won't give their consent."

Mr. Bulstrode smiled and said:

"He is naturally forced to see these things, my dear child."

The girl softened at his tone and said more gently:

"Well, they are terrible facts, of course. It only means that my heart is broken, but it doesn't mean that I will consent to your plan, or to his plan, Mr. Bulstrode. I won't make him break his mother's heart and ruin his career for me."

The gentleman came up and took her hands: his voice was very gentle:

"What, then, will you do?"

"Oh, wait," she said with less spirit. "Wait until his mother consents, or until she dies...." She began to hang her head. Her eulogy of her lover over, only the dry facts of the present remained.

She had no more enthusiasm with which to animate her voice.

Here Mrs. Falconer and the Marquis opened the door, and started back as the animated picture of beauty being consoled by kindness met their view.

"Oh, come along in!" cried the girl cheerily. "I have just been ballyragging Mr. Bulstrode!"

De Presle-Vaulx came eagerly forward:

"Don't listen to her, Monsieur! Molly's tired out after so much success."

The startled benefactor looked doubtfully from her to the young man.

"And you?"

"Oh, I?" shrugged De Presle-Vaulx, "I'm already half cowboy!"

Mary Falconer put her arm round Molly's waist, drew her to her, "and Molly is more than half Marquise."

"Mr. Bulstrode," again cried the girl impetuously. "_Please_ reason with him! He's horribly obstinate. You have put this dreadful idea in his head; now please tell him how _ridiculous_ it is. If he goes West and spoils his career and breaks with his family, I'll never marry him!

As it is, I will wait for ever!"

"But my dear child!" Mary Falconer was determined to have the whole thing out before them, "you don't seem to get it into your head that you have neither of you a sou, and Maurice can never earn any money in France."

Miss Malines, to whom money meant that she drew on her father, the extravagant stockbroker whose seat even in the Stock Exchange was mortgaged, and who had not ten thousand dollars' capital in the world--lost countenance here at the cruel and vulgar introduction of the commodity on which life turns. She sighed, her lips trembled, and she capitulated:

"Oh, if that's really true ... as I suppose it is----"

Bulstrode watched her, she had grown pale--she drew a deep breath, and, looking up, not at her lover, but at the elder man, said softly: