Trilby Part 19

It soon became evident that Little Billee was in extraordinary high spirits--in an abnormal state of excitement.

He challenged Svengali to spar, and made his nose bleed, and frightened him out of his sardonic wits. He performed wonderful and quite unsuspected feats of strength. He swore eternal friends.h.i.+p to Dodor and Zouzou, and filled their gla.s.ses again and again, and also (in his innocence) his own, and trinqued with them many times running. They were the last to leave (except the three helpless policemen); and at about five or six in the morning, to his surprise, he found himself walking between Dodor and Zouzou by a late windy moonlight in the Rue Vieille des Mauvais Ladres, now on one side of the frozen gutter, now on the other, now in the middle of it, stopping them now and then to tell them how jolly they were and how dearly he loved them.

Presently his hat flew away, and went rolling and skipping and bounding up the narrow street, and they discovered that as soon as they let each other go to run after it, they all three sat down.

So Dodor and Little Billee remained sitting, with their arms round each other's necks and their feet in the gutter, while Zouzou went after the hat on all fours, and caught it, and brought it back in his mouth like a tipsy retriever. Little Billee wept for sheer love and grat.i.tude, and called him a cary_hat_ide (in English), and laughed loudly at his own wit, which was quite thrown away on Zouzou! "No man ever _had_ such dear, dear frenge! no man ever _was_ s'happy!"

After sitting for a while in love and amity, they managed to get up on their feet again, each helping the other; and in some never-to-be-remembered way they reached the Hotel Corneille.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'ANSWER ME, TRILBY!'"]

There they sat little Billee on the door-step and rang the bell, and seeing some one coming up the Place de l'Odeon, and fearing he might be a sergent de ville, they bid Little Billee a most affectionate but hasty farewell, kissing him on both cheeks in French fas.h.i.+on, and contriving to get themselves round the corner and out of sight.

Little Billee tried to sing Zouzou's drinking-song:

"Quoi de plus doux Que les glougloux-- Les glougloux du vin a quat' sous...."

The stranger came up. Fortunately, it was no sergent de ville, but Ribot, just back from a Christmas-tree and a little family dance at his aunt's, Madame Kolb (the Alsacian banker's wife, in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin).

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CARY_HAT_IDE]

Next morning poor Little Billee was dreadfully ill.

He had pa.s.sed a terrible night. His bed had heaved like the ocean, with oceanic results. He had forgotten to put out his candle, but fortunately Ribot had blown it out for him, after putting him to bed and tucking him up like a real good Samaritan.

And next morning, when Madame Paul brought him a cup of tisane de chiendent (which does not happen to mean a hair of the dog that bit him), she was kind, but very severe on the dangers and disgrace of intoxication, and talked to him like a mother.

"If it had not been for kind Monsieur Ribot" (she told him), "the door-step would have been your portion; and who could say you didn't deserve it? And then think of the dangers of fire from a tipsy man all alone in a small bedroom with chintz curtains and a lighted candle!"

"Ribot was kind enough to blow out my candle," said Little Billee, humbly.

"Ah, Dame!" said Madame Paul, with much meaning--"au moins il a _bon cur_, Monsieur Ribot!"

And the crulest sting of all was when the good-natured and incorrigibly festive Ribot came and sat by his bedside, and was kind and tenderly sympathetic, and got him a pick-me-up from the chemist's (unbeknown to Madame Paul).

"Credieu! vous vous etes cranement bien amuse, hier soir! quelle bosse, hein! je parie que c'etait plus drole que chez ma tante Kolb!"

All of which, of course, it is unnecessary to translate; except, perhaps, the word "bosse," which stands for "noce," which stands for a "jolly good spree."

In all his innocent little life Little Billee had never dreamed of such humiliation as this--such ignominious depths of shame and misery and remorse! He did not care to live. He had but one longing: that Trilby, dear Trilby, kind Trilby, would come and pillow his head on her beautiful white English bosom, and lay her soft, cool, tender hand on his aching brow, and there let him go to sleep, and sleeping, die!

He slept and slept, with no better rest for his aching brow than the pillow of his bed in the Hotel Corneille, and failed to die this time.

And when, after some forty-eight hours or so, he had quite slept off the fumes of that memorable Christmas debauch, he found that a sad thing had happened to him, and a strange!

It was as though a tarnis.h.i.+ng breath had swept over the reminiscent mirror of his mind and left a little film behind it, so that no past thing he wished to see therein was reflected with quite the old pristine clearness. As though the keen, quick, razorlike edge of his power to reach and re-evoke the by-gone charm and glamour and essence of things had been blunted and coa.r.s.ened. As though the bloom of that special joy, the gift he unconsciously had of recalling past emotions and sensations and situations, and making them actual once more by a mere effort of the will, had been brushed away.

And he never recovered the full use of that most precious faculty, the boon of youth and happy childhood, and which he had once possessed, without knowing it, in such singular and exceptional completeness. He was to lose other precious faculties of his over-rich and complex nature--to be pruned and clipped and thinned--that his one supreme faculty of painting might have elbow-room to reach its fullest, or else you would never have seen the wood for the trees (or _vice versa_--which is it?).

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'LES GLOUGLOUX DU VIN a QUAT' SOUS....'"]

On New-year's Day Taffy and the Laird were at their work in the studio, when there was a knock at the door, and Monsieur Vinard, cap in hand, respectfully introduced a pair of visitors, an English lady and gentleman.

The gentleman was a clergyman, small, thin, round-shouldered, with a long neck; weak-eyed and dryly polite. The lady was middle-aged, though still young looking; very pretty, with gray hair; very well dressed; very small, full of nervous energy, with tiny hands and feet. It was Little Billee's mother; and the clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Bagot, was her brother-in-law.

Their faces were full of trouble--so much so that the two painters did not even apologize for the carelessness of their attire, or for the odor of tobacco that filled the room. Little Billee's mother recognized the two painters at a glance, from the sketches and descriptions of which her son's letters were always full.

They all sat down.

After a moment's embarra.s.sed silence, Mrs. Bagot exclaimed, addressing Taffy: "Mr. Wynne, we are in terrible distress of mind. I don't know if my son has told you, but on Christmas Day he engaged himself to be married!"

"To--be--_married!_" exclaimed Taffy and the Laird, for whom this was news indeed.

"Yes--to be married to a Miss Trilby O'Ferrall, who, from what he implies, is in quite a different position in life to himself. Do you know the lady, Mr. Wynne?"

"Oh yes! I know her very well indeed; we _all_ know her."

"Is she English?"

"She's an English subject, I believe."

"Is she a Protestant or a Roman Catholic?" inquired the clergyman.

"A--a--upon my word, I really don't know!"

"You know her very well indeed, and you _don't_--_know_--_that_, Mr.

Wynne!" exclaimed Mr. Bagot.

"Is she a _lady_, Mr. Wynne?" asked Mrs. Bagot, somewhat impatiently, as if that were a much more important matter.

By this time the Laird had managed to basely desert his friend; had got himself into his bedroom, and from thence, by another door, into the street and away.

"A lady?" said Taffy; "a--it so much depends upon what that word exactly means, you know; things are so--a--so different here. Her father was a gentleman, I believe--a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge--and a clergyman, if _that_ means anything!... he was unfortunate and all that--a--intemperate, I fear, and not successful in life. He has been dead six or seven years."

"And her mother?"

"I really know very little about her mother, except that she was very handsome, I believe, and of inferior social rank to her husband. She's also dead; she died soon after him."

"What is the young lady, then? An English governess, or something of that sort?"

"Oh, no, no--a--nothing of _that_ sort," said Taffy (and inwardly, "You coward--you cad of a Scotch thief of a sneak of a Laird--to leave all this to me!").

"What? Has she independent means of her own, then?"

"A--not that I know of; I should even say, decidedly not!"

"What _is_ she, then? She's at least respectable, I hope!"

"At present she's a--a blanchisseuse de fin--that is considered respectable here."