Mrs. Vanderstein's jewels. Bryce Charles

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СКАЧАТЬ lady, with fair hair wonderfully curled and twisted, who obscured the light a good deal as she stood with her shoulders disdainfully turned to the interior of the room and her snow white nose close against the plate glass, which separated her from the street. Plainly she felt it a come-down to look out on to this gloomy Pimlico roadway. Around her were strewn combs and brushes, bottles of brillantine and china pots containing creams for the complexion, curls and tails of false hair – in some cases attached to gruesome scalps of pink wax – and half a dozen elaborately carved tortoise-shell combs, which the luckless Eugène had invested in in a fit of mistaken enthusiasm shortly after his arrival in England, but which had never received so much as a comment or an inquiry as to price from any of those who had since looked on them.

      They had remained, however, a source of pride to Madame Querterot, who would often remark to Julie what an air they bestowed.

      Presently, after a glance at the clock, Julie put down her work and came to the door between the two rooms.

      “You are back, mother,” she said, looking at her gravely.

      “So it appears,” snapped her mother without raising her eyes.

      “I am afraid you must be tired,” went on Julie calmly. “The day has been so hot. Will you not take a glass of lemonade before supper?”

      “Have you got a lemon?” asked Madame Querterot somewhat less crossly.

      “Yes,” said Julie.

      She opened the cupboard and taking out a lemon, a tumbler, and a lemon squeezer, went about the business of preparing a cool drink for her heated parent.

      “Has anyone bought anything to-day?” Madame Querterot asked when after a few minutes the beverage was handed to her. “Put a little more sugar in the glass.”

      “A boy came in for a bottle of hair-oil,” replied Julie, “and a few women have bought hair-pins and hair-curlers. It has been a dull day.”

      “We shall soon be in the street at this rate,” said Madame Querterot despairingly. “One cannot live on a few packets of hair-pins and a bottle of hair-oil. No. If only we could move to a fashionable locality. Here no one ever comes and we have but to die of hunger.”

      “We haven’t been here very long. We may do better presently. It is the customers whom you massage that keep us from starvation.” Julie propped open the door into the shop and taking up her work sat down by the table in the parlour.

      “Bah! Who knows how long they will continue? They have the skin of crocodiles, all of them. What can I do with it? Nothing. And in time they will find that out, and I shall be put to the door. What will happen then? You, I suppose, think you will be safe in your religious house. And your poor mother, you will be able to mock yourself of her then, hein!”

      “Mother, you know I shall not leave you while you want me. I have not spoken of becoming a nun since father died, have I?”

      “Your father!” exclaimed Madame Querterot with emotion. “Your father was a poltroon. No sooner did I need his assistance than he deserted me!”

      “Mother!” cried Julie, and there was that in her tone which made Madame Querterot’s lamentations die away into inaudible mumblings.

      The girl did not say any more, but went on quietly with her sewing, till after a while her mother rose to go upstairs.

      At the door she paused.

      “Bert is coming to supper,” she said over her shoulder. “You have not forgotten that it is to-night we go with him to the theatre? He will be here soon, I should think,” and she went on up the narrow stairs without waiting for an answer.

      Half an hour later, when they sat down to a cold meal, which Julie had carefully prepared – for Madame Querterot was particularly fond of eating and had seen that her daughter early acquired the principles of good cookery – they had been joined by the guest to whom she had alluded.

      This was a young man of anæmic aspect, with fair hair that lay rather untidily across a high, narrow forehead. His face, which was pale and thin, was not at first sight particularly prepossessing. The contour of it was unusually pointed, though the chin receded so much that it could hardly be said to exhibit a point. The mouth was weak and large and always half open, so that the teeth, stained brown by the smoking of continuous cigarettes, were not completely hidden when he talked under the straggling little moustache, the end of which he had an unpleasant habit of chewing. The nose was prominent and looked too large for the rest of his face, the eyes, dark and deep-set, seemed to flash with unsuspected fires when talk turned on a subject that interested him. It was they that redeemed the whole man from total insignificance. They were the eyes of an enthusiast, almost of a fanatic. He did not talk much, but seemed content to devour the food set before him and to gaze untiringly at Julie who sat opposite him at the small square table.

      Julie was a very good-looking girl in her way, which was not at all an English way, although the English language came more naturally to her lips than her mother tongue. To tell the truth, she was not very proficient in that, her mother and father having both found it easier, after she began to go to school, to talk to her in broken English. Indeed, after twenty years or so of residence in London that language became as natural to them as their own tongue, and Madame Querterot’s French had by now grown quite as anglicised as that of many linguists in her adopted country. She found, however, that many of her customers preferred her to talk in broken English; they liked to feel that here was some one come straight from the gay city to do their pleasure.

      Her daughter inherited her mother’s oval face and arched eyebrows, but there the likeness ceased. Julie was tall while Madame Querterot was short; she was dark, while her mother was fair, and of a fairness that owed nothing to art. Julie had a straight, short nose and a little rosebud of a mouth, her skin was dark but glowing with health, and the brown eyes, set far apart under the low brow, had a wide-open look of sorrowful surprise as if she found herself in a world that failed continually to come up to her expectations. Bert, it was plain to see, found all this very much to his liking, and was so taken up with the contemplation of it that a great deal of Madame Querterot’s conversation fell unheeded on his ears, and his answers, when he made any, were for the most part quite irrelevant.

      Madame Querterot had by this time completely recovered her good temper, or at all events displayed the amiability habitual to her in intercourse with strangers. She prattled away about the weather, the letter she had that day received from her relations in Paris, asked about Bert’s work, and showed, and possibly felt, great interest in his meagre replies. Presently she began to talk about the occupation of her own day.

      “There is an old lady whom I visit for the massage,” she said, “who would make you laugh to see. She is ugly, she is fat, she has the complexion of a turkey! Yet there is no one so anxious as she to become young again. Was she ever beautiful? I do not know; but it is certain that she will not be so again. Every day I find her with a mirror in her hand and every day as I leave her she takes it up again to see if there is any improvement. For all I know she sits like that, gazing at her unsympathetic reflection till the next day when I come once more.”

      Madame Querterot paused and took a draught of her lemonade.

      “A little more sugar, Julie, my cherished, and it would be better still,” she said. “In this country sugar is less dear and you are unnecessarily careful of it. If we were in France I would not say so; there, there are impôts. But this, one must admit it, is the cheapest place one can live in. That is why one finds here so many Jews. Bah! the Jews! Why does one suffer them? In England as in France one sees nothing else; but even more in England since l’affaire Dreyfus. There is one lady to whom СКАЧАТЬ