"Broken Music"

“SO she’s sent for you too, has she?” said the doctor. Of course he knew that Miss Prenderghast must have sent for Monsieur le Curé as she had sent for the doctor himself, for neither of them would have gone to the Castle uninvited. They would have cheerfully borne with many things for the sake of Jean D’Ucelles, but they would not have gone uninvited to see his aunt, especially not for déjeuner.

The Curé hesitated; if he could have made a mystery out of his invitation he would have done so; he loved mysteries quite as much as the doctor loved probing them, but he was not quite such an adept at inventing them--he preferred those which had been already invented for him.

“She intimated that she desired to see me,” he cautiously replied. “I could have refused, but she is, as we all know, alas! a Protestant, and as such her soul is in hourly peril. I said to myself: ‘Perhaps this is an awakening to the truth.’ It’s true I should have preferred to go up to the Castle after déjeuner. It is a strange thing--I have often remarked it--that Protestants enjoy neither the fruits of the spirit nor the fruits of the earth. It was not so always at the Château. I can remember well enough in the late Baron’s time what a table she kept--the poor young English wife--even in his absence. She was not born a Catholic, it is true; but she became one. She spared no expense, and she had a great respect for the clergy. She was always telling me to take care of myself. She had a cook trained in Paris.”

“Perhaps she was able to train her cook,” said the doctor. “The more pity she couldn’t train her husband--the poor Baron, he was always a wild one. I had hoped the marriage would steady him, but it never did! How well I remember his saying to me: ‘You believe in nature, then, Monsieur; so do I. She has made the plants to keep still, but men she has made to move about--do not trouble yourself, then, that I fulfil my destiny!’ He was going to Paris, of course; he always was. I remember it was before Monsieur Jean’s birth. I had ventured to implore him to remain. I knew it was a liberty, but what would you? The Baronne was in a very delicate condition. I feared that she had anxieties, there was much talk about the Baron’s long absences--always without her, you understand, but not always, I fear, without others--and I had much sympathy with the poor lady, alone, and in a strange land. She was very young, too, and neurotic; she wanted to die.” The doctor blew his nose.

“That was a sin,” said the Curé severely. “I can hardly believe that of Madame; she never mentioned the fact to me. I think you must be exaggerating.”

“Bah!” snapped Dr. Bonnet. “I am not a priest. I have some experience of women; she was in love with her husband. English women are droll; it is a great mistake, I find, this love of the husband--it leads nowhere. However, it is not so easy to die when one is twenty-five and has a man of science against one, and then when Monsieur Jean was born it was all another story! The Baron sent a telegram in the best of taste, and came down later with the Comte and Comtesse D’Ucelles to the christening.”

The Curé nodded.

“It was a magnificent christening,” he said. “I myself officiated. There was talk of the Bishop of the Diocese, but Madame was firm; she said I should be the one to make her son a Christian, as I had made his mother Catholic. Yes, yes, doubtless she is with the Blessed Saints--the little English lady--and I hope the Baron too, though of that we cannot be quite so sure.”

Monsieur le Curé made the sign of the cross and looked very grave. There was every reason why he should, for the Baron D’Ucelles had shot himself through the head five years ago--two years after his wife’s death. It was natural that he should regret her. She had spent six months in giving him what he wanted, and thirteen years in not giving him what he didn’t want. She would have made an ideal wife for any man. Still it was not altogether on her account that he had followed her to the grave. The late Baron had been a little extravagant both with his money and with his life, and when he had at length discovered that he would shortly become a helpless paralytic on a very small income, he had decided to take the only means left him to avoid these issues. He had left behind him only Ucelles itself and two small farms, which was all that could be saved for his son out of his once handsome inheritance. His family said that this was what came of having married an English woman without a dot.

“There is one thing,” said the Curé, after a pause, “that I have never quite understood, and this is why Monsieur Jean should have been brought up by this English relation?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“I too have wondered,” he said. “But what will you? The Comte, his guardian, married a rich wife of the bourgeoisie, and they have a large house in Paris and a big income; they have no children of their own. What more likely, it would seem, than that they should adopt Monsieur Jean? In this world, so I take it, what is likely does not happen. Instead, one fine day this English aunt arrives, who knows nothing of our tongue or of our ways, and nothing--it would seem--of children, it is to her, then, that they entrust our little Baron. For myself, I am a philosopher, I have no theories--all I believe is that in the long run nature has her way, and her way is, perhaps, the best; at any rate it is the only one I know.”

“I have always endeavoured to guard him against her errors,” said the Curé; and indeed he had done his best. He had baptized Jean, he had taught him his catechism, and prepared him for confirmation and for his first communion; he had also taught him a little Latin, a great deal of theology, and what he thought was literature. He really believed that Jean thought so too, but then he had watched Jean so carefully and incessantly for twenty years that he knew nothing about him at all. The doctor, who had not seen nearly so much of Jean, understood him a great deal better. He had kept a fresher eye for change.

Both men were silent after this. Little St. Jouin lay in the broiling sun behind them, a small, huddled town in the ancient stubble-fields of the plain. The broad white road, through which life flashed by in swift, infrequent modern traffic, divided it from a fashionable watering-place on the one side and from a commercial seaport on the other. But nobody ever stopped at St. Jouin, there was no reason why they should; it had nothing rare enough about it to ensure its ruin and there was no one to realize that in being so near modernity it had altogether escaped it. Certainly the two figures that plodded along the broad white road had no such fancies; they had no fancies at all. They had lived in St. Jouin nearly all their lives. Monsieur le Curé in particular, with his high, narrow head and irritable, unseeing eyes (the kind of eyes that are always glancing about, driven by a suspicion that there is something wrong to be observed, and overlooking everything else), was not likely to approve of fancies. Why should he? his religion was sufficient for him. He was the most important person in St. Jouin; there was no unbelief there (in spite of the newspapers) and very little faith. Everybody went to church, so that their lives were always under the Curé’s eyes; only their souls escaped him.

The doctor had his ideas, of course, but he was terribly scientific; he had spent a year in Paris thirty years ago, and he took in a Radical newspaper. He thought he was a red-hot Socialist and a cynic, but he was really a very kind-hearted man and treated all his poorest patients free of charge, only he was a little impatient about what he did not understand. He was quite sure that what did not appeal to him personally was either old-fashioned or new-fangled, and when he talked about progress, he meant his own ideas.

The great bell at the Château rang out the hour of noon; it seemed to shake the hot air round them and to keep the silence listening to its deep reverberations. The Curé stopped, crossed himself, and repeated his Ave with bowed head. The doctor, who was a stout man, was glad of the pause, but lest his friend should suppose that he was putting it to a religious purpose, he whistled--at least he tried to; but he was too much out of breath to make a success of it.

Through the opening in the trees beyond them Ucelles itself appeared. It was a long, low house, with a steep, grey roof, in which tiny round windows were thickly set. At a distance it still looked, what it had once been, the chief mansion in the district--the Château of Ucelles. The garden had been allowed to run to seed, but the long avenue of limes approaching the house made stout sentinels for its dignity.

In a small wood of fir and plane trees, close to the house, stood the family chapel; the sun shone through the leaves above it, and the priest and the doctor caught a glimpse through the open grille of a tiny altar covered with fresh flowers. In front of the house stretched an uncultivated meadow, but in the centre a square was trimmed with neat little box hedges, and in the middle of the square was a small pond covered deep with water-lilies. Around it late roses and early chrysanthemums mingled their blooms together.

“He has always kept his mother’s garden gay,” said the Curé approvingly; “and the flowers in the chapel there are fresh. I prefer myself the artificial ones, but we must be indulgent to youth; the Church has always recognized that.”

The doctor frowned. The Curé had never revealed to him what his ambition for Jean was, but the doctor had long ago guessed it. You cannot know a man for thirty years and be entirely ignorant of his favourite idea, especially when he has not got more than one. The Curé wished Jean to become a priest, and the doctor hated the idea with all his heart. He was a Socialist, you must remember, a Radical and a cynic, so of course he wanted Jean to become a grand seigneur--a man of the world, and at the same time noted for his domestic happiness, with a large family of sons.

As for Jean himself, he wanted to become a musician, but nobody minded very much what Jean wanted.

“It has occurred to me,” said the Curé, after he had finished saying his Ave, “that we have been sent for--of course, you must understand that I have no authority for my idea; I am merely expressing what has passed through my mind--that we may be asked to consult with Mademoiselle Prenderghast on the subject of Monsieur Jean’s future.” The Curé coughed.

“There’s his uncle,” growled the doctor. “He ought to settle the question.”

“I think the boy’s taste should be considered,” suggested the Curé. He thought that he had formed Jean’s taste, and that he might safely leave it to settle matters his way.

“I wish he could have done his military service,” said the doctor. “If I had been the fool at the Maire de Valbranche I would have passed him; he is delicate, but it’s only raw, untrained nerves and morbid religious fancies. The old adhesion in the left lung they thought themselves so clever in spotting, why, it’s nothing--nothing at all, I tell you; just the result of that English spinster’s notion of how to treat a delicate child with measles. But there! modern science only goes by what’s at the end of a stethoscope, or a microscope, or a misanthrope,” said the doctor. He was not quite sure what a misanthrope was; however, it sounded all right, and, after all, the Curé wouldn’t know any better. “It doesn’t allow for life forces.”