The Bois was not seething with fashionable life as it would be towards the sunset hour. The dandy Clubmen, the smart ladies, had gone to Longchamps with the four-in-hands. Polo was going on near the Pont de Suresnes, the band of a regiment of Cuirassiers was playing in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and Hungarian zithers and violins discoursed sweet music on a little gilded platform at the axial point of Nadier's open-air restaurant--which is shaped like a half-wheel, with pergolas of shower-roses and Crimson Ramblers radiating from the gilded band-stand to the outer circle of little white tables at which one can lunch or dine in fine weather under a light screen of leaves and blossoms, beneath which the green canvas awnings can be drawn when it comes on to rain.
The tables were crowded with French people taking late _dejeuner_, and English, Germans, and German-Americans having lunch. The gravelled courtyard before the terrace was packed with showy automobiles.
If _canard a la presse_ did not grace the meal supplied to Franky and Margot on Nadier's terrace, the _potage printaniere_ and _ecrevisses_ and a _blanquette d'agneau_ were exquisitely cooked and served. Asparagus and a salad of endive followed, and by the time they had emptied a bottle of Chateau Yquem and the _omelette soufflee_ had given place to _Peches Melba_, Margot had smiled several times and laughed once.
She was so dainty and sweet, so brilliant a little human humming-bird, that the laughing, chattering, feasting crowd of smartly or extravagantly dressed people gathered about the other trellis-screened tables under Nadier's rose-pergola sent many a curious or admiring glance her way. And Franky was very proud of his young wife, and theirs had been undeniably a love-match; yet in spite of the good dishes and the excellent Chateau Yquem, little shivers of chilly premonition rippled over him from time to time. He had got to speak out--definitely decline, in the interests of Posterity, to permit interference on the part of Margot's Club circle in his private domestic affairs.... How to do it effectively yet inoffensively was a problem that strained his brain-capacity. Yet--again in the interests of Posterity--Franky had never previously interested himself in Posterity--the thing had to be done. He refused Roquefort, buttered a tiny biscuit absently, put it down undecidedly, and as the waiter whisked his plate away--conjured crystal bowls of tepid rose-water and other essentials from space, and vanished in search of dessert--he spoke, assuming for the first time in his five months' experience of connubial life the toga of marital authority.
"I think, do you know, Kittums"--Kittums was Margot's pet name--"that it will be best to face the music!"
"_Connu!_" Margot shrugged a little, widely opening her splendid brown eyes, "But what music?"
"The"--Franky took the plunge--"the cradle-music, if you will have it!"
Margot's gasp of dismay, and the indignant fire of a stare that was quenched in brine, awakened Franky to the fact of his having failed in tactics. The return of the waiter with a pyramid of superb strawberries and a musk-melon on cracked ice alone stemmed the outburst of the pent-up flood of reproach. Entrenched behind the melon, Franky waited. The waiter again effaced himself, and Margot said from behind another handkerchief:
"Oh, how _could_ you! ... I never _dreamed_ that I should _live_ to hear you speak to me in that way."
Over the melon, whose rough green quartered rind had delicate white raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline maps of countries in Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded his wife. He said:
"Why are you and all your friends so funky of--what's only a natural phe--what do you call it? ... What do men and women marry for, if it isn't to have--children? ... Perhaps you'll answer me?"
"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over the neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To--to be happy together--to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to be a gorgeous season. Balls--balls! right on from now to the end of July--then from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls, reviving the modes, music, and manners of Ancient Civilisations--Carthagenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic--got up and arranged by the Committees of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London by the New Style Club.... Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the dresses and decorations--nothing like them will ever have been seen! And--Peigault says--Tango and the Maxixe are to be chucked to the little cabbages. A new dance is coming from Sao Paulo that will simply wipe them out.... And now--just when I was looking forward--when everything was to have been so splendid----"
The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked up the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture he gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:
"Look here. This is--strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em--the kiddies--so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or is it--not only the--the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and--the temporary disfigurement--you're afraid of--but the--the--the inevitable pain?" He glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife, saying in a low voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He waited an instant, and then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ... For God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"
*CHAPTER III*
*FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE*
The terrace under Nadier's roses--dotted with little tables covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering feasters--the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride--a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely--with her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes--Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the bowl....
"Yes--yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. "The grotesque ugliness.... And the"--the last two words came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips--"the pain--the awful pain! And besides--my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"--she caught her breath--"but there are heaps, heaps, _heaps_ of married women who fear--_that_--equally! And they arrange to escape it--I don't know how! ... For I knew--nothing--when I married you! ..." She lifted her great eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've been ashamed ever to confess that I was--ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a language--amongst other women--that I didn't understand! ..."
There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant. Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris--returning to London for June and July, generally spending August and September in Devonshire--to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.
Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King's Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions--by telephone--to vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.
"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the girl's dead mother--half Irish, half Greek by birth.