While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:
"Give me one!--I've forgotten mine! ..."
"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:
"You're hurt! But now you know--you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.
"Frightfully! All the more because"--Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly--"I can't help being thundering--glad!"
"I--see! ..."
She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately:
"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"
She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from _Samson et Dalila_ on the terrace of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.
"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879--tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos--but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough--I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."
Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:
"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"
Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.
"It would matter--lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army--in War-time, mind you!--for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him--and as for _his_ grandfather--the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't--sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me--about your mother----" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"--he was getting idiotic--"or Roman noses! Be plucky--and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street--man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! ..."
Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....
*CHAPTER IV*
*RAYMOND OF THE S. AE. F.*
The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with women--bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold out.... Not built that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed. He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club, another avenue, intersecting the Allee de Longchamps and skirting the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, _via_ Bagatelle.
Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a filmy feathery thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset _chiffon_, half shaded red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her marvellous gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the second waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the third waiter (who came forward with this, and the _en tout cas_ of Madame--a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the broad Allee de Longchamps with the narrower Route de Madrid. And the towering plume of her astonishing hat brought down a shower of red rose-petals as she passed out before him--and Franky, with some of these on his top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his waistcoat, was irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.
Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader, more frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages, people in automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and bicyclettes, and followed narrower pathways, stretching between green lawns adorned with shrubberies and clumps of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by sweethearting couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies, while venerable gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the columns of _Figaro_ or _Paris Midi_.
When even these figures became rare, it was borne in upon Franky that he and Margot were not upon a path that led to the Grounds of the Polo Club. Reluctantly, he admitted himself lost.
"Does it matter? ..." Margot's voice was weary. "If you're absolutely set on it, we could ask one of those men in cocked hats and waxed moustaches and red-and-yellow shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip. But I don't feel the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the Lakes. These alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and green. I vote we go on."
"Madame cannot pass this way. It is not open for strangers."
A Republican Guard, a good-looking _sous-officier_, had spoken, comprehending the tone rather than the English words.
"Why not?" Margot's eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:
"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking place here to-day."
"But my husband is an English officer--" Margot was beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away.
"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"
"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don't suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot--what they'd cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind. Look there!--more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Ae. F." Behind the driver's seat towered the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in _kepis_ and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro.