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Page 1
WHEN I AM KING
A RESPONSIBILITY
CASTLES NEAR SPAIN
I.
I woke up very gradually this morning, and it took me a little while
to bethink myself where I had slept--that it had not been in my own
room in the Cromwell Road. I lay a-bed, with eyes half-closed,
drowsily look looking forward to the usual procession of sober-hued
London hours, and, for the moment, quite forgot the journey of
yesterday, and how it had left me in Paris, a guest in the smart new
house of my old friend, Nina Childe. Indeed, it was not until somebody
tapped on my door, and I roused myself to call out 'Come in,' that I
noticed the strangeness of the wall-paper, and then, after an instant
of perplexity, suddenly remembered. Oh, with a wonderful lightening of
the spirit, I can tell you.
A white-capped, brisk young woman, with a fresh-coloured, wholesome
peasant face, came in, bearing a tray--Jeanne, Nina's femme-de-chambre.
'Bonjour, monsieur,' she cried cheerily. 'I bring monsieur his
coffee.' And her announcement was followed by a fragrance--the
softly-sung response of the coffee-sprite. Her tray, with its pretty
freight of silver and linen, primrose butter, and gently-browned
pain-de-gruau, she set down on the table at my elbow; then she crossed
the room and drew back the window-curtains, making the rings tinkle
crisply on the metal rods, and letting in a gush of dazzling sunshine.
From where I lay I could see the house-fronts opposite glow
pearly-grey in shadow, and the crest of the slate roofs sharply print
itself on the sky, like a black line on a sheet of scintillant blue
velvet. Yet, a few minutes ago, I had been fancying myself in the
Cromwell Road.
Jeanne, gathering up my scattered garments, to take them off and brush
them, inquired, by the way, if monsieur had passed a comfortable
night.
'As the chambermaid makes your bed, so must you lie in it,' I
answered. 'And you know whether my bed was smoothly made.'
Jeanne smiled indulgently. But her next remark--did it imply that she
found me rusty? 'Here's a long time that you haven't been in Paris.'
'Yes,' I admitted; 'not since May, and now we're in November.'
'We have changed things a little, have we not?' she demanded, with a
gesture that left the room, and included the house, the street, the
quarter.
'In effect,' assented I.
'Monsieur desires his hot water?' she asked, abruptly irrelevant.
But I could be, or at least seem, abruptly irrelevant too.
'Mademoiselle--is she up?'
'Ah, yes, monsieur. Mademoiselle has been up since eight. She awaits
you in the salon. La voil� qui joue,' she added, pointing to the
floor.
Nina had begun to play scales in the room below.
'Then you may bring me my hot water,' I said.
II.
The scales continued while I was dressing, and many desultory
reminiscences of the player, and vague reflections upon the
unlikelihood of her adventures, went flitting through my mind to their
rhythm. Here she was, scarcely turned thirty, beautiful, brilliant,
rich in her own right, as free in all respects to follow her own will
as any man could be, with Camille happily at her side, a well grown,
rosy, merry miss of twelve,--here was Nina, thus, to-day; and yet, a
mere little ten years ago, I remembered her ... ah, in a very
different plight indeed. True, she has got no more than her deserts;
she has paid for her success, every pennyweight of it, in hard work
and self-denial. But one is so expectant, here below, to see Fortune
capricious, that, when for once in a way she bestows her favours where
they are merited, one can't help feeling rather dazed. One is so
inured to seeing honest Effort turn empty-handed from her door.
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