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Page 49
'Then you're not of her Court?'
'I? Of her Court? _Mais quelle id�e_!'
'It was only a hypothesis. Of course, you know I'm devoured by
curiosity. My days are spent in wondering who you are.'
She laughed. 'You must have a care, or you'll be typical,' she warned
him.
'I never said I wasn't human,' he called after her, as she cantered
away.
VIII.
The next day still (the fifteenth), 'Haven't I heard you lived at
Saint-Graal when you were a child?' she asked.
'If you have, for once in a way rumour has told the truth. I lived at
Saint-Graal till I was thirteen.'
'Then perhaps you knew her?'
'Her?'
'The Queen. Mademoiselle de la Granjolaye de Ravanches.'
'Oh, I knew her very well--when we were children.'
'Tell me all about her.'
'It would be a long story.'
She leaped from her horse; then, raising her riding whip, and looking
the animal severely in the eye, 'B�zigue! Attention,' she said
impressively. 'You're to stop exactly where you are and not play any
tricks. _Entendu? Bien_.' She moved a few steps down the pathway, and
stopped at an opening among the trees, where the ground was a cushion
of bright green moss. 'By Jove, she _is_ at her ease,' thought Paul,
who followed her. 'How splendidly she walks--what undulations!' From
the French point of view, as she must be aware, the situation gave him
all sorts of rights.
She sank softly, gracefully, upon the moss.
'It's a long story. Tell it me,' she commanded, and pointed to the
earth. He sat down facing her, at a little distance.
'It's odd you should have chosen this place,' said he.
'Odd? Why?' She looked at him inquiringly. For a moment their eyes
held each other; and all at once the blood swept through him with
suffocating violence. She was so beautiful, so sumptuous, so warmly
and richly feminine; and surely the circumstances were not anodyne.
Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her
lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and
then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her
breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black
cloth of her dress--all these, with the silence of the forest, the
heat of the southern day, the woodland fragrances of which the air was
full, and the sense of being intimately alone with her, set up within
him a turbulent vibration, half of delight, half of pained suspense.
And the complaisant informality with which she met him played a
sustaining counterpoint. 'What luck, what luck, what luck,' were the
words which shaped themselves to the strong beating of his pulses.
What would happen next? Whither would it lead? He had savoured the
bouquet, he was famished to taste the wine. And yet, so complicated
are our human feelings, he was obscurely vexed. Only two kinds of
woman, he would have maintained yesterday, could conceivably do a
thing like this: an _ing�nue_ or 'that sort.' She wasn't an _ing�nue_.
Something, at the same time, half assured him that she wasn't 'that
sort,' either. But--the circumstances! The situation!
'Why odd?' she repeated.
'Oh, I don't want to talk about the Queen,' he said, in a smothered
voice.
'The oddity relates itself to the Queen?'
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