He
met nobody. It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely
forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.
III.
At Saint-Graal Andre was waiting to lunch with him.
'When we were children,' Paul wrote in a letter to Mrs Winchfield,
'Andre, our gardener's son, and I were as intimate as brothers, he
being the only companion of my sex and age the neighbourhood afforded.
But now, after a separation of twenty years, Andre, who has become our
cure, insists upon treating me with distance. He won't waive the fact
that I am the lord of the manor, and calls me relentlessly Monsieur.
I've done everything to entice him to unbend, but his backbone is of
granite. From the merriest of mischief-loving youngsters, he has
hardened into the solemnest of square-toes, with _such_ a long
upper-lip, and manners as stiff as the stuff of his awful best
cassock, which he always buckles on prior to paying me a visit.
Whatever is a poor young man to do? At our first meeting, after my
arrival, I fell upon his neck, and thee-and-thou'd him, as of old
time; he repulsed me with a _vous_ italicised. At last I demanded
reason. "Why _will_ you treat me with this inexorable respect? What
have I done to deserve it? What can I do to forfeit it?" _Il devint
cramoisi_ (in the traditional phrase) and stared.
Pages:
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158