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The Pension Beaurepas
by
“I have come for you, dearest,” said the mother.
“Yes, dear mamma.”
“Come for you–come for you,” Mrs. Church repeated, looking down at the relics of our little feast. “I was obliged to ask Mr. Ruck’s assistance. I was puzzled; I thought a long time.”
“Well, Mrs. Church, I was glad to see you puzzled once in your life!” said Mr. Ruck, with friendly jocosity. “But you came pretty straight for all that. I had hard work to keep up with you.”
“We will take a cab, Aurora,” Mrs. Church went on, without heeding this pleasantry–“a closed one. Come, my daughter.”
“Yes, dear mamma.” The young girl was blushing, yet she was still smiling; she looked round at us all, and, as her eyes met mine, I thought she was beautiful. “Good-bye,” she said to us. “I have had a LOVELY TIME.”
“We must not linger,” said her mother; “it is five o’clock. We are to dine, you know, with Madame Galopin.”
“I had quite forgotten,” Aurora declared. “That will be charming.”
“Do you want me to assist you to carry her back, ma am?” asked Mr. Ruck.
Mrs. Church hesitated a moment, with her serene little gaze. “Do you prefer, then, to leave your daughter to finish the evening with these gentlemen?”
Mr. Ruck pushed back his hat and scratched the top of his head. “Well, I don’t know. How would you like that, Sophy?”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Sophy, as Mrs. Church marched off with her daughter.
CHAPTER VIII.
I had half expected that Mrs. Church would make me feel the weight of her disapproval of my own share in that little act of revelry in the English Garden. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman–I could not but admire the justice of this pretension–by recognising my irresponsibility. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church’s view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man, in such a situation, is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora’s appearing in public under the insufficient chaperonage of Miss Ruck. Besides, she liked to converse, and she apparently did me the honour to believe that of all the members of the Pension Beaurepas I had the most cultivated understanding. I found her in the salon a couple of evenings after the incident I have just narrated, and I approached her with a view of making my peace with her, if this should prove necessary. But Mrs. Church was as gracious as I could have desired; she put her marker into her book, and folded her plump little hands on the cover. She made no specific allusion to the English Garden; she embarked, rather, upon those general considerations in which her refined intellect was so much at home.
“Always at your studies, Mrs. Church,” I ventured to observe.
“Que voulez-vous? To say studies is to say too much; one doesn’t study in the parlour of a boarding-house. But I do what I can; I have always done what I can. That is all I have ever claimed.”
“No one can do more, and you seem to have done a great deal.”
“Do you know my secret?” she asked, with an air of brightening confidence. And she paused a moment before she imparted her secret– “To care only for the BEST! To do the best, to know the best–to have, to desire, to recognise, only the best. That’s what I have always done, in my quiet little way. I have gone through Europe on my devoted little errand, seeking, seeing, heeding, only the best. And it has not been for myself alone; it has been for my daughter. My daughter has had the best. We are not rich, but I can say that.”