Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/441

4 learned to put up with in this. His eyes twinkled under their gray lashes as he pictured to himself the Archangel Michael, for instance, trying to seat them on the heavenly benches to their satisfaction, so that no one of them should be in a draught and so that each should have the best view that was to be had of all that was going on. Unless every seat was a front seat, he saw great trouble in store for the Archangel Michael.

They twinkled again when, at length, at the end of his deliberation, he took up his pen and, in his most precise, stilted English, with queer French crooks and pothooks to every letter, informed his correspondent that he felt himself honored in being able to comply with his request.

Mrs. Abner Robinson, a well-to-do widow of New England extraction, was monsieur's most prominent pensionnaire. Madame Ro-ban-son he called her, with a strong accent on the second syllable. By reason of her wealth and a certain dignified force of exaction that some women have, the most coveted seat at the table was hers, as well as the corner rooms on the first story commanding the best view of the lake and the mountains.

Madame had chosen these rooms partly because of the outlook and partly because of the quiet that she could secure to herself in them.

Noise jarred upon her inexpressibly, and she had pampered herself in her sensitiveness until it had become a mania.

Once, indeed, in her earlier days, in America, she had entered complaint against her neighbor's roosters—not because they had crowed at unearthly hours, but because she had kept awake expecting them to.

She congratulated herself that, at length, in her beautiful, sunny corner-room in the Swiss pension, she had found a haven of silence.

On the one side she was separated from her neighbors by broad, deep linen-closets. On the other was the one man of the establishment, the ex-clergyman. He did, to be sure, clear his weak windpipes every morning, early, with most rasping, grating, wall-piercing persistency. But that demonstration over for the day, he might have been in a state of coma, for all the noise that he made. Madame hugged herself hourly, she was so contented with him, and her satisfaction bade fair to be permanent.

Her state of mind can be better imagined than described when the news descended upon her out of a clear sky that the clergyman had been called back to his native heath of London by the death of a connection; that he would be absent for several months, and that in his absence his rooms would be occupied by a child of eighteen months and its nurse. Really one feels sorry for her, even in thinking about it.

Being a woman of action, she bearded monsieur in his office at once. His very soul twinkled as he saw her coming. "There will be doings," was the free translation of what he said to himself in French. His courtesy, however, was more courtly even than was customary with him. He was desolated to have caused madame, so valued a pensionnaire, such inconvenience. If he had known,—but now the apartment had been definitely promised. The letter had stated that it must be upon the first story, and there was no other vacant. Monsieur le Bébé was already en route. He said "Monsieur le Bébé," not simply "the baby" or "the child," from a whimsical respect for the fact that the little invalid was the male head of his family. Poor little soul! he was both head and foot, for he had not a single near living relative. If madame would like to change her room, temporarily, he continued, it should be done—no trouble would be too great. Perhaps, however, if madame would wait, she might not find the inconvenience so great as she anticipated. Perhaps madame would find it advisable to consider the matter for a day or two.

Madame did not change her room. Monsieur knew quite well that she would not. The clothes-press of the one of which she was in possession was altogether too commodious, and her bonnet-boxes fitted the upper shelf exactly. It would have been madness to change.

Her state of mind, however, did not improve; it was only equalled by that of her companions, the other elderly women. Over their coffee-cups of an afternoon, they grew quite red in the face, their heads shook and their hands trembled