SHE followed him about the fringes of the groups pressing into the great front room where a stringed orchestra was starting the first, glorious notes of the Marseillaise; and suddenly a man's voice, in all the power and beauty of the opera singer and with the passion of a Frenchman singing for his people, burst out with the battle song:
Allons, enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé . . . .
It lifted her as nothing had ever before. "Go, children of your country; the day of glory is here! Against us the bloody standard of tyranny is raised! . . . ."
She had sung that marvelous hymn of the French since she was a child; before she had understood it at all, the leap and lilt of the verse had thrilled her. It had become to her next an historical song of freedom; when the war started—and America was not in—the song had ceased to resound from the past. The victory of the French upon the Marne, the pursuit to the Aisne; then the stand at Verdun gave it living, vibrant voice. Still it had been a voice calling to others—a voice which Ruth might hear but to which she might not reply. But now, as it called to her: "Aux armes! . . Marchons! Marchons! . . " she was to march with it!
The wonder of that made her a little dizzy and set her pulse fluttering in her throat. The song was finished and she was amid the long fronds of palms, the hanging vines, and the red of winter roses in the conservatory. She looked about and discovered Hubert Lennon guiding Gerry Hull to her.
"Cynthia, this is Gerry Hull; Gerry, this is Cynthia Gail."
He was in his uniform which he had worn in the French service; he had applied to be transferred from his old escadrille to an American squadron, Ruth knew; but the transfer was not yet effected. The ribbons of his decorations—the Croix de Guerre, the Medaille Militaire, the Cross of the Legion of Honor—ran in a little, brilliant row across the left breast of his jacket. It bothered him as her eyes went to them. He would not have sought the display—she thought—of wearing his decorations here at home; but since he was appearing in formal—almost an official function—he had no choice about it. And she recognized instantly that he had not followed his friend out of the "jam" of the other rooms to meet her in order to hear more praise of himself from her.
He was, indeed, far more interested in her than in himself. "Why, I've met you before, Miss Gail," he said, and evidently was puzzling to place her.
Ruth went warm with pleasure. "I spoke to you on the street—when your car stopped on Michigan Avenue this morning," she confessed. She had not been Cynthia Gail, then; but he could not know that.
"Of course! And I said some stuffy sort of thing to you, didn't I?"
"I didn't think it—stuffy," Ruth denied, utilizing his word. There were seats where they were; and suddenly it occurred to her, when he glanced at them, that he was remaining standing because she was, and that he would like to sit down, and delay there with her. She gasped a little at this realization; and she seated herself upon a gaily painted bench. He looked about before he sat down.
"Hello; I say, where's Hub?"
Lennon had disappeared; and Ruth knew why. She had forgotten him in the excitement of meeting Gerry Hull; so he had felt himself in the way and had immediately withdrawn. But she could do nothing to mend that matter now; she turned to Gerry Hull, who was on the bench beside her.
He had more quickly banished any concern over his friend's disappearance and was observing Ruth with so frank an interest that, instead of gazing away from her when she looked about at him, his eyes for an instant rested upon hers; his were meditative, almost wistful eyes for that moment. They made her think, suddenly, of the little boy whose picture with his grandfather she used to see in her father's newspaper—an alert, energetic little boy, yet with a look of wonder in his eyes why so much fuss was made about him.
"I seem to've been saying no end of stuffy things since I've been back, Miss Gail; they appeared to be what I was expected to say. But I'm about at the finish of 'em. I'm to say something here this afternoon; and I'm going to say exactly what I think. Wouldn't you?"
"Of course I would," Ruth said.
"Then you forgive me?"
"For what?"
"Posing like such a self-righteous chump in a cab that you felt you ought to ask me what you should do!"
"You haven't been posing," Ruth denied for him again. "Why, when I saw you, what amazed me was that—" she stopped suddenly as she saw color come to his face.
"That I wasn't striking an attitude? Look here, I'm—or I was—one man in fifty thousand in the foreign legion; and one in thousands who've been in the air a bit. I'd no idea what I was getting into when they told me to come home here or I'd—" he stopped and shifted the subject from himself with abrupt finality. "You're going to France, Hub tells me. You've been there in peacetime, of course—Paris surely."
Ruth nodded. She had not thought that, as Cynthia, she must have been abroad until he was so certain of it.
"Did you ever go about old Paris and just poke around, Miss Gail?"
"In those quaint, crooked little streets which change their names every time they twist?"
"The Rue des Saints Pères, the Rue Pavée—that name rather takes one back, doesn't it? Some time ago it must have been when in Paris a citizen could describe where he lived by saying it was on 'the paved street.'"
"Yet it was only in the fifteenth century that wolves used to come in winter into Paris."
"To scare François Villon into his Lodgings for a Night?" Gerry said. "So you know that story of Stevenson's, too?"
"Yes."
"I suppose, though, you had to stay at the Continental, or the Regina, or some hotel like that, didn't you? I did at first, when my tutor used to take me. You'd have been with your parents, of course"
"Of course," Ruth said.
"But have you planned where you'll stay now? You'll choose your own billets, I believe."
Ruth appealed to her memories of Du Maurier and Victor Hugo; she had read, long ago, Trilby and Les Misérables, of course, and Notre-Dame de Paris; and she knew a good bit about old Paris.
"The Latin Quarter's cheapest, I suppose."
"And any amount the most sport!"
She got along very well; or he was not at all critical. He was relaxing with her from the strain of being upon exhibition; and he seemed to be having a very good time. The joy of this made her bold to plan with him all sorts of explorations of Paris when they would meet over there with a day off. She looked away and closed her eyes for a second, half expecting that when she opened them the sound of music, and the roses, and palms, and conservatory, and Gerry Hull must have vanished; but he was there when she glanced back. And she noticed agreeable and pleasing things about him—the way his dark hair brushed back above his temples, the character in his strong, well-formed hands.
Lady Agnes came out looking for him; and he called her over:
"Oh, Agnes, here we are!"
So Ruth met Lady Agnes, too; but Lady Agnes took him away, laughingly scolding him for having left her so long alone among all those American people. Ruth did not follow; and while she lingered beside the bench where he had sat with her, she warned herself that Gerry Hull had paid her attention as a man of his breeding would have paid any girl whom he had been brought out to meet. Then the blood, warm within her, insisted that he had not disliked her; he had even liked her for herself.
The approach of an elderly woman in a gray dress returned Ruth to the realities and the risks of the fraud she had been playing to win Gerry Hull's liking. For the woman gazed at her questioningly and swiftly came up.
Ruth arose. Was this Hubert Lennon's "Aunt Emilie?" she wondered. Had she recently seen the real Cynthia so that she was aware that Ruth was not she?
No; the woman was calling her Cynthia; and with the careful enunciation of the syllables, Ruth recognized the voice as that which had addressed her over the telephone when she was in her room at the hotel.
"Cynthia, you are doing well—excellently!" This could refer only to the fact that she had met Gerry Hull already and had not displeased him. "Develop this opportunity to the utmost; you may find him of greatest possible use when you are in France!"