The Little Blue Devil/Antoine's Father

“Antoine, my son.”

“Yes.”

Antoine sat quite still, far back in a big leather chair in the lounge of the Parisian hotel—a morose little boy with an unchildlike face. He did not look at his father—he rather preferred not to. He never expected his father to be anything but unpleasant, and the parental expression this morning was, if possible, more unpleasant than usual. The only effect of the mellifluous caressing tones which Gaston threw into his voice was to put his small son on his guard.

“Yes,” he said indifferently.

“What a grunt, little pig! Your manners grow more charming every day. . . . Antoine, I go to Moscow to-night.”

“I know, but I needn’t go and pack yet. It does not take me long to———,”

“I said I go. For you there is no room.”

Antoine’s head flew up with a jerk. There was generally something to be afraid of behind the jokes of Gaston Ste. Croix, and this sounded like a particularly heavy example. Antoine and his father were alone in the world—ever since ​his mother had died two years since, worn out by seven years of misery and Ste. Croix. Perhaps if the marriage had been a happy one she would have tried to be reconciled to her father, and gone back to the old home, and then the small Antoine would at least have known something of his near relatives, and who they were, and where they lived. But as it was, Antoine’s mother could not bear the thought of returning to Trent Stoke defeated, and showing her wounds. And so it came that Gaston, his father, was the only near relative that Antoine knew, and Gaston had just announced that he was going to leave him in a Paris hotel.

He raised his head sharply and looked his father full in the face. “Then what do I do?” he said gruffly—but there was a note of fear in his voice.

“You? Really, I do not know. For long, my brave Antoine, you have shown an unbecoming independence of me.”

Antoine waited, silent. He was very much like what Gaston must have been as a boy, except for the grey eyes under his straight black brows. But years had not improved the elder Ste. Croix. His face was lined and puffy, and its expression unpleasant to the last degree, especially at this particular moment. Gaston broke the strain impatiently.

“You make your own arrangements, you understand? I have done enough for you.”

Another pause. Then Antoine, stammering and suddenly childish: “But—but you’ll leave me here? Wh—what can I do?”

“You can ask your friends. Don’t whimper—we never pretended to be devoted to each other, O Télémaque le jeune. You can ask your friends—our friends—for advice and help. I have done everything for you and I am tired of it.”

Antoine showed his teeth in a snarl very like Gaston’s own.

​“We have no friends; you have tired them out—asking.”

“No impertinence,” said Gaston coldly, and the boy shrank back. Then he spoke from sullen depths:

“Well, give me money.”

Gaston laughed. “What a dutiful son!”

“Give me some money. You’ve taught me that, anyhow,” said Antoine between his teeth.

“A gratifying show of feeling! And it should be some satisfaction to the noble family of your mother to find their heir in the gutter. You will make a worthy Trent, Lord of Trent. But you shall not say I sent you away without sufficient means———”

Ste. Croix smiled as he put his hand into his pocket. (“He can’t have much cash or he wouldn’t be going away to-night,” thought Antoine with the wisdom of experience.)

“I shall give you all I have!”

Antoine took the coins from him and counted them grimly.

“Eleven francs fifty,” he said, and the hate in his eyes might have frightened most men.

“Say thank you, my sweet son.”

“No!”

“No? Then it is good-bye—but you should be very grateful to me———”

“I’m too little to understand your jokes,” said Antoine viciously, knowing that that would annoy Ste. Croix more than any other remark he could make; and he went out.

A highly comforting situation for an infant not yet ten years old. The ideas that Antoine had gathered from his mother about her family were very few and very vague. She had seldom spoken of her father—she believed the breach with him to be irrevocable. The Right Honourable Hugh, Lord Trent, sixth of the name, was violently prejudiced against the whole French nation, because one Dulac ​had unwarrantably deceived him in the year 1861, causing him to lose a considerable sum. He said they were all the same and he wouldn’t let ’em come within three mile of him, dam scoundrels! He never allowed his household to speak of them.

Therefore his daughter Adelaide, being young and wildly romantic, promptly fell in love with the first Frenchman she had ever seen, the undesirable but good-looking Gaston Ste. Croix. She met him while she was staying at a country house, and she ran away with him. Lord Trent swore she was dead to him, dead to him, sir! Damme, he'd rather see a daughter of his in her coffin—she had better not attempt to see him again . . .

Perhaps if she had been a little wiser, or a little less proud, she would have known that his anger was partly assumed. But she never did try to see him or to communicate at all. She knew him very well, foolish as she was. He was a hot-tempered and unreasonable old man.

If it had not been for that fact, the small Antoine might have had some clear knowledge of his grandfather and his family; and of the old house at Trent Stoke; and of the little orphan half-cousin, who, as things were, stood to inherit the house and the title and everything pertaining to it—Pamela Learmonth, five years old, the child of Lord Trent’s daughter by his second wife. And Lord Trent, on his side, might have been aware of the continued existence of his grandson Antoine-Hugues-Phillipe-Ste. Croix. As it was, his elder daughter not having been heard of for ten years, Lord Trent, in the casual manner that he combined with an unusual rigidity of prejudice, presumed her dead, and Pamela Trent heir to the Trent barony, which descended in the female line. Not that he or anyone else worried much about it, for he was obviously going to live for another twenty years.

Ste. Croix had married Lord Trent’s elder daughter solely for her money and her position, knowing that the title was ​bound to descend through her, and thinking that her father would keep her well supplied with money. But he did not; and she would not ask; and Ste. Croix only got an empty satisfaction from depositing the birth certificate of his small son, together with one or two other documents, with her solicitors in London. They represented future gain, but the future was rather dim, and he was a gentleman of a material mind. As the years went on Gaston Ste. Croix decided that Antoine was an asset of, at best, doubtful value, and at present decidedly in the way. Not that he was particular as to where he took his son—Antoine had seen ugly things in the last two or three years, and perhaps worse before his mother died. It is astonishing how early a child can understand–and Antoine knew that it was not for love that Gaston took him about. It is doubtful if Gaston Ste. Croix had ever loved anyone but himself to any extent worth considering.

Gaston having decided to get rid of Antoine, his method was characteristic. He did it at once with the least possible trouble to himself. It would have made no difference to him if the boy had had not one friend in Paris. As a matter of fact, he did have one friend—George Derwent—who was a friend, in spite of the sixteen years’ difference in their ages. And that same evening George Derwent found Antoine hunched up on one of the uncomfortable red leather lounges of the vestibule, staring into space, with his child-mouth set in a hard line.

“What’s up, old man?”

Antoine did not turn his head as he spoke, evidently following his own line of thought.

“What do you do when you’re ten?”

“What do you do? What are you driving at?”

“What do you—do—when you’re ten? What can you—when you’re only ten years old—to make a living?”

“Well, I’m blessed! You’re a funny kid. You don’t ​do anything, of course. You wait till you’re big and strong and———”

“But I haven’t time. And I must.”

“Antoine, what under the sun do you mean?”

“Don’t say Antoine. Call me Tony as you mostly do—I’m English, not French. And I mean I must do something. I know that! I’m not such a kid as to think you can live on eleven francs fifty centimes. It’s not half our hotel bill for one day. And———”

“Tony, what’s the trouble? What on earth has a bilingual whippersnapper like you to do with hotel bills? I don’t understand what you’re at.”

“It’s just—he—has—turned me out," said Tony, so quietly that the slow words sounded flat and lifeless, as if he did not understand them himself. “I’m—on my own. And ten’s rather small to do anything.”

“He? Your fa—You can’t mean———”

“Yes, he has. My father. He–he said. . . he was going to Moscow and there wasn’t room.”

Antoine stopped dead. It is probable that he felt tears somewhere near and did not wish them to come to his voice. He was never a tearful child.

“But—he can’t do a thing like that! He has to support you.”

“He’s done it," snapped Tony, in a tone that seemed to say: Since I must have a scoundrel for a father, admit that he is the most efficient of scoundrels. “And he’s off—you can’t stop him. And—d’you suppose I’d go back to him?”

A disconcerting infant! But obviously something must be done.

“I say, Tony, you’ll stay with me till we can settle things? There are places where they take care of———”

“I won’t go to an orphanage,” said Tony suspiciously. “You never get out.”

​“I mean a place where—oh, you know. Something must be done.”

“But not that. I won’t go. You can show me something to do, myself, if you like. I want to—to grow up as quick as I can. And when I’m a man I’ll———”

He pulled up with a jerk. George regarded him with serious, troubled eyes.

“Yes, what, old man?”

“I’ll—most likely kill my father.”

What a baby it was, after all! George almost laughed. And yet it was not quite a child’s voice.

“You mustn’t talk like that, Tony.”

“I never shall again.”

“I’m—awfully sorry.”

Tony grunted and threw off the sympathy with a fling of his shoulders. Then he looked up at Derwent with a smile amazingly angelic, coming as it did in that sombre, sullen-browed small face of his.

“It must be about dinner-time,” he suggested. “I’m hungry.”

George was disproportionately relieved. Here was something he felt quite able to deal with. They went into the salle à manger together.