" O BELLA BELLA BOCCA!"

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 18 November 1911, Page 10

" O BELLA BELLA BOCCA!"

(By CHARLES OLIVER, in "The World.")

Claudine Liesse sat at the table in her high chair, engaged in the laborious manufacture of tremulous pothooks. Her auburn curls fell about her face, and from behind this advantageous screen her little eyes could review all her surroundings without a betraying movement of her head. The bright eyes wandered about the bare, clean room, from Victorie, her father's dog, nodding by the stove, with his nose almost on the carefully hoarded fire, to her mother sewing at the window, where the November fog shut out the world like an exterior curtain of dingy cotton wool. At length, however, there came a welcome diversion. There was a step on the landing, a key in the door, and Monsieur Liesse entered, bringing a wave of cold air in his tall figure, his slouch hat and long cloak, and his great beard that mingled for a moment with Claudine's curls. "Bonjour, ma fille," he said cheerily. Then with some timidity, "Et bonjour, ma femme." "Bonjour, Hippolyte." Madame Liesse did not raise her eyes from her work. There was a silence —one of those silences with which Claudine was only too familiar. At last Monsieur Liesse put down his hat and cloak on the table and went softly out into the kitchen. He came back in a minute or two with a long face. "Ma femme," he said, "it appears t'-at there is ... in the house . . no . . .no . . .so to speak . . . bread." "There is no bread," answered Madame Liesse, "for those who do not work." Monsieur drummed with his- fingers on the table. "Ma femme," he said again, "for a mere nothing ... a matter of . . .

er. . . . twenty sous . . . one could eat something at a restaurant."

"I have not twenty sous," answered Madame Liesse, threading a needle. "But you have the ... er ... the Uittje property at AubervilJiers, ma femme."

Madame Liesse put down her work upon her lap and raised her face —a drawn, thin face, cold, still beautiful. "Hippolyte," she said, "when for my sins I married you, I was a rich woman."

"And an uncommonly-attractive one," ventured Monsieur Liesse; "uncommonly attractive always, pardie!" "You have eaten up my property," went on Madame Liesse evenly, "and there is nothing left but the house at Aubervilliers. That you shall not have. Ifc was my father's house; it shall be my daughter's."

' 'That is your last word ma femme ?' he asked.

Madame Liesse was bending again over her work. She nodded. Monsieur Liesse, with a tragic movement, threw his great oloak about his shoulders. He reached down his guitar from the wall, and as lie- did so all the boyish gaiety came back to his face. He stood there with a laugh in his eyes, touching the strings softly to the light air that Claudine loved so well, though the words lie hummed under his breath were, as always, unintelligible to her. The air ended on a dainty little silvery arpeggio like the bluebell's tinkling that, her father had told her, only the fairies can hear. "Mesdames, au revoir," said Monsieur Liesse with mock solemnity. Then he whistled Victoire and turned away. At the door he stopped. "Pardie! I was forgetting," he said. I He came back, laid his latchkey on 1 the tabtej and then went out t A very remarkable thing had happened to Monsieur le Comte de St. Maur. Monsieur de St. Maur was an extraordinarily young old gentleman. His long bne lace, healthily pink and innocent ot obtrusive wrinkles, was garnished with glossy black whiskers, to which a streak or two of grey gave a note of sincerity. His dress was faultless from Ins tall hat, white or black according to season, set a trifle out of the perpendicular, to his dainty spats, whit© or black, according to season. Fashionelderly fashion —mirrored itself in Monsieur le Comte. And the remarkable thing was that Monsieur le Comte had fallen in love— ridiculously, boyishly in love—with the Claudine Lfesse, cashier ato I armentier's restaurant. And one day Monsieur de St. Maur, leaning against tn° mahogany desk in Tom-and-Herry attitude, had proposed marriage to Mademoiselle Liesse.

Monsieur de St. Maur had indeed been prudent enough to set investigations on foot before he made his proposal. He had learnt that Mademoiselle Liesse was not hampered with relations who might prove obtrusive. Monsieur le Convte wished to marry Claudine alone, and not a large, impecunious plebian family. There was a grave dignity in Claudine's beautiful face that iroze a proposition of something short ot marriage on Monsieur le Comte's lips.

_ Tt was not Monsieur de St. Maur's intention to force Claudine when she became his wife on society. He was sufiiciently m love to desire her happiness ; and this be saw was by no means a certain result of her problematical acceptance by Lis world of the Quartier b- Germain He had an idyll in view, to be played out at his beautiful country seat, where an elderly but quite presentable shepherd, he might pass Vie rest of his days at the feet of his tair young shepherdess. Monsieur de St. Maur was not exactly the Prince Charming of Claudine's diearns; and it was only that retreat horn the world which he advanced so dimdently that made his proposal in the least degree acceptable. Some part of her father^ Bohemian spirit had descended on Claudine. Her soul cried out for the wider horizons of the country.- its larger air, the profundity of iorests, the calm of river-lapped meadow.?; to all .of which things the sombre imeventfulness of her life with her mother, and the difficulty of her existence since the death of Madame Liesse gave a somewhat exaggerated value, bhe was weary of her prosaic existence as Monsieur de St. Clair was weary of tj» brilliancy of his, Their longing for the agresaole deserts was a 'link be-' tween them. I

One afternoon Monsieur de St. Mamhad taken Claudine to Marseilles in his .automobile. They re-entered Paris Ijv tne Avenuo dv Bois. The setting sun made of the Arc de Triomphe a gate of radiant glory, about which the dust rose in a golden haze.

''More slowly," murmured Claudine The automobile had the Arc de Triomnhe behind ifc now, and went leisurely down the Champs Elysees, close up to the pavement. Claudine leaned back on the cushions with her eyes shut. But suddenly she opened them, and sat forward.

"Stop!" she cried. Then with her hand on Monsieur de St. Maur's sleeve "Do you hear?" slie said. '

Back from the road, under the trees of a side avenue, a group of listeners Fiad gathered about an itinerant singer. "What is he singing?" she asked eagerly.

"An Italian thing," replied Monsieur de St. Main-. "Oh, bella, bella bocca 1' '0 fair, fair voice!' Fair voice, indeed! Was ever such a mockery? Half a tone out, my poor friend. Here. . . ."

His hand moved to his pocket, but Claudine petrified it into immobility with five words. "If it were my father. . . ." She sprang from the automobile and peered between the shoulders of the crowd. It was her father. The light was growing dim, but not so dim that it did ; net reveal a most lamentable wreck in Monsieur Liesse. All the ugliness that a dishonored old age can bring with it was crowded upon him; he was unsightly from his greasy slouch hat to his all but soleless shoes. The song came to an end on that once familiar arpeggio, so halting and broken now. The crowd melted away with smiles, nudging elbows, shrugged shoulders. Then Claudine went to Monsieur Liesse. "Father!" she said, and laid her hand on his arm. Monsieur Liesse turned on her a fiery Lice, fringed by the straggling meshes of his white hair and beard. "My child, my long lost child!" began Monsieur Liesse with maudlin tears. He was so broken, so unkempt, so frayed, so dingy! His voice was so ciacked, so scorched with alcohol! Yet it was "a fair, fair voice." For it had come. . . . and she had not sold herself. "Later we will tell each other everything," she said. "But take me wibh you now. To-morrow we will go to Aubervilliers. I have a little money. She drew his arm through hers, and led him deeper into the shadow of the trees. The cracked, raucous, vinous voice chattered senilely into her ear. But above it she could hear the slaraming of the door of Monsieur de St. Maur's automobile, the trepidation of its started machinery. "0 bella, bella, bocca!"