IX
The Crucifix was duly saluted, the Rosary hung back upon the bed-knob.
“Embrace me now, my friend,” said de Moulny, his blue eyes shining under a smooth forehead. Hector held out his hand.
“We will shake hands as English boys do. They ridicule our French way of kissing, Miss Smithwick says.”
“And we die of laughter,” said de Moulny, “when we see them hand a lady a cushion or a chair, or try to make a bow. If I had not this basket on my stomach I would get up and show you how my cousin Robert Bertham comports himself in a drawing-room. He is certainly handsome, but stiff! His backbone must be a billiard-cue,nom d’un petitbonhomme! Yet he can run and jump and row, for if he has not the grace of an athlete he has the muscles of one. He was stroke of the Eton Eight last year; they rowed against the School of Westminster in a race from Windsor Bridge to Surly and back, and beat. They have beaten them again this year, Bertham tells me in his last letter. He writes French with a spade, as M. Magne would say.”
The nerves of both boys were tingling still with the recollection of the double compact they had sealed with an oath. Now they could look at one another without consciousness, and were glad to talk of Bertham, his English awkwardness and his British French. For mere humanity cannot for long together endure to respire the thin crystal air of the Higher Emotions. It must come down, and breathe the common air of ordinary life, and talk of everyday things, or perish. So Hector listened while de Moulny held forth.
“Bertham will be Bertham of Wraye when he succeeds to the peerage of his father. It is of ancient creation and highly respectable. He is my cousin by virtue of an alliance between our houses some eighteen years back, when my grandmother’s youngest daughter—my Aunt Gabrielle—married Lord Bertham, then Ambassador for England here. You know the English Embassy in the Rue du FaubourgSt.Honoré? My grandmother did not approve of the union at first, the Berthams are Protestants of the English Establishment. But an agreement was arrived at with regard to my aunt’s faith and the faith of her daughters. The sons, Robert and the younger boy ... but that’s my grandmother’s cross, she says, that she has heretics for grandsons.... My Aunt Gabrielle is a charming person—I am very fond of her. She boasts of being English to the backbone ... pleases her husband by wearing no costumes that are not from theatelierof a Londoncouturiére—that must behercross, though she does not say so!” De Moulny grinned at his own joke.
“How you talk!” said Hector, flushed with admiration of his idol’s powers of conversation.
“I like words,” said the idol, lightly taking the incense as his due. “Terms, expressions, phrases, combinations of these, please me like combinations in Chemistry. I do not enjoy composition with the pen; the tongue is my preference. Perhaps I was meant for a diplomatic career.” His face fell as his eyes rested upon the basket that humpedthe bedclothes. It cleared as he added, with an afterthought:
“Diplomacy is for priests as well as statesmen. Men of acumen and eloquence are wanted in the Church.” De Moulny folded his lean arms behind his head, and perused the whitewashed ceiling.
“Tell me more about your cousin Bertham,” Hector begged, to lure de Moulny from the subject that had pricks for both.
“You are more interested in him than I am,” said de Moulny. “He writes to me, but I have not seen him since I spent an autumn month at theirchâteauof Wraye in Peakshire two years ago. Their feudal customs were interesting, but their society.... Just Heaven, how dull! Even my Aunt Gabrielle could not enliven us. And he—my cousin Robert—who cannot fence, was scandalized because I do not box. Because I said: ‘If you fight with your fists, why not with the teeth and the feet?’ That I should speak of thesavate—it made him very nearly ill.... He implored: ‘For God’s sake, never say that in the hearing of any other Eton fellows! They’ll make my life a hell if you do!’ Say that in English, Redskin, you who have the tongue of John Bull at your finger-ends.”
Hector translated the words into the original English and repeated them for de Moulny’s amusement.
“It must be a queer place, that Eton of theirs,” went on de Moulny. “When they leave to enter their Universities they know nothing. Of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Arithmetic, they are in ignorance. Their rowing and other sports—considered by all infinitely more important than intellectual attainments—are ignored by the Directors of the School, and yet—to these their chief efforts are addressed; to excel in strength is the ambition above all. They are flogged for the most trifling offenses, upon the naked person with a birch, by the Director-in-Chief of Studies, who is a clergyman of the Established Church. And the younger boys are servants to their elders.”
“We make them so here,” said Hector pointedly. “We subject them to the authority that others exercised over us, and that they in their turn will use over others.”
“Subjects are not serfs. These younger boys of Eton are worse used than serfs. They call the system of torture ‘fagging’; it is winked at by the Directors,” explainedde Moulny. “To be kicked and tormented and beaten—that is to be fagged. To carry coals to make your master’s fire, to bring him buckets of water from the pump, to sweep and dust and black his boots, make his bed and sleep on the floor without even a blanket if he does not choose that you shall enjoy that luxury—that is to be fagged, as Bertham knows it. They are infinitely worse off than we, these sons of the English nobles and great landed gentlemen. And yet one thing that we have not got, they have”; de Moulny thrust out his underlip and wagged his big head, “and it is worth all—or nearly all these things we have that they have not. They are loyal to each other. There is union among them. In Chemistry we know the value of cohesion.... Well!... there is cohesion among these Eton boys. How much of it is there here? Not as much as—that!” He measured off an infinitesimal space upon the bitten finger-nail, and showed it to Hector, who nodded confirmatively, saying:
“There is no currying favor withpionsand tattling to masters, then? Or lending money at usury to other pupils—hein?”
“No!” said de Moulny, with a frowning shake of the head. “There is none of that sort of thing. Because—Bertham told me!—the boy who was proved to be guilty of it would have to leave Eton. Instantly. Or—it would come about that that boy would be found dead; and as to how he died”—he shrugged his shoulders expressively—“it would be as possible to gain an explanation from the corpse, Bertham says, as to wring one from the resolute silence of the School.”
Hector knew a delicious thrill of mingled horror and admiration of those terrible young Britons, who could maintain honor among themselves by such stark laws, and avenge betrayal by sentence so grim.
“But there are other rules in the Code of Eton that are imbecile, absolutely, on my honor, idiotic!” said de Moulny. “Not to button the lower button of the waistcoat—that is one rule which must not be broken. Nor must Lower boys turn up their trousers in muddy weather, or wear greatcoats in cold, until their elders choose to set the example. And unless you are of high standing in the School, you dare not roll your umbrella up. It is a presumption the whole School would resent. For another example, you areinvariably to say and maintain that things others can do and that you cannot, are bad form. Bertham saw me make a fire one day, camp-fashion, in five minutes, when he had been sweating like a porter for an hour without being able to kindle a dead stick. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, with his eyebrows climbing up into his curly hair, ‘for a fellow to light fires; but to do servant’s work well is bad form, our fellows would say.’”
“Why did you want a fire?” demanded Hector, balancing his rush-bottomed chair on one hind-leg.
“To boil some water,” de Moulny answered, his eyes busy with the flowery, sunshiny parterres of the Director’s garden. “Up on the Peakshire hills,” he added, a second later, “to heat some water to bathe a dog’s hurt leg. Oh! there’s not much of a story. Bertham and I had been out riding; we had dismounted, tied our horses to a gate, and climbed Overmere Hill to look at a Roman camp that is on the top—very perfect: entrenchments, chariot-road, even sentry-shelters to be made out under the short nibbled grass.... Sheep as black as the gritstone of the Peakshire hills were feeding there, scattered all about us—lower down an old white-haired shepherd was trying to collect them; his dog, one of the shaggy, long-haired, black-and-white English breed that drives and guards sheep, seemed not to know its business. Bertham spoke of that, and the shepherd explained in hispatoisthat the dog was not his, but had been borrowed of a neighbor—a misfortune had happened to his own. It had got the worst in a desperate fight with another dog, acombat à outrance, fought perhaps in defense of its master’s sheep; it was injured past cure; he thought he would fetch up a cord later, from the farm whose thatched roofs we could see down in the valley below, and put the unlucky creature out of its pain. We thought we might be able to do something to prevent that execution, so Bertham and I went to the shed, an affair of hurdles and poles and bunches of heather, such as our Breton shepherds of Finistère and the Côtes du Nord build to shelter them from the weather....”
“And the dog?”
“The dog was lying in a pool of blood on the beaten earth floor. A shoulder and the throat were terribly mangled, a fore-leg had been bitten through; one would have said the creature had been worried by a wolf rather thana dog of its own breed. And she was sitting on the ground beside it, holding its bloody head in her lap....”
De Moulny’s eyes blinked as though the Director’s blazing beds of gilliflowers and calceolarias, geraniums and mignonette, had dazzled them. Hector asked, with awakening interest in a story which had not at first promised much:
“Who was she?”
De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:
“She was the type ofjeune personneof whom my grandmother would have approved.”
“A young girl!” grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.
“One might say to you, ‘There are young girls and young girls.’”
“This one was charming, then?” Hector’s waning interest began to burn up again.
“Certainly, no! For,” said de Moulny authoritatively, “to be charming you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought of coquetry. And—if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should give you again the negative. Beauty—the beauty of luxuriant hair, pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl’s should, loosely upon shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear, burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened, thickly lashed—these she possessed, with features much too large for beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of her age and sex, I have no name for that!”
“No?” Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on:
“No!—nor would you. Suppose you had met the Venerable Jeanne d’Arc in her peasant kirtle, driving her sheep or cows to pasture in the fields about Domremy in the days before her Voices spoke and said: ‘Thou, Maid, art destined to deliver France!’ Or—what if you had seen the Virginsof the Temple at Jerusalem pass singing on their way to the tribune surrounded with balconies, where while the Morning Sacrifice burned upon the golden Altar to the fanfare of the silver trumpets, they besought God Almighty, together with all Israel, for the speedy coming of the Saviour of mankind.... Would not One among them, draped in her simple robe of hyacinth blue, covered with the white, plainly-girdled tunic, a veil of Syrian gauze upon her golden hair, have brought you the conviction that She, above all the women you had ever seen, was destined, marked out, set apart, created to serve a peculiar purpose of her Creator, stamped with His stamp——”
The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector’s astonished gape, and their owner barked out: “What are you opening your mouth so wide about?”
Hector blurted out:
“Why—what for? Because you said that a raw English girl nursing a dying sheep-dog on a mountain in Peakshire reminded you of the Maid of Orleans and Our Blessed Lady!”
“And if I did?”
“But was she not English?... A Protestant?... a heretic?”
“Many of the Saints were heretics—until Our Lord called them,” said de Moulny, with that fanatical spark burning in his blue eye. “But He had chosen them before He called. They bore the seal of His choice.”
“Perhaps you are right. No doubt you know best. It is you who are to be——” Hector broke off.
“You were going to finish: ‘It is you who are to be a priest, not me...!’” de Moulny said, with the veins in his heavy forehead swelling, and a twitching muscle jerking down his pouting underlip.
“I forget what I was going to say,” declared Hector mendaciously, and piled Ossa upon Pelion by begging de Moulny to go on with his story. “It interested hugely,” he said, even as he struggled to repress the threatening yawn.
“What is there to tell?” grumbled de Moulny ungraciously. “She was there, that is all—with that dog that had been hurt. A pony she had ridden was grazing at the back of the shed, its bridle tied to the pommel of the saddle. Bertham approached her and saluted her; he knew her, it seems, and presented me. She spoke only of the dog—lookedat nothing but the dog! She could not bear to leave it, in case it should be put to death by the master it could serve no more....”
Hector interrupted, for de Moulny’s voice had begun to sound as though he were talking in his sleep:
“Tell me her name.”
“Her name is Ada Merling.”
Even on de Moulny’s French tongue the name was full of music; it came to Hector’s ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner, with a defiant “tuck-tuck!” takes wing, with curious slanting flight. The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind, as de Moulny went on:
“True, the dog seemed at the last gasp, but if it were possible to stop the bleeding,shesaid, there might be a chance, who knew? It had occurred to her that cold-water applications might check the flow of blood. ‘We will try, and see, Mademoiselle,’ said I.”
De Moulny’s tone was one of fatuous self-satisfaction.
“A rusty tin saucepan is lying in a corner of the shed. This I fill with water from a little spring that trickles down the cliff behind us. We contribute handkerchiefs. Bertham and I hold the dog while she bathes the torn throat and shoulder, and bandages them. Remains the swollen leg. It occurs to me that fomentations of hot water might be of use there; I mention this idea. ‘Good! good!’ she cries, ‘we will make a fire and heat some.’ She sets to collecting the dry leaves and sticks that are scattered in a corner. Bertham makes a pile of these, and attempts to kindle it with fusees.” A smile of ineffable conceit curved de Moulny’s flabby pale cheeks and quirked the corners of his pouting lips. “He burns matches and he loses his temper; there is no other result. Then I stepped forward, bowed.... ‘Permit me, Mademoiselle, to show you how we arrange these things in my country.’” De Moulny’s tone was so infinitely arrogant, his humility so evidently masked the extreme of bumptiousness, that Hector wondered how the athletic Bertham endured it without knocking him down?
“So I hollow a fireplace in the floor, with a pocket-knifeand a piece of slate, devise a flue at each corner, light the fire—which burns, one can conceive, to a marvel.... She has meanwhile refilled the rusty saucepan at the little spring; she sets it on, the water boils, when it occurs to us that we have no more handkerchiefs. But the shepherd’s linen blouse hangs behind the shed-door; at her bidding we tear that into strips.... All is done that can be done; we bid Mademoiselle Merlingau revoir. She will ride home presently when her patient is a little easier, she says. We volunteer to remain; she declines to allow us. She thanks us for our aid in a voice that has the clear ring of crystal—I can in no other way describe it! When I take my leave, I desire to kiss her hand. She permits me very gracefully; she speaks French, too, with elegance, as she asks where I learned to make a fireplace so cleverly?
“‘We are taught these things,’ I say to her, ‘at the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, in my Paris. For we do not think one qualified for being an officer, Mademoiselle, until he has learned all the things that a private should know.’ Then it was that Bertham made that celebratedcoq-à-l’âneabout its being bad form to do servant’s work well. You should have seen the look she gave him.Sapristi!—with a surprise in it that cut to the quick. She replies: ‘Servants should respect and look up to us, and not despise us; and how can they look up to us if we show ourselves less capable than they? When I am older I mean to have a great house full of sick people to comfort and care for and nurse. Andeverythingthat has to be done for them I will learn to do with my own hands!’ My sister Viviette would have said: ‘When I grow up I shall have arivièreof pearls as big as pigeons’ eggs,’ or ‘I shall drive on the boulevards and in the Bois in an ivory-paneled barouche.’ Then I ask a stupid question: ‘Is it that you are to be a Sister of Charity, Mademoiselle?’ She answers, with a look of surprise: ‘Can no one but a nun care for the sick?’ I return: ‘In France, Mademoiselle, our sick-nurses are these holy women. They are welcome everywhere: in private houses and in public hospitals, in time of peace: and in the time of war you will find them in the camp and on the battle-field. Your first patient is a soldier wounded in war,’ I say to her, pointing to the dog. ‘Perhaps it is an augury of the future?’
“‘War is a terrible thing,’ she answers me, and growspale, and her great eyes are fixed as though they look upon a corpse-strewn battle-field. ‘I hope with all my heart that I may never see it!’ ‘But a nurse must become inured to ugly and horrible sights, Mademoiselle,’ I remind her. She replies: ‘I shall find courage to endure them when I become a nurse.’ Then Bertham blurts out in his brusque way: ‘But you never will! Your people would not allow it. Wait and see if I am not right?’ She returns to him, with a smile, half the child’s, half the woman’s, guileless and subtle at the same time, if you can understand that? ‘We will wait—and you will see.’”
De Moulny’s whisper had dwindled to a mere thread of sound. He had long forgotten Hector, secretly pining for the end of a story that appeared to him as profoundly dull as interminably long; and, oblivious of the other’s martyrdom, talked only to himself.
“‘We will wait and you will see.... You have the courage of your convictions, Mademoiselle,’ I tell her, ‘and courage always succeeds.’ She says in that crystal voice: ‘When things, stones or other obstacles, are piled up in front of you to prevent your getting through a gap in the dyke, you don’t push because you might topple them all over, and kill somebody on the other side; and you don’t pull because you might bring them all down on your own head. You lift the stones away, one at a time; and by-and-by you see light through a little hole ... and then the hole gets bigger, and there is more and more light.’... There I interpose.... ‘But if the stones to be moved are too big for such little hands, Mademoiselle?’ And she answers, looking at them gravely: ‘My hands are not little. And if they were, there would always be men to lift the things that are too heavy, and do the things that are too hard.’
“‘Men or boys, Mademoiselle?’ I question. Then she gives me her hand once more. ‘Thank you, M. de Moulny! I will not forget it was you who built the fireplace, and helped to hold the dog.’ And Bertham was so jealous that he would not speak to me during the whole ride home!”
Upon that note of exultation the story ended. To Hector the recital had been of unmitigated dullness. Nothing but his loyalty to de Moulny had kept him from wriggling on his chair; had checked the yawns that had threatened to unhinge his youthful jaws. Now he wasguilty of an offense beside which yawning would have been pardonable. He opened his black eyes in a stare of youthful, insufferable curiosity, and called out in his shrill young pipe:
“Jealous, do you say! Why, was he in love with her as well as you?”
De Moulny’s muscles jerked. He almost sat up in bed. A moment he remained glaring over the basket, speechless and livid with rage. Then he cried out furiously:
“Go away! Leave me! Go!—do you hear?”
And as Hector rose in dismay and stood blankly gaping at the convulsed and tragic face, de Moulny plucked the pillow from behind his head, and hurled that missile of low comedy at the cruel eyes that stung, and fell back upon the bolster with a cry of pain that froze the luckless blunderer to the marrow. Hector fled then, as Sister Edouard-Antoine, summoned from her colloquy in the passage by the sound, came hurrying back to the bedside. Looking back as he plunged through the narrow, black swing-doors—doors very much like two coffin-lids on hinges, set up side by side, he saw the Sister bending over the long heaving body on the bed, solicitude painted on the mild face framed in the starched-white linen coif; and heard de Moulny’s muffled sobbing, mingled with her soft, consoling tones.
Why should de Moulny shed tears? Did he really hate the idea of being a priest? And if so, would he be likely to love his friend Dunoisse, who had, with a broken foil, pointed out the way that ended in the seminary, the cassock, and the tonsure?
The savage, livid, loathing face rose up before Hector’s mental vision—the furious cry that had issued from the twisted lips: “Go! Leave me! Go!—do you hear?” still rang in the boy’s ears. The look, the cry, were full of hate. Yet Alain had, but a moment before, solemnly sworn to be his friend.... When we are very young we believe such oaths unbreakable.
Came Pédelaborde, and thrust a warty hand under Redskin’s elbow, as he stood frowning and pondering still, on the wide shallow doorstep of the Infirmary portico, brick-and-plaster Corinthian, elegant and chaste....
“Hé bien, mon ami; nous voilà reconciliés?A visit ofsympathy,hein?It is quite proper! absolutely in rule.... But”—Pédelaborde’s little yellow eyes twinkled and glittered in his round brown face like a pair of highly-polished brass buttons, his snub nose cocked itself with an air of infinite knowingness, his bullet head of cropped black hair sparked intelligence from every bristle—“but—all the same, to call a spade a spade,saisissez?the trick that did the job for de Moulny is a dirty one. As an expert, I told you of it. As a gentleman,voyez?—I hardly expected you to use it!”
“A trick.... Use it!” Hector stuttered, and his round horrified stare would have added to de Moulny’s offense. “You don’t mean—you cannot believe that I——” He choked over the words.
Pédelaborde chuckled comfortably, thrusting his warty hands deep into the pockets of his baggy red serge breeches.
“Why, just ashelunged after his feint, didn’t you—hein?Plump!—in the act to riposte, and cleverly managed, too. Suppose he believes it a pure accident. I am not the fellow to tell tales.... Honor”—Pédelaborde extracted one of the warty hands on purpose to lay it upon his heart—“honor forbids. Now we’re on the subject of honor, I have positively pledged mine to pay Mère Cornu a trifling sum I owe her—a mere matter of eight francs—could you lend them until my uncle—hang the old skin-namalinks!—forks out with my allowance that is due?”
“I will lend you the money,” said Hector, wiping the sickly drops from his wet forehead. “But—I swear to youthatwas an accident—I slipped on a slug!” he added passionately. “Never dare to believe me capable of an act so vile!”
He had not had the heart to spend a franc of his own monthly allowance of two louis. He pulled the cash out of his pocket now; a handful of silver pieces, with one treasured napoleon shining amongst them, and was picking out the eight francs from the bulk, when, with a pang, the barbed memory of his oath drove home. Perhaps these coins were some infinitesimal part of that accursed dowry....
“Take it all!—keep it! I do not want it back!” he stammered hurriedly, and thrust the wealthy handful upon greedy Pédelaborde so recklessly that the napoleon andseveral big silver coins escaped that worthy’s warty clutches, and dropped, ringing and rolling and spinning, making a temporary Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Junior’s parade.
“Paid not to split! Saperlipopette!... Then there was no slug! He meant to do the thing!...”
Honest Pédelaborde, pausing even in the congenial task of picking up gold and silver, straightened his back to stare hard after the Redskin’s retreating figure, and whistle with indrawn breath, through a gap in his front teeth: “Phew-w!”
Those little yellow eyes of the dentist’s nephew were sharp. The brain behind them, though shallow, worked excellently in the interests of Pédelaborde. It occurred to him that when next Madame Cornu should clamor for the discharge of her bill for sweetstuff and pastry, the little affair of the trick fall might advantageously be mentioned again.