PART SECONDDR. VERMONT(Told by the author)DR. VERMONT AND HIS GUESTS UPON THE ISLANDITwanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank. No windblew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since feudal times.Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood, hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader, and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life. Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look at it.Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside,out of the chill air, and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where the road seemed to issue from the sky.‘Do you not see something down there—something dark that moves?’ she breathed, without looking at her companion.‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes, Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight towards the bridge.’Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle,her whole face dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle see?Mademoiselle began in a thick voice—‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’—and then stopped, and drew her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s stupor.‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’she added, in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to her vision.‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at such a moment.‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask questions or demur, and atthat moment the bell rang loudly, with violent emphasis.‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require thisappartement, in which case I can return to Beaufort this evening.’‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a while.’A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect, and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window, searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his coming for ten long years.His face lit up with a soft smile when he sawher, and he went forward, upon the pleasant exclamation—‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily, and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an odd charm to the simplest speech.‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer oldhouse, your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me, not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from surprise.‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change decided you to remain here now,’ she said.‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.‘Your child, François!’Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement of brow and eyelid.‘Tiens!It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh! I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst ofit is, you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you, François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come back—at last.’‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister, your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light, but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of sovereignty.’‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his reflections.The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash, and a big bow of red ribbonon the top of her curly brown head. Dr. Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a charming little girl, his own daughter.‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with an ingratiating smile.Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her, ‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with tears.‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked in the pause.The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette suspected!‘That reminds me, Henriette—I have left three friends outside. I suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of nights?’‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation have you here?’‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room—the large one opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé, which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put up. I think you can manage.’‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old room—yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so? Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto, “The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle!What would I not give to be the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for me.’He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his heartless words upon Henriette.These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement. With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her prayers for indulgence in the matter ofcuisine; and shook their heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely mystified him.When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad engagement in quitea novel light. The thought of that pistol held by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the most abject blunder and excesses—and by nothing less than absolute dishonour.Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan,and who loved the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an indifferent translation, and knew by heart.He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things; and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions. The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady. The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe,as intelligent, but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age, with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech upon her face—by the way, he did not like English women; they lackedatmosphere, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or any desire to please—and hence he had the more leisure to devote to inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger, as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant, he was in thegrip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant. Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp theMarseillaise, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, andtudieu!his own were wet!These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested, not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past—but upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose up, and confronted him with its ruthlessdénouement. And if he were not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have played an ignobletrick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette—on one memorable occasion. He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by. Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found elsewhere.‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing. ‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon her charms that night.
(Told by the author)
ITwanted three days to the end of the year. The afternoon had been so exceptionally mild, that Mademoiselle Lenormant and her foreign friend were still sitting out on the gallery enjoying the sunset. The air was very clear, and the heavens beautifully coloured, though the winter dusk was beginning to drop. But it was as yet a mere suggestion of dimness that did not hide, while it accentuated, the edge of bleak and empty road along the sky-line. It sharpened the outlines of the bridge and its castellated points below. The river was smooth like dark glass, and rosy clouds made a blood-red margin along its outer bank. No windblew among the trees of the melancholy garden, visible from the other side of the gallery, and so still was it, that the farthest sounds sent back their travelling echoes. The footfall of a solitary peasant crossing the bridge made a martial clatter, so clear and strong and self-assertive was it upon the pavements that seemed to sleep since feudal times.
Little Gabrielle sat in a corner of the gallery in jacket and hood, hugging Minette, who bore the discomfort bravely, while she spelled out a story from a large picture-book on her knee. It was satisfactory to see that the kitten took as much interest in the story as the reader, and enlivened the study by occasional lunges at the brown finger following each line. The child’s pretty voice hardly interrupted the low conversation of the two ladies, who faced the view of Beaufort, and watched the road, while they discoursed upon the philosophy of life. Mademoiselle Lenormant always watched that road, whether she sat in the gallery or upstairs in her own room. It was the rival of Gabrielle and her books, for she would willingly leave either at any moment to look at it.
Joséphine came down to carry Gabrielle inside,out of the chill air, and the child was still protesting loudly, and calling imperiously on her aunt to rescue her from private tyranny, when Mademoiselle bent forward with an excited gesture, her eyes riveted upon the point where the road seemed to issue from the sky.
‘Do you not see something down there—something dark that moves?’ she breathed, without looking at her companion.
‘Effectively. It appears to be a group of men on horseback. Yes, Mademoiselle, it is a party of riders, and they are coming straight towards the bridge.’
Mademoiselle shook from head to foot, and went and caught the balustrade to steady herself, while she continued to examine the blot of moving shadow upon the landscape, that increased with each wink of eyelid, until soon it was a visible invasion of males on horseback. A dull thud of hoofs was borne upon the air, and near the bridge, one of the party, apparently the leader, drew up, and seemed to address the others. These at once fell behind, three in number, and the foremost turned his face to the island, and galloped ahead.
‘Joséphine, viens, viens vite,’ shrieked Mademoiselle,her whole face dyed pink, and her grey eyes dark and luminous with emotion.
Joséphine hurried out, cap-strings flying, all in a state of wild concern. What was it, but what on earth was it? What did Mademoiselle see?
Mademoiselle began in a thick voice—
‘Je crois, Joséphine, que c’est le docteur’—and then stopped, and drew her hand slowly across her eyes, like one awakened from a moment’s stupor.‘C’est Monsieur le docteur qui nous arrive enfin,’she added, in her usual voice, and with a full return to her old self.
Joséphine peered over the balustrade, but she only saw three moving shapes upon the bridge, the outlines of horse and man intermelted to her vision.
‘The foremost rider must now be half way up the street,’ cried Mademoiselle’s companion, glad yet ashamed that she should be there at such a moment.
‘Take Gabrielle, Joséphine, and put on her pretty grey dress and her laces. Marie will open the door for Dr. Vermont.’
Joséphine carried off the startled child, too frightened to ask questions or demur, and atthat moment the bell rang loudly, with violent emphasis.
‘I will leave you now, dear Mademoiselle,’ said her friend, with sympathetic pressure of her fingers. ‘Monsieur will doubtless require thisappartement, in which case I can return to Beaufort this evening.’
‘No, no, there is a bedroom upstairs. You will not leave me so abruptly, not now, when perhaps I may most need a friend. Stay yet a while.’
A heavy step was crossing the hall, and came through the dining-room towards the gallery. The foreigner, on her way to her own room, caught sight of a lean, youngish-looking gentleman, with a fair beard and thin brown hair worn off temples, deeply marked by life. He glanced at her keenly, as he stood for her to pass, and she had time to note the social polish of his manners, and the melancholy dignity of his aspect, and then he crossed the floor and stepped out through the window, searching with mild brown eyes for the woman who had waited for his coming for ten long years.
His face lit up with a soft smile when he sawher, and he went forward, upon the pleasant exclamation—‘Ma sœur!’ His intention was to bestow upon her a formal embrace. His hand was stretched out, and when her cold slim fingers touched it, and lay in his palm, and he saw the lustre of unshed tears in the sad grey eyes that met his own steadily, and a rosy flame tremble like confession over the cheeks’ pallor, a new impulse came to him, and he simply lifted her hand to his lips.
‘Henriette,’ he murmured, in a troubled voice.
‘The silence has been long, François,’ she said, and smiled.
He still held her hand, and gazed at her curiously. She was not so changed as he, and if the years had thinned, they had not lined her face. At thirty-three, he even found her more attractive than at twenty. There was that about her which compelled interest, and gave an odd charm to the simplest speech.
‘Henriette, you have much to pardon me, and your indulgence will have to go still further than you dream. Ah, how vividly a forgotten past may bear down upon a man at the first sight of a familiar place! All my life down here had clean gone from my mind. This queer oldhouse, your father, you, even Adèle, have been for me years past, not even a memory, much less a link with all that is gone. It is incredible how completely a man may forget. No regret, no remembrance pursued me in Paris, and the instant I crossed the bridge it all surged back on me, not as remembered days, but as the actual present. Verily, we are droll rascals, Henriette, and mercilessly tyrannised by experience.’
He had dropped her hand now, and was leaning against a pillar, staring across at Beaufort. Mademoiselle’s brows twitched sharply, but she uttered no word of reproach, partly from pride, and partly from surprise.
‘It will be good news for Gabrielle, and for me, if such a change decided you to remain here now,’ she said.
‘Gabrielle?’ he interrogated softly.
‘Your child, François!’
Oh, this he understood as a reproach, though it touched him but slightly. He made a step forward, still questioning her with movement of brow and eyelid.
‘Tiens!It is true. Is it credible I could forget I had a child? Oh! I know what you must think of me, Henriette; and the worst ofit is, you cannot think badly enough of me;’ he said, laughing drearily.
‘It would be a poor satisfaction for me to think badly of you, François. I am not your judge. It is enough for me that you have come back—at last.’
‘What a sweet woman!’ cried Dr. Vermont, in amazement. ‘My sister, your kindness confounds me. Life has not taught me to expect anything like it, and I begin to believe I am not the sage I have lately loved to contemplate. What, indeed, if these steadfast, silent creatures be the sages after all, and we, the philosophers and seekers after light, but the fools, who wear cap and bells, and mistake them for badges of sovereignty.’
‘Here comes Gabrielle, François,’ said Mademoiselle, interrupting his reflections.
The little girl lingered shyly upon the edge of the gallery, which Joséphine endeavoured to make her cross by whispered entreaty and pushes. She did not know this man who was her father, and her small brains were busy contriving a way to greet him. She made a pretty picture thus, in grey silk and white lace, with a broad crimson sash, and a big bow of red ribbonon the top of her curly brown head. Dr. Vermont stared at her as an object of natural curiosity rather than a charming little girl, his own daughter.
‘She is very like you, Henriette,’ he said, and held out his hand with an ingratiating smile.
Gabrielle came slowly forward, and took it; then looked up into his face in grave and silent deliberation. She decided suddenly to offer her cheek for the paternal kiss, which she did, with much conscious dignity and no sense of pleasure whatever.
‘Let me see,’ said Dr. Vermont, when he had perfunctorily kissed her, ‘she is now about ten. The very age her mother was when I first beheld her. Poor pretty Adèle! She does not in any way resemble her.’
He sighed deeply, and Henriette’s eyes, fixed on Gabrielle, filled with tears.
‘What rooms does Monsieur wish me to prepare for him?’ Joséphine asked in the pause.
The Doctor started, and remembered, with a quick disagreeable sensation, the nearness of his friends, and its extraordinary significance. If that good soul Joséphine but knew! If Henriette suspected!
‘That reminds me, Henriette—I have left three friends outside. I suppose you can put us up down here, or upstairs, for a couple of nights?’
‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.
‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation have you here?’
‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room—the large one opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé, which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put up. I think you can manage.’
‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old room—yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so? Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto, “The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle!What would I not give to be the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for me.’
He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his heartless words upon Henriette.
These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement. With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her prayers for indulgence in the matter ofcuisine; and shook their heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely mystified him.
When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad engagement in quitea novel light. The thought of that pistol held by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the most abject blunder and excesses—and by nothing less than absolute dishonour.
Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan,and who loved the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an indifferent translation, and knew by heart.
He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things; and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.
This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions. The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady. The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe,as intelligent, but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age, with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech upon her face—by the way, he did not like English women; they lackedatmosphere, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or any desire to please—and hence he had the more leisure to devote to inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.
And yet the Doctor’s calm inspection was not without a twinge of anger, as at a kind of infringement of his personal rights. As he sat in the old salon, where in his youth he used to chat with Monsieur Lenormant, he was in thegrip of the past, softened, almost sentimental. Nothing was changed about the place, which wore the same homely aspect of shabbiness and comfortable untidiness. But three of the personages of that little drama were dead: Monsieur Lenormant, Adèle, and young Dr. Vermont. For he, too, had been young and bright and pleasant. Once he had thrilled from head to foot when Adèle, with a charming movement, took one of his long fingers, and helped him to vamp theMarseillaise, and their eyes met in a foolish fluttering glance, andtudieu!his own were wet!
These were extraordinary things to remember, perhaps, but not so extraordinary as the persistence with which his backward glance rested, not on the image of his lovely young wife evoked from the past—but upon Henriette as she then was. That picture of grave, silent girlhood haunted him in a singular and unexpected way. The forgotten drama rose up, and confronted him with its ruthlessdénouement. And if he were not too proud and wilful ever to acknowledge regret, he might know that it was there the sting lay, as he remembered: that he should have played an ignobletrick upon poor old Monsieur Lenormant, and have looked at Adèle instead of at Henriette—on one memorable occasion. He had played for his happiness, and happiness had passed him by. Perchance, had he played a more honourable game, happiness would have been with him all these years, and the noble woman, whose suffering in his choice he now knew he had then divined, would have brought him finer and more delicate enjoyment than that which he had found elsewhere.
‘Yet who knows?’ he added, as a sound lash upon sentimental musing. ‘There is no such thing as happiness, and I should have tired of her goodness as I have tired of the badness of others.’
But he smiled indulgently, when Anatole droned a melancholy melody upon her charms that night.