His tones grew sweet and full—
“O, Nicanor! let this strange new shadow between us be dispelled, at once and for ever. I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Nicanor.”
“I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Miguel.”
“Very well. Then I yield her to you.”
“O, pardon me, Miguel! but that is just the point. I wanted to save you the pain—the sense of self-renunciation; but your blindness confounds me. More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. Your infatuation for Mademoiselle Suzanne is very plain to very many. What is plain only to yourself is that Mademoiselle Suzanne returns your devotion. You are not, indeed, justified in that belief.”
“Why not?”
“She has confessed her regard, in the first place, for me.”
“But she has also confessed to me that I have won the leading place in her affections.”
“That is absurd, Miguel. She is the soul of ingenuousness.”
“Perhaps, Nicanor—we are only boys, after all—she is a practised coquette.”
“You must not say that, Miguel, if you want me to remain your friend. You, perhaps, attach too much importance to your looks as an irresistible asset in matters of the heart.”
“Now I shall certainly quarrel with you.”
“You are mistaken, I think. Mind, to women of intellect, is the compelling lure.”
“It remains to be proved.”
“You are determined to put it to the test, then? Good-bye, Miguel.”
“This is not a real breach between us? O, Nicanor!”
“We must come to a definite understanding. Until we do, further confidence between us is impossible.”
He strutted away, perking his angry head, and whistling.
But Suzanne had accomplished the amiable débacle for which she had been intriguing. She had, paradoxically, separated the inseparables. It was a little triumph, perhaps; a very easy game to one of her experience—hardly worth the candle, in fact; but it was the best the boat had to offer. It remained only to solace the tedium of what was left of the voyage by playing on the broken strings of that friendship.
It was Nicanor who suffered most under the torture. He had always been rather accustomed to hear himself applauded for his wit—a funny little acrid possession which was touched with a precocious knowledge of the world. Now, to know himself made the butt of a maturer social irony lowered his little cockerel crest most dismally. As for good-natured Miguel, it was his way to join, rather than resent, the laugh against himself; and his persistent moral health under the infliction only added to the other’s mind-corrosion. In a very little the two were at daggers-drawn.
The “affair” made a laughable distraction for many of the listless and mischievous among the passengers. They contributed their little fans to the flame, and exchanged private bets upon the probable consequences. But Suzanne, indifferent to all interests but her own, worked her oracles serenely, and affected a wide-eyed unconsciousness of the amorous imbroglio which her arts had brought about. First one, then the other of the rivals would she beguile with her pensive kindnesses, and, according to her mood or the accident of circumstances, reassure in hope. And the task grew simpler as it advanced, inasmuch as the silence which came to fall between Miguel and Nicanor precluded the wholesome revelations which an interchange of confidences might have inspired.
At last the decisive moment arrived when Suzanne’s more intimate worldlings were to be gratified with her solution of the riddle. It was to end, in fact, in a Palais Royal farce; and they were to be invited to witness the “curtain.”
A few hours before reaching port she drew Miguel to a private interview.
“Ah, my friend!” she said, her slender fingers knotted, her large eyes wistful with tears, “I become distracted in the near necessity for decision. Pity me in so momentous a pass. What am I to do?”
“Mademoiselle,” said poor Miguel, his chest heaving, “it is resolved already. We are to journey together to Paris, where the bliss of my life is to be piously consummated.”
“Yes,” she said; “but the publicity—the scandal! Men are sure to attribute the worst motives to our comradeship, and that I could not endure.”
“Then we will make an appointment to meet privately—somewhere whence we can escape without the knowledge of a soul.”
“It is what had occurred to me. Hush! There is a little accommodating place—the Café de Paris, on the Boulevard des Dames, near the harbour. Do you know it? No—I forgot the world is all to open for you. But it is quite easy to find. Be there at eight o’clock to-morrow morning. I will await you. In the meantime, not a hint, not a whisper of our intention to anyone. Now go, go!”
He left her, rapturous but, once without her radiance, struck his breast and sighed, “Ah, heart, heart! thou traitor to thy brother!”
And at that moment Suzanne was catching sight of the jealous Nicanor, angrily and ostentatiously ignoring her. She called to him piteously, timidly, and he came, after a struggle with himself, stepping like a bantam.
“Is it not my friend that you meant, mademoiselle? I will summon him back. Your heart melts to him at the last moment.”
“Cruel!” she said. “You saw us together? I would not have had a witness to the humiliation of that gentle soul—least of all his brother and happier rival.”
“His——! Ah, mademoiselle, I entreat you, do not torture me!”
“Are you so sensitive? Alas! I have much for which to blame myself! Perhaps I have coquetted too long with my happiness; but how many women realize their feelings for the first time in the shock of imminent loss! We do not know our hearts until they ache, Nicanor.”
“Poor Miguel—poor fellow!”
“You love him best of all, I think. Well, go! I have no more to say.”
“Suzanne!”
“No, do not speak to me. To have so bared my breast to this repulse! O, I am shamed beyond words!”
“But do you not understand my heartfelt pity for his loss, when measured by my own ecstatic gain?”
“Well?”
“Suzanne! I cannot believe it true.”
“I feel so bewildered also. What are we to do?”
“You spoke once of a journey to Paris together.”
“You and I? Think of the jests, the comments on the part of our shipmates! We are not to bear a slurred reputation with us. I should die of shame.”
“What if we were to meet somewhere, unknown to anybody, by appointment, and slip away before the world awoke?”
“Yes, that would do; but where?”
“Can’t you suggest?”
“I know of a little Café de Paris. It is on the Boulevard des Dames, near the harbour. Say we meet there, at eight o’clock to-morrow morning, in time to catch the early mail?”
“O, yes, yes!”
“Hush! We have been long enough together. Do not forget; be silent as the grave.”
“Brains triumph!” thought Nicanor, as he went. “Alas, my poor, sweet, simple-minded comrade!”
De la Vénerie carried betimes quite a select little company with her to the rendezvous. They were all choking with fun and expectation.
“The dearingénus!” said Captain Robillard. “It will be exquisite to see the fur fly. But precocity must have its lesson.”
They had their rolls and coffee in a closet adjoining the common room. There was a window overlooking the street.
“Hist!” whispered the tiny Comte de Bellenglise. “Here they come!”
Nicanor was the first to arrive. He was very spruce and cock-a-hoop. His big brown eyes were like fever-spots in his little body. He questioned, airily enough, the proprietor, who had been well prompted to answer him.
“No, monsieur; there is no lady at this hour. An appointment? Alas! such is always the least considered of their many engagements.”
As he spoke, Miguel came in. The two eyed one another blankly after the first shock. At length Nicanor spoke: the door between the closet and the café opened a little.
“You have discovered, then? Go away, my poor friend. This is, indeed, the worst occasion for our reconciliation.”
“I did not come to seek you, Nicanor. I came to meet Mademoiselle Suzanne alone, by appointment.”
“And I, too, Miguel. I fear you must have overheard and misconstrued her meaning. It was I she invited to this place.”
“No, Nicanor; it was I.”
“She has not come, at least. We must decide, at once and for ever, before she comes.”
“I know what you mean, Nicanor. This, indeed, is the only end to a madness. Have you your pistol? I have mine.”
“And I have mine, Miguel. You will kill me, as you are the good shot. I don’t know why I ever carried one, except to entice you to show your skill at breaking the floating bottles. But that was before the trouble.”
“Dear Nicanor!”
“But let it beà l’outrance. I want either to kill you or to be killed.”
“If she were only out of the way, you would love me again.”
“Amen to that, dear Miguel!”
“Yet we are to fight?”
“To the death, my brother, my comrade! Such is the madness of passion.”
The paralyzed landlord found breath for the first time to intervene.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! for God’s sake! consider my reputation!”
Miguel, starting away, and leaving Nicanor with his back to the closet, produced and pointed his weapon at the trembling creature. These South Americans were a strange compound of sweetness and ferocity.
“If you interfere,” he said, “I will shoot you instead. Now, Nicanor, we fire at discretion, one shot to each.”
The bang of Nicanor’s pistol shattered the emptiness. Miguel was down on the floor. Nicanor cast away his reeking weapon, and, running to his friend, raised his body in his arms. The door of the closet opened, and Suzanne, radiant and gloating, stood in the entry. “That was a good shot, Nicanor,” said Miguel, smiling weakly. “You are better at men than bottles.”
“Miguel! Miguel! you have your pistol undischarged. Faint as you are, you cannot miss me at this range.”
“Stand away, then, Nicanor.”
Nicanor stood up, tearing his coat apart.
“Here, here! to my heart, dearest!”
Miguel, supporting himself on his left hand, raised his pistol swiftly, and shot Mademoiselle Suzanne through the breast. Then he fell back to the floor.
“That is the short way to it, Nicanor. Confess, after all, I am the better shot. Now we are reunited for ever.”
Suzanne had not a word to say to that compact. She lay in a heap, like the sweetest of dressmaker’s dummies overturned.
The landlord raised a terrible outcry.
“Messieurs! I am ruined, unless you witness to the truth of this catastrophe!”
“I, for one, will witness,” said de Bellenglise, very white. “Mademoiselle, it is plain to the humorist, has only reaped what she sowed. But I do not envy M. Nicanor his survival.”
Heaven, however, did, it appeared, from the fact of its claiming him to the most austere of its foundations, La Trappe, in Normandy, where men whom the law exonerates may suffer, voluntarily, a lifelong penal servitude.
And, in the meanwhile, Miguel could await his friend wholehearted, for he had certainly taken the direct way of sending Mademoiselle Suzanne to a place where her future interference between them was not to be dreaded.
WhenLuc Caron and his mate, whom, officially, he called Pepino, plodded with their raree-show into the sub-Pyrenean village of San Lorenzo, their hearts grew light with a sense of a haven reached after long stress of weather. Caron sounded his bird-call, made of boxwood, and Pepino drummed on his tabor, which was gay with fluttering ribbons, and merrily they cried together:
“Hullo, gentles and simples! hullo, children of the lesser and the larger growth—patriots all! Come, peep into the box of enchantment! For a quarter-real one may possess the world. See here the anti-Christ in his closet at Fontainebleau, burning brimstone to the powers of evil! See the brave English ships, ‘Impérieuse’ and ‘Cambrian,’ dogging the coast from Rosas to Barcelona, lest so little as a whiff of sulphur get through! Crowd not up, my children—there is time for all; the glasses will not break nor dim; they have already withstood ten thousand ‘eye-blows,’ and are but diamonds the keener. Come and see the ships—so realistic, one may hear the sound of guns, the wind in the rigging—and all for a paltry quarter-real!”
Their invitation excited no laughter, and but a qualified interest, among the loafing village ancients and sullen-faced women who appeared to be the sole responsible inhabitants of the place. A few turned their heads; a dog barked; that was all. Not though Caron and Pepino had come wearifully all the way from Rousillon, over the passes of the mountains, and down once more towards the plains of Figueras, that they might feel the atmosphere of home, and claim its sympathetic perquisites, was present depression to be forgotten at the call of a couple of antics. Twelve miles away was not there the fort of San Fernando, and the cursed French garrison, which had possessed it by treachery, beleagured in their ill-gotten holding by a force of two thousand Spaniards, which included all the available manhood of San Lorenzo? There would be warrant for gaiety, indeed, should news come of a bloody holocaust of those defenders; but that it did not, and in the meanwhile, blown from another quarter, flew ugly rumours of a large force of French detached somewhere from the north, and hastening to the relief of their comrades. True, a fool must live by his folly as a wise man by his wisdom; but then there was a quality of selection in all things. As becoming as a jack-pudding at a funeral was Caron in San Lorenzo at this deadly pass. Not so much as a child ventured to approach the peep-show.
The two looked at one another. They were faint and loose-lipped with travel.
“Courage, little Pepa!” said Caron. “There is no wit-sharpener like adversity. The hungry mouse has the keenest scent.”
It was odd, in the face of his caressing diminutive, that he held himself ostentatiously the smaller of the pair. He seemed to love to show the other’s stature fine and full by comparison. Pepino, in fact, was rather tall, with a faun-like roundness in his thighs and soft olive face. He was dressed, too, the more showily, the yellow handkerchief knotted under his hat being of silk, and his breeches, down the seams of which little bells tinkled, of green velvet. Caron, for his part, shrewd and lean and leather-faced, was content with a high-peaked hat and an old cloak of faded mulberry. His wit and merriment were his bright assets.
Pepino, for all his weariness, chuckled richly.
“Sweet and inexhaustible! I could feed all day on thy love. Yet, I think, for my stomach’s sake, I would rather be less gifted than the mouse. What is the use to be able to smell meat through glass when the window is shut?”
“Wait! There are other ways to the larder than by the door. In the meanwhile, we will go on. There are two ends to San Lorenzo, the upper and lower: we will try the lower. North and south sit with their backs to one another, like peevish sisters. What the one snubs the other may favour.”
He swung the box by its strap to his shoulder, closed the tripod, and, using it for a staff, trudged on dustily with his comrade. Half way down the village, a man for the first time accosted them. He was young, vehement, authoritative—the segundo jefe, or sub-prefect of San Lorenzo.
“Wait!” he said, halting the pair. “I know you, Caron. You should be de Charogne—a French carrion-crow. What do you here, spying for your masters?”
“Señor,” said the showman, “you are mistaken. I am of your people.”
“Since when? I know you, I say.”
“Many know me, caballero, in these parts, and nothing against me but my nationality. Now that is changed.”
“Since when? I repeat it.”
“Since the Emperor tore my brother from his plough in Rousillon to serve his colours, and our father was left to die of starvation. We are but now on our way back from closing the old man’s eyes, and at the foot of the hills we recovered our chattels, which we had hid there, on our journey north, for security. I speak of myself and my little comrade, Pepino, who is truly of this province, señor, having been born in Gerona, where he made stockings.”
The sub-prefect looked at Pepino attentively, for the first time, and his dark eyes kindled.
“And wore them, by the same token,” he murmured.
He swept off his hat, mockingly courteous.
“Buenos dias, señora!” he said.
Caron jumped.
“Ah, mercy, caballero!” he cried. “Can you, indeed, distinguish so easily? Do not give us away.”
“Tell me all about it,” said the sub-prefect. “Truly this is no time for masquerading in San Lorenzo.”
“But it was the most obvious of precautions to begin with,” pleaded Caron. “Over the mountains is not safety for a woman; and since——”
“And since, you are in San Lorenzo,” said the other.
“It is true, señor. Pepa shall re-sex herself to-night. Yet it is only a few hours since we found our expedient justified.”
“How was that?”
“Why, in the hills, on our way back, we came plump upon a French picket, and——”
He leapt, to the sudden start and curse the other gave.
“What have I said, señor?”
“Dolt, traitor!” thundered the sub-prefect. “French! and so near! and this is the first you speak of it! I understand—they come from Perpignan—they are Reille’s advance guard, and they march to relieve Figueras. O! to hold me here with thy cursed ape’s chatter, while——”
He sprang away, shouting as he went, “To arms! to arms! Who’ll follow me to strike a blow for Spain! The French are in our vineyards!” The whole village turned and followed him as he ran.
Caron, in great depression, led Pepino into a place of shade and privacy.
“I am an ass, little one,” he said. “You shall ridemefor the future. Andthisis home!”
She threw her arms about his neck, with a tired spring of tears.
“But I am a woman again, dear praise to Mary!” she cried, “and can love you once more in my own way.”
This befell in 1808, when the ferment which Napoleon had started in Spain was already in fine working. The French garrison in Figueras—one of those strongholds which he had occupied at first from the friendliest motives, and afterwards refused to evacuate—being small and hard beset by a numerous body of somatenes from the mountains, had burned the town, and afterwards retired into the neighbouring fort of San Fernando, where they lay awaiting succour with anxious trepidation. And they had reason for their concern, since a little might decide their fate—short shrift, and the knife or gallows, not to speak of the more probable eventuality of torture. For those were the days of savage reprisals; and of the two forces the Spaniards were the less nice in matters of humanity. They killed by the Mass, and had the Juntas and Inquisition to exonerate them.
But Figueras was an important point, strategically; for which reason the Emperor—who generally in questions of political economy held lives cheaper than salt—had despatched an express to General Reille, who commanded the reserves at Perpignan, on the north side of the mountains, ordering him to proceed by forced marches to the relief of the garrison, as a step preliminary to the assault and capture of Gerona. And it was an advance body of this force which Luc and his companion had encountered bivouacking in the hills.
It was not a considerable body as the two gauged it, for Colonel de Regnac’s troops—raw Tuscan recruits, and possessed with a panic terror of the enemy—were showing a very laggard spirit in the venture, and no emulation whatever of their officers’ eagerness to encounter. In fact, Colonel de Regnac, with his regimental staff, some twenty all told, and few beside, had run ahead of his column by the measure of a mile or two, and was sitting down to rest and curse, below his breath, in a hollow of the hills, when the two captured vagabonds were brought before him.
There had been no light but the starlight, no voice but the downpouring of a mountain stream until the sentry had leaped upon them. Chatter and fire were alike prohibited things in those rocky ante-rooms of hate and treachery.
“Who are you?” had demanded the Colonel of Caron.
“A son of France, monsieur.”
“Whither do you go?”
“To attend the death-bed of my old father in Rousillon,” had answered Luc, lying readily.
The Colonel had arisen, and scanned his imperturbable face keenly.
“His name?”
Luc had told him truthfully—also his father’s circumstances and misfortunes.
The officer had grunted: “Well, he pays the toll to glory. Whence, then, do you come?”
“From Figueras.”
“Ha! They have news of us there?”
“On the contrary, monsieur; your coming will surprise them greatly.”
“It is well; let it be well. Go in peace.”
A little later the sentry, confiding to one who was relieving him, was overheard to say: “Ventre de biche! I would have made sure first that those two rascals wentupthe hill!”
He was brought before the Colonel.
“My son, what did you say?”
The sentry, scenting promotion for his perspicacity, repeated his remark, adding that, if he were right in his suspicions of the vagabonds’descent towards San Lorenzo, there would be trouble on the morrow.
He was soundly welted with a strap for his foresight, and thereafter degraded—to his intense astonishment, for a private was not supposed to volunteer counsel. But his prediction was so far vindicated that, in the course of the following morning, a well-aimed shot, succeeded by a very fusillade, vicious but harmless, from the encompassing rocks, laid low a member of the staff, and sent the rest scattering for shelter. They were, at the time, going leisurely to enable the main body to come up with them; but this stroke of treachery acted upon men and officers like a goad. Re-forming, they deployed under cover, and charged the guerrillas’ position—only to find it abandoned. Pursuit was useless in that welter of ridges; they buckled to, and doubled down the last slopes of the mountain into San Lorenzo.
“IfI could only encounter that Monsieur Caron!” said the Colonel sweetly.
And, lo! under the wall of a churchyard they came plump upon the very gentleman, sitting down to rest with his comrade Pepino.
It seemed a providence. The village, for all else, appeared deserted, depopulated.
Luc scrambled to his feet, with his face, lean and mobile, twitching under its tan. The Colonel, seated on his horse, eyed him pleasantly, and nodded.
He was hardly good to look at by day, this Colonel. It seemed somehow more deadly to play with him than it had seemed under the starlight. He had all the features of man exaggerated but his eyes, which were small and infamous—great teeth, great brows, great bones, and a moustache like a sea-lion’s. He could have taken Faith, Hope, and Charity together in his arms, and crushed them into pulp against his enormous chest. Only the lusts of sex and ambition were in any ways his masters. But, for a wonder, his voice was soft.
“Son of France,” he said, “thou hast mistaken the road to Rousillon.”
Luc, startled out of his readiness, had no word of reply. Pepino crouched, whimpering, unnoticed as yet.
“What is that beside him?” asked the Colonel.
A soldier hoisted up the peep-show, set it on its legs, and looked in.
“Blank treason, Colonel,” said he. “Here is the Emperor himself spitting fire.”
“It is symbolical of Jove,” said Caron.
“Foul imps attend him!”
“They are his Mercuries.”
“No more words!” said the Colonel. “String the rascal up!”
That was the common emergency exit in the then theatres of war. It had taken the place of the “little window” through which former traitors to their country had been invited to look.
Pepino leapt to his feet, with a sudden scream.
“No, no! He is Caron, the wit, the showman, dear to all hearts!”
Colonel Regnac’s great neck seemed to swell like a ruttish wolf’s. His little eyes shot red with laughter. He had as keen a scent as the sub-prefect for a woman.
“Good!” he said; “he shall make us a show.”
“Señor, for the love of God! He spoke the truth. His father is dead.”
“He will be in a dutiful haste to rejoin him.”
“Señor, be merciful! You are of a gallant race.”
“That is certain,” said de Regnac. “You, for your part, are acquitted, my child. I take you personally under my protection.”
“Good-bye, comrade!” cried Caron sadly. “We have gone the long road together, and I am the first to reach home. Follow me when you will. I shall wait for you.”
“Fie!” said the Colonel. “That is no sentiment for a renegade. Heaven is the goal of this innocence, whom I save from your corruption.”
They hung him from the branch of a chestnut tree, and lingered out his poor dying spasms. Pepino, after one burst of agony, stood apathetic until the scene was over. Then, with a shudder, correlative with the last of the dangling body’s, she seemed to come awake.
“Well,” she said, “there goes a good fellow; but it is true he was a renegade.”
The Colonel was delighted.
“They have always a spurious attraction,” he said, “to the sex that is in sympathy with naughtiness in any form. But consider: false to one is false to all, and this was a bad form of treachery—though,” he added gallantly, “he certainly had his extreme temptation.”
“The French killed his father,” she said indifferently.
“The French,” he answered, “kill, of choice, with nothing but kindness. You, though a Spaniard, my pet, shall have ample proof if you will.”
“I am to come with you?”
“God’s name! There is to be no enforcement.”
“Well, you have left me little choice. Already here they had looked upon us with suspicion, and, if I remained alone, would doubtless kill me. I do not want to die—not yet. What must be must. The king is dead, live the king!”
He was enchanted with her vivacity. He took her up before him on his saddle, and chuckled listening to the feverish chatter with which she seemed to beguile herself from memory.
“These jays have no yesterday,” he thought; and said aloud, “You are not Pepino? Now tell me.”
“No, I am Pepa,” she said. “I am only a man in seeming. Alack! I think a man would not forget so easily.”
“Some men,” he answered, and his hand tightened a little upon her. “Trust me, that dead rogue is already forgathering with his succuba.”
By and by he asked her: “How far to Figueras?”
“Twelve miles from where we started,” she answered.
A thought struck him, and he smiled wickedly.
“You will always bear in mind,” he said, “that the moment I become suspicious that you are directing us wide, or, worse, into a guet-apens, I shall snap off your little head at the neck, and roll it back to San Lorenzo.”
“Have no fear,” she said quietly; “we are in the straight road for the town—or what used to be one.”
“And no shelter by the way? I run ahead of my rascals, as you see. We must halt while they overtake us. Besides”—he leered horribly—“there is the question of the night.”
“I know of no shelter,” she said, “but Our Lady of Refuge.”
“An opportune title, at least. What is it?”
“It is a hospital for the fallen—for such as the good Brotherhoods of Madrid send for rest and restoration to the sanctuary of the quiet pastures. The monks of Misericorde are the Brothers’ deputies there—sad, holy men, who hide their faces from the world. The house stands solitary on the plain; we shall see it in a little. They will give you shelter, though you are their country’s enemies. They make no distinctions.”
De Regnac pulled at his moustache, frowning, pondering.
“Where these monks forgather are fat kids and old Malaga—a tempting alternative to the munching of cold biscuit under the stars. But—sacré chien!one may always take in more with the gravy than ever fell from the spit. What, then!”
He jerked his feet peevishly in the stirrups, and growled—
“Limping and footsore already come my cursed rabble—there you are, white-livered Tuscan sheep! The bark of a dog will scare them; they would fear a thousand bogies in the dark. It is certain I must wait for them, and bivouac somewhere here in the plains.”
Indeed, the first of them came on as he spoke—a weary, stumbling body of laggards, trailing feet and muskets.
“Halte-là!” he thundered; and the men came to a loose-kneed stand, while the corporals went round prodding and cursing them into a form of discipline. De Regnac grumbled—
“Are we to have this cold grace to our loves? God’s name! my heart cries out for fire—fire within and without. These monks!”
“Shall I slip before, and sound them? You may trust me, for a Spanish girl, who has learned how to coax her confessor.”
“Ha!You!” He held her, biting his great lips. “What are you good for but deceit, rogue! No, no; we will go together.”
He called his staff about him, and they went forward in a body. Presently, topping a longish slope, they saw, sprung out of the plain before them, a huddled grey building, glooming monstrous in the dusk. Its barred windows stared blindly; twin towers held the portico between them, as it were the lunette of a vast guillotine; a solitary lamp hung motionless in the entrance. Far away across the flats a light or two twinkled over ruined Figueras, like marsh-candles over a swamp. The place seemed lifeless desolation embodied—Death’s own monument in a desert. Gaiety in its atmosphere shivered into silence.
But at length a captain rallied, with a laugh.
“Peste!” he cried; “a churchyard refuge! Let us see if the dead walk!”
He battered with his sword-hilt on the great door. It swung open, in staggering response, and revealed a solitary figure. Cowled, spectral, gigantic—holding, motionless, a torch that wept fire—the shape stood without a word. It was muffled from crown to heel in coarse frieze; the eyelets in its woollen vizor were like holes scorched through by the burning gaze behind—the very rims of them appeared to smoulder. Laville, the captain, broke into an agitated laugh.
“Mordieu, my friend, are the dead so lifeless?”
“What do you seek?”
The voice boomed, low and muffled, from the folds.
“Rest and food,” answered Laville. “We are weary and famished. For the rest, we ask no question, and invite none.”
“So they come in peace,” said the figure, “all are welcome here.”
The Colonel pushed to the front, carrying his burden.
“We come in peace,” he said—“strangers and travellers. We pay our way, and the better where our way is smoothed. Take that message to your Prior.”
The figure withdrew, and returned in a little.
“The answer is, Ye are welcome. For those who are officers, a repast will be served within an hour in the refectory; for the rest, what entertainment we can compass shall be provided in the outhouses. A room is placed at the disposal of your commander.”
“It is well,” said de Regnac. “Now say, We invite your Prior to the feast himself provides, and his hand shall be first in the dish, and his lip to the cup; else, from our gallantry, do we go supperless.”
Once more the figure withdrew and returned.
“He accepts. You are to fear no outrage at his hands.”
The Colonel exclaimed cynically, “Fie, fie! I protest you wrong our manners!”—and, giving some orderssub vocefor the precautionary disposal of his men, entered with his staff. They were ushered into a stone-cold hall, set deep in the heart of the building—a great windowless crypt, it seemed, whose glooms no warmth but that of tapers had ever penetrated. It was bare of all furniture save benches and a long trestle-table, and a few sacred pictures on the walls. While the rest waited there, de Regnac was invited to his quarters—a cell quarried still deeper into that hill of brick. No sound in all the place was audible to them as they went. He pushed Pepino before him.
“This is my servant,” he said. “He will attend me, by your leave.”
The girl made no least demur. She went even jocundly, turning now and again to him with her tongue in her cheek. He, for his part, was in a rapture of slyness; but he kept a reserve of precaution. They were escorted by the giant down a single dim corridor, into a decent habitable cell, fitted with chairs, a little stove, and a prie-Dieu; but the bed was abominably rocky. De Regnac made a wry face at it for his companion’s secret delectation.
The ghostly monk, intimating that he would await outside the señor commandante’s toilet, that he might re-escort his charge to the refectory, closed the door upon the two. De Regnac cursed his officiousness, groaning; but Pepino reassured his impatience with a hundred drolleries. However, when the Colonel came out presently, he came out alone; and, moreover, turned the key in the door and pocketed it.
“Merely a prudential measure,” he explained to his guide. “These gaillards are not to be trusted in strange houses. I will convey him his supper by and by with my own hands.”
The figure neither answered nor seemed to hear. De Regnac, joining a rollicking company, dismissed him from his mind.
And alone in the cell stood mad Pepino.
But not for long. A trap opened in the floor, and from it sprouted, like a monstrous fungus, the head and shoulders of the giant monk. Massively, sombrely he arose, until the whole of his great bulk was emerged and standing in a burning scrutiny of the prisoner. A minute passed. Then, “Whence comest thou, Pepa Manoele? With whom, and for what purpose?” said the voice behind the folds.
His question seemed to snap in an instant the garrotte about her brain. She flung herself on her knees before him with a lamentable cry—
“They have killed my Luc, brother—my Luc, who took me from your wards of mercy, sins and all. They have killed my sweet singing cricket, my merry, merry cricket, that had no guile in all its roguish heart. They put their heel upon him in the path—what are songs to them!—and left my summer desolate. If I weep one moment, I know that blood will scald my cheeks and drain my heart, and I shall die before I act. O, brother! keep back my tears a little. Show me what to do!”
She clutched in agony at his robe.
“Come,” he said; “the way is clear.”
* * * * *
The feast was served to the tick of the hour by lay brothers, another blank-envisaged form directing them. The tables smoked with cheer, and de Regnac rubbed his hands. There were the joints of fat kid and the flagons of old Malaga—salmis of quail, too; truffled sausages; herrings with mustard sauce, things of strong flavour meet for warriors. The steam itself was an invitation—the smell, the sparkle. Only one thing lacked—the Prior’s grace. De Regnac, bestial always, but most like a tiger in the view of unattainable meats, crowded the interval with maledictions and curses. His courtesy stopped anywhere on the threshold of his appetites. Baulked of his banquet, he would be ready to make a holocaust of the whole hospital. Yet he dared not be the first to put his fingers in the dish.
“Where is our host?” he growled. “Doth he fear the test—or death—a coward faint with indecision?”
Even with the word, he found him at his elbow—an old, dry pipe of a man, wheezing thin air. The father’s face under its dropping cowl (no doubt his lungs were too crazy for the vizor) showed stark with rime; his forehead was streaked with it; his eyes were half-thawed pools. He spoke. Hoarse and feeble, his voice seemed to crow from the attics of a ruined tenement, high up among the winds.
“Fall to, soldiers, fall to! There is no grace like honest appetite. Fall to! And they tell me ye have travelled far to claim our hospitality. Fall to!”
De Regnac smacked his shoulder boisterously, so that he staggered.
“Not till you have blessed our meal for us, old father.”
The Prior raised his trembling hands. The other caught at them.
“Not that way. We ask the taster’s grace. It was a bargain.”
“Be seated, señor,” said the old man, with dignity. “I do not forget my obligations.”
He went round, bent and stiffly, taking a shred from each dish, a sippet dipped in the gravy.
“Bella premunt hostilia,” he expostulated. “Intestine wars invade our breast. What a task for our old digestion!”
His roguery pleased and reassured his company. They attacked the viands with a will. He never ceased to encourage them, going about the board with garrulous cheer.
“And ye come over the hills?” said he. “A hungry journey and a dangerous. It was the mountains, and the spirits of the mountains, that were alone invincible when the Moorish dogs overran all Spain—all but the mountains. The heathen crests were lowered there—rolled back in a bloody foam. Dear God! I’m old.”
“Not so ancient, father,” cried de Regnac, “but that good liquor will revitalize you. There remains the wine.”
“Ah me!” sighed the Prior; “must I?”
They swore him to the toast by every bond of honour. Their throats were ragged with drought.
“Well, well,” he said. “I’ll first dismiss these witnesses to their father’s shame. I’ll be no Noah to my children.”
He drove the servitors, with feeble playfulness, into the passage; pursued them a pace or two. In a moment he was back alone, his cowl pulled about his face.
“Give me the draught,” he said hoarsely, “nor look ye upon the old man’s abasement. I am soon to answer for my frailties.”
Cheering and bantering, they mixed him a cup from every flagon, and put it into his hand, which gripped it through the cloth. He turned his back on them, and took the liquor down by slow degrees, chuckling and gasping and protesting. Then, still coughing, he handed the cup, backwards, to the nearest.
“Bumpers, all!” roared de Regnac. “We toast old Noah for our king of hosts!”
Even as he drank, as they all drank, thirsty and uproarious, the great door of the refectory clanged to, and the Prior spun with a scream to the floor. De Regnac’s cup fell from his hand; a dead silence succeeded.
Suddenly the Colonel was on his feet, ghastly and terrible.
“Something foul!” he whispered; “something foul!”
Staggering, he swerved out, and drove with all his weight against the door. It had been locked and bolted upon them. Not a massive panel creaked. They were entombed!
Hush!
Solemn, low, mystic, arose without the chaunt of voices in unison—the prayers for one sick unto death: “Receive, O Lord, the sacrifice we offer for thy servant, who is near the end of her life.”
With a scream, de Regnac threw himself towards the body on the floor, and lifted it with huge strength in his arms. As he did so, the cowl fell away, and revealed the face of Pepino. The shadow of death was already fallen on it; but she spoke, and with a smile.
“When he pursued them, I was waiting and took his place. Curse him not. He observed the letter. ’Twas I poisoned the wine. Take back thy wages, dog! O, I go to find my Luc—if thou darest follow me!”
He roared out—a spasm took his throat. He tried to crush her in his arms. They relaxed in the effort. Howling, he dropped her, and fell beside in a heap.
Then, from out a mortal paralysis, arose sobbing and wailing at the table. Some seized salt, some the wet mustard from the fish, and swallowed it by handfuls. Others ran hither and thither aimlessly, screeching, blaspheming, beating the walls, the obdurate door. There was a regimental doctor among them; he was the first dead. None found help or hope in that ghastly trap. The venom had been swift, gripping, ineradicable. Within half an hour it was all a silent company, and the Miserere long had ceased.
Somewhere in a book I read of a tale like this, which was headed “Patriotic Fanaticism.” Those were certainly the deadly days of retaliation; but in this case Love, as always, was the principal fanatic.
Kelvin, not I, is responsible for this story, which he told me sitting smoking by his study window.
It was a squalid night, I remember, wet and fretful—the sort of night which seems to sojourners in the deep country (as we then were) to bring rumours of plashy pavements, and the roar of rain-sodden traffic, and the wailing and blaspheming of women lost and crying out of a great darkness. No knowledge of our rural isolation could allay this haunting impression in my mind that night. I felt ill at ease, and, for some reason, out of suits with life. It mattered nothing that a belt of wild woodland separated us from the country station five miles away. That, after all, by the noises in it, might have been a very causeway, by which innumerable spectres were hurrying home from their business in the distant cities. The dark clouds, as long as we could see them labouring from the south, appeared freighted with the very burden of congregated dreariness. They glided up, like vast electric tramcars, and seemed to pause overhead, as if to discharge into the sanctuary of our quiet pastures their loads of aggressive vulgarity. My nerves were all jangled into disorder, I fear, and inclining me to imaginative hyperbole.
Kelvin, for his part, was very quiet. He was a conundrum, that man. Once the keenest of sportsmen, he was now for years become an almost sentimental humanitarian—and illogical, of necessity. He would not consent to kill under any circumstances—wilfully, that is to say; but he enjoyed his mutton with the best of us. However, I am not quarrelling with his point of view. He, for one—by his own admission, anyhow—owed a life to “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,” and he would not, from the date of his debt, cross her prerogatives. The same occasion, it appeared, had opened in him an unstanchable vein of superstition, which was wont to gush—bloodily, I might say—in depressing seasons of the mind. It provoked me, on the evening of the present anecdote, to a sort of peevish protest.
“Why the devil,” I said, “are spectral manifestations—at least, according to you fellows—everlastingly morbid and ugly? Are there no gentle disembodied things, who, of their love and pity, would be rather more anxious than the wicked, one would think, to communicate with their survivors?”
“Of course,” said Kelvin; “but their brief sweet little reassurances pass unnoticed. Their forms are insignificant, their voices inarticulate; they can only appeal by symbol, desperately clinging to the earth the while. On the other hand, the world tethers its worldlings by the foot, so that they cannot take flight when they will. There remains, so to speak, too much earth in their composition, and it keeps ’em subject to the laws of gravitation.”
I laughed; then shrugged impatiently.
“What a rasping night it is! The devil take that moth!”
The window was shut, and the persistent whirring and tapping of a big white insect on the glass outside jarred irritably on my nerves.
“Let it in, for goodness’ sake,” I said, “if itwillinsist on making a holocaust of itself!”
Kelvin had looked up when I first spoke. Now he rose, with shining eyes, and a curious little sigh of the sort that one vents on the receipt of wonderful news coming out of suspense.
“Yes, I’ll open the window,” he said low; and with the word threw up the casement. The moth whizzed in, whizzed round, and settled on his hand. He lifted it, with an odd set smile, into the intimate range of his vision, and scrutinized it intently. Suddenly and quickly, then, as if satisfied about something, he held it away from him.
“Ite missa est!” he murmured, quoting some words of the Mass (he was a Catholic); and the moth fluttered and rose. Now, you may believe it or not; but there was a fire burning on the hearth, and straight for that fire went the moth, and seemed to go up with the smoke into the chimney. I was so astonished that I gasped; but Kelvin appeared serenely unconcerned as he faced round on me.
“Well,” I exploded, “if a man mayn’t kill, he may persuade to suicide, it seems.”
He answered good-humouredly, “All right; but it wasn’t suicide.”
Then he resumed his seat by me, and relighted his pipe. I sat stolidly, with an indefinable feeling of grievance, and said nothing. But the silence soon grew unbearable.
“Kelvin,” I said, suddenly and viciously; “what the deuce do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t believe,” he answered, at once and cheerily, “even if I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“Well, this. There was the soul of little Patsy that went up in the smoke.”
“The village child you are so attached to?”
“Yes; and who has lain dying these weeks past.”
“Why should it come to you?”
“It was a compact between us—if she were summoned, in a moment, without time for a good-bye. We were close friends.”
“Kelvin—excuse me—you are getting to be impossible.”
“All right. Look at your watch. Time was made for unbelievers. There’s no convincing a sceptic but by foot-rule. Look at your watch.”
“I did, I confess—covertly—in the instant of distraction caused by Kelvin’s little son, who came to bid his father good night. He was a quiet, winning little fellow, glowing with health and beauty.
“Good night, Bobo,” said Kelvin, kissing the child fondly. “Ask God to make little Patsy’s bed comfy, before you get into your own.”
I kissed the boy also; but awkwardly, for some reason, under his frank courteousness. After he was gone, I sank back in my chair and said, grudging the concession—
“Very well. It’s half-past eight.”
Kelvin nodded, and said nothing more for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, he broke out—
“I usen’t to believe in such things myself, once upon a time; but Bobo converted me. Would you like to hear the story?”
“O, yes!” I said, tolerantly superior. “Fire away!”
He laughed, filling his pipe—the laugh of a man too surely self-convinced to regard criticism of his faith.
“Patsy,” he said, “had no Ghost-Leech to touch her well. Poor little Patsy! But she’s better among the flowers.”
“Of Paradise, I suppose you mean? Well, if she is, she is,” I said, as if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a Ghost-Leech?”
“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the hurling-matches of the dead.”
I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.
“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d count it heresy to believe otherwise. Yet have you ever considered how man’s one great distinctive faculty must be admitted into all evidence of his deeds upon earth, as minuted by the recording angel? It must be admitted, of course, and appreciatively by the final assessor. How could he judge laughter who had never laughed? The cachinnatory nerve is touched off from across the Styx—wireless telegraphy; and man will laugh still, though he be damned.”
“Kelvin! my good soul!”
“The dead, I tell you, do not put off their sense of humour with their flesh. They laugh beyond the grave. They are full of a sense of fun, and not necessarily the most transcendent.”
“No, indeed, by all the testimony of spiritualism.”
“Well; now listen. I was staying once in a village on the west coast of Ireland. The people of my hamlet were at deadly traditional feud with the people of a neighbouring hamlet. Traditional, I say, because the vendetta (it almost amounted to one) derived from the old days of rivalry between them in the ancient game of hurling, which was a sort of primitive violent “rugger” played with a wooden ball. The game itself was long fallen into disuse in the district, and had been supplanted, even in times out of memory, by sports of a gentler, more modern cast. But it, and the feud it had occasioned, were still continued unabated beyond the grave. How do I know this? Why, on the evidence of my Ghost-Leech.
“He was a strange, moody, solitary man, pitied, though secretly dreaded, by his neighbours. They might have credited him with possession—particularly with a bad local form of possession; to suspect it was enough in itself to keep their mouths shut from questioning him, or their ears from inviting confession of his sufferings. For, so their surmise were correct, and he in the grip of the hurlers, a word wrung from him out of season would have brought the whole village under the curse of its dead.”
I broke in here. “Kelvin, for the Lord’s sake! you are too cimmerian. Titillate your glooms with a touch of that spiritual laughter.”
Agreeably to my banter, he smiled.
“There’s fun in it,” he said; “only it’s rather ghastly fun. What do you say to the rival teams meeting in one or other of the village graveyards, and whacking a skull about with long shank-bones?”
“I should say, It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Anything turning upon a more esoteric psychology would. What pitiful imaginations you Christmas-number seers are possessed of!”
“I dare say. But I’m not imagining. It’s you practical souls that imagine—that common sense, for instance, is reason; that the top-hat is the divinely-inspired shibboleth of the chosen; and so on. But you don’t disappoint me. Shall I go on?”
“O, yes! go on.”
“The hurlers meet under the full moon, they say, in one or other of the rival graveyards;but they must have a living bachelor out of each parish to keep goal for them.”
“I see! ‘They say’? I see!”
“The doom of the poor wretch thus chosen is, as you may suppose, an appalling one. He must go, or suffer terrors damning out of reason. There is no power on earth can save him. One night he is sitting, perhaps, in his cabin at any peaceful work. The moor, mystic under the moonlight, stretches from miles away up to his walls, surrounding and isolating them. His little home is an ark, anchored amid a waste and silent sea of flowers. Suddenly the latch clinks up, advances, falls. The night air breathing in passes a presence standing in the opening, and quivers and dies. Stealthily the door gapes, ever so little, ever so softly, and a face, like the gliding rim of the moon, creeps round its edge. It is the face, he recognizes appalled, of one long dead. The eyeplaces are black hollows; but there is a movement in them like the glint of water in a deep well. A hand lifts and beckons. The goal-keeper is chosen, and must go. For seven years, it is said, he must serve the hurling-matches of the dead.”
“State it for a fact. Don’t hedge on report.”
“I don’t. This man served his time. If he hadn’t, Bobo wouldn’t be here.”
“O? Poor Bobo!”
“This man, I say, survived the ghastly ordeal—one case out of a dozen that succumb. Then he got his fee.”
“O, a fee! What was that? A Rachel of the bogs?”
“The power to cure by touch any human sickness, even the most humanly baffling.”
“Really a royal reward. It’s easy to see a fortune in it.”
“He would have been welcome to mine; but he would take nothing. He made my little boy whole again.”
“Kelvin! I dare say I’m a brute. What had been the matter with him?”
“Ah, what! He simply moaned and wasted—moaned eternally. Atrophy; meningitis; cachexy—they gave it a dozen names, but not a single cure. He was dying under slow torture—a heavy sight for a father.
“One day an old Shaman of the moors called upon me. He was ancient, ancient—as dry as his staff, and so bent that, a little more, and he had tripped over his long beard in walking. I can’t reproduce his brogue; but this is the substance of what it conveyed to me:—
“Had I ever heard speak of Baruch of the lone shebeen—him that had once kept an illicit still, but that the ghosts had got hold of for his sins? No? Well, he, the Shaman, was come too near the end of his own living tether to fear ghoulish reprisals if he told me. And he told me.
“Baruch, he said, was suspected in the village of keeping the dead’s hurling-goal—had long been suspected—it was an old tale by now. But, och, wirrastrue! if, as he calculated, Baruch was nearing the close of his seven years’ service, Baruch was the man for me, and could do for my child what no other living man, barring a ghosts’ goal-keeper, could do likewise.
“I humoured him when he was present; laughed at him when he was gone; but—I went to see Baruch. It’s all right: you aren’t a father.”
“You went to see Baruch. Go on.”
“He lived remote in such a little cabin as I have described. Lord! what a thing it was!—a living trophy of damnation—a statue inhabiting the human vestment! His face was young enough; but sorrow stricken into stone—unearthly suffering carved out of a block. It is astonishing what expression can be conveyed without a line. There was not a wrinkle in Baruch’s face.
“All scepticism withered in me at the sight—all the desperate effrontery with which I had intended to challenge his gift. I asked him simply if he would cure my child.
“He answered, in a voice as hoarse and feeble as an old man’s, but with a queer little promise of joy in it, like a sound of unborn rain, ‘Asthore! for this I’ve lived me lone among the peats, and bid me time, and suffered what I know. In a good hour be it spoken! Wance more, and come again when the moon has passed its full.’
“I went, without another question, or the thought of one. That was a bad week for me—a mortal struggle for the child. The dead kept pulling him to draw him down; but he fought and held on, the little plucked one. On the day following the night of full moon, I carried him in my arms to the cabin—myself, all the way. I wouldn’t let on to a soul; I went roundabout, and I got to Baruch unnoticed. I knew it was kill or cure for Bobo. He couldn’t have survived another night.
“I tell you, it was a laughing spirit that greeted me. Have you ever seen Doré’s picture of the ‘Wandering Jew,’ at the end of his journey, having his boots pulled off? There is the same release depicted, the same sweet comedy of redemption—the same figure of fun, if you like, that Baruch presented.
“He put his hands on Bobo’s head, and——”
“Well?”
“Bobo walked home with me, that’s all.”
Kelvin got up from his chair to relight his pipe at the fire. As he moved, the door of the room opened, and a decent woman, his housekeeper, stood, with a grave face, in the entrance.
“Patsy’s dead?” said Kelvin.
“Ah, the poor mite!” answered the woman, with a burst of tears. “She passed but now, sir, at half after eight, in her little bed.”
Thefollowing story was told to a friend—with leave, conditionally, to make it public—by a well-known physician who died last year.
I was in Paul’s type-writing exchange (says the professional narrator), seeing about some circulars I required, when a young lady came in bearing a box, the weight of which seemed to tax her strength severely. She was a very personable young woman, though looking ill, I fancied—in short, with those diathetic symptoms which point to a condition of hysteria. The manager, who had been engaged elsewhere, making towards me at the moment, I intimated to him that he should attend to the new-comer first. He turned to her.
“Now, madam?” said he.
“I bought this machine second-hand of you last week,” she began, after a little hesitation. He admitted his memory of the fact. “I want to know,” she said, “if you’ll change it for another.”
“Is there anything wrong with it, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said; “No!” she said; “Everything!” she said, in a crescendo of spasms, looking as if she were about to cry. The manager shrugged his shoulders.
“Very reprehensible of us,” said he; “and hardly our way. It is not customary; but, of course—if it doesn’t suit—to give satisfaction——” he cleared his throat.
“I don’t want to be unfair,” said the young woman. “It doesn’t suitme. It might another person.”
He had lifted, while speaking, its case off the type-writer, and now, placing the machine on a desk, inserted a sheet or two of paper, and ran his fingers deftly over the keys.
“Really, madam,” said he, removing and examining the slip, “I can detect nothing wrong.”
“I said—perhaps—only as regards myself.”
She was hanging her head, and spoke very low.
“But!” said he, and stopped—and could only add the emphasis of another deprecatory shrug.
“Will you do me the favour, madam, to try it in my presence?”
“No,” she murmured; “please don’t ask me. I’d really rather not.” Again the suggestion of strain—of suffering.
“At least,” said he, “oblige me by looking at this.”
He held before her the few lines he had typed. She had averted her head during the minute he had been at work; and it was now with evident reluctance, and some force put upon herself, that she acquiesced. But the moment she raised her eyes, her face brightened with a distinct expression of relief.
“Yes,” she said; “I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it’s all my fault. But—but, if you don’t mind. So much depends on it.”
Well, the girl was pretty; the manager was human. There were a dozen young women, of a more or less pert type, at work in the front office. I dare say he had qualified in the illogic of feminine moods. At any rate, the visitor walked off in a little with a machine presumably another than that she had brought.
“Professional?” I asked, to the manager’s resigned smile addressed to me.
“So to speak,” said he. “She’s one of the ‘augment her income’ class. I fancy it’s little enough without. She’s done an occasional job for us. We’ve got her card somewhere.”
“Can you find it?”
He could find it, though he was evidently surprised at the request—scarce reasonably, I think, seeing how he himself had just given me an instance of that male inclination to the attractive, which is so calculated to impress woman in general with the injustice of our claims to impartiality.
With the piece of pasteboard in my hand, I walked off then and there to commission “Miss Phillida Gray” with the job I had intended for Paul’s. Psychologically, I suppose, the case interested me. Here was a young person who seemed, for nopracticalreason, to have quarrelled with her unexceptionable means to a livelihood.
It raised more than one question; the incompleteness of woman as a wage earner, so long as she was emancipated from all but her fancifulness; the possibility of the spontaneous generation of soul—thedivina particula auræ—in man-made mechanisms, in the construction of which their makers had invested their whole of mental capital. Frankenstein loathed the abortion of his genius. Who shall say that the soul of the inventor may not speak antipathetically, through the instrument which records it, to that soul’s natural antagonist? Locomotives have moods, as any engine-driver will tell you; and any shaver, that his razor, after maltreating in some fit of perversity one side of his face, will repent, and caress the other as gently as any sucking-dove.
I laughed at this point of my reflections. Had Miss Gray’s type-writer, embodying the soul of a blasphemer, taken to swearing at her?
It was a bitterly cold day. Snow, which had fallen heavily in November, was yet lying compact and unthawed in January. One had the novel experience in London of passing between piled ramparts of it. Traffic for some two months had been at a discount; and walking, for one of my years, was still so perilous a business that I was long in getting to Miss Gray’s door.
She lived West Kensington way, in a “converted flat,” whose title, like that of a familiar type of Christian exhibited on platforms, did not convince of anything but a sort of paying opportunism. That is to say, at the cost of some internal match-boarding, roughly fitted and stained, an unlettable private residence, of the estimated yearly rental of forty pounds, had been divided into two “sets” at thirty-five apiece—whereby fashion, let us hope, profited as greatly as the landlord.
Miss Gray inhabited the upper section, the door to which was opened by a little Cockney drab, very smutty, and smelling of gas stoves.
“Yes, she was in.” (For all her burden, “Phillida,” with her young limbs, had outstripped me.) “Would I please to walk up?”
It was the dismallest room I was shown into—really the most unattractive setting for the personable little body I had seen. She was not there at the moment, so that I could take stock without rudeness. The one curtainless window stared, under a lid of fog, at the factory-like rear of houses in the next street. Within was scarce an evidence of dainty feminine occupation. It was all an illustration of the empty larder and the wolf at the door. How long would the bolt withstand him? The very walls, it seemed, had been stripped for sops to his ravening—stripped so nervously, so hurriedly, that ribbons of paper had been flayed here and there from the plaster. The ceiling was falling; the common grate cold; there was a rag of old carpet on the floor—a dreary, deadly place! The type-writer—the new one—laid upon a little table placed ready for its use, was, in its varnished case, the one prominent object, quite healthy by contrast. How would the wolf moan and scratch to hear it desperately busy, with click and clang, building up its paper rampart against his besieging!
I had fallen of a sudden so depressed, into a spirit of such premonitory haunting, that for a moment I almost thought I could hear the brute of my own fancy snuffling outside. Surely there was something breathing, rustling near me—something——
I grunted, shook myself, and walked to the mantelpiece. There was nothing to remark on it but a copy of some verses on a sheet of notepaper; but the printed address at the top, and the signature at the foot of this, immediately caught my attention. I trust, under the circumstances (there was a coincidence here), that it was not dishonest, but I took out my glasses, and read those verses—or, to be strictly accurate, the gallant opening quatrain—with a laudable coolness. But inasmuch as the matter of the second and third stanzas, which I had an opportunity of perusing later, bears upon one aspect of my story, I may as well quote the whole poem here for what it is worth.
Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme,As courtlier gallants woo,With utterances sweet as thymeAnd melting as the dew.An arm to serve; true eyes to see;Honour surpassing love;These, for all song, my vouchers be,Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.Bid me—and though the rhyming artI may not thee contrive—I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart,A poem that shall live.
Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme,
As courtlier gallants woo,
With utterances sweet as thyme
And melting as the dew.
An arm to serve; true eyes to see;
Honour surpassing love;
These, for all song, my vouchers be,
Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.
Bid me—and though the rhyming art
I may not thee contrive—
I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart,
A poem that shall live.
It may have been derivative; it seemed to me, when I came to read the complete copy, passable. At the first, even, I was certainly conscious of a thrill of secret gratification. But, as I said, I had mastered no more than the first four lines, when a rustle at the door informed me that I was detected.
She started, I could see, as I turned round. I was not at the trouble of apologizing for my inquisitiveness.
“Yes,” I said; “I saw you at Paul’s Exchange, got your address, and came on here. I want some circulars typed. No doubt you will undertake the job?”
I was conning her narrowly while I spoke. It was obviously a case of neurasthenia—the tendril shooting in the sunless vault. But she had more spirit than I calculated on. She just walked across to the empty fireplace, collared those verses, and put them into her pocket. I rather admired her for it.