HadLord Murk been of a present inclination less reserved and withdrawing, he had months before found easy access to the presence of the merry maid, whose little red heels seemed now, as it were, to have taken his misogamy by the tail. For, indeed, when at last he sought, he found this young lady’s identity established in a word. She was neither more nor less (with a reservation in respect to the gossips) than the adopted daughter of a very notablegouvernanteto a royal family; and she happened to have already sojourned in Bury some six months, during which he, the hermit-crab, had chosen to tuck himself away apathetic into his shell.
Ned had, of course, heard of the not altogether peaceful invasion of the drowsy little town by one particularly hybrid company of emigrants that was, in fact, the travelling suite of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, whom the Duke her father had, for safety, shipped to England towards the latter end of the previous year. The importance of mademoiselle’s advent was signified rather in her rank than her maturity, which presented her as a lymphatic little body, some fifteen years of age, with pink eye-places and a somewhat pathetic trick of expression. But, if her title proclaimed her nominal suzerainty over thevaletaillethat, in its habits of volubility and swagger, was to inflame the popular sense of decorum by-and-by to a rather feverish pitch of resentment, the very practical conduct of the expedition was in the hands of that wonderful woman whom an irreverent virtuosity had entitled “Rousseau’s hen.”
Ned had not in the least desired to make the acquaintance of this Madame de Genlis. His position in the neighbourhood rather entailed upon him the courtesy of a welcome to the royal little red-eyed stranger at his gates; yet, adapting his unsociability to popular rumour of the formidablebas-bleuthat dragoned her, he delayed a duty until its fulfilment became an impossibility. And even a chance report or so that had reached him of the beauty of madame’s adopted child—the flower-faced Pamela (“notre petit bijou”), in praise of whose name, abbreviated, a dozen local squireens were flogging their tuneless brains for any rhyme less natural to the effort than “damn!”—moved him only to some sardonic reflections on the uncomplimentary significance of a gift that seemed designed in principle for a stimulant to fools.
To fools had been his thought; and now here he was, having for the first time happened upon this actual Pamela, not only awake of a sudden to a glaring sense of the social solecism he had committed, but awake, also, to a sentiment much less intimate (as he thought) to the world of ordinary emotions. It was astounding, it was humiliating so to truckle to the thrall of a couple of blue eyes that, for all purposes of vision, were no better than his own. He stood astonished; he rebelled—but he pursued. He felt his veryamour-propregiving before the incursion of a force, stranger yet akin to it. So the big brown rat (oh, vile analogy!) usurped the kingdom of his little black cousin.
Why, then, did the unfortunate young man not reject and cast forth the spell that seemed to drain him of all the ichor of independence? Why did he wantonly stimulate in himself a fancy that his calm judgment pronounced hysterical? How can these things be answered? How could any sober reason analyse the motives of a person who kept in his tail-pocket, and frequently sat upon, a charm that absolutely bristled with spikes? It is the way of love. When the mystic bolt flies, the philosopher apart must take his chance of a wound with the man who lives in a street.
Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting—with the persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his thoughts—the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds.
This house—a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s shops opposite—was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced—across that sort of homelyplace, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old market boroughs—a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the seconddéjeuner, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her.
“One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at the feast.”
The gentleman laughed.
“Egad!” said he. “It is to illustrate how Time stands still with madame the Countess of Genlis; and, as to the mummy, why, a mummy is but dust, and dust is easy to lay”—and he took a great pull from a bumper beside him.
He drank brandy-and-water with his meat. “’Tis this country appetite,” he would say. “Violent diseases need violent remedies;” but by-and-by he would take his share of the port and madeira with the rest. Now he looked across the table to a little shy lady, and, says he, but speaking in very bad French, “Mademoiselle the princess, as I dissipate myself of this shadow, so may you as readily of that that magnifies itself to the eyes of madame the countess.”
He opened his own eyes as he spoke, comically, to imply some imaginary vision of terror. He was very proud of these orbs, that were large and liquid. Indeed, he never allowed the well that replenished them to run dry.
“Est-ce bien possible! fie, then, Mr Sherree-den!” put in a very little voice—not of the lady addressed—from farther down the table. “But mademoiselle takes water with her wine.”
Madame tapped on her plate with her fan, uttering an exclamation of reproval. But the gentleman only laughed again.
“Miss Rogue, Miss Pamela,” said he, being by this time secure of his priming, “I will compliment you and your wit on making a very pretty couple.”
“We are twins,” said the girl saucily. “We were found together on a doorstep.”
“Tais-toi, coquine!” cried madame sharply. “The pair of you had been well committed to the Foundling.”
She treated with vast indulgence generally this pretty child of her adoption. It seemed only that this particular subject was fraught with alarm to her. By-and-by, when the queer meal was ended (there had been present at it, besides the ladies and Mr Sheridan, three silent Bœotians—concordia discors: practical scientists attached to the household, and now admitted,à l’Egalité, to a share in its social rites), madame conducted her guest to her boudoir over the front porch, and opened upon him with the matter momentarily nearest her heart.
“Does it magnify itself to my eyes, this—the shadow of the tower?” she said. “I do not know. It was not so at Barse, where we arrive first; but heere—heere! The place oppresses me. Its antiquity is a rebuke to the frothy dynasties. Every whisper is from a ghost of the past bidding us of the new mode to begone. We are hated, tracked, and watched. I see faces behind trees; I heere mutterings through the walls. What have we to do in this haunted town?”
“It is the burying-place of kings,” said Mr Sheridan. “It should be to your taste.”
Madame la comtesse had no echo for levity. She seemed quite genuinely agitated. Her trick (pronounced eternal by one that detested her) of advertising the beauty of her hand and arm by toying, while she conversed, with a fillet of packthread, as if it were a harp string, was exchanged now for an incessant nervous handling of a little miniature Bastille, carved from a fallen stone of the original, that hung upon her bosom. Her face—pretty yet, though narrowing down to an over-small chin—seemed even yellow, drawn, and affrayed. This appearance was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that she wore no rouge. She had once made a vow to quit its use at the age of thirty, and now at forty-five she was yet true to her word. Indeed, she was the verydévoteof Minerva-worship.
She sighed, “That I, whom Nature intended for the cloister, should have to fight always against the snares and the wickedness! I sink. Was there evaire the time when my flesh not preek to the fright? Oh yes, once when I was vain! It is vanity that make the goodarmure. I had no thought but levity when I marry M. de Genlis—and afterwards during the years of Passy, of Villers-Cotterets, of the Rue de Richelieu! Then I have no fear of the morrow; I have no fear at all but of the too-ardent lover.”
“It must have been an ever-present fear,” said Mr Sheridan gravely.
She shook her head with hardly a laugh.
“I am an old sad woman; myarmureis crumbled from me. I play now only one part—in those times it was many. From Cupid to acuisinière, I had the gift to make each character appear natural; to present it, nevairtheless, of the most charming grace. I was adored and adorable; but it was vanity. I would not exchange the present for the past. I could perform on seven, eight instruments, monsieur; I could dance to shame the unapproachable Vestris; I knew Corneille by heart; Mirabeau himself was not cleverer in organising a comedy for the living, than I for the artificial, stage. Myrôlewas to promote the healthy condition of amiability, to teach people how to be happy though innocent. Thatrôleyet remains to me; the rest is gone. When vanity has taught its lesson the pupil may become teacher. I leave since many years the theatre of emotions for the theatre of life. It would be good for some of your countrywomen to follow my example. When I sink of your Congreve, your Vanbrugh, and of the young ladies at Barse that listen wisout a blush,eh bien, on peut espérer que l’habit ne fait pas le moine!”
“Faith, it’s horrible!” said Mr Sheridan; and he remembered how assiduously madame and her charges had frequented the theatres during their two months’ stay at that questionable watering-place before they came to Bury.
“But the morals of ‘Belle Chasse’ have not penetrated to England,” says he, with a little roguish bow to the lady.
Madame uttered a self-indulgent sigh. She looked round on the frippery of fancy-work—moss-baskets, appliqué embroidery, wax flowers, illustrations of science in the shape of tiny trees formed from lead precipitate, illustrations of art in the collections of little moony landscapes engraved on smoked cards, illustrations of practical mechanics in the binding of a sticky volume or so—that lay about the room. These were all so many evidences of her system—instruction in the pleasant gardens of manual toil. She was possessed of the little knowledge of a hundred little crafts. She could have written a ‘Girl’s Own Book’ without the help of one collaborator.
“I have eschewed all the frivolity,” she said. “It is only now that I desire for others to taste sweetly of the fruits of my experience. I am like a nun wishing to dictate the high morality from her cell. The world passes before my window in review, and I applaud or condemn. Is it that I am to be accused of self-interest, of intrigue, because I would convert my hard-wrung knowledge to the profit of my fellows? Yet they pursue me with hate and menace. My reputation is the sport of calumny; my life hangs by a thread. I write to monseigneur, and he aggravates, while seeking to allay, my fears. I write to M. Fox, and he laugh politely in my face. My friends heere, that I thought, turn against me—Sir Gage; Madame Young, also, that is prejudice of that Mees Burrnee you all love so. And she is a tower of strength, the little Fannee—oh yes! but steef, like the tower there. That is the same wis you all. One must evaire conform to your tradeetions or you look asquint.”
“I think you exaggerate the danger,” said Mr Sheridan soberly. “But whatever it be, here am I come down from London to your counsel and command.”
Madame rose from her seat and rested her long fingers caressingly on the speaker’s shoulder.
“Mon chevalier, mon très cher ami,” she said, some real emotion in her voice, “forrgeeve me. It would be good of you at any time; but now, now! The pretty bird, the sweetrossignol, that cried into the night and was hearkened of an angel! Ah! she has no longer of the desolation of the song that must hush itself weeping upon the heart!”
She pressed her other hand to her bosom. Her companion leaned down a moment, his fingers shading his eyes.
“The desolation!” he muttered. “Yes, yes; but for us now there is a deeper silence in the woods.”
They spoke of his wife, who had died but a few months previously. Perhaps the great man had been as faithful to her as it was the fashion for men, great and little, to be in those days to their partners. At any rate, he had loved her to the end—in his own way.A proposof which it may be recorded as richly characteristic of him how, while this same wife lay a-dying, he had been known to ease his heart of sorrow by scribbling verses to Pamela (then living in Bath), in whose beauty he had found, or professed to find, a reflection of his Delia’s old-time fairness.
Now, fortuitously, the little sentimental passage was put an abrupt end to; for, as she leaned, madame all of a sudden started violently and uttered a staccato shriek.
“Le voilà, thetristedark stranger! He come again; he come always! You tell me now there is no purrepus in this devilish haunting?”
She retreated, backing into the room, shrinking without the malignant focus of any stealthy glance directed at her from the road outside. Mr Sheridan jumped to his feet and looked from the window. Strolling past in the sunlight, with an air of studied preoccupation upon his face, strolled a melancholy young man of enigmatical aspect.
Madame, withdrawn into the shade of a screen, stood panting hysterically.
“It is evaire so. He come by morning and by noon—thus, hurrying not at all, but watchful, watchful from the blinkers of his eyes. Why am I so hated and pursued? Is he agent of M. de Liancourt, do you think? Ah! but it is worthy of a runagate so to war on a woman.”
She squealed out in a sudden nerve-panic to hear her companion laugh. He ran to the door of the room.
“Faith!” he cried jovially, “I’m in the way to resolve this riddle at least,” and he pulled at the handle and vanished.
She cried after him to come back—not to leave her alone—that she would lose her reason were anything to happen to him. His descending heels clattered an only reply. Then at a thought she ran to the window and peeped from the covert of curtains. The stranger was wheeled about at the moment and returning as he had come. She saw Mr Sheridan run forth bareheaded, accost, and seize him by both of his hands. He seemed to return the greeting; he——
Madame the countess sank into a chair, as mentally paralysed as though the end were upon her.
Her chevalier was conducting the spy to the door of the house.
A much-strickenyoung gentleman—very undeservedly released from the onus of a social embarrassment for which he was alone responsible—stood gravely bowing before the lady of the house. His face was quite white.
“I am vastly pleased,” said Mr Sheridan, “to be the means of presenting to madame the Countess of Genlis a neighbour, the Lord Viscount Murk. I have the honour of a slight acquaintance with his lordship. I was even more intimate with his predecessor in the title. But at least I can disabuse madame’s mind——”
Madame, who up to the moment had seemed half-amort, rose hurriedly all at once and swept her stranger a magnificent courtsey.
“I feel already that I have known monsieur for years,” she said, hard winter in her voice.
Mr Sheridan burst out laughing.
“Come, come,” he cried, “a mistake isn’t malice. There was never one yet that sinned against nature. Zounds, madame, when the respite arrives, we bear no grudge against the executioner! I can vouch for my lord that he had no thought of offending.”
Ned looked enormously amazed.
“None whatever,” he said. “Why should I, when I have not even the honour of madame’s acquaintance?”
This was certainly ambiguous. Mr Sheridan laughed again like a very groundling.
“Without affront,” said he, “let me ask your lordship a question. Why have you haunted madame, who is plaguily afeared of ghosts?”
“Haunted!” exclaimed Ned.
“Haunted,” replied the other. “Or is it, perhaps, one of madame’s sacred charges that is the object of your visitations?”
Madame de Genlis, who included in herrépertoireof accomplishments the art of reading character, here, after gazing intently at the young man a few moments, permitted herself an immediate relaxation from severity to the most charming indulgence.
“Dieu du ciel!” she cried. “What an old, old, foolish woman! It is nussing, monsieur. I see you pass and come back, and come again one hundred time like a ’ope-goblin, and I sink—I sink—ah! no matter what I sink. I not know you less than nobody—not until Mr Sherree-den come and espy you and say, ‘Do not fear thees poor eenocent.’ And now I see it is not the old woman that attracts.”
Ned was by this up to the ears in a very slough of self-consciousness. To stand detected before the authority he had manœuvred to hoodwink!—so much of the innuendo he understood. For the first time, perhaps, he realised how, in lending himself to some traditional tactics, he had advertised himself of the common clay. He felt very hot, and a little angry; and his anger whipped his sense of personal dignity to a cream-like stiffness.
He was sorry, he said, he had been the cause of the least uneasiness to madame la comtesse. He was a man of a rambling disposition—of a peripatetic philosophy. Often, he had no doubt, absorbed in some train of reflection, he would unconsciously haunt a locality that, associating itself with the prolegomena of his meditations, would seem to supply the atmosphere most conducive to their regular progression. He——
And here the door opened, and a young lady ran into the room.
“A thousand pardons!” cried this young person. She did not know madame was engaged other than with Mr Sheridan, and he counted for nothing. But mademoiselle and she were learning to make artificial birds’-nests, with painted sugarplums for the eggs, and they looked to madame la gouvernante to advise them.
She curtseyed to my lord, with a little pert toss of her head like a wind-blown Iceland poppy-flower, when he was made known to her. She had no recollection of him, it was evident. All that play he had rehearsed to himself, according to fifty different readings, of the return of the red heels to their owner, became impossible of performance the moment he found his audience a reality. There and then he foresaw, and prepared himself heroically to meet, his martyrdom.
* * * * * * * *
Now all the glory and tragedy of Ned’s life came to crowd themselves into a few months—into a few days, indeed, so far as his connection with the strange household at Bury was concerned. Herein—no less on account of his magnetic leaning towards a bright particular star, than because he had made hisentréeunder the ægis of Mr Sheridan—he was accepted and discussed; pitied by some unsophisticated young hearts; weighed in the balance of a maturer brain, and found, perhaps, deficient.
“He has the grand air,” said madame; “he is noble and sedate, and of amiable principles. But—hélas!à quoi sert tout cela—if one so gives effect to the gospel of distribution as to deprive oneself of the means to honourably perpetuate one’s race!”
“I have always admired madame’s little ornament of the Bastille,” said Mr Sheridan.
“Ah!” cried the lady, smiling, “monsieur is varee arch; but beauty is not the common property, and the little Pamela shall ask a fair return for hers.”
“Well,” said Mr Sheridan, “’tis notorious that Damon hath squandered his inheritance on a very virtuous hobby, and lives meanly in the result. And that, be assured, is a pity; for he seems a young gentleman of parts.”
It was thus he played the devil’s advocate to Ned’s beatification. Early he began to harp upon the one string behind the poor fellow’s back. He professed to be in love with Pamela himself, and the intrusion of this most serious suitor interfered with his amusement. He trifled, no doubt, in a very July mood; he loved the girl for her prettiness and her saucy manner of speech; he was humorously flattered by the familiar deference accorded him in a house of which he was claimed the dear friend and protector. And on this account, and because he was nothing if not unscrupulous in affairs of gallantry, he condescended to acknowledge himself Ned’s rival for the favour of Mademoiselle,néeSims (that was Pamela), and to make good his suit with arguments of wit and brilliancy that threw poor Damon’s solid virtues into the shade.
Perhaps Madame de Genlis may have been the more inclined to besprinkle with cold water the ardour of the young lord, in that she took the other with a rather confounding seriousness. Mr Sheridan, indeed, offered himself at this period a particularly desirable match for a nameless young woman of inconsiderable fortune. He was only a little past the zenith of his reputation, and the glamour of his best work yet went always, an atmosphere of greatness, with him. At forty-one years of age he was equipped with such a personality of wit, eloquence, and riches (presumable) in proportion, as, combined, made him a very alluring parti. In addition to this he could claim the advantages of a tall, well-proportioned figure; of a striking, though not handsome, face; of an education in the most liberal modishness of the age. His expression was frank, his manner cordial and free from arrogance. From first to last he was a formidable rival.
Now, on the very day (the little comedy was all a matter of days) following Ned’s introduction by him to the family, he—seeing how the wind blew, and at once regretting his complaisance—began some petty tactics for the stultifying of a possible antagonist. He drove the ladies, uninvited, over to lunch at “Stowling,” on the chance of taking Master Ned unawares, and so of exposing the intrinsic poverty of a specious wooer. Nor was his astuteness miscalculated. My Lord Viscount, in the act of sitting down to a mutton-chop, was overwhelmed in fathomless waters of confusion. He hastily organised—even personally commanded—a raid on the larders; but their yield was inadequate to the occasion.
He apologised with desperate dignity. A merry enough meal ensued; but, throughout, hatred of his own self-sacrificing principles dwelt in him like a jaundice, and he could have pronounced fearful anathema on all the fools of philanthropy who omitted to stock their cellars with nectar and ambrosia against the casual coming of angels.
Mr Sheridan supplied a feast of wit, however, and Ned was grateful to him for it. He even revived so far at the end as to beg the honour of providing the ladies with invitations to an Assembly ball that was to be holden in Bury on the Thursday of that same week. Rather to his surprise they accepted with alacrity; and so the matter was arranged. And then, at Mr Sheridan’s request, but unwillingly, he played cicerone to his own domain, and thought at every turn he recognised a conscious pity for his indigent condition to underlie the fair compliments of his guests.
When these were gone he sent straightway for his steward, and surprised the good man by an extraordinary jeremiad on the maladministration of a trust that fattened the dependants of a starving lord. He himself, he said, was expected to dress like a bagman and feed like a kennel-scraper, in order that his household might gorge itself disgustingly in silken raiment. He would have reforms; he would have money; he would have the house victualled as for a siege, and grind the faces of the poor did they question his right to drink, like Cleopatra, of dissolved pearls. And then he burst out laughing, and shook the honest man by the hand, and turned him out of the room; after which he sat down by the window and gnawed his thumb-nails.
Now, it will be understood, this unfortunate youth was fairly in the grip of that demoralising but evasive demon that is the sworn foe to philosophy. He was entered of the amorous germ; and the procreative atom, multiplying, was with amazing quickness to convert to misuse all the sound humours of his constitution. He could not seek to exercise a normal faculty, but it confused and routed what he had always recognised for the plain logic of existence. He was ready to discount facts; to magnify trifles; to attach an unwarranted significance to specious vacuities; to fathom a deep meaning with the very plumb he used for the sounding of a shallow artifice. Sometimes, in a recrudescence of reason, he would think, like any calm-souled rationalist, to analyse his own symptoms, to annotate the course of his disease for the benefit of future victims to a like morbosity. It was of no use. His moral vision was so out of focus as to distort to him not only his present condition, but all the processes that had conduced thereto. He was humiliated; and he writhed under, and gloried in, his humiliation. To him, as to many in like circumstance, it seemed preposterous that he should have come unscathed through many battles to be outfenced by a child with a sword of lath. So feels the warrior of a hundred fights when he is “run in” by a street constable for brawling.
Ned dressed for the ball with particular care. He was to constitute himself of madame’s party, and for that purpose had engaged to dine with it before the event. The meal was a desultory one, the ladies’ toilettes serving as excuse for an unpunctuality that was generally opposed to the principles of la gouvernante. But, one by one, all took their places at the table—Mademoiselle d’Orléans, in a fine-powdered head-dress, having a single feather in it like a cockade, and with her little plaintive rabbit eyes looking from a soft mist of fur; Pamela, sweet and roguish, wearing her own brown curls filleted with a double ribbon of yellow; and Mademoiselle Sercey, another young relative of madame’s, and an inconsiderable item of the household at Bury. There were also accommodated with places three or four of the Bœotians before referred to—silent, awkward men, painfully conscious of their quasi-elevation, who sat below the salt and talked together in whispers.
Mr Sheridan came in late. He had compromised with his grief so far as to exchange his black stockings for white, and to wear a diamond brooch in his breast linen. His hair was powdered and tied into a black ribbon. Ned must acknowledge to himself that he looked a very engaging gentleman.
He sparkled with fun and frolic, and he fed the sparkle liberally from the long glass that stood beside him.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to the princess, “your hair is very pretty. Love hath nested in it, and is hidden all but his wing. But is it not ill-manners to keep him whispering into your ear in company?”
“He talk only of the folly of flattery, monsieur,” said the little lady, simpering and bashful.
“A ruse,” cried the other, “that he learned when he played the monk. Beware of him most when he preaches.”
“Mademoiselle is told to beware of you, monsieur,” said Pamela to a gravely ecstatic young gentleman who sat next to her.
“Of me?”
“Are you not then the monk, the airmeet; and is it not mademoiselle’s ear you seek?”
“No,” said Ned brusquely.
He looked at the pretty insolent face, at the toss of brown curls, the little straight saucy nose, the lowered lids. He thought he had never seen anything so wonderful and so fair as this human flower. The neck of her frock was cut down to a point. She seemed the very bud of white womanhood breaking from its sheath.
Did she gauge the admiration of his soul? He was not a boisterous wooer or a talkative. For days he had purposed lightening the conscious gravity of his suit by “springing” her lost heels upon his inamorata. He could never, however, make up his mind as to the right wisdom of the course. A dozen considerations kept him undecided—as to the possibility of giving offence, of appearing a buffoon, of failing, out of the depths of his infatuation, to introduce into the conduct of the jest a necessary barm of gaiety. Without this, how little might the result justify the venture? It was an anxious dilemma. The thought of it threw into the shade all questions of a merely national character in which he had once taken an interest; and, in the meantime, he continued to carry the ridiculous baubles about in his pocket.
Now, is it not one of Love’s ironies to depress a wooer by the very circumstance that should exalt him; to make him so fearful of his own inadequacy as that he seeks to stultify in himself the very qualities that Nature has amiably gifted him withal? Thus Ned, naturally a quite lovable youth when he had no thought of love, was no sooner come under its spell than he was moved to forego that pretty, self-confident deportment, that was his particular charm, for an uncommunicative diffidence that appeared to present him as a hobbledehoy. He lived in the constant dread, indeed, of procuring his own discomfiture by an assumption of assurance.
“You know it is not,” he said—daring greatly, as it seemed to him.
“Iknow, monsieur!”
The blue eyes were lifted a moment to his. Perhaps they recognised a latency of meaning in the gaze they encountered. Madame de Genlis had once summed up the character of this sweetprotégéeof hers. “Idle, witty, vivacious,” she called her; a person the least capable of reflection. Idle, without doubt, she was, in the nursery-maid’s acceptance of the term—a child full of caprice and mischief.
“Sure, sir,” she added, with a sudden thrilling demureness, “you must knowmefor a low-born maid?”
She was a little startled into the half-conscious naïveté by the dumb demand of the look fastened upon her. Besides, she was certainly moved—in despite ofmère-adoptiveand some significant warnings received from her—by the submission to her thrall of a seigneur whose ancient nobility no present penury could impeach.
But she had no sooner spoken than she recollected herself.
“Do you think me like Mademoiselle d’Orléans?” she said, hurriedly stopping one question with another. “It is some that say we might besœurs consanguines.”
What did the child mean? Had she any secret theory as to her own origin; and, if so, was she subtly intent upon discounting her first avowal? She may have wished to imply that no real necessity was for her self-depreciation. She may have wished only to divert the course of her neighbour’s thoughts. He was about to answer in some astonishment, ridiculing the suggestion, when Mr Sheridan hailed Pamela from his place opposite.
“A nosegay!” he cried, tapping his own flushed cheek in illustration. “Give me a rose to wear for a favour.”
“It is easy,” said the girl. Her eyes sparkled. She turned to a servant. “Go, fetch for Mr Sherree-den my rouge in the little box,” she said.
“Fie, then, naughty child!” cried madame; “it merits you rather to receive the little box on the ear.” But the great orator chuckled with laughter.
“Pigwidgeon, pigwidgeon!” he said, nodding his head at the culprit. “Not for youth and health are rouge and enamel, and all the vestments of vanity.”
“Not eiser for youth or age,” said madame severely.
“But only for ugliness,” said Sheridan.
“No,” said madame—“nor for zat. It is all immoral.”
“Immoral!” he cried; “immoral to put a good face on misfortune!” He looked only across the table, over the brim of his glass, when he had uttered hismot. He delighted to make the girl laugh. His own wonderful eyes would seem to ripple with merriment when he saw the light of glee spring forward in hers. Pigwidgeon he called her, and she answered to the name with all the sprightliness it expressed.
“Pigwidgeon,” says he, “when you come to the age of crow’s foot, you shall know ’tis a lying proverb that preacheth what’s done cannot be undone, or, as a pedantic fellow writes it, ‘what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.’”
“And it is vary true,” says madame stiffly—“whosoever the pedant.”
“Well,” says Sheridan, “’twas no other than him that writ ‘Rasselas’; for which work let us hope that God by this time hath damned him—with faint praise.”
He checked himself immediately.
“That were better left unnoticed,” says he, with great soberness; “’tis only the fool that uses the sacred name in flippancy.”
He fell suddenly quiet, and a momentary surprised silence depressed the company. It did not last long. All were shortly in a final bustle of preparation for the ball. The ladies were bowed, the Bœotians melted, from the room. The two gentlemen were left to their wine; the elder’s eyes twinkled back the ruddy glow of the decanters.
“Come, my lord,” says he, “you are staid company, I vow. A toast or two before we leave the table.”
“‘Here’s to the widow of fifty!’” cries Ned, adapting from the great man himself, and raising his glass.
The other laughed.
“I drink her,” he said. “A full bumper to Mrs Sims!”
“’Twas Madame de Genlis I meant.”
“And I meant the mother of Pamela.”
“You take it so, then?”
“I take the child, at least,” said Sheridan evasively, “to be ‘the queen of curds and cream.’”
Ned was, of course, not ignorant of the scandal attaching to this little waif of royalty. It made no difference in his regard for her, though perhaps the other wished it might. Mr Sheridan, maybe, had shot a tiny bolt of jealousy—a tentative hint as to the vulgar origin of the pigwidgeon. It missed fire, and that gave him a thrill of annoyance. He was conscious of some actual resentment against this solemn suitor who had come into his field of enamoured observation. He did not fear him; but he wished him out of the way, that he might flirt in peace. At the same time he may have possibly undervalued the determination of his reticent adversary.
“Well,” said Ned, “here’s to the mother of Pamela, whoever she be!”
“With all my heart,” cried Sheridan, “and to the father, by the same token.”
Ned turned his calm eyes so as to look into the injected orbs of his companion.
“What manner of presence hath monsieur the Duke of Orleans?” said he; “it was never my fortune to happen on him in Paris.”
“He is a friend of mine, sir,” said Sheridan. “From what point of view am I to describe him? His enemies—of whom there are many in England—say that the fruit of evil buds in his face. Egad! I was near seeing it break into flower once. ’Twas at Vauxhall, when the company turned him its back. He would have thought like a Caligula then, I warrant. A prince, sir, something superior to the worst in him, which is all that men will recognise.”
“But his personal appearance?” said Ned.
The other returned the young man’s gaze with a thought of insolence.
“Am I to smoke you?” he said. “Mademoiselle d’Orléans is a little like her father in expression; but our Pamela is not at all like Mademoiselle d’Orléans.”
Ned came to an immediate resolution.
“Mr Sheridan,” said he, “I would crave your indulgence for a word in season. You have advantages in this house that are not mine. You are a great person and a welcome guest, while I am only here—I know it—on sufferance. You may turn your exceptional position to the profit of your amusement. If it is to do no more, it is asking you little to beg you to forego so trifling a sport. If you are serious, then let us, in Heaven’s name, come to a candid understanding.”
He set his lips to suppress any show of emotion. But he was moved, and it was not for the other, however dumfoundered, to put a jesting construction on the fact.
“My lord,” said he, pretty coldly, though his words seemed to belie the tone in which they were spoken, “it would ill beseem a feeling heart at any juncture—mine, particularly, at the present—to refuse its sympathy to an appeal of so nice a nature. I will not pretend to misapprehend your lordship, nor will I fail to respond in kind to your lordship’s frankness.”
“Then you relieve me of the awkward necessity of an explanation,” said Ned. “Heaven knows, there is no question of any right of mine to fall foul of your attitude towards one who may be your debtor for fifty benefactions. Heaven knows, also, that I never intended to imply that my most humble suit towards a certain lady was conditional on any information I might receive as to her actual parentage. Born in honour or out of it—I tell you, sir, so far as she is concerned, ’tis all one to me. I speak straight to the point. You may claim priority of acquaintance; you may be able to advance twenty reasons why my taking you to task is an impertinence. Yet, when all is said—if you are not serious, it is just that you should yield the situation to one who is.”
Mr Sheridan had sat through all this, twirling his glass with a rather lowering smile on his face.
“Yield the situation!” he said; “but you take me by the throat, sir. I must assure you there is no situation of my contriving.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, “I am rejoiced to hear you say so, and do desire to convince you that I find nothing more than a very engaging playfulness in your treatment of the young lady.”
“Then, why the plague,” said Mr Sheridan, opening his eyes, “all this exception to my attitude?”
“Because you choose—let me be plain, sir—to constitute yourself my rival in her favour.”
Mr Sheridan exploded into irrepressible laughter.
“Zounds!” he cried; “here, if I will not be something other than myself, I shall have my throat cut.”
“Is it,” said Ned firmly—“pardon me, sir—is it to be other than yourself to refrain from indulging a whim that is obviously another man’s distress?”
“My lord,” said Mr Sheridan, twinkling into sudden gravity and replenishing his glass, “this aspect of the case is such a one as I really had not considered. But let me assure you that you were one of the direct causes of my coming down here at all.”
“I?”
“You, most certainly.” (He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward.) “Madame, by her own assertion, was being watched and shadowed. She claimed the protection of our laws. She appealed to our Government in the person of Mr Fox. The gracious office of succouring the afflicted he deputed to me. I hurried down to Bury St Edmunds, and the first suspicious character pointed out to me was my Lord Viscount Murk.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Of course. But the situation, you see, is none of my handling.”
He drank down his glassful, and fell suddenly grave.
“I have no wish,nec cupias nec metuas, to constitute myself your rival. This mourning suit, my lord, is of a recent cut.”
His tone was so dignified, the illusion so sorrowfully significant, that Ned was smitten in a moment. How were his ears startled then to hear a rallying laugh for anticlimax!
“My dear fellow, believe me, I am not of those who imagine a bond in every light exchange of glances. My dear fellow, all we who are not Turks are shareholders in a woman’s beauty. There may be a managing director who has the right to a more intimate knowledge of it: what care we who speculate in the open market, so long as it flatters us with the soundness of our investment! We draw the interest without responsibility, and are always ready to commit the conduct of the business to him that hath the acknowledged right to control it.”
He got to his feet.
“Hush!” he said; “we are summoned. Elect yourself to be this managing director if you will. I am quite content to rest, drawing my modest dividend that you have no right to begrudge me.”
* * * * * * * *
The advent of so distinguished a party in the assembly rooms created quite a little furore of excitement amongst the honest burgesses of Bury. My lord, the reserved and almost inaccessible; the illustrious parliamentarian, whose very presence seemed to secure to all in the place a sort of reversionary interest in those glories of Carlton House with which he was notoriously familiar; the little stranger princess, whose sojourn in the remote English town was so eloquent of the tragedy that even then was threatening to foreclose upon her house—these were the nucleus of such a coruscation of stars of the first magnitude as had never, within living memory, added its lustre to the congregated social lights of the borough.
But when madame la comtesse, adapting her conduct of the expedition to those principles of which she was the present representative, permitted her royal young charge the unconventional licence of dancing with any and all who had the high good fortune to procure themselves an introduction to her, local opinion underwent a gradual transformation that culminated, it is to be feared, in actual scandalisation.
“It transcends,” was the pronunciation, in a deep voice, of Mrs Prodmore. “Anything so unblushingly shameless I had not dreamed could be. I protest we are threatened with a Gomorrah.”
She was so verydécolletéeas to figure for the type of self-renunciation offering to strip itself of all that it possessed. That was much, and much in little, yet much in evidence. Her bodice—what there was of it—was sewn with gems. Indeed, her judgment of the new-comers may have been tainted by the fact that madame had declined to be introduced to her—to her, the richest woman in the room. She was already fat, yet she swelled with righteousness. She suggested a little a meat pudding bulging from its basin.
“Perhaps,” said timid Mrs Lawless, whom she addressed, “the French adhere to a standard of propriety that is only different from ours in degree. She may not mean any harm.”
She spoke with anxious diffidence, conscious of the fact that at that very moment her son, Squire Bob Lawless, was dancing with Pamela.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs Prodmore loftily, “but whether she means harm or not, I prefer, with my traditions, to consider such behaviour an outrage. Ignorance does not condone indelicacy.”
In the meanwhile, the dance having come to an end, Pamela and her partner were strolled to within earshot of a saturnine young gentleman who stood glowering in a corner.
“Ecod!” Mr Lawless was saying, “’twas the finest sport, miss. Two broke collar-bones and a splintered wrist, and all for the sake of experiment, as you might call it.”
Pamela looked up with her soft eyes.
“It is cruel,” she said. “I do not like fox-hunting at all—so many giants riding down the one little poor pigmy.”
“Why,” said the other, in a surprised voice, “you’re wilful, miss. Wasn’t the point of it all that ’twas nought but adraghunt?”
“Comment?” said Pamela.
“With a herring,” explained the squire.
“Well,” said Pamela, “that is just as cruel to the herring.”
She turned round on the instant to the sound of a little explosion of laughter.
“My lord!” she exclaimed.
She dropped her companion’s arm; bowed graciously to him.
“I commit myself to this escort,” she said. “A thousand thanks for the dance, monsieur.”
Poor Nimrod had no choice but to accept his dismissal. He had crowed over his fellow-squireens. He must come down now, a humbled cockerel. He walked away sulkily enough.
“Monsieur,” said Pamela to Ned, “I am glad to have amused you.”
“It is for the first time this evening,” said his lordship grimly.
She was beginning, in a little sputter of fire, “And pray what right have you——” when the expression in his face stopped her. A woman, no doubt, has some spiritual probe for testing the presence of love, as a butterfly feels for honey in a flower.
“None whatever,” said Ned. “It is my unhappiness.”
She looked at him quite kindly. The sweetest babies of pity sat in the blue flowers of her eyes.
“Why have you not ask me to dance?” she said. “Poor Pamela is flouted of all of whom she had the hope to be honoured. You do not desire my hand; no, nor Mr Sherree-den eiser. ‘I am not to lead you out,ma chèrie,’ he say. ‘It is because I am ask to drop the sobstance for the shadow.’ I request of him what he mean. ‘’Tis only the fable of the dog and the piece of meat,’ says he. ‘And how do that concern itself of the question?’ I ask. ‘Why,’ he answer, ‘I am the dog and you are the piece of meat; and that is to say that Pamela is food for reflection’—and then he laugh, and bid me ask of Monsieur Murk to interpret me the fable.”
Her voice was full of tenderness and appeal. Ned, despite some emotion consequent on the mention of his rival, felt as remorseful as if he had wantonly crushed a rose in which lay a sleeping Cupid. He knew he had not asked the girl to dance with him, for only the reason that a morbid sensitiveness impelled him to self-martyrdom—drove his pride and his jealousy to battle; the one ready to resent that an obvious preference was not shown by her for him out of all the world, ready always to fold a wing of pretended indifference over the bleeding wound in his breast; the other ready, on the least provocation, to make a shameless confession of the corroding secrets of its inmost soul. Certainly Providence may be assumed to have its own reason for constituting a disease to be its highest ethical expression. Truth and Love! How have these inoculated one another with the virus drawn from ages of misfaith, till each seems to have become an inextricable constituent of the common plague of jealousy!
“And am I also the piece of meat to you,” says Mistress Pam, “that you will have nussing to speak with me?”
“I will not drop you for the shadow, at least,” cries the other fervently—“no, not as long as I have a tooth in my head!”
So love glorifies bathos. The two stood up together for the next set. Thenceforth Ned moved on air, breathed all the evening the intoxicating oxygen of idolatry. The girl alternately flattered and flouted, wounded and caressed him. He must draw what consolation he could from the fact that Mr Sheridan at least left him a fair field. Now and then he would chance upon view of this gentleman, and always it seemed to him that, as the evening progressed, the convivial face waxed steadily more rubicund, the fine eyes more unspeculative.
Once the party came together over the refreshment trays—the sweetmeats and negus that preceded the final break-up.
“Do not eat so much cake, child,” says madame la gouvernante to Pamela. “It will lie heavy on your chest.”
“Happy cake!” murmurs Sheridan, so that the ladies might not hear him.
But my lord did; and he might have been moved to some resentment had it not been for the other’s obvious condition.
Ned, after parting from the ladies, would walk his long mile home by the solitary echoing road. He needed loneliness; he needed the illimitable graciousness of the open world. Within those shining walls, it seemed to him, he had not been able to think collectedly.
Whither was he hurrying, and in what perplexity of mission? At one moment exalted, at another depressed, he could have thought himself the waif of a destiny in which his reason had no voice.
He looked up at the sky through an overhead tracery of leaves. The blown branches of trees made a tinsel glitter of the brilliant moon. Some roadside aspens pattered with phantom rain. A sense of unreality stole into his mind, half drugging it. The sound of his footsteps was echoed back from a wall he passed. The echo appeared to double and redouble upon itself; the footsteps to come thicker, thronging fast and ever faster, till he fancied an army of shadows must be going by on the opposite side of the way. His brain grew full of the whisper and rustle of their march. The spectral noise became accented by the far clang of voices—the shout across half a world of some vast human force struggling upon a tide of agony.
The long wall ended. He pulled himself together and shook out the ghost of a laugh.
Whither? he thought again, as he strode on. To the goal to which his every desire seemed to be compelling him? But he had no will in the matter. That had been sapped—snapped—deposed in a moment. He was nothing but a log, the stump of a mast, in the surf—now rolled upon the shore, now dragged back and committed to fresh voyagings. His erect philosophy, that had helped him so long over multitudinous waters, was become nothing but a broken wastrel of the sea for Fate to play at pitch-and-toss with. Should he ever again be in the position to recover and splice it, to set sail and escape from the fog and welter of the spindrift in which he now tumbled?
As he reached his gates, he looked up once more at the sky. The moon waded through a stream of cloud.
“She will sink,” he muttered. “Her glitter is already half quenched. Am I in love, or only sickening for a scarlet fever?”
Prettyearly on the morning after the ball Ned rode over to pay his respects to, and inquire after the health of, the ladies. None, apparently, was as yet in evidence; but Mr Sheridan, having information of his coming, sent down a message inviting him up to his bedroom; and thither the young gentleman bent his steps, not loath to avail himself of any excuse for remaining.
He found theviveurof the previous night propped up on his pillows, a towel round his shaven head, a pencil and paper on the counterpane before him. At the dressing-table stood a little common man, in a scratch wig and with a very blue chin, who mixed some powders with small-beer in a tumbler.
“You won’t thank me for introducing you,” said Sheridan to Ned. “Monsieur has notle haut rang(spare thy concern), nor any word of our tongue.”
“Who is he?” said Ned.
“My physician.”
“The deuce he is!”
“Ah! I am under the influence here of a democratic atmosphere. No hand-muffs and silver-headed canes in the economics of Egalité. In Rome, as Rome. Monsieur is, in fact, a beast-leech attached to the household to teach mesdemoiselles how to put Pompon’s tail in splints when it has been caught in the parlour door. He can bleed, rowel, and drench; shoe a horse, or salt a pig. And, egad! now I think on’t, there is his right use to me. For, when a man has made a hog of himself, what better physician does he need than him that hath the knowledge how to cure bacon?”
Deprecatory of the applause that he waited a moment to secure, he called over to the little man by the table: “Dépêche-toi, monsieur!ma gorge est en feu!”
“Attendez, monsieur, attendez!” replied the leech in a thin, hoarse voice: “ayez encore un peu de patience, je vous prie.”
He brought the cup over in a moment. Sheridan sent the liquid hissing down his throat. He gave a sigh of pleasure.
“Ah!” he said, “small-beer and absolution were invented by the devil to tempt men to sin for the sake of the ecstasy of relief they bring.”
He looked at Ned, his fevered eyes watering in the strong glare of sunlight that shot under the half-closed blind.
“You have an enviable complexion, my lord,” said he. “Did you ever, in all your life, experience the need to dose yourself with so much as a mug of tar-water?”
Ned laughed.
“I refuse to lend myself to point a moral,” said he. “Palate is a matter of temperament, and temperament is a cause, not a consequence. Mr Sheridan may find in wine the very stimulant I borrow from country air and exercise.”
“Oh, the country!” said the other, with a groan: “from Tweed to Channel nothing but the market-garden to London.”
“So you think? And yet you stay on here?”
Mr Sheridan shrugged his shoulders. His face seemed to have fallen quite sick and peevish.
“By my own wish?” said he. “But at least I scent liberty at last. Madame (I am abusing no confidence in telling you) contemplates changing her quarters very shortly.”
Ned was conscious that his heart gave a somersault.
“Indeed?” said he, reining-in his emotion. “And for what others?”
“I can’t say. Monseigneur is, I believe, at Brussels. That is all I know.”
“And when is the removal to take place?” said Ned sinkingly.
“Faith! it can’t be too soon for me. Madame, the dear creature, hath ‘spy’ writ large upon her brain. Her tremors and her apprehensions would be ridiculous, were they not tiresome. There is no listening to reason with her. She is convinced she is surrounded by secret agents of the royalty she hath provoked. She lives in hourly fear of assassination for herself, and abduction for her sacred charge. One day she will do this, another, that; bury herself and hers in the caves of Staffa; return to the protection of her illustrious protector. That, I warrant, will be the end o’t. But there is some difficulty in the way—some imperative necessity, as I understand, that forewarning of her return be conveyed to monsieur the duke; and she hath no messenger that she can trust to the task—no prodromos to signal her approach. So day by day she grows more distraught, until I know not what to say for counsel or comfort.”
There was some odd quality in the stealth with which he regarded the young man as he spoke. He saw his words had so far taken effect that Ned was fallen into a musing fit where he sat by the bed. He was too finished an artist in practical joking to ruin the promise of a situation by over-haste. He would drop a suggestion on “kind” soil and leave it to germinate. He knew that a seed thumbed in too deep is often choked from sprouting.
So, having deposited his grain, he took means to dismiss his subject—in the double sense. “Well,” he said, “and that is all that’s to remark on’t. But I was to have put you twenty questions when I asked you to come up: as to the ball, and your enjoyment of it; and as to how far you was satisfied I had held to my share of the compact. Sir, I claim you responsible at least for the state of my head this morning.”
He turned over on his pillow with a moan.
“Zounds!” said he, “small-beer, I find, is like small-talk for deadening one’s faculties. I must commit myself to good Mr Pig-curer, if I would save my bacon.”
Ned secretly thought this a poor capping of a fairly respectable witticism. He would have valued the joke even less as a spontaneous effusion, could he have examined its essays scribbled over the scrap of paper on which Mr Sheridan had been writing before he entered: “Physicians and pork-butchers: both cure by killing: like all butchers, they must kill to cure,” and so on, and so on.
However, he got to his feet immediately and, apologising for his intrusion, made his adieux and left the invalid to his aching cogitations.
These were, perhaps, more characteristic than praiseworthy. Mr Sheridan’s social ethics would always extend a plenary indulgence to practical joking. It was a practical joke to rid oneself of a rival by whatever ruse. His ruse had been to grossly misrepresent to madame the young lord’s financial condition. Quite indefinitely he had succeeded in investing Ned with the character of a needy adventurer. Local evidence as to the reckless philanthropy, visual proof of the inner poverty, of “Stowling,” helped him to the fraud. Madame may have been ambitious for the child of her adoption; she may have become cognisant of the fact that a littletendressewas beginning to show itself in the girl’s attitude towards her grave young suitor; she may have been anxious only to accommodate herself to the wishes of her distinguished guest, whom she fervently admired, and upon whom at this juncture she was greatly dependent for advice and assistance. At any rate, she lent herself to his plans. The two devised a little plot, of which she was to be the ingenuous agent, and my lord, the poor viscount, the victim. Perhaps the understanding between the conspirators was sympathetic rather than verbal. Of whatever nature it was, a certain method of procedure was adopted by both—diplomatically to conciliate; effectively to get rid of. Madame, it must be said, was not attracted to his lordship. Her volatility recoiled from his solemnity. Conscious of the most lofty principles, she could never, when in his company, free herself of the impression that she was being “found out.” She had a shrewd idea that Ned’s respectful subscription to her opinions was in the nature of a moral bribe to secure her favourable consideration of his suit—that secretly he valued her at that cheaper estimate thatshesecretly knew represented her real moral solvency. When one has a grudge against the superior understanding of a person, it is a thing dear to one’samour propreto convert that understanding to one’s own uses.
As Ned descended the stairs, madame came suddenly upon him and, welcoming him with quite cordial effusion, drew him into a side room.
She hoped he was not fatigued after the late festivities. As for the members of her own household, they were one and all the victims of amigraine. (She here looked forth a moment, and issued a sharp order to some one to close a little door that led from the back hall into the garden.) Yes, all were enervated—overcome. Mademoiselle was in bed; Pamela was in bed; Mr Sherree-den was in bed. As for herself, no such desirable indulgence was possible. A ceaseless vigilance was entailed upon her. During such moments of relaxation as she permitted herself, she was constrained to wear a mask of gaiety over the shocking anxiety of her soul. She was surrounded by menace and intrigue. There was scarce one she could rely upon—only Mr Sherree-den, and he could little longer afford to be parted from his duties. There was not a soul, even, she could entrust at this time with a letter it was imperative should be conveyed abroad by a confident hand. She had no hesitation in informing monsieur of its direction. It was to monseigneur, the father of the young princess, at present sojourning in Brussels. It was to acquaint monseigneur of the pitiable anxiety of the refugees, and to beg him to order their return at once. But it would be necessary for the messenger to back up the substance of the letter by arguments deduced from a personal knowledge of the condition of the victims; and who, in all her forlorn state, could she find meet to so delicate a mission?
She wept; she clasped her hands convulsively; she apostrophised Heaven. Was this the brilliant, self-confident, rather aggressive chaperon of the night before? Ned listened in something like amazement. He could never have misdoubted the obvious suggestion of her lamentation. As to her sincerity, it is very possible he was completely duped. He was not at all in the plot against himself; and madame had been a notable actress from the days when, at eleven years old, she played the title part in Racine’sIphigénie en Aulide.
“Ah, monsieur!” cried she; “but the joy, all troubles past, of welcoming in our land the amiable friend who should be the means to our returning thither!”
If now the idea of offering himself to the mission first began to take root in Ned’s mind, it was because his jealousy would not tolerate the thought that, failing him, another might be found to serve his mistress with a less questioning devotion. Still, he would not yet commit himself definitely to a course that not only—in the present state of continental ferment—entailed a certain personal risk, but entailed a risk that in the result might effectively separate him from that very fair lady it was his principal wish to serve in the matter. Moreover, it was certainly in his interest to ascertain if it was this same lady’s desire to be so served by him.
“When does madame wish this letter conveyed?” he said gravely, after some moments of deep pondering.
“Oh, indeed!” cried madame, “but varee soon—in two-tree days.”
“And the messenger is to be a sort of outrider to your party?”
“An outrider?—but, in truth. Yet, how far an outrider, shall depend upon his influence with monseigneur.”
Ned bowed.
“I should like to think the matter over,” said he. “It is possible, at least, I may be able to serve madame with anavant-coureur.”
Madame seized his hands in an emotional grasp.
“My friend! my dear friend!” she murmured.
“And now,” said Ned, “with madame’s permission, I will take a turn in the garden.”
Had madame again the impression that she was “found out” of this unconscionable Joseph? She certainly flushed the little flush of shamefulness, and for the moment had not a plausible word at her command. For, indeed, she knew and, what was worse, believed that my lord knew that Pamela was at that very time seated by herself in the little box-arbour amongst the Jerusalem artichokes (the girl’s figure had been plainly visible through the doorway which madame had ordered over-late to be closed); and the sudden realisation of the situation was like a cold douche to her self-confidence. To deny this cavalier, on whatever pretext, the substance of his request, was assuredly to convict herself of having lied as to Pamela’s whereabouts; was to dismiss him at a critical moment; was, possibly, to deprive him of that actual inducement to serve her which an interview with the young lady might confirm. On the other hand, the girl herself may have profited by some indefinite warnings as to the folly of effecting amésalliance; as to the ineffectiveness of a coronet when it is in pledge to the Jews.
Madame, after a scarcely appreciable moment of hesitation, came to her decision with a charming smile.
It was entirely at monsieur’s disposition, she said. There was not a soul in it, and she would see that monsieur was not disturbed. For herself, the contemplation of flowers resolved many problems that the subtlest sophistries were unable to disentangle.
Ned set foot on the long box-bordered path with his mind in a condition of strange ferment. The glamour of the previous night; the sweet glory of this new bidding to the side of his mistress (over which his soul laughed, as over its own humorous strategy in the hoodwinking of a credulous guardian); the thought that it was in his power to assist to its welfare the very dear object of his solicitude, and, by so assisting, to convert what might otherwise seem a pursuit into a welcome—such fancies combined made of his brain a house of pleasant dreams. All down the bed-rows the scent of blossoming mignonette accompanied him to the arbour at the end of the garden. To his dying day this gentle green flower remained the asphodel of his heaven. Great ships of cloud, carrying freightage of hidden stars, sailed slowly across the sky to ports beyond the vision of the world. Yet there did not seem enough wind to discrown a thistle-head. The lark rose straight as the smoke from the town chimneys, dropping a clew of song into the very gaping throats of his own nestlings in the field. The rattle of a horse’s headstall, the drowsy thunder of rolling skittle-balls, came over the wall from the neighbouring inn as distinct in their every vibration as though the silence of night, in a motionless atmosphere, had merged itself imperceptibly in the life of a day but half awake. And, behold! at the end of the garden was the crystallised expression of all this peace and beauty, the breathing spirit of the roses and of the mignonette. Ned, as he looked down upon her, had a thought that, if she woke, the wind would rise, the rose-leaves scatter, and the cloud argosies dash themselves shapeless on rocks of air.
How pretty she was! Great God, how pretty and how innocent! To him who had fronted stubbornly the storms of passion, who had been sought a sacrifice to the misconsecrated heats of a love whose name in consequence he had learned to loathe, this new power of reverence was most wonderful and most dear. He could have worshipped, had he not loved so humanly.
Mademoiselle was sunk a little back into the leafage of the arbour. Her eyes were closed, her lips a trifle parted. She was cuddled into a pinknégligé. Everything she wore seemed to caress her. An open book lay upon her lap, one slender finger serving for listless marker in it.
Suddenly a tiny smile, the ghostliest throb of laughter, flickered at the corners of her mouth. Ned leapt hot all over.
“Oh, monsieur!” murmured the unconscionable witch, as if talking in her sleep, “but are you the doctor?”
“Yes,” said Ned.
She put out a languid hand, never raising her eyelids.
“Madame-maman says it is the cake; but I think it is the Englishman that lies heavy on me.”
“What Englishman?” said Ned.
“My lord the Englishman, monsieur. Is he not the heaviest of all in Bury?”
Ned touched the young healthy pulse as if he handled a wax flower.
“If that is the trouble,” said he, “it is soon dealt with.”
“But how, monsieur? and would you not first see my tongue?” and she put out the tip of a supremely pink organ.
“It is as red as a capsicum,” said Ned.
Pamela burst out laughing. She sat up, her cheeks flushed, her brown hair ruffled on her forehead.
“Oh!” she cried, “you do not say pretty things at all; you are not like Mr Sherree-den.”
“No,” said the young man sadly. “And because I have not his readiness, I must lack his good fortune. Is that the moral of it? But I could be a willing pupil if you would be my tutor.”
“Is it so? I should punish and punish till you wearied of me. Say, then, like Mr Sherree-den, ‘Oh,mon bonté-moi!’ (he does not, you know, speak varee good French); ‘but here is a poor little sick fairy crumpled in a rose petal.’Hélas! you could not have said that, you solemn man.”
“I could not, indeed; but I should have taken the poor little sick fairy and nursed her upon my heart.”
She looked up at him kindlily and, suddenly, pathetically—
“But I am not sick at all,” she said, “and you must not take my play to your heart.”
Thereat, foolish Ned, reading her words literally, missed his small chance.
“I never did,” he only answered stoutly. “I knew you were not asleep.”
Mademoiselle pouted.
“I do not act so badly, nevertheless,” she said, “when I may have an appreciative audience.”
“And I, at least, am that.”
She shrugged her shoulders, yawned a tiny yawn.
“Well,” she said, “I must not keep monsieur from his business; and monsieur the doctor shall not persuade me to cure too much cake with more.”
She rose, smoothing her rumpled plumes. Ned smiled.
“I will not, since you bid me, take it to heart,” he said. “Had you found me as heavy as you say, you would not last night have voluntarily elected to bear so much of the weight of my company.”
“I sacrificed myself, monsieur, according to my principles, to the good of the community.”
“Pamela,” cried my lord, suddenly pained, “my business is to go on a journey only for the reason that I may serve you!”
She would have resented, without any real feeling of resentment, his familiar use of her name, had not his tone found the sympathetic chord in her that his words could not reach.
“Has madame asked you, then?” she said, with some wonder, some gentleness, in her voice.