“Little Lady Dormette,Hark to my crying!Would not you come to meThough I were dying?Little Lady Dormette,Kiss my hot eyes,Make me forget!Little Lady Dormette,Why have you left me?Sure not to lie with himThat hath bereft me?Little Lady Dormette,Oh, do not kiss him,Lest he forget!Little Lady Dormette,Thee I so grieve for;If thou forsakest me,What shall I live for!Little Lady Dormette,Crush thy heart to mine,Make it forget!”
“Little Lady Dormette,Hark to my crying!Would not you come to meThough I were dying?Little Lady Dormette,Kiss my hot eyes,Make me forget!Little Lady Dormette,Why have you left me?Sure not to lie with himThat hath bereft me?Little Lady Dormette,Oh, do not kiss him,Lest he forget!Little Lady Dormette,Thee I so grieve for;If thou forsakest me,What shall I live for!Little Lady Dormette,Crush thy heart to mine,Make it forget!”
“Little Lady Dormette,
Hark to my crying!
Would not you come to me
Though I were dying?
Little Lady Dormette,
Kiss my hot eyes,
Make me forget!
Little Lady Dormette,
Why have you left me?
Sure not to lie with him
That hath bereft me?
Little Lady Dormette,
Oh, do not kiss him,
Lest he forget!
Little Lady Dormette,
Thee I so grieve for;
If thou forsakest me,
What shall I live for!
Little Lady Dormette,
Crush thy heart to mine,
Make it forget!”
The voice was small, sweet, emotional, but a man’s; the soft throb of a guitar accompanied it. All bespoke a certain melting effeminacy that was disagreeable to Ned. He pushed open the door however, made his salutation, and stood to take stock of his surroundings.
Here, in truth, was revealed the working heart of the model—the stokehole of that vessel of which the outer room exhibited but the polished bearings. The fat air was heavy with the smell of lately cooked food; the pots, the trenchers, the waste parings that had served to the preparation of the latter were even now in huddled process of removal by a pantingcuisinière, with whom the company present did not hesitate to exchange a dropping-fire of badinage. A foul litter of vegetable and other rubbish disgraced the white deal of the table—cabbage leaves and broken egg-shells and a clump of smoking bones. In the scuttle was a mess of turnip peelings, on the hearth an iron pail brimming with gobbets of grease and coffee-grounds and the severed head of a cock.
“A Dutchman’s cleanliness,” thought Ned (and he had some experience of it), “is like the elf maid’s face, a particularly hollow mask. He reeks fustian while he washes his windows three times a-day.”
The room was long and low, with black beams to its ceiling, from which hung bushes of herbs. A steaming scullery opened from it on the fire side; on the other, against the distempered wall, stood a row of curtained cupboards, half-a-dozen of them like confessional-boxes; and in the intervals of these were, perched on brackets, five or six absurd little figures—saints and Virgins, the latter with smaller dolls, to represent the Christ, pinned to their stomachers. There was but a single window to this kitchen, at its far end; and a couple of lamps burning rancid oil seemed the very smoking nucleus of an atmosphere as stifling as that of a ship’s caboose in the tropics.
A figure seated on the table struck a tinkling cord as Ned advanced, and sang up a little impertinent stave of welcome.
“Behold, Endymion wakes from Latmus!” said he, and flourishing a great flagon of wine to his mouth, he tilted it and drank.
He was a smooth-cut young fellow, with features modelled like a girl’s. His hair, his brows, the shade on his upper lip toned from brown to rough gold. His eyes were soft umber, his cheeks flushed sombrely like autumn leaves. He was as assured of himself as a gillian, and a little theatrical withal in his pose and the cock of his hat.
There were two others in company—a serene large man, with deliberate lids to his eyes and straight long hair, and a round-faced sizar from the University of Liége. These latter smoked, and all three drank according to their degree of wine, hollands, or brandy-and-water.
“You flatter me, monsieur,” said Ned a trifle grimly, and he sat himself down by the table and returned with a pretty hardihood the glances directed at him.
For some moments no one spoke. The placid man—a prosperous farmer by token of his button-bestrewed jacket and substantial small-cloths—put a piece of sugar-candy in his mouth and drank down his glass of hollands over it in serial sips. The student, looking to him on the table for his cue, sat with the expression of a chorister whom a comrade secretly tickles. Mr Murk felt himself master of the situation so long as he resisted the temptation to be the first to break the silence.
Suddenly the young man with the guitar unbonneted himself, kicked his hat up to the ceiling, gave an insane laugh on a melodious note, and turned to the new-comer.
“I surrender,” said he; “I would rather lack wine than speech.”
“Both are good in moderation,” said Ned.
“Bah! a monk’s aphorism, monsieur; moderation makes no history. It is to grow fat under one’s fig-tree—like Lambertine here” (he signified the contented farmer, who chuckled and shut his eyes).
“And what of the wise Ulysses?” quoth Ned.
“He saved himself for the orgy,” cried the stranger. “He was moderate only that he might taste the full of enjoyment. I go with you there.”
“Not with me, indeed.”
“No, of course. There are blind-worms amongst men. For me I swear that human life has an infinite capacity for pleasure.”
He took another great pull at his pot and laughed foolishly. His face was ruddy and his eyes glazed with drink.
“You were singing when I came in,” said Ned. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
The student sniggered, thecuisinièresniggered, the farmer waved a tolerant hand.
“You see?” said the musician. “We make no business here of any man’s convenience but our own. I shall sing if I want to.”
He twitched the strings with some loose defiance, and swerved into a little vacant amorous song.
“Does that please you?” he asked at the finish.
“It neither pleases nor disgusts me,” said Ned. “It is simply not worth considering.”
“You must not say that,” said the round-faced student.
Mr Murk turned upon him gravely.
“I am a foreigner, sir, as you see,” said he. “I come amongst you to enlarge my experience and to correct a certain insular habit of prejudice. To this end I use a sketch-book, and sometimes I paint portraits. I shall have the honour of depicting you as a starling.”
“Oh, eh!” said the student. “That is funny. And why?”
“It feeds on the leavings of my lord the rook,” said Ned.
The farmer chuckled heartily, and the musician burst into a wobble of laughter.
“I am the rook!” he cried—“I am milord the rook! You are a man of penetration, monsieur, and I take you to my heart.”
He endeavoured to do so literally, and fell flat off the table on the top of his guitar, which he smashed to pieces. And then he composed himself to slumber on the floor, and in a minute was snoring.
“He acts up to his creed,” said the farmer, in a tone of unruffled admiration. “You must not misjudge him, monsieur the artist. M. de St Denys is generous to a fault.”
“St Denys! Is that M. de St Denys?”
The other swang his large head.
“It is so. His reputation extends itself, it would appear. He makes himself a name beyond Méricourt for the most liberal principles.”
“Liberal to excess, indeed.”
The student ventured again.
“He illustrates what he professes.”
“An infinite capacity for piggishness?”
“No, monsieur; but to extend the prerogatives of pleasure; to set the example of a cultivated licence that thecanaillemay learn to elevate itself to the higher hedonism.”
Ned had nothing to say to this boozy ethology. The other two chorused crapulous praise of the fallen musician.
“He is the soul of honour,” said the farmer, who seemed a man of simple ideas.
“He devotes himself, his oratory, his purse, to the cause of intellectual emancipation,” cried the student.
“And what does his father, M. de St Denys, say to all this?” asked Ned.
Lambertine shook his perplexed head. The student humoured a little snigger of deprecation.
“There is no father,” said he. “M. de St Denys the younger reigns at the Château Méricourt. I see you sneer, monsieur. It is natural for a victim of insular despotism. Here the prospect widens—the atmosphere grows fresh. You will not have heard of it, no; but it is true that there is a sound in the air. Monsieur, I will not be sneered at!”
“And what is to be the upshot of it all?” inquired Ned, ignoring the protest.
“According to M. de St Denys, a universe of gentlemen.”
“He is, at the same time, the soul of honour,” said Lambertine.
“Well,” said Mr Murk, “I think I will go to bed.”
He appealed to the cook, who still fussed among her pans, with a look of puzzled inquiry. She answered sourly—
“You can take your pick. There are plenty to choose from.”
It was then he discovered, to his profound astonishment, that the confessional-boxes were sleeping-places, to the use of one of which he was unblushingly invited in the very face of his company.
“Well,” thought he, “I am travelling for experience;” and he took his knapsack, chose that cupboard nearest the window and farthest from the table, and, withdrawing himself behind the curtains, undressed, folded and laid his clothes aside, and philosophically composed himself to slumber on a little bed that smelt of onions.
Conditions were not favourable to rest. The heat was suffocating; the atmosphere unspeakable. In the distance the voices of his late companions droned like hornets in a bottle—sometimes swelled, it seemed, into a thick passion of tearfulness. Without brooded an apoplectic silence, broken only by a spasmodic rumbling sound that might have signified dogs or cattle, or, indeed, nothing more than the earth turning in its sleep, or the rolling heavenwards of the wheel of the moon. Now and then some winged creature would boom past the window, its vibrant note dying like the voice of a far-off multitude; now and again the seething rush of a bat would seem to stir up the very grounds of stagnation. Suddenly a heart-wrung voice spoke up outside his curtain—
“Monsieur! I am not to be laughed at. Bear that in mind!”
There followed a sound of sobbing—of footsteps unsteadily receding; and thereafter a weary peace was vouchsafed the traveller, and he dreamed that he was put to bake in the selfsame oven that had provided his supper.
“That is a fine economy,” he heard the cook say—“to roast the rooster!”
The words troubled him excessively. He thought them instinct with a dreadful humour—too diabolically witty to admit of repartee; and so, lapped in despondency, oblivion overtook him.
Writhing, as it were, from the edges to a central core of heat, Ned woke to find himself wriggling like an eel in a bath of dripping. He sat up in his dingy cupboard, and feeling and seeing a slant of sunlight blazing through its curtains, plunged for the open and breathed out a fainting sigh of relief.
Shrill murmur of voices from a distance came to him; but the kitchen, stalely redolent of wash-houses, was deserted of all save himself.
A pudding-basin on a magnified milking-stool—presumably a washhand-stand—was placed in a corner; and thereat he fretted out an ablution that was a mere aggravation of drought. Then he dressed himself with a sort of fierce and defiant daring, rather hoping to be taken to task for some intolerable solecism in his rendering of local customs.
He was disappointed. The solemn girl came into the kitchen when he was but half-way through his toilet, and, without exhibiting the least interest in his condition, set to preparing and serving his breakfast.
By-and-by he seated himself at the table.
“I am sorry to have kept you out of the room,” he said, with superfluous sarcasm.
“I do not understand,” she said indifferently.
“At least you will know now how a gentleman dresses.”
“It is possible,” she said. “But, if I were one, I should put on my shirt first.”
“Well,” said he, “where is M. de St Denys?”
She stared at him like a cow; but it was the provoking part of her that she would not avert her gaze when he returned it.
“Where,” said she, “if not at the chateau?”
“He recovered his feet then, it would seem?”
“His feet? Oh,mon Dieu! they were not lost! What questions, monsieur!”
“Are they not? And who now is this Lambertine?”
“He is Lambertine—a farmer very prosperous, of Méricourt.”
“With whom the lord of the manor consorts? M. de St Denys, then, is not fastidious in his choice of company?”
“Truly, even you need not hesitate to address him, if that is what you mean. He listens to all alike; he holds himself a human being like the rest of us. When he walks in the sun he will not think his shadow longer than that of another man of his height.”
“And he is the soul of honour?”
“Essentially, monsieur. He would extend the right of an equal indulgence in pleasure to all.”
“Ah,ma chérie!” said Ned calmly, “how you must love him!”
“That is of necessity,” said the girl. “He has lowered himself to make us do so.”
Ned ate a very large and deliberate breakfast, and then issued forth into the village, carrying his letter of introduction with him.
“This St Denys,” he thought, “has been reading Diderot and the Encyclopedia. Has he also theories of reconstruction? My uncle would not think it amusing that his letter should so miscarry.”
A little breeze had risen, blowing from the south. It made the heat more tolerable, and it was the begetter of a pretty tableau by the village fountain. For there, with her pitcher set on the well-rim, stood a bright Hebe of the sun, ripe, warm, and glowing as the very fruit of desire. Now she had put her hands back under her free-falling hair—that was thick and pheasant brown and wavy like a spaniel’s—and had lifted it, sagging, that the cool air might blow under and comfort the roots. She was a full-bosomed wench, and the pose threw her figure into energetic and very graceful relief. Ned, who was really passionless, and responsive only to the artistic provocation, went up to her at once.
“I should like to draw you like that,” said he.
She twitched involuntarily; but, with immediate intuition, maintained her posture, and conned him from under languorous lids.
“How, monsieur?” said she.
“Exactly as you are. I have my tools with me. I beg you to do nothing but just breathe and enjoy life.”
Actually, before she could deny him, he was sketching her. Then, suddenly—watching first the quick travelling of his pencil—she lowered her arms and, like a foolish virgin, extinguished the light of inspiration.
“I think you are very impertinent,” she said.
“If beauty,” said he calmly—for he had secured the essentials of his picture—“willdistribute largesse, it must not be surprised to see it scrambled for.”
The girl’s lips parted, as if the fairy bee were probing there for honey.
“What insolence!” she murmured. “Am I then beautiful? But perhaps monsieur sees his own image reflected in my eyes, and falls in love with it like thedamoiseauNarcisse.”
She showed the slightest rim of white teeth. It was as if the bow of her mouth revealed itself strung with silver. Her eyes, when open, floated with deep amber lights; her cheeks were sweet warm beds dimpled by Love’s elbow; she was full of bold rich contrasts of colour—a young vestal flaming into the lust of life.
Ned was a little surprised to hear a peasant girl, as he thought her, imaging from mythology.
“I never fall in love,” he said gravely; “not even with myself.”
The girl laughed out, putting her arms defiantly akimbo.
“Then I would not be a suitor there,” she said.
“To me? And why not?”
“Because no man ever loved a woman well that did not love himself better.”
She took her sun-bonnet and pitcher from the low wall.
“I have heard of such as you,” she said. “It is to make your art your mistress, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Ned. “Come and see why.”
He held the sketch out to her. He had been working at it all the time he talked.
“Little Holy Mother!” she murmured, after a vain attempt to repress her curiosity, “is that I?”
“Is it not?” he said; “and would notyoulove an art that enabled you so to record impressions of beauty?”
“It is an impression, my faith! Am I black and white like a spectre? Where are my brown hair and my red cheeks?”
Ned tapped his breast-pocket.
“In your heart, monsieur?”
“In my paint-box, mademoiselle.”
“Well,” she said, “they may remain there, for me. I shall never come to claim them.”
“You had best not,” he said. “It is full of ghosts that might frighten or repel you.”
She was moving away, when she stopped suddenly.
“Look who comes!” she cried low. “There is the pretty subject for your pencil!”
The fountain stood at the village head, on ground somewhat raised above the wide street, orPlace, round which the hamlet was gathered. Not a soul seemed to be abroad in the hot sleepy morning. The jalousies of twenty small houses were closed; the ground-haze boiled up a fair man’s height as seen against any dark background; the tower of the little white church looked as if its very peaked cap of lead were melting and sinking over its eyes—an illusion grotesquely accented by the exclamatory expression of the arrow-slit of a window underneath. There was scarce a sound, even, to emphasise the stillness—the tinkle of a running gutter, the drowsy weak ring of iron on a distant anvil—these were all. Méricourt lay sunk in panting slumber in the lap of its woods, its chimney-pots gasping at an inexorable sky.
But now there came towards and past the fountain, from a hidden meadow path, a second girl, who bore upon her head, gracefully poising it, a fragrant bundle of clover, young forest shoots and tufted grasses, under the shadow of which her face was blurred as soft and luminous as a face in tender crayons.
“It is a picture,” said Ned.
“It is half a saint,” said the girl.
Then she cried, in her flexible rich voice—
“Holà, Nicette! I shiver here in a colder shadow than thine.”
“Nicette!” muttered Ned, and he scrutinised the passing figure more closely.
“How, Théroigne?” answered back the other, without slackening her pace or turning her head.
“There runs a new spring in Méricourt!” cried the girl, with an impudent glance at the young man.
“But a new spring! and how dost thou know?”
“My little finger told me. It has veins of ice, Nicette. Thou needst not scruple to bathe in it, for all thy modesty.”
The clover-bearer passed on, with a little ambiguous laugh.
“And she is a saint?” said Ned.
“Half a saint, by monsieur’s permission—a sweetbon-chrétienwith one cheek to the sun and one to the convent wall.”
“And presently to fall of her own sweetness, no doubt.”
To his surprise the girl drew herself up haughtily at his words.
“You exceed the bounds of insolence, monsieur,” she said frigidly. “It is like blasphemy so to speak of Nicette Legrand. And what authority has monsieur for his statement?”
“How can I have any, Théroigne, but your own show of levity towards me?”
She seemed about to retort angrily, changed her mind, shouldered the pitcher, and turned to go.
“At least,” said Ned, “have the goodness to first direct me to the Château Méricourt.”
She twisted about sharply.
“The chateau! What do you seek there?”
“Only my friend, M. de St Denys.”
“Your friend!”
She conned his face seriously; then suddenly her own lightened once more.
“Of a truth,” she said, “I would rather be your friend than your lover.”
“Love is much on your lips, mademoiselle.”
“You should say he shows his pretty judgment. But Nicette has the mouth of austerity. Follow her, then. She will have no need to rebuke you, I’ll warrant.”
“There is some contempt in your voice, mademoiselle. Is not that to give yourself a little the lie?”
“How, monsieur?”
“But now you chid me for speaking lightly of this very Nicette.”
“She has a better grace than I, perhaps, to care for herself. I mean only she will lead you whither you desire.”
“To the chateau?”
“She keeps the lodge at its gates.”
She frowned, nodded her head, and went off with a little mocking song on her lips, turning down a side track that led to farm buildings. She was a lithe voluptuous animal, breathing a lavish generosity of life. Ned watched her in a sort of rigor of admiration as she retreated. A high stone wall, pierced at regular intervals with loopholes, enclosed the steading she made for. Above the coping showed the roofs of the house, and of numerous substantial barns that backed upon the wall; and, at a point in the latter, frowned a huge studded gateway, strong enough to withstand the shock of anything less than artillery.
By this gate the girl paused a moment, looked back, and seeing the stranger still observant of her, whisked about resentfully enough to bring down upon her head a sleet of acacia petals from a bush that stood hard by. Then she vanished, and Ned turned him to his pursuit of the other.
She had already reached the farther end of thePlace, and he followed rapidly, lest she should disappear from his ken. But he came up with her as she was leaving the village by a road that mounted on a slight gradient amongst trees. At the wrought-iron gates of the chateau, set but a few hundred yards farther in a thicket of evergreens, he addressed her, as she was shifting from her head the great burden it had borne.
“That is much for a girl, Nicette. I will help you with it.”
She looked at him, he could see, with some abashed recognition. Her lips, that were a little parted in breathlessness, trembled perceptibly. Without a protest she let him receive and drop upon the road the truss of clover. Some strands of the bundle that were yet entangled in the disorder of her rabbit-brown hair gave her an unlicensed strangeness of aspect; but for the rest it was the Madonna of the old church of Liége—the colourless, puredévotewith the Greek profile and round blue eyes small-pupiled.
“Nicette,” said the young man, who, if cold, had an admirable assurance, “to pass from Théroigne to you is to go to sleep in the sun and wake to the twilight.”
She gave a little gasp.
“Does monsieur come to visit the chateau?” she murmured.
“Or its master?—yes. But first I will help you in with this.”
“No, no!” she protested faintly.
“But, yes, I say. Open the gate, Nicette. And for what is this great heap of fodder?”
“It is for my beautifulgénisse—Madeleine of the white star.”
She pushed open the gate. Within, to one side, was a low trellised lodge, set within the forward apex of an elliptical patch of garden. Farther back was a byre, and behind all a lofty bank of trees. A fine avenue of Spanish chestnuts led on to the house, which was here hidden from view.
“Whither?” said Ned.
She intimated the rearward shed, with a half-audible note of deprecation. He shouldered and carried the truss to its destination. A liquid-eyed cow, with a rayed splash of white on its forehead, blew a sweet breath of wonder as he entered. Within, all was daintily clean and fragrant.
“Now,” said he, “I must go on to the chateau. But I shall come again, Nicette, and paint you into a picture.”
The girl stood among the phloxes utterly embarrassed. He made her a grave salutation and pursued his way to the house. At a turn of the drive he came in view of the latter—a sombre grey building, sparely windowed, and with a peak-roofed tower—emblem of nobility—caught into one of its many angles. A weed-cumbered moat, with a little decrepit stream of water slinking through the tangle of its bed, surrounded the walls; and in front of the moat, as he encountered it, a neglected garden fell away in half-obliterated terraces. Here and there, placed in odd coigns of leafiness, decayed wooden statues of fauns and dryads, once painted “proper”—or otherwise—in flesh tints, had yielded their complexions piecemeal to the rasp of Time; and, indeed, the whole place seemed withdrawn from the considerations of order.
Much wondering, Ned crossed an indifferent bridge—long ceased, it would appear, from its uses of draught—and found himself facing the massive stone portal of the chateau.
“There is a canker hath gnawed here since my uncle’s day,” thought he, and laid hold of a long iron bell-pull. The thing came down reluctant, and leapt sullenly from his grasp, and the clank of its answer called up a whole mob of echoes.
The door was opened by an unliveried young fellow—a mere peasant of the fields by his appearance.
“M. de St Denys? But, yes; monsieur would be at home to receive—unless, indeed, he were not yet out of bed.”
Ned recalled a figure prostrate on the wreck of a guitar.
“Convey this letter to your master,” said he; “and show me where I may wait.”
He entered a high, resounding hall. A boar’s head set at him from above a door in a petrified snarl. Opposite, a great dark picture—fruit, flowers, game—by Jan de Heem, made a slumberous core of richness in the gloom. These, with a heavy chair or two, were the only furniture.
The man conducted him to a waiting-room near as desert and ill-appointed as the vestibule. The whole house seemed a vast and melancholy barrow—an imprisoned vacancy containing only the personal harness and appointments of some lordly dead. Its equipments would appear to have conformed themselves to its service, and that was reduced to a minimum.
Ned heard the sound of a listed footfall, and turned to meet the master of Méricourt.
M. de St Denys came in with the visitor’s letter in his hand. He was in a yellow morning wrapper that was in cheerful contrast with his sombre surroundings, and a tentative small smile was on his lips. He wore his own hair, bright brown and unpowdered, and tied into a neck ribbon. A little artificial bloom, like the meal on a butterfly’s wing, was laid upon his cheeks to hide the ravages of dissipation, but the injected eyes above were significant of fever. He was, nevertheless, a pretty creature of his inches (and they might have run to seventy or so)—exhilarating, forcible, convincing as a man. Only, as to that, his mouth was the hyperbolic expression, justifying his sex rather by force of appetite than of combativeness.
“M. le Vicomte Murk?” said he, raising his eyebrows.
“Prospective, monsieur,” said Ned; “but as yet——”
“Ah, ha!” broke in the other, showing his teeth liberally, “you wait to step into old shoes. It was my case once—five years ago. I had not the pleasure to know your uncle, M. le Vicomte.”
“Pardon, monsieur. I am a plain gentleman.”
“Truly? We order things otherwise here—for the present, monsieur—for the present.”
Obviously he had no least recollection of thecontretempsof the previous evening.
“And you are travelling for experience?” (He referred lightly to the letter in his hand, and lightly laughed.) “Possibly you shall acquire that, of a kind, in little rustic Méricourt. We are in advance of our times here—locusts of the Apocalypse, monsieur, having orders to respect only the seal of God.”
“We, generically, monsieur would say?”
“Oh! I include myself.” (He made a comprehensive gesture with his hand.) “Behold the monastic earnest of my renunciation. I am vowed to a religion of socialism that takes no account of superfluous frippery. I devote my pen and” (he laughed again) “dissipate my fortune to the cause of universal happiness.”
“Yourself thereby, I presume, securing the lion’s share.”
“Of happiness? Truly, I think, I have hit upon the right creed for a spendthrift. But my conscience is the real motive power, monsieur, though you may be cynical of its methods.”
He spoke with an undernote of some ambiguity. It might have signified deprecation, or the merest suggestion of mockery.
“And how shall the sacrifice of your fortune promote the common happiness?” said Ned.
“Plainly, monsieur,” answered St Denys, “by scattering one at least of the world’s heaps of accumulated corruption. Wealth is like a stack of manure, a festering load that is the magnet to any wandering fly of disease. Distribute it and it becomes a blessing that, in fertilising the soil, loses its own noxious properties. But I would go further and ask what advantages have accrued from that system of barter that turns upon a medium of exchange? Has it not cumbered the free earth with these stacks till there has come to be no outlook save through aisles and alleys of abomination?”
“That may be true,” said the other, curiously wondering that so much disputation should be launched upon him at this outset of his introduction; “but civilisation, during some thousands of years, has evolved none better.”
M. de St Denys shrugged his shoulders.
“Civilisation!” he cried. “But you retain no faith in that exposed fetish? Is not civilisation, indeed, one voice of lamentation over its own disenchantment? Can any condition be worse than that of to-day, when the ultimate expression of the social code reveals itself a shameless despotism? Do you ever quite realise—you, monsieur, that through all this compound multiplication of the world’s figures, its destinies remain the monopoly of a little clique of private families? One seems to awaken suddenly to a comical amazement over man’s age-long subscription to so stupendous a paradox. Let us soothe ouramour propreby submitting that it was an experiment that has proved itself a failure.”
“Nevertheless, monsieur,” said Ned gravely, “I think that in rejecting this civilisation by which you profit—in encouraging rebellion against the established forms that necessity has evolved out of chaos and wisdom included in its codex—you, to say the least of it, are moved to drop the substance for the shadow.”
He spoke with some unconscious asperity. He could not bring himself to admit the entire earnestness of one, of whose self-indulgent character he had had such recent proof. This metal, he fancied, was plated.
“I cannot believe,” he added, “that so complex a fabric could have triumphed over the ages had it not been founded upon truth.”
“But successive architects,” cried St Denys, “may have deviated from the original plan.”
“Still, it holds and it rises; and I for one am content to go up with it—to re-order its chambers, perhaps, but never to quarrel with the main design.”
“And I for one would descend and leave it. Ah, bah! one may mount to the topmost branch of a tree, and yet be no nearer escaping from the forest. I find myself here in interminable thickets, monsieur. I see the poor, leaf-blinded denizens of them nosing passionlessly for roots and acorns in a loveless gloom; and I know the long green fields of light and pleasure to stretch all round this core of melancholy, if only these could find the way to win to them. Is self-discipline necessary to existence? Surely our very butterflies of fashion prove the contrary.”
“Now what,” thought Ned, “is the goad to this inexplicable character?”
“Does monsieur, then,” said he, “advocate a creed of hedonism?”
“Why not?” cried the other. “Shall not man enlarge, develop, and become more habitually one with his amiable instincts under the influence of pleasure, than he ever has done in his bondage to a religion of self-denial? To deny oneself is to deny God, after whose image one is made.”
“A pretty conceit,” said Ned; “but it spells degeneracy.”
“Ay, monsieur; and to the very foundations—as far back as the garden of Paradise.”
“What! You would revert to primitive conditions?”
“To the very ‘naked and unashamed’—but applying to that state the influence of long traditions of gentle manners. We will admit the happiness of the community to be the first consideration, and reconstruct upon a basis of nature.”
A spot of colour came to his cheek. His eyes kindled with a light of febrile enthusiasm.
“To be free to enjoy, in a world of yielding generosities,” he cried; “to be cast from restrictions designed to the selfish aggrandisement of infinitely less than a moiety of our race; to strip indulgence of the shamefulness that century-long cant has credited it withal—that is the El Dorado I give my efforts and my substance to attain.”
“There,” thought Ned, “is confessed the animalism to which the other is but a blind. But this is half-effeminate vapouring.”
He had no sympathy, indeed, with theories so untenable. This lickerish, unconstructive paganism was far from being the lodestar to his own revolutionary cock-boat. Yet he could not but marvel over M. de St Denys’ extremely practical expression of extremely frothy sentiments. Involuntarily he glanced round the room.
“Yes,” cried the other, observant of the look. “I am not one of those doctors who refuse their own medicine.”
A thought of surprise seemed to strike him.
“But I run ahead of my manners,” cried he, with a quick laugh. “You charge me with a letter, and I return you a volley of exposition. I have not even offered you a seat. Pray accommodate yourself with one. And you knew my father, sir?”
“I had not the honour. He was a friend of my lord viscount.”
“Who gave you a letter to him. There is figured out the value of the social relations. He has been dead, sir, since five years. He left two sons, of whom I am the younger. My brother, Lucien, a sailor, who held his commission to the West Indies under De Grasse, perished there in ’81 in an explosion of powder. The estate devolved upon me. We have not your laws of primogeniture, and had poor Lucien returned, we should have shared the burden and the joy of inheritance——”
He had been leaning carelessly back against a table while he talked. He now came erect, and added, with a queer look on his face—
“—and the pleasure of welcoming to Méricourt the nephew of our father’s friend.”
“You are very good, sir,” said Ned.
“I would fain believe it, monsieur. I have the pleasure to offer you the use of the chateau as an hotel for just so long as you care to stay.”
Ned, taken momentarily aback, hesitated over the right construction of so enigmatical an offer.
“Ah!” said the other, “it is to be considered literally.”
“In the business aspect, monsieur?”
“Assuredly. You must understand I have waived the privileges of my class, amongst which is to be numbered the right to acquit the wealthy of taxation. The ponds must feed the rivulets, monsieur.”
Seeing his visitor lost in introspection, “Enfin,” he cried, with a musical laugh, “that is the practical side. It is not based, believe me, upon a system of profits. For the social, I take you to my heart, monsieur, with all enthusiasm.”
And so Ned became a guest at the chateau at cost price.
Monsieurthe master of Méricourt would seal that queer compact of entertainment with the nephew of his father’s friend over a bottle of Niersteiner, which he had up from the cellar there and then.
“’Tis a rare brand,” quoth he, his eyes responding with a flick to the drawing of the cork; “and we will share both bottle and expense like sworn brothers!”
Ned sipped a single glass reluctant. So much the better for the other.
“I am your debtor!” he cried, as he drained the flask. “Draw upon me for the balance when you will.”
His face was flushed. He talked a good deal, and not in an intelligent vein. The visitor accepted him as an enigma that time should solve. There seemed so much firmness of purpose, so wanton an infirmity of performance, in his composition. Certainly, having the courage of his convictions in one way, and the consequent right to expound them literally in another, he might lay claim to consistency in flooding himself with wine before eleven o’clock in the morning. Still, to Ned, this implied a certain contradiction, inasmuch as no creed of right hedonism could include excess with its penalties.
“Monsieur,mon ami,” cried St Denys, on a wavering, jovial key, “you will oblige me by indulging, while here, your easiest caprices. Come and go as you will; I desire to put no restraint on you. You shall pay only for your clean linen, and for your food and drink. The first two you will find at least wholesome. For the last, behold the proof! If you want luxury, you must seek elsewhere. My socialism is eminently practical. The free expression of nature—that is the creed we seek to give effect to in this little corner of the world. But we are no Sybarites.”
“Nor I,” said Ned; “but, for you—you are a man of strong convictions, monsieur?”
St Denys laughed, sprawling back in his chair, and waved his hand significantly to the empty walls.
“Just so,” said Ned. “But I am a verychiffonnierfor raking in the dust for hidden motives.”
The Frenchman cocked a sleepy lid, scrutinising his guest with a little arrogance of humour.
“They are here, no doubt, these motives,” said he. “Perhaps I am astute, perhaps I have the seer’s eye. If I foretold you a deluge, what would you do?”
“Invest my money in an ark.”
“A floating capital, to be sure. But you could never realise on it if you weathered the storm.”
“And you, monsieur?”
“And I, monsieur?—I should endeavour, very likely, to extract the essence of twenty years from one; I should at least spare no expense to that end. Were I foredoomed to founder, I would make myself a wreck that I might sink the more easily.”
He came scrambling to his feet.
“Do you like music?” he cried. “I will canvass you in the prophetic vein. I see the rising of the waters.”
He was looking about vaguely as he spoke.
“What the devil is become of it?” he muttered.
“Are you hunting for your guitar? You will find it flat beyond tuning, I am afraid.”
“How, do you say?”
“M. de St Denys, you fell asleep, literally, on it last night in the ‘Landlust.’”
“‘Landlust!’ Oh!Dieu du ciel! I am beginning to remember.”
“Why,” he chuckled, with hazy inspiration, “your veritable figure, monsieur, stands out of the fog.”
“Indeed, it was thick enough to stand on.”
“And little Boppard, and the gross old Lambertine, who is father to our village Aspasia, the fat old man. But I must introduce you to Théroigne Lambertine, monsieur, to add one beat a minute to your politic pulses.”
“Indeed, I think I have already introduced myself.”
“The deuce you have!”
“And is she your Aspasia? And who is her Pericles?”
“Harkee, monsieur!” said St Denys, with a fall to particular gravity, “that will never do.”
Then he broke into a great laugh.
“The father,” he cried, “is the bulwark of paradox. See that you never strive to take him by storm. He is of those who would undermine the Church while confessing to the priest. He clings to the old formulæ of honour that, in others, he pronounces out of date. He advocates free thought as a eunuch might advocate free love, without an idea of what it implies. His advance is all within his own ring-fence—round and round like a squirrel in its cage. He will go any distance you like there, only he must not be ousted from his patrimony. The world for all men thinks he, but his farm for Jack Lambertine. Popped into his pet seed-crusher, he would bleed a vat of oil. But he is an estimable husbandman; oh yes, he is that, certainly.”
“He gives you a better character, it seems, than you him.”
“Why, what have I said to his discredit? He has made the whole human race his debtor in one respect.”
“What, for example?”
“M. Murk,mon ami, he has produced a Théroigne.”
Ned, paint-box in hand, presented himself at the lodge-door. A sound of low singing led him through a very lavender-blown passage to the rear of the cottage. Here he came upon Nicette in a little bricked dairy dashed cool with recent water. She was skimming cream from a broad pan with her fingers. The tips of these budded through the white, like nibs of rhubarb through melting snow.
“Behold her as she stands!” said the intruder. “Here is the milk-washed Madonna for my picture.”
He put down his box and approached the maid. She stood startled, her hands poised above their work. Ned took her by the wrists, and, conducting his captive with speechless decorum to a sink, pumped water over the sheathed buds till they flushed pink with the cold.
“Now,” said he, “dry your hands on that jack-towel, Nicette, and we will get to work.”
The girl’s eyes floated in a little backwater of tears. Crescents of hot colour showed under them on her cheek-bones.
“Monsieur will make a jest of me,” she said, in a rather drowned whisper.
“I will make a Madonna of you, Nicette, if you will pose yourself as I wish.”
Her lips quivered. She looked down, twiddling her wet thumbs.
“I am established at the chateau, Nicette. I am a friend of M. de St Denys, who would have me dispose of my time to my best entertainment.”
“And that monsieur seeks of the poor lodge-keeper?”
“Truly, for I am an artist above all things.”
This cold fellow had a coaxing way with him. After not so long an interval he was busily at work, with the girl seated to his satisfaction. The sweet coolness of the dairy received, through a wide-flung window, the scent of innumerable flowers that thronged the little garden without. To look thereon was like gazing on the blazing square of a stage from the sequestered gloom of an auditorium. There was an orchestra, moreover, all made up of queer Æolian harmonics.
“What is that voice, Nicette, that never ceases to moan and quarrel?”
“It tells the wind, monsieur.”
“What does it tell? A story without an end, I think.”
He rose and looked through the window. A little complaining horn, pivoted on the top of a long pole, swung to the lightest breeze and caught and passed it on in waves of protest. Upon a slack wire or two that, like tent ropes, held the pole secure, lower currents of air fluttered with the sound of a knife sharpening on a tinker’s grindstone.
Ned grunted and resumed his seat.
“It would drive me silly to have that for ever in my ears. How can you stand it, Nicette?”
“It speaks to me of many things, monsieur.”
“What, for instance?”
“Monsieur will laugh.”
“No, I will not.”
“The whispering of the flower spirits, then; the steps and the low voices that come from beyond the dawn before even the shepherds are awake; sometimes the noise of the sea.”
“You have travelled?”
“Ah! no, monsieur. But I have heard how the great waters mutter all their secrets to their shells; and I like to think that my air-shell up there is in the confidence of the strange people one cannot see.”
Ned paused in his work, and dwelt musingly on his companion’s face.
“So,” said he, “you are a half-saint on the strength of these little odd ecstasies.”
“Indeed I am no part of a saint.”
“Now, Nicette, you must put no restraint on your speech whenever I am with you. You interest me more, I think, than anybody I have ever seen. Do you know, I have no imaginative faculty like this of yours. I am too inquisitive to dream nicely. I like to get to the bottom of things.”
Obviously there was some lure about him that drew the girl, in tentative advances, from her reserve.
“I do not think there is a bottom to things,” she said, looking up, a little breathless at her own daring. “Some day, perhaps, when monsieur thinks he has reached it, he will fall through and find himself flying.”
“Shall I?” said Ned abstractedly, for he was wrestling with a difficulty. Then he went on, with a quick change of subject,—“are you very fond of your cow?”
Nicette’s eyes opened in wonder.
“Of Madeleine? Oh yes, monsieur.”
“How often do you feed her?”
“But twice in the day.”
“Of green meat that you gather?”
“It is the fashion with us. Is it not so to stall the cattle in the country of monsieur?”
“Only at night. And how often do you feed your little brother?”
The unexpected question completely dumfounded the girl. Ned laughed, put his brush in his mouth, and fetched a louis-d’or from his pocket.
“Will you take this now, Nicette?”
Something to his consternation, she rose hurriedly from her seat, made as if to leave the room, and broke into a little fit of weeping. He went up and spoke to her soothingly—
“Silly, pretty child! are you ashamed? You are none the worse in my eyes for showing some inconsistency. Think only you are in the confidence of one of your strange people. Here, take it, Nicette.”
She threw his hand away. The coin rang on the floor.
“I will not, I will not!” she cried. “Oh, please to go, monsieur. How can I sit for the Madonna any more when you make me out so wicked!”
“M. de St Denys,” said Ned, “are you not here the children, so to speak, of an ecclesiastical benefice?”
“We are in the circle of Westphalia, monsieur—children, certainly, of the Duc de Bouillon, who is suffragan of the Archbishop of Cologne.”
“And how does his lordship accept this moral emancipation of little rustic Méricourt?”
The other laughed carelessly.
“As he would accept the antics of children, perhaps. It does not trouble me. In a few years all livings will be in the gift of the people.”
“You are serious in thinking so?”
“Why not?”
“Because I cannot interpret you, or comprehend for what reason you run riot on a road of self-abnegation.”
“Perhaps it is the war of the spirit with the flesh, monsieur. Who knows, were a man of vigour not to reasonably indulge his senses, if his senses would not maliciously lead his judgment astray? Shall an anchorite prescribe for the hot fevers of life? I like to test the passions I would legislate on.”
“And you foresee the triumph of the races over their rulers?”
“I foresee the bursting of the dam of humour—the mad earth-wide guffaw in the sudden realisation of a preposterous anachronism. I see all the old landmarks swept away in a roar of laughter—the idols, the frippery, the traditions of respect for what is essentially mean and false, the egregious monkeys of convention solemnly dictating the laws of society to their own reflections in looking-glasses.”
“And what then?”
“The reign of reason, monsieur: the earth, with its flowers, for the children of its soil; the commonage of pastures, of woods, and of valleys; the adjustment of the relations of love and increase to the developments of nature; the death of shame, of artificiality, of ignoble sophistries.”
Ned shook his head. Was the man sincere in all this? Did he seek to adapt himself, with and in spite of his weaknesses, to what he considered the inevitably right? or were his repudiation of caste, his sacrifice of fortune, a mere wholesale bid for the notoriety that is so frantically sought of melodramatic souls? His voice was vibrant with enthusiasm; he seemed to lash himself into great utterances, to feel conviction through force of sound; and then in a moment he would (figuratively) swagger to the wings, cock his hat, and bury his face in a foaming tankard.
The two young men were strolling through a twilight of woodland. They had dined at four o’clock, had sat an hour or so over their bottle, and were then, by arrangement of St Denys, to present themselves at a certain rendezvous of localesprits forts.
“Thou shalt handle Promethean fire,” said the lord of Méricourt, “and shalt kindle in the glance of a goddess.”
“Very well,” answered Ned. “I will come, by all means; but she will not find me touchwood.”
They had mounted from the back of the village at the turning into the road of the chateau. A few hundreds of yards had brought them to the fringe of the dense forest that rolled in terraces of high green down to the very outskirts of the hamlet. Thence they had passed, by tracks of huddled leafiness, into deeps and profounder deeps of stillness.
The silence about them was as the silence of a peopled self-consciousness—as the under-clang of voices to a dreamer whose heart works in his breast like a mole. Every bird’s song was an echo; the germ of new life under every pine-cone seemed stirring audibly in its little womb. If a squirrel scampered unseen, if a rush of wings went by unidentified, the sound became a memory before it was past. Nothing of all beauty was material. The thurible of the sun, trailing clouds of smoke, was withdrawn into the sacristy of the hills; the music of the vesper hour fled in receding harmonics under a roof of boughs; long aisles of arborescence, dim with slow-drifting incense, held solitude close as a returned prodigal. Here was the neutral ground of soul and body; thronged with unrealities to either; full of secret expectancies that massed or withdrew to the shutting and opening of one’s eyes.
The dusk formed like troops in the bushy hollows. Still M. de St Denys led his companion on. Suddenly he stayed him, with a hand on his sleeve.
A sound, like the rubbing cheep of a polishing-cloth on wood, came to their ears from somewhere hard by. Stepping very softly, the two men stole into a clearing dominated by a single huge beech-tree—an old shorn Lear of the forest. At its roots a young boar was engaged whetting its tushes, that curled up like the mustachios of a swinge-buckler. The muscular sides of the beast palpitated as it swung to and fro.
Now St Denys, with meaningless bravado, left his friend and walked up to the brute, that cocked its ears and was still in a moment. Ned caught the porcelain glint of its eye slewed backwards,—and then St Denys flogged out at the bristling flanks with a little riding-switch he carried in his hand. The pig fetched round; the young man uttered a shrill whoop and lashed it in the face; and at that the animal plunged for the thicket and disappeared.
Ned went on to the tree. He thought all this a particularly thrasonical display, and would not appear to subscribe, by so much as referring, to it.
“A mammoth in its day,” said he, looking up at the vast wreck of timber that writhed enormous arms against the darkening sky.
“Ay,” said St Denys, assuming indifference of the slight. “That has been a long one, too. I can scarce remember it but as it is now, and I am rising twenty-seven. It held itself royal and unapproachable, you see; defined the commonalty of the forest its limits of approximation to it like a celestial Mogul. The girth of this clearing in which it stands is the girth of its former greatness. No sapling even now dare set foot in thesanctum sanctorum. These forests have their traditions as men have.”
“Perhaps modelled on ours.”
“Perhaps. We shall see. Come here again in a year—two years; and if thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.”
Again there seemed the theatrical posing. The speaker put a hand on the trunk of the great tree.
“Here is the verybienséanceof vanity,” he said—“the archetype of society. Withered, denuded, worm-eaten to a shell, it yet decks its cap with a plume of green, wraps its palsy in a cloak of stars, and stands aloof like something desirable but not to be attained.”
“A shell, you say? It looks solid as marble.”
“It is a king, monsieur, without a heart. Some day when the storm rises it shall fall in upon itself. I know its hollowness from a boy. I have climbed fifty times this drooping bough here—which you may do now, if you will. Up there, where the branches strike from the main stem, one may look down into a deep well of decay.”
He caught his hand away with a repelling exclamation.
“Bah! it sprouts fungus at less than a man’s height; it is rotting to the roots. It shall take but a little heave of the tempest’s shoulder to send it sprawling.”
Ned humoured the allegory with some contempt.
“Thrones do not crash down so easily,” said he. “Their roots extend over the continents.”
St Denys came from the tree, slid his arm under his guest’s, and drew his gentleman down an obscure track that ran into the thicket.
“So you love kings?” said he.
“I neither love nor decry them. I wish to walk independent, like a visitor from another star, availing myself of every opportunity of observation. I shall not swerve from my convictions when they are formed.”
“And as far as you have got at present?”
“I see more evil rising from the depths than descending from the heights. I see the peaks of volcanoes held responsible for the eruptions that are hatched by turbulent forces far down below—compelled to be their mouthpiece, indeed. Kings are what their people make them. Let the forces subside, and the very cones in time will come to pasture quiet flocks.”
“Or let the lava overflow, overwhelm, and obliterate—distribute itself and grow cool. So shall the pasturage be infinitely more extended. Oh, inglorious conclusion! to justify individual evil on the score that it has no choice!”
“I do not,” said Ned calmly. “I recognise only the right of the individual to an independent expression of self. To secure this he must conform to a social code that excludes the processes of tyranny.”
“And that code must read equality.”
“No; for men are not equal. The world must always exhibit a sliding-scale of intellect and capacity; the unit, a perpetual aspiration. Materially, there must be a desideratum—anultima ratioto ambition. Call it king, consul, dictator. Whatever its name, it is merely the crystallisation of a people’s character and energy—the highest effect given to a national tendency.”
“But all this, my friend, is not compatible with hereditary titles.”
“No; and there I pause.”
“It is gracious of you. A little further, and you will recognise the impossibility of patching up old fustian to wear like new cloth. Better to commit all to the fire than to spare the sorry stuff because a bit here and there is less decayed than the rest.”
As he spoke a square of mellow radiance met them at a turning of their path. The light proceeded from the window of a wooden hut or shanty—a tool-shed it might have been, or at the best a little disused hunters’ lodge. It was sunk in a bosket of evergreens; built of luffer-boards that gaped in many places; and its roof of flaking tiles was all sown with buttons of moss.
“The headquarters of the brotherhood,” said St Denys, with a laugh; and he pushed open a creaking door and drew his visitor within.
“Holà, Basile!” came in a triple note of greeting.
Ned found himself—wondering somewhat—in a bare, small room, furnished only with a table and plain benches of chestnutwood. At this table were seated the exiguous sizar of the “Landlust,” and a couple of rather truculent-looking gentry—farmers of small holdings, by reasonable surmise. An oil-lamp burned against the wall, and its light swayed wooingly on the face of the fourth member of the company—Théroigne Lambertine, whom the young man had foreguessed to be the goddess. She sat, raised a little above the others, at the head of the board, a smile on her lips, her eyes awake with daring. Her hair was loosely caught under a scarlet handkerchief; about her bosom a white fichu was only too slackly knotted. Ned had never seen a living creature so richly secure in the defensive and aggressive qualities of beauty. She looked at him with a little defiance of recognition.
“Mes amis,” said St Denys, “I have the pleasure to introduce to you a visitor whom you will know as Edouard. He is all, I may tell you, for reforming society.”
“That is a discipline thou shalt not wield here, Edouard,” cried one of the loobies, with an insolent laugh.
Ned faced the speaker gravely.
“Not even for the whipping of a jackass?” said he.
There answered a cackle of derision. St Denys caught his friend by the arm.
“It is unfair, it is unfair!” he cried merrily. “I have brought him hither without a word of explanation.”
Then he took his captive by the lapels of his coat.
“Monsieur, or Edouard,” said he, “this is the one spot within the compass of the nations where a man is entirely welcome for himself so long as he is it. Here we throw off every unnatural restriction, say what we will, do what we will—provided no evil consequence is entailed thereby. We are the club of ‘Nature’s Gentry,’ founded upon and governed by that solitary comprehensive rule. We neither give nor take offence, for where absolute freedom of speech is permitted all may be said that there is to say. Cast from the prohibitions of conventions, truthful beyond conceits, we restrain ourselves in nothing that is of happy impulse, deny ourselves no indulgence but that of doing hurt to our neighbour.”
“Basile has spoken,” said Théroigne in her full voice; “Basile is very great! And thou, thou tall staidness, come and pay thy homage to Nature’s queen.”
Ned turned swiftly, walked up to the girl, and kissed her cheek.
“What the devil!” cried St Denys hoarsely.
“Have I done hurt to my neighbour?” said Ned, facing round.
The Belgian laughed on a false note.
“You are immense,” said he. “The brotherhood takes you to its heart. See that you, on your part, resent nothing.”
He turned, with rather a frowning brow, to the table. Théroigne, flushed but unabashed by the Englishman’s boldness, watched her predial lord covertly.
“A small gathering to-night,” he said; “but what of that when the Queen presides?”
He fancied himself conscious of a new startled intelligence in the eyes of two, at least, of his company. This stranger (the look expressed), how had he appropriated to himself what they had never dreamed but to respect as unattainable? Truly it had been for him to rightly interpret to them their own law.
St Denys stamped his foot impatiently.
“Why do you blink here like moping owls?” he said. “The air is balm; the moon walks up the sky; there is not a bank but breathes out a sweet invitation.”
They bustled to their feet at his words. One man pulled from under the table a hamper loaded with wine-flasks and horns.
“We revel in the open,” said St Denys to Ned. “We give our words flight, like fairies, under the stars. Nothing remains to rankle, or to generate mischief, as in the close atmosphere of rooms.”
“Very well,” said Ned, “the open for me;” and he stepped out, accompanied by three others, into the sweet-blown wood.
The moment he found himself alone with her, St Denys turned upon Théroigne.
“Mademoiselle coquette,” said he, showing his teeth, “I could very easily strike you on the face!”
“And why?” she said quietly, her eyes glittering at him.
“Oh! do you not understand?”
“Little mother of God!” she cried low, her nostrils dilating, “but here is a consistent president! Did not the stranger conform to rule? Would you have had me give you the lie by repulsing him?”
“To the devil with the rule!” cried the other in suppressed passion. “You know it for a blind—not as an excuse for licence. This folly, this ridiculous club! is it not designed but to enable us to indulge a passion of romance—under the very ægis of M. Lambertine, too, when he chooses to leave his tavern and his pipe?”
The girl in a swift transition of mood came from her seat and put up her hands caressingly to the young man’s shoulders.
“Basile,mon ami,” she murmured; “it is ridiculous, I know; but it is an excitement in this little dull world of ours. Thou sport’st with professions of opinion that are not the truth of thy soul. Thou knowest, as I know, dearest, that these wild theories spell disaster; that through all the waste of the ages honour is the pilot star that it is never but safe to steer by. Oh, do you not, Basile?”
“Surely,” said St Denys impatiently. “What have I said to disprove it? But honour will not dispel the fog through which these ships of state are driving to their doom. I who prophesy the crash—God of heaven, Théroigne! dost thou think my ambition surfeits on this scurvy junto of clodhoppers? It is play, my beautiful—just play to pass away the time.”
“And I too play, soul of my soul—but I will no more. This Englishman, if he dares again, he shall suffer. Thy honour shall be mine, as thou hast sworn to save me from myself—oh, Basile, darling, remember how thou hast sworn it!”